five axioms for action at UC Davis: Joshua Clover.

1. EVERY OFFER OF DIALOGUE AND DISCUSSION FROM THE ADMINISTRATION IS A STRATEGY FOR SILENCING US, AND SHOULD BE RECOGNIZED AS SUCH.
2. ONE ACTION, ONE DEMAND
3. COPS OFF CAMPUS
4. FACULTY: STAND WITH STUDENTS, PUSH BACK AGAINST THE ADMINISTRATION, OR GET THE HELL OUT OF THE WAY.
5. HISTORY IS MADE BY THOSE WHO SAY NO

Some thorny issues have come up during the recent and astonishing wave of student and worker actions in the UC system and beyond, in the face of a barefaced and intolerable privatization program conducted via the pretext of economic crisis. They are issues both of theory and of political strategy, and I do not claim to have any final answers. But I think these issues, and there are five I want to touch on, can be addressed — and can be addressed at a strategic level, distilled down to some basic axioms. The issues on my mind are, basically, these: the matter of dialogue and conversation; the matter of demands and negotiations; the matter of the police; the matter of the role of faculty in this movement; and the matter of speech itself.

Dialogue & Conversation

We have learned to respond almost automatically to the virtue of "dialogue" and "conversation," as if each of us had a magnet inside that was inevitably drawn to such things, exactly as if they were things and not tactics. It is similar to how we are trained to respond to “democracy,” as if “democracy” as it really exists in our lives was an unquestionable good. But as someone remarked ruefully in the paddy wagon on November 19th, “this is what democracy looks like, too.”

Trapped in the quicksand of Chancellor’s talks and Commission meetings, we remember that this is what dialogue and conversation look like, too. They are tactics and they are words — they are always capable of being double agents, of working for either side. One should be thoughtful about how these words and tactics work in our specific situation. "Dialogue" and "conversation," I mean to say, do not have internal characteristics. They are tools, and they often serve those in power. In the last couple weeks we have seen this most clearly. We call for an apology; we are offered a review. We call for charges to be dropped; we are told that somebody will talk to somebody else. We call for an end to the privatization programs; we are offered some sort of forum where all questions will be answered — as if the problem for a laid-off groundskeeper, or a family priced out of education, is that certain questions haven’t been answered. As if there was an explaining problem here, and not a problem of privatization, indifference, and greed.

The administration's calls for dialogue and conversation have only meant the following:
1) do not act
2) we will be substituting speech for action at every turn for the foreseeable future
3) please leave now
4) and also, please send us back some representatives, you know, later, for further empty chitchat; abandon your solidarity, your unity and your political form; reform yourselves along the administrative and bureaucratic lines we prefer and recognize, and we will be happy to talk to you then, because
5) we are condescending, patronizing bureaucrats and that’s how we roll.
Now, I am all for talk. We should talk to each other, as much as we can bear. Not to stop things from happening, but to make them happen — because we can. We should talk on our way to living our shared commitments.

At the same time it has become clear that the only form of communication that we have at our disposal that the administration will hear is action itself. So the deferral of action is a kind of silencing. And if talk substitutes for or defers action, it has to be understood in those terms. That is the most basic code of this particular situation, and I think it can be distilled down to this first axiom: EVERY OFFER OF DIALOGUE AND DISCUSSION FROM THE ADMINISTRATION IS A STRATEGY FOR SILENCING US, AND SHOULD BE RECOGNIZED AS SUCH.

Demands & Negotiations

Last Tuesday in Mrak Hall we made demands, and negotiated, and I think this was important. We stood up for folks who had risked and endured arrest, and this is a crucial form of solidarity. We should be proud of that. But it was a small victory on treacherous terrain. The terrain of demands and negotiations is one that they prefer. It divides us, because we do not all have the same demands. It gets us in the habit of making concessions, when we should be forming the habit of taking what is rightfully ours. It sucks the energy from political life with the vampiric quality that is always the nature of power, power which must exploit the energy of workers and students to perpetuate itself.

