Reflexivity

Here is the text of the official statement read around the world on February 4th, this one specific to the protest I attended in Boston.
The banner is from a march in (I think) Bogota.

The anti-narco-terrorism conversation continues. Can millions of people force change? We may have been disheartened – pacifists worldwide could not stop the war against Iraq, millions organizing against neo-liberal economic policies that keep the disenfranchised down have so far not had much of an impact on eradicating systemic injustice….however the number of wars in the world is down and a larger percentage of people worldwide have moved out of poverty than in any time in history. (See The Economist, The world’s silver lining, January 24, 2008.) However, each time we try to learn new tactics and improve strategies. Each time we gain new friends and allies; each time we strengthen bonds of collaboration. Each and every time we send a message to the wealthy and powerful that our tolerance for being pawns in their games of dominance is lessening.
The especial trick is not to close the vise so tightly that brutal and bloody violent resistance is the only option available to those on the other side. We have to keep squeezing, we have to force restructuring that enables alternative avenues for the expression of human desires, but we have to do it in such a way that we do not allow ourselves to become “them.” We have to do it in such a way that “they” want to become a part of “us.”

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Beginning to read Gabriel Garcia Marquez’ nonfiction concerning Colombian drug dealer Pablo Escobar’s efforts to escape extradition to the U.S. is intense. Not only am I still feeling the effects of a friend’s “news of a kidnapping,” I am 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. In the opening acknowledgments, Garcia Marquez’ describes the “belated realization” that, rather than a coincidence of several unrelated abductions occurring at the same time, his friend’s abduction was part of “a single collective abduction of ten carefully chosen individuals, which had been carried out by the same group and for only one purpose” (1996, tr. 1997, this version 2008).
I cannot seem to relocate a critical assessment of the anti-Farc protests of a few days ago suggesting that they would have no effect on the paramilitary organization. The individual quoted worked for some kind of Latin America watchdog group which has observed the situation for years. Echoing sentiments expressed by several Colombians who responded to my questions in the Facebook Discussion (UN MILLON DE VOCES CONTRA LAS FARC) and/or in my teaching weblog (A Place in Space), the regional expert argued that Farc is well aware of the popular sentiment against them and has already taken that fact into account with all of its on-going operations.
A review of Noticia de un Sequestro (News of a Kidnapping) by the New York Times offers Americans the chance

To walk a kilometer in Colombia’s shoes, let us imagine that we have a President who carries five bullets in his body as the result of an assassination attempt by drug traffickers. Let us imagine that Lady Bird Johnson and Amy Carter have both spent time in the hands of cartel kidnappers, living on tortillas, in fear of their lives in tiny cabins deep in, say, the Big Bend country. Bryant Gumble, Diane Sawyer, Katie Couric and Oprah Winfrey have all been urged by their colleagues to hang in there while they, too, endure a spell in the hands of criminals with not too much education, hairtrigger tempers and extremely high-caliber weapons. Two popular Attorneys General, thought particularly close to the President, have been gunned down, along with several successive heads of the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the Drug Enforcement Administration and of their respective field offices, as well as numerous Congressmen and a few senators.

I would not say that I belatedly realized how awful the situation is between the democratically-elected government of Colombia and a forty-year-old paramilitary called the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC), but I have definitely been on a steep learning curve. The challenge that focuses my attention is how to shift the overall dynamic from one of tit-for-tat literal violence to inexorable momentum that disbands FARC in its current formation and integrates Colombia into one non-warring polity. The popular, global demonstrations around the world against FARC on February 4th were impressive; they signal a level of emotional commitment from “the people” that needs to be harnessed in a constructive direction rather than fractured within by divisive politicking. How?
Obviously it is neither my place nor my desire to offer advice. What I can do, though, is synthesize the information I have acquired over the past few weeks since Alf and Ana were kidnapped, and continue to emphasize the power of language to literally and materially set a shape for the future. It does matter – very much – how the problem is described. In social scientific technical terms, the description of the problem sets the parameters for possible solutions. One way of understanding the power of socially constructing reality is through the concept of a frame (see a brief powerpoint on Framing.ppt presented yesterday at the School for International Training).

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There were a few Americans and at least two Dominicans in the crowd, while passersby occasionally chatted with each other. I overheard two middle-aged men (apparently strangers) engage each other:

“Do you know about FARC?”
“I’m learning!”
“They’re a serious bunch. Where are they? In Colombia I think. They had a ceasefire for awhile but just got active again.”
“Nasty dudes, huh?”
“Yeah.”

