One of the truly great things about my postdoc is I am reading again. And reading a wide range of books and articles. Some of it is reading for our working groups (for example Jody Greene’s excellent, really excellent, work on the the relationship between liability and property established by copyright), other reading is on psychiatric survivors and then I am catching up on some theoretical stuff on politics, being that is the backbone of much of my work.

I just finished “Contingent Foundations” by Judith Butler, which is a concise and short piece touching on her signature topic: the nature of politics when you are anti-foundationalist and you confront the reality of discursive constraint. On the one hand, some of her work deeply resonates with me, for after all, I am not one to champion individuality along the lines of unhinged agency and am precisely interested in how political action manifests within a field of various constraints. What I like about Butler is that despite her penchant for deconstruction, she steers clear from the twin towers of cynicsm and nihilism and attempts to affirm a positive (if not positivist) and emancipatory politics. In her own words:

“… if feminism presupposes that “women” designates an undesignatable field of differences, one that cannot be totalized or summarized by a descriptive category, then the very term becomes a site of permanent openness and resignifiability.. To deconstruct the subject of feminism is not, then to censure its usage, but on the contrary, to release the term into a future of multiple signification, to emancipate it from the maternal or racialist ontologies to which it has been restricted and to give it play as a site where unanticipated meanings might come to bear. Paradoxically, it may be that only through releasing the category of women from a fixed referent that something like ‘agency’ becomes possible. For if the term permits resignification, if its referent is not fixed, then possibilities for new configurations of the term become possible.” (1992: 16).

On the other hand, despite a positive politics, I feel that the nature of political action in her work and many in her class, is left unspecified, and here I mean in a very pragmatic sense. How is it exactly do we “release the term into a future of multiple signification”?

I agree with her that categories, words, etc., the world of the discursive, is much more bloated than most language ideologies will let on. Resignification is possible, especially when we contest the universalisms that presuppose some of our cherished categories. Yet, sometimes you get the feeling that resignification is a simple act of language and will (just the thing she writes against) as opposed to requiring an engaged and difficult material practice by which new subjectivities and moralities can be born through building of alternative moralities. One must engage in a dialectic between a desire for alternatives that exists in an inchoate and imaginary plane, and its realization through the medium of intersubjective action. For it is through a material vehicle in which one can participate in the process of resignification and more importantly embody new meanings.

Now that the dissertation is almost done, I realize that a lot of it focuses on the experience of crisis and its relationship to the otherwise mundane processes of everyday life through which values are erected and solidified. My first chapter, for example looks at the DeCSS protests, examining how they allow for a moment of acute reflexivity in which incipient norms are solidified. Crisis is a moment in which certain cultural trends are sealed, a done deal, well at least until another crisis hits. Now I am on my last full chapter, which examines three ethical moments/forms of labor that unfold on the Debian project

Heartbreak. I think we have all experienced it and I bet it had something to do with some disturbance in the romantic force field, as it is, damn, a powerful field of force. Though this term is apt to capture lost romantic love, to simply leave it within the rubric of romance is to rob it of the richness it holds to convey some fundamental characteristics on the human condition, that of human connection.

A few days ago, a 13 year old Maori girl was nominated for the best actress category for her performance in Whale Rider, a movie about a tribal elder

I have always been weary of being served “decaf” at cafes. Tonight, I think I find mysef caffeinated for the first time in a long while. My friend Jason recently told me, “you know, caffeine does not wake you up but gives you some really good ideas, they just come one after another….” Well, as I sat watching Ikiru at the Music Box, ideas came racing through my head (I drank the supposed decaf before the movie).

The movie was stunning, which was confirmed at the end when Marshall Sahlins who was sitting in front of me broke out clapping at the end. Seriously, it was a moving movie about regaining life and the conditions that sap it away from you which are at once psychological and social. The main character led an intert life for 30 years as a faceless beaurocrat working in a mind numbing position. Time ceased to be important and was essentially robbed from him. He was busy all day stamping papers and evading life in whatever guise and doing so in the name of a son he had no connection with… All of this changed when he got the diagnosis of cancer and he started to feel again and creep into the vicissitude of life. He found meaning fighting for the “right thing,” (I don’t want to ruin the movie) and basically he took control of time in his life again.

