design constraints

must... stop... reading...

2008-12-10T20:43:46Z

In the midst of everything-is-due-right-now...

End of first semester of grad school is edging a little closer to subdued hysteria.

My lack of a tightly-defined research question for my ecological stoichiometry term paper is making it WAY too
easy to just keep googling... skimming... googling... skimming... looking for the magic idea to jump out of a fucking hat.

Stop it, you*. I need to just write and write, and the rest will fall into place.

Apparently I go to the internet to give myself a pep talk.

NO MORE RESEARCH. NONE. I've got what I need to present tomorrow night. What I don't have is an actual presentation, so that's what I'll do now. Instead of more research. Instead of poring through more Works Cited sections.

Fin.

OK, let's go!

*me

desire vs. academia vs. everything

2008-11-21T20:11:46Z

My favorite intellectuals are the ones with natural science chops.

I came to grad school to get a livelihood (via the design world).

And I came to become a better intellectual,
by honing empirical and technical analytical tools.

And I came to become more useful for change.

Will any of these goals be met? This afternoon it all seems to be in serious doubt.

I hear the first year is constant battle with existential dread (of the Kafka-esque bureaucratic flavor) anyhow.

I've never been good with delay of gratification.

All I really want to do is teach and learn with dissident intellectuals.
I can't recall anything ever making me feel more alive.

I heard that relationships succeed and fail based on the compatibility between
• How we like to express care, and
• How our interlocutor recognizes care.

Dissident intellectuals might be the only ones who really recognize the way I express care.

Maybe I came to grad school to increase my ability to convene an audience.

It's almost enough to wish I had never encountered SfDaS.
The contrast with everything else is unbearable.
But that's probably my blood sugar crashing.

On studying w/ John Todd, after Bateson

2008-11-12T05:37:14Z

“After they had cast God out of the Garden, they really went to work on this purposive business, and pretty soon the topsoil disappeared. After that, several species of plants became ‘weeds’ and some of the animals became ‘pests;’ and Adam found that gardening was much harder work. He had to get his bread by the sweat of his brow and he said ‘It's a vengeful God. I should never have eaten that apple.’

- Gregory Bateson, “Conscious Purpose Versus Nature,” 1968

“When we recognize that there is no design in "Nature," this perception will set us free form the old controversy, so that we can go on to recognize that indeed the phenomena called ‘adaptation,’ ‘acclimation,’ ‘addiction,’ and so on are always brought about by the dualism of interactive processes. It takes two or more organisms and an environment, all interacting, to generate and regulate any evolutionary process. And the resulting process may be beneficial (to whom?) or stabilizing or lethal.”

- Gregory Bateson, A Sacred Unity: Further Steps to an Ecology of Mind, 1977

I'm interested in constructing a way of looking at the world that lets us use some of the same indicators for social health as for ecological health. I want that way of looking, as an intervention into the way we think about design. I've written about social health, ecological health, and design elsewhere (though that paper is getting kind of crusty) - for now suffice to say this:

Changing the world is not the problem.
The world is changing right now, faster than ever before.
Don't try and change how the word is - there is no lever big enough.
Change how the world changes.
Design is the systematic practice of change.
Intervene into the way we do design, and you change the way we
translate our intentions into tools, landscapes, institutions, art, policies, etc.
Change design, and you change change.

Following Bateson implications above (and elsewhere), the dominant mode of design in the world today can be characterized aslinear goal-seeking. Identify a goal, visualize the shortest path to achieve it, break that path into discrete steps, and begin. That’s the exoteric version. There’s also another, hidden, element of linear goal-seeking design: Think of your goal as cut-off from the rest of reality - an island unto itself - and steadfastly maintain that sense of isolation as you pursue it. Keep your eyes fixed firmly on the prize.

After a few thousand years of (some of) humanity getting better and better at this mode of design, the result are in. The consequences for the natural world - as well as for humanity - are disastrous. And the better we get at it, the bigger the disaster is.

Why is this? There are two reasons.

One: When we constrain nonlinear systems according to the mechanistic pursuit of a single goal, we inevitably impair their ability to self-organize.

The process of linear, goal-seeking design, which shapes so much of the human environment, strips the native complexity from the systems it touches. One need only compare a forest to a farm, or a village commons to a grade school classroom, to see that. We begin with a system whose complexity affords it a great deal of resilience, and by shaping and constraining it according to a narrowly-defined goal - if not replacing it wholesale - we render it fragile, easy to disrupt or shut down.

The presence of a grid pattern in a living system is a sure sign (though not the only one) that the system is being reorganized for extraction, and that it's ability to self-organize is being impaired.

Two: Our goal is not isolated. We, and the system we are designing, are both coupled to a larger system that is, by definition, infinitely more complex. So when we practice linear design, we create a complexity gradient between the comparatively crude and fragile system we create, and the greater social and ecological systems it is coupled to. This complexity gradient is, in effect, an adaptive pathway for unpredictable complexity to reinvade the impoverished system.

That patch of the world on which we impress our design - a landscape, a community, an individual - is no longer performing the balancing and regulation functions that are part of its adaptive history. Instead, it is doing one thing very well - pursuing our goal - while achieving a set of unexamined and accidental consequences. That addition and subtraction of functions pushes the myriad systems (with which our patch of the world is coupled) out of whatever basins of stability they had occupied. Social and ecological systems become unstable.

