Georgia II

In Welcome to the Desert of the Real, Slavoj Zizek tells his readers that whenever clear lines are drawn in the sand that is the moment to resist association with either of the two positions. This almost seems common sense to the average English graduate student - we have been taught to resist argumentation centered on/based around binary oppositions from the moment we stepped into the classroom.

However, on the protest site in Georgia, I felt that [for the first year in the five years I've been going to this protest] the distinctions between the protesters and the military/police personnel began to become more permiable. This wasn't because the police began to chant and shout with us - they have done this in the past as well. In fact, due to their situation standing in the immersion of this protest, just being near the litany/chants/songs will cause most people to join in the collective almost unconsciously.

Heading to GA, I thought this year was going to be a pivotal year. The anti-war movement is in the liminal consciousness of most Americans; with the growing body counts, it has been harder and harder for the governmedia to cover up public positions opposed to the war. [Moreover, it is not to the Media's best interest to do so. It can turn the anti-war movement into a commercial commodity.] I felt that, this year, the government was going to have to put forth a greater resistance to the movement as there would almost certainly be more people.

But, to my surprise, this year there was less government intervention than in previous years. In part, this was due to a court order enforcing our right not to consent to unlawful searches. The baracades and metal detectors were absent from this years protest. However, there were several other things notoriously absent as well. There was no active anti-protest; most years, there are at least a handful of people who set up their own booth and berate us for being unamerican. The machine the fort uses to blast the crowd with noise propaganda was turned down - and not used during the saint's litany for those murdered by the School of Americas. Even then, it was only used a few times.

There were less police. The police moved more freely through the crowd. There was only one time during the day when a military copter circled the protest. There were less people over the edge of the gate waiting to apprehend those that crossed the line on to the base. The arrests were done with far less violence.

Rather than be pleased with this lack of opposition, I felt it alarming. In the same way that the local newspaper headline turned the protest into bodies, not message - the position of those there felt no resistance. Rather than the SoA protest being a protest at all (a protest in it's fifteenth year) I felt that the government/police understands it now as something different; the School of Americas protest has become simply an event which brings a flow of capital from the "liberal north" to southern Georgia.

The girl and I drove around Georgia more this year than before. We visited West Point's Dam, constructed by the Army Corp of Engineers. We traveled around the city of Columbus more. It is clear that the economy of southern GA is heavily dependant on the Military for its economy.

With this in mind, if a protest meets no resistance, it is doing no good - it is only talking to itself. In fact, now that I believe that the government understands this, I believe in future years rather than resist the military may do more to [i]accommodate[/i] protesters. I can see them setting up a stand and selling tee-shirts, or moving through the crowd selling refreshments.

Here, where there are no longer clear distinctions, one must be careful to attempt to observe the flow of capital. The process of Cognitive Mapping becomes the way to navigate the [perhaps subjectless] environment.

Georgia I

"We Aint Going Away!"

That was the headline of the local paper in Columbus, Georgia, the city north of Fort Benning. Fort Benning was the site of the protect I attended this past weekend.

Several people have asked me what I was protesting against. Fort Benning is the home of the U.S. Army School of the Americas. At least, the School of the Americas is what it's former name was; a few years ago the SoA shutdown and reopened under the monkier W.H.I.S.C. (The Western Hemisphere Instititute for Security Cooperation). Simply a name change.

The SoA trains Latin American soldiers in 'counter-insurgency' techniques in order to protect 'U.S. Interests.' Translated, the SoA is breeding ground for teaching non-U.S. troops torture tactics to use against the people of Latin America in order to secure the position of corrupt government and to quell indigent uprising against American corporations.

This is done using U.S. taxpayer money, meaning that if you payed your taxes or bought any taxables in the past 15 years you have been assisting in this effort. Each year, thousands of us gather at the gates of Fort Benning with the purpose of shutting down that part of the military base.

I am not for the closing of the base entirely. From the time I have spent down there, it is clear to me that too much of Georgia's economy (especially southern GA) is dependent on the military installations. However, the SoA is a separate wing of the base - one whose functions can be amputated at a great savings to the American Tax payer.