It is hard to blame them for pursuing this most obvious strategy. We must look to ourselves on this score. We have no right to chant “Whose university? Our university!” if we don’t mean it. You can’t really say “Whose house? Our house! Can I have a cookie?” If it’s your house, it’s your cookie. If we really mean that it is "our university," we should not be asking and we should not be negotiating. If we accept the idea that we can only win concessions, special and temporary dispensations, then we are accepting that it is their university; that any gains are given, and may be taken back. I guarantee this: if you win a 32% fee rollback but don’t free the university from its program of privatization, the fees will go up double that by the time your brothers and sisters graduate. If you gain a budget increase from Sacramento and don't take control of the University's direction, that budget increase will be spent on privatizing more, not less. If we believe it is our university, we should be asking for nothing, and taking nothing less than the university itself.

But I also understand that people feel like there is no coherence and no legitimacy without demands. I’m just a poet, so I’m not sure what’s so great about coherence and legitimacy. But let's discuss this seriously as a strategic matter. I do not think we can make thirty demands at once. I do not think we can make three demands at once. Emphasis on at once. Here’s why: because, as we learned last week, if you make three demands at once, they will disappear; cops in tactical gear will hide themselves in a stairwell, and they will come back and offer some version of “we’ll offer you half of number one, three-sevenths of number two, and some weird fucked up version of number three, plus let’s have a nice dialogue next week.” And then you find yourself saying “um, should we ask for three-quarters of one, five-sevenths of two, and what was number three again?” and there are the cops in tactical gear helping you decide.

This process is demoralizing, it pits us against one another, it renders the struggle as a matter of individual interests rather than collective rightness. And perhaps most important at a strategic level, it forces us to give up certain things we don’t want or need to give up, half of this for a third of that for two-elevenths of that and suddenly a bunch of stuff has been let go. So again I think I can distill this down to a basic strategic axiom. But first let me be clear about what I am not saying. I’m not saying we can’t have three demands, or thirty. I’m saying it doesn’t work to make them all at once. My axiom is very simple, and I hope it will make sense: ONE ACTION, ONE DEMAND. This avoids the problem of trying to represent a bunch of disparate interests in a messy bunch, and avoids being in a situation where you have to choose between someone’s demands and someone else. ONE ACTION, ONE DEMAND. You walk into a building, and the people who go in demand that there be no furloughs for any Bracket One workers — that’s under 40,000/year. You don’t demand a conversation. Conversation is silencing. ONE ACTION, ONE DEMAND; one demand that must be met by action from the administration.

The Police

For this process to be carried out in good faith, it cannot be a situation of threat. These negotiations cannot be carried out in the presence of armed cops: not visible and not hidden, not at five yards and not at 150 yards.

The police lines that were set up at Mrak on November 19th, the barricades that were set up at Berkeley the next day, were perfectly descriptive of a far more longstanding situation. Two weeks ago I spoke of an us and a them — I tried to clarify that for all the nuance of this situation, there truly was a basic antagonism between those who wished to privatize our education and our lives, and those who refused this. This is the line for our struggle: private and enclosed, public and open. And the police line is the exact same line. Cops may not wish to be there any more than you wish to be participating in this struggle, but they are being paid to make sure that what is private stays private, to make sure that the line stays there, and that you can’t challenge it, that you are always under threat. The administration will talk until everyone passes out from boredom, but if you say just once NO, we won’t leave this building, it’s ours and not yours — even if you pose no threat, are unarmed, peaceful, well-mannered and polite — then you get a police line. Because the police aren’t there to keep the peace; nobody doubts that police add violence and danger to protests. Police are there to make sure that the distinction between ours and theirs remains clear and impassable. So when you challenge that line, you get a police line. You get arrests. You get a 90-pound woman thrown down by four cops on the hood of a car. You get a militarized campus with seven police forces and batons and guns and dogs and a motherfucking helicopter. You get 30,000 more troops being sent Afghanistan while your fees go up 32% and they lay off workers. Privatization and militarization are two sides of a single sheet of paper, and that paper is the contract that wants to buy and sell you, and to intimidate you into putting up with it. So that brings me to the third axiom: the police line and the line of privatization that excludes you are the same line. One is an image of the other. If you want to fight privatization — if you want to even preserve that as a possibility — it begins with the non-negotiable demand: COPS OFF CAMPUS. If it were up to me to choose the first demand going forward from today, my own proposal for its one demand would be that: COPS OFF CAMPUS. No dialogue or conversation before that happens; it’s a precondition. COPS OFF CAMPUS. Otherwise there is no point in making other demands, as we will be threatened and harassed and beaten before we can achieve them. COPS OFF CAMPUS or we are already silenced.