As changes cascade through coupled systems, the adaptive intelligence of the whole “attempts” to re-establish its developmental trajectory, in ways that are utterly unpredictable in detail, and (by now) totally predictable in pattern. We see this as “invasion” of new organisms, dead zones in the Gulf of Mexico, pesticide-resistant weeds, and antibiotic-resistant bacteria. And we see it as school shootings, global military conflict, and xenophobic suspicion and violence. All of these can be viewed as systems that have been thrown off a metastable developmental trajectory, and into a zone of chaotic oscillation between potential adaptive strategies.

When our systems prove fragile and clumsy, we use linear design to compensate with more of the same. We create checks, buffers, balances, and compensators, that of necessity are created out of the same process that produced the problem. Our human environment becomes more and more a house of cards, a sprawling, interlinked set of systems that are each designed to achieve one goal, by the shortest path possible. We build more and more complex, more and more fragile systems, out of our own linear goal-seeking subsystems, while stripping complexity, resilience, and self-organization from the living world around us.

It begins to appear that the massive increases in social complexity in the past 5000 years might be a less than zero sum game. For every new differentiation, for every new alternative, created in human society, our world as a whole has lost complexity. Following Bateson, the light of the Mind that is immanent in the global biosphere is dimming, becoming obscured, even as a few flares illuminate the shadow-shrouded landscape of human society.

Enter ecological design.

The precepts of ecological design (as expressed in From Eco-Cities..., but others could do just as well) turn the worldview of linear goal-oriented design on it’s head. They are a system of pointers, that serve to direct our attention to crucial intersections - the coupling of our design with the larger world, the internal coupling of the subsystems within our design, and even to that crucial connection between our own mental system and a larger immanent Mind.

In contrast to linear goal-oriented design, ecological design demands nonlinearity. While it retains the sense of a design goal, that goal is understood as radically connected with the matrix of the living world, rather than simple and unitary.

The design schematic becomes:

• Identify a problem. • Examine the network of causality and information that surround that problem. • Envision an assemblage of biological systems that, in their functioning as a whole, transform the circumstances of the problem • Examine the network of causality and information that will attend this transformation. • Allow this vision of consequences to affect the design. • Assemble these biological wholes, and give them the conditions necessary for self-organization. • Observe, gather data, assimilate, and repeat.

The precepts, taken as a whole, produce a single imperative that counters the trajectory that linear, goal-oriented design propels us along.

That imperative is:

Conserve complexity.

By addressing human needs with ecological design methodologies - by bringing together familiar and novel assemblages of organisms, and fostering their self-organization - we get out of the trap of trading in smart complexity for dumb. Instead of creating fragile systems at the expense of resilient ones, we bring long-term evolutionary intelligence into our designed systems, to create a more vigorous, adaptive, coevolutionary process.

“Conserve,” in this context, carries both its meaning “to preserve” and its meaning “to limit.” Following the pattern of intelligence - of immanent Mind, in Bateson's term - that marks evolutionary processes in the biosphere, we set our sights on maximizingstable gains in complexity. That requires an enlightened “net accounting” - for any gains that require gross losses elsewhere in the system will not be stable. If it turns out that all our fancy and interconnected information technology in some way actuallyrequires the destruction of the Amazon rainforest, then the gross gains in complexity won’t really be gains at all. Nor will they be stable - from the perspective of immanent, evolutionary intelligence, they will be a flash in the pan - evanescent complexity, rather than resilient.

Each of Todd’s precepts points down a pathway of building evolutionary intelligence into the meeting of human needs. This is the only pathway that promises a bright future for humankind. Only by creating space within human settlement for the flourishing of evolutionary intelligence (much older than humankind) can we hope to achieve a sustainable global culture. Only by conserving the resilient complexity of the natural world, and weaving it more throughly through the fabric of our lives, cultures, and built environments, can our civilization survive the coming years - at least, in a form worth having. We have an opportunity, by limiting the fragility of our infrastructure, and social systems, to stop trading in smart complexity for dumb, and create a civilization worth the effort of sustaining.

The fact is, there is no reason why we cannot make a world in which each exchange with another living system - individual, ecosystem, or community - fosters the health and self-organization of that system, even as it fosters our own. It’s a worthwhile goal, and might be the only pathway that will get us through these times. Our most formidable task is simply countering the worldview of linear, goal-oriented design. This is our Great Work. We don't even need to know where we are going - only that we are avoiding what definitely doesn't work. We have a lot going for us - deflecting a dynamic system toward something new, away from failing strategies, is also how natural selection does its design work. We can bring that evolutionary intelligence into our design process, and in doing so, conserve the vibrant, functional, living complexity of the human and natural systems we live in. We don't need to set a world into motion - thank goodness - we only need to inflect it's course.

autosum: from facebook

2008-09-14T03:48:15Z

Hmm.

After high school?

Messed around, played in bands, delivered pizzas (among other ignominious jobs), partied pretty hard.

After about 5 years of that, I began to tire of the rock 'n' roll lifestyle.

