Identity in a Box, or, The Modern Listmania

Lists are addictive. From the standby Top 10 to the various assortments of things cobbled together and associated on the Huffington Post, I’ve always found that lists seem to fulfill some deep-seated void for analysis and order in our postmodern mélange. Which is why I found this interview with Justice Stephen Breyer (of the United States Supreme Court) at The Browser so interesting. In short, it’s a list of the five books that have had, in his estimation, the biggest influence on his judicial thought. It’s an intriguingly diverse list: ranging from Tocqueville’s Democracy in America to Austin’s fun little How to Do Things with Words all the way to A la recherche du temps perdu. Breyer actually does a very good job explaining his relationship with each of the books and giving them sense in concert with the others.

Yet even without the analysis, the list of 5 books would give us, the readers, something curious to think about. In our heads, we can perform the same type of analysis that Breyer performed upon himself, with the added unit of operating within the paradigm of the Foucauldian author-function. We work from both ends, trying to find the pathway between Breyer’s jurisprudence and Proust, not unlike the quest to link everyone in the world to Kevin Bacon or the President William Jefferson Clinton Birthplace Home National Historic Site to Peter Gabriel’s 1977 self-titled album but with (very) slightly more intellectual value. Drawing links and finding connections creates a way to generate more thought and more discourse all while satisfying an urge for order in the universe and eating up free time that might otherwise be spent bored.

There is a fascinating question that comes along with asking about books, movies, writers, or philosophers in terms of intellectual influence or most meaningful impact, as the Breyer interview does. It provides a substitute for asking someone to explain her personal philosophy or what she believes, instead allowing those beliefs to channel through external sources and reference points. It raises the issue of the relationship between identity and identification – to what extent is the Self internal (an “identity”), how does that identity interact with objects in the world (“identification”), and does it make more sense to say that identification is an expression of the identity or that identity is constitutive of the objects of identification? It’s a harder question than it seems, because we as readers are never given access to the underlying identity for our inspection and requisite analytical pokes and prods. Instead, we’re given Breyer’s list of books, his own legal opinions and writings, and the explanation that he offers here and told to connect the two.

The association between names and ideas gives us a way to shortcut when explaining complicated ideas and to place things in their historical contexts. Perhaps it’s an oversimplification to say that people are entirely comprehensible as products of their influences, but it’s certainly not a reach to say that people are the products of their influences and unique moments. I think Derrida makes a good point of this in “Signature, Event, Context” when he talks about the relationship between performatives and constatives in language, coincidentally enough, in response to Austin’s book:

Could a performative statement succeed if its formulation did not repeat a "coded" or iterable statement, in other words if the expressions I use to open a meeting, launch a ship or a marriage were not identifiable as conforming to an iterable model, and therefore if they were not identifiable in a way as a "citation"? (326)

I think Derrida is right in assigning the force of performatives to the authority of similar performatives that came before. There is a mingling of personal agency and authority (eg only religious figures, justices of the peace, and ship’s captains can marry people and no one but the President of the United States can give force to an Executive Order) with an external authority centered in tradition and precedent, in much the same way that words do have to have some sort of cited referentiality to be comprehensible. This principle extends to the “list of books that have influenced you” question. One can identify with five books, three philosophers, or a few movies; pick a greatest contribution of some civilization or other; or explain a movement and why she finds herself on it, and in those discussions, a picture a personal philosophy and an intellectual identity arise. These exercises have value beyond diversions and time-killers, because they give us a way to talk about the things we believe in the way they actually grew in the first place.

I iz in ur ethics, dekonstruktin ur paradigms

Long time, no blogging! Sorry for being out of the loop for the last couple of months; last semester was incredibly hectic. On the plus side, it's done now and I'm very happy with how all of it went. I promise I'll have something neat and original up soon.

In the meanwhile, I wanted to share a couple of pages of a paper I wrote for my independent study in deconstruction last semester. It took ages and a couple of rewritings in different places, but it got done through the blood, sweat, and tears and I'm mostly proud of how it turned out (mostly, because this paper treads very close to my moral and political philosophy and I felt like I was trying to justify to myself that I have a coherent system of ethics at times. That would have taken a lot more pages. In a lot of cases it did and then got cut.)

