Hélène Cixous Hyperdream: Derrida’s Gift of Death

Hyperdream is not a book about mourning. It is an act of mourning. Mourning for mother. Mourning for a friend: J.D. Mère. Ami. Mommy. My me. Morning comes and the narrator anoints her mother. This unction against death conjures another. Giving grieving to the mother whose living flesh skin is inscribed with moutheyesscarsores calling, gazing, insisting to be seen, holes to be healed. A skin of eyes. Unheimliche. The scene of the home, homme, femme, healing unto death. The gift of death from the giver of life. How does one go about mourning the present? “I’ll be this skin tomorrow” [1] The Twins burn into the night. “One dies in the end, too fast.”[2] Manhattan. May happen. Those who gave us the gift of life, the two (mommy-daddy) must always fall in time, towers collapsing into the ashes of tomorrow.

“This concern for death, this awakening that keeps vigil over death, this conscience that looks death in the face is another name for freedom.”[3] Freedom is the gift of death, the other’s sacrifice of the self, for the other, in the other. As the narrator keeps vigil over death, the death to come of her mother, she remembers 1) The Twin Towers in New York. 2) Her friend Derrida who she wishes she could telephone. 3) The bed her brother has been sleeping in that was once owned by Walter Benjamin. “You can always loose more.”[4]Leaves fall from trees to spring new life. More loss.

Benjamin’s bed, a literary inheritance her mother bought years before, a place to lie, alive. More life.

“To sleep—perchance to dream. Ay, there's the rub! For in that sleep of death what dreams may come, When we have shuffled off this mortal coil, Must give us pause.”[5]

The aura of Benjamin’s bed haunts the narrator with memories of her friend, conversations, conversions.

“Maybe I ought to convert.”[6] Her friend tells her once, promising to continue the conversation. She is haunted by never finishing this conversation, whether he was speaking to her or through her to himself. The conversion from life to death? Death to life? Christian conversion, as he speaks of in The Gift of Death? The call has been disconnected --------

But Derrida is granted a leave. Having left her once, he is given leave as a patient is given leave from the hospital of death to visit the world, this hospitality. Ghostpitality. A leave to converse, traverse the line of life and death. “And, lo, I am with you always, even unto the end of the age.”[7] The narrator understands her loss is life. “We were dying of death, one goes on dying for a very long time, but since we might see each other again, life could ebb and flow, come back in go out again, I told myself, its warm flux irrigate all that was dead dying from the death of my friend, my animals, my trees my books my dreams all that was needed I told myself was to invent some superhuman strength[.]”[8]Life is always loosing. “Now and then one could re-establish the lines of communication that nourish friendship.”[9]Holding on to the haunting trace of the other established in the call, a call that continues past death, that even comes from death, beyond death, the call yet to come. “It is from the site of death as the place of my irreplaceability, that is, of my singularity, that I feel called to responsibility.” Response from death. The future’s call to the past to create the present. “I wanted to go on living on the hypothesis of leaves being granted but perhaps inside me the other side, my friend’s, truth to tell, had blazed itself a voice to which I’d never on my own have considered yielding, but which spoke to me with an authority I couldn’t not wish to yield to, supposing it was my friend’s, providing I myself remain unaware of this.”[10]

Now burning the ashes of yesterday’s tomorrow.

---

[1] Hélène Cixous. Hyperdream Trans. Beverly Bie Brahie. Cambridge, UK: Polity Press, 2009. passim.

[2] An utterance attributed to J.D. that becomes a major mediation for the narrator. passim.

[3] Jacques Derrida. The Gift of Death. Trans. David Willis. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995. 15

[4] Cixous, passim.

[5] Hamlet Act III Scene 1 Lines 72-75.

[6] Cixous, 104.

[7] Matthew 28:20

[8] Cixious, 149

[9] Cixous, 146.

[10] Cixous, 159-160

A Bad Joke: Nietzsche and The Dark Knight

Friedrich Nietzsche reconceptualized ethics by questioning the foundations of good and evil. He traced the terms back to what he called the development of “noble morality” and “slave morality.” Etymologically, the word “good” is related to the words the Goths, Greeks, and Celts used to describe themselves, an affirmative definition based on the nobility of life. “Bad” is the term for others in noble morality. However, with the development of “slave morality,” the terms were reversed in a negative definition that applies the term “evil” to what was formerly “good” and makes the “bad” become “good.” As Nietzsche explains, “[w]hile every noble morality develops from a triumphant affirmation of itself, slave morality from the outset says No to what is ‘outside,’ what is ‘different,’ what is ‘not itself;’ and this No is its creative deed” (p. 36). Absent immanent affirmation of life, slave morality must develop an elaborate mechanism for enforcing itself as not the other. This is because since the rise of the church in Europe the rules governing morality have been in the hands of a priesthood, and, according to Nietzsche, “The truly great haters of the world have always been priests” (p. 33).


For Nietzsche, the victory of Christianity in Europe is the spread of a certain type of attitude that defines the self in relation to others: “The slave revolt in morality begins when ressentiment itself becomes creative and gives birth to values: the ressentiment of natures that are denied the true reaction, that of deeds, and compensate themselves with imaginary revenge” (p. 36). The meek are promised that they will inherit the earth as a way of stopping them from becoming active against their masters, a reactive force. It is ressentiment that defines the self by first negating the other, by projecting evil onto the other, in what is a failure of forgetting. For Nietzsche the noble is able to forget any perceived slight against itself, because it is strong, but the weak latches on to the evil as a means of developing the self: so that evil is both something that we apply as a label for the other that we conceive of as our oppressors and a source for our own bad conscience in recognizing that evil is also inherent to ourselves. In the reactive, slave morality of the person of ressentiment, the statement “They are bad so I am good” is what allows us to say “I am,” but so doing requires a memory of our own selfishness which triggers bad conscience. In the development of bad conscience there is an inability to employ “active forgetfulness, which is like a doorkeeper, a preserver of psychic order, repose and etiquette: so that it will be immediately obvious how there could be no happiness, no cheerfulness, no hope, no pride, no present, without forgetfulness.” (57-58). Christianity, and by extension modern European morality, has developed a system to overcome this forgetfulness, making us always aware of our debt, never letting us get over it. And the job of enforcing this order falls to the ascetic priests, those who deny life by enforcing a set of rules that create bad conscience by telling us that we’re evil, that life itself is evil, but also provide succor through adherence to their rules and sacraments.