Enrolled at Ulster Community College, then after a semester transferred to SUNY New Paltz. I studied Music Theory & Composition there.

Favorite composition: "Springtime in the Elephant Graveyard"

After 3 semesters of that, transferred to Bard. Intimidated by the music scene there, and experiencing a surge of interest in thinking about the world, I dove into social theory. Eventually settled on anthropology. Got seriously into radical politics.

Thesis title: "This Is What Democracy Looks Like: Modes of Resistance in the Praxis of the US Direct Action Movement"

Best scam: Got Bard to pay for my trip to Prague to attend the anti-IMF/World Bank protests there in Fall of 2000.

Graduated just before my 27th birthday in 2001. Moved out of my apartment in Kingston, and didn't move back in anywhere until 2005. Travelled around the US mostly - visiting punk houses and anarchist collectives, touring w/ puppet cabarets, forging Greyhound bus passes, hopping freight trains.

In 2003 went to Latin America for 3 months. Guatemala, Brazil, Uruguay, Argentina. Started learning Spanish. Started studying Permaculture.

Kept studying Permaculture.

Got mixed up with School for Designing a Society.

In 2005, came back to the Hudson Valley to try and settle down a bit. Got a place with some friend in Red Hook, got a job working in green building. Learned a bit of carpentry.

Started dating Brook, my sweetheart.

Started developing a workshop curriculum about creating personal, conceptual, and strategic relationships between ecological design and social justice. Called it Liberation Ecology.

In Summer 2006, moved to Germantown to live at a collective farm. Stayed for a year. Learned a bit about farming. Learned a bit more about dense group dynamics than I wanted to.

In Summer 2007, decided to embark on making Permaculture & Liberation Ecology my full-time (or nearly so) gigs.

Last autumn, decided to apply to grad school. Spent the winter in Austin TX, being with my sweetheart and working for an ecological engineer.

Did my first Liberation Ecology workshop tour.

Came back to the Hudson Valley in the springtime, with newly long-distance relationship in one hand, and my funding letter to for grad school in the other.

Helped organize the Northeast Climate Confluence over the summer, thus helping ensure that the conversation about grassroots, community-driven responses to climate change can get rolling in the northeast, while also ensuring that I would be stone broke for most of the season.

Move to Burlington the week before classes started.

Now two weeks deep in grad school. Don't know hardly anyone here. Lots of fresh acquaintances. Lots of uncertainty about institutional culture, institutional power. Not sure who to trust.

Studying amazing things - ecological design, simulation modeling, field ecology, more.

You?

while we're at it, a lovely quote from my friend

2007-08-08T22:26:49Z

"Everything I've ever done was when I was younger."
- Brook Lightning, Germantown, NY

quote of the, err... season

2007-08-08T14:32:03Z

"...medicine is a social science, and politics is nothing but medicine on large scale."
-Rudolf Virchow

This is interesting for me, since I'm in the process of reframing the liberation ecology project in terms of social and ecological health, rather than justice and sustainability.

I don't know what text this came from, since I pulled it second-hand from an essay by James McManus on the criminalization of stem-cell research, "Please Stand By While the Age of Miracles is Briefly Suspended."

There is a sweet wikipedia page on Virchow. It sounds like he was the Paul Farmer of the nineteenth century.

Oh - I posted a position paper on my slowly-forming website www.liberationecology.org. It's big and awkward for the format - I don't yet know how to do basic things like make it available for download or put it in a separate page. I'll figure it out. There's only so many hours in the day.

Wendell Berry quote

2007-05-02T01:12:00Z

"A change of heart or of values without a practice is only another pointless luxury of a passively consumptive way of life."

Whew! Phew!

2007-04-02T19:15:45Z

I spent Thursday through Sunday attending the annual conference of the American Society for Cybernetics:
Constructivism, Design, Cyberntics: Radical, Social, Second-Order.

It was sponsored and hosted by Mark Enslin of the School for Designing a Society.

What a delirious assortment of weirdos: inspiring, frustrating, incoherent, impossibly coherent, dim, provocative, virtuoso.
It was enriched exponentially by the presence of a horde of experimental theater performers/composers from Olympia, with their mentor Arun Chandra. Not to mention the indigenous Urbana experimental composers.

OK, I really just got on here to note two things. One is promising, the other is something less clear.

They are both sentences.

1: An economic system is whatever mechanism it is in a social system that connects the meeting of our needs to the frustration of our desires.

(Responding to questions about what is meant by the term "economic system.")

2: Human ecosystems have armies because we do not have decomposers.

(Not that armies are doing the work of decomposers. The system needs armies to do what armies do, because the work of decomposition/recirculation is NOT being done.)

Economic Identity and Ecological Caste [draft excerpt]

2007-02-10T02:54:13Z

Here are some thoughts gradually cohering:

Since the advent of mercantile capitalism, and more so since the Industrial Revolution, and even more so since the Information Age, the ecological relationships and roles of the caste pyramid have become vastly more complex than the rudimentary and general outline sketched above. Instead of a well-demarcated relationship between ascriptive social role and energy budget (i.e. being born into the role of producer, processor, coordinator, or regulator), under the current system one’s energy budget is mediated – and consequently often obscured - by a variety of economic and cultural factors, the most overt being the presence or absence of monetary wealth.