Anyways, this chunk is the first subheader, entitled with a smile "A Theory of Power and Privilege, or, the Morality of Space Exploration." This is most of the theory chunk; it comes with a little primer on the logic of binary opposition and the way it manifests with regards to identity. Hope you find it interesting.

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A Theory of Power and Privilege, or, the Morality of Space Exploration

The deconstructive theory of power, and thus deconstruction’s ethics, is primarily based upon the logic of the binary opposition. There are two main components of a binary opposition: first, a categorical distinction is drawn between some concept and some other concept, differentiating them, and second the two terms of the opposition are placed into a hierarchy. So, one term of the binary is privileged at the expense of the other and assigned to a position of centrality; the other is sent to the margins. On surface, the construction makes the term placed at the center seem like more of a given in discourse and affords it a greater power to influence the boundaries and limits of thought. Yet deconstruction exposes the underlying structure of various oppositions as they exist in language by showing the way that the terms of the binary are mutually dependent upon one another for their positioning; the central term is as reliant upon the marginal term for its power as the marginal term is reliant upon the central term for its lack thereof. This gives a kind of foundational strength to the term on the margin, where it envelops the central term and destabilizes it. For instance, queer theorist Calvin Thomas notes this phenomenon occurring in the heterosexual / homosexual binary:

Homophobia... is the disavowal of this dependence on homosexuals, of the structuring necessity of this negation... For that reason, despite the structural constitutive roles that "femininity" and "blackness" play in constructions of "masculinity" and "whiteness," the role played by "queerness" in the construction of "straightness" is even more structural and constitutive; racism and sexism, that is, certainly help to "keep one" white and male but not in the same way or to the same extent that homophobia works to "keep one" straight.[1]

In Thomas’ framing, heterosexuality, as the dominant term, turns into a continuous disavowal of homosexuality. The logic of this reconsideration is based on a variant of the “one-drop rule” or the concept of hypodescendency, which places any person of mixed socioeconomic or racial heritage into the lower category by default, which finds its most notable historical example in early 20^th Century racial integrity acts.[2] A single interruption in the disavowal is enough to cast someone into a lower and more marginal status, which has the curious effect of placing non-privileged racial, sexual, gender, class, and other categories into a simultaneous place of influence and non-influence: it is powerful in that the central term of the hierarchy defines itself with reference to the marginal category and oppressed in that such identities are, in Christian language, “fallen” or “impure” with regards to the privileged identity. That contradiction undermines the place of legitimacy that the central term in the binary was presumed to have. By blurring the division between central and marginal and changing the relationship that whiteness, maleness, cis-genderedness, heterosexuality, and other dominant identities have with the identities they marginalize, deconstruction offers a means by which the foundations of their privilege and consequently their social power rest.

            The way that an understanding of binary oppositions and their deconstruction come into play in a political context is primarily through the place of relationships between identities in the social sphere, both spatially and temporally. Privileged terms and identities are not merely thought of as enjoying certain, listed benefits at the expense of other terms and identities, but as occupying a central space in society and in discourse through the exploitation of those on the margins. Deconstruction’s metaphor is visual, and that metaphor affects the way relationships of privilege are conceived. Take this passage from near the end of Judith Butler’s Gender Trouble:

What performance where will compel a reconsideration of the place and stability of the masculine and the feminine? And what kind of gender performance will enact and reveal the performativity of gender itself in a way that destabilizes the naturalized categories of identity and desire?[3] (Italics Butler’s)

Note how the only word Butler italicizes in this passage, which comes before a rare line break in the book (one of a handful in the book that does not come before a block quotation or a titled section change), is the word place. Masculinity and femininity are opposed, and their placement is where the two derive their relative power. Positioning in discourse is what enables the rest of the benefits that come along with centrality in the first place, because at that point both the categories and the benefits seem natural, as Butler says in the following sentence. That privilege can either be a matter of “space” in the conventional sense or it can be temporal. For instance, Roland Barthes wrote in a diary entry on May 28, 1978: “The truth about mourning is quite simple: now that maman is dead, I am faced with death (nothing any longer separates me from it except time.)”[4] Yet that temporal separation allowed him to write the other more than a hundred diary entries compiled in Mourning Diary and the whole of On Racine and Camera Lucida. The space provided by time enabled Barthes to produce more discourse, and can thus be a means to repositioning and changes in power.

