On Playing Policy Maker

“We know Saddam has the weapons, what do we do?”

This was how my undergraduate course on American Foreign policy usually began. By a show of anonymous hands, the class was divided evenly in their support for the pending war on Iraq. Already being outraged by the Bush Administration, this young student of political science was quite skeptical of many of the stated reasons for an Anglo-American invasion of Iraq.

Yet, after attending enough classes, and discussing international relations as if one were a policy maker, the assumptions that Saddam had large quantities weapons of mass destruction became internalized; as the professor always said, “We have the receipts.” Even though I was always a vocal opponent of the war, it was as if to get a seat at the table, one had to adopt a certain train of thought and accept certain assumptions.

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In the spirit of thinking as an international relations policy maker, certain historical events overshadowed any given conversation.  And in this context, existential dilemmas become practically whittled down to a spectrum of a few choices. All of which are framed in such a way as to influence another country so that it behaves consistently with our national interest. This spectrum typically covers policy options starting with the least threatening and costly for the policy maker, and increasingly becoming more serious and expensive. The first option being diplomacy, going through economic sticks and carrots, to covert operations, coercion through military presence and ending at some form of direct military intervention.

It wasn’t until recently that I thought it was worth investigating the appeal of adopting this train of thought. A few hypotheses come to mind. One may be the desire to feel as if one were a member of the administration sitting around the table, thinking in the same terms as the powerful. As Erich Fromm wrote about how people align themselves with authority. But primarily, my guess is that there is an impulse to be rational, to take foreign policy seriously. In order to strive for being rational, one may think that one has to really put him or herself in the shoes of the policy maker. In other words, to let go of lofty ideals or principles and adopt a position that is realistic and accounts for constructs such as realpolitik.

The flipside to this train of thought is that those who are not thinking in such terms are somehow naïve. Those who are articulating values without putting them in the context of the choices aforementioned are thought to be disconnected from the existential realities that policy makers must face. It is here, where the cold utilitarian logic lives. Where within the policy maker frame, one must always chose between two evils. Do we contain Iraq and enforce sanctions or do we invade? If hundreds of thousands of Iraqis died under sanctions would war be more humane? (e.g. Link)

One little concern with thinking exclusively in this model is that it is often divorced from reality. When playing policy maker, one doesn’t have access to a great deal classified information. Nor does one necessarily have access to private meetings or underlying reasons for government action (unless they are leaked), only those which have been publicly stated. One lacks the factual resources to make an informed decision. Alas, one has to rest on the assumptions of those in power.

Thus, one is left with the information that is available. The only problem with this approach is that it’s a setup. With Iraq, it turned out the cute cartoons and al-Qaeda connections were a farce. And yet, after the fact, when one may think previous ideas were rational at the time, one may resist being introspective and fully admitting their inaccurate predictions. To admit to articulating such a position places some responsibility on one’s shoulders for enabling the violence that ensued. By perpetuating policy maker frames we can unintentionally end up becoming voluntary propagandists, apologists for policies that cause an extraordinary amount of suffering.

And the scary thing is that this mindset of emulating a fantasy policy maker, is that it is not isolated to foreign policy. In a way, it nearly permeates every issue presented to the public by those in power.  Such defenses have been given with the privatization of social security, and the illegal wiretaps. When the government tries to make excuses using a modicum of logic, often times the logic is put in this frame and the public is invited to spread the message.

The good news is that there is an alternative. We can view ourselves as citizens. We aren’t in power, yet we are powerful. We can make demands. We can speak our minds. It is only when the herd becomes infatuated with pontificating as if they were making decisions in power that the interest of the government does not match that of the citizens.

In the end, the policy maker frame isn’t something that can be easily dismissed.  There is certainly much to learn from an experienced researcher or professor of conflict resolution. It also remains true at times that there may be tough decisions that policy makers are forced to make, which may be in the context of information the public cannot access. Yet, just as Freud thought dreams were the “royal road to the unconscious,” there are ways of discovering truth about our government from a variety of sources, ranging from leaked memos to whistleblowers; secrets do surface. It is from these experiences history has taught us a lesson. As citizens, we need not be slaves to the policy making frame.  We can incorporate this train of thought as an ideological tool to add to our collection, instead of submitting all of our values in the pursuit of being mini Zbigniew Brzezinskis or James Carvilles. In fact, the policy makers should serve our interests, they should work for us, the citizens. Heck, it’s their job.

Some diarists/diaries which inspired this piece:

“Obama’s scold is a good sign” by wu ming

“I’m a Dem When I Want to Be” by pyrrho

For The Record

This diary isn’t adding anything new. It’s just for the record. The record is important.

It is common knowledge that Congress voted to pass the Iraq War Resolution. Yet the media hardly ever mentions that we are to bound the U.N. Charter, it is the law of our land, and thus I was never convinced that the United States of America had the legal authority to attack Iraq. I am not the only one, similar positions have been advocated by Juan Cole, Kofi Annan, Hans Blix, and also by neo-conservative Richard Perle.

