It’s Not You…or Is It?

19.November.2009 in Daily Nonsense, Gender | Tags: , , , , , , , , , | 1 comment

I could really use some feedback on this, because I’m not sure what to do. I’m mostly writing this blog post to work out the pros and the cons for myself. I’m trying to work on my remarks for tomorrow’s Transgender Day of Remembrance event. I really want to hit home the point of the two recent murders of young people who are being portrayed by the media as gay men, erasing the facts that their murders were predicated on their perceived gender identities. That’s another issue altogether, and one that is very important.

I got an email today from a staff writer for the undergrad school paper, The Spectrum. He wanted to know more details about the event I am organizing tomorrow because he is assigned to cover it for the paper. I told him I wanted to meet, and we talked a little bit, but I remain unconvinced. I am not sure if I want a cis man speaking for a community I belong to that is entirely invisibilized on this campus.

The pros in his favor are not just that he is a gateway to a campus media outlet. It’s also that he was willing to come meet with me and talk a little about the sensitivity of the issue. He was clearly worried about the issue and said he would run things by me before publication. He was respectful, perhaps a little apologetic for my tastes, but he genuinely wanted to report the events in a way that respected the event and the lives it commemorates.

On the other hand I feel like I should be writing an Op-Ed for this paper. I don’t think the first interface with the invisible trans community on this campus should be via a cis reporter. Rather, it should be straight from the horse’s mouth. It also bugs me that this report won’t run until next week as opposed to the day of, which is something an Op-Ed could do. (I guess it didn’t even occur to me to send one in since I never see the undergrad paper anyway, my bad.)

I’m also concerned that his studious notetaking will inhibit those in attendance who need this event to be a safe space to think about and reflect on the most extreme expressions of cis privilege and hateful violence. I’m worried it’ll detract from the event.  But, I want the campus to know that people who are a part of our community really and honestly care about this issue. I want to see a dialogue started about it. And I don’t want to trivialize it.

Ultimately, though, this event is about making a safe place for us to reflect and think about the future, not about teaching others about the community. Voz Latina pointed this out to me, and I think she is right. I still hold this latent feeling that we need to make this an obvious issue that people on campus care about.

Do you see my frustration and conflict?

As I write this I lean toward telling him not to come. What should I do?

“Tolerance is the virtue of a man without conviction.”

18.November.2009 in Daily Nonsense | Tags: , , , , , | 1 comment

I was driving to school on Monday feeling all fucked up about having just gotten back a few hours before and I saw a guy with this bumper sticker, and some other bumper stickers too, about how God is his co-pilot or something like that, but the one I read and thought about and had never seen before said, “Tolerance is the virtue of a man without conviction.” I thought it was kind of funny that he should have it on his car (feeling the way he inevitably does about people like me) because I would consider putting such a bumper sticker on something that belonged to me, too.

I have been working very hard on getting this thing together for Transgender Day of Remembrance. So far it is shaping up to be a good event, I have a few films and Isaac will be reading something he’s written and it will be just about right, I think. I have been thinking a lot about what it means to tolerate because I think I am tolerated at UB but maybe not accepted. In some ways I think events like Transgender Day of Remembrance exist because of tolerance.

I guess what I mean to say is I worry that the reason so many people harbor hate in their hearts is because we are taught to be tolerant, not accepting. That the tolerant society allows too many people to go on thinking and saying things that are really dangerous to other people on the basis of free speech. (I don’t feign to know where to draw the line between “freedom of expression” and “hate speech,” but I do know that this is a problem.) That a really left-wing individual would not tolerate the discomfort people have with people who are not like them, rather they would try and make a change in support of mutual understanding and acceptance. Settling for tolerance is weak-minded and stupid.

I guess I am trying to say that a world full of tolerant people is not a world where I would like to live. Merely being tolerated sucks.

What I Left in Manhattan

17.November.2009 in Academia, Daily Nonsense | Tags: , , , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

This weekend, a furious whirlwind of sleeplessness and ideas, has left me feeling kind of angry about something, I don’t know what. I am still so rotten tired from it that I can’t get on my bicycle — the sub-freezing temperature this morning doesn’t help, I guess — and part of it is my body is dragging me down. I got back to Buffalo feeling drained, overwhelmed, struggling to make sense of a number of things.