What this emphasis on space offers is twofold: first, a strong critique of the accusation that deconstruction does not accomplish positive ends, and second, a way to think about the dimensions within which deconstruction works. The focus on space shows deconstruction to be thoroughly contextual and bound by the spaces created by narratives, which is why it cannot offer an explicit prescription for a positive vision of the world on its own. However, those boundaries give deconstruction a space to work, both within and between the limits of thought in a given society. Deconstruction does not need to offer an explicit vision on its own because it can be creative insofar as it lays bare discursive boundaries and begins the process of dismantling them in the service of creating an open space of possibility to build new structures. Changing the location of terms, concepts, and identities in the discursive field does change the way people interact with each other and with their surroundings, and thus has a positive end regardless of whether or not the primary action taken by deconstructive re-reading and reinterpretation was expressly an act of creation. This is part of the reason why a number of the most well-known deconstructive analyses are very thoroughly textual; Of Grammatology devotes itself in very large part to a critique of Rousseau’s “Essay on the Origin of Languages” while Roland Barthes’ S/Z offers an argument on behalf of the death of the author via a more-than-two-hundred page reading of Balzac’s short story Sarrasine. Deconstruction recognizes, and accepts as a premise, its position operating in and around epistemic boundaries that already exist; this recognition both confirms deconstruction as thoroughly and unabashedly relativist and gives it a way to simultaneously critique and create.

Deconstruction’s claim to relativity goes even further. It does not merely place itself within a context of, to use Heideggerian language, thrownness-into-the-world, but rather argues that all metaphysics and philosophical systems are similarly thrown. This argument critiques absolutist ethical systems in the same move that it challenges logocentrism through an attack on the concept of the transcendental signified:

The logos of being, "Thought obeying the Voice of Being," is the first and the last resource of the sign, of the difference between signans and signatum. There has to be a transcendental signified for the difference between signifier and signified to be somewhere absolute and irreducible. It is not by chance that the thought of being, as the thought of this transcendental signified, is manifested above all in the voice: in a language of words [mots].[5]

For there to be an absolute difference between signifier and signified, there must be a transcendental signified from which “meaning” can derive; likewise, absolutist ethical systems require an external law-giver or standard to justify their claims. In a religious context, that standard is usually God or gods; in modern secular moral philosophies, the standard can be anything from human rights to reason to “goodness,” defined any number of different ways. Once the transcendental signified is undermined, then the basis for an absolute standard is undermined along with it. This does not mean that a morality cannot be cogently constructed or that amorality is the only ethical possibility, or that there is no room to criticize ethical systems, but rather that moralities have to follow and interact with social conditions as they are and express themselves within a context and history. There is no neutral ground, no outside-of-culture, and the restrictions of history, culture, and tradition can and should be recognized before the possibility of attacking them becomes meaningful.

In a way, the ethics of deconstruction allow meta-valuation to become part of a framework of valuation; that is, not even systems of ethics are above critique and above radical reinterpretation and modification. Just like the judgments they shore up, these systems are social constructs, and by being constructs they come along with their own set of biases, ideologies, and presumptions that help and hurt different sets of people. That is why the naturalization of ethical guidelines has such pervasive consequences: by becoming ingrained into a culture’s thought, they limit not only what may acceptably be said, written, or done but also what is even conceivable to think, write, or do.  Within that framework even a mere skepticism towards the stability of those boundaries and presumptions can constitute an attack on the power they wield and express:

This text continues, then, as an effort to think through the possibility of subverting and displacing those naturalized and reified notions of gender that support masculine hegemony and heterosexist power, to make gender trouble, not through the strategies that figure a utopian beyond, but through the mobilization, subversive confusion, and proliferation of precisely those constitutive categories that seek to keep gender in its place by posturing as the foundational illusions of identity.[6]

