Saturday, October 09, 2004
10/09/2004 02:45:09 PM
the life named derrida is no more.
he was born July 15, 1930, in El Biar, Algeria. with the wry wink of a playful third-culture kid he, after ascending the ranks of the academy in France (his passport country), described himself as a "little black and very Arab Jew."
goodbye my friend. thank you for the many hours of conversation. i wish we could have met.
vous croyez?
je ne sais pas, il faut croire.
10/09/2004 06:09:43 AM
Coming off of this post...
Speaking truth to power is an unsettling thing. The ancient cynics were masters of it. The classical Greek word for this is parrhesia--free, open, risk-taking speech. The parrhesiastes, truth speaker, is the one who uses parrhesia. Party politics and those who stump for one camp or another can never be about parrhesia because there is no freedom or risk involved in their speech; they are about rhetorical coercion. Institutions and their apologists sterilize truth because of the relationship between the the speaker and what is said; because they speak from a corrosive position of power.
Foucault, during his 1983 Berkeley lectures ("Discourse and Truth"), said:
"The one who uses parrhesia, the parrhesiastes, is someone who says everything he has in mind: he does not hide anything, but opens his heart and mind completely to other people through his discourse.... the speaker makes it manifestly clear and obvious that what he says is his own opinion. And he does this by avoiding any kind of rhetorical form which would veil what he thinks.
...parrhesia is a kind of verbal activity where the speaker has a specific relation to truth through frankness, a certain relationship to his own life through danger, a certain type of relation to himself or other people through criticism... and a specific relation to moral law through freedom and duty. More precisely, parrhesia is a verbal activity in which a speaker expresses his personal relationship to truth, and risks his life because he recognizes truth-telling as a duty to improve or help other people (as well as himself). In parrhesia, the speaker uses his freedom and chooses frankness instead of persuasion, truth instead of falsehood or silence, the risk of death instead of life and security, criticism instead of flattery, and moral duty instead of self-interest and moral apathy."
Friday, October 08, 2004
10/08/2004 11:51:58 AM
Unliving a Lie
Seven years ago, after a decade of working at a high level in conservative politics and media, I made a conscious decision to break ranks -- both privately, to try to reset my own moral compass, and publicly, to try to reset a distorted record, for I felt a responsibility to correct the history books before it was too late.
Oddly enough, I had come to this personal and professional crossroads having made a name for myself in the political media by harnessing the well-financed and well-organized machinery of the conservative movement to attack those who had the courage to try to stand up to it. It was the early 1990s, and following the Republican party line, I had chosen sides in the raging culture war, taking on Anita Hill and the Clintons in ways that I'd come to realize were false and wrong.
The real issue at the heart of this unfolding realization was not political or partisan, although it inevitably played out in a right-left context. The issue was one of honesty and integrity. People who had encouraged me to defend Clarence Thomas, it turned out, didn't even believe the bill of goods they had sold me. And when one of the lawyers working for Paula Jones, whose sexual-harassment lawsuit I had triggered with a salacious article, told me he didn't believe his own client -- it was all just politics -- I began to understand that my celebrated role as a right-wing journalistic hit man was the very opposite of speaking truth to power. Once I admitted this to myself, I had to stop.
10/08/2004 05:49:23 AM
{personal archive post}
In the comments of, The Bible as a She?
__________
the singular personification of a series of loosely-coupled texts retrospectively bound together is interesting for a moment, but quickly becomes nonsense (at least it would in the communities i find myself in).
the texts are not a her, a him or a they. the texts are a series of situated its. wanting the bible to be seen as "more than a text" is wanting it to be something it literally is not. it is interesting that you suggest that you want this so that "she" can be "part of the community." how are these texts not already a part of your community?
i think that personifying the texts of a community by calling them a “she” is different from calling a country or the church a she. the latter are personified communities of people. the former the tangible artifacts these people left.
just as the united states constitution, the federalist papers and the autobiography of benjamin franklin are not personified, but the country of the people who created these works is, so the torah, the writings, the prophets, the gospels and the letters are not personified, but the assembly of the people who created these works is. the church and the texts that she has produced are different in kind and, i would suggest, should be treated as such in our language.