In The Dark Knight the Joker describes himself as a man of action: “I don’t have a plan … I just do things.” The things he does include robbing a bank, kidnapping a fake Batman and killing him, attempting to kill the mayor, chasing a SWAT van with Harvey Dent in it around Gotham City, having Dent and Rachel Dawes kidnapped and tied to explosives, rigging two ferries with explosives, and lying. He is the man of active destruction. One wonders how these things can be accomplished without plans, however the Joker explains: “I just did what I do best – I took your plan, and I turned it on itself.” The Joker’s actions are reactions to the plans made by Dent, Batman and Jim Gordon, but in these reactive actions the Joker puts the forces of law and order (and Batman) in a position where they are forced to be reactive – his reactive force stops them from being active by making them reactive as well: a will to nothingness. As Gilles Deleuze explains, the fulfillment of nihilism is the nihilism that destroys nihilism, or the will to nothingness entails the negation of nihilism itself, so that the man of active destruction wants to be overcome. The Joker tells the mob that he wants to kill Batman, but he cannot and continue to exist. As the Joker tells Batman: “You. Complete. Me.” Batman and Joker are two sides of the same coin, the coin that Harvey Dent uses at first to “make his own luck” and then later in his acceptance of chance as destiny. Two-Face is born from the affirmation of destiny, the acceptance of the Joker’s role as an “agent of chaos,” because “you know the thing about chaos, Harvey? It’s fair.”


The Joker recognizes the ressentiment at the heart of the slave morality in Gotham City: “Their morals, their code … it’s a bad joke. Dropped at the first sign of trouble. They’re only as good as the world allows them to be. You’ll see – I’ll show you … when the chips are down, these civilized people … they’ll eat each other. See I’m not a monster … I’m just ahead of the curve.” The rules of society – the rules of Harvey Dent and Jim Gordon – are a façade, according to the Joker, a reaction to the chaos that is the essential force of reality. So then is the Joker the “man of the future, who will redeem us not only from the hitherto reigning ideal but also from that which was bound to grow out of it, the great nausea, the will to nothingness, nihilism” (96)? It is the Joker – not Batman – who ultimately defeats the mob, but is not the Joker’s morality based on the syllogism “I am evil therefore you are evil?” The Joker sees in Harvey Dent the embodiment of society’s ideals and sees that through corruption of Dent he can bring Gotham down as well. And he succeeds, because Harvey Dent becomes Two-Face – the man of ressentiment – as a result of his failure to mourn Rachel Dawes. He embraces the Joker’s chaos: “You thought we could be decent men in an indecent world. You thought we could lead by example. You thought the rules could be bent but not break … you were wrong. The world is cruel. And the only morality in a cruel world is chance.”


Batman answers Dent by taking responsibility: “We decided to act. We three. We knew the risks and we acted as one. We are all responsible for the consequences.” Batman has only one rule, the rule he makes for himself, perhaps as the ascetic priest to Gotham City, giving meaning to the city by taking the crimes of Harvey Dent upon himself. He can do this without seeking revenge because in the end it is the Batman who is strong enough, who can take it.

Elegy for eloquence

In insomnolence I thought about the apparent superficiality of our society, considering whether it is not a condition made preferable by convenience of consumption. Upon reflection, it seemed to be a projection. In an attempt to understand the other's outlook, I often will rip off your face, erasing what life lies behind those eyes. Rather than brood on the jejune, perhaps I should return to my base and in solitude trace the texts that suture my place.

Be comfortable with complexity.

The selfishness of the subject and liberal (in)tolerance

The following is a response to John Sloop's Disciplining Gender written for Dana Cloud's Feminist Theory and Rhetorical Criticism class.

I think Sloop’s book highlights an important problematic to the idea of gender performativity as a means of resistance: transgression of norms invites disciplining, and in many of these cases the subjects paid for their “gender trouble” with their lives. Of course it is unacceptable that human beings were the objects of violence when their subjectivity came into conflict with external norms, but I think that Sloop’s examination of the discourses surrounding these cases shows that the ideal of ‘self-determination’ is problematic in that (re)presentations of subjectivity will always be structured within existing discourses. In other words, part of reclaiming marginalized subject positions is recognizing the role ideology plays in constituting those subject positions, or, recognizing the colonization inherent in the structuring of subjectivity in the position of the other. You can’t just celebrate oppression and claim to be empowered.

I have to situate my response within some observations of Slavoj Zizek regarding the neoliberal ideal of “tolerance.” Zizek argues that the ideal of tolerance hides within it an inherent disregard for the “other” in that we tolerate things that disgust us. As Zizek says, Martin Luther King never talked about tolerance because the idea of white people “tolerating” black people is repugnant. So the neoliberal idea of moral relativism or as Zizek says the celebration of the suspension of all rules is at heart an unethical system that betrays a disregard for the other and instead reinforces selfishness. Ie: No one is wrong except those who believe in something. How dare you question me? And the idea that if someone tells you that you are wrong you must be right because they are only reifying oppressive norms. That is no basis for an ethical system that respects difference and engages with others as equals. What is really going on here, according to Zizek, is a rebellion against the “Law of the Father” (norms) that hides a desire for disciplining. It’s really an adolescent subjectivity transferred into adulthood as if it’s a revolutionary positioning. As Lacan told the protestors in 1968 “What you want is a Master. You’ll get it.” To complicate things further, Zizek argues that this ideal of tolerance implies an elitist positioning in which those of us who are enlightened are somehow seen as beyond culture (or in a postmodern logic, we can choose our culture) and those who seen as barbaric are those who identify with their culture: for example, Muslims. In other words, the ideal of tolerance promotes a disidentification with culture that commodifies our subjectivity and inherently shows disdain for those who identify with the markers of culture. Respecting everyone's choices equally reifies capitalist hegemony.

