Being (and Time) Able to Read Derrida

Those wacky scientists

are looking for a place in the brain where creativity lives.

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/08/books/08creative.html?th&emc=th

More later.

A passage from Majestrum by Matthew Hughes

This entry is only sort of for the class and may perhaps be a way into continuing with this blog.

From page 98 of Majestrum

I spoke to my inner companion, "Were you listening to my conversation with Warhanny?"
"No," he said, "I was clumping."
His answer disturbed me slightly. I was not sure I like the idea of half of my mind being engaged in activities I had never heard of. "And what is clumping?" I said.
"An intuitive exercise. I throw a scattering of facts before me and then look to see which ones attract each other and which repel."
"By what rules?" I said.
"If I had rules for it, it wouldn't be intuitive. It would be analytical, and I would be you."
"Have you always done this, this clumping?"
"I suppose I must have," he said. "It seems a familiar exercise."
Which meant that through all the years that I had prided myself on the precision of my intellect, the portion of it that had operated out of sight, in the rear pastures of my mind, had been playing an entirely different game."

The Happy (Hungry) Phantom

Happy Waterfalls

I woke up this morning with Tori Amos's song Happy Phantom running through my head. One verse captures of the flavor of something I want

so if i die today
i'll be the HAPPY phantom
and i'll go wearin'
my NAUGHTIES like a jewel
they'll be my ticket
to the universal opera
there's judy garland
taking buddha by the hand
and then these seven little men
get up to dance
they say confucius
does his crossword with a pen
i'm still the angel
to a girl who hates to SIN

And then I read an e-flux email about an upcoming "multidisciplinary event" inspired by Marcel Duchamp's last major work that has viewers look through a peep hole in a wooden door at an landscape, Etant donnés: 1° la chute d'eau, 2° le gaz d'éclairage in which what I presume must be a quote from Duchamp is used a the title for of an exhibition, I want to grasp things with the mind the way the penis is grasped by the vagina. 


I then went in search of a definition for bachelor machine and found a section of an essay by Nell Tenhaaf in a book called Feminism Art Theory that talks about bachelor machines, Duchamp, Deleuze & Guattari and ends with a fluid image. 

To speak from this fragmentary and fluid feminine place is to see that the strange conjuncture of technological mastery, autoerotic pleasure and nihilism of the masculine machines might be thought of differently. It might be thought of as a mythical territory to be reclaimed by the desiring bride.

Granted, these words/images resonate with me for reasons beyond this project, this Part II. Yet there is some reason that I think they belong in my blog. They somehow are part of my rehearsal. One of the things that I think Dean's discussion of the rehearsal does not show well is the ways that multiple threads of associative appropriations, that may seem off topic, that are not bound directly up in Dean's first story/second story, set up/punch schtick, add some oomph to a routine. 

Some rehearsing: A bit (not) to taste

While taking notes on the essays in Appropriation (I worked from later sections to earlier sections in reverse order), I came across an image in Breton and Eluard's essay The Object of a ball.

"Objects with symbolic functions were envisaged following the mobile and silent objects: Giacometti's suspended ball which reunited all the essential principles of the preceding definition, but still retained the methods proper to sculpture." (A, 31).

I have been thinking about mouths open and closed, and ways they might be forcefully opened or closed, as a central image for my routine. The image of Giacometti's ball made me think of ball gags, which are an intense way for mouths to be forcefully open and yet blocked. The item is question can help elicit many different moods- it can be used to make a scene tragic, dangerous, sexy or comedic. 

Image from t-shirt found online of ball gag and a slogan of sorts.

More often than not images of ball gags are used for comedic effect. Episodes of the recently canceled Ugly Betty had a "love dungeon" stocked with clothing and sex toys associated with S&M sex culture. Paddles, whips, ball gags are all props that poke fun at the excesses of two magazine tycoons, Fay Summers and Bradford Meade. The audience is supposed to find this funny because Fay and Bradford are powerful and because they were old and still "getting it" on this non-normative way. Part of the humor comes from the transgressions of implied "shoulds." The powerful should be in more control of themselves (S&M despite being all about control tends to symbolize lack of control/excess when used comedically). The old should not be getting it on.   I think this is similar to how fat people are used in our popular media- they are often used for comedic effect, and it involves all sorts of shoulds.

This is important because our policy issues boil down to arguments about what we should and shouldn't do. 

Giacometti's ball lead to me to ball gags. The image of the mouth forced open but blocked is potent. I began searching for images of ball gags. I specifically wanted images of men's mouths opened and blocked with the ball gag. It is surprising to me, especially considering the ration of submissive men in S&M culture, that a Google image search did not turn up many images of men with ball gags in their mouths in the first few pages- and I was specifically querying "men with ball gags in their mouths." But it did turn op the image of the t-shirt that I inserted above (I'm not sure if every one will see this as I laid it out due to folks email programs).

And it turned up an image labeled "The Fat Man's Ball."

I decided to try to put them together in some way. The Fat Daddy Capitalists- here a figure of satire- with the sly, slightly witty slogan professing membership in a S&M sex culture. But first I wanted to be about both food and speech.

And then I wanted the slogan to be like a cummerbund on one of the "fat daddy" figures which I made into a melting mass- sort of a homage to Cadmus's images of Gluttony. Obviously, my photoshop skills are limited, but it gets a bit of the effect I want. 

A Kruger like experiment

In the mode of comedic unhinging to crack up critical thinking, in the manner of a Barbara Kruger piece.

Routine Movements

Two quotes from  Weighing the Evidence on Exercise by Gretchen Reynolds with just a twist of lime to flavor them.

"Exercise “re-established the homeostatic steady state between intake and expenditure to defend a lower body weight,” the study authors concluded. Running had remade the rats’ bodies so that they ate less."
A hopefully productive reworking: Routine remakes our thoughts' bodies so that they eat/taste more.

"Standing, for both men and women, burned multiple calories but did not ignite hunger. One thing is going to become clear in the coming years, Braun says: if you want to lose weight, you don’t necessarily have to go for a long run. 'Just get rid of your chair.'"

To twist our thought, we may not need grand gestures, it may be as simple as getting pulling the seat from under our own thoughts.

