A Place in Space: July 2008 Archives

The new UMass Journalism Department weblog documents the disturbing trend in hard news staffing/investigative journalism, linking to an article that contexts the decline of trained journalistic staffing in the age of technological expansion. The embedded example of the linked reference source is powerful and poignant, but while an individual Palestinian enacted terror in Jerusalem, the Israeli military held an entire Palestinian town under curfew in an attempt to minimize civil protests against more construction of the wall.

I received an email Monday: "Urgent!!! International Support Needed In Ni'lin." An email report yesterday from the Ni'lin Popular Committee Against the Apartheid Wall clarifies that the curfew is over but not - as claimed by an Israeli military spokesperson - because of negotiations or mutual agreements concerning the issues at stake.

Here is where reporting gets tricky, huh? The intention to illustrate a very basic point plays into a much larger - and problematic - pattern, in which alternative perspectives on particular dilemmas are represented disproportionately. The fact of the created media/news statistic (a percentage of reports roughly "pro" Israel and a percentage or reports roughly "pro" Palestinian) perpetuates the majority-minority stances already rooted in historical trajectories, thereby centering the discourse on the most sharply defined edges of the conflict instead of - what I, personally, would like to see journalism do more intentionally - creating representations that allow people to shift from entrenched positions because alternatives are opened up.

One of my post-sailing-adventure musings is, what if I had read Longitude shipboard instead of The Telling? :-)

There's no way to know, of course, what would have changed or whether those changes might have mattered, in the end. Captain explained how sailors use the variety of sounds from gongs and bells to triangulate position in fog. "Can you really tell what direction the sound is coming from?" I wondered. "In general," she replied. So there you would be, unable to see sky or shore, listening. Moving (because how can you stop?), and listening. Straining to hear a hint of familiar sound, constructing a mental map against remembered ephemera, calculating where you must be (the reckoning?), and committing yourself to being there - fixed (dead?) - in that moment. Then, you would begin to move the boat in the direction your imagined memory suggests, calculating speed and direction by wind and current with no other reference point except a longed-for next sound.

Fog is an extreme version. (Definitions of "dead reckoning" describe the process of "estimating one's current position" and then "advancing ... based upon [other] known [facts of] speed, elapsed time, and course.") In lieu of clear vision, i.e., when one must estimate location, not only might audition take prominence, some neuroimaging research shows emotional perception is also affected.

Ok, yes, you caught me - I am making a big metaphorical leap: from the literal to the representational, from the physical to the symbolic. Loss of clear sight from conditions in the external visual environment or due to perturbations in the internal affective state are not exactly the same thing: but the physicality of impaired vision on knowledge of one's geometrical position in relation to other physical objects can have (I propose!) similar effects as an internal confusion about one's status, role, or relationship (to name a few social scientific categories) in relation to comparable "position(s)" of others.

Dava Sobel details instances in which, "Too often, the technique of dead reckoning marked [any random sea captain, pre-chronometer] for a dead man" (1995, p. 14). No one died on our journey (Thank god! I hear the Captain exclaim), but we definitely mis-fixed a few crucial reference points along the way, keeping corrective navigation in turmoil.

Discouraging as Anonymous' judgment is (a pal wrote, "hey, that "anonymous" poster was way outta line! What was that all about??!!), the solution presented by "Rocks and Shoals" (Articles for the Government of the United States Navy, 1930) imposes a severe lack of ambiguity on relative social position/status. While Captain Donald I. Thomas USN (Ret.) defends the justice meted out under the original document as "speedy and fair, with the rights of the accused properly safeguarded," he ultimately celebrates the code's demise. Presumably not only because he no longer had to listen to it being read out loud once a month, but because it was a source of abuse:

"We got the message loud and clear that we were expected to throw the book at the accused and leave leniency, if any, to [a particular Base Commander]. This well-understood command influence remained until 1951, when the Uniform Code of Military Justice came into being. One of its provisions was that "no Convening authority or commanding officer could censor, reprimand or admonish any court or member with respect to findings and sentence adjudged by the Court and may not attempt to coerce or influence action of a court in reaching its finding or sentence."

Under the Uniform Code, continues Capt. Thomas: "The administration of justice took on more of the characteristics of civil law; not surprising since it was drafted by members of Congress, many of them lawyers who had served in the Armed Forces during the War. Under the Uniform Code, greater latitude was given to peremptory challenges, and the finding of guilt required a two-thirds majority in all but capital cases." (There may be hope for me, yet!) I have no idea what Anonymous' invocation of the Rocks and Shoals was "all about," but the thought that someone I met wrote so starkly is a bit disturbing - I enjoyed everyone I met. And, still, I appreciate the food-for-thought. For instance (in combination with other sources of inspiration and some creative sentence-splicing),

"The zero-degree parallel of latitude is fixed by the laws of nature; [while] the placement of the prime meridian [for fixing longitude] is a purely political decision" (Dava Sobel, Longitude, 1995, p. 4).

