I am getting my first taste of the phenomenology of blue collar work. If there's one kind of labor that is performed it's the sometimes hard, and often times tightly regulated and time-coded work of the blue collar labor. I am a union iron worker.
Let me trace out a few themes:
The body in pain. This characterizes not only the constant struggle against the iron, which produces joint pain and muscle pain, but it registers the labor. Tools enter into this context to either mitigate the pain, but ultimately the trade's outlines are traced in the body's pain. Twisting rods, welding, connecting, and the like all require some constellation of body muscles to perform their functions, and they coalesce into trade knowledge, which has been bled from the iron workers union agreements with other trades and employers for decades.
Another body in pain references another interesting component of labor. The injured body is a body of legal evidence, which leverages legal judgments in the favor of the injured. These large financial settlements indicate that American human life is still at a premium, and employers do whatever they can to avoid them. The numerous recent safety protocols promoted by employers not only try to mitigate the number of injuries but they also regulate the actions of the workers who abide by them. They also are elaborate CYA policies that reduce the effectiveness and ultimate productivity measures of workers for the sake of reducing financial liability for the remaining workplace hazards. I also suspect that these are an in-road into the trades themselves. The more paper work that one must do in order to complete a job reveals the pace and function of each task done, such that every risky move as accounted for.
I am also considering a larger issue about who controls the meaning of work. I sense and hear a lot of pride in the work union iron workers do. "Ratty" operations, as they're called, tend to sacrifice pride and quality for quick work.
Tuesday, March 27, 2012
Tuesday, March 20, 2012
creativity
Why is creativity this fleeting moment book-ended by robotic, motion-dependent banality? Can I put much stake in the structure, the mechanics of creativity? I cannot help but think of those scenes from "32 Short Films about Glenn Gould" where the artist is either taking medication for his pain or is soaking his arms up to his elbows in cold water. One cannot discount the destructive capacity of human activity in mashing the ivories with precision, power, and utter determination. The desire to transcend the physics of music production at moments like these make one forget one's body.
Until the moment ends.
Then the pain comes back, perhaps first as a numb fingertip. The tendons, like so many living piano wires, contract and extend at such rapid pace to render sensible and virtuosic the fingers of the player that one forgets that they're sheathed under the flesh and under much duress. This body in pain reminds the player that they're merely vehicles for an idea, that of music. And music, being a parapet of high-culture, requires the enslavement of the body to its ideal. But maybe we should take a quick step back. Let's recognize that not all cultural elements require such a privation of human comfort to exist. Yet this displacement does occur, even in the smallest. The only difference between reconstructing Bach on a piano for an audience is that it takes much greater a toll upon the body than say hitting bongos rhythmically, high on some plant, until the wee hours of the night. There, the trance-inducing rhythm never escapes those of the body's potential rhythm. Perhaps that "native" ritual tells us something about the subliminal space of its faith that's contrapuntal to the fugue-state of other expressions or explorations of faith.
So let us not forget that there's a physical component to the coincidence of cultural activity and a body in its servitude. But what have we come to at this point?
Time.
Time is a component of all of this. And it is so in a way that is almost tautologically bound or totalizing in its descriptive potential. Time has an important element to it. It's being conquered by symbol use. Because words and ideas are these haunted tools for thinking and engaging with the world. They're something other than us in our use of them. That's because they're invested with a history. It's easy to say that they don't have to be. Yet, there's something impossible to avoid in the notion that while one can continually affirm that they have freedom to re-brand the meaning of words, but to do it alone risks a sort of social suicide, one marked by a solitary individual speaking gibberish. If one is to be successful in this re-branding one must get buy-in from others. One must sustain a marketplace of meaning from which to derive meaning-value and render the re-branded word into social currency, one that can be coined for social cohesion, rhetorical visioning, and practical use. That takes time.
Until the moment ends.
Then the pain comes back, perhaps first as a numb fingertip. The tendons, like so many living piano wires, contract and extend at such rapid pace to render sensible and virtuosic the fingers of the player that one forgets that they're sheathed under the flesh and under much duress. This body in pain reminds the player that they're merely vehicles for an idea, that of music. And music, being a parapet of high-culture, requires the enslavement of the body to its ideal. But maybe we should take a quick step back. Let's recognize that not all cultural elements require such a privation of human comfort to exist. Yet this displacement does occur, even in the smallest. The only difference between reconstructing Bach on a piano for an audience is that it takes much greater a toll upon the body than say hitting bongos rhythmically, high on some plant, until the wee hours of the night. There, the trance-inducing rhythm never escapes those of the body's potential rhythm. Perhaps that "native" ritual tells us something about the subliminal space of its faith that's contrapuntal to the fugue-state of other expressions or explorations of faith.
So let us not forget that there's a physical component to the coincidence of cultural activity and a body in its servitude. But what have we come to at this point?
Time.