Where this comes into play is in the problematic homophobia displayed by the cases in Sloop’s study. What is interesting to me that seems to be relegated to the background is that Brandon Teena’s biological sex was only discovered after he was arrested for what amounts to identity theft: check and credit card fraud. It is strange to me that this seems to not come into play in Sloop’s discussion of the perception that Brandon Teena was deceptive. Instead, we are supposed to accept Brandon Teena’s portrayal of himself as masculine without engaging the possibility that perhaps he really was being deceptive towards his relational partners as a way of negating his/her lesbianism. Because of the idolization of the enlightenment subject and respect for assumed agency (free will) in which the idea of personal responsibility is ignored as oppressive (because, you know, Republicans talk about it so it must be wrong). In the name of tolerance, we’re not supposed to interrogate the assumptions that caused Brandon Teena to perform masculinity in order to engage in relationships with women, while he was biologically a woman himself. In short, I wonder if his disidentification as a lesbian acts to make lesbians and gays invisible yet again. The same goes for the argument that k.d. lang’s ambiguity was somehow better than her identification as a lesbian, or Barry Winchell and Calpernia Addams’s disidentification as homosexuals, etc.

So while my theoretical positioning marks me as postmodern in that I draw primarily on the theories of Foucault, Derrida and Lacan, I also recognize the need for an ethical system (as they did, incidentally) that moves beyond simplistic relativism and perhaps reengages with psychoanalytic theory in recognizing that there are, in fact, dysfunctional subject positions. In other words, even though truth is always already situated within discourses of power/knowledge, that doesn’t mean we are supposed to accept everything as equally viable. Those subject positions that act to reinforce the oppression of homosexuals, women, people of color or the workers should be recognized as problematic rather than simply celebrated as “subversive = good.” Questioning the received wisdom of prior ethical systems does not imply that their reversal is the correct way to be.

The babies

You ever think about the life that someone born around now will have?
It isn't going to end with us. We have to leave them something. It should be something good.

It isn't that complicated. In the past all species have developed until they became extinct. Because they couldn't survive. Some of these we killed. Others died because of ecological changes. One of the things that distinguishes humans from other animals is the impact we have on the environment. A wolf might eat a deer, but damn thing isn't dumping poison into the oceans.

We do this. Because we have to have stuff. Because we are selfish and live for our own pleasure, ignoring the impact it has on anyone else.

A lot of people have talked about how to make the world a better place, but beyond sin, beyond oppression, beyond racism, beyond sexism, beyond whatever you want to call the bad in the world is the selfishness of evolution. That's what capitalism is: evolution. We compete to see who gets to reproduce. Or whose ideas get to reproduce themselves. Humans, see, can think about shit and figure it out. So we come up with ideas and those reproduce themselves in culture so we can become selves who fight to survive. So our DNA can get from here to there.

It is culture that keeps us from being condemned to the fate of all previous species who have had their day and died. We can talk all we want about the fallen civilizations of the past, but truth is the Roman Empire lives on in the U.S. and it will live on in China or whomever survives us. As a species we've only been around a little while, but we've managed to transgress our temporality because of our ability to communicate. A dinosaur could only warn his immediate contemporaries of dangers, could only pass on her acquired knowledge to immediate contacts. We can learn from those who have been dead for thousands of years.

People die. Culture doesn't. It just mutates.

We need to make sure there are hosts for it in the future. Because it is all we can leave of the past.

mm

Think with me please.

Just read the words, don't think too much about what they mean.

A point becomes a line becomes a circle becomes a sphere becomes time becomes thought becomes language becomes consciousness becomes culture becomes reality becomes cosmos becomes God becomes a point.

Now think about each of these words.

A point becomes a line becomes a circle becomes a sphere becomes time becomes thought becomes language becomes consciousness becomes culture becomes reality becomes cosmos becomes God becomes a point.

Long ago before you remember running your eyes across these words the codes to make you were scattered all around the world. Right now you’re thinking, the primary concern in your consciousness is trying to figure out what the fuck I’m talking about, because you imagine there is someone on the other end of these words and they might have something to tell you worth knowing. The words you hear in your head so many of them get lost before you can utter them.

Or write them.

Floating back into the sea of signifiers. This is the sea that makes up our consciousness. As it flows over the sands of the shore that makes up the self. It shapes it. Ideology. Language. You learn it to shape the seas, to have some control over the flows, so you can have control over yourself. And your ability to shape it is what limits your will to power.

Because you want to be affirmed.

You want to know that you’re not the only one who sees how crazy it is. And you want to join with others. But in that is a body, made up of cells. The light from the screen triggers synapses in your brain. The most complicated thing in the universe. Exchange of energy. Time is your experience of the expansion of the universe. The reason things go in this order is because you are moving from here to there. In multiple dimensions. We directly experience only four, and those poorly. Yet people try to pretend that what they can understand of that is all there is.

The reason there are neurotransmitters sending bioelectricalchemical signals across your synapses is the same reason there is communication. Transfer of energy. The reason humans communicate is because the pattern for us is a double-helix structure made of nucleotides that alternate in a sequence of G A T C to form a pattern that tells your cells to make proteins to make you a human instead of, say, a dolphin. As the universe expands this pattern tends to complicate itself as the energy from the big bang is expended.

The DNA in a single cell has the pattern for the proteins that align themselves in the brain you think is you, it’s what you’re using right now to think about this.

Humans make shit to keep their thoughts trapped, so that they can spread to more people. First we invented speech, but we had to move around in spacetime so to make our thoughts able to move beyond the immediate air we invented writing. So on and now we have the Internet. Huzzah, more people can read this than even existed 2000 years ago. Jesus.

So we developed language to help DNA get from here to there, to keep the expressions of the immanent expanding with the universe. To make room for God. Who is always coming.

The reason we have hierarchy: because our DNA is making survival machines, competing for exchange of energy. It’s called life. It expresses itself as libido and manifests itself in many forms. But our DNA also wants to replicate itself by dominating the DNA of others, whether we are men or women, because we all have “dominant” and “recessive” genes. That doesn’t make the genes better or worse than each other, it just means they contain the programming for different things. And the new combinations make new survival machines that then want to spread their DNA forward through the aeons.

The DNA is more tied to females, though, because it is through them that mitochondrial DNA is transmitted, and that’s what makes our cells being alive possible. That’s why we eat, shit, fuck and kill. Just more going through the system. That’s why we have ideology, an emanation from the DNA that replicated itself in language so make survival machines that could work together to become more complicated. So oppression is an expression of the domination at work on the genetic level. We make up consciousness, culture, society and all this other shit to become another organism. So the mind doesn’t die with the brain, because the mind allows the body to survive, which allows the DNA to replicate itself.