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Article VI of our Constitution states:

This Constitution, and the Laws of the United States which shall be made in Pursuance thereof; and all Treaties made, or which shall be made, under the Authority of the United States, shall be the supreme Law of the Land; and the Judges in every State shall be bound thereby, any Thing in the Constitution or Laws of any state to the Contrary notwithstanding. (emphasis mine)

Although it is clear that we are bound to the U.N. Charter, framers of the war have argued that U.N. Resolution 1441 gave the United States the legal authority to invade Iraq. President Bush explains this argument:

Last September, I went to the U.N. General Assembly and urged the nations of the world to unite and bring an end to this danger. On November 8, the Security Council unanimously passed Resolution 1441, finding Iraq in material breach of its obligations, and vowing serious consequences if Iraq did not fully and immediately disarm.

Today, no nation can possibly claim that Iraq has disarmed. And it will not disarm so long as Saddam Hussein holds power. For the last four-and-a-half months, the United States and our allies have worked within the Security Council to enforce that Council’s long-standing demands. Yet, some permanent members of the Security Council have publicly announced they will veto any resolution that compels the disarmament of Iraq. These governments share our assessment of the danger, but not our resolve to meet it. Many nations, however, do have the resolve and fortitude to act against this threat to peace, and a broad coalition is now gathering to enforce the just demands of the world. The United Nations Security Council has not lived up to its responsibilities, so we will rise to ours. ( Guardian)

It is evident in this speech that President Bush is making the case that by invading Iraq the United States is following the protocol of U.N. Resolution 1441. The resolution does state: “Recalls, in that context, that the Council has repeatedly warned Iraq that it will face serious consequences as a result of its continued violations of its obligations.” The administration’s justification may make sense intuitively. We signed a Security Council resolution that stated that there will be serious consequences if Iraq is found to be in material breech, and the administration claims Iraq had done so, hence the war has a legal basis. Yet such an interpretation does not account for the U.N. Charter, the constitution of the U.N. if you will.

Prior to the war, Marjorie Cohn, an associate professor at Thomas Jefferson School of Law, wrote:

“The invasion is likely to occur without further authorization from the U.N. Indeed, Colin Powell said on CNN’s “Late Edition,” that if the U.N. isn’t willing to authorize the use of “all necessary means” to disarm Hussein, “the United States, with like-minded nations, will go and disarm him forcefully.”
But only the Security Council can authorize the use of armed force. Since 1990, the Council has not authorized the use of force in Iraq. No country can unilaterally use military means to enforce a U.N. resolution without violating the U.N. Charter. It remains to be seen when and how the United States will unilaterally decide that Iraq has breeched the terms of Resolution 1441, and use that as a pretext to strike. The lives of a quarter million U.S. soldiers and millions of Iraqi people are at stake. (emphasis mine)(pitt.edu)

Professor Cohn’s position appears to be referring to a specific article in the U.N. Charter. Chapter VI of the U.N. Charter deals with issues of peace and aggression. Within this chapter, Article 39 states:

The Security Council shall determine the existence of any threat to the peace, breach of the peace, or act of aggression and shall make recommendations, or decide what measures shall be taken in accordance with Articles 41 and 42, to maintain or restore international peace and security.(U.N. Charter)

In other words, the Security Council as a whole must decide if a country is in material breech and on the measures which should subsequently be taken. It never did.

Works Consulted/ More Information

President Bush statement, Feb. 6, 2003
David Krieger: The War on Iraq as Illegal and Illegitimate
Find Law-Documents(this is great!)
United Nation’s Press Release

Liberals and Conservatives: the same values?

Cross-posted at Dkos & MLW

Are typical liberal and conservative value systems apples and oranges?

When comparing two value systems which seem to be different Neil Levy, in A Short Introduction to Moral Relativism, explains two scenarios: one in which two people disagree because their perspective “begs the question” of the other’s value system and another in which two individuals disagree because of a set of facts.

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Cross-posted at Dkos & MLW

Are typical liberal and conservative value systems apples and oranges?

When comparing two value systems which seem to be different Neil Levy, in A Short Introduction to Moral Relativism, explains two scenarios: one in which two people disagree because their perspective “begs the question” of the other’s value system and another in which two individuals disagree because of a set of facts.

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What he means by “begs the question”, I guess it’s a logic term, is this: “We say that an argument begs the question against another view when one or more of the premises it uses to show that that view is false is itself rejected by the adherents of the disputed view”. This implies that when people disagree it may be the case that one is claiming something about an opposing argument that the person who believes that argument doesn’t in fact believe. It turns out that disagreement may often be superficial.

