Current discussions speak of a solar economy and a solar revolution while emphasizing its novelty in our coal- and oil-powered world. Contrary, civilization is by virtue a solar powered phenomenon. What makes a civilization? Complex social organization. What makes complex social organization possible? A large population that can be subdivided into specialized occupations. What makes this large population? Food. How is this food acquired? The hugest contributor to population explosions and the attendant societies organized around food production, the veneration of this production into a mythological construct maintained by a priest class, and ascendance of god kings who control the conditions of plant growth is the grain, nurtured by the sun, the soil, the water, and human toil. Corn in the Americas, wheat in the Middle East and Europe, rice in Asia--each growth of a civilization was powered by the same energy source surplus food production, which was, in turn, powered by the sun. Civilization has and always will be solar powered so long as members of a civilization need to eat. And a religion will venerate the arrangement of people and institutions around what the sun can produce to both sate the risk associated with basing the existence of an artificially maintained population center around food production and to justify the organization of such a society. More importantly, religion conducts a shell game with the causality between sun, plant, food, satiety, and food safety.
Ecology tells us that the sun is a wasted resource. Even by the grossest calculations among scientists, of the sun's total energy that reaches the earth, one tenth, one exponent, one power is lost between what photons blanket the earth and those that ricochet off of chloroplasts inside the cells of photosynthetic life on earth. And for each ensuing step the same loss occurs, which is what gives a food chain such a wide base and not much hierarchy. By dint of that reality humanity has learned that food production around a good source of weather and water affords almost a limitless opportunity to produce its staple foods. And because the sun is a wasted resource the opportunity to maximize production exists such that enterprising farmers who clear a plot of land can expand production to a hypothetical point of excess. And thus in an economy based in real worth, the possibility to produce great food riches exists. Here we have the basis for a relationship between people, the land, and the sun, which produces wealth, power, and population. And it is in that retreating hypothetical point of excess where land use achieves excess food production, a precariously grown population, and a power structure that administers it where we find the roots of slavery.
In essence, it is the excessive production possibilities along with now-established excess population that sets the stage for a gross abuse of power in the establishment of slaves. Between the sun, the plants, and the people a line of ascension is drawn through symbolism. From this symbolism a very real condition of existence, food, anchors a new identity in power relations between the coordination of land use and the coordination of labor to take advantage of that hypothetical excess production of food. These are the conditions for the emergence of slavery. Technologies of food production don't end at the plow or the irrigation ditch. They extend into the social organization of a class of toilers and the ideological systems that convince them to work the fields, justify the coercive content of labor, and smuggle into the fruit of labor, i.e., civilization, the connection to the sun, the land, and plants. And so out of this arrangement we find the development of property, both land and produce, and finally chattel, that is, people held for labor.
Agriculture is many thousands of years old. People have learned to domesticate and breed plants and animals to establish a productive relationship to set parcels of land. The peculiarities of this system, like human reproduction itself, is that it is set in that atavistic mold and rarely finds different expression outside of those real conditions of labor or the real consequences of not doing the labor. Food production requires a certain amount of labor input to prepare the land, plant the seeds, nurture the growing food crops, harvest them, and process them into the foodstuffs that form the foundation of a culture. Even after landing on the moon and sending rovers to mars we find people enslaved or close to slavery conditions working the land for land owners under some coercion be it the whip, the threat of death, or the reinforcement of money.
The line from sun to food production plays out in time. That is, agriculture, takes time. The culture of food production, the veneration of productivity gods, the arrangement of sacrifices to appease those gods, the quasi-religious ceremonies around planting and harvest, those are human culture. Human culture is time. More importantly so, it is time shifted, that is, time with an express outcome ordering how its sequences flow. From this we have the coordination of the basic conditions of toil required for survival being used to consequentially order how that toil will occur and to what extent it will be maintained. Even after landing on the moon and sending rovers to mars we find that labor and its value is something that can be infinitely exploited for the gain of a few under the quasi-religious organization of labor into a system of production that sustains itself. This is the basis for that shell game, that essential ambiguity, that is handled through myth and ritual.
Agriculture is a mode of social control. And more basically survival is the existential condition upon which all thinking and any mode of sociality rest. Survival is the razor dividing is and is not. Agricultural practice, if one is born into it, is an ongoing struggle with the land to produce enough food for survival. It tethers people to a place, and it requires cooperation among families and communities. This condition of survival is the bedrock of community and the cultures that form within them. Without the immediate concerns for survival people lose that tether to the land, that tether to a place, and the ties among neighbors required to sustain a life and its meaning in practice.