Because:

A point becomes a line becomes a circle becomes a sphere becomes time becomes thought becomes language becomes consciousness becomes culture becomes reality becomes cosmos becomes God becomes a point.

Because you're just trying to get from here to there. Because the universe exploded into being. Energy going from here to there. Just as the DNA in your body comes from your parents and goes to your kids, the thoughts in your head are the ocean of signifers beating against the shore of your material existence.

mm

Feminism and agency

"The master's tools will never dismantle the master's house."
-Audre Lorde

"It is hard to fight an enemy who has outposts in your head."
-Sally Kempton

I somehow managed to do all the readings for my Feminist Theory and Rhetorical Criticism class this week and it has made me think a lot about things I've had an ongoing discourse with others about for the past two years. One thing I consistently find is that I have a real problem with the ideology of individualism so common to our society, because I think it's essentially an appeal to selfishness and I'm kind of a Buddhist so that's not cool to me. This shows up in our articles this week and is nicely responded to by Barbara Biesecker and Dana Cloud (who, along with Josh Gunn, make up the trio of communication scholars I think are usually right).

Here's where I'm coming from:

I approach these problems from a critical perspective that views partiarchy, racism and capitalism as all part of the same hegemonic order. My theoretical perspective is informed by Marxist, psychoanalytic, Foucauldian and Deluezian theory. Huzzah.

So: I think appeals to selfishness are just another way of interpellating us as consumers. Which means we're colonized.

I believe that one of the ways 21st century hegemony works is by telling us that it's ok to objectify ourselves and others, thus robbing us of a position as a speaking subject. Objects don't have agency. Subjects do. Sort of (as subjects are formed by discourse). I believe this is part of our colonialization under late capitalism, where our identities are commodified and we're just another product on the market. From a psychoanalytic perspective, we become fetishes and fetishize(?) others to maintain them as "other" and reconstruct our identities as paranoid egos. Love has no place in hegemony. Love is consubstantial and breaks down barriers. We need barriers to sell shit.

So like, there are these theories of "empowerment" that I believe are just ways of buying into patriarchy from a different angle. They tell you others are selfish if their lives don't revolve around you. That others only have value inasmuch as they exist to serve you in some way. Doesn't anyone else see the irony there? This shit runs deep and many people probably don't even know it informs their perspectives. Once feminism deterritorialized sexuality, for example, capitalism responded by reterritorializing it.

Feminism reclaims sexuality by saying women can enjoy sex without being whores. Partiarchy/capitalism responds by saying "ok, but sex is still an economic exchange, whether you're a man or a woman. Women, you can have the currency, but you're still going to have to buy or sell." so we go out to the club and buy each other drinks to get each other drunk to fuck and think we're empowered (but you can't play a playa!). By reifying the mind/body binary and trying to seperate emotion from sexuality, capitalism wins because others just become another object to consume (also: you, mass-produced and marketed. We'll take your surplus).

Your body and mind are the same damn thing!

If you don't approach relationships from a basis of equality you're just becoming another tool in the system. If you think empowerment comes from manipulating others, it's because there are "outposts in your head." I don't think true empowerment comes at the expense of another. I think if you try to use the master's tools you end up becoming part of the problem. So there's that.

In Foss and Griffin's article about invitational rhetoric they say one of the fundamental principles of feminism is "self-determination" and my question is "what the fuck does that mean?" Does this assume an independent, rational subject? This, again, is a capitalist construction that makes us love our oppressors. We do what they want thinking it's what we want because, you know, we're colonized. Are we supposed to ignore the discourses that construct our subjectivity? Are we supposed to ignore the structures in our society that constrain our agency? Believing that if we do what we want we're doing what's best? What?!! What about other people?

There's a whole industry dedicated to constructing the illusion of self. "Self-help" books, "The Secret," "The Game" etc are all there to make us think more about what we want than what is good for society as a whole. Because if we start thinking socially we might question capitalism and they don't want that. But these are all parts of the discourses that construct our subjectivity and constrain our agency by determining our desires. You do what you want because it's what they tell you you want. Fuck everyone else. That's fucked up.

My answer of course is the doctrine of 'No-Self' and the Four Noble Truths. Desire causes suffering. That kind of thing. It is desire that chains us to our oppressors and makes us love it, making us another cog in a machine that is destroying the environment and keeping women, GLBT folks, people of color and the poor marginalized.

Which leads to another point I wonder about. In my master's program there were a couple people who insisted (by fiat, not really making an argument but saying it as if it's true and if I didn't believe it I was oppressing them) THAT only those on the margin can REALLY see the system. So automatically, I as a white middle-class male heterosexual should be taken as reinforcing the system with everything I say because, um, I'm not sure why. While I recognize that it took a lot for me to start (START) to understand my own privilege, I also have to wonder if my position as "master" doesn't give me some kind of insight into the master's tools. And perhaps on how they work on the colonized. Because while I obviously am wrong about a lot of stuff, I recognize that I can be seen as the "colonizer" rather than the "colonized." So, like, I'm sorry, but sometimes I look at people and just wonder how they can't be aware of how they are embodying angloamerican hegemony or whatever. I'm just saying. This isn't an idea I'm attached to. It's just something I've been wondering about.

mm

(You Drive Me) Crazy: The Rhetorical Construction of Britney Spears's "Breakdown"

This is my paper proposal for Basic Rhetorical Criticism with Josh Gunn:

Britney Spears has spent much of her young life within the popular gaze. Over the past 10 years through music videos, concert appearances and five successful albums, Britney’s image has become an industry. At the start of her career she was sold as a fetish of the virgin/whore dichotomy, playing the “sexy schoolgirl” role in her first video for “…Baby One More Time.” While her more talented colleagues (Christina Aguilera and Justin Timberlake come to mind) rely on actual vocal ability to sell records, Britney has become one of the most successful female artists of all time through a combination of a catchy (manufactured/insipid) sound and constant popular attention. However, for the past few years Britney’s personal strife has fueled her public persona as she’s undergone what Vanessa Gigoridadis (2008) calls “the most public downfall of any star in history.”