Levy provides an example of begging the question:

“..Someone might argue that abortion was impermissible on the grounds that abortion is the killing of an innocent person. But this argument begs the question against people who think that abortion is permissible, precisely because they deny that abortion is the killing of a person at all. Unless the opponent of abortion offers an additional argument, which demonstrates that the foetus is a person, we have no reason to be moved by her contention. In general, then, an argument begs the question against an opposing view when it is based upon a contention that ought to be the conclusion of the argument, not a premise of it.”

It is merely rhetoric which causes riffs between liberals and conservatives?

 If we examine the premises of our arguments we may find out that in some scenarios we actually do share the same values but that we support different policies. Is the disagreement one of facts?

What about economics?  Many conservatives vote against their economic interest. I sense that many of these same people would agree that any given administration should support an economic platform that was “in the best interest of most Americans.” So on one hand, we may share the same premise, but perhaps things are more complicated. There is the conservative notion of economic individualism and merit.

Many conservative pundits commonly use the language of personal responsibility and believe that earning a decent living is almost exclusively the role of the citizen. There seems to be a disagreement about the role of the state in creating a “fair game” and government in general. So, it may be the case that the economic views are affected by views on the nature of government.

The point? That entire ideologies have been created to deliberately provide a façade of logic, and that at its root the premises often do boil down to something akin to believing in a value system which is best for both the individual and for society.

On other issues such as abortion, liberals and conservatives may indeed not agree upon the same premises. One who views that fetuses have souls and that abortion is a form of homicide may not be able to be convinced otherwise. In order to change one’s mind one would have to convince that person to challenge their premise and/or adopt a new argument or value.

So, what is the implication of this idea?  

Well maybe nothing ground breaking, but it emphasizes that on certain issues, policies can be explained in such a way that if a given conservative were intellectually honest, she or he could be persuaded of a progressive policy based upon premises she or he already agrees upon. But! In on other issues the person would have to make a leap to be persuaded and would have to adopt new values.

Irish Car Bombs, Beirut, and Beer

Last year I went out to a bar and met up with a friend who had just returned from a tour from Europe. She told me all about her trip, but then told me a brief story, or more of a lesson.

One night when she was in Dublin, she stumbled, and yes I mean stumbled, into a pub. Her and her friends were trying to think of a way to drink a lot in a short period of time, so she had the idea of ordering an “Irish car bomb” (which is when the bartender pours a pint of Guinness and gives you a shot of Jameson or Baileys, and you then subsequently drop the Jameson into the pint and chug the whole thing). This turned out to be a bad idea.

The bartender took a second, and then explained to my friend that they were fresh out of car-bombs but that he could make her a “9/11.”  Well, she was a little shocked, but explained to me that she learned never to order an Irish car bomb in Dublin.

Well Irish car bombs aren’t the only alcoholic endeavors to embody a political title. Back here in the Land of Liberty I have been to countless places where people play a gamed called “Beirut.”

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Here’s how it’s played: there are two teams with usually two people on each team. Each team sets up six or ten cups on both sides of a ping-pong table (or anything resembling one) in a diamond formation. Then the teams pour some beer into each cup, usually red solo cups but they did just come out with some funky white ones, filling it about one-third of the way. After this is done, the teams then both throw a ping-pong ball across the table, aiming to get the ball into one of the cups. Who ever gets it in first, goes first, and then the teams take turns throwing the balls, drinking the cups of beer when the other team gets them in.

I’ve actually had fun playing the game, I must admit. But when one thinks about why the game is called “Beirut” only one explanation seems plausible. Juan Cole explains the “Towers of Beirut” in the context of the Israeli invasion of Lebanon in 1982:

The horrible Israeli siege of Beirut in summer of 1982, which lasted for weeks, involved the brutal and indiscriminate bombing of the city. Many of the “towers” that were destroyed contained hundreds of innocent Beirutis.

The ping-pong balls represents the bombs, and the red Solo cups represent the buildings in Beirut. The game is over when the Paris of the Middle East is leveled. If people would be appalled if young adults were playing a 9/11 or a Jerusalem bus drinking game in other countries I think they should adopt a new name for their drinking game, why not just call it “Beer Pong”.

Sidenote: The Cole article is interesting, but since Sharon is doing something I find productive right now I don’t think it’s the time to really get into that. However, I think it’s important to bring up this ridiculous title for a casual drinking game, it’s called this all over New England, and I’ve heard it called the same down in D.C.

Cross Posted at the Daily Kos and My Left Wing

New "Tough" Foreign Policy for Dems?

Update [2005-8-15 9:7:55 by deano]: I wrote this diary as an immediate reaction to the article. I didn’t want to say Biden was not a true Democrat and I do support a strong position for the Democrats on foreign policy. I just would rather see Democrats talk and act like Democrats instead of giving into the ideas and language of the right.

