Mushin-Sho

hockey teams: University of Michigan vs. The Russians:

The problem with reading 20 year old texts, despite or rather because of their contemporary relevance, is that any ideas you have about them can probably be found in some journal article. Worse, it may be their ideas that are coming through as you read fooling you into thinking that you’re actually smart. yech. Regardless (a favorite word of mine), here are some thoughts on Jameson’s conception of Utopia.

“...even hegemonic or ruling-class culture and ideology are Utopian, not in spite of their instrumental function to secure and perpetuate class privilege and power, but rather precisely because that function is also in and of itself the affirmation of collective solidarity.”

Jameson on his lessons from Benjamin’s “identification of culture and barbarism:”

“[It]...reassert[s] the undiminished power of ideological distortion that persist even within the restored Utopian meaning of cultural artifacts, and remind[s] us that within the symbolic power of art and culture the will to domination perseveres in tact.” (my emphasis)

This conception of the Utopian delivers two interesting insights for me. First, every struggle must be read as a clash of Utopias, insofar as we agree with Marxism’s primacy of the mode of production. The problem is inverted then from not living in a Utopia to one of living in multiple Utopias. Odd. The second, an extension of the first insight/ thought, is more of a rhetorical question. Doesn’t every Utopia, every class/ ideological formation carry within it the “will to domination,” which in turn leads to the first idea that all struggles are clashes of Utopias?

I sure as hell (!) don’t want to live in Pat Robertson’s Utopia.

Foucault, then, can be used to understand how this will to dominate manifests in concrete forms, both those that can be subsumed into Marxism and those that stand quizzically gazing at Karl. Moreover, if we accept Foucault and drive for revolution within and through those same (oppressive) power techniques, then we must turn back to Jameson and learn this lesson:

“...it is increasingly clear in today’s world (if it had ever been in doubt) that a Left which cannot grasp the immense Utopian appeal of nationalism (any more than it can grasp that of religion or of fascism) can scarcely hope to “reappropriate” such collective energies and must effectively doom itself to political impotence.”

Mike, meet Fred. Fred, this is Mike.

...means older brother in Telugu, my first language. He, a photographer by hobby, is a genuis who is recognized as such by all who encounter him; unfortunately the mirror doesn’t seem him that way.

Here are two photos and my brief comments on them:

“Power lines” (Two words, I think, otherwise it should be):

For larger size: Clicky here

The towers don’t have character as much as they are characters. The image highlights the towers’ human form and conversely the dehumanization that industrialization/ commidification brings, partly through these same lines, into our homes to help power our (non) lives. Note, for example, that the tower in the foreground has the mixed aura of Atlas bearing the weight of the world and Nataraja using his many arms to do the same. Moreover, and my favorite part, the foregrounded tower has a smaller tower in its ‘belly’; the tower is pregnant with another tower; industrialization’s self-replication.

“Alien Transmitter”

I take pictures of this little box all the time. Dunno why…

Biggie size found here:

Let me theorize your choice for you:

Clearly, this “alien transmitter” has become the locus of a projected desire, the will to subvert and broadcast that subversion. Since, unlike me, you have lost your “resident alien” status and have become, by logical inference, a ghastly infidellic American citizen, this box has become one space in which you can recapture, or perhaps shoot, that lost alieness. Interestingly, the box is white-ish and uses clear plastic generously; hmm…could my brother be seeking the opacity of a lost alien-eden.

hmm…could my brother’s brother be officially lost in academic language never again able to enjoy the simple, innocent joy of another clear plastic, packaging bubble sheets?

stay tuned…we’ll be right back after these brief pill popping breaks…

Hockey has to be one of the most beautiful sports on the planet. The kinetic intelligence manifest in each moment as massive bodies balance themselves on razors, move through an entirely foreign enviornment (ice), manipulate a tiny disc in infinitely creative ways—-not with their natural appendages like those wossy sports but with an extension—-all while getting hit hard as hell.

Playing is even more fun.

All that for this key moment: One of the Redwings’ most exciting players is Pavel Datsuk; a Russian; I love Russian hockey with its emphais on puck control and “look like a bad ass while you make the other team dizzy” attitutde: now the moment:

“...that was a Datsukian deke…”

announcer as scholar as announcer

and just as I finish this post…Datsuk makes two beautiful plays that directly lead to a goal.

anyone remember the Russian-5? That was nothing short of magical.

Certain foundations in my life have been exploded recently. Now, the object is not to rebuild foundations but rather to re-ground myself in the groundless, which is the ultimate ground.

