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Our Official Blog : Political Dissent, Speech Acts and the New School Milieu
Posted by horatio on Monday, October 05, 2009 (01:18:28) (124 reads)
An Open Letter to the New School
10.2.09
As many people at the New School are likely now aware, student protests at a Milano public forum on Homeland Security, where Tom Ridge was the featured guest, have sparked considerable controversy around issues of freedom of speech and political protest. This is a controversy deeply entwined with not only the history and legacy of the New School, but also with the current campus climate and administration of the school. Some of the questions that have emerged so far include:
~ Were students justified in protesting the appearance of Tom Ridge at the New School?
~ Were the specific tactics used to disrupt the Tom Ridge event appropriate?
~ What standards does the community use to judge what is "appropriate" or "inappropriate" actions?
~ Are all forms of protest equally legitimate and protected?
~ What is the relationship between the protection of free speech on campus and the creation of a safe space for academic discussion and debate?
~ Should the university only invite individuals to speak whose values or politics we agree with?
~ What exactly are the core values and the mission of the New School today, and how do they relate to our historical legacy as an institution?
~ Does the university community have an affirmative obligation to condemn actions which pose a potential threat to free speech at the New School?
~ Can issues of political dissent be separated from the political critique being offered by those acts?
These are all very important questions which the university is now grappling with, but which I believe we as a community are not adequately discussing. With that being said, I believe the academic community at the New School has an obligation to engage with these issues in a constructive and timely manner—one which does justice to our political views and positions as individual members—as well as our philosophical obligation as the embodiment or living spirit that defines the New School. We must demonstrate the value of theory and practice in a unified manner in and out of the classroom.
In an attempt to do just that, I offer the following reflections to the New School community. First, by addressing the underlying political issues as I understand them and as I see them relating to the specific issue of Tom Ridge speaking at the New School. Second, by framing the issues of political dissent and free speech in both a very grounded New School context, as well as a larger philosophical context. And finally, by trying to suggest the interconnections between the first and seconds parts, and their immediate ramifications for our school.
Continued in Read More link below...
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Dear Diary : reflecting on frustrations
Posted by horatio on Wednesday, September 30, 2009 (15:11:11) (80 reads)
It's just been one of those weeks, or at least that's how it feels right now. Talk about ups and downs. I feel like a rag doll in the teeth of some wild little dog trying to rip out all of the stuffing from the ears.
I had a dream about a huge monster bird thing haunting me, walked in the rain, got soaked and thoroughly enjoyed it, got reprimanded by some friends for speaking my mind, am about fed up with campus politics and Tom f-ing Ridge, and if I have to read another pamphlet about destroying time and the university bullshit I am going to puke. I feel like I am trying to be a bridge between impossible contradictions and I'm falling down.
Some days, I wonder why I even care at all. It would be a hell of a lot easier to just forget it all, throw my convictions on the shelf along with all my politics, and just dissolve into Modern Combat III, Cartoon Network, Quiznos subs and washing dishes or selling junk for $6 an hour. But I can't stop caring. I don't have room on my bookshelf for all of my politics, and I got tired of tv a long time ago. But right now I'm tired of people too. Tired of all the assanine bs, the ignorance and the shallowness. The social conservativism of my peers, who actually have nothing to conserve but a rotten status quo that even they don't fully understand and believe in, but since they can't see anything else, all they can do is cling tighter and tighter.
Is this really living, or just the warm up for total and complete alienated death of our being and an authentic life? Right now, I really can't tell...
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Dear Diary : Reflections on Life
Posted by horatio on Wednesday, August 05, 2009 (17:57:05) (82 reads)
Life sure feels strange sometimes, or at least it does for me, and especially as of late.
Did you ever have the feeling that you were the captain of a vast yet desolate ship, sails at full mast, the sounds of the wind and sea raging all around you, as you plunged headlong into the darkness and fog just beyond your sight?
Or what about walking the narrow edge of a steep mountain precipice, every step a risk, as you half fearfully and half excitedly peer over the careening edge just over your shoulder and wonder how long you would fall for if you were to slip just a bit?
Or perhaps the feeling is so much bore mundane or banal--as Arendt might call it--and that very mendacity is as maddening, if not more, than anything one's mind might conjure in the last fits and throws of, say, the last quaff from a frothy glass of hemlock.