Wealth, measured in money, is indeed a reasonable and reliable indicator for ecological caste. In the absence of a pricing system that reflects the true ecological costs of products and services, however, monetary wealth and caste will remain somewhat autonomous. The flow of money – now more than ever a flow of information - emerges from and coordinates flows of energy and resources, but it is not identical with them.

Thinking about “economics,” like other hard and soft sciences, we suffer from confusion over the use of one word for both the discipline and the phenomena that it observes. And in the case of economics, which unlike some other sciences is prescriptive, a confusion between what it describes and the rules and norms it proposes.

In the methodology of the symbolic/ecological split, then, economics belongs in the symbolic domain. It has long been accused by professionals in the hard sciences of having little or no empirical grounding, for all its mathematical sophistication. In that light, the discipline of economics (neoclassical economics in particular, the elite orthodoxy that it is) can be understood as a set of justifications and strategies for the coordination of ecological caste relations.

It is for these reasons that economic class, in caste ecology, is not understood as the foil to identity, a la class politics vs. identity politics. Rather, it is viewed as a particular kind of identity, albeit a unique, special kind. One is marked by money, much as by style of dress, accented speech, occupation (i.e. behavioral patterns), and other symbols, as having a particular class position. Class status is ultimately a symbolic marking for a particular kind of treatment by those with the power to allocate resources. In this way it is not, at the root of it, functionally different from the way in which we are marked by skin color, gender, other variations in accent and style of dress, citizenship, body shape, spatial/geographic location, etc. I don’t want to suggest for a moment that we should collapse class and other forms of identity – each system of marking operates according to it’s own logic (and illogic) and each requires it’s recognition as a distinct system, as well as it’s own strategies of resistance and techniques of subversion. I do mean to suggest each of these systems of marking are in effect at the same time, amplifying, suppressing, and distorting each other in ways that are not always predictable. The effects, however, are readily observable, in the myriad moments in anyone’s day, when one is granted or denied access to some resource – or singled out for violence. I propose that, for the project of collective liberation, it is singularly important to recognize a basic underlying unity to the function of the various marking systems, even as we maintain and develop our critical understanding of the particularities of the distinct codes.

This being said, it remains a reasonable methodology to look to monetary wealth as a rough indicator of energy budget, and thus ecological caste position. The monetary system of marking is the most powerful of the various symbolic modes for determining one’s access to and use of resources, and this in turn is perhaps the signature variable of the energy budget.

making moves

2007-02-06T01:49:45Z

I'm taking a new tack this week: I'm setting aside the first half of the day, every day, for writing.

There's been a little compromising already today, but I think I've got a workable schedule for the rest of the week.

I'm excited about this. I'm generally dying to get more time to read and write. It's effing hard, what with working for money, working on farm-and-house related stuff, and maintaining relationships. Now that I've got a little (and I mean little) bit of money in the bank, some of the pressure is off. Now I need to push myself and really make time for writing, or I'll go crazy.

I've been working a little renovation job about 20 minutes from here, for a couple of really nice folks, and with a carpenter who I learn a lot from. The pay is better than I've gotten in a while, and off the books, so I don't need to work too many hours to get by. My expenses are pretty low, living in collective bohemian squalor like I do.

We have two pregnant goats, both of whom will be giving birth in the next couple weeks. There will be an unstoppable juggernaut of cuteness rolling through our homestead like a fuzzy, bleating tsunami.

This is the promo sheet for the workshops I give

2007-01-30T22:37:56Z

Title:
Liberation Ecology: Exploring and Creating the Connections Between Social Justice and Sustainability

Duration: 3 – 6 hours (1 or 2 3-hour sessions)

Maximum Participants: 15-18

Description:

What would sustainability look like, if it refused to sustain white supremacy? What would liberation look like in a system headed for ecological collapse? These questions haunt the divide that runs right down the middle of the projects and communities in which we dedicate ourselves to making the world a better place. Why do we think of fundamental issues like justice and sustainability as being unrelated to each other? Now is your chance to find answers to these questions, and begin to bridge that divide in an atmosphere of engagement, excitement, and collaboration.

Integrating presentation for multiple learning styles, discussion, and small-group work, the Liberation Ecology workshops are like what most of us wish school could have been. Using the material of their own projects, aspirations, and day-to-day lives, participants are guided through a process of exploring the networks of relationship that integrate them into broader systems, in a critical synthesis of ecological, social, and evolutionary perspectives. With hands-on mapping exercises that draw out the hidden connections between power, freedom, and the flow of energy and resources across seemingly disconnected social and ecological communities, participants discover and discuss new perspectives on our situation, and new strategies for changing it.

We don’t have to settle anymore for the absurdity of choosing between social and ecological objectives in our activism – and we shouldn’t! Take this opportunity to build your theory-and-practice toolbox for making a new kind of activism – one that refuses to choose between, and sees a way forward in which justice and sustainability are woven together into a dynamic whole. Inspired, visionary, everyday folks all over the world are working together now to create that future – and naming that movement as a movement, and identifying the themes that unify such disparate people and projects, is part of the workshop, and part of the work in store for us. Rafter works with participants to create an environment rich in what is needed for the audacious task of transforming our social system: passion, collaboration, and inspired critical thinking.