Rick Klein wrote an article on the front page of the Boston Globe entitled Democrats embrace tough military stance. At face value this message seemed fine, a tough stance against imminent threats and possible humanitarian intervention:

After months of internal debate and closed-door discussions, Democrats have begun to develop a more aggressive foreign policy that focuses heavily on threats they say are being neglected by the Bush administration, while avoiding taking a contentious stance on Iraq.
Even Democrats who have been associated with liberal positions on international affairs are calling for more troops in uniform, proposing that threats of force be used to stop nuclear weapons programs in Iran and North Korea, and pressing for potential military intervention to ease famine and oppression around the world.

But what really bothered me was the idea that this strategy is also a part of making Democrats look tough, i.e. this stance is not necessarily the right thing to do but will help us win elections.

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The emerging message among Democrats reflects a recognition that winning congressional and presidential elections in the post-Sept. 11 era requires candidates to establish a willingness to use America’s military might and keep the nation safe, according to party leaders and strategists… Senator Evan Bayh, Democrat of Indiana, hit the presidential proving ground of Iowa early this month to warn that ”people don’t think we [Democrats] have the backbone” to deploy the military, and said Democrats must overcome that perception to be successful in future elections.

Now maybe this is just political rhetoric, whatever that means. But it seems to me that if this is meant seriously, it is unnecessary. Why can’t the strategists simple have Congressional members stress the actual use of force say under the Clinton administration. Why not defend the Democratic Party with its actual track record instead of lending credibility to Rumsfeld-speak?

Even Joe Biden pays lip service to the extremist status quo position that international law is meaningless in a Hobbesian world-view:

Senator Joseph R. Biden Jr. of Delaware, the ranking Democrat on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, has laid out a doctrine of rebuilding alliances while making clear that ”force will be used — without asking anyone’s permission — when circumstances warrant.”

I don’t mean to be misleading, some of the policies are noble such as a expanding veterans health care or giving adequate funds to the transit systems for better security. But, I do think there is a line. There is a line when crossed where Democrats in power cease to be true Democrats. Advocating for a foreign policy similar to that of the neo-conservative crowd for more votes at home is certainly going too far.

Art, Culture, and Labor [UPDATE]

Update [2005-8-8 4:9:45 by deano]: A few sentences reworded for clarification. It sounded a little off!

I believe there is a disconnect between certain practices in contemporary art and most of the public’s idea of what constitutes art. Part of the problem, in my humble opinion, is a lack of the proliferation of recent art history. While art is nebulas, art history can function as an important tool in exposing us to new ideas and helping us understand art.

This may be an outcome of the idea that it is common for people to reject what they don’t understand. What follows is a general attachment to received opinion about what art is, and what art should be.

If culture is important, as an influence in our society as well as our political climate, and we believe art is a fundamental cornerstone of our culture, than it follows that our culture will not progress until artistic trends of the last century are, at the least, investigated.

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I was very intrigued by an article by Helen Molesworth from the “Work Ethic” exhibit she curated at the Baltimore Museum of Art in 2003. Aside from her intriguing argument, the article is a wonderful, concise resource for understanding various artistic movements of the 20th century (which she saw as unified).

T.J. Demos summarizes Molesworth’s argument as follows:

The rich array of work by nearly fifty artists demonstrates how they have adopted administrative capacities and managerial identities, and favored conceptual processes over manual production, enacting modernity’s paradigmatic shifts in labor. These include the waning of manual manufacturing and the rise of an information-based service economy, the further evolution of which is the recently coined “experience economy,” a designation of micromanaged zones of commerce that project ambience around products to increase profits. One danger in hooking art into these cycles is that determinist alignments may result, wherein artistic practice is seen to slavishly follow economic dictates. Molesworth’s argument avoids this reflectionism, instead locating transformations in labor as immanent to artistic practice. The result was a rare show of conceptual rigor and historical depth.

Molesworth commences Work Ethic by describing the growing trend of artists after WWII to put aside traditional media such as painting, sculpture, and drawing. She does so in describing a piece by Robert Rauschenberg:

..Rauschenberg’s legendary Erased de Kooning Drawing (1953) consisted of just that–the artist erasing a drawing by Willem de Kooning…

This essay argues that one unifying principle of the extraordinarily heterogeneous field of post-World War II avant-garde art was a concern with the problematic of artistic labor.  

In investigating her hypothesis, I thought about a hypothetical question: Who is the most influencial artist of the 20th century? Although many museums give much attention to Pablo Picasso and the Impressionists, if I was forced to decide, I would probably respond with Marcel Duchamp. Molesworth continues:

Conceivably, no twentieth-century artist was more ambivalent about artistic labor than Marcel Duchamp. In the teens, he purchased mass-produced commodities (most famously a urinal he titled Fountain [1917]) and dubbed them “readymades.” The readymades defied two historical definitions of art: namely, that art should be unique and that it should be produced by a highly trained artist with a requisite set of learned skills. By challenging the necessity of traditional artistic labor and the value of unique objects and by establishing a potential continuum between the space and activities of everyday life and the rarified realm of art, Duchamp’s readymades constituted the most serious attack on the category of Art since the Renaissance.