In the period from 2006 to early 2008 Britney’s music took a backseat to her stints in rehab, “accidental” crotch shots and custody battles with ex-husband Kevin Federline (K-Fed). As Grigoridadis (2008) writes, “She’s the canary in the coal mine of our culture, the most vivid representation of the excess of the past decade.” As a celebrity whose image is manufactured for public consumption, Britney Spears’s public “breakdown” has also been extensively documented, raising questions about 21st century American culture: “She's the perfect celebrity for America in decline: Like President Bush, she just doesn't give a fuck, but at least we won't have to clean up after her mess for the rest of our lives” (Grigoridadis, 2008). Just when it seemed she might make a musical comeback with her successful 5th album, disturbingly titled Blackout, she gave a performance at the 2007 MTV Awards that might lead one to wonder if she even knew she was there. Speculation about her psychological condition came to a climax early in 2008 when she was taken to the hospital by the LAPD, leading to rumors that she had attempted suicide and might be suffering from bipolar disorder.

Britney’s construction as a celebrity and the discourses about her mental illness raise several questions. What is it about Britney Spears that fascinates Americans? Why do we seem to take so much pleasure in her suffering? How might the commodification of her identity interact with the rhetorical construction of her mental illness? Is the Britney we know a cultural construct? If so, is her crazy really a communication of our cultural craziness? Did we drive her crazy? Finally, what does it say about America that we would do this to a human being? Though this analysis interrogates the discourses surrounding Britney’s “breakdown”, as a primary rhetorical artifact I have chosen as a text the South Park episode “Britney’s New Look” that first aired on March 19, 2008.

In the typical style of South Park, “Britney’s New Look” takes a satirical look at a cultural phenomenon while also driving home a clear message, which I intend to unpack in my rhetorical criticism. Within the first five minutes of the episode Britney, who has taken refuge in South Park, is driven to blow off her face with a shotgun when the boys join in on the paparazzi frenzy and break into her hotel room to take a picture of her. Through the miracle of animation, Britney survives and continues to be the focus of the episode despite not having most of her head. The media and her managers seem oblivious to her suffering as they force her to gargle her way into the studio and continue to degrade and humiliate her. The boys, however, realize the error of their ways and try to help Britney escape the constant attention.

Butters and later Stan argue that treating Britney the way we do is inhuman and that we should just leave her alone. When she attempts suicide in the episode, the message is clear: we made her do it. The boys try to take her to the North Pole, but are unable to escape because of the plot that becomes the metaphor for the message of the episode. Britney can’t escape because we need her to die. In the episode, her creation as a celebrity and subsequent downfall is explained as part of a convoluted sacrificial ritual that America engages in to insure a good harvest. The episode climaxes with a crowd gathering around Britney and photographing her to death. In an ominous conclusion, the citizens of South Park congratulate each other on the good harvest but pause to watch a celebrity gossip show talking about the newest teen sensation: Miley Cyrus. The implication is oops, we’re doing it again. Though Trey Parker and Matt Stone’s argument that we create and destroy celebrities for a good harvest is satirical, the question they ask I think is an important one because of what it says about 21st century U.S. American culture:

What have we done to Britney Spears and why?

References
Grigoriadis, V. (2008) The tragedy of Britney Spears. Rolling Stone. (Feb 21, 2008).
Retrieved September 3, 2008 from http://www.rollingstone.com/news/story/18310562/cover_story_the_tragedy_of_britney_spears/print
Parker, T. and Stone, M. [Writers, directors and producers] (2008) Britney’s new look.
[Television episode]. South Park. March 19, 2008.

Reminder

Packing makes me feel very alone. It means I'm leaving a group of people to go join another group of people I'll eventually leave, probably alone again. No one to share the journey with.
I started crying.

Eventually though I realized how selfish my attitude that "no one can ever love me" is, because it really means that I won't accept the love I'm given. It's like I'm telling the people who love me that their love isn't good enough. I'm blinded by my own inability to fill the god-shaped hole in my heart.

The other day I had a conversation with someone I love very much about why writing is important to me and at the time I said it was because I didn't know if I'd ever have kids and wanted to leave something behind. The quest for immortality for someone who doesn't believe in an afterlife. On hindsight I see how selfish that is and remember my real reason, the original reason writing becomes my life:

I want people to read what I write and feel like they aren't alone.

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Paradigm

In our introductory grad classes in our Master's program we had discussions that were designed to help us find a paradigm. Sometimes it turned into quantitative vs qualitative or post-positivist vs critical or whatever.
It was basically justify why you think the way you do. Some people need to do that by dismissing other ways of thinking. Whatever. I think that's just insecure. And I'm one of those people. Because as some brilliant communication scholar said, "How do I know what I think until I say it?" I usually think about the things I say before I say them, unless they're jokes then they just kind of come out and I feel bad afterwards. But my point is that when I say things I use a lot of short cuts and allusions because I already know what I mean. This is a problem because sometimes it doesn't make any sense. Like now. Or it comes across as pretentious or arrogant. Both probably true as well, but I contend that everyone thinks everything they think is right or they'd change their minds, unless they're idiots. I know I keep learning shit so I expect that's probably true for other people.
So I'm expecting that some of this might come up in my Ph.D. program, although it is a different school. It is a game that makes you think about why you think the way you do though, and I think that's why some people don't like playing.
I believe that communication takes place at several levels of consciousness. That the input from our senses we get from other people is processed in different areas of the brain. A lot of that input is symbolic. Because it is a way of representing thoughts, feelings, etc. to others who have no direct experience of them. This allows our consciousness to seperate itself from our physical bodies and become part of another's. Because of the Burke thing, how we can never be another person. Ok that got me off on another thought tangent and now I'm tired so I'm going to bed.

More later?

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The finite sadness

"Love, love / it's who you know"
-Smashing Pumpkins "Love"

np: Twilight to Starlight

Last night as I was driving home from a friend's house two things happened. First, my iPod played a song from Mellon Collie followed by a song from Thom Yorke's solo album The Eraser. Then I realized that it might be the last time time I make that drive from Gilbert to Tempe. In about three weeks I'm going to drive from Tempe to Austin.

Two years ago, as I prepared to move from Shreveport to Tempe, I listened to The Eraser and Mellon Collie constantly. They both have a peculiar resonance for me, so much that I haven't been able to listen to The Eraser since I've been in Arizona and usually will skip the tracks that come up in shuffle. When it first came out in 2006 I was reading a lot of Philip K. Dick novels and going through withdrawal in more ways than one, including the usual meaning. So everytime I hear any of the songs it reminds me of this uncanny gnostic alienation and freaks me out a little.