Slavery or abject labor conditions is one efflorescence of a system based in power (that is food energy) production, which in turn is used, in its excess, to found an exchange economy, a diversified labor pool, and an artificially concentrated population. The other efflorescence is slavery by any other name--survival within an often precarious system of food production. Having landed on the moon and sent rovers to mars we are still bodies that need sustenance.
Thursday, March 23, 2017
Wednesday, March 22, 2017
The Case of Gloria
"The patient is an attractive, well-dressed, 43-year-old woman who became acutely psychotic about one month before admission to the hospital. Before that time she had been working with her husband in a mail order gift business. After completing the Christmas catalog, under considerable pressure because of printer's deadlines, the patient began to have vague fears that her husband would hurt her. She felt an 'evil presence' in the building in which they lived and ran away to a friend's house. There she tried to write a letter to her husband, but felt that the electric typewriter she was using was 'cancelling people out' and that she might be the last person left on earth. On the street she felt that people were not who they seemed to be, and that they were giving her messages by 'clicking' their eyes. Intermittently she heard a voice saying, 'Gloria (her name) is nuts,' and telling her not to smoke." (p. 227)
From the 'Diagnostic Dilemmas' section of the "DSM-III Case Book"
From the 'Diagnostic Dilemmas' section of the "DSM-III Case Book"
Wednesday, March 1, 2017
To Study Communication to work in Communication
I probably take myself too seriously. It's not without its merits. I want to do right and part of the package of presenting essential details, be they fact or opinion, is appearance. That must be managed. It's an essential fact of social exchange. If you're going to talk with an audience you have to appeal to that audience's notions of any number of things. Image is just one of them, and it can be managed both in the physical register (one's appearance) and in the discursive register (the words chosen and how they're delivered).
I probably took myself too seriously during my communication studies. I stuck my nose in the books I was assigned; I spent too much time reading the research articles; and I doggedly followed the orders laid out by the professor. I recall that the majority of those falling into the Communication major were undisciplined cut ups but well spoken and fearless public performance artists, and they were almost all undisciplined in the art of reading, studying, and reproducing for tests. They played the rebels. They would get on my nerves because I felt they were playing fast and loose with with what could be described as a social pathology. They were imposing upon everyone's sonic space to varying effect. But most revealing of all, they had friends, high self-esteem, and were managing to maintain the center of attention. Maybe I was too serious about these things.
Enter this man from the field.
The man in the center of attention is Tony Patrico. Like me, he was a Communication major. I went to SLU. He earned his degree across the river at SIUE. I was on a communication theory track with media technology interests. This was the late 90s, and because Father Onge had taught at SLU as well as Marshall McLuhan metatheoretical approaches to communication technology were in vogue. Secretly, I aspired to be a creative writer in the most abstract, don't-tell-anyone-your-aspirations kind of way. That, in particular, was how I was raised: "don't reveal your hand kid."
I can't speak deeply upon Tony Patrico's background as I am not registered at Linkedin. But I learned through search that Tony earned a broadcast communication degree that equipped him with practical knowledge for the broadcast field. He's in radio now, which probably is the outcome of internships and an exemplary record that is the consequence of an industry-direct education. He's "obviously" talented at the one thing that matters, entertaining others, because the proof is in the pudding. This man has run crowd address at hockey games and is always present at public events where the radio station is present. I've listened to his broadcast off and on for years, mostly due to the fact that work trucks have radios and the men who decide what will play have specific interests, and those interests fall in line with this fat man lampooning himself in front of these beautiful women and his radio show crew.
What I recall from listening to his show is that it grated against me and my education in how the shows discusses categories of experience rife with bias and controversy in ways intended to evoke those very things via titillation and shock. Like most radio hosts he's built a loyal base of listeners who look forward to his show, its weekly highlights, and the worldviews that it confirms. I recall being at a very dirty steel mill driving to the location of our maintenance job while Patrico took calls from the public on the topic of white women who have dated black men, whether or not the sex was good, and whether or not they had large penises. The calls were mixed, and the topic quickly faded. In the recurring segments of his broadcast Patrico announced porn star birthdays or dived into amother category that mildly conformed to morality: stories about how dumb criminals got caught.