Far from destroying art, Duchamp’s profound challenge ultimately served to create an enormous field of aesthetic possibility. It helped liberate artists from conventional modes of working, contributing to a climate that permitted and rewarded an increasingly porous idea of art’s possibilities. Artists no longer needed to content themselves with the production of visually aesthetic objects. Art became a realm of ideas.

Molesworth then examines how various movements in the 60s and 70s were highly conceptual, or idea driven, and often manifested itself as “anti-commodity.”

The new art remained, however, extremely difficult for lay viewers to understand or interpret. Its difficulty lay, in large measure, in its double rejection: as artists stopped employing traditional artistic skills, they also stopped making works of art that imagined the museum or the collector’s home as their final destination. Instead, artists attempted to make works of art that would actively resist easy assimilation into the realm of the art market, where art was seen to be one luxury commodity among many.

Duchamp’s speech, “The Creative Act,” addressed another very influential concept. Duchamp declared “the then radical idea that `the creative act is not performed by the artist alone.” This idea “stripped” the artist of some previously assumed privileges.

He suggested that the author could no longer be seen as an omnipotent, singular, and codified dispenser of meaning. Instead, the reader is the privileged subject, for the “reader is the space on which all the quotations that make up a writing are inscribed … a text’s unity lies not in its origin but its destination.”

This idea can be summarized in Ronald Barthes’s statement, “the birth of the reader must be at the cost of the death of the Author.” As Molesworth points out, this “Death of the Author” caused many artists and writers to “deployed a variety of means to undermine or downplay their own authorship.” Some used various methods of chance, others used serial mathematical systems, some delegated their work to assistants, and finally other works of art included the audience!

On these “Death of the Author” influenced pieces Molesworth writes:

Some art historians have viewed the strategies of anti-authorship, such as LeWitt’s imagining of himself as a clerk, as part of the “de-skilling” of the artist. Yet it is more accurate to treat this transformation as a re-skilling, for as artists weathered the change from a manufacturing to a service economy, it stands to reason that the declining value for one set of skills would be accompanied by a rising value for another.
That Rauschenberg should request to erase one of de Kooning’s drawings can be seen less as an anti-oedipal urge and more as an acknowledgment that one form of artistic skill was being supplanted by another–draftsmanship erased in the face of conceptual art’s nascent ascendancy. Despite the lack of technical skill required to erase the drawing, Rauschenberg claimed to have worked very hard to erase the drawing well. And the results of his hard labor are evident: not even the slightest trace of the drawing remains.

The conceptual thrust also had implications for art education. Increasingly, students of art in college have had a more theoretical background instead of one in which she describes as manual labor, especially at the master’s level. Thus, she argues the shift from making commodities to be bought and sold in the art world parallels the same phenomenon for the vast majority of the working class in America.

However, the intent artists and students was not always greeting with open arms because of some of the crystallized notions of what art should be.

But the romantic myths of the artist as outcast, the artist as lone genius, the artist as inspired (not trained) or, conversely, the artist as one possessing a highly distinctive set of laboriously learned skills still held sway in the popular imagination. In these scenarios, the rise of the professional artist was viewed as a cynical degradation of art’s magical or auratic status.

::Intermission / Seventh Inning Stretch:: (Seriously, this diary is long, take a little break!)

Sol leWitt is often quoted on conceptual art. LeWitt stated

“In conceptual art the idea or concept is the most important aspect of the work . . . all planning and decisions are made beforehand and the execution is a perfunctory affair. The idea becomes the machine that makes the art.”

With this emphasis, Molesworth points out that there became the concept of an “executive artist.” She explains:

…Stella shocked the art world with his idea of an “executive artist” who has others do his work for him, Warhol actualized this model when he established The Factory and famously quipped that if people wanted to know about his work they should ask his assistants. Despite their embrace of the executive model, both artists also flirted with other forms of identification, projecting an affinity with members of the working class…. Stella’s adoption of house painting’s tools and techniques was accompanied by the following recollection: “it sounds a little dramatic, being an `art worker.’ I just wanted to do it and get it over with so I could go home and watch TV.”

A natural outgrowth of the de-commodification of art as well as the “de-skilling,” or the liberation of strictly traditional media, involves a puzzling question about what constitutes art and the blurring between the previously understood boundaries between art and life.

Brue Nauman did just that. He commented: “If you see yourself as an artist and you function in a studio … you sit in a chair or pace around. And then the question goes back to what is art? And art is what an artist does, just sitting around the studio.” However, Nauman changed the meaning of his studio from a place of artistic paranoia, wondering what to do next, to a place akin to a theatre, a place where he recorded himself performing various tasks.

