Week 5

Appadurai's question: "Why kill, torture, and ghettoize the weak?" It is because we fear them. Why? Well, minority/majority are relatively new concepts, associated with nation-states, but creating a "them/us" relationship (also called "othering") is inherent in a society. When a majority feels threatened, it becomes what Appadurai calls a "predatory identity", which feels that the threatening minority must be destroyed. To rally support, statistics about rising birthrates in the minority are often quoted. The fear is that the majority and the minority might possibly switch places. "Majoritarian" identities are so called because they "strive to close the gap between the majority and the purity of the national whole." This amply describes Nazism. The author finds that the reason such small minorities cause such furor in the majority is that they are seen as the cause of nation's incompleteness of purity. Interestingly, the majority's rage increases as the strength and size of the frustrating minority decreases. But what about benevolent, inclusive, liberal majorities? No, says Appadurai, the seeds of genocide are always present, just in a different way: while majoritarians fear minorities because they represent a nagging obstacle to national purity, liberals are sympathetic as an unintended byproduct of their inherent tendency to favor minorities of opinion (not race, etc.). "What?!" you may exclaim. That's right, "This unintended displacement of the liberal concern with protecting the opinions of procedural minorities (such as minorities on courts, council, parliaments, and other liberative bodies) onto the rights of permanent cultural minorities is an important source of the current, deep ambivalence about minorities in democracies of all varieties."

Appadurai examines the case of India's post-British government and its inclusive, liberal constitution: as it turns out, rather than being inclusive, forty years after independence there was a strong wave of right-wing Hinduism that resulted in violence against Muslims and fear of minorities. Hinduism was pushed to be synonymous with patriotism. Fifteen years later, however, the population revolted and voted the right-wing out. Good for them, but why was the right wing so easily accepted by supposedly intelligent liberals? The author ponders the question.

There was a particularly large shift toward racism in many countries in the 1980s and 1990s because they had to simultaneously cope with opening themselves to international (read: foreign) culture/commerce and dealing with cultural minorities' demands for citizenship.

However, as the author notes previously, majorities require minorities, so the attempt to remove one minority, should it succeed, simply lays the groundwork for the creation of another. Is an economic minority preferable to an ethnic minority? As an example, I want to examine the United States and Japan. The U.S. is 80% White, 12.9% Black, 13.4% Hispanic/Latino (which includes people of any race), 4% Asian, and several other various percentages. Japan, on the other hand, is 99% Japanese. While we in the U.S. have large and furious debates regarding the non-White minorities within our population, what is going on in Japan? There must be some kind of minorities. Perhaps the only minority is economic? As it turns out, according to the "Demographics in Japan" Wikipedia entry (which has the same information as the CIA factbook, plus much more), there is still discrimination against ethnic minorites, and in fact much greater pressure than in the U.S. to outwardly conform and to be considered full Japanese. The difference is that the ethnic populations in Japan number in the hundreds of thousands, not tens of millions. But it turns out that the greatest discrimination is economic: to quote the Wikipedia entry, "Despite popular claims of Japanese homogeneity on the part of observers both foreign and domestic, three native Japanese minority groups can be identified. The largest are the hisabetsu buraku or 'discriminated communities', also known as the burakumin. These descendants of premodern outcast hereditary occupational groups, such as butchers, leatherworkers, funeral directors, and certain entertainers, may be considered a Japanese analog of India's dalits [untouchables]." These minorities look entirely Japanese, and would be able to pass as such were it not for background checks conducted when important occasions such as marriage are involved. They live in ghettos, and can be identified by clothing, dialect, and mannerisms. If there is a U.S. equivalent, I'd say it would be "white trash". So it seems that Japan has fewer ethnic minorities, but discriminates against them more, whilst the main target of discrimination is the economic lower class.

Tardieu: in addition to the wealth gap there is also a technology gap. By creating "street libaries" - a setup on a neighborhood street that includes arts and crafts and, most importantly, a computer - the extremely poor, often called the Fourth World, are able to experience and learn about technology. However, it must be presented in a way that they can both understand and master. Warschauer recounts an experience in which a "telecenter", a place where the poor can learn computer skills and use the Internet, was run in such a way that those it was attempting to help felt overwhelmed and uninterested. The man in charge said he was attempting to be "non-political", which ultimately meant that it involved none of the politics of the people and instead was politically Western - emphasizing the number of people trained over community involvement. In this vein, the author makes it clear that technology is never neutral. Yes, computers are tools that do one's bidding, but their development has not affected all people equally (the author notes that the system of displaying characters had only enough room for those of English-esque languages, and thus progress occurred more in countries with similar languages). However, technology does not always bring momentous societal change, nor, in fact, does it function at all in the way predicted by the "neutral tool" model. Instead, one needs to use a sociotechnical model, which better predicts and understands the extremely wide range of effects that technology can impose.