Thus, deconstruction can never fully align itself with the center or with power; it can only be construed as a fighting-against. This fact means that it can never settle with the state of the world as it is and that it must always “subvert” or “transgress.” But it also confirms that deconstruction perpetually allies itself with those on the margins and with the powerless, because in context, any assault upon the structures and narratives that support oppression can be construed as solidarity with them in some capacity. The pattern of overthrowing and redefining categories, especially the categories of “human,” “citizen,” “property,” and the like during civil rights struggles in the United States and elsewhere, has gradually led to improving conditions for non-privileged communities: for example, both women and people of color have gained suffrage, African-American communities have won emancipation from slavery, women gained the right to no-fault divorce, unions fought for and earned better working conditions, and LGBTQ people have access to a bevy of rights and growing clout of social acceptability that did not exist even three decades ago. This may perhaps be part of the logic behind Derrida’s entitling the book of essays that contains “Différance” and “White Mythology” as he does – Margins of Philosophy. Deconstruction is at once marginal philosophy, the margin of philosophy, and a philosophy for the margins, and through its alliance with the margins, it takes upon itself an ethical mantle. It understands the logic of binary oppositions, especially the creation of hierarchies within them. It recognizes its own place and functions within a context, a place, and a history and seeks to thoroughly critique dominant structures and narratives. By critiquing those narratives, it undermines the sites and bases of power within societies, blurs the relationship between center and margins, and creates a new space of possibility for those exploited by privilege to be liberated from their epistemic oppression and begin to redefine the terms upon which society operates.

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[1] Calvin Thomas , "Straight with a Twist: Queer Theory and the Subject of Heterosexuality." The Gay '90s: Disciplinary and Interdisciplinary Formations in Queer Studies. Ed. Thomas C. Foster, Carol Siegel, and Ellen E. Berry. New York: New York UP, 1997. Print. 99-100.

[2] For example, see the Racial Integrity Act, Virginia SB 219, 1924. This law was passed concurrently with Virginia SB 281, which provided for the sterilization of persons deemed by the state to be “feebleminded.” The period between the passage of these laws and their final repeal in 1979, partially through the US Supreme Court case Loving v. Virginia 388 U.S. 1, is commonly understood to have permitted eugenics within the state of Virginia (Virginia HJ607ER).

[3] Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. New York: Routledge, 2006. Print. 189.

[4] Roland Barthes, Mourning Diary: October 26, 1977-September 15, 1979. Comp. Nathalie Léger. Trans. Richard Howard. New York: Hill and Wang, 2010. Print. 130.

[5] Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology. Trans. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins UP, 1997. Print. 20.

[6] Gender Trouble, 46.

Emptiness.

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The Borders in my town has been in the process of closing for a few weeks now. I first heard about it when I came back to California for Thanksgiving break; at that point, the store had a 30% off sale on everything in store and up to 50% or so on bargain materials. When I went back today to pick up some holiday gifts, the sale had turned into a 40% off on everything to 60% for bargain stuff. They're replacing it with a new medical building.

I'm a big fan of print culture. I really love bookstores and libraries. They've always felt like a source of comfort for me. I can't really imagine using an e-reader because I'm so attached to the tactile sensation of pages, especially worn pages, beneath my fingers. I get finicky about the contrast, size, and typeface of the print on pages. I like certain publishers more than others because of that. Et cetera.

Which is why it was so weird to go into this bookstore in its death throes. People swarmed. Shelves were empty. The area around the Children's section, which included the Biography section and the Philosophy section, was corded off with police tape. All of the sorting was haphazard; the sections weren't well labeled and the staff clearly hadn't bothered to alphabetize everything when they moved it. There were signs taped onto some of the columns in the store, printed on brightly-colored paper, with things like "A mind is a terrible thing to waste!!" on them throughout. Most of the shelves themselves had yellow index-cards at the top indicating that they had been sold to one person or another; others had signs with prices on them, several of which had been Sharpied-out once or twice and reduced. Sections once-familiar were jammed with books that I remembered from other parts of the store.

The experience was profoundly unsettling. I felt like a vulture at times, picking off the scraps of the place at its end, exploiting the sale prices and joining the mass in hastening the store's demise. There was a profound sense in me that something there had been lost, that an order with which I was familiar had been discarded in the end times, that things I remembered and memories that I had did not apply to the building in which I was standing. Something was off. I wasn't sure what. But, the emptiness was palpable; cold and staid.