Mellon Collie has more complex shades for me. When it first came out I was in the middle of the deepest depression of my life (so far). I was still mourning the move from Iowa to Ohio and spent most of the 2 years in Canton leaving the house only for visits to the shrink (or the hospital if it was really bad), alternating my time between the basement and attic of our little house and listening to this album over and over. Flash to 10 years later and I'm sitting in an apartment in Shreveport by myself going through the accumulation of the years preparing to leave a place I've finally allowed to feel like home for I don't know what, and Mellon Collie is on infinite repeat.

There are some clear differences between leaving Shreveport and leaving Tempe. Although I like Arizona a lot, I don't feel it has defined who I am the way Shreveport has. ASU has obviously refined my career path. I've met some great people who I love a lot. And I think Arizona is a great place to live with the big-city advantages of Phoenix and the outdoors experience of the rest of the state. But at the same time, especially over the past few months, I've felt somewhat uncomfortable in the culture of the place, if that makes sense.

I won't talk about the department as such, because I don't want to talk shit when I really have no animosity at all, let's just say there is a difference of "value(s)" that has made me feel like the odd one in the department from the beginning. What I'm really talking about when I say "culture of the place," though, is Arizona and the obession with image and overall superficiality that I feel is at work here. Maybe I'm just projecting. It is the plastic surgery capital of the world though. And plastic, along with vanilla, are good words to describe it. The overwhelming aura of "sameness." Obviously this judgement isn't absolute (like I said, I've met a lot of interesting and genuine people) and may just be a way of me trying to say "hey I'm different, I'm special" but it just feels like Arizona is where the boring people of the world go to conform. I do believe that it will develop more character, but as it is a lot of it feels like a facade. Prefab. People and buildings. Interchangable. Commodities constantly marketing themselves. Because our value as people is defined by how much others buy our bullshit. Lame.

When people ask where I'm from I tell them Louisiana and I "identify" as Southern even though I spent my formative years in the Midwest. When I was leaving Shreveport I had no idea what I was in for. I came to graduate school not knowing exactly what I was going to study, just knowing I'm interested in culture and how it shapes us and we shape it. I didn't know anyone here. I hadn't been in school for three years and was tired of the "real world." Though I was unsure if I was up to the discipline of graduate school, I left Shreveport because I knew that I had to do something with my life besides being the night manager at a liquor store. And my nomad soul needed wandering.

Moving to Austin I already know some people. I have a rough idea of what the path ahead of me looks like. I'll be closer to family. I'll be closer to my friends back in Louisiana. I anticipate feeling more at home in the culture of Austin and fitting in better with the department at UT. At the same time there are some people here I'm going to miss a lot. Some of them I'll get to see on a semi-regular basis at conferences. But some of them I won't and that's probably what hurts the most. This is what Mellon Collie means to me: sadness tempered by the knowledge it comes from love, bittersweet. Not knowing if I'll ever see these people closest to my heart again. When I was leaving Shreveport I felt heartbroken because I had to leave people I loved and continue on my journey always alone. Da capo.

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"Love is suicide"
-Smashing Pumpkins, "Bodies"

Thesis abstract

I just finished my master's thesis. Here's the abstract:

The 9/11 Truth Movement is a collection of activists, academics and dissident experts who promote a new investigation into the attacks of September 11, 2001 (9/11). This analysis approaches 9/11 Truth as a rhizome with multiple entry points and possible levels of interpretation. Through assemblages of Lacanian psychoanalysis, Foucauldian theory and Deleuze and Guattari’s schizoanalysis I present this text as an abstract-machine which can be linked to the rhizome of 9/11 Truth in order to interrogate its discourses. As a vernacular social movement that attempts to resist neoconservative ideologies of globalization, 9/11 Truth illuminates the potential for online movements to manifest themselves in the public sphere. While 9/11 Truth uses conspiracy rhetoric to promote the multiple theories advocated by members, I argue that this paranoid subjectivity is inherent to negotiation of identity in Postmodernity. Specifically, the theories promulgated in the 9/11 Truth Movement invoke a modernist notion of rationality in discourses that both resist and reproduce the hegemonic order of contemporary America as desire is structured through discursive formations of power/knowledge.

Footnotes

Throughout my thesis I use footnotes to change voice, unpack concepts, self-reflextively comment on things, and make jokes.

There's a part where I talk about an interview on Fox News by John Gibson of Michelle Malkin where they talk about the "9/11 Truth Virus" I really want to add a footnote to Gibson that just says "ass" and one to Malkin that says "psycho."

But that would probably be unprofessional.

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Thesis

You can tell I'm almost done cuz I just came up with this:

Title: TruthText(s): A critical/cultural analysis of the 9/11 Truth Movement

Chapter 1: The 9/11 Truth rhizome
Chapter 2: Theories of paranoia, conspiracy rhetoric and vernacular discourse
Chapter 3: Desiring-Production: An analysis of Loose Change
Chapter 4: Social-Production: 9/11 Truth assemblages
Chapter 5: Lines of Flight: Conclusions, limitations, implications

We'll see if it sticks.

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Explaining things

"Matt, you got all the right answers but you didn't show your work."
"Wait, why do I have to show my work if I got the right answers?"
"Well how did you get those answers?"
"Um, I'm sorry, I'll be more careful next time." I really didn't know how I got the answers. Or did, but I couldn't explain it. I don't think it was the way we were taught in class, but I don't remember that.
"You have to show your work because guessing isn't always going to work."
"Ok." And soon thereafter I dropped out of high school.

Now there aren't any right answers. There's just shit that makes sense to me. And I have to show my work because I might be totally full of shit. First I have to show that I know my way around. Eventually maybe I can say "Hey, I already looked there, remember? No, follow me over here." And people will.

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Clusterfuck

I haven't been posting on here the last few days because I'm trying to finalize my thesis. Which requires me making sense of the things I read.
So there's all these dead French dudes: Jacques Lacan, Michel Foucault, Gilles Deleuze, Felix Guattari and Jacques Derrida. And I go back and forth between them, knowing that my understanding of their writings is informed by my understanding of others' writings. So I read Foucault with Derrida and vice versa, etc.