I've been thinking quite a bit about the eighties feminist slogan, "the personal is political." I absorbed this ethos, and attempt to live its significance. After twenty-some years of practice I sometimes feel as if I'm close (the perception never lasts for long!) I triangulate my reference points broadly: from the interpersonal sphere of my friends, to the international relations such friendships draw me into, and this blog in-between. The third axis is time; that curious dialectic between the present and the future. More often than I prefer to acknowledge, my close-up aim fails because of interference from the past.

What obscured the facts? I think it must, at least in part, be how I look - not my generic appearance, but the particular expressions that cross my face, the movements my body makes when I am feeling awkward, uncomfortable, insecure. Or, conversely, when I'm confident, psyched, exuberant! Whatever internal emotion, mood or attitude inspires the viscera, despite whatever skills or talents I've nurtured, whichever socialized or conditioned awful habits I've tried to reconfigure - I must still be appear visibly only within a certain range of possibility. And that range is associated with every previous time I "looked" that way, and potentially even with other people who appear/have appeared similarly - whether for the same or different reasons, under alternative or familiar conditions.

Despite my ambition, I am a follower. I "follow" what I perceive, reacting when caught off guard, responding when my act has a little more room to maneuver into a way to fit together. It's impossible to establish a temporally causal relationship (first this, then that) - I am not attempting such linearity. I am trying to explicate how I get caught playing into roles (behaviors, actions, attitudes) that diverge from intention and desire. How is it, in other words, that I keep appearing in certain ways that invite responses which lead me to feeling unseen?

'Tis a puzzle, no? :-)

Mike said that, talking (to himself?!) as he entertained a couple of neighborhood girls by trying to figure out one of their toys.

Yesterday was full of tugs. I spent the afternoon and evening enjoyably, after taking a much longer time than usual to blog (and cook! shhhhhhh). Being on the periphery of two kidnappings with happy endings left me full of vicarious emotion. For the last three days I have been feeling a bit de-centered, as if there's "a disturbance in The Force" (!), or - as the new roomie said, I am "out of alignment" with myself. My thinking is slow, difficult; my self-consciousness heightened. I speculate that I'm experiencing fallout from being (now) in a timespace different than expected (on land rather than still at sea), or the process of absorbing recent life lessons, or the malaise that lingers from old wounds . . .

I know I don't have the jazzy hectoring tone considered most successful in writing on/for the web. The thing is, I don't want to play into that collusively heeyyy cowboy insider attitude that Jack Shaffer promotes. Yet, I appreciate that friends do (sometimes, smile) actually read the blog and (rarer still, hence precious) give me feedback on my writing. Building "indexes" over the past few days must have put me in a summative mood, because I carried that mode into writing about Alf's freedom instead of just blogging the moment. Perhaps I'm feeling it more necessary than usual to justify my existence (I got flamed!), to explain the reasons for my choices, or otherwise try to articulate how I perceive things going together? I am also prepping to teach, and I never (ever!) stop learning.

Even though I'll probably never capture the tone of our times, my mind resonated with resemblances to another angle of Caleb Crain's reflections on online literary style. In particular, he writes (and I insert comments):

I've kept a blog for several years (ditto), and although its readership is tiny (mine too), I of course notice when the hits rise and fall. (I should pay more attention!) I seem to get more readers when I post frequently, when I write about people or topics in the headlines, when I have been drawn into a conflict, and when I write something that speaks to a self-image that a group of people share. (Hmmm, it would be interesting to know if any such patterns are evident here in Reflexivity.) Over the years I've gradually revealed more personal details (we differ in this); I still reveal very little, comparatively, but enough to entitle me to say that I feel a tug there, too. Perhaps the tugs that I feel are a better data source, come to think of it, than my blog's underemployed hit counter. If I were to interpret those tugs, I would say that writing on the internet tends to be more popular when it satisfies the reader's wish to be connected--the wish not to miss out.

Funny - is Crain suggesting an internal (his own) or external (from others) tug to reveal more? Where (with whom) does the wish to be connected originate, and can it be cultivated as a social/relational force for institutional/historical change?

Only if we act on those wishes. :-)

Yesterday will be remembered fondly by many. I received the wonderful news from Maria Claudia:

Today there are photos on Facebook. Joy in the morning! I would say Alf does not appear any worse for the wear, but no doubt changes have been etched into his character after nearly five months in captivity. Although I do not know him personally, choosing to care has constituted some of my own always-in-process character, too.

The kidnapping of Alf and his girlfriend, Ana, occurred just two weeks before the beginning of the spring semester. I wrote:

"Violence creeps closer, no matter how hard we try to keep it at bay, no matter how thickly we deny that it could happen to us or those we love." (the bubble thins)

At the time, just two months back from visiting Israel and the West Bank, I imagined some parallels between FARC and Palestine, between the Colombian government and Israel. This view was refuted or met with silence: uncontinued. (Perhaps I could have remained more involved in the conversations that I did have access to?) I was not (and am still not) invested in proving such a claim, only in thinking through how violence gets perpetuated by unyielding stances on both/all sides. Uribe (for instance) is not without fault (no government is); and the people born into life with FARC are not essentially evil.

