spleen

good morning, headache

A few days ago, I sought out technical information about the collapse of the World Trade Center. Most of these reports included something about the intense heat caused by jet fuel, and somehow this led me on to more and more articles until I found myself (once again) reading first-hand accounts. There are terrible things that it seems we simply shouldn't know, shouldn't have to know, but I feel some responsibility to gather up this information and store it in my head. This is our history now.

One of the designers of the World Trade Center said, "I cannot escape the people who died there … that still to me somehow up there in the air are burning."

I thought back about some people I'm acquainted with who responded to all of this with a "who cares?" mentality immediately after the attacks. Initially I thought of these responses as an attempt to cope with the enormous grief of the event, but as the weeks dragged on and their opinions remained unchanged, I got angry. Comparisons between the statistics for drunk driving accidents were used to show how the body count from the largest terrorist attack in history was insignificant. I respect a person's right to have an opinion, of course, but I am still angry. I found (and find) these lines of reasoning to be obscene.

This is history, and not for the squeamish:

http://www.moonbeam.net/sfhs/

http://www.remotepoint.com/~today/Draves

http://more.abcnews.go.com/sections/us/dailynews/homefront020305.html

quotes from New York City journals: http://somniloquy.org/misc/quotes.txt

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notes

1. The American cultural struggle may ultimately be summed up as "rights of the individual" versus "we the people." The last twenty or so years in academia, politics, arts and the like have largely consisted of a battleground between traditional systems of privilege and the drive towards greater diversity. Its more recent manifestation comes as a unity/diversity paradox, in which we as a culture strive for the ideal of maintaining both cultural cohesiveness and individual identity.
2. Another way of looking at the struggle is to think of it as analog versus digital. The concept of individual — you, me, him, her — is a discrete one, a counting of values. The concept of a society is (ideally) continuous, a measuring of quantity — rich to poor, marginalized to centralized, etc. The increasing emphasis on diversity, individuality and difference might be seen as an increasing acuity of social perception — we are able to perceive people in their multiple roles and positions simultaneously.
3. It is crucial to remember, in this increasing social acuity, the place of the continuous, analog perception. You may encounter a woman who is simultaneously Hispanic, a lesbian, a professional and a mother, but these identities are unstable, dynamic, shifting. That is to say, an identification is not a rigid box but a rough approximation, a vague description of an individual's position in the larger society.
4. It is this notion of continuous unstable identity that I'm interested in. In that Foucaultian way, identity is a tenuous thing that arises from a highly complex interplay of power between individuals, institutions and other entities. Identity is a discourse that doesn't evolve and actualize; rather, it is rhizomic, prone to mutations, reversals and interruptions. The individual is discrete, a digit interacting with other digits, or perhaps more appropriately, an agent subjected to the complex protocols of a larger network. But the identity associated with an individual is analog, plastic, wave-like in its form and function. Our bodies are interconnected by this flow of associations and monikers.
5. In body, we are eternally separate. In identity, we are indistinguishable. The movement from you to me is the movement from shore to ocean; no distinct and permanent line exists to mark where the land ends and the ocean begins. We interfere with each other, interrupt and invoke disunity, the way two radio stations interfere.
6. Therefore, my struggle is that of reconciling sameness and otherness. In one way, I am totally isolated from others. In another way, I am you.
7. Certain activities are distinct in their disintegration of identity borders and their acknowledgement of continuous identity. Sex, art and religion are a few of them. These activities can also be used to reinforce identity borders.
8. I wonder if the use of these activities to reinforce borders naturally gives rise to hierarchy and "base/superstructure" power dynamics. And if it does, I wonder if it more often than not leads to abuse of power.

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warning

Something's coming. To speak it is to prevent it.

Posted in notes, poetry, prayer | No Comments »