It's probably cliché by now to bemoan the death of the local bookstore. Other people have done it with prettier prose. And I'm conflicted about how much that outweighs the ability of people to have greater access to cheaper books now than before. But there will for me always be a sadness in watching bookstores, even corporate ones, die one by one. There's something about physical places that gives them a soul of their own. Memories are built in them, they become like old friends. Friendships, romances, periods of life alight and dissipate. Especially for bookstores, they are places of communal thought and learning. Their presence says something profound about the values a culture and society holds and the things we as people love, with all of our hearts and souls.

What do we lose, irreparably and forever, when a place dies?

I picked something up for me on the way to the cash register. The store's last copy of Paradise Lost.

Riding the Crest

From Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, Chapter 8:

Strange memories on this nervous night in Las Vegas. Five years later? Six? It seems like a lifetime, or at least a Main Era — the kind of peak that never comes again. San Francisco in the middle sixties was a very special time and place to be a part of. Maybe it meant something. Maybe not, in the long run . . . but no explanation, no mix of words or music or memories can touch that sense of knowing that you were there and alive in that corner of time and the world. Whatever it meant. . . .

History is hard to know, because of all the hired bullshit, but even without being sure of “history” it seems entirely reasonable to think that every now and then the energy of a whole generation comes to a head in a long fine flash, for reasons that nobody really understands at the time — and which never explain, in retrospect, what actually happened.

My central memory of that time seems to hang on one or five or maybe forty nights — or very early mornings — when I left the Fillmore half-crazy and, instead of going home, aimed the big 650 Lightning across the Bay Bridge at a hundred miles an hour wearing L. L. Bean shorts and a Butte sheepherder's jacket . . . booming through the Treasure Island tunnel at the lights of Oakland and Berkeley and Richmond, not quite sure which turn-off to take when I got to the other end (always stalling at the toll-gate, too twisted to find neutral while I fumbled for change) . . . but being absolutely certain that no matter which way I went I would come to a place where people were just as high and wild as I was: No doubt at all about that. . . .

There was madness in any direction, at any hour. If not across the Bay, then up the Golden Gate or down 101 to Los Altos or La Honda. . . . You could strike sparks anywhere. There was a fantastic universal sense that whatever we were doing was right, that we were winning. . . .

And that, I think, was the handle—that sense of inevitable victory over the forces of Old and Evil. Not in any mean or military sense; we didn’t need that. Our energy would simply prevail. There was no point in fighting — on our side or theirs. We had all the momentum; we were riding the crest of a high and beautiful wave. . . .

So now, less than five years later, you can go up on a steep hill in Las Vegas and look West, and with the right kind of eyes you can almost see the high-water mark — that place where the wave finally broke and rolled back.

 

Mawage is wot bwings us togeder tooday

I was having a conversation on Facebook earlier (see subject header). No, not about a marriage about to take place, but rather this little concept called "covenant marriage". From said link:

In some parts of the United States, a covenant marriage is a legally distinct kind of marriage, in which the marrying couple agree to obtain pre-marital counseling and accept more limited grounds for divorce. The covenant marriage laws emphasize the belief that marriage is more than just a mere contract between two individuals, contending that without marriage, there would be no foundation of family in society and, in turn, no civilization or progress to follow.

There are obvious giant problems with the part that begins "without marriage, there...", but I won't get into that now because it's (a) not a very interesting line of argument, (b) will take too long to detail all of the issues, and (c) will just kind of make me angry. Rather, I want to focus on something that was said in the midst of the discussion (from Leah Libresco of Unequally Yoked)

it makes marriage a THING (or, should I say, a unique signifier). Right now, marriage is not particularly different from long term cohabitation, which carries its own barriers to exit (leases, etc). If we want it to be a separate category, especially for people like you and me, who can't have sacramental marriages, it needs to be differentiated legally and linguistically to forge a cultural distinction

The question I find interesting, and that I think is significant for Leah, myself, and for atheists generally is why exactly this is what we want, given that we don't buy into the rhetoric of a transcendental religious meaning. Given that, I don't exactly know what should make marriage a "unique signifier". Marriage sans God, as far as I see it, does make marriage look a lot like a long-term co-habitation with a lot of pretty legal things (which are important, yes, but not in the roughly metaphysical sense we're talking about). The way we conceptualize marriage is what's different, and I think that conception is unhealthy -- it posits that there's a fundamental change in essence in a relationship when a wedding vow is made, a bright-line distinction. I've never been married (shocker!) but it doesn't seem to me that, in the minds of the people going through the vows, that the love signified by the wedding ceremony and to a broader extent the marriage is different in kind after the "I do"s than it was before. Different in degree certainly, but it doesn't seem like the love looks different.