Sometimes life requires a re-evaluation. Sometimes we require a different life than the one we are leading. And sometimes life just crashes and melts like that computer hard drive you loved so much because it had all of your memories saved on it. And no matter how many times you hit reset, no matter how many disk scans you try running, no emergency boot disk will restore the damage. And so we yell and scream, and sometimes we even cry. Maybe it helps, maybe it doesn't. Either way it doesn't really matter, as we still get to the same place at the end of the day.
I guess in a lot of ways, it's like the old parable about traveling the mountain, and every path leading to the top. It's not the destination itself that ultimately matters, but the paths we have to walk to reach it that will ultimately define who and what we are. And in those adventures, the best story is the one we have yet to write for ourselves. So like the intrepid explorers, we too must continue to survey the landscape of our selves and probe the distant mountains of our psyche as we explore the world. And perhaps, like the capitan, we too may meet a Dersu Uzulu along the way, or have the chance for a wild tiger to cross our paths in unexplored territory.
Why is it then that the first steps on a new journey are sometimes the hardest to take?
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Supreme Courts and Objectivity
Posted by horatio on Sunday, June 07, 2009 (02:18:18) (93 reads)
On the Sotomeyer question... reflections to follow.
Q: Initial thought: When has there ever been an "objective" Supreme Court Justice that was not influenced by "his or her social, political or religious views"? and since when has the court ever had a "judge that objectively applies the law to the facts?"
A: to follow...
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Our Official Blog : Consumer (Red)
Posted by horatio on Monday, May 18, 2009 (18:57:58) (108 reads)
Here is a poster cover I have been working on for the latest issue of Canon magazine. Just a design inspired by a friend's work on the Red campaign...
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This Just In - New School Computer Network Crashes - All Printer down
Posted by horatio on Monday, May 18, 2009 (18:52:06) (111 reads)
Ah, the irony of final at a school run by incompetent bureaucrats!
So I was trying to print some image for a project, and of course since its the last few days of finals everyone is jam packed into the computer lab trying to finish their final papers. So I printed one flyer, nothing. Having had similar problems in the past I printed it to another computer printer, still no luck. Ok, I have seen this before, no sweat. Then a few minutes later one of the girls from the lab tells everyone that the printers are down--across the entire university--and hopefully they will be back up in about 10-15 minutes, she says with a hesitation.
And it's also rather ironic, sitting here in the 3rd floor computer lab where every pole has the words QUIET please printed on them in huge letters--meanwhile the sound of hammering, pounding and construction work has been going on for the last hour directly behind on of the corner lab walls, making it completely impossible to concentrate.
Oh, and did I mention I have been sitting on a milk crate for the last hour because the only free computer I could find had no chair at it...
Ah, how I love the new school.
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Our Official Blog : New Words for the Day
Posted by horatio on Monday, May 18, 2009 (03:12:46) (95 reads)
Well, it's always fun to take a few minutes after a long project and reflect on how it all turned out. Too bad I don't have time to do that 
So instead, I'll just offer a few tidbits from my work today. In short, trying to finish up a god-awful long ethnography project that is about 35 pages too long--it was supposed to be around 20!--egads, and my homemade pizza is cold and hard and the microwave keeps beeping at me to get my coffee out of it, so all I can do is say, here's the new words I added to my spell checker:
-unmutilated
-Marcuse
-... {yeah, my computer froze up trying to get past Eros and Civilization--I wonder if it is trying to tell me something ;)}
-zine/s
-radicality {this one was particularly amusing, since the sentence read "We recognize no pre-given limits to the radicality of our intentions." Apparently the built-in spell checker on the computer disagreed...}
-ethnographer's
-it wanted to add Kerrey's but I just decided to tell it to "Ignore All", it seemed rather fitting.
-recuperators (?) WTF is a recuperator anyway?
-countermoves
-accommodationist
-flyering
-assed, as in half-assed
-Unaguration
-consensed
-admin
-something's
-spatiotemporal {at least the computer tried on this one, it suggester atemporal...}
-Bakhtin
-insurrectionary
-unlife {it suggeted unlike - how unlike life unlife is - hahahaha, i digress}
-deconstructing {seriously!? How big of a statement on modernity is it that my computer knows reconstruction, but not deconstruction! Oh the irony.}
-it thinks Booya should be Yahoo?!