This man represents a success story in the field of mass communication. But he also reflects a core paradox of the intellectual pursuit of a field that is about the tools of mass persuasion. His success comes not from his intellectual ability but from a different set of native skills: being an approachable everyman whose adorableness comes from his ability to lampoon himself, not appearing any different than his average radio listener, and in some combination of these basic skills appeal to a wide enough audience of listeners in order to retain his job.
I had ideas, serious ones. I still have them, and they probably fit better on an Art Bell show than on a Friday morning alternative radio talk show at the high end of the FM dial. I listen to John Zerzan's curated radio show broadcasts from the University of Oregon and I get it. Zerzan, who is an intellectual trained in a field other than communication studies, has nowhere near the same listenership nor is he a male brand that consistently pleases crowds of mixed sex, age, and lifestyle. I recall the scene from "Talk Radio" where talk radio host Barry Champlaign is summarily booed during a promotional visit to a basketball game during his introduction and speech. Then a local woman confronts him and spills her drink on him. What initially won Champlaign's spot on radio was his personality, and what ultimately rubbed his listeners wrong were his liberal ideas and his Jewish background. For that he was murdered but not before he was mailed numerous anti-Semitic threats to the radio station.
I had ideas, serious ideas, and like a Karl Marx mine tended toward the gnostic discipline of showing others their false consciousness while uncovering some 'true' reality, whatever that may mean.
In reality I should have let myself get fat, developed a good physical humor routine, and simply stored up enough self-confidence in spite of all that self-effacing "kook branding" to persuade others to hire me in a very-hard-to-crack field of mass communication.
What bothers me is that a person like Tony Patrico, who is very much a product of the Saint Louis Metropolitan Region, is for most people a standard-bearer of the field of Communication. People like me, who often carried people who resembled Tony through the tougher aspects of the major, which wasn't really that hard anyway, ended up too proud to take any old job let alone go shirtless and fat as an entertainment brand for the region and ironically found themselves in occupations where they work among the generally uneducated and are exposed to the "raunch and circumstance," via radio, of those cut ups from my class who by hook, crook, skill, grit, and luck landed the jobs that I thought would be available to the "best" in my field. Straight A's, invitations to be the university news editor by a real, honest-to-goodness news editor, and a free ride through graduate school all ended up putting me in a rebar patch on the side of a road, working for an hourly wage that is ultimately secured as a yearlong career by doing the one thing I was too proud and defiant to do during my university years: make lasting professional ties, shamelessly network, and basically lying one's way through interview after interview. I don't work in Communication, nor do I work in Construction yearlong. That's a shame. I am a bloody wasted resource.
I am a shitty liar, a decent storyteller, a hard worker, and a loyal friend. But I also value myself and my time, so I refuse to allow myself to become a self-styled brand through communication skills. I refuse to be the overweight, shirtless man-child. I would rather lead by example, and be an example to which others should aspire. What would that make me, a Mengele? I am not, nor do I really have the self-esteem to maintain my composure among others with beauty, intellect, and self-confidence. I sit alone. I count what money I've been able to save. And I waive off what that older, wiser men tell me: "you're smart."--when what they determine to be 'smart' is merely achieving a zenith of selfishness as an independent consumer of one's labor rewards in a consumer society.
I probably took myself too seriously during my communication studies. I stuck my nose in the books I was assigned; I spent too much time reading the research articles; and I doggedly followed the orders laid out by the professor. I recall that the majority of those falling into the Communication major were undisciplined cut ups but well spoken and fearless public performance artists, and they were almost all undisciplined in the art of reading, studying, and reproducing for tests. They played the rebels. They would get on my nerves because I felt they were playing fast and loose with with what could be described as a social pathology. They were imposing upon everyone's sonic space to varying effect. But most revealing of all, they had friends, high self-esteem, and were managing to maintain the center of attention. Maybe I was too serious about these things.
Enter this man from the field.
The man in the center of attention is Tony Patrico. Like me, he was a Communication major. I went to SLU. He earned his degree across the river at SIUE. I was on a communication theory track with media technology interests. This was the late 90s, and because Father Onge had taught at SLU as well as Marshall McLuhan metatheoretical approaches to communication technology were in vogue. Secretly, I aspired to be a creative writer in the most abstract, don't-tell-anyone-your-aspirations kind of way. That, in particular, was how I was raised: "don't reveal your hand kid."