And behind all this is a trio of thinkers that I consider foundational: Nietzsche, Freud and Marx. Sometimes Darwin sneaks in there too.

Because my brain wants to make sense of things, I'm a little scattered. Schizophrenic even.

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Telos -> Techne: an eschatology

Dick Cheney is fucking crazy. According to the New York Times his office may have been involved in editing congressional testimony about global warming. I say "may" because that's what the NYT says. I say that shit is real. Cheney and co have had a persistent pattern of trying to manipulate evidence about global warming and environmental threats (Abestos in Manhattan the week after Sept 11). And evidence about weapons of mass destruction. Etc. This adminstration reifies the belief that if you control the discourse, you control reality.

I had a discussion with two friends/collegues the other day about 9/11 and got kind of upset. They started citing some of the same type of evidence the 9/11 Truth Movement cites to make the case that it's possible the Bush administration (ie Cheney) was behind 9/11. I've been doing research on 9/11 and the Truth Movement for over a year for my thesis, and I think a lot of the claims made by 9/11 Truth are shaky. The reasoning is kind of like this: if we question the official explanation, and we can find motive for those who give us the official explanation to lie, it must mean that those who gave us the official explanation are using it to cover up their responsibility. My problem is that motive does equal means. The assumption, of course, is that it's the United States Government, the most powerful thing on earth, so they can do anything they want. I don't buy this. So while I do think the official explanation has problems, I don't think it means that the buildings were bombed or that al Qaeda wasn't involved, etc. Of course, the useful thing about the "9/11 conspiracy theories" is that they're adaptable. If the government changes its story, it is lying to us. If we change our story it's because we have to explain the lies.

Maybe the U.S. government is behind al Qaeda. Maybe, but I think al Qaeda was perfectly capable of doing it without our help. Maybe we had warnings and let it happen. Maybe, but it's just as easy for me to believe we just fucked up. I do believe the 9/11 Commission was a "cover-up" but I believe it covers up our inability to actually deal with the threat of terrorism. I think we inflate the threat of terrorism to justify a lot of heinous shit but when it comes down to it there are things beyond the government's control. THE GOVERNMENT IS FALLIBLE.

Anyway, to the point: I still think al Qaeda did it. And I don't think that the U.S. government did it. Can I imagine them either arranging for al Qaeda to do it or having forewarning and ignoring it to let it happen? Yes, but my burden of proof here isn't "can you imagine it happening" because fuck, I can imagine a lot of things happening that ain't real. (And the response to the burden of proof re: 9/11 conspiracy theories is that the evidence is suppressed as part of the conspiracy so you can't say for sure who did it or why, only that it didn't happen the way the government says it did. ok...) I think attaching yourself to one of these theories fulfills an ego-defense function aka paranoia. It helps order the universe to imagine that the U.S. Government, if it failed to protect us, must have been responsible. The idea that they're a bunch of fuckwits like us who make mistakes is too much to handle. But I think it's true.

Let's look at this real fast:

Al Qaeda. Motive: Response to U.S. hegemony in the Middle East. Yes. Means: Hijacking planes and crashing them into buildings. Ok. Opportunity: failures in the U.S. security apparatus. Makes sense to me.

U.S. Government. Motive: False flag attack so necons can do some fascist shit, we can start new wars in Middle East and get oil. Well that went exactly according to plan, didn't it? Means: Let hijackers into country to do their plan, plausible I guess. Plant bombs in the buildings, etc. Whatever, who, how, when, etc? No one knows. Stupid. Also, hundreds of government people from Clinton and Bush adminstrations have to play along, not one whistleblower. Opportunity: 9/11. Pretend it was a terrorist attack. Blame it on bin Laden. What?

One friend made the argument that the government plans everything several steps ahead, and I said I just didn't think they were that smart. She said this was really ignorant. I think that's naive and symptomtic of hegemony. Like South Park said, they can't have power if people realize that they can't control things like 9/11. So 9/11 Truth reifies the hegemony of the current adminstration by giving them more credit (evil credit) than they deserve. If we look at the record, what the Bush adminstration does is try to control the episteme, the way we understand and interpret things. But that doesn't translate to techne, or knowing-how to do shit. If the government was able to conspire to cause the 9/11 attacks, I submit that this would be one of the only plans in the last 8 years the Bush administration successfully carried out (not to mention that it would require Clinton's complicity, since the hijackers were let into the country on his watch).

Here are some examples of Bush's telos not translating into techne (with a paranoid interpretation in parentheses): Going into Afganistan to capture bin Laden, only to have him escape into Pakistan (what if we let him escape?). Going into Iraq to set up another client-state democracy in the Middle East to counter Iran, but they elected a Shiite government friendly to Iran (maybe we want Iran to become our new USSR?). Hurricane Katrina (Bush hates black people). No child left behind. Economic stimulus. Etc.

But back to Cheney. Why the fuck would you want to pretend global warming isn't happening? Because it represents a threat to economic interests. Ok, I buy that. Because global warming might kill a lot of people in the world and the NWO wants to kill most of us so they can consolidate control. Eh...

But what if Cheney believes this too? Like, what if Cheney believes that a kind of armageddeon is inevitable (I mean, he knows we're running out of oil, etc.) and that it is up to him and his friends to make sure they're ok to survive it. That's fucked up evil, but Cheney might be crazy enough to be down for that. What gets me is this: if you believe that this New World Order thing is really this diabolical plot to centralize control over the earth, shouldn't you believe that al Qaeda did 9/11 because that represents a resistance to global American hegemony? It shows the cracks in the surface of the Empire. Right? By believing that the U.S. government did it aren't you sacrificing your agency (responsibility) to a supposed force beyond our ability to control? Aren't you just supplementing the U.S. government for Yaldabaoth?

If Cheney has delusions of grandeur why accept the premise of his delusions? The funny thing here, to me, is that because he is in a position of power he has the ability to manifest his delusions. But as delusions they don't work out exactly as planned, because nothing ever does, does it? So if he can get the rest of us to believe that the NWO is going to protect an elite while allowing the rest of the world to shrivel and burn, then it probably will, because there are a lot of problems in the world and if we believe the source of those problems also controls the power to change them then...