No local media covered the event; their attention presumably taken up with the upcoming presidential primary tomorrow. In Dade County, FL, however, the local newspaper announced the event this morning. Bloomberg released an article Colombians Stage `Million Voices’ March Against FARC, which interprets this event as a rebuke to Venezuelan President Chavez while not seeming to believe the protest itself will make an actual dent in the FARC’s operations. Here is some news from Bogota, which also mentions a related protest in Paris. This BBC story details some of the history that led to today’s world-wide protest. An article from Reuters describes how the protest has highlighted some political divisions within Colombia, including fear of retribution. Colombians in East Naples, Italy, protest, joining upwards of 200 cities by that reporter’s estimate. Snuffle Square blogged about a demonstration observed near a Colombian Consulate. The Christian Science Monitor has also covered the story, highlighting the Facebook angle.


I also came across a Venezuelan blog with background on Chavez‘ involvement, and another one cautioning against potential unintended consequences. A grim entry on terror compares FARC with other terroristic groups, painting a picture of increasing entrenchment of persistent random violence.
Meanwhile, a relatively random sample of generally typical U.S. undergraduate students explain why they were unable to attend the protest themselves. The page I’m linking is a “category” page: from the titles you can tell which ones relate to the protest and which are on a different subject.

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Rachel posted this story questioning the decontextualization of activist films at Sundance.
One of the filmmakers says he’ll use a website for Flow: For the Love of Water to organize around water policy. Can he? Will he really?

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Sign the petition.
Downloadable logos and images for t-shirts and signs (scroll down to get to the English versions), or make your own: white flags, Colombian flags, and/or flowers…

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Mike reached up and patted this sign to remind me to slow down. I’d asked the class why I’d gone off on a particular tangent….it related, but I had to pause for a moment, back up, where did I begin? How did I arrive where I was? What was the point?!
I came across the sign near the hallway trashcans on my way to class and I thought it was too perfect to pass up: not for them, for me! I’ve a good feeling about this group, based on how assertive they were during the first and subsequent activities. We laughed a fair amount. And – they took the material seriously. Minds at work. I like.
At some point, they’ll be designing some webpages. In the meantime, I’m using the space to post lesson plans and track our progress.
Any day now, students will start to post their first self-analyses of a decision-making process. They’ve been asked to make a real decision – to attend or not attend a protest in Boston against the FARC who occupy part of Colombia. (FARC is the organization responsible for the kidnapping of friends of a friend – close enough to touch me. I decided to be affected; I decided to care, to act, to do the little that I can do.)

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from The Spymaster, a report on the US Intelligence Community by Lawrence Wright for The New Yorker (January 14, 2008).

Ed Giorgio, a security consultant who worked at the N.S.A. under [current Director of Intellgence Mike] McConnell, and who is the only person to have been the nation’s chief code breaker and its chief code maker, said, “Early on, Mike had what many directors of the N.S.A. have near the end of their tenure — that is, an info-sec epiphany.

Giorgio warned me [reporter at large Lawrence Wright], “We have a saying in this business:

‘Privacy and security are a zero-sum game.’ “

I [Wright] asked McConnell if he believed that Al Qaeda was really the greatest threat America faces.

“No, no, no, not at all,” he said. “Terrorism can kill a lot of people, but it can’t fundamentally challenge the ability of the nation to exist. Fascism could have done that. Communism could have. I think our issue going forward is more engagement with the world in terms of keeping it on a reasonable path, so another ism doesn’t come along and drive it to one extreme or another. And we have to have some balance in terms of equitable distribution of wealth, containment of contagious disease, access to energy supplies, and development of free markets. There are national-security ramifications to global warming.”

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from Earthseed (Parable of the Sower):

God is Power –
Infinite,
Irresistible,
Inexorable,
Indifferent.
And yet, God is Pliable –
Trickster,
Teacher,
Chaos,
Clay.
God exists to be shaped.
God is Change.

I met David in the department computer lab yesterday. “So, you don’t believe in authenticity, do you?”
Nice to meet you, too!
Of course I do. Authenticity is, for me, an experience not a label, a lived moment of phenomenological alignment when the energies that compose “me” merge in concordance with the energies of a situation and other involved persons, ideas – the context. I think of “peak experiences” and the experience of “flow.”
My authentic moments usually won’t match anyone else’s, in substance or in timing – everyone will experience their own authenticity distinctly. This is why shared moments are so powerful (hmmm, which is why I am so interested in them as events with the potential to change reality – see problematic moments – and so drawn to them personally as a source of incredible nurturance. I want more!)
As I muse on this, I think there may be two “categories” of phenomenological authenticity, one that is dialectically structured and one that is dialogically intentional. The former is reactive to social structure (see a negative example of coming into alignment based on a valence (intra/interpersonal attractive force) to soak up a certain strand of environmental and communicative dynamic interaction) and the latter is empowered, coming from a deliberate and conscious turning or utilization of recognized valences into a force that acts back on the dialectical conditioning.
(btw – I’m in a thick swamp attempting to distinguish dialogical from dialectical. Neither process has control over the outcome, but to subsume “dialogue” under “dialect” is to accept a singular structuration for all of human society. No, thanks.)