Try saying that three times fast.

At these moments, which I egoistically (seriously) assume will be described as key turning points in the biographies to come after I pass, the smaller details feel like the ultimate lead weights. The same space that created Confucius also created “Chinese” water torture.

drip: my laptop is as unstable as I am
drip: the wireless network in my apartment is flipping out, although (randomly) not now.
drip: ...my love is coming here…also means she must leave…
drip: not being able to think of clever lines for blog post

I wish I had a sound proof room so that I could practice full out (I tend to be loud) and not disturb my neighbors. Although, come to think of it, no one will want to tell the Kung-Fu practicing neighbor to keep it down. Hmm…time for some late night practice…

Also, an interesting quote from Jameson on renunciation:

No longer a response and an adaptation to the constricting situation of the petty bourgeoisie and the objective contraction of possibilities, it is now generalized into a global refusal of commodity desire itself.

right on brotha man…

...a taste of what awaits: Woot: contest 46: Unfair advantages

I have officially wet my pants laughing…

art in the age of mini-chenized––never mind…that was lame…

www.RoofStudio.com

This is my creation on a small ad next to a nytimes article on the resurging popularity of custom tailored shirts…hmm…good ad placement…

Father and son driving somewhere get into a car accident. The father is killed. The son, in critical condition, is rushed to the nearest hospital. The ER doctor rushes into the operating room, sees the boy and says, “I can’t operate on this patient, he’s my son.” –> How can this be?

The doctor is, of course, his mother. The ‘riddle’ works to point out our patriarchal biases because we don’t have immediate access to the idea of a female as a doctor. Every woman in my family is a doctor and I still did not ‘solve’ this riddle when I first heard it in high school.

A more contemporary reading/ answer would be that the doctor is the boy’s other father. When that assumption is made then we must create a new riddle.

There is a form/ content division that I use in my brief polemic on slave songs. There are innumerable complications of this binary; appropriating Church hymns is itself subversive: the act itself is content. Pardon me, but I will use this rickety binary again to start off and will, hopefully, collapse it by the end.

There seems to be an interesting inversion when it comes to New Media. The content has certainly changed in accordance with the digital logic that produces it, but that is not the reasoning behind the knee jerk reactions from students, faculty and the Chronicle of Higher Ed., which has recently countered itself. There is greater resistance because it is a new forum and form.

Blogging, as a basic example, is a tool to accomplish a variety of goals. As a forum to discuss ideas with (potentially) large discourse communities, blogs can serve the basic project of our work, to join the larger (academic and otherwise) conversations in which we seek to position ourselves. I also find it encouraging and informative to read highly respected academics throw out ideas they are working on and see the evolution of those ideas. Most encouraging is when these same academics mention their brain-blocks, foreground their own humanness, something I personally would never do ;–)

Regardless, blogs specifically, and New Media generally, can be/ are new forms through which this work is done. The blog space can be new media if one begins to play with the possibility the space offers; pictures next to text, those awful smily faces, links etc… Blogs are not in themselves New Media simply because they occupy a digital space––that only makes them Re-Media. However, New Media meets its greatest (initial) resistance at this stage, where the same content is re-mediated into another form that is ‘new’ and ‘alien’.

You can change the content, just don’t change the box!!?

Raise all the hell you want, just stay in that corner over there and do it.

New Media is, then, changing the box, moving out of the corner so that content and form are both drives to revolution. Church hymns as sung by Eminem: whoa, that scared the hell outame

The idea of class struggle through a shared code should resonate in our classroom projects. What is critical thinking but one stage toward active citizenship, toward an infinite revolution? The form through which this thinking is achieved varies with every teacher who has that as a part of their project, but are we beating a master code into them? Standard English?

I came in to this year bingeing on Foucault and convinced that since there is no such thing as struggle outside of power structures, my job is to teach students the language of power. The idea was quickly complicated within the first few weeks when a colleague rejected notions of standard English, allowing their students full access to “Black English.”

There is a slippery interdependency between ‘code’ and ‘discourse’ here whose illumination would help me think through these questions further. Any recommendations?

“They sang songs for inspiration, they sang songs for relaxation, they sang songs to take their minds up off that fucked up situation.” –Mos Def

I remeber an episode of “The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air” focused on slave songs. The one I remember most distinctly was called “Wait in the water,” whose title is the chorus with the accompanying verses “till the moonlight,” “and don make no sound,” and others that I will not attempt fake for the purposes of my post here.

