Week 9

Taussig's article on the reading of the face as a measure of merit is especially insightful in this age. "Right or wrong, reading the face is here to stay as a type of irriducible folk wisdom of popular culture. So deeply ingrained is this, a veritable 'instinct' and mad ambition, that the whole visual world can be thought of as 'face' to be read for its inner 'soul'." However, if the face is linked to judgement, then the masking of the face is as well, as we can see in the case of revolutionary Spain's Zapatista leader Marcos. His use of a mask created a mystique about him that was briefly dispelled when government officials "unmasked" him by showing a picture of "his" face and naming him a mere shopkeeper's son. In Sergei Eisenstein's The Strike, villains morph between human and animal.

In Bratich's essay, he finds that secrecy extends far beyond the concept of a box with unknown contents. Spectacular secrecy, as he calls it, includes the notion of public secrets, and he finds that the act of "revealing" a public secret, such as the identity of the informer in the Watergate scandal, merely adds to the secret. Apparently, it is possible to reveal in such a manner that the mechanisms that maintain the secret or benefit from it are strengthened rather than weakened. When the Spanish government revealed the identity of Marcos, it would seem that they were not fully aware of the implications of their revelation, and in fact the revolters' resolve was strengthened by the idea that a mere shopkeeper's son could be the leader of such a great movement. Such is also the case with secrecy in the U.S., except that those guarding the secret are masters at revealing in the most lucrative way.

In summary, the face is used as a measure of trustworthiness and overall merit. Spectacular secrecy is so excessive that those who are not "in the know" cannot fully grasp what the secret means, and instead the revealing of the secret benefits the revealer. To synthesize, all one needs to succeed in politics is a trustworthy face and Karl Rove.

Week 8

After reading the passages from Shiva's "Water Wars", I feel profoundly remorseful about my lack of awareness and for engaging and continuing to engage in a nonsustainable lifestyle. What the articles described was greed as manifested in the actions of large corporations and supposedly helpful entities such as the World Bank. These actions, under the guise of efficiency, strip the indigenous populations of their rights to clean water and pull water out of the ground in excess of the environment's ability to replentish it. Simultaneously, money is funneled out of the country and into corporate coffers. Large companies are investing heavily in aquaculture, hoping to corner the world's supply of water. One expert was quoted as saying that water's "uniqueness" does not hold up under analyis - it is merely another commodity. On the contrary, says Shiva, water is the one commodity for which there is no alternative. While indigenous water practices have sustained communities and ecosystems for hundreds of years, it would seem that greedy individuals would rather the entire world pay for water.

This discussion relates to that of the previous week - utopia. Wouldn't it be nice if there was a community in which drinking water was a right and where no one went thirsty? The idea of community-run, sustainable water management is utopic, but, as Shiva notes, was a reality for many years in small villages before environmentally harmful companies interfered.

While the root of all problems is greed, a sub-problem where water is concerned appears to be urbanization. Cities suck up water (as we can see by the very real water war in which Los Angeles drained Mono Lake), and use it unsustainably. Villages use it far more wisely, but villages are not profitable and generally do not generate excess revenue, as they use it all to sustain the village.

What can we do about the privatization of water and the stripping of water rights from indigenous communities? The only path I see, short of miraculously curing corporate greed, is participating as much as possible in politics with the goal of creating new laws that curtail (and hopefully stop) the destructive actions that cause water shortages. As citizens, we are obligated to participate on behalf of our collective well-being. If we do not participate, we become denizens, those who inhabit but who do not contribute. If I had the resources, I'd do what I'm proposing for my project: create a law that compels people to vote. Then, I'd distribute information about water privatization. Hopefully, people will read the information and vote accordingly.

Week 7

Those who experience subaltern pain live their lives "expecting that at any moment their ordinary loose selves might be codified into a single humiliated atom of subpersonhood" (Berlant 122).

"Men violently dominating other men for control of states is called war; men violently dominating women within states is relegated to peace" (Mackinnon 4). She finds that the biggest problem with sexual inequality is not that states refuse to create legislation to combat it ("virtually no one says they support sex discrimination" (10)), but rather that states fail to enforce said legislation. This ties in with the Berlant reading, which finds that far too much sexual inequality, including violence, takes place in private, and as it is a citizen's right to privacy, the state (run overwhelmingly by men) has essentially given up. The problem, Berlant finds, is that men reside in public, whilst women reside in private. Historically, a woman who resides in public is a prostitute, and the effects of this fiction are still felt today in that women who attempt to "reside" in public are thought of as somehow overstepping their boundaries. While state legislation condemns inequality, the attitudes of the men who comprise the heads of state do not adequately execute or enforce what is written. This has given rise to nongovernmental organizations that fight on behalf of women's rights.