A short post on Appropriation

Some quotes that I find interesting.


Richard Prince: you have to play the picture, you can't play yourself.


Kruger: I am prone to a kind of lascivious optimism. I want to question the notions of heroism and skew the conventions which loiter around depiction. 


Yve Lomax as quoted by Tickner: she knocked some metaphors off the table.


Stezaker: What is hidden in that surplus, that excess [of images], is what interested me, because it's clear that it is the tension between the world of excess and the world of everyday reality governed by its rationalist forces


Aragon quoting Ducasse: a maxim does not need to be corrected. It needs to be developed.


Debord and Wolman: Detournement is less effective the more it approaches rational reply.  


Duchamp: use a Rembrandt as an ironing board. 


Warhol: when you see a gruesome picture over and over again, it doesn't really have any effect


Retort: Empire and "Jihad", two virulent mutations of the Right.

Topics overlapping: obesity dances with health insurance

There is much to chew on in An Insurer's New Approach to Diabetes, whether one is focused on my public policy issue obesity or Wendy's policy issue heath care/insurance.  

Both UnitedHealth and the C.D.C. want to expand on the success of a clinically proved program that has been offered by the Y. Based on evidence drawn from that program, people who are pre-diabetic and lose just 5 percent of their body weight can reduce their chances of developing the disease by almost 60 percent. The C.D.C. is also considering ways to encourage organizations beside the Y to develop similar programs.

What is most interesting to me is that this program's success is founded on a regular (weekly) routine of social gatherings as well as solo work. This is a stretch, but I want to connect the idea of this social routine with what it means to think the event.

Unhinging productivity

Barbara Kruger in interview tells us, "I think the 'C word' [criticism] can still be operational, can still work to put into place certain procedures and ways of looking, which have a tumultuously unhinging relationship to the etiquettes of power" (A, 115).

We should be unhinged, productively. I propose a Mad Hatter move in which as we rehearse our routines we remember that "detournment is less effective the more it approaches rationale reply" (A, 35). The "plane of immanence . . . implies a groping experimentation and its layout resorts to measures that are not very respectable, rationale or reasonable. These measures belong to the order of dreams, of pathological processes, esoteric experiences, drunkenness, and excess" (WIP?, 41). We are to give, for our own work, "witness to the abrupt coming together of unrelated, even incoherent thoughts" and "shameless transgression" (M, 130 and 131) "Proper grammar and syntax have nothing with making a joke funny" or a joke-machine run (SUC, 60).

I thought I wanted to use the understated overstatement as the tone for the voice of my stand up conceptual persona. My obsession with the idea of restraint (rules, norms, systems to pull meaning out of chaos) in the texts leads to its opposite. I do not wire my jaw shut to lose weight. 

To create meaty work, worth its weight, as I weigh these matters, as I am way laid by my manners, I, as the mad fool, have to unhinge my jaw. I gorge and vomit. 

I will be The Biggest Loser. To lose the weight, to lose my way, to lose my preconceptions, to loose my trek. 

This is in the mode of the Brazilian film/literature/art that uses anthropophagy as a tactic. (http://www.lorenzogunn.com/tropicalia.pdf). I try to ingest and transform some of the power of, take the strength of theory and popular culture.  

And to bring it back to image, we should let our images consume us. To quote Brazilian artist Helio Oiticica, "It is the image that devours the spectator." I want to unhinge the jaws of my images so they eat my thinking, digest and transform it. 

bit=byte=bite

routine=diet (die it, dye it, dial it, deal it)

twist=unhinge

A bit rehearsed in an email now with some images and links

A phrase I have turning in my head is "It's all over until the fat lady does not sing." An stereotypically large opera diva as the statue of liberty stands on on side of a set of scales- the other scale is weighted down with books and studies and facts and tables and laws and arguments about obesity. She weighs less than these weighty tomes. The scale is made of a distorted image of the logo for The Biggest Loser.  The opera diva's mouth is sewn shut yet things are sliding in and out of her mouth at the seams.

The scale with the tomes is the hungry maw, the hungry ghost, the figure of gluttony (referencing Paul Cadmus).

Her scale is a bridle- she stands on the mouth piece, the leather straps forming a cage around her- leading to reins, some in her hand, some in the "hands" of the tomes. Some strap down the books/laws/agruments/facts/tables/studies. All of this is set on a plate, as if the viewer is a diner about to dig in.

Fat tax: a taxing diet

Quote from Health Official Willing to go the Mat Over Obesity and Sugared Sodas.

A response to the "crusading" Dr. Richard Daines, who is trying to get a penny-an-ounce tax on sugared sodas passed in New York State, from supermarket owner Mr. Nelson Eusebio:

“Educating people helps them more than taxing them,” Mr. Eusebio said. “If taxation was a form of diet, New Yorkers would be the healthiest people on the planet because we are the most overtaxed people on the planet.”

I like this image of taxation as a form of diet. In my mind it links to the larger dyad of restraint/lack of restraint that seems to be threading through my understanding of not only my target but most of CATTt.

A minor textual detournement of Lifeload and Multitude

Kind of sort of of a cut up of a passage from Lifeload, a fantasy novel by Jo Walton, (p. 1) and a passage of Multitude by Paol Virno (pp. 52-53 and 61).

If you go far enough to the defect of semanticity, they say, you come to the lands where people are like statues, going through a defined series of monotonous signals each day out of pure routine. The world dries up. Acts are without power.

Contrariwise, if you set off to the excess of semanticity, people become feyer and stranger, more powerful maybe, but less able to remember who they are from moment to moment, until at last they run together and separate as fast as rainbows, an unstable and contained continuum, and only the gods can keep themselves whole. Power is without acts.

Between these extremes falls the katechon, where folks have wit and will enough to oscillate between the negative and the positive, to restrain but not remove the regression to the infinite.

Linguistic games with a scrap of an email

Virno uses the joke as a model for how human creativity, how innovation, works/is possible. "Jokes are the diagram for innovative action" (Virno, 74). Jokes make use of fallacy. At the end a section, he asks what it means that creativity is structured around faulty reasoning, around error. I'd like to suggest that all our linguistic games, all our communication is in some senses rooted in error. I quote an email I wrote in the character of Bishop Bishop in response to someone asking her whether or not it was possible to communicate with an image.

