Ghost in the Wire

I've changed nameservers and finally made the upgrade to MT 3.3 and all the css zaniness that goes with it. On the downside, some items may not work right just yet, but I'll be working on fixing those. On the upside, you can now comment without logging in.

The first seminar over at the.aetet.us started today. The seminar is on the concept of the political and begins with a discussion of Schmitt, and a post by me. Please, feel free to join in, offer comments and rejoinders, and otherwise enjoy yourself.

In a recent exchange on the Media Ecology Association's listserv, an exchange that started with a discussion of web 2.0 and its negative implications and that ended with a discussion of human qualities lost (or not-present) in cyberspatial communication, I was struck by how non-specific was the actual discussion of web 2.0 and how easily that discussion slid into more recognized and routinized forms of critique. This isn't a failing of anyone person or group of persons on the listserv, but rather a consequence of a certain oppositional understanding of the human, one that posits the human entity as something distinct from the media with which that entity negotiates the world around them, people included.

The problem is one that remains familiar to certain strands of phenomenological inquiry regarding media, namely that the results of critique are already prescribed by the methodological presuppositions contained within the critique itself. For many phenomenologists, telecommunication necessarily poses problems in that it provides merely the illusion of presence and never the advent of presence itself. The specificity of the particular telecommunications medium matters only tangentially; be it a phone or a television, a blog or an email, video conferencing or text messaging, the fundamental axis of the critique is presence, and so there is little need to attend to particularity. In the critique of what might be dubbed (and was dubbed, albeit favorably, by one of the interlocutors) the "human vibrancy" critique, again what matters is the "essential" attributes that constitute humanness, and the fact that many of these attributes (for example, touch and smell, or even more ethereally, a preternatural sort of physical resonance between two people) simply cannot manifest within cyberspatial communications. This will be as true as it is for a joomla installation as it is for an email exchange, or a postcard, for that matter, and so it's easy to elide the particularities of a medium, in all its technological singularity, in favor of the more universal application of a metric that exists oppositionally - as the thing against which mediation is understood.

I find this means of critique problematic for a variety of reasons.

Can there be a thinking or a performance of criticism that does not repeat itself? Can we analyze and critically engage the social codes around us without participating in them?

In Lacanian psychoanalysis, a distinction can be drawn between the symptom and the sinthome, the former being evidence of some larger dynamic hinted at in an utterance or text, and the latter being characterized more by a repetition (or even a repetition compulsion), in which the same things are said or written or done over and over again. This repetition occurs because of the enjoyment that flows from it, from the jouissance of the act. At times, it seems as if certain methods and means of criticism can accordingly be dubbed sinthomatic, in that the criticism fails to provide much insight into something new but instead offers up a performative act of reaffirmation about the presuppositions that animate the critique, an affirmation that of course generates its own enjoyments.

In his most recent book of "Cool Memories," Baudrillard declares that:

Critical distance becomes the metastasis pure and simple of the reality it is analysing, which has itself become critical by capillary action and permeable to the worst of things. Positive and negative are in league like charity and cruelty, like violence and compassion. Criticism then provides a balancing function for the system, or serves to regulate the transit, like those capsules you take to offset the side-effects.

We can hear echoes of Sloterdijk's critique of cynical reason: people know the problems, they even like discussing them, they just don't believe that knowing the problems should change their behavior. Criticism, cultural or academic, provides the monstrous balancing act to a system that relies upon such negations in order to perpetuate itself. I'm thinking academically at least of much ideology-critique, with its laments over racism, sexism, classism, and other annotated implements of hegemony, each time roughly similar laments. And justifiably so, for it's not that the conditions have changed; but is it possible that such critiques provide the counterforce that keeps the originary force, the one ideologically problematic, in place?

The alternative, though I am not sure if these are at all opposed, would be a "symptomatic" criticism, which many already practice and to great effect. But it seems as if there remains a threshold beyond which even the pursuit of symptoms becomes a compulsion.

When you have a kid after spending a good portion of your life training to be an academic, you tend to go out and read a lot about child-rearing, mostly out of habit. As a result you learn a bunch of interesting facts, some of which may or may not be helpful for parenting, but that will indeed make you the life of the party (assuming it's a very dorky party) when you rattle off said interesting facts to an astonished and surprisingly receptive audience.