The Role of Faculty

It’s tempting to say, faculty off campus too! In their own way — see notes on dialogue and conversation, above — faculty have effectively been silencing students: by talking at them, by trying to take them gently by the shoulder and lead them to sweet reason, away from the action that is manifestly necessary. It is disappointing to see faculty refusing to commit to action, deflecting the struggle to Sacramento — anywhere but my campus, please! — to see them misrecognizing the principle of solidarity.

I see three possible roles for the faculty, and none of them involves telling students how they should comport themselves, none of them involves derailing the momentum of this movement even with the best intentions. I think faculty can stand with the students and other workers and when I say “stand,” I mean sit with them and link arms when necessary, out of a commitment to solidarity — out of shared struggle, and as comrades, not as bosses. I think faculty can use their privilege to push as hard as they can against the administration and their cops, can tell them how to comport themselves, and thus try to create as much space as possible for students and workers to organize themselves autonomously. Or they can not interfere, if they can’t see that this struggle is their own and that it will be fought by acting, rather than saying stuff. You have figured this out before the faculty, which is greatly to your credit. A fourth axiom, to my colleagues: FACULTY: STAND WITH STUDENTS, PUSH BACK AGAINST THE ADMINISTRATION, OR GET THE HELL OUT OF THE WAY.

Who Speaks?

The last matter, which in certain ways includes all the previous matters, is the one of speech, of who speaks. We have been invited to speak repeatedly, this last week and the week before and the month before. Every Regents’ meeting invites you to speak. Every Chancellor, every Commission. The evidence, and there is a huge amount of evidence, tells us that among the possible outcomes when people speak at these invited events, the least likely outcome is a reversal of fee hikes, layoffs, privatization. This outcome is considerably less likely than getting arrested or tazered, a conclusion based on actual evidence. And of course the more likely outcome still, by far, is that you will be condescendingly ignored.

There is no free speech with cops there, there is no free speech when it is predecided that no one will listen, and what you can and can’t say. You are not really allowed to speak, except for that speech which is a form of silence, the speech that agrees not to take action. That is presented as the only option, but it is not in fact the situation. The situation is this: you do not need a place and time dictated to you, and require no invitation. You can say NO, we have other things on our agenda today. You can speak with your actions. You can choose where you wish to speak from, and make them come to you. We have learned that they will.

The President speaks, the Commission speaks, and the Chancellor speaks, and they will say petty and dishonest things wrapped in the language of democracy and hope, dialogue and necessity. And when you challenge this story with real facts and real necessity on your side, you will be ignored. And when you challenge it with action, you will be told about rules and regulations. Unless you say Yes to showing up at an appointed place and time, with an invitation, you will be silenced.

But history speaks too. History speaks from Montgomery, Alabama, in 1955. History speaks from the Stonewall Inn in 1969. History speaks from Argentina in 2001, when workers occupied factories that increasingly exploited them, and made them their own, deprivatized them. There were rules and regulations in each of these places. Each situation had its Chancellors and Commissions for the Future and its Linda Katehi and Janet Gong and its cops. History spoke anyway. Or, rather, people spoke and made their own history, even in conditions designed to dissuade them from intervening in it. They said NO. In the face of this I say, and this is my last axiom, HISTORY IS MADE BY THOSE WHO SAY NO.

We spoke, we began to speak, when we linked arms at Mrak Hall. We began to say NO. We were not the first, not here at UC Davis or elsewhere, and we certainly won’t be the last.

But, you will say, is it not outrageous to compare a campus struggle to the Civil Rights movement, to the Gay Rights movement, to the Worker’s Occupation movement? Maybe so. But I looked around Mrak Hall a couple times, and I saw many people of color, many queer folks, many folks who work. We share a life with those movements, and we share an obligation to them. I believe that obligation is to recognize that our struggle is continuous with theirs, and to act on that recognition. To know that we are not just about fee hikes, or tax codes. Those matter. But if they are our entire concern, I don't think we have a right to invoke such histories of struggle, even as they speak to us.

Our obligation, if we wish to be in dialogue with those traditions — for is that not the only dialogue we really want? — is to act so as to change the most basic structures, the ones that thrive on our division, that thrive on parceling out a little bit here and a little bit there just to take it back next week or next year. Our obligation is to act so as to change the most basic structures, the ones that like to make lines of exclusion, police lines, lines of privatization. It is these to which we must say NO, and we must do this together. This is our minimum obligation to other struggles against a dominated life, and our minimum obligation to ourselves.