It isn't a consolation, but we misunderstand each other almost as often as we understand each other. Human communication (text, speech, body language, images, etc) is full of errors, gaps, glitches, misunderstandings.

There is a whole tradition of theater (the absurdists) that deal with the inability of humans to communicate. The work of Ionesco, Beckett, even Albee to some extent, are good examples of how a form predicated on dialogue paradoxically uses that form to emphasize how difficult or even impossible communication is. Yet, the paradox is even deeper because we understand what they saying, the meaning of their work is fairly clear, something is communicated.

Watching a young child who is in the process of learning how to speak- we might suppose that we learn to communicate orally by trying out different combinations of sounds and having people reinforce certain of those combinations in specific ways. The child says ba, often just for the pure pleasure of forcing lips and vocal chords to move and make noise, and the parent responds, "Bottle? Do you see your bottle?" So in some ways, misunderstanding is rooted in the our ability to understand. It is bedrock to it. Without those initial misunderstandings, misinterpretations of the child's vocalizations, the parent wouldn't make an emphasis that channels that sound towards specific words. I find the idea that misunderstanding might be required for eventual understanding to be glorious. But then, admittedly, I am perverse.

A page from my thesis paper that is pretty much on topic

[text in red is from writing by Bishop Bishop]

The joke-like delivery can be a powerful bait and switch, hiding deadly earnest ideas. A playful delivery can make a serious idea “pop.” Some of it is that the surprise, the novelty, of the joke opens us up. Comedian and teacher Greg Dean tells us, “In order to work, a joke has to surprise you.”

 Some of it is that my generation (Generation X) and following generations, for better and worse, is disposed to prefer irony. Some of it is that the stark contrast between a comedic style of delivery and serious content helps us see things more clearly. 

I suppose I should not expect a well rounded definition of the erotic from the author of Story of the Eye a freak fest of disturbing porn. Bad boys like Bataille really are romantics at heart. Instead of romanticizing flowers and chocolates and communion and warm fuzzy feelings, they romanticize shit and death and pain and isolation and deviance. I may have mentioned it before, but I’m suspicious of romantics- whether they are the happy-happy-joy-joy kind or the wallow-in-their-own-excrement kind.

In Multitude: Between Innovation and Negation, Paolo Virno tells us that a  “joke is an action that undermines and contradicts the prevalent belief-system of a community (endoxa), thus revealing the transformability of the contemporary form of life.”

I playfully, gleefully race back and forth across the boundaries between the comedic and the non-comedic because it seems a way to underscore one of the central tenets of Bishop Bishop’s Mission, which is to not put our faith in fixed meanings but to learn how commit just enough to get something done but not so much that we shatter as our understandings of what those things ought to be shift (and shake). 

In a piece like Cant of Can’t, small bits of humor- the punning title, an unsubtle emphasis on “the Not So Good Words” of  “the Good (and Not So Good Words),” the sarcastic recasting of Nike’s slogan and the oblique wink at how popular understandings of religion overemphasize the power of “positive thinking”- leads not to a laugh but to what some of my audience said was a powerful and useful confrontation with the limits of our lives.

A short post on Virno

Some useful threads from Paolo Virno's Multitude: Between Innovation and Negation:

The potential dangerousness of the human animal is also what makes it possible to innovate.  The ability to imagine/create "that which can be different from the way it is" creates chances to danger and creativity. Truly radical evil has the same root as the good life. Institutions only protect us if they part of the same dangers they try to protect us from.

Contemporary political institutions function as a permanent state of exception. The multitude (the One of many) is the fundamental form of political existence. Virno proposes the ideas of the katechon (that which restrains and contains without destroying) as the institution that best adapts itself to the permanent state of exception.

He choose jokes as a model for creativity. Whoever coins a joke does something new. Every joke contains the norm and a fragment of the state of exception. He looks at Freud (jokes, dreams as source of information), Aristotle (phroneis, fallacies) and Wittgenstein (semisolid, semihard nature of rule that is the test and the rule) in depth.

He suggests the joke or the fallacy, which points to the rule/norm while breaking/changing/playing with it and points to the fact that whole meta structure of rules/norms, as a model for how political innovation might happen. The creative moment of the witty quip is also the same type of thinking that Virno wants for our politics. The creative political move can come up with a third way. To use his example of the exodus: not staying in slavery with Pharaoh, not rebelling against Pharaoh- but going out into the desert.

Explaining the political punching bag post

According to Dean, a stand-up routine is a series of loosely linked jokes on a central topic told with attitude. Each joke shares the same basic structure. There is a set up, which has a premise and a 1st story followed by a punch with a premise that shares a connector with the premise & 1st story of the the set up but that reinterprets it to tell a 2nd story that pokes holes in a target assumption. Jokes in routine often have tags that extend the work already done by the joke to get another bang for the buck or there may be transitions between jokes.

Following Dean's structure, I break down the first couple of minutes of Colbert's routine. This drains all the water out of the routine's swamp, but it allows us to take pictures alligators (with ticking clocks in their bellies), so we can build our bit/byte/bite of a routine.

Topic:  The bill introduced by Congressman Posey (Birther movement and its spawn)

Intro: The character of pundit allows for easier introduction of new routine as new bit of news. 

Joke

Punch premise: introducing a bill will increase rumors, and is a crappy/stupid thing to do

Set up premise: introducing a bill will quash rumors, and is an act of kindness

Set up: Bill’s bill was part of his plan to squash rumors that Obama was ineligible to be president

1st story: putting focus on something stops rumors

Target assumption: He was trying to help

Connector: focus on rumors

Reinterpretation: He didn’t help

2nd story: putting focus on something increases rumors

Punch: by getting those rumors into as many outlets as possible (this is a sarcastic punch- an obvious problem stated as if it is not a problem)

Tag: To quell rumors, demanding test to determine if FL congressmen are part alligator.

Joke

Set up: I’ve had enough with the reckless whispering

Punch: But the rumor is . . .