I guess I spent the weekend thinking about the body in relation to the kind of things that I’m involved in in media study. It was interesting having a meeting yesterday about what we are to do with the VR lab, since VR is a specific kind of virtual embodiment, wherein you are asked to leave your body behind but at the same time cannot escape the vestigial importance of your embodiment. I don’t think I like it. The idea of it creates a kind of weird cognitive dissonance in me. I have never been interested in VR for this reason, I think.

It was like my deep and visceral reaction to the attempt to disembody so much of our online experience at the conference; the attempt to ignore the body in so many myriad ways, whether limiting the scope of virtual activism to the internet proper, or this idea of the “post-racial,” which is utter bullshit, because we’re not post-anything having to do with identity yet, as a society. In games, and on the internet, the problem with our analysis is exactly that we try to edit out our bodies, so we miss critical parts of the way online society works. How are we even allowed to think about a society without thinking about it as a body (virtual or “real”) and about the bodies which make up its parts? (The distancing of bodily suffering; what the trolls are after; the things we assume about each other.)

This weekend made me fiercely want to be alone, but also terrified of it. Maybe it created the cognitive dissonance in me that made me like the internet so much in the first place.

I really enjoyed being at the conference — I listened to some excellent talks, met some great people, and was challenged to think about things differently, which is always a huge gain. I wish every conference could do that. I think that was the original point of having them but somehow it doesn’t always work like that. To actually go to a conference and get that — a sense of a place and time and community where you can actually do a little fighting and a little sharing — is exceptional. Thank goodness for that.

It was also great being back in New York. I realize I haven’t been there in about two and a half years, which is kind of a long time. I have a lot more friends there now than I used to. I saw a lot of them (not all of them, sadly) and that was good. It was a whirlwind of a weekend.

Yet the boundaries that were drawn this weekend are still making me reel. Located in space and time, I can’t forget that. Maybe it’s my own complex and difficult relationship with my body that makes me latch onto these sorts of things, but the thing that I noticed in the sessions I attended was a preoccupation with the screen (a hegemony, really) — some people were surprised at the powerpoints that pervaded the conference, for example. What does that mean, after all?

I have a lot to sort out. Lots of thoughts. Lots to do this week, too — getting home was a reminder that Transgender Day of Remembrance is Friday, Nov. 20. (Speaking of embodiment.)

Identity and Individualization

12.November.2009 in Daily Nonsense | Tags: , , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

I’m generally very critical of what I kind of see as the market fetishization of the individual and of individualization. Peter called me out the other night, though, on my tendency to also validate the importance of individual identity. In many ways it’s very important to my picture of social justice and of movement building. I’m kind of in serious conflict about this now.

On the one hand, I think the fact that the market has co-opted our radical individuality into an advertising tool is very screwed up. I am nervous about the way we are sold individualization — whether it be in the form of the newest gadgets for your mobile phone that are highly customizable, or in the form of being sold privileges — like gay marriage. (I’m mostly here talking about the simple fact that the marriage question diverts attention away from segments of society — and who fall under the queer umbrella — who are so far underserved that marriage isn’t even on the radar. I’m also concerned about the argument for gay marriage that says that gay people are affluent and therefore will spend a lot of money on their weddings if they can get married. Blargh!)

The fact of the matter is, being an individual in this sense has been taken from us. It’s now being used to sell us stuff and thereby keep us complacent.

On the other hand, I detect a problem with abandoning this kind of attention to individual identity. I don’t think that it’s necessary to completely ridding ourselves of these ideas — maybe of the rhetoric. After all, I am continually frustrated by the impossibility of addressing historical injustice if we don’t consider identity. Further, how do we have a conversation about power if we don’t think about the lived experiences of individual people?

So, ultimately: is there a balance between the acknowledgment of individual identity and lived experience and the ability to flout the control structures of late capitalism?

This might not actually make any sense. I welcome your input on the matter. I think this is a pretty big problem!

