On September 11, 2001 planes "kamikaze" attack buildings in the United States. The offical narrative frames this as terrorism and calls it an act of war.
The U.S. military and CIA reciprocate the gesture by waging war through the use of remote-controlled planes.
Ours is a world of remote control.
We wage a war on terror as a war on ideas. Terrorism simply needs to be a webpage or a speech by a radical cleric, which inspires someone to take the life of a non-believer. In this way, terrorism forces its views upon U.S. soil by influencing those who perpetrate terrorism, remotely.
Remote Control.
Likewise, terrorism grows out of a sense of Islamic identity, tribal identity, racial or ethnic identity, that is contradictory to that of the West. Fundamentalist Islam is a ward against Pepsi, Coke, and loose morals. All of this happens as Hollywood and Coke headquarters find new ways and new markets for their products, They dump these products onto a population in central Asia to influence their consumption without ever setting foot there.
Remote Control.
I am reminded of Arnold Toynbee's description of civilization as emanating from a center, populated by a creative few. Their creativity radiates out, gets adopted, and expands a civilization on the choices, identities, and commitment to enact it by the internal and external proletariat. When these groups no longer find legitimacy in the cultural accoutrements of this civilization it ceases to exist. Civilization's scope in space and in time is a measure of its influence and its control over its own dissemination. Civilization holds a high bar of influence, like that of the fundamental tool of humankind, language. And that high bar is the influence that persists both in space and in time after the speech has ended and its creator has died.
The idea lives on, remotely.
Remote.
Control.
Control.
Remote.
God Bless America
Thursday, May 30, 2013
Monday, May 27, 2013
identity work
Everywhere I see identity work.
As I drive people slap bumper stickers on their cars, which proclaim what they are or what they love. Most of these loves are rather trite affectations such as "I love skiing" or "I love New York." And while I cannot deny that the person slapping this bumper sticker on his or her car actually feels this way I always must return to the big question.
"What is love?"
What is any emotional state for that matter? I have heard this elsewhere and I believe it myself. The majority of our childhood is spent being taught how to understand and act to specific stimuli. Central to this teaching is being furnished the words for what it is we are feeling. I cannot help but thinking that my nieces are learning how to be sad or depressed simply to feed a certain response mechanism set in place by their parents and grandparents. It's a very strange set of affairs that a somewhat pathological behavior would get molded into an acceptable condition such as being tired or feeling sick in order to give that pathological behavior a somewhat more acceptable window dressing.
These statements of one's feelings and their cliched plastering on car rear ends provides an effective introduction to the work we all do to connect with something other than us, be it a process, a group, a belief, or a companion human or otherwise.
For me love is a violent and sometimes possessive statement of affect. This is because love has become a sink for so many institutions that desire conditions for human bondage, and thus they tack phrases onto affirmations of love such as "in sickness and in health" and "til death do you part." These steep a romantic relationship into absolutist talk. And while the pictures are being processed and placed into a memorable portfolio other institutions are busy placing incentives upon the married couple to go into debt together because together they can get a better percentage than they otherwise could.
It sounds to me like companies are finding ways to insinuate themselves into loving relationships through financial transactions and contractual obligations. They do this knowing that they can position the responsibility to pay on time to make it equate the responsibility to one's spouse or lover.
Clever ruse.
Marriage is one of many relationships that are central to the identity work that most humans engage in and find rewarding. Identities are faces and feelings plastered onto any number of things. Identities are names, iconography, slogans, mission statements, invested with an emotional connection to bond individuals to larger entities. Identities are ready-made lifestyle choices replete with numerous consumer choices to accessorize and mobilize the lifestyle into representative activities. Buying cars, boats, bikes, sporting equipment, building muscles, tattooing skin are all identity choices. In modern societies they are a veritable connective tissue, the integument tethering people to objects, ideas, behaviors, and future-placed commitments. Identities are a form of control and manipulation because they are access points to the psyche and soul of each individual. Identities mediate experience of self, other, and world. In the pop neuroscience argot identities are a constellation of neural networks that are self-supportive and, importantly, are pleasure producing. We satisfy identity work through self-improvement via diet, exercise, surgery or some combination of these. Identity work is central to cosmetic neuropharmacology whereby 'patients' con their psychiatrists into prescribing them a performance enhancing brain drug.
Identities are the consumer gloss of citizenship. People pick pre-arranged political sides, passionately support abstract causes, and burp sound bytes that have long-lost any true personal meaning but instead short circuit any critical thinking about the issue they gloss. In some glassy building groups of experts in psychology, marketing, and human behavior use a powerful set of tools to generate new identities every day. These identities are the stuff of social control, feeding human behavior into a cycle of work all day, spend on 'free' time, stay up all night, and drug to maintain. Identity work is performed at its most ostentatious during leisure activity, but it's performed all of our lives.