I think it is time for all of us to speak now, in the kind of speech that can be heard, that doesn’t require an invitation, that doesn’t go to them but insists they come to us, if they would like to be part of the history we are making. I invite them to do so, to be on the right side of history, the right side of the police line. They are many. We are many more.

Nuff said.

A Serious Man.

The Coen brothers new title A Serious Man enters theaters in 2009, set against the back drop of 1967 (or 1970 depending on the source). The film opens sometime in the 1800's with a ersaz parable about a dybbuk(demon). The woman, believing the man to be dead stabs him in the chest and he walks out of the house into the snow with the utensil still protruding from his chest. We then open to 1967, Larry Gopnik (Michael Stuhlbarg) is getting a physical at the doctors office, which is funny because he's a physics instructor at the local university on the eve of his tenure approval. He has a typical late '60's family, wife, one boy, one girl, suburban lifestyle. But at home his son in absorbed in the growing pop-culture of F Troop, Jefferson Airplane, and marijuana, where his daughter continues to attempt to shed her history in saving for a nose job. His wife has found another man she wants to marry and is seeking a religious divorce so she can remarry in the church. His unemployed brother, a math theorist of sorts, continues to drain his cyst in the bathroom all day and get arrested for counting cards in poker games at night. His neighbors form the poles of the political spectrum, on the right a Jew hating, boating, hunting, father and son combo, on the left a nude sunbathing, pot smoking, Jewish woman who "Takes advantage of the new freedoms."


As Larry is kicked out of his house by his wife and her would-be-husband Sy, The Columbia Record Club keeps calling his office phone, his son runs from Fagle a large boy trying to collect his $20 for pot, his daughter socializes at the local teen hangout, his wife employs an aggressive team of divorce attorneys, his brother has continuing problems with the law, and a North Korean exchange student and his father continue trying to bribe Larry to pass the failing Clive. Over the course of the film everything continues to be taken away from Larry, his money, his family (who don't seem to miss him much), his brother's happiness, his free time (now divided between lawyers and rabbis), and even his property as his neighbor marks off the area designated for his boat shed. And as each one of these hurdles gradually is overcome that sense of tension instead of being dispersed becomes even further complicated and more challenging.


It is in this fashion that the Coen brother tendency for parable become visual in Larry's connection to Job. Job, for those like me who know nothing of the 'good book', has all of the gilding of his life stripped away by god in the effort to make him speak out against the God. And so goes Larry's life culminated in the end by an impending tornado and an ominous phone call. Everything that was so good is taken away all at once. Larry, like Job, never goes as far as to speak out against "Hashem" (The Name). And it's at this point where dates become fairly significant for our understanding of the larger parable of the American experience.


In 1967 we are entrenched in the Vietnam War, the end of Modernism, the race riots and political processes that usher us into the Late Modern period of capitalism and what we now refer to as the postmodern period. In short the affluence saved up in the post-war post-depression eras is on the cusp of dramatic change just at the end point of this film. All of the multifaceted ways that the sheltered Jewish community of Minnesota is watching class tensions and political issues slowly efface their experience of American suburbia, are likewise happening again today in 2009. While the subtleties of these experiences and issues have changed they're still present in our national landscape. The suburbs are increasingly vacant after the economic wake of 2001 stock bubble crashing and the extended ripple culminating in 2008 as the tornado of Lehman Brothers, just as in the film. All the perceived prosperity of Larry Gopnik, founded on the Fordism of the previous generations, has become the hedge funds and future's trading of our post-Fordist Aughts. And thus as Grace Slick and the Rabbi Marshak ask: "When the truth is found to be lies, / And all the hope within you dies"? Leaving the part out about wanting someone to love is exactly right at this point. It's a statement about where we are, the quality of American globalization, the prominence of captialism on a global geography. Larry Gobnik is ever more right therefor to ask: "Why?" And so the Coens leave us with the most important question of all; one that requires further action.