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Guilty as charged. :-/
A friend last night told me that that approximately 80% of what I write makes sense, but there’s 20% when I lose her. That happened somewhere in the middle of reading yesterday’s post. We hypothesized: boring? Lack of transition or context? Possibly, we mused, I wander too deep into my own mind, and simply do not make the links apparent – such writing is then “not a finished product,” which can throw a reader off or away from the communication I attempt.
A few days earlier, another friend caught my systemic misspelling of Colombia and let me know (for which I am grateful, thanks). I was using the US version, Columbia, which refers to a different place and (obviously) invokes a much different context. Less obviously, but nonetheless apparent to a close reader, is what such a basic mistake reveals about me as an outsider. Just now, I’m up for a bit of self-chastising, as a pithy reviewer of television coverage of the US presidential campaign quotes Mark Twain:

…somewhere he said that “only presidents, editors and people with tapeworm have the right to use the editorial ‘we.’”

Dang. The thing is, I invoke “we” deliberately, as an act of membering, an attempt to constitute belonging. I started doing so, consciously and with intention, at last fall’s second Dialogue under Occupation conference, which took place in Abu Dis, Palestine. I want to insist on a base level of togetherness among everyone who has participated in either of the first two conferences as a foundation for a community focused on tangible changes in entrenched institutional systems. There is no reason not to extend the boundary of “we” to include peace activists and change agents in Colombia and elsewhere in the world. The trick, as I was able to articulate a week or so after the conference, is to name violence without doing more.
Did you follow the link? I suspect this could be one place where I lose readers. Yesterday, for instance, I referenced a graduate level communication seminar on Language as Action and Performance. This link is not as straightforward as the one above concerning how we need to stop talking violence into inevitability. You have to notice, in today’s instance, that the link feeds to a whole category of posts that I have related to each other through the label Language. Geez, even as I am explaining this (to myself as well, grin) I can see how much labor I hope you are willing to undertake. :-/ (Sorry!) The thing is, I am trying to work an epistemology, and I am still learning how to convert true beliefs into knowledge. (Another friend informs me that real philosophers limit the object/referent of “epistemology” to propositional knowledge, thereby excluding the how. My exposure to the term via pedagogy (education) and sociology will not allow a separation between the process and the outcome. Anthony Giddens’ structuration theory describes this merger, and his distinction between practical consciousness and discursive consciousness explicates the interaction between “the how” of coming to know and “the what” of knowing.)

Giddens postulates a dynamic interplay between “practical consciousness” (tacit, take-for-granted knowledge) and “discursive consciousness” (knowledge/reasons that can be verbally articulated) as social agents reflexively monitor and rationalize their activities/practices. Practical consciousness is emphasized to a greater extent in this process, however, since it is linked directly with the casual mastery of routines….

In addition to the theoretical precepts which I am actively attempting to put into conscious and deliberate, “performative” action, there is the whole unique history of me as an embodied human being with particular experiences of social life and relationships. As much as I try to think “out from” myself as a person with agency to influence events and meanings, I also attend “inward” to the ways I react and then respond to events and the meanings I make of them. The conditioned dialectical interactions are what I want to shift from the dominant external power of established structure to an internal force of dialogical interaction that both recognizes my freedom to move variably within a range and concentrate my energies on a specific structural feature where I sense possibilities for a turn from one trajectory to another.

As I watched myself (over the past few days) feel and try to articulate some humanity for the other side, for the enemy, I realized that I always do this. I did this two years ago when Israel began bombing Lebanon and many of my friends burst into outrage. Yes yes yes, the bombing was wrong and unconscionable. The reasons for the attack are not justifiable under any ethical rubric. And – to use words that demonize all Israelis by casually conflating the policies of the government with the individual choices of citizens is a language trap. I think the same dynamic applies to Farc. As awful, horrific and devastating as their actions have been on the nearly one thousand individuals kidnapped, and miserable and agonizing as the pain ripples have been, we – not a royal imposition, but a self-selected cadre of compassionate people – have to manage not to throw our resulting pain back into the world, even onto those who elicit it.

