Go to school to go to school, not to get a job.

I think this is bullshit.

I think professional education and business school is seriously dangerous. Think about it: a bunch of privileged young folks spend 4 years and hundreds of thousands of dollars to obtain specialized degrees and then taking on high levels of personal debt makes a critical engagement with status quo politics nearly impossible. This type of education creates two types of debt: financial and ideological.

First, financial: a costly professional education means that acquiring high paying jobs becomes not only desirable but absolutely necessary. College debt straightjackets your personal finances, and requires that the debtor almost immediately pursue a job amenable to the financial powers that be. The time-dependent nature of repaying loans means that students must immediately enter the workforce, often to the point of becoming un-/under- paid, vaguely indentured labor during college as interns in the professional arena or servers in the service economy. The most useful things college does for its students is allow critical reflection on existence, a product borne of free, unstructured time and exposure to ideas that run counter to established wisdom. Forcing financial debt onto students also forces the professionalization and routinization of thought by requiring that students immediately enter the workforce, undermining the most useful products of higher education: radical criticism.

Second, ideological: the financial costs and dependence of students on their degrees for personal advancement means they are forced into defending the means by which they acquired their degree from critical challenge. During a group meeting on strategy for how to cajole NYU into disclosing its operating budget and endowment, one student spoke up to say that he thought we should avoid tarnishing the name of NYU on the whole (a perhaps necessary step to reform a deeply troubled institution). The upshot being that students in many ways must defend their school, and teachers from ideological attack, fostering an unreflexive, unbending commitment to the schools they attend. Becoming financially committed to an institution fosters a particular type of intellectual commitment; a dangerous move as schools transform themselves into corporate, increasingly removed and elities entities with narrow profit oriented goals.

Two Notes on Media

Writing is an activity fundamental to intellectual processes and theorizing of politics. Theory, and intellectual activity implies a relationship to the not-present, the ability to describe, with some persuasiveness and utility, political situations not immediately present in their entirety. Theory connects past events to potential future events by describing the politics that lies behind both. Thinking theory and politics implies duration and reflexivity on the inaccessible past and the unknowable future, articulated by a writer occupying a space that supposedly links both in a political moment. Writing creates a physio-logic-al duration to ideas that mirrors this task, indexing ideas as composed in writing to that which has gone before in the text, as well as what will come, in the eyes of the reader who makes sense of the written text.

Lost in translation – interpretation and conceptual understanding of language composes the subject doing the interpreting. The model marks an exchange of ‘intent’ or ‘symbolization’ for ‘effect’ to compose a fragile subject position. This model requires creating a disjunction between two forces – the symbolizing forces and the interpreting forces, that turn the symbol into meaning of some variety. Attempting to describe the interpretive conditions for meaning creation posits a subject as a bounded entity with discrete forces acting upon it. Attempting to parse the forces that determine meaning is constructing the history for a subject, even describing the subject as interpreting implies a disjuncture from other subjects or potential meanings, with this particular subject making decisions according to a rationalized set of procedures. It asserts an ‘interpretive difference’ as the foundation for setting up an economy of meaning as transformation and exchange. Left unsaid is the subject doing the interpreting, the specifics of meaning transformation as an activity.

Some Thoughts on Conflict

I met an acquaintance recently who described their education as that in ‘conflict studies,’ what seemed to me a peculiar approach to analyzing politics. She described the ideas of conflict resolution and conflict prevention both, raising questions for me as to the content of these terms, ideas implied by war as well.

The first question was ‘what is a conflict, and which do we try to resolve?’ Conflict concerns the non-political, that which is supposed to define the boundaries of normal political practice. Organizations like the US or HRW take up ‘conflict’ because it nominally appeals to all, to the foundations of political practice. Conflict occurs through disagreement over the conditions of political practice, the terms of politics – conflict begins with disagreement and gets resolved in consensus. To me, ‘disagreement’ as the core of ‘conflict’ fundamentally concerns the question of who decides. A person can find another’s logic regarding a decision faulty, but as long as both agree on who should make the decision, disagreement doesn’t arise. Following this, it seems that conflict concerns contestation between subjects over the right to decide certain questions (of state, territory, resources for example). Thus, a primary precondition for conflict studies should be the policing of identity that composes a subject that then imagines disagreement with other subjects.