You Can Be Whatever You Want…Except Free

10.November.2009 in Daily Nonsense, Intertubes, Philosophy, Politics | Tags: , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about late capitalism as a form of political control, especially in unconventional environments. We talked on Sunday at brunch about how the sale of the experience and the sale of “individual identity” is a form of control peculiar to our day and age. There are a couple of disparate things I’ve been thinking about lately in regards to this.

I.

I remember being in China two summers ago, a couple months before the Beijing Olympics, and wandering through the botanical gardens with my dad. We saw a young couple running through the gardens with their toddler-aged child. It was cute. The dad was laughing, taking pictures of the mom and the kid, wobbling around next to some flowers.

“People here look so happy,” he said. “They can buy clothes, food, cars, in the colors and styles they want. They can express themselves through the consumer goods they buy. Five, ten years ago this was not true.”

I remember talking to some other students at Peking University, who told me that people were content so long as they could have the material goods they thought of as part and parcel to the material wealth of the West. The right to assembly was not as important culturally as the right to a Chrysler 300.

II.

What constantly weirds me out about the “green” movement is how consumption-oriented it is. I don’t mean that in the sense that it is concerned with our consumption, because obviously anybody concerned with the state of the environment should be worried about our consumption. What I am constantly struck by, and grossed out by, is the co-opting of the rhetoric of the “green” movement to sell products. New products. Products that are manufactured using traditional methods. Products that may or may not have any positive impact on our “carbon footprint” at all.

We shouldn’t fool ourselves into thinking that “green” marketing is anything but marketing. And the weird thing is that we’re willing to buy the experience of feeling like we’re making a difference in the world. We might each have our own reason for doing so, but we’re buying it. The selling of an experience, as opposed to an item, is something peculiar to late capitalism. I have been thinking about this since Zizek lectured here at the beginning of the semester.

III.

Yesterday in my class we talked about the development of society and economy in Second Life, and what that means for our society and economy in our first lives. I think one of the things that always strikes me is how mad excited everyone gets about the economic opportunities and innovation that come along with Second Life growing as a kind of “3D internet,” as one of my students called it. Nobody is really discussing the way in which Second Life is actually run. (Which is the way the vast majority of virtual worlds are run, through an administrator oligarchy.)

Now I understand that some people will say, “Wait a minute, Cayden, Second Life isn’t about forming a government. After all, it’s run by a company that is interested in using its software to make money — and to enable people to connect, to create things, and to play.”

At the same time, in Second Life you can be anybody and do pretty much anything you want. Except liberate yourself. What’s easy to forget about it is that you’re being sold an experience in an ultimate way — people spend hundreds and sometimes thousands of dollars on ethereal piles of pixels in order to have an experience in the game. You’re being sold a deeply consumeristic experience, no less. The main tabs on the Second Life website are “What Is Second Life?” “World Map” “Shopping” “Buy Land” “Community” “Help” and finally the join button, which emphasizes that joining is free. Which is funny. Considering two of the six main tabs are about spending money.

IV.

So what does all this mean? I think these three things are symptoms of a bigger issue. Something about how too much wealth begets complacency. Or that our priorities aren’t quite what they used to be, or rather that our priorities were never what we were made to think they were. And also something about capitalism as culture, not just as economic system.

The symptoms speak to an environment where economic freedom is mistaken for individual and political freedom. Think about it.

Actual, Present Life

5.November.2009 in Academia, Daily Nonsense, Music | Tags: , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

It’s funny that this year has been secretly about versions. a.Version, of course, but also versions of self, past scholarship, re-version, con-version, transgression. Saving the game in a different save slot so you can go back to it later. It’s funny, of course, how things that seemed to be abstract objects from your past life come bubbling up into your actual, present life, isn’t it? That we hear echoes constantly of the things that we once did?

I have been considering for a while how the person I used to be became the person I am now, how more than most people I think Ibarong experience a lack of continuity in personal identity, how surprising it is that sometimes old me seeps into the things I say and do now.