A babe is born and is often assigned a color based upon its gender. This baby is given gender-specific toys and addressed, consciously or not, in sex-specific ways. All of these support the healthy and arbitrary development of the addressee, which takes up residence between the ears of the baby. And this addressee begins to adopt the language in media res as one that is already overwhelmingly invested with significance, history, and a sense of duty to it. So this adult-in-training goes about languaging into a world presupposed by languaging. "What and why" are often heard, and the issue settles into the child's adolescence by the circular argument's coda, "because." End of story.
This adult goes about its manufactured life, mistaking its manufactured identity for one that it made itself. Sooner or later, through designs built into the program of society, whether by accident or by fateful choice, lifestyle, or duty, the identity that was made over the course of its life dies. And then this life gets placed into a box, dressed in clothing acceptable to its audience, and is remembered one last time before it is interred into the soil. There the identity slowly degrades into the sundry elements that make up the bulk of our universe: hydrogen, nitrogen, carbon, and so on. And the little worms with no identity go about their "lumbrical" labor passing this once meaningful entity through their lengthy tube-like bodies.
And so in the end, identity work is an overcompensation for a more base understanding that all life--owing to the chances of evolution and the substrate of physical reality--is merely tubes. Except in our case our tube is bi-directional. Into it goes all the food and out of it come all the waste, but the one exception is that we also belch out the ideologies by which we live out our tube-lives without ever realizing it as such.
Identity work is such a chore, but its dark horizon is shaped by something the symbolism underlying identity work presupposes--the identity of no thing.
And we all 'wanna' be somebody.
As I drive people slap bumper stickers on their cars, which proclaim what they are or what they love. Most of these loves are rather trite affectations such as "I love skiing" or "I love New York." And while I cannot deny that the person slapping this bumper sticker on his or her car actually feels this way I always must return to the big question.
"What is love?"
What is any emotional state for that matter? I have heard this elsewhere and I believe it myself. The majority of our childhood is spent being taught how to understand and act to specific stimuli. Central to this teaching is being furnished the words for what it is we are feeling. I cannot help but thinking that my nieces are learning how to be sad or depressed simply to feed a certain response mechanism set in place by their parents and grandparents. It's a very strange set of affairs that a somewhat pathological behavior would get molded into an acceptable condition such as being tired or feeling sick in order to give that pathological behavior a somewhat more acceptable window dressing.
These statements of one's feelings and their cliched plastering on car rear ends provides an effective introduction to the work we all do to connect with something other than us, be it a process, a group, a belief, or a companion human or otherwise.
For me love is a violent and sometimes possessive statement of affect. This is because love has become a sink for so many institutions that desire conditions for human bondage, and thus they tack phrases onto affirmations of love such as "in sickness and in health" and "til death do you part." These steep a romantic relationship into absolutist talk. And while the pictures are being processed and placed into a memorable portfolio other institutions are busy placing incentives upon the married couple to go into debt together because together they can get a better percentage than they otherwise could.
It sounds to me like companies are finding ways to insinuate themselves into loving relationships through financial transactions and contractual obligations. They do this knowing that they can position the responsibility to pay on time to make it equate the responsibility to one's spouse or lover.
Clever ruse.
Marriage is one of many relationships that are central to the identity work that most humans engage in and find rewarding. Identities are faces and feelings plastered onto any number of things. Identities are names, iconography, slogans, mission statements, invested with an emotional connection to bond individuals to larger entities. Identities are ready-made lifestyle choices replete with numerous consumer choices to accessorize and mobilize the lifestyle into representative activities. Buying cars, boats, bikes, sporting equipment, building muscles, tattooing skin are all identity choices. In modern societies they are a veritable connective tissue, the integument tethering people to objects, ideas, behaviors, and future-placed commitments. Identities are a form of control and manipulation because they are access points to the psyche and soul of each individual. Identities mediate experience of self, other, and world. In the pop neuroscience argot identities are a constellation of neural networks that are self-supportive and, importantly, are pleasure producing. We satisfy identity work through self-improvement via diet, exercise, surgery or some combination of these. Identity work is central to cosmetic neuropharmacology whereby 'patients' con their psychiatrists into prescribing them a performance enhancing brain drug.