Among other things, the brilliance of Ikiru is capturing the relationship between time, meaning, and modern beaurocracies. Think about it… Every time you are running some errand, going to the doctor, trying to figure out your goddam taxes, trying to make a positive change in your neighborhood, working two jobs to make the bills meets, etc, you usually encounter a faceless entity (health insurance company, the government, American high school system, your employers, the IRS) in total frustration and you are robbed literally of time and eventually for many, their will. Many people don’t find themselves as in an extreme of a situation as that of the protaginist in Ikiru yet his state is what many people world over find themselves in a less virulent form. But once you have like a good portion of society in a state where they are without time, the status quo is easy to stay as the… status quo.

Unfortunately the brilliance of American political hegemony is the fact that 1. People are given freedom of speech although basically the message is ignored and/or drowned out 2. Many folks are scraping away just enough that they are not in a terrible socio-economic state but are left with little time to do anything else but make sure to keep etch a living 3. There is such a strong ethic of individualism that if you aren’t “making it” in whatever capacity, it is well the individuals fault… There is little room for an ethic of social welfare and responsibility

This movie actually speaks to some of these elements such as muting information, the myth of individual self-sustainability in a powerful way… It also gave me some good ideas for my dissertation on the relationship between free software (by the way, GNU sort of turned 20 today!) and rerouting around bureaucracy. The philisophical and cultural elements of free software culture empahsize everything that is antithetical to bueaucractic culture and this is captured even in technical architectures and expressed in the anxiety over keeping everything “open” and having control ove everything. I do think this is very much a response to the deep seated bureaucratic ways (the Iron Cage perhaps in Weberian terms) of our social state. But perhaps I just had too much caffeine.

The readingrules reading group met on Sunday to talk about Our Posthuman Future by Francis Fukuyama, a book that is pretty maddening for its impoverished view of human ethics yet very compelling at some other level. This is somewhat a simplification but I tend to categorize non fiction books under three categories:

1.Plain dumb
2.Brilliant (and this can be for a multitude of reasons)
3.Infuriating (in a good way).

His was infuriating, but I usually find that to be a positive thing for I find myself not reading but arguing with the book. My fingers grip the pages while my eyes absorb the words and my mind races thinking of all the reasons why I don’t agree with a certain position, occasionally caving in noting that the author makes some really good points.

The book is essentially about ethics, about what it means to be human, to act morally, what guides the desire to be good, and how new genetic technologies (especially the ability to change “human nature”)will threaten the very basis of our (no, his) Ethical foundations.

First his view on ethics and nature: His basic argument is that the most sound system of ethics is one derived out of “human nature” as it then is the only way that we can have a sort of pan-universal morality that cuts across time and space and cultures.

Unfortunately, he gives a really unsatisfying rendition of human nature, basically saying that it is, well in a nutshell, “complex”, a complex mixture of our ability to acquire language, learn, reason and feel emotions:

“What is Factor X [Factor X is is awfully original code word for human nature].That is, Factor X cannot be reduced to the possession of moral choice, or reason, or language or sociability, or sentience, or emotions, or consciousness, or any other quality that has been put forth as a ground for human dignity. It is all these qualities coming together in a human whole human being that make up Factor X. Every member of of the human species possesses a genetic endowment that allows him or her to become a whole human being, an endowment that distinguishes a human in essence from other types of creatures.” P. 171

The specifities of these are addressed but in an incomplete and piecemeal way. Genetic modification has then the ability to simplify the complexity of humans and/ or make other beings like humans (and vice versa) so that the clear and demarcated boundary between human and non-human would be blurred undermining the whole basis of a morality based on a unique human nature.

OK, that is the short of it and though I do admire his desire to try to find a basis that emphasizes equality across people and know that there are serious ethical issues in the realm of bio-tech and genetics, I find any moral rendition that places the human above all else is one that well, is just not my bag of ethical tea. I am going to spare my few readers one of my longer posts because I think I can get really carried away criticizing FF but I think one of the things that is problematic is, well it is very obvious, it is so very humancentric which, for the question of “human morals” might not seem to be such a bad thing. But it does not exactly allow for a deep integration of humility which in my cup of E-Tea, is a necessary ingredient whether it is because it is an important factor for treating others with respect and dignity or whether it is an important means to treat nonhuman things well or at least with awareness of how we are treating them individually or as a society.

I have already read our next book the Hacker Crackdown, which also touches upon ethics but from a very different angle. I look forward to talking about it with a bunch of other people who will have, I am sure, passionate thoughts about it!