WWTA

Spike Jonze has long been known for skateboard videos, music videos, Ikea commercials. With his second big screen work, Where the Wild Things Are all of the techniques he's long crafted and worked come together over the course of a story about childhood. The difference in this book to film adaptation is that most films have to cut out sections of the book, revise them to fit into the temporal space of a theater going audience. In this case the reverse is true; Jonze had to figure out how to add a storyline of sorts to the classic childrens' book, a book that many of us writing about it grew up on no doubt. The main ways this film stays afloat is through an indy soundtrack--courtesy of Karen O.--which fills up every non dialogue visual moment by doubling the affect of the image with harmony. But embedded in this non-diagetic sound is the notion that audiences are no longer complacent with the silent spectacle a la carte.




The story line Jonze is able to work over the original text is simple, the mirror image of Max at home in the snow fort imagining friends to play with comes to life; indeed this is the entirety of the book. The gaps that are filled in come from the creatures that Max imagines. As the seven segments of Max's imagination they fulfill the different slices of suburban banality experienced in the films opening, emphasized with the physical action of fort-home smashing at the onset of the island experience. Where initially the Wild things seem to have respective Real people, the course of the film leads us in a different direction and the cast list and voice list keep this association explicitly separate. But what comes to life is the sort of nonsensical portions of childhood, the emotional states running rampant without any consequences or guidance. The structure of the island is the structure of adolescence, but we can also read it as one of our economic situation; unstable present is complicated with perceived and indefinite changes in the future and the uncertainty there in. Following this path gets quite complicated if we consider the chocolate cake-wall street bailout concluding moment, no words just the satisfaction of the senses. Yes, you can run away from your problems and then come back and be rewarded.



On the level of parable we find that the role of Carol, voiced by James Gandolfini, while immediately the alter ego of Max is also a dangerous similarity to that of abusive-stereotypical alcoholic father figure. He looks down to Max in the same way Max looks up to him. Their reciprocal needs for the family unit and their displacement of that dissatisfaction into both the artistic-creative and the fury of destruction as poles reveals the unstable role of both. The difference is that one grows up, the other either sobers or continues to widen the fissures of a failing nuclear family model. And this comes out as the most significant thing the film portrays. That creation and destruction are a dialectic relationship, equally possible in each person. That the rumpus exists in the act of smashing, and that building is always the second half movement of last nights fit of despair. That the new architecture of the collective(Wild Thing City) will be more awe inspiring, environmentally considerate, complicated, and marginally more enjoyable, than the individualized nest homes of yesterday. The former depends on the falling away of the latter. While in no way will the new home automatically fix the emotional pit-falls of the old, by shifting that concern from singular satisfaction to collective well being we'd indefinitely be better off creating and succeeding within that mental space.

Occupy California; UC Walkout; G20 Protests; Baader Meinhof Komplex

It is important to remember that democracy and capitalism are two separate things, the former being an economic structure, the later being a system of government. That the two are conflated so often here in the states reveals how the nuances of economic and political bodies are difficult to separate, especially for those operating within those bodies. Witness our current moment.


On Thursday the G20 met in Pittsburgh, hashing out economic plans for a globalized world. The president was in attendance, and it seems the white house's prioritizing the G20 over the G7 represents the growing wealth of other previously impoverished nations, also the growing disparity of US(western) economic privilege. While the US is still managing to provide the form and means of dialogue, it is quickly becoming a ceremonial right. In the wake of our current economic situation our silence is illuminating. It suggests that in typical US fashion we will decide our own fate, according to what our own interests are despite sitting at the table alongside everyone. This is much like an abusive husband giving domestic advice to a group of neighbors at his backyard BBQ. When they address him, he quietly drinks his beer.

Our domestic situation is dire. Especially here in the Golden State. That I'm able to go to this during the day, and this on the same night, is testament to the energy in the air. More importantly the message of both seems to be that all of our actions have political ramifications. Action is always political, as is inaction.

Yesterday the students of UC Santa Cruz, alongside workers of the university, began to occupy one of the buildings on campus. Their statement is here. We're in solidarity with peaceful action, resistance, appropriating spaces. If you do not place a stake in the ground and claim it something, that space is otherwise ignored. I've long been wondering why our state employees are not doing the same things in regards to their furloughs. The belief that our government can operate at 80% with 100% efficiency is irrational; the belief that education can operate at 90% with 100% efficiency is irrational; the belief that an education of 90% should cost 32% more is irrational.



We want to offer a few ideas for those seeking further action politics.