Identities are the consumer gloss of citizenship. People pick pre-arranged political sides, passionately support abstract causes, and burp sound bytes that have long-lost any true personal meaning but instead short circuit any critical thinking about the issue they gloss. In some glassy building groups of experts in psychology, marketing, and human behavior use a powerful set of tools to generate new identities every day. These identities are the stuff of social control, feeding human behavior into a cycle of work all day, spend on 'free' time, stay up all night, and drug to maintain. Identity work is performed at its most ostentatious during leisure activity, but it's performed all of our lives.
A babe is born and is often assigned a color based upon its gender. This baby is given gender-specific toys and addressed, consciously or not, in sex-specific ways. All of these support the healthy and arbitrary development of the addressee, which takes up residence between the ears of the baby. And this addressee begins to adopt the language in media res as one that is already overwhelmingly invested with significance, history, and a sense of duty to it. So this adult-in-training goes about languaging into a world presupposed by languaging. "What and why" are often heard, and the issue settles into the child's adolescence by the circular argument's coda, "because." End of story.
This adult goes about its manufactured life, mistaking its manufactured identity for one that it made itself. Sooner or later, through designs built into the program of society, whether by accident or by fateful choice, lifestyle, or duty, the identity that was made over the course of its life dies. And then this life gets placed into a box, dressed in clothing acceptable to its audience, and is remembered one last time before it is interred into the soil. There the identity slowly degrades into the sundry elements that make up the bulk of our universe: hydrogen, nitrogen, carbon, and so on. And the little worms with no identity go about their "lumbrical" labor passing this once meaningful entity through their lengthy tube-like bodies.
And so in the end, identity work is an overcompensation for a more base understanding that all life--owing to the chances of evolution and the substrate of physical reality--is merely tubes. Except in our case our tube is bi-directional. Into it goes all the food and out of it come all the waste, but the one exception is that we also belch out the ideologies by which we live out our tube-lives without ever realizing it as such.
Identity work is such a chore, but its dark horizon is shaped by something the symbolism underlying identity work presupposes--the identity of no thing.
And we all 'wanna' be somebody.
the value of love (or friendship)
I have a practical measure for the value of love. It can apply to certain forms of friendship where friends can reliably serve one another in times of need, be it holding a piece of wood or holding a hand.
When you're depressed you don't bottom out.
That's it. My relationship showed me this today. I didn't need to call upon her but knew she was close by if I needed her. I was in a particular state of melancholy that proceeds a night of drinking and mild or implied debauchery. There I was, driving my car, depressively tracking under the speed limit on a busy road when I didn't bottom out. Now my sadness spiraled into a soft collection of ideas about this gal in my life.
I had a cushion.
I still did things that could constitute cheating. I gave this other girl a big hug, and followed that up with a text message today about said hug. She never replied, and it affected me not in the least.
I didn't bottom out.
A few weeks ago I parlayed a few leftover beers and my assistance with a third-floor renovation in my building into dinner, more drinks, and late night chatter with the gal next door. A few years ago, before Helen, I bottomed out in one of those very deep and dark spirals of redefining actions. I made a pass at this gal, and she shut me out of her life. Then I had the audacity to share my feelings about her with my good friend, who is now her husband. He shut me out of his life.
Then I bottomed out.
I tried hard to reclaim my self worth from them. Slowly, I pieced together my life and rebuilt a relationship with the two neighbors. But this was a true test of the values mentioned above and the relationships present and tested with my 'amorous overture.' Those amorous feelings came rushing back about two months ago. I finally parlayed them, as noted, into helping her. She was in a pair of elastic shorts, on her knees, scrubbing the old floor. I helped by vacuuming, removing items off the floor, and dumping out the vacuum. She had her back arched in a way that was quite flattering to her physique. I held my composure, offered her beer, and kept things genial. The work turned into dinner, which turned into more drinks, and more chatter. Soon we were alone on her front porch drinking a late-night round of beers, witnessing all kinds of strange behavior from the new neighbor next door. Somewhere out of the haze of those beers she told me those damn words, again. "I love you."
I was as high as a kite.
My recollection of the event is hazy, but I recall asking her what this meant in light of her marriage and her having said it before. She confirmed what I had wanted, and I shared with her my feelings. We aren't as close of friends after my first amorous overture. Some of this I chalk up to her own uneasiness with her feelings and with me. Through the haze of that evening and the help of some beers I remember being slumped over her legs, holding one, while she told me that she loved me, quite loudly, as she caressed my skull and pressed her head against it.