So then, for the atheist, there's a choice in how we attack the marriage question: do what Leah says, and try to see covenant marriages as a way to split out all of the nasty cultural expectations that go along with marriage, or use the word marriage to change the character of what's signified. Here, a brief starting point is useful:

3. Despite the general displacement of the classical, "philosophical," Western, etc., concept of writing, it appears necessary, provisionally and strategically, to conserve the old name. This implies an entire logic of paleonymy which I do not wish to elaborate here. Very schematically: an opposition of metaphysical concepts (for example, speech/writing, presence/absence, etc.) is never the face-to-face of two terms, but a hierarchy and an order of subordination. Deconstruction cannot limit itself or proceed immediately to a neutralization: it must, by means of a double gesture, a double science, a double writing, practice an overturning of the classical opposition and a general displacement of the system. It is only on this condition that deconstruction will provide itself the means with which to intervene in the field of oppositions that it criticizes, which is also a field of nondiscursive forces. Each concept, moreover, belongs to a systematic chain, and itself constitutes a system of predicates. There is no metaphysical concept in and of itself. There is a work - metaphysical or not - on conceptual systems. Deconstruction does not consist in passing from one concept to another, but in overturning and displacing a conceptual order, as well as the nonconceptual order with which the conceptual order is articulated... To leave to this new concept the old name of writing is to maintain the structure of the graft, the transition and indispensable adherence to an effective intervention in the constituted historic field. And it is also to give their chance and their force, their power of communication, to everything played out in the operations of deconstruction. (Derrida, "Signature, Event, Context" from Margins of Philosophy)

To unpack a little bit: what Derrida's saying here is that whenever you set up a dichotomy between two things (the example he focuses on here is speech/writing, the one I want to use is "religious conception of relationship" / "secular conception of relationship", understanding that the two do not match neatly onto the set of religious people / atheists, as Leah herself shows), there's always an implicit hierarchy that has existed historically and influences how people now see the relationship between the two things in question. In Derrida's case, speech is "privileged" over writing -- that is, historically, people have thought about writing as "parasitic" on speech and a "derivative" thereof, with speech as the default; in our case, it's the idea that marriage is a fundamentally religious institution and that non-religious people who get married are parasitic on a religious framework.

To follow the reasoning, what we should be doing is playing with the word "marriage" and applying the term to a whole bunch of different things to make "marriage" the concept show itself for what it really is: not that much of a change at all (but still meaningful for the people involved!) This lets us change how the word works culturally, to strip away the problematic elements that come along with marriage as understood in a religious context and overthrow the religious framework that creates the way we conceptualize "atheist marriage" in the first place. This allows something else to live and breathe that fits more in line with a godless framework, and at least as far as I'm convinced, something that's less oppressive to women in more religiously conservative communities who might be expected to enter into a marriage that looks something like a covenant marriage without the supposed ability to "take the choice more seriously" that covenant marriage offers as a putative benefit.

So, marriage: still means things! But not the same things that we presume it means because of religious privilege and cultural influence! If deconstructing marriage means that atheists get space to express their love in a way that's not just an inferior knock-off of the Judeo-Christian way of doing things, in a way that creates a space more friendly to women at the same time, that satisfies me.

So, what did I miss?


What should marriage look like in an atheistic framework?


What, if anything, is metaphysically different about marriage that doesn't extend to other relationships?


(P.S. If the above wasn't clear, let me know and I'll try to clarify -- Derrida always tends to get a little messy.)

No, The New York Times, Michael Vick Doesn't Get to Be a Hero

The New York Times, last Saturday, ran this article on the "renaissance" of Michael Vick:

“I told people I thought he would be a great story and he would do the right things off the field,” said the former Colts coach Tony Dungy, NBC’s “Football Night in America” analyst, who counseled Vick during and after his incarceration. “But if people had pressed me and asked if I thought he could get back to this level, I would have to say probably not. I would have said he’ll get a certain percentage of the way back, but how could you ever get all the way back?”