I've been thinking about the problem of citizens and denizens, and I'm wondering if there isn't a kind of forced denizenship present in developed countries, particularly the U.S. Poor communities can't afford technology, and so they can't participate in global online culture and thus (among other things) contribute to or at least learn about politics affecting their lives. In addition, they have no time away from working or recovering from work to participate politically.

In Fredric Jamison's article, postmodernism is examined as a successor and effacer of modernism. The question is whether postmodernism can embody the same necessary societal elements as its precursor. He describes postmodernism as a reaction against the establishment of high modernism, which itself had to struggle greatly in order to achieve the status it enjoyed for so long.

The Dow article doesn't use the phrase "public secret" when describing the situation at Krome, the INS detention center near Miami, but it is very similar to the Daniel article: injustices are committed upon the prisoners, particularly the women, and the public knows nothing about it. The big difference is that in this article, the public is less at fault. Yes, we did allow an oppressive prison complex to arise because we foolishly thought that more prisons equaled more safety, but the author focuses just as much on the fact that the injustices within the system are deliberately hushed by those in charge. It has occurred to me as I have been pondering the concept of the "public secret" that it isn't entirely the public's fault that the secret exists. Verily, the Dow article says, "The secretive immigration prison world is likely to be pulled even further from public scrutiny." Granted, those who voted for more prisons and tighter immigration controls are far from innocent in this matter, but I wonder if so much blame should be heaped upon people for not knowing about the injustices in the prison systems when the media has been banned from entering the prisons and thus from reporting to the populace. From what I read in the Dow article, anyone who tried to publicize the injustices at the prison was silenced. I think I'm partially motivated to absolve myself of some of the blame inherent in public secrets, but I daresay the majority of the blame falls on the people who restrict the information in the first place.

Angela Davis is another witness to prison injustice. She remarks on the ease with which "tough on crime" policies were introduced and the exponential expansion of prisons and prison populations: to people who expect to never end up in prison, meaning most people, the idea that people who commit crimes will be punished thusly is a convincing one. After all, if you're a criminal, you ought to be imprisoned. I mean, no one wants criminals on the street. The problem is that prisons are a self-perpetuating phenomenon. When a prison opens (for instance, in a town where a big corporation just packed up and left thousands jobless), new jobs are created (and the jobless people who turn to crime are imprisoned). The state pays the contractors who build the prisons, and the prisoners are used as cheap labor. In essence, prisons funnel money out of poor communities, and the prisoners are disproportionately Black and Latino.

Appadurai: globalization, ethnocide, econocide, ideocide, incompleteness, rage. Re national ethos: "No modern nation, however benign its political system and however eloquent its public voices may be about the virtues of tolerance, multiculturalism, and inclusion is free of the idea that its national sovereignty is built on some sort of ethnic genius." Intranational violence requires minorities. The racialized indirect violence in the U.S. - filling prisons with minorities - is the result of a national feeling of incompleteness. The majority subconscious seems to say "If those dang minorities would just disappear, we could have a nation filled with the people whose great ancestors colonized this land and built this great country." But then we remember the Nazis' attempt to do just that, and we are ashamed, so we just keep doing what we're doing, only we don't talk about it that way.

Appadurai's notes that minorities will always be present in a society because the society actually creates minorities. This extends from the national level to my experience back in middle school where my clique of friends (who, by the way, hated the idea of cliques - that was for the "popular" kids) more than once created a minority within ourselves. This minority consisted of one young man who happened to have the fewest social skills, and he was ostracized slowly and painfully. We didn't think of it or call it ostracization; it was simply that everyone more or less found him to be annoying, and so when the one member who found him unbearable verbally ousted him, no one else interfered. It validated the existence of everyone who was included, and ruined the excluded boy's school experience. I often felt sorry for him - it wasn't his fault that he happened to aggravate - but I was shamefully glad when he was gone. We talked about it occasionally - "yeah, I feel sorry for him, but I just can't stand him!" In the end, we knew we'd done something hurtful, but I think we all rationalized it in the same way that people who never expect to go to prison do: "I'M certainly not going to do anything that would be a reason for imprisonment (or ostracization); as for those people who would, they deserve it!" The problem arises when we think we've purged the transgressive minority: ever so subtly, a new minority is created. Another kid is annoying in a different way. And thus middle school sociopolitical happenings echo those of a nation.

Week 3

I found the thread in this week's readings to be related to sympathy/compassion/naked life. McPhee tells a story of immersing herself in a tragedy to better understand it; Agamben discusses the concept of "naked life", or life as biological, not political. It occurs, for example, in the site of McPhee's study - the people whose livelihoods were disrupted by landslides are ordered to evacuate rather than receiving government aid, and by continuing to live there they live at the mercy of the powers involved, for their rights have essentially been stripped. Both McPhee and Sontag remark on the sensationalizing of tragic images.

