Strange Foreign Bodies

The body exposes itself to the depths of its guts, between the fibers of its muscles and along its vessels. It exposes the inside to the outside and always escapes further, deeper into the abyss that it is. However this is the truth of the world: it comes out of nothing, it is created, which means that it is unproduced, unformed, and not constructed. It is an alteration and a spasm of nihil. The world is an explosion and an expansion of an exposure (which can be called “truth”, or “meaning”). The chiasm of the body and of the world exposes exposure to itself—and with it, the impossibility to finally bring the world to the spirit, and bring meaning to significance.
The body is a strangeness which is not preceded by familiarity.

-Nancy

Person(a) of the Year

Although the selection of a persona or group based identification rather than a specific individual is not a new development for TIME; this year's selection of "The Protester" points toward intriguing new developments in the dynamics of global publics. TIME Magazine’s selection criterion is rather simple; the award goes to that person, group, or concept which most influenced the news, for better or for worse.

Why “The Protester”? Why not the singular Tunisian fruit vendor; the spark that spurred a fire that would rapidly proceed to engulf the globe; from the favelas of the south to the arctic blasted Russian metropolises, and the most developed countries in the world? Why not choose even a specific group of protesters, “The Arab Spring” or the #OWS movements?

Here’s portion of TIME Magazine’s defense of their selection: 

Everywhere this year, people have complained about the failure of traditional leadership and the fecklessness of institutions. Politicians cannot look beyond the next election, and they refuse to make hard choices. That's one reason we did not select an individual this year. But leadership has come from the bottom of the pyramid, not the top. For capturing and highlighting a global sense of restless promise, for upending   governments and conventional wisdom,  for combining the oldest of techniques with the newest of technologies to shine a light on human dignity and, finally, for steering the planet on a more democratic though sometimes more dangerous path for the 21st century, the Protester is TIME's 2011 Person of the Year.

News by definition is generated from controversy. News is a form of protest against the status quo; it pokes holes in the previously seamless fabric of the present. In re-presenting the facts of what has occurred the news defies expectations of what we thought was occurring. But news is also analysis, opinion, and commentary on how we should relate ourselves to new developments; as they emerge in real-time. News even offers analysis on the news. And other media offer analysis on the analysis of the analysis. Entertainment, factual presentation, commentary and opinion become ever blurred in the era of Meta-news. Yet the news has also donned the mask of the figure of the “The Protester” in response to the “The Protester” itself, in its myriad forms.

The Person of the Year is not decided based on extracting data from algorithms or trends from complex metrics. TIME’s award is an analysis by the media of the media, but while it claims to be simply representing the facts of the case, should this award not be the most obvious of decisions? Shouldn’t the answer be staring us straight in the face? TIME doesn’t seem to even feign some sort of claim to objectivity or very rigorously stress the differences between the runner-up’s and the winner. The selection process is based on perceptions, and like all perceptions, from the very beginning it is an act of valuation.

Developments in Cognitive Psychology and Neurophilosophy have demonstrably proven the inability to maintain a distinction between fact and value. At the most basic level of the visual cortex (V1), before one is even conscious of a visual sense perception, feedback loops of higher order thinking processes have already influenced the act of perception. Sober, rational deliberation that’s freed from all extraneous influence vanishes, always trailing in the wake of precognitive, emotional valences.

And in a sense, TIME Magazine is all too aware of this phenomenon. In the penultimate statement defending their decision, TIME reflects on the affective capacities that “The Protester” generated:

For capturing and highlighting a global sense of restless promise

The criterion for selection is fundamentally based on the influence a person/group/concept has had on the media. The reason “The Protester” was so influential was because it fostered the conditions of possibility that connected, created and fed unpredictable desires. There was something else at work in the figure of “The Protester” this year. The figure itself always already was a figure that embodied influence. In a sense every TIME Magazine Person of the Year recipient embodies the figure of “The Protester” in one-way or another.