-anarcho {apparently it knows anarchy, but not anarcho?}
-primally
-unfreedom
-autodestruction {it thought this should be two words...}
-immediatists
-mediatists
-sublation {it went for the close sublimation, and an entirely different meaning!}
-supersession
-timeframe {again with the two word thing}
-disjoining {ditto}
-Ranciére
-biopolitical {which is truly ironic when one of the alternate options is nonpolitical}
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Dear Diary : Why I Write and The Flesh of Words
Posted by horatio on Wednesday, April 15, 2009 (04:19:43) (121 reads)
I'm trying to clean my head out.
Trying to clean my room out.
Trying to clean my computer out.
While cleaning out my wallet I found a small cache of fortunes. I have this bad habit of keeping every fortune from a fortune cookie, just hording them all up for a bad day when I need to cash in on my fortune. So here's what they had to say to me, this little memory time capsul from the not so distant past.
-Adversity is the prosperity of the great.
-Life to you is a dashing and bold adventure.
-Any impatience you show will only create more stress.
-There is in the worst of fortunes the best chance of a happy ending.
-As soon as you feel too to do a thing, do it.
-You will hear pleasant news.
-Friends long absent are coming back to you.
(ironically as I write this the song is singing..."I'm going home...")
-When someone wrongs you [it?] is good virtue to ignore [them?/it]
(this fortune was stuck to another one and dates 9.15.06... )
-From a past misfortune good luck will come toy ou.
-A friendship founded on business is better than a business founded on friendship.
-You are altruistic and will be involved in many humanitarian projects.
-If you wait too long for the perfect moment, the perfect moment will pass you by.
-Doing the best at this moment puts you in the best place for the next moment.
and finally, last but not least (drum roll please...)
-Unexpected gain and honor will be yours!
Sweet!
And in the process of all of this I ran across two excellent books that I know I should just put back in the dark where I found them, but rather will take a look at them soon. The first one is The Flesh of Words: The Politics of Writing by Jacques Ranciere, and the other on is Why I Write: Political language is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind by George Orwell.
I find this particularly interesting in light of the recent e-mails I was looking at from people in the writing program at the New School comdemning the violent actions of the students and threatening the safety and such of the campus, as well as being against its founding ideas and values. Very interesting to see reactionary writing coming out of the "writing" area of the New School... who knows?
Anyway, onward to more struggle kiddies. And don't forget to thank the tooth fairy for another good nights sleep.
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Our Official Blog : Mapping Resistance
Posted by horatio on Saturday, April 04, 2009 (04:41:01) (96 reads)
Mapping Resistance
Today has been a strangely productive day. I hope these questions are helpful for our inquiry into the nature of resistance. They are inspired from my current reading of Talal Asad's On Suicide Bombing (-love the cover image) and meditations on the construction of animal, nature and human... With that in mind, let me begin with two quotes, rather than a poem
| Quote:: |
"If you're not afraid of it, it will hurt you," said animal behaviorist Dave Salmoni. "You can't get the wild out of a cat because he's in a cage."
The Lion House is where the mauling occurred... just after the public feeding with at least 50 patrons watching, Tatiana turned on Komejan [a zookeeper]. Chari and his son [zoogoers] were standing 8 to 10 feet away, focused on another tiger named Tony, when they heard a shriek. |
Does anyone else see the sick hidden irony in all of this? Tony the Tiger? The Lion House? public feedings? "Civilized" versus "savage"? or is it just me...
As I read the first few lines in ch. 2 this thought came to mind: How do you “show” a particular construction of a particular logic which then constitutes (makes "real") certain understandings of what "war" and "terrorism" mean (and look like) in relation to our additional constructed understandings* of what he calls the "question of legality" and "feelings and vulnerability and fear of social disorder"? {p39} After coming out of the end of ch. 1 I had this question of the "liberal democratic state" and its relationship to violence on the tip of my mind.
The thought, because I have apparently been thinking and looking at maps and mapping (both are true), came out in the form of a visual map idea. Could a group of 15 people map out our understandings, our “logic”, of what a construction like “resistance” looks like, either visually or linguistically (most likely written, but possibly sung or performed)? Could we draw out on a big white board with a marker our outline, our assumptions, our “logics” of resistance? Maybe. What about the liberal democratic state? Could we map that out? Don't we, like Walzer—also construct a particular discourse on what is “resistance” in our class and in our daily lives? Could we map those out? Would they be similar?