1) The UC Students, staff, faculty and others needs to take action to the capital. Let the House, the Senate, Governor Schwarzenegger, see you in person. Occupy the lawns, roam the sidewalks and streets, let them know that the defunding of public education, system wide, will not be tolerated. That the prison systems should never, ever, receive more funding than education. EVER. Else we live in a state that values containing past criminals more than educating future generations. That the impoverished should not be impoverished further because of the financial mistakes of the wealthy. That public universities should not financially exclude the public.

2) If the university system increases student fees by 32%, as students, feel free to not enroll in 32% of your classes. Effectively taking the UC spring quarter off and going for an extended summer would create a true budget emergency for the university system to deal with. It would help establish that $6,600.00 a year is a nice round number to cap tuition costs at. If that's the most students are willing to pay, the "market" must self adjust (or die trying). Remember you have the right to take semesters and quarters off, free of charge, without losing your student eligibility. If you do not exercise your rights, your rights will be taken from you.

3) Use that summer time to create communities, communes, occupy spaces. There are no jobs for you to work, but there are spaces that mandate public occupation. If the public is to benefit from our dire situation, our spaces must be wrestled back from private interests.

Moral Panic[and vomit] and the Copyright Wars.

In the course of his book William Patry covers the history of copyright, beginning with its development in England through time to where we are today in America. Essentially his argument focuses on the definition that capitalism is by design a system of "creative destruction" for established business models, which is to say that our economic system can never be fixed and necessitates new business models that over take old business models infinitely (in the name of progress?). This we can call the "free market" ideology. Copyright, in its history, has never been retained for the protection of authors or creators rights--however many times this has been the claim--but for the protections of business models that depend on monopoly rights to fight off new technological developments. The argument to establish the monopoly rights goes something like this: in order to enable society to receive a surplus of works via the market, copyright is essential to guarantee a monetary return to the producers of these works. Works which would assumingly therefore not exist with out copyright protection. Finally we are to remember that the owner of copyright is almost unanimously not the original creator of the work, the creator having been paid for "labor," but the publishers of the work who seek to capitalize on the "intellectual property" of the author or artist.

Our courts bought the argument, and more recently with the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, the film industry and music industry have control over the forms that their copyrighted works become available and how these works become available to the public.

The underlying point of the book, which is spelled out for us on every occasion possible, is that contrary to its ontology copyright actually works to handicap development, create monopolies, and "fix" a market while using as its defense "free market ideology."

Patry even goes on to equate the current copyright rights as they're provided by our own legal system as Lenin style Communism, or even Mussolini style Fascism.



Far and away all of the information contained within this book is interesting and useful, and on one level--according to the definitions he establishes for Communism and Fascism, and how they relate to the business practices of copyright industry--we're in agreement with him. But the curious thing is trying to decipher exactly what Patry thinks of the free market ideology itself.

He praises Obama multiple times, uses Greenspan as an apt example of deregulation and how free market ideology isn't by definition a good thing in itself, and the entire thrust of the book is about breaking down the monopoly of copyright law. One of his early examples, from the first English copyright wars, is how they define copyright alongside property right, as intellectual property.

It seems he is opposed to a truly free market, believes in private property, but uses a jingoistic appeal to free market ideology to oppose the copyright monopoly. I guess that makes him a moderate. Yet the conclusion of the book suggests otherwise, perhaps he is progressive. He cites the development of Korea and Japan in opening up new markets for internet use through their determined approach to providing high speed internet for their citizens. In fact they have internet connections that are cheaper, or the same price as ours even, which run at 2-4 times our current connections speeds. In South Korea this is done through government action, the exact opposite of private enterprise or corporate development, and Patry seems to suggest that we really need our government to provide these large scale infrastructures for us.

Yet if we understand the development of capitalism, like all things established by legislation and practice to not exist in nature--that is to say it's a social development--then wouldn't the free market ideology be the thing that moves us forward? Isn't large scale government the opposite of free market development? If he can recognize that copyright explicitly protects the wealth of Southern California while impoverishing our national culture, why does he attempt to use the exact same economic system that brought us to this point as a possible way out of it? Finally we're asked to take action against these entities who believe that control equals profit (and what other end does capitalism really have?):

In other areas where government monopoly, created to serve the public interest, is blatantly abused over a long period of time, it is taken away.