A "great story"?  Remember who we're talking about here: Michael Vick, former quarterback for the Atlanta Falcons, who orchestrated an enormous interstate dogfighting ring. For five years. Fortunately the article here did mention his involvement with the dogfighting ring, but as these things usually are, it was only mentioned in passing as a low point against which could be juxtaposed a "football renaissance" for Mr. Vick. It has all of the ritual trappings of a religious revival, complete with throngs of adoring disciples:

But just inside the locker room door, at least 50 journalists huddled so tightly last Wednesday that when the player they were waiting for, Michael Vick, surveyed the gathering, he could only shake his head slightly.

“Amazing,” Vick whispered.

And monasticism:

Vick’s studying, though, has been crucial. Members of the Eagles organization said Vick had to be reminded to leave the training facility. The film room has become his sanctuary, and he has learned the Eagles’ offense better than he did Atlanta’s. 

Plus some martyrdom:

“I have been under pressure my whole life,” Vick said. “Pressure to take care of my family and a lot of other things. This is football — it’s pressure. But you’ve also got to make light of the whole situation. That’s what I try to do. There’s always going to be pressure. But it brings the best out of you.” 

I'm not very happy about this situation as a whole. Vick might be a good football player. He might even be a really good football player. But honestly, is the fawning love from sports commentators and even that symbolic bastion of Balance and Truth, The Grey Lady, necessary? Again: the "best" brought out of Vick by that pressure he's been feeling his whole life? Based on that, his "best" includes management of a dogfighting ring, at least three dogs from which had to be euthanized because they were completely incapable of being re-socialized.

Unfortunately, this sort of coverage and cultural acceptance is not unique. There are any number of other examples of apologia or glorification of famous people, even those with the deepest and darkest scars: those that excuse Roman Polanski's raping of a young girl on the basis of his "artistic genius", for example, or Paris Hilton apparently posing for her mugshots now, plus any number of highly publicized celebrity trials after which the celebrity is almost universally let off the hook. If anything, these cases prove that real justice and the legal system very rarely intersect (though ideally they should). So long as the powerful have both the cultural and real, financial capital to turn the United States justice system into a mockery of itself -- where money can buy powerful lawyers, or where wealthy defendants can defer cases endlessly, or where prosecutor's offices and police forces abuse and coerce those without the resources to fight back -- it becomes incumbent on us as a society to be aware of this fact. When Michael Vick's prison sentence becomes a stepping-stone in our discourse to his rebirth, there's a problem that has everything in the world to do with power.

Perhaps this bleeds into a trickier question of the concept of heroism and valorization generally. I'm becoming more and more convinced that heroism is inherently problematic in that it produces a really simplistic discursive representation of people (who tend to be famous and usually rich) that whitewashes the evils they commit for the sake of creating a narrative that paints them as good. Look at the term "flawed hero": the "flaw"-edness of the hero is a deviation from the category, not an inherent part of it. People are way more complicated than this characterization gives them credit for, and in our minds, it generates a very visceral, very emotional reaction when these "heroes" are criticized (see the many, many defenses of Roman Polanski or Mother Teresa -- there are a lot).

So while I don't think that we should instead be counter-categorizing these people as inherently "evil" (because no one and nothing can be inherently anything, différance and all that), Michael Vick's name should never, ever come up in our heads without a giant asterisk. And that's where the New York Times article fails. It turns that asterisk, that complicating factor, into a Herculean trial to be surpassed. And as long as that happens, these people will continue to get away with atrocity.

Wikileaks is Necessary

Sorry I haven't been posting very frequently; I have a number of different topics floating around that I've wanted to write about (atheism as a social movement, the racial effects of capitalism, a thought-piece about conceptualizations of American identity and problematizations therein via literary criticism and analysis, etc the list goes on) but I haven't been able to get around to them because of schoolwork. Anyways, the following is the text of a speech I gave on the floor of the Yale Political Union on Tuesday on the topic "Resolved: Wikileaks Should Not Have Published Classified Documents". I was the second speaker in the Negative, on the docket along with fantastic blogger, amazing speaker, and great friend Leah Libresco of Unequally Yoked. All names referenced herein are redacted unless the people in question would like their names reinserted. Enjoy! (For those interested: the resolution failed by a vote of about 28-35-2, if I remember correctly).

