Clinton Valley

Georgia II

2005-12-04T10:39:00.001-08:00

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

2005-11-27T17:26:00.000-08:00

"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

2005-11-13T17:38:00.000-08:00

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

2005-10-30T18:18:00.000-08:00

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

2005-10-23T21:13:00.000-07:00

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

2005-10-16T07:57:00.000-07:00

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

2005-10-09T19:19:00.000-07:00

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.” )

Mona (or, On Standarization)

2005-10-02T19:25:00.000-07:00

Earlier this week the girl and I stopped at my parent’s trailer in Pontiac. My father is the kind of man that takes in all of the neighborhood’s stray animals. On the porch,( dark blue latex vinyl paint mostly peeled away as a visible sign of neglect) there are five different types of cat food: four different varieties of canned Nine Lives, and some Kitten Chow dry food. Three of the containers were still full; he always puts out more cat food than can reasonably be eaten even by starving strays.

The cat of the week, by this I mean the one which has his attention, is a local named Mona. My father is rather reasonable and logical about naming his cats. Mona received her name because she never purr’s. When given affection while eating, she only emits a moan which is somewhere between a bark and a low growl. It always ends suddenly, going up an octave before terminating. My father attributes this to always having to defend her food in the wild. He thinks she is afraid that we will take the food away from her. I do not know what to think.

Anyway, on our visit, Mona happened to be on the porch. She wasn’t eating, but waiting at the screen door looking inside the trailer. She was startled by our approach, but soon let the girl pet her and fuss over her.

I said I thought the cat looked like a squirrel. She told me to stop it, that I would give the cat a complex. I said that I thought squirrel’s were cooler than cats. The girl disagreed, and said that we were messing with Mona’s identity. I said it was ok, that the cat would develop a double-consciousness. Mona would think it was a squirrel, all the while wondering how its acting as a squirrel reflects on all Cats.

I’m certain that both you (the reader) and I (the writer) are/have been expecting this to turn into some form of analogy or allegory. If this were about pedagogy and standardization, perhaps the girl and I both are both educators. We both see Mona (our student) in different ways and are attempting to mold Mona via our own personal identity politics. Then, the primary issue of standardization is one of the postmodern condition - as Walter Benn Michael’s calls it, “the primacy of the subject.” WBM situates conflict in postmodernity as a conflict of identities rather than a conflict of ideologies. Clearly, in the girl’s and my discussion of Mona, this is the case. The conflict is entirely incommensurate - neither she nor I will have the “correct” answer, only differences of subject position from which to see Mona which are irreconcilable.

But this is really a story about a cat. Mona doesn’t care about our identity politics, or about my father’s naming her Mona. Mona cares about securing food/water, shelter, heat, and eventually a mate (or several). Mona (if we continue the same allegorical mode, our student) functions wholly on a logic of desire. Mona will perform (in the most theoretically loaded sense of the word “perform”) whatever identity that secures such material wants. The logic of desire is what brings an individual into the realm/paradigm of production/consumption - or, as that model no longer works (if it ever did), brings the student into “Process” in the D&G sense of the term.

Paper production: Process and Product (Gitmo Remix)

2005-09-26T04:24:00.000-07:00

What Bartholomae shows in the student college placement exam in his “Inventing the University” is clearly a violent struggle between voices. The student is caught within a -

You are gagged and blindfolded. An even darker sack is placed over that, and a collar is placed around your neck holding the bag in place. Your hands are bound shut. The enclosure makes your head uncomfortably warm. You perspire. Your wrists and ankles are bound together. The air is humid and you begin to hyperventilate. You know you are flying in a jet, because your jaw and ears are popping with the change of pressure. They will not allow you to lie down and hit you with the butt of their rifles if you try to do so.