I believe we must learn to manage our own pain, because I have been guilty of acting mine out on beloved others and observing the devastating effects. Sometimes, the guilt and depression are overwhelming. In fact, being able to throw myself into a support network on behalf of a friend was a means for surviving a severe bout that struck the same day as I learned of Ana and Alf’s kidnapping. Would I have devoted so much energy if I was not so desperately trying, myself, to survive? I cannot say. What I can say, is that – having done so – my commitment is real.

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I’m receiving quite an education about Farc while learning more about myself as a participant in discourses. Two of Alf and Ana’s friends have commented on my susceptibility to rhetoric. I need to be firm in my response although I very much hope we can continue to dialogue, even if dialogue with Farc is an impossibility.
First, Juan and Javier, No! It is not that I believe in the words as a reflection of Farc’s actual intentions. I do know better than that. My initial info came from the wikipedia links posted at Thorny Days, not from any of Farc’s own self-representations (which is not to assume the wikipedia entry wasn’t originally made by a Farc member, however I do choose to exercise some trust that some compilation of minds with different political perspectives have checked out and contributed to the wikipedia entry). My view is more complicated, and my words are carefully chosen. I knew some of my thoughts were risky, but this is just it, yes? We live in risky times; how will we confront our own fears? How can we possibly manage our own pain?
Yesterday I began to read a book for my own dissertation research proposal: Stories in the Time of Cholera. The professor in a course I took last fall on “Language as Action and Performance” mentioned this anthropologically-based discourse analysis as a powerful demonstration of the power of language to shape horrific realities. The authors trace the institutional use of cultural reasoning to create and justify medical profiling,

“document[ing] the mechanisms through which denigrating images are generated through specific institutional practices and in response to concrete organizational crises, presented for public consumption, used in creating widely shared perceptions of people and events, and made the center of public policy” (2003: xvi).

I had not realized, before beginning to read, that the cholera epidemic was in Venezuela, and not too long ago (early 1990s). I was struck immediately by the rhetoric blaming Colombia (which is weird, since the Orinoco Delta is on the opposite national border, near Guyana). The deft analysis of the authors in showing how everyone’s talk about the Warao and other indígenas contributed to 500 deaths is absolutely compelling and scarily discouraging – how can such deliberately de-personalized forces ever be countered? Through the framework of medical profiling, the authors show how the words and stories of politicians, journalists, and even health care professionals create a racialized tiering of sanitary citizens and unsanitary subjects, thus pre-creating the rationale for the co-constructed inevitability of failure to prevent the cholera epidemic.

What we are part of, HereAndNow – me as an absolute newcomer, and “you” (specifically any who have suffered because of Farc, and particularly those who know Alf and Ana) – is “The Talk” that will determine the parameters of possibility for the future. Now, I needed to know the depth of the pain and passion of which Juan wrote. The words were effective: I had nightmares of rape last night. I am absolutely grateful for the education and the respectful tone, despite the obvious upset triggered by my words. We all need to be able to say “the hard words,” we cannot afford to run what Briggs and Briggs-Mantini describe as “the risks of leaving hard words out of the story” (xviii). So I hope none of you will stop confronting me on my misconceptions, ignorances, and even sheer idiocies. I cannot meet my own ethical standards if you do not insist on trying to shape them. Please do not let me off the hook.
At the same time, I believe how we characterize the real human beings who do make up the membership of Farc matters. I do not on any level agree with or condone their actions. But, let me just jump off on one of the starker facts: the forced conscription of eleven-year-old boys. Horrific, inhumane, unjust, yes. We can apply every epithet to that behavior and be correct. But what about those eleven-year-old-boys who have now grown into the young men composing some percentage of Farc’s “armed forces”? They had to survive, didn’t they?
How long and how persistently will we insist on punishing them for the fate they have had to live? Understand me, I am not excusing their actions. And – I refuse to put myself on some higher moral plane simply because I’ve never had to face the choice of killing someone or dying myself. Perhaps as an adult, now, I might, maybe, be able to take the ultimate stand and risk surrendering my own life rather than take another’s. As a child? Who among us can honestly make that claim? I am sure there are some, I do not intend to diminish anyone with that bedrock altruistic clarity. In reality, though, I think those individuals are truly rare.
No, I’m not suggesting any kind of blanket amnesty. I am saying that we must invent ways of talking that maintain some acknowledgment of humanity on the other side. Evil, as Hannah Arendt has tragically explained, is banal. And, perhaps we are not all susceptible, and/or can even break out of it despite socialization. If there is this chance, is it not the best and most effective way to insert an intervention that might actually cause the larger dynamics to shift? Meanwhile, we – injured and afraid – must not forget the common core of human instincts from which any abuse of power emanates. I do not say we excuse; I do not even say we go so far as to forgive. I do say we must understand, and from this understanding forge a better way.

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