Joke

Set up: We’ve all been in the place of getting some hot gator love

Punch: Most of us remember to use protection

Segue: Bill couldn’t get a co-sponsor, interview with Posey

Political punching bag

The Colbert Report	Mon - Thurs 11:30pm / 10:30c
Illegitimate Grandson of an Alligator
www.colbertnation.com
Colbert Report Full Episodes Political Humor Fox News

Baby Fat Facts

Baby Fat Not Be So Cute After All suggests that all the policy changes aimed at school aged children (reducing access to sugared sodas, revamping school lunches by adding salad bars) may be too little, too late. Research points to evidence that signs of childhood obesity, and the related health problem of diabetes, begin in infancy, even in the womb.

One of the most convincing studies on the link between gestational diabetes in the mother and diabetes in her children was done almost 10 years ago among Pima Indians. Siblings born after the mother developed Type 2 diabetes had a higher body mass index throughout childhood and were almost four times as likely to develop diabetes as siblings born before the diagnosis.

“The intrauterine environment of a woman with diabetes overnourishes the fetus,” said the study’s author, Dana Dabelea, an epidemiologist at the Colorado School of Public Health. And that, she added, may “reset the offspring’s satiety set point, and make them predisposed to eat more.”

There a many reasons that I find this research troubling, especially the ways in which it would be easy to blame fat women for harming their fetuses. In a Left Hand of Darkness sort of way, I could see a time in which fat women of breeding age were locked up into prison and made lose weight to insure a healthy, non-fat next generation.

But for some reason, in a non-logical tangential step sort of way, the idea that the battle to not be fat starts in the womb, that restraint and lack of restraint are issues from before birth, makes me think of Virno's equation of the dangerousness of humans with our capacity to innovate (Virno, 20).

It's Not Easy Being

It's Not Easy Being Fat Again by Alessandra Stanley is a review of a new reality show "Kirstie Alley’s Big Life." I posted this link without any commentary weeks ago in a bookmark for later sort of way. At the time, we did not yet have a clear picture of the tale/tail of Part II of the blog.  What interested me at the time was the sheer number of TV shows about obesity.

Gaining back lost pounds is every dieter’s nightmare, of course, and “Big Life” takes its place in a widening spectrum of obesity television. Ever more extreme seasons of “The Biggest Loser” are matched by myriad variations, which over the years have included “More to Love,” “Dance Your Ass Off,” “X-Weighted,” “Big Medicine,” “Honey We’re Killing the Kids,” “Bulging Brides” and “I Can Make You Thin.”

Stanley complains that Alley's second look at being fat is tragedy.  "The self-indulgence and denial that were hyped for laughs on “Fat Actress” are still in play, but without the same wit or satiric bite." She wants it to be comedy.


While there are plenty of problems with Stanley's positioning of the show (the stereotype of the jolly fat person that pokes fun at her own obesity to entertain us being just one), I think her desire for a more comedic flavor has much to do with wanting a show that is more hopeful than despairing. Laughing at and through your troubles, can be denial or well-disguised bitter self mockery, but often it shows resiliency, flexibility and an ability to tell a narrative about yourself that helps you keep on keeping on even with weighted down by things that are difficult to change or sustain.


Our creation of like-but-not-quite-joke-machines is a way to uncover the unthought rooted in the hopeful belief that it is possible to innovate. It is not that the comedic is truer than the tragic or that the comedic is inherently hopeful; much comedy is rather bleak about the human condition when we cut through its protective laugh layers. Yet the comedic attitude does offer a wider range of possibilities than the tragic. As we try to twist our thoughts out of shape to find new thoughts, we want the option that gives us the most flexibility. 

Just a little food for thought

From Democracy Now! headlines for Monday, March 15, 2010

Study Finds Link Between Childhood Obesity and School Lunch

A new study from the University of Michigan has found middle-school students who regularly eat lunch provided by their schools are more likely to be overweight and have higher levels of cholesterol than those who eat meals brought from home. Researchers said only six percent of school-supplied meals meet the nutritional requirements set by the US Agriculture Department.

Protecting the poor with policy

Just a link to a NYT editorial, Healthy Solution: Taxing Sodas on a proposed NY tax on sugary sodas and beverages. The comparison is made between the positive impact of taxes on cigarettes, which are said to have made a dent in the number of smokers, and a possible impact of a tax on soda.  The editorial is a disturbing plea to pass paternalistic policy to help the poor (alliteration, what a joy).  I agree with the tax, but I dislike the attitude that I am finding in more and more editorials.  This attitude suggest that poor people, like the children who also are the focus of much of the discussion of possible policy on sodas and junk food, need to be protected. There is an implied equation of the poor with children, as those who do not know and cannot choose better, so "we" have to know and choose for them. And while that is true to in some respects for our children; I do not think it is true for the poor.

My main problem is that it is not just the poor who are getting fat (off of sugary sodas, bad carbs, etc). The percentages are higher among the poor, but the problem cuts across class divides. Everyone is getting fatter (though there is some evidence that the rate of increase has stabilized recently). We have to be careful of position those that are fat as an other over there instead of us over here.

On a personal level, since I've cut out sugary soda as a daily beverage (I occasionally have a coke as a dessert like treat), and that is pretty much the only thing I've done in terms of my diet or exercise, I've lost 15 pounds that I have kept off easily.

Animal open to the would

I have read the first 32 pages of  Paolo Virno's Multitude: Between Innovation and Negation.  I will  do the obligatory sum up posts to try to capture central ideas that lead to instructions for the project after I've read more of the text.

Now, I want to let a give a few of the ideas stirred up by reading the text a place to stretch their legs. These musings are not directly part of the project, but they part of the zig zag path that leads me there.

I can only read theory a chunk at a time. I read a bit; then I have to set it down for a while. I have to give my brain space to deal with all the thoughts directly related to the text and the (often multiple) relay races down associative thought trails started by reading that chunk of text. If I don't, I won't be able to concentrate on the next chunk of text. My brain will be too distracted. The trick for me has been to learn how to productively use my inability to focus on just one idea. I still am finessing this system, but it seems to work best when I give myself some space for all the generative, associative thoughts and then spin them into a funnel, a spiral, through which I can look. All the spinning ideas create a focus point at their center.