Audience: This workshop is appropriate for activists of all stripes, aspiring and retiring activists, student and their organizations, educators, progressive congregations, organizers, organizees, and anyone who is interested in ecological and social action for a better world. No specialist background knowledge is required. A general knowledge of social and environmental issues is helpful.

Presenter Bio: Rafter has been active in the global justice movement for eight years as organizer, participant, and scholar. In 2003 he received certification in Permaculture Design at Gaia Ecovillage, in Argentina, while traveling in South America in search of contexts where anti-imperialism and grassroots ecological design were practiced hand-in-hand. He has been steadily teaching and studying grassroots ecological design since then. He has been a student and teacher of social project design since working with School for Designing a Society from 2004-2006. Seeing a need for a curriculum that focuses explicitly on the neglected, underlying connections between social justice and sustainability, he has been sharing and developing content for the Liberation Ecology workshop for the past three years, and has given different versions of the workshop 10 times since July 2005. In addition, he has facilitated or co-facilitated workshops on social project design, permaculture design, the economics of globalization, mycology, and wild foods and medicines. He lives and works at the Germantown Community Farm, a community food security project in its first year in the Hudson River Valley, NY. He received a BA in Anthropology from Bard College in 2001.

Testimonials:

“In his workshop on Liberation Ecology, Rafter openly engages with the overlap and interaction of social and environmental oppressions. His presentation is accessible in a way that attracts and grabs hold of your attention, and remains provocatively on your mind long after the workshop session has ended… Rafter's efforts are bringing serious analysis and action to a much-neglected connection between social-economic boundaries and environmental degradation.”
-    Jen Carson, anti-racism activist

"Rafter's Liberation Ecology workshop digs to the foundation of late capitalist suicide culture more efficiently, and coherently than any other presentation I've seen. His examination of inequity is based on analysis of class, race, gender, damaged soil ecology, distributed solar energy and much more- it's all there, as of course, it has to be."
-    Kevin Skvorak, Rattlesnake Mountain Farm co-founder

“Liberation Ecology opened my eyes to profound realizations and to connections I had never made before. As a novice, I found it completely accessible and absorbing.”
-    Chen Tamir, student and curator

“I can honestly say that Liberation Ecology is the most exciting thing I’ve [encountered] since stumbling across permaculture; [Rafter] articulate[s] a way of examining a very diffuse nest of problems and issues that I think would resonate […] with people in a lot of different movements and circles. […] It gives us a set of ideas and a vocabulary to start with; it’s a form of conceptual empowerment.”
-    David Travis, permaculture instructor/designer

“The [workshop] is providing a space for critical cross-movement work; work which I believe is integral to building our capacity for a more intentional, communicative, and dynamic revolutionary struggle for social, racial, economic, and ecological justice.”
-    Maggie von Vogt, social worker and anti-racism organizer

"I continue to be amazed by the outcomes of our short Liberation Ecology workshop with Rafter. We identified some underlying issues of ecological design concerning social and economic justice, came together to create succinct design criteria to address these issues, and educated each other about existing projects that are already working to resolve them."
-    Ethan Roland, permaculture designer

Towards a Politics of Awkward Language

2007-01-20T00:52:42Z

In response to this here.

I think it's worthwhile to avoid inferring any real political project to Pullum's article - at least one having much to do with race. There is, I suppose, a certain politics to insisting that prescriptive linguistics is hogwash and we all should be encouraged to follow our own sense of aesthetics, as long as we do so thoughtfully and with sensitivity. (And I do think that he implied, and demonstrated, that those qualifiers are important to him.)

But beyond syntactic anti-authoritarianism, it didn't seem like a particularly political piece. He used a politically racy piece of language as an object to work out his logic on. Whether that sort of exercise is appealing to you is another sort of aesthetic preference, too.

Yes, he does miss the boat about the ways that whiteness and non-whiteness have been strategically constructed and deployed, cemented and contested, over the last few centuries. That doesn't seem to stop him from engaging with anti-racist issues in institutional settings - though there may be an opportunity for him to improve his praxis by clearing up some of that confusion.

Him missing that particular boat would be more important to me in a piece with a more intense (or just different) political intervention - or one that didn't frame itself in the first sentence as idiosyncratic, personal, aesthetic, preference, etc.

Given all that, I kind of liked it - but then again, I am openly nerd-identified.

To get at the politics that don't quite make it into Pullum's piece:

What is there to gain by prescribing specific anti-racist language? Beyond an Intro to Anti-Oppression conversation, or in self-defense, I don't think that there is a whole lot to gain. The ethical (anti-oppression) prescriptions I go by are general, and necessarily not about particular words. They are, in order of importance:
(1) Call people how they want to be called.
(2) Be tactical.
(3) Change patterns.

How this plays out is that I alternately refer to: white folks, the European diaspora, beneficiaries of white supremacy, people who are marked as white, and the minority caste (though that overlaps with class categories) on one hand; and then to POC, people targeted by racism, insert-preferred-identifier folks, victims of white supremacy, and the majority castes, on the other.