The protest is in it's 15th year. I do not anticipate our actions being able to shut down the School. However, I continue to go to Fort Benning as a way of projecting my voice. I do it to say "Not in my name." I do pay my taxes, and without being able to dissent, I would feel that I was in someway silently agreeing to it.

Moreover, I do it because of the radical sense of that "Act," in the Agamben sense of eternity intervening in history. An act of protest, once done cannot be undone. To protest is to call forth voluntarily the power of the act in this sense.

The headline gives a strange sense. However, it enphasized the physical presence of the protesters. To say that we are not going away is about the extent of what we are capable. Bodies however do not always convey the message you want them to have, though they always convey a message. A headline about presence is not a headline about voice, what we were saying.

We were there, but were we heard?

More on this in a second post tomorrow, on Zizek, subject position, and blurring the distinctions.

Letter

This last week, I recieved a letter in the mail. It was handwritten, and was on military stationary. It came from PFC Timothy McTigue.

Tim is one of my best friends, and certainly the the one I have been friends with the longest. The two of us grew up in the same trailer park in Pontiac, MI. We were one year and one day apart and our mothers decided it would be a good idea if we played together - me three and he four years old.

When one lives in a mobile home park, one gets used to things being modular. Your neighbors and friends come and go at a constant rate. This is expected when where you live is on wheels. You develop a strong ego barrier, and a terrifying fear of tornados. Tim, however, has been one of the few constants. Through several moves (due to having divorced parents) we have never lost though.

He wrote in the letter that he met someone just like me, someone that read philosophy and could recite song lyrics from memory - except that they were six foot five and from Africa. He asked for computer and financial advice.

This letter has been in my posession for a week and I haven’t been able to put down anything as a reply to it.

Perhaps a little context. My father is a two tour Vietnam vet. My favorite sitcom of all time is M*A*S*H. The most touching moments in that series for me are the episodes when Alan Alda writes home to his father in Crab Apple Cove, Maine. I don’t know if I was so moved because of the context, because it was one of my best friends, or if it was because I hate the military so much.

Writing this now, in either case, it is the space of composition that moved me so painfully and emotionally. It was the stationary that did it, good or bad, that brought all of these associations.

The letter was handwritten. I don’t write letters by hand because of being arthritic. This makes them mean more.

In-Class Assignment: Homeplace

As promised in class, here is the outline of the assignment (which according to Dr. Rice is a semester-long project) that Sarah Ruddy and myself developed in class last Monday. Cheers.

I. Read "Homeplace" by bell hooks. Define hooks' homeplace (One class period allocated.)

II. Have the students develop a homeplace as an assemblage (One class period allocated. Weekend to do assignment).
----> Create a virtual homeplace from available materials (found objects)
----> Produce a personal space out of cultural objects. Examples could be:
- still photographs
- verbal quotations
- film clips
- advertisements
- song lyrics
- audio clips
- design an actual building based on parts
- diorama with found objects
(This portion may be done in web, paper, digital media, or any form of print format(s). )
*Writing Componant: The student must produce two pages showing the reader around their personal space.
*Presentation Componant: Each student is allowed up to five minutes to present their space to the class. (Presentations will take two class periods).

III. Creating a city: Link your homeplace to two others. (This will make certain that students pay attention to the other presentations on the previous two days of class).
*Writing Componant: The student must produce two pages explaining their connections to the two other students homeplaces.
*Presentation Componant: as a class, they will produce a map of the city. (One class period allocated for this exercise alone).

IV. Wrapup: Re-produce a simple image of the new city developed in class (Another weekend to do this portion). Some examples of ways to do this are:
- brochure
- a literal map
- developing a skyline
- digitally-manipulated photographs
- two more pages of writing about the city

Crafting An Image

A couple weeks ago, the girl and I went to see Tim Burton’s “The Corpse Bride” (CB) at the theater. Both of us, being Tim Burton fans (and one of us being a huge Johnny Depp fan, though I’m not saying who), were excited by the prospect of seeing what Burton’s imagination had whipped up. I had read before seeing it that CB was a film ten years in the making - that’s a long time to brew.