In the immediate wake of the revolts experts, theorists and scholars scrambled to try and explain why predictive models and theoretical frames failed so miserably to foresee such a drastic upheaval. The events that we are witnessing can only be traced to one sort of cause, the final cause, in an Aristotelian sense. The TIME article relates the figure of “The Protester” to the etymological origin of democracy or demos. All of these movements are ‘caused’ in the sense that they fulfill the meaning and strive to satisfy the end of the demos.

But there are also very specific figures that are emblematic of “The Protester.” There is the Tunisian Fruit Vendor, the romanticized figure of self-sacrifice and ineffable defiance of conventional wisdom. There are the #OWS protesters, the leaderless and organic network of protesters, but a more contentious figure, admired, mockupied and demonized all at once. Within the Occupy Wall ST. Movement the most famous representatives are the victims; the NW Grandma and UC Students Pepper-sprayed, the Iraqi War Veteran whose skull was fractured by Oakland Policy with a tear gas canister, or countless others who were subjected to police brutality.

I posted during the first few months of the #OWS protests about the statistical connection between acts of police repression and media coverage of the protests. There was a significant positive correlation between instances of state violence and the amount of media traffic consumed by global publics; thus its no surprise that the most well known figures are the victims.

    
    Yet TIME Magazine repeatedly insists on the fact that this revolution was not linearly caused by advances in technology:

Technology mattered, but this was not a technological revolution. Social networks did not cause these movements, but they kept them alive and connected. Technology allowed us to watch, and it spread the virus of protest, but this was not a wired revolution; it was a human one, of hearts and minds, the oldest technology of all.

But perhaps the human heart itself has changed. What if our affective sensibilities have grown drastically? The article explicitly asks the question:

Is there a global tipping point for frustration?

To me the more interesting question is not whether there is a tipping point or brink in terms of the numbers of people that have to be frustrated before general sentiment translates into action; or whether there is a brink in terms of how pissed people have to get before an emotion becomes an occupation.  Instead, what if technological prosthesis expands our collective affective horizon of possibility? Or if there were a brink, what if it were not fixed or timeless? What if we could actively work on finding ways to lower or raise its threshold? Or return to a more ancient education of the sense? In so many ways (that need not be repeated here) the sources and levels of frustration within the varying contexts (from #OWS to the Arab Spring, to Russia and Greece) differed dramatically, yet tactics by the different groups were remarkably similar. This movement emerged from and continues to generate a social imaginary; an envisioning that feeds forwards and backwards through the public , other movements and the prefigured present; like an electric charge. The bonds of solidarity sedimented through millions of bytes in the bucket spurred passionate attachments to the trajectories of other protesters and movements. The interconnectedness of the movements provided an infrastructural base that would outpace its wildest dreams.

The movements combine:

the oldest of techniques with the newest of technologies to shine a light on human dignity

What if the newest of technologies is really just as ancient of principle? Are the technologies, as they disclose themselves in their many-sided mystery not the tools enabling one to take to the task of generating an ethos? Can we not think of ethos as a technique as well as a technology?

A technique of the self;

A prosthetically enhanced capacity to respond;

An augmented duty to own up to one’s ownmost potentiality for respons(e)ibility. 

Occupy Austin and the Idle Talk of ‘the they’

In relation to the ongoing Occupation movements I’ve been split in terms of whether I have hope in them, identify with them or simply let sputter out unnoticed. Initially I thought they were rather novel and if they gained enough inertia they could potentially lead to mass strikes that could reinvigorate organized labor. But as I began to look into the demography of the movements, the landscape appears to be characterized more by trustafarians playing hacky sack and drinking micro-brews. Even the recent campus movements that chant “we’re the 99%” seem somewhat ridiculous to me. Yes you are the 99% but most likely if you’re attending this university you’re the top 10% of the country, and top 1% of the world.