The town of La Conchita was the site of "a deadly debris", and the people were ordered to evacuate, but they stayed. An artist and author Christina McPhee ventured there to immerse herself in the tragedy because to see it from outside would be to only see afterimages of a whole that could only be perceived by those who have experienced it in its entirety. Says she, "there's no honest way to approach the place of trauma without being implicated in it somehow." There's also "the diagram", which is something that resists an author's frustration, requires surgery, refuses everything, and makes its appearance when the author tries to cut together all the footage she has taken of La Conchita. There is a problem of the footage of trauma becoming essentially pornographic - sensory overload that is touched up to make it as overloading as possible. However, the diagram refuses it. This is a problem, but thankfully the linear editing machine explodes psychotically into itself, creating unwatchable footage that excites the author, who then recuts the footage digitally. Lust, permeable membranes, breakage, and strange colloid mixes from which springs the diagram combine to form a veil of "inscape".  By experiencing the tragedy not when it happened but in the aftermath firsthand, she gains an insight that no CNN sound bites could ever deliver.

I suppose that I must first distinguish between zoe' and bios, the words that were used to refer respectively to "naked life", or biological life, and political life, life as a citizen. In any nation-state, Agamben remarks, the two exist, and there is a fracture. There has already been a distinction in this class between "people" and "People", the former referring to the proletariats and the latter referring to the citizens of a nation. This always just seems to sort of be inherent in any Westernized (capitalistic?) nation. The Nazis' Final Solution, Agamben posits, was an attempt to "heal" the fracture between People and people. It seems to me that trying to bridge the divide is reliant on everyone not being greedy (i.e. a main reason that Communism didn't work out).

Sontag and McPhee discuss the issue of sensationalizing tragedy. It becomes almost "pornographic", says McPhee, and the reason that we as People find these images so compelling is that be observing remote tragedy, our innocence and lack of participation in creating that tragedy make us feel good, and we can focus on that instead of on whether our affluence actually perpetuates such tragedies. 

Now for DENIZENS, which is my thread of interest. Agamben was the only author that used the term, and he used it with respect to both non-citizen immigrants and non-political citizens. When citizens of a nation whose idea of citizenship is more zoe than bios decides to immigrate, they become residents of another nation. However, though they may be protected by laws that apply to all the nation's residents, they are not citizens in a political sense. They cannot participate in the government without naturalizing themselves - becoming citizens. The problem is that many do not wish to become citizens. This problem is compounded by actual citizens who simply refuse to participate politically. Both of these classes of residents may be termed "denizens" rather than "citizens". An example of a denizen would be, until two years ago, me. I didn't vote for my first two years of elligibility because of various reasons, but the point is that I didn't participate politically, and that therefore I did not serve my responsibility as a citizen. However, my goal is to participate in capitalism, the ideology that drives the politics of this nation, and so I suppose that by indirectly advancing it by simply living as a consumer could be construed as a vague sort of political participation.

Public Secrets, Defacement, Witnessing, Compassion (Week 2)

The four assigned articles created a thread that was somewhat difficult to follow, but which nonetheless connected the idea of the "public secret", defacement (both literal and metaphorical), the act of "witnessing" (which, in true digital media style, has been appropriated by the author and its meaning altered), and the concept of compassion as it applies on a social scale.

The first article, written by the professor for this very class, Sharon Daniel, is both an expose' of the prison system and a discussion of the concept of the "public secret". The prison system is an enigma, for it is often dramatised on television to the point of unbelievability. Corrupt guards, sadistic cellmates, and gang rivalry fill the screen, and the viewer remembers the oft-printed disclaimer "based on true events": that is, exponentially more dramatic and insane than the true events themselves. Between prison as dramatised on television and prison as rarely spoken about negatively in the media, citizens don't really know what to think. But no matter what they think, it's usually in passing, because they don't really want to know the reality of the prison system. This is where the concept of the public secret becomes relevant. As the essay quotes, the idea of a public secret is "knowing what not to know". The problem of the military being unwilling to accept homosexuals was circumvented by creating a public secret of sexual orientation within the military ("don't ask, don't tell"). If no one knows whether anyone else is homosexual, it solves the problem of having to deal with issues that would otherwise inevitably arise. An equivalent policy actually "solves" the problem of negativity directed toward the prison system: by banning media from entering prisons, no one can ask or be told about the injustices that Daniel has documented for the last several years. Another example of a public secret involves the Iraq War. Regardless of one's stance as to whether or not it should have been started, there was obvious encouragement by the administration of the idea that there were links between Saddam and Al-Qaeda. The "secret", which the White House even admitted, was that none had actually been found. While I would assume that knowledge of this public secret is greater than that noted by Daniel, they both are direct examples of the same concept.

A large-scale system, such as that which is able to create and perpetuate public secrets, is far too massive to oppose directly. It usually controls media coverage and has enough lawyers to take care of any small uprisings many times over. In this case, guerilla warfare becomes one of the few remaining options. Defacement as examined by Michael Taussig goes beyond the obvious definition of simply marring the surface of an entity. In this case, it is a metaphorical act as well. Greg Taylor created a sculpture of the Queen and Prince Phillip naked and rusting, in effect defacing them by creating art that depicted them vulnerable and grotesque. Also, your eye is actually a solar anus. Betcha didn't know that.