I can't speak deeply upon Tony Patrico's background as I am not registered at Linkedin. But I learned through search that Tony earned a broadcast communication degree that equipped him with practical knowledge for the broadcast field. He's in radio now, which probably is the outcome of internships and an exemplary record that is the consequence of an industry-direct education. He's "obviously" talented at the one thing that matters, entertaining others, because the proof is in the pudding. This man has run crowd address at hockey games and is always present at public events where the radio station is present. I've listened to his broadcast off and on for years, mostly due to the fact that work trucks have radios and the men who decide what will play have specific interests, and those interests fall in line with this fat man lampooning himself in front of these beautiful women and his radio show crew.
What I recall from listening to his show is that it grated against me and my education in how the shows discusses categories of experience rife with bias and controversy in ways intended to evoke those very things via titillation and shock. Like most radio hosts he's built a loyal base of listeners who look forward to his show, its weekly highlights, and the worldviews that it confirms. I recall being at a very dirty steel mill driving to the location of our maintenance job while Patrico took calls from the public on the topic of white women who have dated black men, whether or not the sex was good, and whether or not they had large penises. The calls were mixed, and the topic quickly faded. In the recurring segments of his broadcast Patrico announced porn star birthdays or dived into amother category that mildly conformed to morality: stories about how dumb criminals got caught.
This man represents a success story in the field of mass communication. But he also reflects a core paradox of the intellectual pursuit of a field that is about the tools of mass persuasion. His success comes not from his intellectual ability but from a different set of native skills: being an approachable everyman whose adorableness comes from his ability to lampoon himself, not appearing any different than his average radio listener, and in some combination of these basic skills appeal to a wide enough audience of listeners in order to retain his job.
I had ideas, serious ones. I still have them, and they probably fit better on an Art Bell show than on a Friday morning alternative radio talk show at the high end of the FM dial. I listen to John Zerzan's curated radio show broadcasts from the University of Oregon and I get it. Zerzan, who is an intellectual trained in a field other than communication studies, has nowhere near the same listenership nor is he a male brand that consistently pleases crowds of mixed sex, age, and lifestyle. I recall the scene from "Talk Radio" where talk radio host Barry Champlaign is summarily booed during a promotional visit to a basketball game during his introduction and speech. Then a local woman confronts him and spills her drink on him. What initially won Champlaign's spot on radio was his personality, and what ultimately rubbed his listeners wrong were his liberal ideas and his Jewish background. For that he was murdered but not before he was mailed numerous anti-Semitic threats to the radio station.
I had ideas, serious ideas, and like a Karl Marx mine tended toward the gnostic discipline of showing others their false consciousness while uncovering some 'true' reality, whatever that may mean.
In reality I should have let myself get fat, developed a good physical humor routine, and simply stored up enough self-confidence in spite of all that self-effacing "kook branding" to persuade others to hire me in a very-hard-to-crack field of mass communication.
What bothers me is that a person like Tony Patrico, who is very much a product of the Saint Louis Metropolitan Region, is for most people a standard-bearer of the field of Communication. People like me, who often carried people who resembled Tony through the tougher aspects of the major, which wasn't really that hard anyway, ended up too proud to take any old job let alone go shirtless and fat as an entertainment brand for the region and ironically found themselves in occupations where they work among the generally uneducated and are exposed to the "raunch and circumstance," via radio, of those cut ups from my class who by hook, crook, skill, grit, and luck landed the jobs that I thought would be available to the "best" in my field. Straight A's, invitations to be the university news editor by a real, honest-to-goodness news editor, and a free ride through graduate school all ended up putting me in a rebar patch on the side of a road, working for an hourly wage that is ultimately secured as a yearlong career by doing the one thing I was too proud and defiant to do during my university years: make lasting professional ties, shamelessly network, and basically lying one's way through interview after interview. I don't work in Communication, nor do I work in Construction yearlong. That's a shame. I am a bloody wasted resource.
I am a shitty liar, a decent storyteller, a hard worker, and a loyal friend. But I also value myself and my time, so I refuse to allow myself to become a self-styled brand through communication skills. I refuse to be the overweight, shirtless man-child. I would rather lead by example, and be an example to which others should aspire. What would that make me, a Mengele? I am not, nor do I really have the self-esteem to maintain my composure among others with beauty, intellect, and self-confidence. I sit alone. I count what money I've been able to save. And I waive off what that older, wiser men tell me: "you're smart."--when what they determine to be 'smart' is merely achieving a zenith of selfishness as an independent consumer of one's labor rewards in a consumer society.
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