Neither of us were disappointed. The film was fantastic. While the film’s musical numbers didn’t quite meet the standards I believe Burton set in The Nightmare Before Christmas, he generates a world of nuiance where by the end the horrible becomes the lovely. I never thought I would become endeared to a maggot, even an animated one, ever. However, even in this, Burton draws out emotion.

The thing that I find interesting is that the basic premice of this film involved some form of necrophelia. Necrophelia is a word you don’t find coming up much in civilized company. However, in any film named “The Corpse Bride” it obviously should come up? Shouldn’t it? After all, marriage, as the XT right always remind us, is a sacred bond which has the intent to start a family and have children at it’s core. It is the sacrament that regulates sexuality and institutionalizes sex’s purpose. It is hardly necessary to subject the title of Burton's film to full deconstruction to see that this is so.

So then the marriage to a corpse must generate some sort of necrophilic tones. There is a scene in CB where Emily (the corpse bride) and Victor (Depp) kiss. She says “You may kiss the bride.” The screen goes black. Though the screen goes dark, the audience knows what happened. Why is this not an outrage to conservatives and moral majority people across the country? The answer must be simple: medium. It is Burton’s choice of medium, the carefully sculpted stop motion form and the mode of the conventional fairy tale, that allow him to escape such critique. Where Poe is routinely associated with necrophilia due to laying in his sister/lover’s sulpecher in Annabel Lee, Burton nor his characters field such association. Burton manages to compose the image in such a fashion that people see the morals and values are still intact - enough to give it a PG rating.

The second thing that I find (perhaps even more) interesting is the presentation of the afterlife in The Corpse Bride. It is a world that exists in one long Day of the Dead celebration. While this is hardly shocking in a film which attempts to bring the dead as close to the living as possible, the way it does it is shocking. The scenes are saturated in a world of lights and Jazz riffs that cannot help but be reminicent of New Orleans.

It is interesting that after 9/11, any film that had a disaster in it was immediately shelved or delayed in its release. The national consciousness felt it necessary to do this in the wake of the terrorist attacks. However, no such apprehensions seem to follow CB. The film seems to emulate a world of the dead of New Orleans, images of which are still in the national conscious/unconscious. Yet no problems are associated with its release. Is it the medium, as I postulated in the allowance of necrophilic content, or in this case is it simply class consciousness? Perhaps it is enough to say that the poor blacks fo New Orleans were not thought about in life - what would lead me to believe that their memory would be considered in death.

CVC

As promised in the previous post, here are some words elaborating on the name of the blog.

Clinton Valley Center was a state-funded psychiatric hospital. Both the name of the hospital and this description of it are misnomers. The CVC’s original name is more accurate and speaks more closely of its function: Eastern Michigan Asylum for the Insane opened on August 1st, 1878. The massive Victorian structures that made up the center remained open, and were expanded, during the over one-hundred years it was open. It was closed by Governor Engler in 1997.

During the summer of 2000, the buildings of the asylum were tore down. In the past two years, a community of luxury condominiums have been erected in its stead.

Both my grandmother and mother endured extended stays at this facility. When I was young, I remember frequent family visits to this place in my father’s old Chrysler station wagon, or in my great aunt’s ‘76 Chevy - it was only five minutes from the place where my family lived. When it was demolished in 2000, I was, in part, relieved. The threat of any future family internment in that facility was gone. However, the absence of CVC became, and still is, unsettling to me. I had invested significant emotional energy in those buildings - its absence created a vapid psychic space.

Moreover, the luxury condominiums that replaced CVC seem to me a greater sickness than the asylum upon whose foundation they rest.