It seems as though he's calling for a revolution, a change, you know, something akin to the nature of capitalism, that elusive "creative destruction." So while we little people of America ponder how to fit that revolution into our house payments, loans, student debts, and family lives, Patry will go back to doing legal work for google.com

Teen Personal Essay.

As more and more conversations emerge in the wake of the Facebook-healthcare-reform-status-update-meme, I've been drawn to more and more interesting ideas about the (real or otherwise) convergence of politics and social/viral forms. Beginning with a post from Gerry Canavan, followed up by a post from American Stranger, the issues of viral politics obviously falls short of actual public demonstration and likewise still counts for something (beyond the subtle commodification of certain political perspectives, as all social-network-perspectives are readily available for this sort of packaging).

In his post Stranger(or Traxus) links to this fun write up about the tensions between Facebook and MySpace, a debate my generation has been entrenched in. One of my most memorable initiations with MySpace happened as I was slumming with some of my musician friends in LA as their tour brought them to The Roxy. The day of the show the boys each spent over an hour on their respective MySpace pages looking at provocative photos of young ladies and writing on their profile walls, encouraging these ladies to attend that night's concert. (The boys also spent about an hour each flat ironing their hair.) I was quite skeptical of the MySpace revolution as it garbled up most of my actual social circle, thus my experiences were based mainly on how my male friends would try to pick up on girls while simultaneously achieving a lot of self promotion for whatever hobby or artistic endeavor they were involved in. I had a long term relationship at the time and my band wasn't touring the country and therefore I never signed up on MySpace. Mostly what I remember of the first users was their ages, all late teens to early twenties, our pioneers of social networking sites.

Five years later my long term relationship became a marriage and my wife created a Facebook account in my name so that she could keep in touch with her friends while simultaneously ensuring that her High School students (and co-workers) could not find and/or view her profile. (Yes, I'm aware that you can edit your settings and she has created her own account since then.) But since this moment I've also amassed a pretty large group of friends without trying very hard and the more I think about it, the more homogeneous all of these friends seem in the wake of reading the above Facebook-MySpace article. This is not to say that I was unaware of this phenomenon, but that I was also perhaps neglecting it's significance. I bring this to light so that we might consider the relative similarity between Gerry Canavan's and my own recent Facebook status update phenomenon. The telling detail is that likely most of our "friends" all fall into a relatively similar political perspective, class, race, etc., etc.

But also today I was reading this (via GC's blog) about Marx, Taylorism, childhood, and amusement. And beyond the fact that the picture on the right, plus a mountain lion, should definitely be the cover of the new Abraham Lincoln, the final paragraph of the post really hits home:

It's almost as if no one who doesn't have a product to sell or an axe to grind takes the world of children and childhood all that seriously.

And here I am recalling the development of (private)social networks, explicitly how they shape and have been shaped by children-teens-young "naive" adults.

It's no discovery that a large part of our economy is made up of marketing to children. I've got a neighbor who doesn't have any television access because she doesn't want her two boys hounding her for new plastic toys after they watch cartoons; we all remember New Kids on the Block via N'Sync; the current wave of full print tee-shirts; the sheer volume of a store like Target devoted to childrens toys, school supplies, clothing, music, DVDs, and videogames (it's probably half of their inventory and sales). But the fact that this "demographic" which fueled the rise of social networking, has also been the main deterrent from MySpace for adults and those of the white background Facebook interface, informs us again that none of these forms exist to bring us together. As Dana Boyd says, they mirror society and our prejudices are reflected in them. Which is to say Facebook is the new virtual Shady Terrace gated community where we continue to seek private spaces free of prying (foreign) eyes. A spacial relation and fear Jameson condemns oh so eloquently in Postmodernism:

Here a certain Nietzscheanism operates to defuse anxiety and even fear: the conviction, however gradually learned and acquired, that there is only the present and that it is always "ours," is a kind of wisdom that cuts both ways. For it was always clear that the terror of such near futures ---like the analogous terror of an older naturalism--- was class based and deeply rooted in class comfort and privilege. The older naturalism let us briefly experience the life and the life world of the various underclasses, only to return with relief to our own living rooms and armchairs: the good resolutions it may also have encouraged were always, then, a form of philanthropy. In the same way, yesterday's terror of the overcrowded conurbations of the immediate future could just as easily be read as a pretext for complacency with our own historical present, in which we do not yet have to live like that. In both cases, at any rate, the fear is that of proletarianization, of slipping down the ladder, of losing a comfort and a set of privileges which we tend increasingly to think of in spatial terms: privacy, empty rooms, silence, walling other people out, protection against crowds and other bodies. Nietzschean wisdom, then, tells us to let go of that kind of fear and reminds us that whatever social and spatial form our future misery may take, it will not be alien because it will by definition be ours. Dasein ist je mein eigens---defamiliarization, the shock of otherness, is a mere aesthetic effect and a lie.