So here are a couple of ideas spinning in the spiral of my thought tornado:

1. Having been involved in what many would call the radical (anarchist/socialist) left, I have often been frustrated with the assumption that humans are basically good. This leads to inefficient systems for decision making, bad decisions and a tendency to demonize people within the community who commit an act seen as bad/evil/wrong (sexual assault is a persist problem). If we are basically good, then we have to choose to do evil, which makes our sins more heinous. Even though many ascribe to the notion that it is the systems (of oppression, etc) that shape our behavior, somehow when it gets down to the individual level, people do not want to think that the potential for violence resides within them. The perpetrator is classed as other, as "not man."

2. I don't think we are basically good or basically bad. What I have thought for a long time is that every human (and human institution) has the possibility of acting in a many, very different ways (constructive, destructive) for all sorts of reasons (many of them not logical). A radical potentiality. I appreciate the way that Virno plots this out even if he equates it with the "innate destructiveness of our species" (24). I am overall sympathetic with the case he lays out, but I'm not sure if aggressiveness automatically equates with violence. It is outside the scope of this project, but I want to note that looking at how aggressiveness might be distinguished from violence could be interesting. Also, that not all violence is "bad." I appreciate the fact that Virno calls it "so called evil." I think that qualification is important.

3. This musing is completely tangential; just a thought about wit and public policy. Really this thought falls more within the realm of the Marchand reading, but it was more directly caused by reading the Virno. Right now in Gainesville, there is a campaign to get the city council to lift the absurd daily limit placed (and other such restrictions) on the number of meals that various homeless shelters can provide. It seems that what needs to happen is for all the restaurants and grocery stores to set a limit on the number of meals that can be provided to elected officials in any given day (let's say one). Obviously, would be impossible to carry out as an actual campaign move, most importantly because I'm sure many businesses downtown approve of the limit. But it could be filmed as a short comedy sketch. And posted online and spread through social networks.

Humor and its discontents

I am fascinated by the possibilities of producing modernist tableau(x) featuring the conceptual persona of the stand up somehow telling a vital anecdote relating to the concept of routine. I haven't read the Dean on stand up comedy yet (ah, spring break- a time to catch up and get ahead on reading, cleaning, writing), but I have some thoughts/musings/opinions already.

We have been told that following Virno (which we are just starting to read) to treat our public policy issue as a joke. The interesting thing about jokes, about humor, is that often at the core, are anxieties about important issues. Humor is a way to deal with anxiety. I discussed this in my post Selling chubby hubbies vacuums. Humor is one place we can play out behaviors and thoughts that are less socially acceptable. There are lines that we are not supposed to cross but getting damn close to those lines, crossing over them now and again, taking risks, is what marks the most memorable comedy sets/comics.

Bodily functions will always be a source of humor. Funnily enough, becoming more accepting of bodies and their functions and limits actually can increase our tendency to make jokes about the body. I think this is because even for those of us more accepting of bodies that fart and shit and belch and squirt and piss and smell and make all sorts of odd noises, there still is anxiety about how much we cannot control those functions.

Almost twenty years ago, over a Christmas holiday, I got sick with a dreadful flu that made me spend quality time in the bathroom for four days. My father got the same flu but only for two days. At the time, I made some joke about how he should have to suffer the flu for four days- this is not the sort of joke that would play for a crowd- it was a family, in crowd sort of a joke. And for years after that horrible Xmas shitfest, my father and I would make jokes about my jokingly serious, seriously joking anger that he only had the flux for two days.

All this discussion about bodies is important, because "fat" bodies often are the butt of the joke. We have anxieties about obesity; so as a culture we make (often cruel) jokes about fat, fat people and their behavior. My own family often has dealt with our tendency to pack on pounds (and not just 10 to 30 pounds extra, more like 100 to 300 pounds extra) by making jokes- often self deprecating, very earthy jokes.

A cookie less a day does not keep the fat away

at least according to this NYT article, In Obesity Epidemic, What's One Cookie.

The gist of the article is that the "small changes add up" campaign of first lady Michelle Obama is a misleading message. The "small changes add up" message basically says if you just cut or burn 100 extra calories a day, it leads to significant changes over time- 1 pound in 35 days, 10 pounds in a year.

The reality is, according to an article in The Journal of the American Medical Association, that the body's adaptive mechanisms almost always shift to compensate one way or the other for a small change like 100 calories; and unfortunately, our bodies are a bit better and more prone to help us keep weight on when we cut or burn 100 calories more a day.

Small changes in calorie consumption are not completely a waste of time. Those changes can help people from gaining weight.

The conclusion of the article is that obesity is not something that most individuals can tackle on their own. Quoting Dr. Ludwig, it suggests that a large scale shift in policy and education needs to happen. The last quote is interesting because while I sort of of agree with the premise that it is not a matter of self-will- it positions the poor as somehow more helpless than other groups (this is true to some extents but very troubling).

“If we just expect that inner-city child to exercise self-control and walk a little bit more, then I think we’re in for a big disappointment.”

An Introduction of Sorts, Part I

This blog is the first project for Digital English, a class taught by Dr. Greg Ulmer during the spring 2010 semester at the University of Florida.

We are using a system called the CATTT (which I'll explain in the second post) as a heurectical experiment to create a "concept" for the internet environment.  The central premise is that while the book format is a superb way to work out theoretical ideas in literacy, it is not the right one for electracy.  This all is based on a discussion of three apparatuses for knowledge- orality, literacy and electracy- which create/solicit/demand different methods and tactics.

The experiment asks, "what parts of theory work on the internet?  what parts do not?" One of the motivations behind this experiment is to take back the concept factory back from commerce.

We are using five texts, but Part I (Project I) focuses on two texts and a public policy issue. The texts discussed in this blog are What is Philosophy? by Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari and Advertising the American Dream: Making Way for Modernity 1920 to 1940 by Roland Marchand. The public policy issue, often but not always a disaster, is different for each student. My public policy issue is obesity. As the blog has progressed I have focused my attention on the question of calories- too many, good versus bad, teaching people about calories.

An Introduction of Sorts, Part II

For both Projects/Parts I and II, we are using the CATTT. Unfortunately, I cannot find my notes from the first day of class, which were quite detailed about what the CATTT is/does, so I am having to hodge podge based on my notes from other class sessions, scanning of Dr. Ulmer's blog and my recollections.