In a lot of ways, the movement has been somewhat self-aggrandizing in many senses. I understand it is decentralized and leaderless, and thus is may be wrong to make sweeping generalizations, nonetheless I think writ large what is being produced will end up remaining unorganized and position-less. It comes off as an outburst of populism, not a tangible political force. I think the result is that either politicians will pander to and co-opt them, and van Jones has already attempted to do just that, or the movement will refuse the influence and they will drift into obscurity. Transforming a moment of potentiality into a nullity.

There are those that proffer broad based class critique, [and I say critique instead of ‘warfare’ because this is nothing like ‘warfare,’ just watch the Brooklyn balloon resistance] but its typically aimed at scapegoating ceo’s rather than the totality. Then there are those that criticize ‘the system’ yet the response they seek to garner is simply a reinstatement of the unemployed. More taxes, less bread!

In my previous post I indicated that I would not be reducing my analysis to class critique and that I would engage in a more phenomenological approach. In Sein und Zeit in The everyday being of the “there,” and the Falling of Dasein section Heidegger writes

Our interpretation is purely ontological in its aims, and is far removed from any moralizing critique of everyday Dasein, and from the aspirations of a ‘philosophy of culture’ (SuZ, 210).

Likewise, my interpretation of these movements does not come as a distanced recluse rather I went and observed the movements first hand the last couple of days. I may be somewhat more moralistic than Heidegger in tenor, but will attempt to use the phenomenological analysis as a jumping off point for questioning the effects, modes, and genuineness of the movements as a thing in and of themselves.

Yesterday when I went to the pre-rally on the main mall of the University of Texas at Austin I spoke with Professor Miller (I hate sharing my last name with this guy) of the McCombs Business School. He was talking to some of the protesters and a journalist from the Daily Texan. After pontificating about the ills of government regulation his basic point was that ‘these kids’ need to quit ‘complaining’ and start coming up with incentive based solutions to the market. One of the things that sparked this post however was a comment he made that these protests simply get people to join on board something without understanding the ‘back story’ of the situation. Basically that the protests make people unreflectively bandwagon onto a movement they are ignorant about.

At the time I quickly retorted that symbolic protests are not public policy forums and that his argument was generally more characteristic of the right than the left, and that this is simply a response to the rhetorical branding that’s worked so well since the Gingrich revolution. On further reflection after watching the protests evolve in person and online, and seeing the media’s coverage of the movements it seems he might have had a decent point after all.

Heidegger produces the idea of Idle Talk as a mode of Dasein’s average everydayness. It’s not that Idle Talk is more or less present-at-hand as a mode of discourse than others, it points to the ways that this mode can only come from the sort of Being that has disclosedness as a necessary and essential aspect of its existence. Heidegger’s definition,

The Being-said, the dictum, the pronouncement [Ausspruch]-all these now stand surety for the genuineness of the discourse and of the understanding which belongs to it, and for its appropriateness to the facts. And because this discoursing has lost its primary relationship-of-Being towards the entity talked about, or else has never achieved such a relationship, it does not communicate in such a way as to let this entity be appropriated in a primordial manner, but communicates rather by following the route of gossiping and passing the word along. What is said-in-the-talk as such, spreads in wider circles and takes on an authoritative characters. Things are so because one says so. Idle talk is constituted by just such gossiping and passing the word along- a process by which its initial lack of grounds to stand on becomes aggravated to complete groundlessness (SuZ, 212, emphasis original).

Idle talk is a people magazine, shooting the breeze, speaking without ground. What’s interesting here is not just a basic description of people talking without either being sincere or having acquired a level of expertise to do so but rather the analysis of the ways in which Idle Talk lends itself to circulation. Idle Talk as a mode of communication is more apt to circulate because its very nature implies that lack of ontological questioning; things can simply be taken on face. This precludes a search for the grounds upon which the discourse is spoken from, it is a part of the larger forces of nihilism in which the Being of beings that speaks is forgotten. The type of entities that language possesses is likewise forgotten, concealed, and covered over. Heidegger writes;

The groundlessness of idle talk is no obstacle to its becoming public; instead it encourages this. Idle talk is the possibility of understanding everything without previously making the thing one’s own. If this were done, idle talk would founder; and it already guards against such a danger. Idle talk is something which anyone can rake up; it not only releases one from the task of genuinely understanding, but develops an undifferentiated kind of intelligibility, for which nothing is closed off any longer (SuZ, 213).