This emphasis away from a final product opened a door which lead to art which has been classified as Performance Art, where there can be an emphasis on the process of creation over the finalized product. Molesworth mention’s Chris Burden’s Honest Labor (1979) in which he dug a ditch over the course of three days which resulted in a rather useless product, a ditch: “Here, the artist does an “honest day’s work” yet refuses to produce a luxury commodity object.”

Performance and process art manifested themselves in many ways (and still do!). In certain instances the art dealt with socio-political themes as well as ethical dilemmas. Helen Molesworth investigates the art of Martha Rosler who video taped her household tasks, and points out that this critique involved many issues, including women’s unpaid labor. In other pieces, movements such as Fluxus dealt with the ubiquity of capitalism’s influence in our lifestyle and “insisted on recreation without a profit motive.”

In terms of the dilemmas I alluded to earlier, the essay addresses the work of Yoko Ono (yes, that Yoko Ono), specifically her Cut Piece (1964). In this piece members of the audience were invited to literally cut off Ono’s clothes until she was nude. While, I think the piece is open to many different interpretations, I find the dilemma interesting as Molesworth points out:  

In each instance, viewership was presented as an activity bound up with the enacting and solving of ethical situations: Should audience members dissuade other audience members from taking too much of Ono’s clothing?… In other words, the audience is placed in a fraught situation in which its potential passivity is made manifest. By emphasizing the role of the viewer/participant and the struggle it entails, these performances pressure the category of leisure, questioning whether audience-participatory works are a space of deregulatory release or whether they, too, come with responsibilities.

Work Ethic wraps up with a discussion of Gabriel Orozco’s Mesa de ping-pong con estanque (Ping Pond Table, 1998). Orozco’s piece essentially looks like two-ping pong tables which connect, perpendicular from each other, with a pond in the center with water lilies. Molesworth explains:

Viewers are invited to play. Because there are no preestablished rules, the terms of engagement depend upon the participants. The museum’s imagining of viewers as solitary is disallowed; instead, a contested (and competitive) public space is offered where participants come together as equals to negotiate a situation. In many regards, Orozco’s work offers a utopian microcosm of the traditional public sphere in which disinterested citizens are encouraged to come together to debate the function of their society. Citizens thus bear responsibility for the work of public life. Today, however, such a public sphere has largely ceased to exist, as corporate interests almost entirely shape public debate, and here, debate (or its potential) is substituted with play. Deploying the Fluxus strategies of the nonserious, the game, and the radically altered commodity, Orozco is able to revisit the site of the museum as the primary arbiter of art’s role and meaning in society.

She goes on to explain the duality of Orozco’s piece as a work of sculpture as well as one which provides an experience for the museum visitor.

In Ping Pond Table viewers complete the work, but they are asked to do so in a fashion that is more communal than solitary. Ping Pond Table thus suggests that in the face of diminishing spaces for critique and debate within a hypercommercialized experiential art world, perhaps the space of play can be reclaimed as having a potentially critical dimension. Far from a mere repetition, such a reinvention (provisionally) resists the contemporary forces of global capital–forces that have transformed art into a mere commodity and museums into mandatory tourist destinations–and articulates the potential politics and pleasure in both resisting and shaping new forms of labor and leisure. Contemporary art may hold a key, then, to new identities and to how the conditions of social possibility can be reshaped in the new millennium.

Well, this diary is already too long, so just a few thoughts. Most importantly, I think getting the ideas out there about the history of Conceptual Art amongst other movements can be quite helpful for people to interact with contemporary art. I also find that many of the concerns and dilemmas some of these artists had are quite relevant in the blogesphere.

Just as Molesworth wrote about how Orozco’s tables are a place for citizens to come together and discuss the function of their society, the same thing has been going on here discussing censorship and standards, as well as the obvious larger discussions of our society and world. Yoko Ono’s dilemmas of how people should behave given a certain degree of freedom remind me of the concept of self-regulation that we practice in the blogesphere, whether its comment rating, telling a user that his or her diary is a duplicate, or writing an e-mail to an administrator explaining why another diarist is out of line.

Note: Much of the information I provide is paraphrasing Molesworth’s essay.

Cross-posted at My Left Wing, The Daily Kos, and The European Tribune.

Belfast, Negotiation, and Westernization

I recently have come across two columns from different parts of the world which I thought had some interesting parallels. One was by Rami Khouri, via the Daily Star of Lebanon. The other article was by William Pfaff who is a columnist for the International Herald Tribune.

Rami  Khouri’s, From Belfast to Beirut: Good news at last, tackles the idea of being inclusive in bringing various conflicting factions to the negotiating table as well as the idea that the factions must feel some sense of ownership of the ideas that are being brought to the table.

Khouri begins his piece by investigating the implications of the Irish Republican Army’s decision to halt violent resistance against the UK and explaining how this could serve as a model for establishing a peaceful Middle East “which in turn would help reduce the global terror problem”.