Time is a component of all of this. And it is so in a way that is almost tautologically bound or totalizing in its descriptive potential. Time has an important element to it. It's being conquered by symbol use. Because words and ideas are these haunted tools for thinking and engaging with the world. They're something other than us in our use of them. That's because they're invested with a history. It's easy to say that they don't have to be. Yet, there's something impossible to avoid in the notion that while one can continually affirm that they have freedom to re-brand the meaning of words, but to do it alone risks a sort of social suicide, one marked by a solitary individual speaking gibberish. If one is to be successful in this re-branding one must get buy-in from others. One must sustain a marketplace of meaning from which to derive meaning-value and render the re-branded word into social currency, one that can be coined for social cohesion, rhetorical visioning, and practical use. That takes time.
Friday, March 9, 2012
interview for a war veteran
Interviewer:
"I see that you were in the Iraq War from 2003 until 2006. Tell me, how has this experience equipped you for this position?"
Iraq War Veteran:
"Well sir. I believe I am uniquely qualified for this position. I can fly a fifteen million dollar weapons platform into the heart of a city, receive kill commands from a lawyer in Miami, and successfully identify, target, and eliminate enemy heat signatures 1000s of yards away on the ground. Sir!"
Interviewer:
"Do you know your way around a cash register?"
Iraq War Veteran:
"Each of these missions cost in excess of seven hundred and fifty thousand dollars in logistical support, weaponry R & D, fuel, training, and armaments expended. Sir!"
Interviewer:
"But are you ready to manage the most demanding-yet-successful Huck's Food and Fuel Mart in the metro-east I-44 corridor?"
Iraq War veteran:
"Sir yes, sir!"
"I see that you were in the Iraq War from 2003 until 2006. Tell me, how has this experience equipped you for this position?"
Iraq War Veteran:
"Well sir. I believe I am uniquely qualified for this position. I can fly a fifteen million dollar weapons platform into the heart of a city, receive kill commands from a lawyer in Miami, and successfully identify, target, and eliminate enemy heat signatures 1000s of yards away on the ground. Sir!"
Interviewer:
"Do you know your way around a cash register?"
Iraq War Veteran:
"Each of these missions cost in excess of seven hundred and fifty thousand dollars in logistical support, weaponry R & D, fuel, training, and armaments expended. Sir!"
Interviewer:
"But are you ready to manage the most demanding-yet-successful Huck's Food and Fuel Mart in the metro-east I-44 corridor?"
Iraq War veteran:
"Sir yes, sir!"
Thursday, March 8, 2012
it's bigger than you
There's a problem I run into from time to time. We use a lot of words to varying effect. Sometimes we conjure up wise old relics with our usage, and it is there that the idea conveyed is bigger than you.
This is when something strange happens. You are quickly alienated from yourself. Perhaps you spoke in a way that makes you appear 'too big for your britches.' Perhaps you spoke in a way that makes you appear more foolish, more bigoted, prejudicial, or otherwise unsavory even to yourself. There's no reason that this should occur other than it does, and it demonstrates how rhetorically weaponized meaning happens through our uncovering of history with words, our invading of homes with our words, our invasion of the interior lives of others with our words.
How violent can an "I love you" be? When it achieves an absolute measure of death as its ending. Can or should anyone love that much? Is it fair to you or to me? It's as the author in the book lying next to me would say, slavery to formalism. We become enslaved to a lot of things. An idea in our head seems like an unworthy king for a court of one. When we function in a world on the basis of our idea of that world then perhaps this king leads none. Ideas are, in fact, no things. Yet we invest so much in them that we'll fell a forest for the greater glory of this no thing. And what better way to demonstrate it's no potential than for this no thing to command an army and obliterate something, to erase it totally from existence. This notion of erasure is a sacrifice upon the altar of no things.
This is when something strange happens. You are quickly alienated from yourself. Perhaps you spoke in a way that makes you appear 'too big for your britches.' Perhaps you spoke in a way that makes you appear more foolish, more bigoted, prejudicial, or otherwise unsavory even to yourself. There's no reason that this should occur other than it does, and it demonstrates how rhetorically weaponized meaning happens through our uncovering of history with words, our invading of homes with our words, our invasion of the interior lives of others with our words.
How violent can an "I love you" be? When it achieves an absolute measure of death as its ending. Can or should anyone love that much? Is it fair to you or to me? It's as the author in the book lying next to me would say, slavery to formalism. We become enslaved to a lot of things. An idea in our head seems like an unworthy king for a court of one. When we function in a world on the basis of our idea of that world then perhaps this king leads none. Ideas are, in fact, no things. Yet we invest so much in them that we'll fell a forest for the greater glory of this no thing. And what better way to demonstrate it's no potential than for this no thing to command an army and obliterate something, to erase it totally from existence. This notion of erasure is a sacrifice upon the altar of no things.
bodies and minds
We are not unique.