"...in the end it's the Colombian political will -- one, to make these steps, and two, pay for them -- that has made this happen," said ... a [US] deputy assistant secretary of state for the Western Hemisphere."

That's from a story in today's NYTimes about the rescue of Ingrid Betancourt and other hostages yesterday - a coincidence of timing reminiscent of Alf and Ana's capture at nearly the same time as a massive global protest against FARC was being organized on Facebook. I spent some days working through a range of thoughts and emotions: grim realities & the force of spirit , weird twist of synchrony , and hyperempathy. Somewhere in the course of all that I decided to invite students to consider involvement.

They were (understandably) confused (!), however they rose to the occasion with a series of blog entries about deciding not to attend. Meanwhile, I read Gabriel Garcia-Marquez (News of Kidnapping), considering the long trip home,

"trying to imagine a way out for the millions of Colombians who only want to go about their daily lives, rather than being pawns in someone else's brutal "game" for wealth and power."

Perhaps it is apparent (but maybe not) that I consider average Colombians to be representative of average human beings - the great grand masses of us subject to the machinations of gargantuan social institutions and historical habit. What befalls them could confound us, too, and certainly is representative of occurrences and happenings to normal, typical folk in most countries around the globe. And there are, indeed, more organized and increasingly large protests developing: persistence will win the prize!

Ana was freed the first week of March. I mused then about coincidences of timing in-and-at the swirling center . In this situation - the random/chaotic juxtaposition of my friends, my passions, my ambitions - synchronicity abounds! I name (by choice, for the purposes of design) such events as centripetal dialogic force.

Yesterday's headline, which I saw mere moments after reading Maria's glorious announcement, read: Colombia Plucks Hostages From Rebels' Grasp. I only know a few Colombians, but they have enhanced my life in a million ways. I agree with today's NYTimes' featured journalists, Simon Romero and Damien Cave,

Wall-E was conceived in 1994 and born fourteen years later. That's a long gestation! One could argue that Wall-E was born "whole" - completely developed, a finished product, an artistic, aesthetic entirety in and unto itself. Notwithstanding the creative genius, technical sophistication, and pure brilliance of the hundreds of people who co-constructed the film, to deem it done would be a disservice to its communicative potential. Sure, the story is told with such self-deprecating humor one can readily overlook its grim source material. Heterosexual gender stereotypes persist, and the future appears predominately white - but these representations are mere gloss to the base commentary of global capitalism's devastating effect on the planet's ecology as it remains predicated on the twin engines of advertising and consumership.

I mused yesterday (on Facebook), about what A.O. Scott describes as the essential genius of all of Pixar's films:

"...this idea of an identity crisis - of a main character who is torn between the demands of his group identity and his own aspirations, ambitions and dreams." (Pixar's 4th Dimension)

My question, based on communication theory that privileges the ritual nature of communication as the primary shaper of our social (economic, intellectual, political) worlds, asked if Pixar is "determining the human condition for a generation or three?" To be precise, they are not doing this alone, but their reflection of our current situation (as illustrated in the consciousness concerning what makes us laugh at ourselves and each other) both acknowledges and reinforces other social trends. For instance, to what extent does Wall-E's clumsy and determined adoration for Eva, and Eva's haughty disdain turned affection, foreground the relational needs of people to belong and be cared for over the group needs of humanity to suck up and deal with the costs of conceding the direction of our future to impersonal institutions, such as war, law, finance, war, the profit imperative...

The interpersonal overlays the intrapersonal dilemma Scott argues is central to Pixar's successful main characters, whether they are natural rebels or reluctant heros, which is the necessity of

"finding a synthesis, or a compromise, a way of acknowledging who you are as a matter of where you come from, but also being able to express who you are as a matter of who you want to be."

In the background, unquestioned yet foundational to the story - and to our era - is the competitive quest to be a) Bigger n Larger than everyone else, bolstered by belief in a technological utopianism: we will design the machines that will save us. Unfortunately, rescue exceeds the human lifespan by several generations. Wall-E (with many more lives than a cat) displays a peculiar mix of curiosity and lonliness; not only is his directive to remove centuries of accumulated industrial garbage, his iconicity as a janitor is deliberately deployed to display an optimistic strand of pure dumb luck as the ultimate savior. He also lives out - tolerantly - the risks of examining objects closely: they tend to stick - often unfashionably so. This is how and why I suspect a pop cultural effect from Wall-E could be marshalled along with the many other contemporary strategies (overt and incidental) of innumerous people to alter some of the predictable trajectories of history.

Because here's the thing - despite everything Wall-E loves to dance! (Cute: hula-hoop and headphone vignettes.) (Dancing features prominently in friends' recent gmail status messages: "Where the Hell is Matt?" and "Chocquibtown - Somos Pacífico".) And he never takes himself too seriously - or at least, in seriously fulfilling his directive and embracing his nature, he copes with the inevitable fallout of various experimental attempts (balls, firehydrant). Pixar provides a personality template based on a way of being that has become popular, enshrining a cultural coping strategy we can turn toward the problems we face or use to mock them.

The thing is, whichever we choose, it's gonna take some time before we can measure the results.