I was struggling for a while to come up with a paper topic for this class, and the vagaries of digital life had me digging through the archives of my writing for class (and isn’t this why a.Version is a great idea?) and I stumbled upon the paper I wrote for Judith Becker’s class (about music, ritual, and trance in a variety of cultures) almost three years ago about music and psychedelia and secular ecstatic experiences — their causes and relationship to mental stability. It occurred to me that I had a paper here that could be expanded, added to, that maybe making an archive of my writing about psychedelic religious and aesthetic experience might yield a passable book or dissertation, or something — well, you get the idea.

And also, I hadn’t thought of this paper very much at all. I had thought of the books I read for it in passing at the beginning of the semester because of something someone had said in my present class about psychedelia. I have been working through Julian Jaynes’s book The Origins of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind and it seems really self-evident that Dr. Becker’s research fits into this picture, and that there’s a really great connection here that Jaynes couldn’t have explored.

How odd, I think, that versions and these sorts of past histories should be so important now. (Also, upon further reflection, I think that Dr. Becker was the first person who had me thinking about Orientalism in the academy — she said something to me, in passing, about how she is annoyed at her discipline being called ethnomusicology. Also something about how it’s very hard for musicologists to study Balinese gamelan ritual and dance because of the overwhelming number of Aussie tourists who inundate the islands? — and how that has become a great important thing in my life too.) I think ultimately this has something to do with why I like folk music.

Having a Conversation in a Crowded Room

1.November.2009 in Daily Nonsense | Tags: , , , , , | Leave a comment

Maybe lately I’ve been feeling a bit like I’ve been hitting my head against a wall, but things are giving a little bit here and there. The furious networking I’ve been doing outside of the department this semester is starting to congeal into something tangible and interesting — the other grads were really receptive to the idea of a Transgender Day of Remembrance event — and I’ve been tapping the shoulders of possible allies all over the place. I’ve started having good conversations with faculty in my department and in Visual Studies who actually want to engage. I’m beginning to be challenged in good ways.

I still sort of feel like I’m trying to have a conversation in a crowded room. It’s a feeling of grinding my gears, yelling over the jukebox at the bar, going home excited for the future but unfulfilled, and going on wild goose chases for collaborators and critics. It’s like going to a party and meeting someone really fascinating but not being able to talk to them because there’s 300 other people milling around, being noisy and nosy. Maybe this is why I like the internet (and textual healing).

But I’m building up steam. Something great is going to happen here in the next 12 months. I hope it involves a Public School, playful interventions, and chickens.

RE: Red Light, Green Light

28.October.2009 in Alternate Reality Gaming, Daily Nonsense | Tags: , , , , , , | Leave a comment

Last night was great. I spoke with a number of people further about giant Red Light, Green Light, which is rapidly evolving into something way bigger and more epic than maybe I had initially planned, but that’s what grad school is for, I think. Stephanie has promised to find me a book about the design and construction of UB’s North Campus (as a structure of control, as a way to prevent student organizing) and Mark thinks I should undertake an architectural study of the campus to create a comprehensive overview of why an intervention like a SMS-enabled game of Red Light, Green Light should get us thinking.

And I think a lot. I think about the alienation of working at a commuter school, working in a building with white halls and walls and light grey floors, where even though we are an art department and neighbor another art department, public displays of aesthetics are kept to a minimum, tightly constrained, kept in their place. Even posters for department events (nice ones) get taken down if they’re not in their designated spot. (Paintings that might interfere with the overall aesthetic or ethical concerns of building use are strictly forbidden: take the example of a painting of a young woman vomiting that was turned around by building staff when dance parents came to visit.) I honestly find North Campus soul-crushing. I find CFA completely contrary to any sense of community space, of aesthetic development, of play.

I don’t think we have to take this sitting down. Giant Red Light, Green Light is evolving into a critical performance practice. Instead of trying to reach the goal (me on my humble laptop, planted somewhere previously disclosed) in the fastest time possible, players will instead have to form the largest groups possible and, within a half-hour, reach the goal. In order to win, players must organize. They must talk to people on campus they’ve never spoken to before. They need to challenge the campus protocols that say — keep your head down, do your work, don’t bother anyone else, go home in the evening.

I am still trying to come up with an appropriate reward for winning. Thoughts?