This leads to the equally important question about which conflicts become priorities for international politics – this is clearly a subject of immense breadth, but here are my thoughts. First, there is a level of above the table politics that shapes international conflict priorities. In the case of the US, media and government call attention to conflicts that concern subjects of high political salience – in many cases now, this means conflicts that concern Islam or oil. Specifically, cases where countries that threaten oil access are more likely to be seen as conflict-prone (in the case of Iran, Venezuela) while countries that secure access under similar conditions (Russia, Saudi Arabia) will be seen as more stable. Other types of conflicts never make it to the level of any international agenda, and remain prior to much of politics. These conflicts concern the electoral and sometimes police politics of a state. All political bodies have perpetual minorities, and the conflicts that emerge out of minority-majority disagreements like that over national healthcare or nuclear disarmament in the US remain below the international conflict radar. In these cases, the disagreement is properly political, the violence created by them subsumed to the properly instrumental on the course to preserving a state or economic system.

Tweaking Heroes

Brad Neely produces some funny shit.


The JFK video won't embed, but is almost as funny. I think both of these videos do what Howard Zinn or James Lowen can't by popularizing critique of American history as told in traditional ways. They take that critique out of the realm of he said/she said historical accounts (though these should not be discounted by any measure: Zinn and Lowen were a big influence on me) - and instead skewers dominant historical narratives as hype. The Neely approach regards historical-hype pure ideological speculation by taking the Washington-as-hero narrative to the extreme, and in doing so draws humor from its absurdity.

Quick Campaign Rhetoric Roundup

Hillary Clinton is not an exception: a recent book demonstrates how the 'groundbreaking' rhetoric of Clinton's campaign reinforces stereotypes that relegate women to the private sphere and make it harder for women to be elected.

A New York Times op-ed page back and forth about the politics of gender in the campaign. I tend to think that Steinem has the better point concerning how the coverage of Hillary shapes gender politics in general - and I'm a little tired of the 'call for debate' seen in Herbert's column.

Fear of Death and Elections - reminders of mortality create reactionary tendencies in voters, encouraging identification with the nation-state and traditional family values (whatever those are). Giuliani could still win if he does a better job of looking the part of a 9/11 hero- however, the better iconography goes to the firefighters who rightfully oppose his candidacy, which could spell doom for an already faltering campaign.

Warming up to new climate rhetoric

Two articles - "Warm Regards" and "This Time it's Personal"- recently stumbled upon at BookForum demonstrated some encouraging developments in discussing global warming and environmental change.

In particular, I like the suggestion to just start ignoring global warming skeptics. At some point, someone wins in a ‘debate’ like that over global warming. I think environmentalists should realize the general success of the discourse surrounding global climate change. To me, this means shifting the debate, rather than refusing any discussion. Say the debate has to be over something else – what to do, who has to act – and take the position of people who can affect global climate change. In particular, this means environmentalists have to stop obsessing over global warming skeptics. Don’t offer to debate them, don’t pretend like their opinion has any currency in politics, and just move on.

The problem with global warming now has to do with getting people to change the way they live. Generally, people don’t feel empowered to change global warming in a significant way.