Yes, most of those are awkward as hell. And, I happen to think that awkward language is desirable. There is a point of view that sees language - easy, familiar language - as the strong arm of the status quo. Our tendency to rely on what we already know, and understand thoroughly, acts as a relentless conservative drag on our efforts to make new (kinds of) relationships. Certainly for me, as someone trained in whiteness, I've begun to see that white supremacy is something that is woven - subtly, overtly, and thoroughly - through the language with which I perceive the world. Departing from the path laid out for me requires a break with what is familiar, with what comes naturally and flows elegantly.

And I don't think that this is true just for those of us trained as oppressors, and I don't think that it is true only of white supremacy. I think that the whole social order, with it's myriad of criteria for the allocation of power and freedom, is maintained - not only through violence and its threat - but through the terrible inertia of easy language. Witness how the fierce resistance of conservatives to adopt the preferred identifiers of non-white (or otherwise locally non-dominant) groups reflects and coordinates their resistance against actually flattening hierarchies and sharing resources.

So Pullum's playful, yet curiously high-stakes, exercise doesn't make much in the way of a political point. He flirts with a potentially radical stance: Fight the power of linguistic authoritarians, and fight white supremacy too. And to the degree that this describes his position, I salute him (even as he has his own lessons to learn about whiteness, as do I). But he ultimately fails to find the potential connection between those two kinds of power, and the resistance they require. Alas, his justification for the "idiosyncratic" use of language comes down to a dislike for awkwardness, a preference for elegant syntax. And that, I argue, gets us nowhere but right here.

What about this, as an alternative:
* White supremacy and linguistic authority are related. The dominant language coordinates the relationships of domination.
* To create desirable alternatives, we need to create new language to coordinate new relationships.
* This language, in opposition to all our training, will necessarily be awkward and strange (at least at first). This is OK - in fact it's a good sign, because our training to dislike new, awkward language is a basic part of how the social system maintains itself in language.

Please note - I am not suggesting that changing our language is enough. When white folks use the phrase "people of color," it is probably sometimes a useful marker for people targeted by racism to know that there might be a potential ally, or friendly person, around. In many contexts I'm sure it fails in that regard. What I am saying is this: the tools that we need to make substantive change will come to us in language, or we will invent them ourselves out of language, and if we let our easy preference for what "flows" dictate the language we use, we are hobbling ourselves. In any project that is intended to make a something happen that isn't supported by the dominant institutions of our society, we will need all the love for the new and inelegant that we can muster.

Viva la Awkward!

RIP: Robert Anton Wilson

2007-01-12T21:05:25Z

In response to Jeff Vail's brief obit,
I wrote:

RAW was a huge influence on me during some serious formative years - mid-teens through early twenties. I owe him for introducing me to a wide array of provocative ideas and sources for further investigation; from Hassan i Sabbah to Korzybyski to Wilhelm Reich.

His ol' boy lack of sympathy for feminism rubbed me the wrong way from the start, but I took it with a lump of salt. I eventually did tire of his (ultimately quite trend-setting) focus on trying to re-read process at the human-scale according to the patterns of action at the sub-atomic scale (i.e. Quantum Psychology). Functional organization is scale-dependent,yes? An quark is not an organism is not a social system. Would that he had encountered Maturana and Varela - they accomplish a similar destruction of the ontology/epistemology split without the methodological problems.

But then again, I never would have waded through M&V's _Tree of Knowledge_ as a teenager, and I might well have rejected it's challenges altogether if I hadn't been prepared by RAW's guerilla ontology.

So thank you, Robert Anton Wilson, but don't rest in peace. May your legacy rest as uneasily and undigestibly in the maw of Western culture as your embodied presence has.

Pro and Concrastination

2007-01-09T18:54:41Z

Oh yeah, and my other tickets went away without too much money or further hassle (considering). I feel like I got away with something... but considering time/energy/money expended, that's probably just some sort of cognitive dissonance effect. I ponyed up and played by the rules after all, after all.

The Causing Change piece is an only-somewhat-cleaned-up version of the piece I wrote in court in December, on account of the second draft that I had been working on rapidly turned into a completely different sort of thing, that may emerge later. Entonces...

Causing Change

2007-01-09T18:53:01Z

I've been thinking a lot about large-scale social evolution for the last couple years. I'm interested in this because (to put it real simple) I'm an activist, so I want to play a part in making this place a better place. So, I have these questions about how to get from here to someplace different, and I have these questions about how we got here in the first place.

So why not just read a bunch of history? Well, I'm both frustrated and overwhelmed by often-unspoken rules of history writing (even bottom-up social histories), that require the writer to construct an event-level narrative of specific historical processes, and to not speculate too much on the larger patterns and regularities across cultural contexts. This method has been called "particularistic," and it's mostly just the way things are done in history. A contrasting approach is sometimes called "nomothetic", wherein the writer proposes and defends patterns and tendencies, or even rules and laws, of social change across cultural contexts. "Nomothetic" literally translates to mean "law making."

That latter orientation is the one that I'm attracted to. When applied to large-scale and long-term social change, it amounts to an interest in what is generally called "social evolution." One problem with this orientation is that it includes a lot of bullshit proposals about the nature of "progress," that have been used in pretty awful ways in the European colonial project. Still are, as a matter of fact.