I was stiff with anticipation and worried about her volume. Nothing more came of it, and since then I've held my composure. She had a few drinks the night before her wedding reception and was in her element with her husband and his parents. There, she spoke, under the cloak of evening, and smiled beaming at me, directing her speech at me. She was at ease, and smiling at me profusely. She had done this before. Hell, she had even given my a very hungry stare one one drunken occasion. I cherish these moments. I cherish her. I have a girlfriend. She has a husband. Each of us has our cushion. And we have a very potent love for each other, one that must remain unrequited, stoked, deferred, building, exploding over some nights of drinking, and veiled under the pregnant stares each gives to the other when the beer isn't flowing and our apprehensions are in control. My sex life improved with the inclusion of her in my fantasies. By extension, my self-image has improved through my imagined intercourse with her.
I care about my lady friend. She cares deeply about me. She also works with me. I have my space. My relationship with the neighbors has improved as I offer my help renovating the home or digging a hole. We each have a cushion to ease the fall, and we each have a rekindled passion that must be kept at bay. But I did lose a friendship that I had with her. She no longer knocks on my door randomly just to talk or share ideas. Neither does he, her husband. I've reciprocated the gesture, but on occasion we spend time together. And on those occasions I have one emotion in check simply because I have a love interest elsewhere and I know that I won't bottom out.
When you're depressed you don't bottom out.
That's it. My relationship showed me this today. I didn't need to call upon her but knew she was close by if I needed her. I was in a particular state of melancholy that proceeds a night of drinking and mild or implied debauchery. There I was, driving my car, depressively tracking under the speed limit on a busy road when I didn't bottom out. Now my sadness spiraled into a soft collection of ideas about this gal in my life.
I had a cushion.
I still did things that could constitute cheating. I gave this other girl a big hug, and followed that up with a text message today about said hug. She never replied, and it affected me not in the least.
I didn't bottom out.
A few weeks ago I parlayed a few leftover beers and my assistance with a third-floor renovation in my building into dinner, more drinks, and late night chatter with the gal next door. A few years ago, before Helen, I bottomed out in one of those very deep and dark spirals of redefining actions. I made a pass at this gal, and she shut me out of her life. Then I had the audacity to share my feelings about her with my good friend, who is now her husband. He shut me out of his life.
Then I bottomed out.
I tried hard to reclaim my self worth from them. Slowly, I pieced together my life and rebuilt a relationship with the two neighbors. But this was a true test of the values mentioned above and the relationships present and tested with my 'amorous overture.' Those amorous feelings came rushing back about two months ago. I finally parlayed them, as noted, into helping her. She was in a pair of elastic shorts, on her knees, scrubbing the old floor. I helped by vacuuming, removing items off the floor, and dumping out the vacuum. She had her back arched in a way that was quite flattering to her physique. I held my composure, offered her beer, and kept things genial. The work turned into dinner, which turned into more drinks, and more chatter. Soon we were alone on her front porch drinking a late-night round of beers, witnessing all kinds of strange behavior from the new neighbor next door. Somewhere out of the haze of those beers she told me those damn words, again. "I love you."
I was as high as a kite.
My recollection of the event is hazy, but I recall asking her what this meant in light of her marriage and her having said it before. She confirmed what I had wanted, and I shared with her my feelings. We aren't as close of friends after my first amorous overture. Some of this I chalk up to her own uneasiness with her feelings and with me. Through the haze of that evening and the help of some beers I remember being slumped over her legs, holding one, while she told me that she loved me, quite loudly, as she caressed my skull and pressed her head against it.
I was stiff with anticipation and worried about her volume. Nothing more came of it, and since then I've held my composure. She had a few drinks the night before her wedding reception and was in her element with her husband and his parents. There, she spoke, under the cloak of evening, and smiled beaming at me, directing her speech at me. She was at ease, and smiling at me profusely. She had done this before. Hell, she had even given my a very hungry stare one one drunken occasion. I cherish these moments. I cherish her. I have a girlfriend. She has a husband. Each of us has our cushion. And we have a very potent love for each other, one that must remain unrequited, stoked, deferred, building, exploding over some nights of drinking, and veiled under the pregnant stares each gives to the other when the beer isn't flowing and our apprehensions are in control. My sex life improved with the inclusion of her in my fantasies. By extension, my self-image has improved through my imagined intercourse with her.
I care about my lady friend. She cares deeply about me. She also works with me. I have my space. My relationship with the neighbors has improved as I offer my help renovating the home or digging a hole. We each have a cushion to ease the fall, and we each have a rekindled passion that must be kept at bay. But I did lose a friendship that I had with her. She no longer knocks on my door randomly just to talk or share ideas. Neither does he, her husband. I've reciprocated the gesture, but on occasion we spend time together. And on those occasions I have one emotion in check simply because I have a love interest elsewhere and I know that I won't bottom out.
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