When you arrive, the bag and gag are removed and you are placed in small desk. You can see shapes through the blindfold due to the UV light: the desks are in a circle. One by one, an inscrutable figure uses clamps and cauterizing scissors to remove each person’s tongue. When seven-thirty comes around dinner is served. On the menu, the corpus of dead white men. This metaphor is become over extended, and became hyperbole almost a whole paragraph ago. There could have been infinite permutations - an islamic man having his beard removed and being smeared with menstrual blood, a woman being threatened with sodomy by a guard’s night stick, et cetera. Bartholomae was correct to think of composition in terms of power discourse. However, it must be clear is that the violent struggle of voices goes further than the narrow binary that Bartholomae calls ”the students [sic] primary discourse” and “standard, official literary criticism.” Bakhtin understood that the shifting heteroglossia of mediated reality is a battlefield - the term “heteroglossia” itself was coined to describe the state of tension that creates a hegemonic national language.

The first year composition class is one of those spaces where students “encounter” this shift. Bartholomae imagines the roll of this classroom is to enable his students to obtain the ability to speak. He imagines a classroom where students appropriate language and use its power for themselves, to share in position, power, and privilege. But power is not yielded so easily, nor is it obtained by simple coaxing or through the providing of access. The student cannot simply pickup the rifle and begin beating others or become the inscrutable figure.

Moreover, do we want the student to become the “inscrutable figure”? Such a process of appropriation/recycling/remixing promotes such.

‘Writing’ as the Dasein of Composition Studies?

2005-09-19T01:27:00.000-07:00

In his widely read introduction to Being And Time, Martin Heidegger brought the western philosophical tradition back to the fundamental question of ontology, “What is Being?” Heidegger proposes that in the very form of the question itself lays the groundwork for its failure. “Being,” being the most universal of concepts, renders itself indefinable by its very universality. Beyond the indefinablity of that which is being asked about in the fundamental question of ontology, the nature of questioning itself concerns Heidegger. He sees questioning as “interrogation,” that is, he understands that the questioner is examining the thing asked about. This requires open access to “Beings” as object of examination, and knowledge of what being where with the meaning of Being can be found. This cannot be obtained through the question “What is Being”; such a question presupposes an understanding of Being through its use of the word is.

So, can we approach the question of “What is Writing?” After all, in as much as Being is the object of ontology, Writing is the object of Composition Studies. This question too has a pitfall, in the same way as asking the fundamental question of Being is problematized by asking an ontological question of an indefinable center of ontology, asking the fundamental question of Writing is problematized by writing about the question of Writing. To ask the question is, in an interestingly performative manner, to write the question.

However, where usage in the case of the fundamental question of Being only further displays ones lack of knowledge in the case of “What is Being?”, usage of the question “What is Writing?” provides an example of writing. As mentioned before, one of the problems of the fundamental question of ontology is the issue of access. This problem is non-existent in the question of Composition; each time the question is asked, access is created.

As a way of opening up, and reviving the possibility of addressing the question of Being, Heidegger proposes, as the object of interrogation, the figure of the Dasein (the being in becoming). In the case of ontology, it is a shift in the object and lexicon – no longer is Being directly the object of interrogation, but the being that questions and interrogates Being. Understanding, of course, that Heidegger understood such a being to be in a position of “privilege” – and this understanding of this figure as having a privileged position over those others is a key target for debate (among various other things) in his argument. In the case of the question of Writing, writing the question itself is a manifestation. “What is Writing?” points to itself as writing. Rather than a figure such as the Dasein as the figure of examination, Writing that is the questioning of writing itself becomes the object of interrogation.

So, to find the next step in such a process, the question expands, “What is a Writing that questions writing itself?” It is in the spaces where boundaries are transgressed – where one wonders, “is this writing?” In my view, the forwarding of New Media and the age of digital and image-based composition are a good place to seek writing that pushes the boundaries. Of course, this is but one example, and the important thing about any interrogation is access. We are not seeking a singular object but a multiplicity of ways of asking as example, as access, the fundamental question of Composition.

The hope here is that Heidegger understood the meaning of Being to be available, and already attainable. If this were not true, he proposes, there could not be any ontological knowledge. The same can be said true of Writing: access to writing is open and everywhere, and an entire field of composition proliferates knowledge about writing. But the question of “What is Writing?” must be understood as an insufficient way of approaching an issue so vital to the whole of composition.