My friend Craig described what he sees as a useful metaphor for encouraging people to take the steps to change. He used the metaphor of investment and risk in explicit economic terms – “would you really want to invest this much in a ecological system with diminishing returns and almost certain failure?” I find this interesting because it reverses the way that opponents to action to stop global warming frame their position. Generally, representatives of the warming-industries describe efforts to regulate greenhouse gas emissions as a too-risky investment. I think the viability of an investment metaphor now is the shift in presumption towards the assumption that change is occurring now. Global warming rhetoric has successfully established itself as to allow people to describe every irregular weather pattern as a result of warming. More people believe that change is happening already, and using a socially conservative/evangelical/millennial rhetoric, that everything was once better. In the same way that social conservatives trace the cause of social problems to the downfall of traditional family structures, environmentalists have connected all irregular weather patterns, disease, or drought to the ‘sin’ of global warming. It associates risk with change, and sees ongoing change as a descent into sin. The biggest difference between environmental rhetoric and the language of evangelical Christianity (thus far one of the most successful movements in America) is the possibility of redemption for our sin.

Global warming is too damn global and not personal enough. People affect their environments on a less than global scale, and environmentalist rhetoric needs to change to make the micro-scale of environmental change as significant as the macro scale. Environmentalists should attach a possessive or personalizing modifier to the word ‘environment’ whenever talking about environmental change – certain types of pollution or resource depletion affect people in the world in different ways. For instance, deforestation and energy use to manufacture paper cups impacts the world in a different way than the use of industrial chemicals and water to wash reusable cups. The impact of chemicals and water has more localized effects, while deforestation and energy more global. They don’t impact the environment as-such.

Specifying the way that consumption creates environmental change not only explains the real impacts more effectively, it can motivate change. Take the example above- talking about the specifics of the environmental change allows people to connect to the short term and small scale impacts of consumption. The effectiveness of more localized environmental discourses (NIMBY-style in particular) demonstrates how consumers respond to humanized ecological discourse. Environmentalists should detach this rhetoric from its defensive position and reattach it to a more global, humanitarian rhetoric. In the same way that human rights NGOs have been somewhat effective at encouraging people to make small donations in the name of saving people’s lives (“just one dollar can pay for malaria pills for xxx days…”), environmentalists should frame small scale choices as impacting people directly. This seems particularly important when considering the relatively marginal effects global warming will have on North America vs. the global south.

Fortunately for global warming activists, CO2 and other greenhouse gasses are connected with a variety of more visible and unappealing pollutants. For example, coal fired electric plants expel a large portion of greenhouse gasses, but also leave a more visible, immediate impact on the environment surrounding their operation. Same with cars – smog is a global warming problem in that its creation is connected to the production of greenhouse gas. These immediate, visible pollutants help to personalize and ‘downscale’ to a manageable local level the perceived impacts of activities which contribute to global warming.

Something has got to give on warming: we're fast approaching key tipping points that will determine the sustainability of everyone's way of life.

Duncan

You Owe US - LAT Writer to Readers

The writer of this LA Times Business opinion piece believes that free news content on the internet will be the downfall of journalism, and that news companies should start charging for content online.

Not surprisingly, I disagree. The downfall of one form of news reporting (one that requires “an editorial staff of roughly 890”) does not mean the end of news, nor does the LA Times have a god given right to report the news how it wishes.

Mr. Lazarus confuses information with content. Information just exists on the internet - it cannot be monopolized, and can be accessed by anyone. Yes, there was a time where access to information about places afar was limited, and newspapers built themselves around providing access to that information – ‘news.’ Once that monopoly has been broken, content changes. In a world where information is everywhere, content becomes how that information is presented – both imagistically (why TV networks seem to be doing OK – they have high production values and unparalleled use of visuals), and ideologically (blogging is paradigmatic of one successful business model). Essentially, content on the internet means dealing with how information is used, not merely giving information – news outlets can specialize towards using interesting or effective writers, but cannot depend on limiting access to content to create revenue. Sites like BoingBoing or BuzzFlash! show how internet content involves sorting and describing information, not merely creating it. (A NYT article proves this point: sports news is the ultimate commodity – its only stats and scores at its core. In response, ESPN and other outlets have focused on hiring better commentary talent, creating a unique, vastly profitable ‘brand’ identity)

The job of the news reporter should be to respond to readers, not demand that readers pay for what is already free.