This again echos Boyd's narrative of the great MySpace exodus of maturing and well to do youth, which we can read as the spacial distancing of classes, the elites from the others. That these networks of varied private providers are also explicitly private spaces, indefinitely not public spaces, therefore aligns them quite nicely with the (exclusive) public spaces of our previous eras (again as noted in Boyd's lecture).

Likewise these networks exist as Traxus/Stranger appropriately notes, to keep us off the streets, but in doing so we are also appeased to just like children in the demo area of the Crayola factory seeking constant interaction with quizzes, updates, nostalgic and genuine friendships, all those empty boxes of archaic production we feel obliged to consume. In other words, we are the children of Taylorism; our dwindling factories full of autonomous working machinery are correlations of our public spaces (real and/or privatized), our atmospheres littered with the negative space tweets and virtual political updates.

TGFX.

While others have likely said more insightful, relevant, or interesting things about The Girlfriend Experience, I want to narrow in on two points for further examinations. These two items, as I see them, are really convergences of the same thing, a continual use of inversions to develop our contemporary self understandings.

The picture above is one of the best images I was able to find where the characters appear as negatives, shadows, anime-even, to be placed over the illuminated backdrops, these modernized glowing interiors composed of surface. Likewise throughout the film the characters are equally flat and impenetrable (pardon the pun), despite occasional oscillations of affect. Michael Joshua Rowin say's it differently:

Soderbergh shoots his characters from far off, implements shallow focus to sharpen looming decor, composes frames so that the backs of heads and surrounding objects carefully block them out, lights rooms so softly and pristinely that images which might have mimicked the cool, slick surface glow of Out of Sight, The Limey, and Solaris are instead properly alien and numb.

This then moves us to Ad's post about the infra-interesting, a concept he lays out in his review [linked above]. And while he's interested in that, and rightly so, I'm still working through the flatness of the film in its entirety, specifically that informed by the idea as the character as a negative of the real while still seeking to represent the real explicitly(documentary style of the film, etc). It seems that the meta-ness of this film is directed at the gap of our focus on the star as subject. That Grey, whom all agree is well cast, performs a service void of substance in real life, in the storyline, and also for the film as a whole, moves us to an objectification of star character as thing. [Which I know isn't really news.] This then echoes our interchangeability for star(let) quality. Our centerpiece, the draw to the film (and this is less so for fans of Soderbergh, I'm sure) becomes our disinterestedness in the focus of our gaze: Marylin Monroe come Scarlett Johansson, either way we come to enjoy the insignificance of either, the triviality of their being, their inherent inter-star-mobility.

Lastly this idea of inversion as it informs the flow of money and occupation then directly informs the greater cycling shape of the internet-age as a whole(reminiscent of this post). Focusing in on this(again from MJR):

What’s important isn’t that swells will indulge their desire for sex with a hot young woman by paying obscene amounts of money to make the interaction vaguely resemble a genuine relationship—we know that. What’s important is that such behavior is now part of the expected surplus value of the capitalistic system of morality—if Chelsea fails at her boutique she’ll likely bank on a juicy memoir or luck out with a liaison with a high-profile politician, and everyone’ll win. Another way to put it: Chelsea would never exist without her clients, but these days her clients wouldn’t exist without her. Their illusionary work dealing in illusionary money is made tangible only by her services.

In this way we are reminded of blogs and virtual forms which wouldn't have substance without the development of standardized/institutionalized media. Yet this lack of significant surplus value, exemplified in the gradual downsizing of our newspapers, etc., is also directly related to the "circulatory movement of drive"(much greater insight here). In this way, just as TGFX, cycles through secondary characters and their economical-concerns and similarities, so too is this the shape of our information-era, the mash-up of continual movement. Or to rephrase MJR, Web 2.0 would never exist without standard media, but these days standard media wouldn't exist without Web 2.0. [Which again, I suppose, is entirely known already.]