Will learns that these songs were not simply “for inspiration/ relaxation” but were a way of conveying directions to those intent on escaping their “fucked up situation[s].”

Jameson lite: Placing Bakhtin’s notion of the “dialogic” in his own drive toward a Marxist hermeneutic, Jameson states that the “normal form of the dialogical is essentially an antagonistic one” (his emphasis). Moreover, he uses mid 17th century England as an example; the “master code of religion becomes…the place in which the dominant formulations of a hegemonic theology are reappropriated and polemically modified.” There is a dialogical relation between those (people/classes/structures) who seek to justify/ legitimize their stranglehold on power and those who seek to subvert that project, but that relation is clearly antagonistic. Jameson adds to his qualification on Bakhtin by pointing out that “the dialogue of class struggle is one in which two opposing discourses fight it out within the general unity of a shared code.”

The form of slave songs, amongst others I am ignorant of, as devotional hymns allowed the subversive contents to sneak through even in the presence of their oppressors. The master code of religion is appropriated but my main focus here is the appropriation of one form through which theology is celebrated and spread. So, not only is the discourse appropriated but the material form of that discourse is also, and both are appropriated to serve a highly subversive purpose, namely the escape from those sites where that discourse is beaten into one’s blood. These sites (...CIA “black sites” ?) and their function complicate Jameson’s assumption that the competing class discourses fight within a shared code. Since these sites of violence are used to literally beat in the master code, the shared code itself becomes an extension of bloody physical oppression and simultaneously, paradoxically, a boon through which freedom can be won.

I’m sure I’ll actually analyze this whole transition more in upcoming posts but for the moment let me say this: I am fucking done with ego-mania and misogyny! Fucking DONE!

They were supposed to follow the logic I commented on earlier but have come to be understood as who I am as a person, what I actually think both of the world and myself. To hear this, to understand that this misunderstanding was being perpetuated broke me. I have been utterly distraught, completely flattened and everything I touch is also collapsing.

Words/ discourse have an incredible power to shape consciousness; isn’t this the basic premise of English studies?

Pardon the sophomoric understanding of Butler’s argument for “performance” as a way to circumvent Foucaudian power relations: Separating the ‘performing self’ from the ‘Real’ self, given that any such coherent entity exists, is extremely difficult and, I would argue, over time, impossible. I would like to think that my alter ego could somehow be locked into an inner phone booth and be called on to strap on the cape whenever occasion necessitates it. Unfortunately, to switch metaphors, it has become a tape worm sucking in a lot of energy and growing uncontrollably, poisonously, large.

Taking a knife to it, cutting it out… this is healthy: a healthy Hara Kiri

peace

...later, I want to erase the post below. I’ve had an illuminating weekend which I will comment on in another post. Essentially, I have decided to retire from “performing” the jackass with the accompanied egotism and misogyny. The playful has become the Real and a controlled character has come to dominate in ways that are not desired.

More soon

The background: Kim and I have begun a tradition recently. We get together every Saturday and Sunday in the afternoon to work on projects. She does her reading, writing etc., and I do mine. The point of doing this communally is simply to keep each other on task, with the added benefit of a human sounding board encouraging and discouraging any particular line of thinking.

Kim couldn’t make it this weekend and sent me an email telling me so:

My reply:

“p.s. If this e-mail is incoherent, I apologize. My head’s pretty fuzzy right now.”

Yes, your email was quite incoherent. Shashi doesn’t have girls say no to hanging out with him. Shashi has never accepted the “I’m sick,” “I’m in the hospital,” “I have to go to my chemotherapy today” excuses and has demanded, always successfully, that any woman he desires to be in his brilliant radius be there when he so wishes and leave, without words, upon his command to do so.
Therefore, your rejection of Shashi’s generous offer has neither precedent nor a base in logic, even the p.m.s kind: post-modern savage. Shashi has now transcended words and must return to his morning toast w/ peanut butter served, upon his decree, in his pajamas.

Have you seen “Hitch?” It’s a really cute movie, I really enjoyed it.

srt

The fact that I am posting my own (hilarious) email on my blog is pathetically self-obsessive. That, of course, is precisely the point.

This email, one of many mediums, are a part of my “what the hell is wrong with that guy?” persona, whose job it is to say really obnoxious, egoistic, and entirely out-of-line things in any given moment. I appropriate this kind of humor from “The Family Guy” and “The Daily Show.”