The CATTT is an acronym for a five stage "device" for developing ideas heurectically. Ulmer compared the CATTT to the positions (past, present, future) in a three card tarot spread.  The CATTT becomes OUR CATTT as we place "cards" into the "five card spread."

Below I'm listing the names of the CATTT's slots as well as the particular idea/text slotted in our CATTT (so far) and some rationale, where appropriate:

• Contrast: Commerce as detailed in Marchand's Advertising the American Dream. Deleuze and Guattari fix commerce as our contrast in What is Philosophy?
  
• Analogy: Appropriation
  
• Theory: the idea of the concept and how to develop it, from WIP? by D&G
  
• Target: a public policy issue/disaster (in my case obesity), this gives us a handle to crank the other parts through
  
• Tale: site of sythesis (this is the one that seems simplest and yet I'm not quite sure I've got it).

This table from Ulmer's blog is helpful for Part/Project I.

An introduction of Sorts, Part III

Part or Project I for the class is to develop a poetics, a set of instructions, out of ideas found in D&G and Marchand. We elaborate those instructions by using five categories to define our posts. Those five categories are proper name (self contextualization), target/event (our particular policy issue), concept (ideas from D&G), commodity (ideas from Marchand), heurectics (our attempts to define specific instructions for our poetics, with some background) and blogetics (tale, meta on how the blog works as a medium for thinking/developing theory).

I have found that most of my posts end up combining more than one category; the category of "proper name" seems much more interesting to me woven into a posts covering at least one of the other categories.

Some words in not quite random clusters to get it started

obesity, public policy, public health, moral panics, popularization of scientific data, body image

french theory, philosophy, Deleuze & Guattari, Badiou, the event, the concept

Plants vs. Zombies, acid baths,

cracks, fissures, bogs, swamps, fens "Hey, swampy!"

The Fat of said Chewing

I do not have much time; sometimes that is a good thing; it means I have to focus in, get "right at the meat of things" (lines from Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? pop all the time these days). I have studied the issue of obesity in depth, in part because of a creative project for stage that I hope some day to finish, in part because of a family history of morbid obesity (I technically am obese according to the popularized BMI tables). What I am most interested in about the issue is how scientific data is popularized and understood/misunderstood by public health officials, journalists and the public at large (word play only slightly intended). How do public officials take scientific data, a less conclusive body of facts and figures than popularly understood, and make policy to address the "obesity epidemic?" And how do they make sound policy that isn't unduly influenced by the moral panics about obesity that have nothing to do with health and have to do with class, race and status and the selling of goods? And how can we acknowledge that obesity is a problem without giving in to the madness in which the bodies of young women with an abnormally low level of body fat are presented to us as "beautiful" and "ideal" and "attainable" to sell us clothes, dieting products and the like?

There are many policy issues that come up because of this crisis, this public health disaster, but I am not yet sure where to focus. I am most interested in finding an issue where the scientific facts are less conclusive than the way they are presented in popular discourse, but that is a secondary concern for this project. I may focus in on the public health policy nightmare in which poor and working class people are increasingly obese and undernourished.

Get out your brooms

I start where I am. I sit with laptop resting on legs extended (and propped on another chair) in the one semi-comfortable chair in the house (the other comfortable chair doing its civic duty and being a significant object, perhaps it almost is a character, on stage for the run of Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?. The background music is the rough spinning, sloshing sounds of the washing machine's work, and faint, floating bits of unintelligible dialogue and the slightly louder crashes and yells of action scenes as my spousal unit watches ch131.com, a content pirate's (thinking of Josh's musings) dream.

You can see Avatar, which still is on the big screen, on ch131.com. I haven't watched anything on this channel; not because I'm opposed to a little bit of piracy- the whole academic enterprise, despite many people's misconceptions about ownership and originality is a game in which we all take five finger discounts- wantonly. We all thieve and plunder; we get a little booty now and again.

When we, if we are so lucky, create our concept(s), we will credit and source, but we can never point to all the points of information, inspiration, ideation. We have/will have read, spoken, listened, watched, learned to/from so many, too many sources. Our "plane of immanence" is a "sieve stretched over the chaos" (Deleuze and Guattari, 43).

"The problem of philosophy is to acquire a consistency without losing the infinite into which thought plunges" (Deleuze and Guattari, 42). We, after the "witch's flight" of thought (which I will come back to in another post) have to "Round about the cauldron go;" we have to stir the pot. We will sweat over our cauldrons, trying to find just the right container for our concept(s), spilling hot liquid onto our clothes and skin, getting burned in the process, in the hopes that we  make a potion that works some magic, and  that someone will plunder our plunges.

Blogetics

There are five categories of posts that we are supposed to cover in our 30 odd posts for Project I- proper name, target, concept, commodity, heuretics and blogetics. Blogetics is the category in which we get to indulge in meta- or write about what it means to use the blog as a medium for theory.  It is the category that will have, at most, only a few posts. A little meta goes a long way; too much meta is a means to avoid the meat of an issue, a delaying tactic, a sign of anxiety.

I have another post which is kind of sort blogetics- though it focuses more on the development of my ideas for an email. I have avoided writing about the meta of blogging theory because honesty, I dislike the blog format. I've used it for another project, one better suited to the blog and still find it lacking.

I am not comfortable using it as a place holder for my rough and ready ideas; I do not like drafting in the blog form. I had an active livejournal account for over a year. I found that while there were plenty of typos and grammatical errors, I would spend an large amount of time crafting my words.  I've done much thinking about these ideas, but I don't enjoying thinking through the blog.

Right now, I want to tear the blog out of the computer screen and crumple it up. I'd rather code a website so I could customize with more precision the placement of text and images and videos and sound files and links. I hate being constrained by time stamped format of the blog- I'd like to re-order my posts so they make more of a narrative but to do that involves jerry rigging the dates.

The advantage of leaving the posts as they lie, is that it is a "truer" representation of how I approached the work. When I put pieces together.  Except as I go back and refine ideas in posts (places where I've typed more here later), we lose the history of my thinking.