It's secular gnosticism. And as a former gnostic, I find it attractive as a metanarrative, but I also feel like things are too random to buy into that paranoia. Having said that, I still do believe in the Apocalypse narrative, minus a personal god, because I think the prophecies so inform our ways of seeing reality that we manifest them, ya dig? Lots of bad shit could happen and our way of dealing with it is informed by our episteme in which the prophecies are important chains of signifiers for many of us. I still think it's gonna be different than we expect. I know it's going to be different than Cheney expects, but it's up to us to handle up on that and quit accepting his delusions in order to prevent his paranoid fantasy from becoming reality.

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Annoyed

I'm having one of those days where everything I touch turns to shit. So I'm in a bad mood and don't want to explain it anyone because it just makes me mad.

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Business communication

I'm teaching Com 259: Communication in business and the professions during the second summer session, which I find to be funny. I'm not fond of corporate America. I worked in the "real world" for three years after college and didn't enjoy it. (The most important thing I found in business communication is that you try your best not to communicate; cultivate a paranoid sense that if anyone found out what you were doing you'd be screwed; don't suggest anything they didn't teach in business school; try to figure out ways to get credit for anything anyone does; stifle creativity; think like a prostitute; etc.) I want to subtitle the course: "How to Be a Tool.*" But that wouldn't be professional. heh heh.

So there is part of me that wants to just tell them to watch Office Space and The Office and say "that's what it's like: soulless, absurd, degrading and exploitive." I think that's the best way to make this stuff interesting and luckily the colleague who set up the shell for the online course assigned South Park clips. Awesome.

Last year while teaching the Org Com unit in Com 100 I realized that if Org Com isn't your schtick, it's really fucking boring. When I was writing test questions I found myself falling asleep. For the incoming Freshmen I was teaching I had a hard time imagining that they gave a shit about the org com stuff (interpersonal: good. Sex stuff!). Now I have business students and I have a hard time imagining that they don't already know everything I'm supposed to teach them.

But the book is written by Bud and Sandra Goodall. And Bud is one of those people who reads a lot of books, which I find tends to make your writing more interesting, especially if some of those books are fiction and literature. He also tends to make jokes about conspiracies when he sees me, or calls me a communist. I'm ok with that. I wonder what would happen if I called him a capitalist tool.*

Incidentally, as much as I love some of the Org Com people at ASU, I cringe every time one of them says something about "selling yourself" and that kind of thing. Honestly. Do you have to be cheerful about being a tool*?

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np: Wu-Tang "C.R.E.A.M." The 36 Chambers

* my vernacular for petit-bourgeoisie

Ubi sunt: Elegy for American intelligence

Oh where have all the smart Americans gone? In his new book Rick Shenkman rehashes the tired stereotype of American ignorance, excerpted on Alternet here:

http://www.alternet.org/democracy/90161/?page=entire&ses=a2a47c7198da63e0197a5064b3e10f84

Although I haven't and won't read the book, the article uses statistics from widely distributed surveys over the past few decades to "prove" that Americans are more "ignorant" than ever. Among the things we don't know: Who was our greatest president?

Reading the article I couldn't help but think how it amounts to bitching about how the Americans who answered the surveys cited don't know what people like Shenkman think we should know (ie: those people specialize in things the rest of us don't give a shit about, which is understandably piss off). The example of the "greatest president" to me is typical of the poli sci privleging of knowledge in their field as essential to enacting "good citizenship" and being "informed." It isn't that Americans didn't answer the question, it's that they said it was Reagan, JFK or Clinton. Oh God, how stupid, we didn't answer the way they wanted us to.

There are several assumptions behind this argument that I don't buy. The first, of course, is the privileging of knowledge. Just because many Americans apparently can't answer basic civics questions does not mean they're stupid. Maybe it means civics teachers (ie poli sci types) are shitty teachers? I dunno, I didn't take high school civics and I can answer all the questions he cites. I would imagine, though, that these same people know a lot of other shit (for example, he talks about how more people can name the Simpsons than the parts of the 1st Amendment). What's wrong with that? Isn't that why we have "representative democracy" instead of democracy? So some people can specialize in governance while the rest of us go about the business of being real people with lives. Feeding our families and stuff like that.

Secondly, Shenkman assumes that because individuals can't answer these specific questions it means we as a whole are stupid. This might make sense at first thought in our individualistic society, but we're also an expert society. The division of labor in post-industrial society also means a division of knowledge. What this means is that while individually we might be ignorant of some things, we're also well-informed on other things and the diversity of the country means, to me, that as a whole we're probably SMARTER than ever before (see wikipedia). There is a lot of shit to know and you can't know it all, so most people pick some things to know about and others to leave to others. Many people know more than me about sports, for example. And if you take away the "better knowledge" thing, the amount that someone who knows a lot about sports knows is probably roughly equal to the random shit that I know a lot of. I would imagine.

You may not have thought about this, but there's a pretty good chance that you, if you have a basic college education or beyond (which most people I know do, cuz I'm an elitist) then you (and I) know more (in general) than, for example, Plato, Shakespeare, Washington, etc. Simply because we have the benefit of being on this end of history where a lot of people learned a lot of stuff that was cutting edge at the time and is now elementary school. Like gravity, you know?

Tell me who knew anything about global warming 50 years ago. I'm waiting.

This is all relative and I wonder what Shenkman is comparing this to. I know a lot about movies, but I don't know the technical aspects or even the high theory of it. I've just seen a lot. So if I were to talk to a "real" expert on film, I probably seem ignorant. But if I talk to someone else they might mistake me for an expert.

So the third assumption is I think the most damning: if Americans are more ignorant than ever, this assumes that at one time we were less "ignorant" than we are now. So this is where the conservative thing comes in. Shenkmen is essentially mourning our lost intelligence, without proving that we ever actually WERE more knowledgable than we are now. When was this? Can anyone tell me? Is it because back in the day instead of learning through multimedia we used to all read newspapers? Really? Have you ever actually READ an old newspaper? Because that shit is stupid. Sorry. I'm just saying.

Finally, this argument seems to me to basically be an ego-affirming argument. You see a lot of this on Alternet and other "liberal" media outlets. Bitching about how stupid everyone is because they don't agree with the author on everything, which is a conservative mentality. It's just another way of making up for insecurity. The entire argument amounts to "I must be smart because I can call these people out for being stupid." Which is stupid.

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