Idle Talk circulates throughout the public because of its simple reductive ‘truth’ value. Things don’t have truth for a specific Being as the result of making it their own through ontological reflection, rather things are because ‘they’ have said so. The desire for understanding pure and simple obscures the necessity for inquiry,

The average understanding of the reader will never be able to decide what has been drawn from primordial sources with a struggle and how much is just gossip. The average understanding, moreover, will not want any such distinction, and does not need it, because, of course, it understands everything (SuZ, 212, emphasis original). 

This is what upsets me about the Occupation movements. Its not that I want to see these people engaged in riveting dialectical materialist analyses that would rival Marx or Harvey today, but I think the lack of anything resembling a coherent message points to the fact that the movement embraces an anything goes sort of mentality. Everyone’s sign is just fine. There aren’t any internal tensions being exposed. I understand the left has been plagued by in-fighting for far too long and a generous disposition of alliance is strategic, but to what end? Its probably more strategic to create some sort of signifying point at which the criticism crystallizes. I understand it’s a movement against Wall Street, but does capitalism really have a center? It will always be more dispersed and decentralized than your movement, how successful can mimicry be?

Heidegger puts it best,

Thus, by its very nature, idle talk is a closing-off, since to go back to the ground of what is talked about is something which it leaves undone….Because of this, idle talk discourages any new inquiry and any disputation, and in a peculiar way suppresses them and holds them back (SuZ, 213)

Idle talk as a modality of communication cuts off and closes down. It seeks to shelter being from agonistic engagement. For movements to be successful they need to be more aggressive and explicity. This movement is nothing like the Battle for Seattle or the Arab Spring. There is no attempt to disrupt the flow of goods, traffic, or people. Simple chanting and cheering may ‘speak truth to power’ but it won’t redirect the power relationships.

The dominance of the public way in which things have been interpreted has already been decisive even for the possibilities of having a mood-that is, for the basic way in which Dasein lets the world “matter” to it. The “they” prescribes on’s state-of-mind, and determines what and how one ‘sees’ (SuZ, 213).

Thus my critique is not aimed at tweaking or reforming a bit of the content within the movement writ large, but rather to expose the ways that the general disposition of the movement in terms of the way it inculcates a mood of critique and movement is problematic. It enframes the complex flows of global capitalism and the populist energy of America into neat easily understood and thus subverted forces. This obscures the contradictions of capital rather than searching for breaking points. It assumes single individuals are evil, rather than attempting to smash the oppressor within. It views capital as a disembodied structure rather than one that operates moreso on the ability to reproduce the relations of production by commodifying the sensorium, our musculature, emotive tendencies and perceptual capacities.

When Dasein maintains itself in idle talk, it is – as Being-in-the-world – cut off from its primary and primordially genuine relationships-of-Being towards the world, towards Dasein-with, and towards its very Being-in. Such a Dasein keeps floating unattached [in einer Schwebe]; yet in so doing, it is always alongside the world, with Others, and towards itself (SuZ 214).

This general mood cuts off our capacities to care for the Other’s we are speaking about and for more generally. The desire for completely intelligible system of capitalism and the arrogance it breeds cultivates a general cynicism that fails to see the objectifying processes within the everyday. Capital does not exist solely as an invisible structure that occurs behind the closed doors of the New York Stock Exchange its refracted through our movements, modes of speaking, and friend and family interactions. Until greater attention is paid to the minutiae of everyday biopolitical processes, than the reversal of such power relations will always remain a utopian, moralistic castle in the sky.

While the particular Dasein drifts along towards an ever-increasing groundlessness as it floats, the uncanniness of this floating remains hidden from it under their protecting shelter (SuZ, 214)

A Surplus of Pathos

Pathos Final Presentation on Prezi