It really goes back to an earlier question that came up a couple of weeks ago in conversation. What is the basic “logic” and “common sense” that each person starts from in thinking about a construction like the “liberal democratic state” and the discourse that holds it up in US society? Is it inherently based on exploitation, domination and oppression of some people by others, or is it fundamentally democratic more or less to all people? Can we speak of an “us”? This goes back to the question of mapping. Who gets to do the mapping, and what gets mapped, as the hegemonic discourse and reality are important questions to consider. Ultimately, I think they go back to the larger and harder question, which is who exactly gets defined as the “we” that are resisting against “them”—Schmitt's “friend and enemy” distinction—or the civilized against the savages. A battle over civilization, isn't that what this is? A becoming that is not fully realized, that is always almost at the point of becoming, or emerging—a becoming that is in conflict with itself. What happens in a nation of grown-up schizoparanoids?**
For example, consider the following statement in light of our earlier discussion on "civilized" v "savage" [or I might argue human v nonhuman]:
| Quote:: |
“Civilization refers to the central civilizational anxiety [paranoid anxiety], the fear of invasive malevolence. This is experienced as coming from the outside, but ultimately derives from the projection out of the death instinct. Civilization anxiety can be understood in terms of anxiety about imminent annihilation and derives from a sense of the destructive or death instinct of the self—[and by extension the state]. In this position before the secure internalisation of a good object to protect the ego—[think “the state”], the immature ego [“the state”] deals with its anxiety by splitting off bad feelings and projecting them out [hence the term “social outcasts” and torture centers located outside of the continental US]. However, this causes more civilization [paranoia]. Schizoid refers to the central defense mechanism: splitting, the vigilant separation of the good object from the bad object...a healthy development implies that the infant has to split its external world, its objects and itself into two categories: good (i.e., gratifying, loved, loving) and bad (i.e. frustrating, hated, persecutory). This splitting makes it possible to introject and identify with the good. In other words: splitting in this stage is useful because it protects the good from being destroyed by the bad. Later, when the ego [“the state”] has developed sufficiently, the bad can be integrated, and ambivalence and conflict can be tolerated.”**
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As odd as it all seems, it really is simple, which is perhaps the problem after all. Resistance is about hanging onto something as much as it is about getting something new. What do we want to gain, and what do we want to lose? And mapping that is a lot harder...
Earlier today my mother sent me a video link on the "American Government". While I wouldn't say I support the video's conclusion, but it is a provocative case for defending a Republic rather than a Democracy and speaks directly to the question of a "democratic liberal state."
With that I will end with a selectively fascinating tidbit that only a few people will likely appreciate, but is worthy nonetheless in my opinion.
| Quote:: |
On the East side of Coit Tower, down the Greenwich steps halfway to Sansome, a local artist has made a memorial statue to honor Tatiana the Tiger. I suggest walking from the bottom and up, and you'll see on the right hand side a cobblestone path lined with wood planks (not somebody's backyard!) that leads to an opening. At the top of the slope in the brush, you'll see a mosaic painted life size statue of the tiger underneath a small banana tree. The memorial marks the one year anniversary of the death of the tiger that everyone, except for these Yelpers, forgets to mourn.
RIP Tatiana!
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And after all, Tatiana deserves to have her side of the story told too, right! It's been like five minutes and my sides still hurt and I can't see straight, so I think you might want to watch this too. [warning...this video may cause spontaneous and contagious laughter from anyone in the vicinity. You have been warned!]
That of course left me wondering what can we do to get back to nature and start talking again about freedom. I think I agree with Jules Dervaes, we do need a homegrown revolution!
*[Tatiana might respond: "You need to look both at the construction of the relationship between these understandings, and the construction of each of those distinct and separate "knowledges", one might argue...]
**[inspired and adapted from wiki]
***For more from Asad check him out on the Huffington Post talking more about "Just War".
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Hijabelegance
Posted by horatio on Friday, March 20, 2009 (20:05:35) (100 reads)
No, this is not a joke. I'm on the SHUKR e-mail list because I like their stuff, and this was part of their latest e-mail campaign. I can't help but laugh, and I think it is a great and clever idea. Too bad I'm not really a hijab wearer ;(
Anyway, just passing this little tidbit along. And if you're looking for some nice clothing from a cool Islamic company, check them out. SHUKR
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