But it doesn't have to be that way. While those bullshit progress narratives have gotten a preponderant amount of airtime, there are many counter-examples of folks using a social evolutionary perspective in a positive and critical way. There is a difference, after all, between endorsing a system as natural and good, and simply describing how an undesirable system functions. One pretty well-known critical thinker to propose a set of social evolutionary principles was Marx, and of his dialectical historicism was definitely oriented towards a project of emancipation. It was also deeply flawed in a number of ways, that I won't get further into here.

I won't get into those issues, that is, except to say that some of the problems with Marx's social evolution are representative of problems that are endemic to this whole way of thinking. It seems to be the nature of this endeavor - identifying broad principles of historical change - to try and identify THE fundamental cause or causes behind it all; as Marx did so eloquently when he identified class conflict as the "engine of history."

The thing is, the way that we generally understand cause and effect is (barely) serviceable for navigating the complexities of our day to day existence. We are drawn, culturally-instinctively, to single causes and linear explanations. The classic metaphor for cause and effect is the billiards table, right? Force impacts a ball, it moves and impacts other balls (and so on) in a context that for a long time was the closest we could get to pure Newtonian mechanics. Our desire, in everyday life, for billiards table-style explanations carries through into our other endeavors.

The problem is that not even billiards is that simple. This nearly-there approach to Newtonian simplicity is embedded in a system of measurement and craftsmanship that are calibrated to the tolerances of the human senses. When we identify the vector speed of the cue ball as the cause of subsequent motion on the billiards table, we are taking for granted all of the regularities that mark our lives on Earth, and that mark, for us, the nature of playing pool. But these regularities are contextual and specific, they are not naturally given or eternal. The regularities that mean "billiards" to us emerge, in part, from a historical relationship between craftsmanship and the ability to sense small differences. The gravitational constant, the capacity to sense and measure level and smoothness, the hardness of surfaces, the density of materials (ball, table, cushion), frictiveness of the felt, angle of cushions, the density of the cue, and on and on.

These are the constraints of the terrain. They are each constructed and made-real on the scale and in the perspective of the human observer. If any of these variables were different, what happened on the table would be different. Because we can depend on most of them to be constant, we disregard them as causal factors - even though they are each necessary for the given outcome to occur.

The scale of the observer, extended to include the player holding the cue, includes the fineness of the grain of the player's focus and attention, her cognitive capacity to simulate and predict, her current state of spatial/muscular coordination, physical strength, and degree of small motor control. These are constraints that could be called biological.

These, in turn, intersect and overlap with the player's evaluation of the state of the game, sense of her own skill in that moment, knowledge of the game, strategic disposition, and motivation for participation - including pleasures, social costs and benefits, fear, and broader social strategic priorities. These are the psychological constraints.

Her psychological make-up, then, emerges in a context of her awareness of institutional and unbounded social systems. The rules of the game, the particular context of this game (a tournament? a bar? after work against the boss?), the mood of the group (including degree of competitiveness), and the offers, potentials, and threats that inform the players' motivation for playing - conviviality, sex, esteem, money, danger, conformity, obligation, retaliation, etc. These are a few of the social constraints.

A change in any of these variables, across all these levels of contraint, could change what happens on the table, possibly in ways that we could not hope to pinpoint. Now, imagine that instead of poking balls with a stick, our player is poking other players - living systems as complex as herself. How predictable is the reaction now? Where is the causality now? Imagine that her poking is sometimes with a stick, and sometimes with sentences and gestures. Imagine her, then, as one autonomous observer in a group of autonomous observers, perturbing (poking) each other in specific and hard-to-predict ways, constrained by and altering their physical environments, both in ways that they are aware of and ways that they are not aware of, at the scale of human senses and not, generating a fuzzy-bordered social system through their communications, that in turn institutionally and statistically constrains and coordinates their behavior, and that all the changes at the levels of terrain, biology, psychology, and sociality, persist and accumulate, are obscured, and shape and constrain everything that comes after them.

Now (still there?) imagine that our protagonist is not an individual player at all, but is actually the whole assembly. And now our conversation/game that we are observing is not between individuals, but between two aggregates, a conversation between conversations, in a broader landscape of physical/social aggregates. Remember, unlike our autonomous observers, our players now are not discretely bounded. They freely exchange not only energy and materials, but autonmous observers, and the ideas, social forms, and technics, that they carry.

In the case of social evolution, I think its desirable to be extremely skeptical about claims of simple causality - of engines of history. When taking the approach of comparing the development of different cultures, and trying to identify the causes of change, we are asking the question "What makes the difference?" Something can only be said to make a difference when we decide, at least somewhat arbitrarily, what regularities we will take for granted and what differences we will ignore.

What is worthwhile, I think, in investigating social evolution, is to draw out particular subsets of relations, in a context of desire. For example - and this is what I'm after - the relationship between energy extraction on one hand, and persistent inequality on the other. The "context of desire" part means that this project is not objective. I try to be honest, but not objective. Its not about just generating knowledge (which is why I've resisted grad school so far), not about being a scholar because it's fun (though I do like parts of it a lot). It's about creating tools, making strategies for intervention. Its for the design of projects based on an analysis of these subsets of relations and the desire for a new, different, social dynamic. Its about trying to understand how we got here, and where we might be going, so that we can figure out how to make a difference.

the rewards of extreme procrastination

2006-12-14T00:20:11Z

I'm in Philadelphia right now, following up - at long last - on a traffic ticket from TWO THOUSAND AND TWO (CE).