Khouri writes:

It would be equally nice if all concerned in the West and the Middle East would muster the courage, humility and determination to apply some of the same principles of peace-making in Northern Ireland to the confrontations and conflicts in this region. This could apply in at least three important areas in the Middle East: domestic military conflicts or political tensions within countries (Iraq, Sudan, Lebanon, Algeria, Egypt, Palestine, and others); the Palestinian-Israeli and the wider Arab-Israeli conflicts; and the standoff between the U.S., U.K. and some other Western states and leading Arab Islamist political and/or resistance groups like Hizbullah, Hamas, the Muslim Brotherhood, and others.

Khouri continues to explain the “lessons for achieving a permanent, durable negotiated peace in the Middle East.” He describes three main areas:

These are the need for: a) an honest, patient and fair third-party mediator (the U.S. is the only option), b) decisive, courageous and self-confident leadership among the principal warring parties and mediators (we’re all in the D+/C- range on that one), and c) an inclusive negotiating process that allows all legitimate parties to sit at the negotiating table and help craft a permanent peace accord (nowhere in sight on most counts).

Khouri emphasizes that the process in Northern Ireland included “the republicans and unionists in Northern Ireland, and the British and American governments,” and commends each party.
He then includes the thoughts of Gabrielle Rifkind, a British psychoanalyst. She explains:

“The most important message of Northern Ireland, and it was learned through bitter experience, is that you must include all the parties in the process – whether you like it or not, whatever their faith – you must get them all around the table and hear the different voices…

In an effort to bridge this concept with negotiations in the Middle East, Khouri writes:

This lesson has not been learned in the Middle East, she says, citing how the Palestinian-Israeli Camp David summit in 2000 tried to solve the conflict in a week or two, with a glaring “asymmetry of power that denies the process of seriously engaging in something much more complex, something that takes account of all the different groups.”

Khouri quotes Rifkind again:

“You have to engage people in the end. Even if your ideas are good, as may be the case with the United States today trying to impose democracy and promote peace in the Middle East. Unless she engages people on the ground and listens to them and makes them feel like it’s their idea, and that it organically emerged from them, people won’t sign up for it. When there’s an asymmetry of power, telling other people about how they should behave will not succeed….There is a profound belief that Western society is more civilized and understands these things better, and therefore can tell other people how to be and how to behave, without owning up to the hypocrisy in all of that, or to how you in the Middle East see it in terms of the double-dealing that is going on”

William Pfaff’s editorial “Traditional Culture Strikes Back” raises some interesting points which address some of the same concerns Gabrielle Rifkind had.

Pfaff explains:

The bombers in London and the insurgents in Iraq may think that they are avenging themselves on Western civilization. Some in Washington, London and Tel Aviv may think that they are blocking the ambition of radical Muslims to create some marvelous new caliphate to rule the world. Both are wrong.

The civilizations at war are modernity on the one hand and the traditional world on the other. The Islamic fundamentalists’ terrorist attacks on the West are merely a sideshow – a bitter but doomed reaction to a war that modern society has already largely won, with liberals and conservatives united in their battle against the values, assumptions and mode of life of the vast majority of non-modern mankind.

Pfaff goes on to explain that despite the West’s intent on creating global or transnational progress via free societies and strong markets the West is in fact “the aggressor.” He argues that even perhaps unintentionally the modern world does not respect traditional civilizations and believes destroying them will bring about progress, but he questions this progress.

Pfaff contends that an important factor in understanding cultural differences lies in the disconnect between Western utopian ideas surrounding materialism versus a more traditional religious perspective.

Modern civilization has substituted a material utopia for religious salvation. Since the Enlightenment and the modern scientific revolution unseated religion as our society’s dominant intellectual force, material and social progress has replaced religious salvation as the goal of life.

To take an obvious political example of modern utopianism, the American campaign to deregulate global finance and open the world to U.S. business investment may have American material interest behind it but it was accepted by the Clinton administration and nearly everyone else in America and Western Europe as a progressive idea that would make societies everywhere richer by bringing them into the international trading system.

However, deregulation and the globalization of the world economy casually destroyed what already was there: self-sufficient economies functioning within traditional trading patterns, artisanal manufacturing for local or neighboring markets, subsistence agriculture – and the cultural assumptions that went along with all of this.

Pffaf’s conclusion echoes some of Khouri and Rifkind’s thoughts:

Modern Western civilization is the product of Western history and culture. The West is what it is because of its past. Nobody imposed foreign ideas on the West. Hence the West is at home in the modern world. The modern world was created by, and belongs to, the West.
But the West is trying to impose not only foreign ideas on everyone else, but ideas that contradict and would destroy the fundamental values and assumptions of non-Western societies.

It says: This is progress. Our progress is your destabilization, the destruction of your cultures, the creation of millions of culturally alienated, deracinated, displaced persons, ripped from their own past to become integrated into a radically materialistic ethic.