Email Anxiety

26.October.2009 in Daily Nonsense | Tags: , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

So, I sent the email today. No complaints so far. Josephine was kind enough to help me with it, others too. I hate having to commit to a thing like this, sometimes, because of the way it twists up my stomach just to click “send.” I shouldn’t be so anxious but I think it’s hard not to be, with the politics and the drama. I have a lot of anxiety-inducing emails to write and send this week. Here is a list: email the graduate students about Transgender Day of Remembrance; email the union about insurance coverage; email Eileen Myles about a.Version. Maybe I shouldn’t be so anxious because some of these things are wholly out of my control (i.e., insurance and my hopeless awkwardness). Anxiety is only useful when you have some level of control over the situation, so you can use it to temper your reactions.

One of the best things for anxiety is the bicycle. I put new pedals on it last night and this evening I took the long way home, no bus, just me and ten solid miles of riding. I feel stronger just going the distance. Negotiating the road here requires the a different kind of balance, confidence and aggression than Ann Arbor’s roads did. I got honked at a lot today. Maybe it is because I am still getting used to cleats. Often the bike is better than a therapist I think. I worry that in the winter I won’t be able to ride as much and I’ll get a little madder. A guy on the bus this morning said the bike was beautiful. It really is. Especially with the new pedals, tearing down neighborhood streets in North Buffalo. I took a long hot shower and boiled some pasta and ate it.

My class listened to my lecture today, I think. I saw a lot more leaning forward in chairs than I am used to. Some people asked some good questions. I think I told a good joke or two. I got lost in a riff about the nuances of my stance on equality. I wish I had recorded it, or maybe hastily jotted down some notes at least. I made a Powerpoint presentation for it, that was pretty odd. But it worked okay I think. Some people took notes. I was flattered. I don’t count myself as an expert on Edward Said or Orientalism or postcolonialism but I think they’re thinking about it more, thinking about the subtle things I had hoped they would start thinking about it. Today was a breakthrough day. I feel like a competent teacher.

The loneliness of Ann Arbor was child’s play compared to being lonely here. There I knew I could jump on my bike and less than five minutes away was a house full of people who were certainly home and I could sit on the porch and we would talk about things and have a beer. Here, it’s not so certain. I forgot what it means to be isolated, alien. I guess what’s scary about it is that if you put a flame in a vacuum it dies.

This is Just Like Posting Today and the Last One was Yesterday

25.October.2009 in Daily Nonsense | Tags: , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

Today I think I am feeling a little less insecure. I went to brunch at Josephine and Dave’s and helped their four year old daughter Lucy carve a pirate jack-o-lantern. Everyone was impressed with my pumpkin-carving skills. It turns out I am a multifaceted person. I realized while we were eating that nobody knew about my busted wrist. It has been covered in an Ace bandage for a few days now because of some mysterious flare-up that requires me to give it more support. Biking hurts, typing hurts, and I’ve lost a little grip strength. This is more than unfortunate. I don’t want to take it to a doctor again but if this keeps up what choice do I really have? (Your input is appreciated.)

Sometimes you forget that you used to do other stuff. Like ride horses, and then fall off them. Or have a budding career as a professional musician (until that fateful day). Or that you have more than one good reason to hate doctors (besides having to out yourself to an unsympathetic resident in the E.R.).

Today I was riding my bike home from Josephine and Dave’s and enjoying fall in Delaware Park and how I smelled like pumpkin guts and thinking about how peculiar it is that the things I have done so far in my life have led me here. That I am now friends with the people I am friends with. That we are colleagues or something. Or that I have a “career,” or whatever. That the old stuff drops off into some fuzzy past thing as new stuff is added to the sharper edges of the current part. I have a hard time thinking things happen for a reason but also I’m here to do a job, but that job isn’t necessarily all in my job description.

Josephine told me I made her nervous, too, and would like to talk about it more. She thinks maybe it has something to do with second-wave feminism and have I really got male privilege after all? But she says she doesn’t think it’s all that. I find it hard to believe it’d be all that.

Othello is trying to chew on the corner of The Importance of Being Iceland.

categories

twitter me