I decided to put the blog posts into a narrative order reversing the way the blog archives posts- but there are two narrative orders at play. There is a sort of step by step following of ideas developed in D&G and then in Marchand. And there is an ordering that still tries to preserve how my thinking developed, which was not always in a step by step way.

What is philosophy

According to Deleuze and Guattar, philosophy is the art of inventing, fabrication and forming concepts (p. 2); its object is always to create new concepts (p. 5). They point to how concepts are developed because they want new concepts to be created to save us from the disaster of the third age of the concept (commercial professional training).

The following is primarily pulled from the pages 76 and 77 from the chapter on conceptual personae.

A philosophy (is this equal to Concept with a captial "c") presents/needs three elements. It must lay out a pre-philosophical plane (immanence) with diagrammatic features (Reason), it must invent and bring to life conceptual persona (insistence) with personalistic features (Imagination) and it must create the philosophical concepts (consistency) with intensive features (Understanding).

The order these activities are carried out is not important, but it important to remember that while they pass through one another, they are not deduced from one another (p. 81, p. 77).

A list for the well addressed concept

I'm going to make a list of what seem to be key ideas related to the concept of the concept. laid out by Filles Deleuze and Feliz Guattari (D&G for short) in What is Philosophy?

A concept:

• is created by problems thought to be badly understood or posed (16)
  
• relates back to other concepts and has components that in turn may be concepts (19)
  
• speaks the event, not the the essence or thing (21)
  
• is not a proposition, as in logic (22)
  
• have a proper name, these proper names are intrinsic conceptual persona that haunt a particular plane of consistency (24)
  
• are not a question of right or wrong; concepts are replaced if a new problem with a new plane are defined. the "old concept" is not wrong, but it no longer has meaning (27)
  
• lacks meaning to the extent not connected to other concepts and not linked to a problem that it resolves or helps to resolve (79)

A Plane in the Ass

Another one of my listings of characteristics, this one for the plane of immanence

The plane of immanence

• milieu for speed for the infinite speeds of finite movements of concepts (36)
  
• breath that suffuse the separate parts- concept is the spinal cord (36)
  
• is the horizon of events, absolute and independent of any observer (36)
  
• image of thought (37)
  
• single, pure variation (39)
  
• have these elements- diagrammatic features, movements of the infinite, directions that are fractal, intuitions (40)
  
• must be set up (40)
  
• concepts are not deduced from it (40)
  
• prephilosophical, presupposed in the way concepts themselves refer to nonconceptual understanding (40)
  
• is not a program, but an absolute ground/earth o of philosophy, the foundation on which it creates concepts (41)
  
• provokes disapproval in public opinion (41)
  
• acts like a sieve across chaos (41)
  
• if the problem of philosophy is to acquire consistency without losing the infinite (chaos) into which thought plunges, plane of immanence retains the infinite movement while concepts marke out the intensive ordinates (42)
  
  

Idiots and wagers

I plunge into the middle, since I am no longer at the beginning and cannot see the ends. I jump in and will somehow doggie paddle around from buoy to buoy, hoping not to drown.

I've dived into the water close to the conceptual persona bouy. So we will rest here while I catch my breath. While we hang (grimly) onto this bobbing conceptual persona, we notice some things. Here are a few of the things we distract our clinging selves with:

A conceptual persona is "reconstituted by the reader"- perhaps a viewer will be more in line with our use of Marchand- often appears with a proper name, like Socrates, though we must not confuse Socrates the character of the dialogues with Socrates the conceptual persona. (D&G, 63).

Conceptual personae

• are thinkers, solely thingers (69)
  
• must be remarkable, even if repulsive (83)
  
• constitute a point of view (75)
  
• show thought's territories (69)
  
• think in us (69)
  
• are the becoming or the subject of the philosophy (64)
  
• are true agents of enunciation (65)
  
• are irreducible to psychosocial types (67)
  
• have features- some examples, pathic (maniac, the Idiot), relational (Friend, Rival), dynamic (leaping, dancing) juridical (lays claims to what is right), existential (invents possibilities of life) (70-72)
  
• perhaps are how philosophers waken a dormant concept and play it a new stage (83)

Only a few vital anecdotes are needed to "produce a portrait of a philosophy" (72). So in Pascal's philosophy "the gambler" becomes a conceptual persona that then in a vital anecdote places a wager.

Winning my maiden flight of fat fancy

We have instructions to pull instructions for developing a concept from What is Philosophy? by Gille Deleuze and Felix Guattari. I have begun to flesh out what I think is an instruction in an email, which I will send sometime over the weekend (and re-post as a comment to this post).

The writing out of that instruction is in an awkward, adolescent phase; the ideas are embarrassed by each other and fighting over which gets "shotgun." But I do not want to wait until I have made everything "clear and simple." I want to try to carry it out; to use my "own chivalric powers," my "own method" without waiting to completely understand (D&G, 31).

But you need at least an inkling of what the instruction is to make sense of this bit of sputtering. "What would thinking be if it did not constantly confront chaos?" (D&G, 208). We- philosophers, scientists, artists- defeat this chaos, at least according to Deleuze & Guattari we do, but we have to plunge into it to do so. D&G, like Badiou with his void, created a sexually charged, feminized space against which/in which our actions are framed. I have problems with this imagery though I understand its power.

So I will confront a little chaos; following the witch's flight to the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow to stir up some trouble. I do this all the time. I am more than a little baroque in my intellectual endeavors. If it is baroque, don't fix it!

But I stall. The baroque mode has its own tail chasing, foot gnawing worries. The "classy" classical thinkers worry about getting it right. The baroque worry about getting (conning) you to come along for the ride.

Some fats to fuel our flight (not all fuel is necessarily of good quality; some fats burn better than others)

1. A blog post Obesity: Is it a Form of Malnutrition?

2. A little bit of government reporting.

3. Some "fat" girl fashion.

4. Not "vital" anecdotes because these are of the more "psychosocial type," but as we are told, we have to "diagnose real types" to untangle the three movements- territory, deterritorialization and re-territorialization (D&G, 69).