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I never thought I’d be on this floor following Mr. [redacted] after hearing him praise the value, power, and foresight of government – this is really new. Anyways, this is why Mr. [redacted] is wrong: in so saying that we can inherently trust people to filter and disseminate information that we “can handle”, he ignores the fact that everything has a political bias. This is no different for his lone editor or disseminator or government than it is for any of us in this room. So then, what we’re doing is handing the ability to determine truth to people that are already powerful; in a way, we’re practicing a bizarre kind of epistemological relativism wherein the people with the most money and the most guns get to decide what’s true.

This situation – where the powerful in society give an incomplete picture of events as they unfold to the people necessary for that power’s continued support – is exactly the type of thing Wikileaks is attempting to stop. Only by hearing the stories from those on the margins of our discourse, from those decentralized places that have neither interest nor duty in upholding the existing status quo, can we as the moral supporters of our government actually figure out whether we can and should support the things our government and our corporations do at home and abroad. Using Mr. [redacted]'s language, this comes down to transparency, and why it’s good for all of our sakes – because it means we can see all of the consequences that the moral and political choices that we as a people make.

Let me explain. The material on Wikileaks is targeted to a very specific audience. It’s not the terrorists; they don’t have much less of a habit for killing civilians than we do, and regardless of what a bunch of people posting classified documents do, they’re not going to be more or less likely to kill American soldiers, because in joining a terrorist group, they’ve already made the choice to do that. It’s not the Afghanis; most of Afghanistan (because of continued military occupation and rampant poverty) doesn’t have internet access and rates of computer ownership in Afghanistan is among the lowest in the world, besides that, they don’t need to read internal documents to know that US soldiers shot an innocent deaf and blind man down the street three years ago. Those documents on Wikileaks are intended for us, the privileged people sitting at home in America who make arguments that “we don’t kill civilians”, or “Pakistan is our ally in the region”, or that counterinsurgency is “working”, or that the war is “difficult but necessary”. The documents paint a cultural picture – one where what we’ve heard from the administration and military leadership about the progress of this war seems at best misrepresented and at worst an outright lie. Insofar as the release of these documents can change how we think about the war and our compulsion to support it, their release is a good thing.

But even further, the fact that Wikileaks is disseminating information that those with the greatest interest in maintaining and perpetuating the war saw fit to keep secret gives us the opportunity to see that perhaps the dominant narrative in our political discourse is not a given, and maybe even that the emperor in fact has no clothes. When we lose the opportunity to see information for ourselves, as Mr. [redacted] wants to see happen, and instead what we see are the same repeated analyses and moral judgements made over and over again, we tend to lose sight of how big this war really is, or that perhaps we don’t have any solid footing on which to stand in supporting it. What Julian Assange and Wikileaks did was actually raise the war as an issue to be discussed, even if only for a very brief time, instead of something lost in the background and dismissed as a necessary technical detail of our foreign policy. When we see video of soldiers in planes cracking jokes while shooting groups of people with precision bombs, or when we hear about the extent to which we have unmanned drones blanketing the skies above Afghanistan and Pakistan, it becomes very hard to just look away and dismiss all of that. Mr. [redacted] bemoaned the lack of sanitization of the scenes of war from coverage earlier. But, if images of piles of skulls filling ditches or corpses strewn across field are the consequences of war – and they are – shouldn’t we know about and see those things when we make the choice to continue waging wars? To some extent, we can change and modify our first principles and the things we support by being confronted frankly and honestly with the consequences of what we believe: this sort of discourse happens every day between members of this body. If we’re really comfortable as a people with letting loose the dogs of war and continuing to feed them for eight years on, then we should be able to look through our computer screens into the dead eyes of a young Afghani child killed in battle crossfire and say “I accept this cost.” If we do anything less, we’re not being honest with ourselves or paying fair tribute to the horrors we cause, and Wikileaks will continue to have a role to fill. I think that’s enough to vote in the Negative tonight.