So what does Clinton Valley have to do with composition? The turn to reason and rationality finds its vehicle in the technology of writing. The five paragraph essay, and other forms of composition and rhetorical strategy, are grounded in logic and rationality. Though reason and the rhetorical tradition far predate the project of the Enlightenment, few could argue it was used (is still being used if one had a Habermas-ian understanding of Modernity and the project of the Enlightenment as still ongoing) as a tool of the Enlightenment, as Adorno and Horkheimer call it in “The Concept of Enlightenment,” “totality in language.” And, of course, writing is involved in forwarding the Enlightenment, the printing press is one of the technologies Bacon claims ushered in the age.

This complicity with and forwarding of (the myth of) reason and rationality continues to our composition classrooms. Clarity of thought and structure, closure in form and writing, consistency are things we demand of our students - and as gatekeepers in the core curriculum of almost all universities, what academia demands of all college graduates.

Clinton Valley is resistant to the myth of Enlightenment. It is a memory the ways that the Enlightenment functioned to marginalize, separate, and remove aspects of our society - as Foucault points out in “The Birth of the Asylum.” It is a memory that reason and atrocity coalesce.

Phantom Hat, or How To Plug Good Music

This week, driving home with the girl from national coney island in royal oak, I noticed her placing her hand on her head strangely. I asked her what she was doing - it looked like she was feeling around for a bobby pin in her hair, or pawing around for a scratch on her forehead. She told me that it felt like she had something on her head. I felt the girl’s forehead, and it was a little cold. However, there was definitely nothing on her head.

She continued this for the entire car ride, this feeling like something was there when it wasn’t. She told me that it was probably because she had been wearing a hat all day. I dubbed her problem “phantom hat syndrome.” I imagined the exchange of an injured vet and his doctor in a M*A*S*H hospital:

“I have to thank you doc for saving the hat.”
“I’m sorry, but we couldn’t save your hat.”
“But what do you mean?! I feel it. It’s right there.”


Of course, having a two-tour vietnam vet for a father, I realize just how out of taste jokes relating to phantom limb are. So I ended this line of joking, before I started racking up more days in purgatory (as if my Starbucks habit hasn't landed me enough). There was some silence, and my attention was taken away from the nonexistent hat feeling by the track that was on the car cd-player.

In the player was one of my recent favorite tracks from a british rap group named “The Streets.” I became addicted to the work of Mike Skinner when I listened to The Streets album “Original Pirate Material” where he solidified his sound. The album in the car was The Streets latest, “A Grand Don’t Come For Free.” To put it reductively, A Grand... is a concept album - it is an album that as a whole tells the story of the entering in and falling out of personal relationships. The story functions like a musical novel, due to its multi-character/multi-perspective approach. It was a very successful experiment. The final track was on the radio at the time during the aforementioned silence.

The Streets “Empty Cans,” the end track of A Grand, is the conclusion to Mike’s narrative. All of his relationships, with his friends, family, and significant others are dissolved. This song is divided into two segments. The first portion tells a conclusion that leaves Mike alienated from the world, and tells of a brutal fight between him and a television repair man. The lyrics that begin this part go:

If I want to sit in and drink super tennants in the day I will,
No-ones going to fucking tell me jack,
But can you rely on anyone in this world?
No you cant; it’s not my fault there's wall to wall empty cans.

However, half way through the track, the audience is met with the sound of a tape rewinding. The track seems to start over, but with a twist on the lyrics above:

If I want to sit in and drink super tennants in the day I will,
No-ones going to fucking tell me jack,
But can you rely on anyone in this world?
No you cant; its all my fault there's wall to wall empty cans.

The second half of the track is brings Mike back into society through allowing himself to take the blame for much of what goes down during the album. On a turn of a simple phrase, “it’s not my fault” vs “it’s all my fault,” on acceptance or rejection of blame, is where the conclusion of the narrative hinges.

A Grand’s conclusion gives its own internal remix - it has the feel of a an old “Choose your own adventure book.” I believe that this is a brilliant example of the real power of the remix, the power of choice and agency. A remix has an original (at least in most cases), and with a remix comes the ability to “chose your own ending” or to decide on the source text over the remix.

(My next posts, coming up this week, will explain a bit about Clinton Valley, and will provide my musings on Tim Burton’s “The Corpse Bride.” )