My uncle Eddie was over 600 pounds when he died in 2007. He was not yet 52 years old. He died a slow, horrible death. His illness was complicated by his weight but also by the ineptitude and prejudice of medical professionals at Shands. One of my cousin has lost over 200 pounds. He went from 375 pounds to just under 170 pounds. My nana at 5'6 spent most of her adult life over 230 pounds. She got down to 200 pounds but couldn't lose any more weight. Then in the last six months of her life, dying of liver cancer, she lost over 50 pounds because she no longer could/wanted to eat.

At my heaviest, I have been more than a little over 200 pounds. I periodically, due to health problems that come and go like weather patterns- some what predictable, seasonal conditions with occasional cataclysmic storms on par with the disturbances wrought by climate change- gain a lot of weight and then when the pattern has passed, the weight is lost. As I age, I lose less weight after each (im)perfect storm. I never will be skinny; I am without a doubt not well nourished despite my fat. I am less concerned with weight loss than health, but what constitutes a healthy diet is contested, complicated and compromised.

5. Images: the fat lady sings, getting the skinny, fat chance, cannibalism/zombies

Where Crisis meets Capital

This entry will be super short. I still need to narrow down to a specific case/instance/issue within the larger issue of the obesity "disaster." But Forget Jenny Craig, Hit the Drive-Thru is an interesting example of how commerce/capital/the market harnesses disasters to make money. Like greenwashing but about weight loss instead of the environment. Weightwashing?!?!

Amassing data to cut a big topic down to size

Today one of New York Times's editorials, Calorie Counters, focused on the impact of required by New York law calorie postings in restaurants. This is an example of testing of a public policy decision made in the face of the disaster. Basically, this decision relies on consumers to be knowledge about how calories affect weight (we won't go into the complicated debates- some based in science, some no more than dubious sales pitches- about how the calories from (over)processed carbohydrates might have more of an impact than say the same calories from a bunch of vegetables).

The decision to take in less calories seems to be, when compared to a similar study done in fast food restaurants in low-income neighborhood, more possible if the consumer is from an ZIP-code with higher incomes and a larger share of college degrees. The easy conclusion would be to say that educated people of means are more "rational," but that is doubtful. What they have is more choices, marketed to them, plus an education that makes it somewhat easier to understand the consequences of the posted data.

The editorial concluded that what we should do is get "healthy" chain restaurants into poorer neighborhoods. Ironically, the best way to cut calories is to cook your own food. And to educated people about the consequences of obesity- as if there was agreement about what those consequences were. Maybe we could get a "Fat Bonds" effort from the Advertising world. Except they already slam us with thousands of campaigns about obesity and our anxieties about it.

I am considering looking specifically at calorie posting and food choice policies (like trying to ban sodas from schools) as a way to cut this huge topic down to a blog bite.

The Parable of Good (and Bad) Food

While advertising did shift to focus on the visual, there still is plenty of texts that use the strategy of the parable as outlined by Marchand in Chapter 7, "The Great Parables" in Advertising the American Dream.  The advertising of the 20's and 30's used parables to sell products and "reinforce a modern, secular "logic of living."

The advertising parables did this by using the techniques of biblical parables- vivid/radical comparisons, hyperbole, focus on practical moral lesson from incidents of everyday life (p. 207). Advertising parables "offer comfortable rather than distasteful truths," seek to persuade versus confront and promise that there are "no insurmountable limitations" and offer "a reality easily within reach of their hearts' desires" (p. 207).

Today, we already have bought the modern, secular "logic of living." Today, the parables are used in only slightly more subtle ways.

From side of box of pasta:

Did you know that pasta really is a GOOD CARB?

PASTA has only a moderate effect on blood glucose levels, unlike other starches such as white bread, rice and potatoes, which means PASTA is not as readily converted into sugar.

PASTA is low on the Glycemic Index (GI)- and low GI Foods are digested more slowly, stay in the digestive system longer and help to naturally satisfy hunger! So, eating a delicious meal that includes PASTA can truly be one of your more healthful alternatives.

The dramatic characters of the text are the addressed "you" and PASTA. The moral of the story is that there are good and bad calories, good and bad food and that you have the power to choose the healthy, the right, the good- PASTA with its low GI- from the unhealthy, the wrong, the bad (potatoes, white bread and (white) rice with their high GI. According to the text, if you choose, PASTA, which in all but one case is printed in bold and all caps, you can know that you eating good for you food. The text does not have to do a lot of work because of the society wide obsession with choosing "good" food. This is not just related to obesity; it also pops up in the natural/organic food movement.

Selling chubby hubbies vacuums

Wendy sent me this snap she took of the sign in front of National Vacuum (corner of NW 23rd Ave & NW 6th St.). She wondered if we both could use it. I suggested that it was all to the good to have posts across the blogs that tangentially connect.

National Vacuum is a local legend. The sign's message changes about once a month. The owner uses it to make (often very bad) jokes and puns, send seasonal messages and spread bits of folk wisdom. The sign indulges in "dadisms" (not dadaisms, dad-isms). It uses slogans and maxims to entertain. Most the time the posts have nothing to do with vacuum cleaners. The "goodwill" of the sign and the way it transforms a business location into a local landmark are advertisement enough.

I cropped it to get at the meat of the image; the meat of the message. This message is a sing-song rhyme and advertising slogan rolled into one. The ad suggests that doing housework is a way to burn calories, but instead of focusing on the addressed wife in focuses on an unseen husband. Anxieties about weight are displaced to someone else's body.

Most jokes have an edge; most jokes deal with anxieties. This one deals with anxieties about weight, how household chores are split up, who has more power in a relationship, the ways that long term partnership can lead to complacency about one's looks and the sometimes necessary subtle (and not so subtle) manipulations to get loved ones to do what's good for them. The rhyming and jokey quality of the phrase is like a feint, so all those other meanings can slip into the back door of our brains while we are looking the other way. All those other issues slip in and work on our emotions. We laugh while our fears are played on. The jokey quality of the sign hides the slightly vicious nature of using peoples' anxieties about being fat to sell an appliance. The sign maker isn't trying to be vicious; these advertising strategies are almost a reflex response. We use them without thinking about them; we don't second guess them as a choice.

If I were to classify this slogan as one of the great parables (following Marchand in Advertising the American Dream), it comes closest to being a parable of First Impressions.  (more here later)