We are all trapped within a universe of our making. To consider for a moment that our awareness is our ability to fix time and that this is uniquely tied to our ability to store memory in word, what makes our condition so freeing yet so utterly trapping.
That's the issue. We see the end to our abilities within the framework of our abilities. To language is to bring meaning to the world, meaning that accrues the sediment of history. And that history defines what and who we are. Sure each moment is filled with the potential for freedom from this history, a new beginning. But what are we beginning? What first step are we taking and from what do we step? We're still tethered to a polestar of meaning, and it is that familiar patina of interpretation through which we see everything, even ourselves. Our consciousness has a flatness. We're trapped on a mobius strip of historically constituted awareness. Out of what it springs is an initial desire for speaking into the world and at that moment the full creation of the world as spoken rushes in to fill a void, a void presupposed by meaning, by position in semiotic space.
We're trapped along this oddly flat dimension of awareness, and it is that awareness which enables the awareness of being trapped. When we recognize the potential for a new beginning we see it's contours. When we see the same thing differently than another we recognize its dimensions. In symbolizing we usher in a reality that is symbol based. We mine the potential of our thought, and in that thought we fall as it were an abyss.
So being is an issue of symbol using and symbol using traps us in world of our own making. No, a clarification is needed. Our entrapment is in chasing for that chimera of significance, meaning. What a flag means to you and to mean can be utterly different yet a flag remains before us. Now what is this triad? It's simply a condition for recognizing the potential for meaning making and its utter failure. We may use the same word but it's meaning to us is often fleeting. We can draw an assumption that the two of us are in agreement concerning meaning, but that assumption, once again, gives rise to the perennial breakdown in coordinating action.
Yet we somehow find ways to continue our progress together or alone in some kind of working construction of social organization. How does this happen? I for one can speak to the ability to put my body through pain in order to exact money. Granted these jobs are fleeting, they insult my intellect, and my physical abilities insult their meaning of hard work. But that body in pain brings to reality something that was always there but lost sometimes in the world world of symbols. We've only granted ourselves a modicum of levitation from the real by the symbolic world, but that's all that's required. And given this modicum of levitation from reality we recognize it all too often when world comes crashing through word.
The strength of the base of a foundation is a body in pain. That's an investment in labor--a necessary condition of creations that transcend time that--once the bodies that have sacrificed to create them are gone--become artifacts in time.
Nothing new emerges from this writing that hasn't already been said and thought of in a million different ways--some better, some worse. I wonder why I do this.
We are all trapped within a universe of our making. To consider for a moment that our awareness is our ability to fix time and that this is uniquely tied to our ability to store memory in word, what makes our condition so freeing yet so utterly trapping.
That's the issue. We see the end to our abilities within the framework of our abilities. To language is to bring meaning to the world, meaning that accrues the sediment of history. And that history defines what and who we are. Sure each moment is filled with the potential for freedom from this history, a new beginning. But what are we beginning? What first step are we taking and from what do we step? We're still tethered to a polestar of meaning, and it is that familiar patina of interpretation through which we see everything, even ourselves. Our consciousness has a flatness. We're trapped on a mobius strip of historically constituted awareness. Out of what it springs is an initial desire for speaking into the world and at that moment the full creation of the world as spoken rushes in to fill a void, a void presupposed by meaning, by position in semiotic space.
We're trapped along this oddly flat dimension of awareness, and it is that awareness which enables the awareness of being trapped. When we recognize the potential for a new beginning we see it's contours. When we see the same thing differently than another we recognize its dimensions. In symbolizing we usher in a reality that is symbol based. We mine the potential of our thought, and in that thought we fall as it were an abyss.
So being is an issue of symbol using and symbol using traps us in world of our own making. No, a clarification is needed. Our entrapment is in chasing for that chimera of significance, meaning. What a flag means to you and to mean can be utterly different yet a flag remains before us. Now what is this triad? It's simply a condition for recognizing the potential for meaning making and its utter failure. We may use the same word but it's meaning to us is often fleeting. We can draw an assumption that the two of us are in agreement concerning meaning, but that assumption, once again, gives rise to the perennial breakdown in coordinating action.
Yet we somehow find ways to continue our progress together or alone in some kind of working construction of social organization. How does this happen? I for one can speak to the ability to put my body through pain in order to exact money. Granted these jobs are fleeting, they insult my intellect, and my physical abilities insult their meaning of hard work. But that body in pain brings to reality something that was always there but lost sometimes in the world world of symbols. We've only granted ourselves a modicum of levitation from the real by the symbolic world, but that's all that's required. And given this modicum of levitation from reality we recognize it all too often when world comes crashing through word.
The strength of the base of a foundation is a body in pain. That's an investment in labor--a necessary condition of creations that transcend time that--once the bodies that have sacrificed to create them are gone--become artifacts in time.
Nothing new emerges from this writing that hasn't already been said and thought of in a million different ways--some better, some worse. I wonder why I do this.
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