But what about utopia? Jameson finds that utopia is an unachieveable state in which the basic human evils that cause grief, chiefly greed, are suppressed or entirely removed. The reason for its unachieveability is not simply that human nature is unchangeable (he finds that human nature is historical, not natural, and hence CAN theoretically be changed), moreover that conditions that would allow for a utopia, such as everyone everywhere being employed (which would kill capitalism), require that capitalism somehow already be changed to allow for full employment in the first place. Thus, not only is the changing of human nature a dubious (however theoretically possible) proposition, changing the actual structure of society is a Catch-22.

Putting the ideas together, we have a state in which women are unequal and the idea of restructuring society in a more egalitarian way seems to be regarded in the minds of the men who make up the ruling class as a utopian idea that can never really be realized (and, apparently, an unpleasant one), for the reason that most violence against women occurs in private, and U.S. citizens will NOT stand to have their privacy invaded. Thus, the concept is utopian in that it would work if all citizens either didn't mind having their private lives exposed to law enforcers or if all men were good people and didn't harm women in the first place.

Notes: "mirror for princes" writing comes from the times when a new, inexperienced ruler was about to take power. A document consisting of the basic tenets of a good ruler would be given to the prince in hopes that he would heed them and not become a tyrant.


And now, the ABSTRACT!

I propose to create an institution that lobbies for a law to be created wherein all persons above the poverty line are hereby supplied mandated to vote (they will be supplied with relevant information), lest they incur financial penalties. The revenue created from the (likely) millions of persons who refuse to vote shall be used to provide education programs for those below the poverty line, in the hopes that they will feel compelled to vote as well, or at least to rise above the poverty line and into the jurisdiction of the new law. Since the majority of the U.S. population is white, and majorities have a fear of minorities, perhaps the thought that the minorities will suddenly be voting en masse will be an incentive.

Besides the obvious question of how in the world a measure to enforce voting could ever become law in the U.S., there's the question of whether it would actually (a) have the intended effect and (b) be beneficial. Here's an article pondering this very idea: http://www.slate.com/id/2108832/.

I was discussing the idea of selling one's vote to people who are not allowed (due to their not being citizens), and I discovered another slate article that rand true: http://www.slate.com/id/91418/.

Week 6

Foucault's "What is an Author?" examines the current state of an author by attempting to define or at least illuminate the indefinability of what an author is. He asks, "What does it matter who is speaking?"

-The notion of "the work": when, asks Foucault, does any written word by an author cease to become a "work" of authorship? And if the individual does not occupy the status of "author" in the public mind, what then is considered a "work"?

-The notion of "writing": says the author, "To admit that writing is, because of the very history that made it possible, subject to the test of oblivion and repression, seems to represent, in trancendental terms, the religious principle of the hidden meaning (which requires interpretation) and the critical principle of implicit significations, silent determinations, and obscured contents (which gives rise to commentary)." I honestly have no idea what this means, but it's probably important.

-Names: what is an author's name? Unlike a mere proper noun, it refers to a person who has written something, as opposed to a person who merely exists. Saying, for instance, that an author didn't look like portraits painted of him/her is not a problem, says the author, unless we try to say something that interferes between an author and an existing work, such as "Shakespeare didn't write Romeo and Juliet". Obviously, the work exists, so who wrote it? Apparently this is different than saying that Bob the butcher didn't cut your meat. Well, who cut it? Perhaps it is all a function of the idea that the one act that is not mechanically creatable (such as cutting meat) is writing original works. At least, really famous original works from a long time ago when there weren't computers.

-The author function: 1) Historically, an author's work was considered either good or evil, and the author rewarded or punished accordingly. 2) There is a difference between literary and scientific texts, in that the latter are understood as stemming from the authority of truth, not genius. 3) A writer does not immediately assume author status, but is given it when s/he pleases critics. 4) An author's work is attributed to his/her distinctive style.