I think there is a wonderful, and perhaps even Zen, kind of logic this kind of humor. First, I personally just really enjoy seeing the “shock and awe’ (!) look on someone’s face when I pull these rabbits out. Second, this is an inverted performance that seeks to uphold the very idea(l)s that it seems to so harshly transgress.

Jameson’s example: I don’t have a direct quote, sorry. Jameson, very briefly, uses the idea of blasphemy as an example of the kind of logic I propose above. To blaspheme is to recognize the “sacred” as such, and despite attempting to trasgress it’s rules, one actually reemphasizes the privillege of those rules. Of course, this all depends on one’s purposeful blasphemy. As I write I am breaking a untold number of “sacred” laws but, being totally unconscious of these, am not commiting blasphemy in the Jamesonian/ Thandrian sense.

How Zen: Nothing brings this paegan jackass back to the moment like a hard laugh.

mushy is now packed with 20% more mushiness

please…

Photo by Robyn M. Scafone

Quickly; I must return to work but will certainly comment on this later.

I just posted, and saw again, the poster of Gandhi that Apple released. Although the title is “Subversion,” the irony of having a white apple logo, and their web address, on that amazing photograph is jarring.

~Recent thought: The biggest problem with the world is that it is so damn nuanced, that there is no clear-cut good/ bad, which makes the job of living on this damn planet much harder.

~Recent discussion with Mike Schmidt, to whom I owe an apology for barging into his office and demanding an intellectual conversation: Regardless, he noted a few examples that highlighted my recent thoughts. The very transport vehicles that deliver Coke to remote parts of Africa—-Shashi Tharoor (no, not my alias) calls this Cocacolonization—-are also those used, or potentially used, to deliver medicines for Aids and other epidemics. Michael is holding himself in an ambivalent position, not by choice but by the force of considering the evidence and options of globalization, as it operates now. We briefly talked about the possibility of post-Foucaudian power relations, which, to borrow from Spivak, is a revolution yet to be conceptualized.

~Gandhi through Apple: Satyagraha and the iPod on a ‘Mahatma’ whose renunciation of food and water freed the globe, for the briefest of moments, from Ground.

my piece of nirvana

I just wish I knew how to arrange them the way I want to.

Bill Maher on Bush:

“His visit to Argentina didn’t go as expected. Thousands of people rioting, flipping over cars, smashed store fronts, signs that said ‘Bush Go Home!’ which of course is nothing compared to what would have happened in Detroit if he showed up for Rosa Parks’ funeral.”

Ya damn right! This is one case where I would love for Detroit to live up to it’s reputation. White flight part two.

Also, amidst my internal warfare between anger, swear words and trying to form these sentences, it struck me that the Argentinian reaction is a part of the transnational activism that must be enacted. One.

“You lie once and you’re a liar. You lie a whole bunch, write them down in paragraph form and you’re an author.”—-Craig (roommate)—-keep going, mix lies with fear (perhaps the new technique of power), and you become the scariest man in the world.

I have just been accused of being hyper-academic—-thanks (?)—-saying that even my intimacy would be marked with talk of globalization and critique.

“Trojans?? How dare you bring that archaic imperialism to my bed!”

Then this:

“Shashi, you need to colonize me in slow motion”

I fell off my seat laughing:

hi mom

I borrow the idea of a public announcement from Hillary: anything to plug your blog Hil.

I have spent far too much time flipping through other blogs and extending my own. From 5pm onwards, I am going on a blog fast. Yes, that’s right, I will actually use my computer for the good of humanity, namely by working on my reading and syllabus creation. For this purpose only, and not the satanic linking practices driving my intellect toward paganism, shall I, as heretofore proclaimed, use this device.

God save the queen…

word

I’m a bit proud of myself for making some basic changes to the blog. My blog roll has a new name——me so clever——and, my favorite, a new sidebar section.

I found the ‘diary’ “fuck the world” after some clicking through other blogs and have no choice but to link it. However, I think it needs its own section where others of…you know…those people… will join: simply, unequivocally, hilariously, insane.

so be it…the great webmaster has spoken…

Diplomacy is not simply the art of persuading others to accept a set of demands. It is the art of discerning objectives the world will accept—and the restraints on one’s own power that one must accept in turn. Peace can endure after conflict only if all the major players find it preferable to another war.
[emphasis mine]

The greatest danger lies neither in using force nor in avoiding it, but rather in failing to understand the intricate relationship between power and persuasion.

Both are from “Power and Persuasion” by Frederick W. Kagan

Also found on my del.icio.us account.