Wednesday, October 06, 2004
10/06/2004 12:39:44 PM
The Long Tail
via Reid
Forget squeezing millions from a few megahits at the top of the charts. The future of entertainment is in the millions of niche markets at the shallow end of the bitstream.
10/06/2004 07:00:03 AM
"This country needs a modern trickster myth whispered in parlors by retirees as much as it is spoken about in underground "coffee shops." It needs to transcend collegiate fraternal orders and the chess club. It needs to undermine not just political authority, but the fear that drives us to bow before the smoke and mirrors that convince us we see a cross where there is really a gun.
Your vote will not create this trickster myth. We need a silent revolution that lives in communities. We need technological protocols that are invisible to the red eyes of the FBI-RIAA demon-child. We need a clever love that confuses the chickenhawks into silence. And we need more stories...."
Tuesday, October 05, 2004
10/05/2004 11:12:23 AM
we need houses of mourning. if we had such places i think we might begin to indirectly address certain causes of homelessness, child abuse and neglect and a slew of other personal and familial tragedies.
we have no clear space or social practice of mourning. there is an unspoken expectation and, often, an economic imperative to "move on" rather quickly after the death of a child, the loss of a marriage, the end of a company or whatever reversal of fortune one might experience with a level of traumatizing intensity as to no longer function as one once did. these are transition points and emotional pillars: experiences that "change everything" and that become important narratives on which a recounting of identity hangs.
events such as these, traumas, are not easily integrated into day-to-day life. one pretends to be "over" traumas to their detriment. one cannot make healing happen. healing happens. often it takes time, space and the freedom to story through what otherwise seems impossible to narrate.
10/05/2004 06:34:29 AM
it is hard to retain independent people.
it is harder to retain independent millionaires.
ev leaves google.
Monday, October 04, 2004
10/04/2004 09:48:26 AM
otherness: constituted within unknown narratives; situated at an experiential threshold; barely perceptible amidst a sensory cacophony without clear distinctions...
10/04/2004 09:19:53 AM
community is not a product that we can make. it is an emergent property of the shared spaces between people in functioning trust relationships.
community occupies a liminal, undecidable place between individuals and the structures that bring them together.
Sunday, October 03, 2004
10/03/2004 11:18:04 AM
Kodak wins Java lawsuit
via /.
more out of control patent enforcement. who will put an end to this by spearheading a more nuanced U.S. patent regime? inventing a combustion engine is totally different from inventing "one-click shopping," "linked documents" or a piece of byte code "asking for help" from a runtime engine.
in other news:
60% of Google's 1900 employees now hold stock options worth at least one million dollars.
10/03/2004 08:56:19 AM
the State Department hates Bush. the CIA hates Bush. the military is evenly split. my god, if we were not complacent middle class consumers this would spell bloody revolution. i guess the wage slave wal-mart economy is good for something.
___________
on a related note: is it possible to be more explicitly intentional about cherry picking intelligence to bolster ideological policy than to declare CIA intelligence estimates the product of "pessimists and naysayers" that, because they are not in line with White House PR, have no higher status than that of a "guess"?
mr. president, it is time for some flip-flopping. look at the evidence, the changed ground reality and evolve policy that is more than rhetoric in the political patina of divine infallibility. decisive action is lunacy when the action is duplicitously inappropriate. make some hard decisions. observe political transformation in its native habitat for a moment (the will of a local people not an outside people). consider that the move from totalitarianism to democracy has a multi-generational lifecycle.
intelligence reports that contain forecasts that do not square with the rose-colored re-election glasses that are being issued to dutiful Americans in the run up to November 2nd should be a touchstone that a deliberative president uses in self-critique. if only we had such a president.
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