After getting nabbed, all those years ago, for running a stop-sign (in a deserted business district, past midnight, on weeknight), I decided that I would just forget about it, since I wasn't a Philadelphia resident and had no plans to be.

Flash forward four years. I haven't gotten a traffic ticket since then (because I drive like your grandma, thank you very much). However, I do occasionally forget to get my car inspected in a timely fashion. One quota-making seatbelt-checkpoint later, just down the road from my home in the Hudson River Valley, and I'm being taken to the hoosegow in handcuffs. Turns out my license has been suspended since 2003! That was three weeks ago.

Two trips to Philly later, the old 2002 ticket is dismissed on account of being (at this point) too damn silly. Hopefully, the Aggravated Unlicensed Operation charge in NY will also soon be gone. Hopefully...

On the upside, I've gottent to connect with friends I haven't seen in a while, get off the farm for a bit, and I got some sweet writing done while I was waiting the interminable wait for the judge to appear. I'll post that bit - about some problems with causality, and the epistemology of social evolution - when I get it polished up a bit.

Now I'm enjoying the cozy gentrification ambience of a bohemian cafe in West Philly - wireless internet, strong coffee, vegan baked goods, hip obscure music, you name it. It's nice, I've been here for hours.

Can anyone imagine a bohemia that doesn't exist at the expense of others - that isn't nestled in the armpit of some Empire? Because I sure do like it here, and I sure am committed to dismantling the system that has produced it, and reversing the trajectories that led to it.

Please, if you can think of examples - tell me.

marked for action

2006-12-06T21:23:49Z

Responding to
this.

I like this idea, and I think making the white-folks part of it work well might be more even challenging than it seems. For me, as someone with white skin privilege, I often feel the pressure to have an answer NOW. I see this all around me in white folks who are coming to terms with their privilege - it's as if decisive action now can make up for a lifetime of collusion.

But it can't, of course. As someone marked as white, and male in particular, I'm supposed to know what to do, to take action and fix the situation to be how I think it should be. And white folks taking action to re-make the world according to their ideas of justice just can't address the basic problem of white supremacy: a global pattern of white folks taking action to re-make the world in their ideas of justice, i.e. just us.

One thing white folks need to do is to learn to appreciate (if that's the right word) being in a space where it's clear that they DON'T know what to do, and to learn to live with that tension. I think that it's useful for us to do this so that we can pursue a larger project of looking to communities of color for leadership, influence, direction, and accountability. A five-item list seems like it lends itself to actions, not long term projects, but I would welcome the attempt to defy that expectation. In fact, a to-do list for white folks that specifically frustrates our desires for do-it-now answers might be really useful, come to think of it. Go for it!

please stop this nonsense

2006-12-06T07:41:21Z

I'm sick of waiting for somebody else to say it first:

"Borat" is a fucking minstrel show. All this self-congratulatory chuckling and guffawing about how SBC and his film crew tricked some working class rednecks in the fly-over states into going along with the naive (though no less toxic) racism and misogyny of the Borat caricature makes me fucking sick. Go ahead, Blue State Glee Club, pat yourself on the back some more. Crow to each other about how much more sophisticated and funny YOUR racism is than the racism of the rural and poor.

What if Sascha Baron-Cohen just actually put on black face - but convincingly - and pretended to be from Mali, and tricked some working class jocks into joining in with some songs about female genital mutilation, or some such bullshit? How fucking funny would that be? Would that be enough to phase you, smarmy white america, you fucker? Probably not.

White irony is everywhere - this urge to distance ourselves from the institutions by which we benefit at the expense of others. We do it most compellingly through humor and art that distracts us and numbs us with how shocking and transgressive it is. This is the culture that exists as if only to answer the impish and chortling question "Wouldn't that be fucked up?"

It's not transgressive or shocking, sadly - would that it were. It's a dusty old corpse in a moth-eaten suit, leering at itself in the mirror, congratulating itself on how new and exciting it is. White supremacy is alive and well, and people of color continue to get brutalized by it, and white folks like me continue to benefit from it. Until that is no longer true, please count me out (and please, really - are you white? count yourself out) from every attempt to insulate yourself with irony and cynicism from the system that you are embedded in. Antiracism is not some hook I'm hoping to get let off of, it's the life I want for myself. Until we dismantle white supremacy, the problems of engagement - not escape - are the problems I want.

Really, I can't help but think that in 10 years, the fact that this movie was made will be as unthinkable and embarrassing as the making of "The Toy" is in retrospect - that 80s flick wherein Richard Pryor is semi-willingly purchased/rented by a white tycoon as a plaything for his spoiled child. Or maybe I'm naive - maybe "The Toy" could just as easily be made today. Maybe the sequel will come out next year. Maybe Sasca-Baron Cohen will play the white tycoon AND his despotic child AND the indentured-plaything Central Asian yokel with a heart of gold (albeit hilariously bigoted), and it will really all be tied up in a tidy little package at last.

Oh, shit.