But you also get hit over the head with the simple disconnect between what years of studying child psychology and biology has generated as a body of knowledge and the radically different and poorly named "body of knowledge" that animates political reality. Take, for example, the exemplar of incendiary stupidity known as the No Child Left Behind Act, which has the almost paradoxical distinction of pushing education in the absolutely wrong direction - towards routinized tests rather than critical thinking - and then failing miserably in its efforts to actually do anything with that push, thanks to inadequate funding and patently absurd test material.

Now we can appreciate that the body of knowledge generated by child psychology is contingent and laced with all sorts of assumptions that bias and limit its potency, even as we acknowledge that there is a danger in letting a myth of its potency become too dominant. Nevertheless, when you read these books, you'll encounter a variety of people reporting on and describing what the field thinks it knows. And then you'll come across someone synthesizing that knowledge, someone who is writing about how different types of learning literally rewrite how the brain works in children, and who argues convincingly that this rewriting carries over into the corresponding ways of thinking for adults. And then you start to worry about this, because if it's true then it means that early education plays a really fundamental role in shaping how adults will behave and what capacity they will have for certain types of thought. And then you'll see that same person, after all that synthesis, remark:

While we still want to give children every chance to succeed in traditional learning environments, we now appreciate that learning may happen in many ways, through varied channels. Moreover, what has been so important in schools – a facility to memorize rules and large amounts of data – is becoming increasingly obsolete as computers do these tasks better and faster. Students still need basic academic skills, of course, but in a dynamic, fast-changing technological world, different forms of intelligence are assuming new importance. For today's kids the ability to solve all kinds of problems, get motivated, think reflectively and flexibly, synthesize data, and actively pursue learning throughout life will be important hallmarks of success. (Jane Healy, Your Child's Growing Mind, 218)

That was, I believe, first written in 1987, thought it may have been 1994. Regardless, it sees print years before politicians initiated the ill-fated disaster that is No Child Left Behind. It is, in effect, an argument against over-emphasizing fact-based learning, not because such learning fails, but because it fails to account for the contemporary technological climate. Obviously the politicians who embraced Bush's education "reform" did not or chose not to pay attention. And soon, in a just a handful of years, the first generation raised almost exclusively on routinized testing will begin flooding college classes, and the full extent of the damage will become apparent. I wonder if, in the meantime, with a new congress at hand, we might have a real debate that challenges not the funding or the metrics for No Child Left Behind but that rather focuses on the problem of metrics altogether and the general inadequacy of educational funding in this country. I am not holding my breath.

I can't help it, this is too good not to post. As a long-standing fan of Star Trek and The Daily Show, I say enjoy:

The Onion, which every once and a while does something that warrants remembering how great it once was, offers this hilarious and all too true parody:

In an effort to display his administration's willingness to fight on all fronts in the War on Terror, President Bush said at a press conference Monday that American ground forces in Afghanistan will be aided by the immediate deployment of Marine Pfc. Tim Ekenberg of Camp Lejeune, NC.

...

Ekenberg is scheduled to arrive in Afghanistan on Friday. His duties include providing full military support for the still-tenuous democratic government, resolving potential conflicts between rival warlords, gathering intelligence for his superiors, delivering humanitarian relief to millions of Afghan citizens displaced by factional warfare, and maintaining a high level of personal physical fitness.

Ekenberg's most vital assignment, however, will be to patrol approximately 1,200 square miles of volatile territory on the Afghan–Pakistani border and conduct search-and-destroy missions on the estimated 40,000 caves where U.S. intelligence sources believe Osama bin Laden and his al-Qaeda operatives could be hiding.

It is an exaggerated, albeit fair jab at the surge in Iraq. The vast majority of the new surge troops will be stationed in Baghdad, which means still little solvency for the rest of the territory. The argument being proffered for such a limited theater is that once the government stabilizes, the rest of the country will stabilize as well, a claim that is weak both theoretically and empirically. Still, it begs a question for all of those "framers" out there - why aren't the Dems pointing out that Bush's surge is more about victory in Baghdad than in Iraq? Doesn't the limited emplacement hint that the rest of the country may already be too far gone? I'm just asking. Maybe Michelle Malkin will be able to answer given her recent investigative tour of duty.