It should hardly be surprising that the reaction to this is nihilistic violence.

What do you think?

Donate Blood

Cross-posted at My Left Wing and Daily Kos

Essentially the point of the bloggesphere is to improve the world. Most places have their own goals, their own mission, and work with others who are willing to help.. whether its exposing the calculated lies of the Bush administration or helping raise money for progressive candidates, these are all important avenues and as most people here would agree these acts can be viewed as helping other people or at the least preventing harm.

Well I don’t have anything insightful for you today, sorry!  I just wanted to remind people that:

Under normal circumstances, every two seconds someone in America will need a blood transfusion. Blood transfusions are used for trauma victims – due to accidents and burns – heart surgery, organ transplants, women with complications during childbirth, newborns and premature babies, and patients receiving treatment for leukemia, cancer or other diseases, such as sickle cell disease and thalassemia. (source)

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The American Red Cross has a website which can help you find a place to donate blood if you are interested and/or able.

Checkpoints and Human Rights

Today on DemocracyNow!, Amy Goodman interviewed three women peace activists: Dr. Jumana Odeh, Michal Sagi, and Rana Khouri. Each women has a special relationship with the checkpoints in the Occupied Territories and shared their personal stories.

Dr. Odeh is a Palestinian Mulsim who lives in Jerusalem and is the Director of the Palestinian Happy Child Center. As the title of her center indicates Dr. Odeh works with children and told the story of one epileptic child and the general requirements to get past a checkpoint in medical situations.

And I got lots of calls from my patients, especially that particular child, who was around six, and he had epilepsy. And they ran out of their anti-epileptic drugs, and they lived in a village next to Ramallah. So his father was calling, pleading for help, that they tried to enter Ramallah because the curfew was lifted only for two hours. They were not allowed to enter Ramallah within those two hours. And he was asking for medication. And he told me that `My child is seizuring, he’s fitting; he’s having his seizures on the checkpoint, right on the checkpoint while the soldiers were watching, and they are not allowing me.’ So I had to jump into that checkpoint, run to that checkpoint, give him the medication, calm down the child. And I remember him saying to me, “Please, I don’t want to fall down again! I don’t want to fall down again!” I’ll never, ever forget this story.

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Michal Sagi is a Jewish Israeli who is the Executive Director of SHILO – Jerusalem’s Family Planning, Educational, and Counseling Center and is involved with Checkpoint Watch, a women’s human rights organization which observes Israeli check points in the Occupied Territories. When asked why she is involved with the checkpoints Sagi replied:

I need to go there. I cannot ignore the things that are happening, the things that are being done by using my name, my citizenship. I feel the need to witness and not to be able to say, “I didn’t know. I didn’t see,”

After this comment Amy Goodman asked Michal Sagi to explain what the checkpoints are like, Sagi replied:

A checkpoint is not like here in the airport where someone wants to go in and is being checked for security, but nobody questions his or her right to go on board. In the military checkpoints around the West Bank and around Jerusalem, the soldiers can decide who is going to pass and who is not going to pass. On top of that, the majority of checkpoints are not between Israelis and Palestinians. Most of the checkpoints are separating a Palestinian village from a Palestinian town. So if — let’s say that you’re living in Hewara village, which is southern to Nablus, and you want to get to Nablus in order to get dentist treatment or for shopping or for university, school, whatever the daily needs that one need, they should go out in the morning, early. They would stand at the checkpoint, sometimes for hours, without knowing if they’re actually going to make it, if they’re actually going to pass it, because the rules are keeping the — they keep changing the rules. One day everybody are allowed in, and the next day only people over 35 are allowed. One day students can go inside to university, and one day, no. People are being detained for hours, for checking, but also as a mean of punishment.

Sagi went on to explain that the Israeli military was disturbed by her presence there referring to her as a traitor, but also sometimes getting other responses which were more positive.

And last but not least is Rana Khouri, a Christian Palestinian, who graduated from the University of Michigan. She is the Deputy General Director of the International Center of Bethlehem. Amy Goodman asked her why she returned to Palestine:

Rana Khouri: You mean on this tour? I think for a number of reasons. One, is to show that the conflict is not about religion. The fact that three faiths are presented here, the stories are different, but there is a common aim, which is to end occupation, end the Israeli occupation of the Palestinians. And the fact that it’s not about religious differences. It’s about land. It’s about the denial of human rights for a nation, a people. (emphasis mine)

Rana Khouri went on to explain a personal story.

When we talk about checkpoints, it’s a very personal experience with myself, because I feel that the checkpoints were responsible partly for the death of my father, again, an American citizen. And a year and a half ago, he had a massive heart attack, and he was to be transferred for a hospital in East Jerusalem because there are no good health system in the West Bank or in Palestinian cities and areas. And at the checkpoint, he was held for four hours, trying to — I mean, the man was almost dead.
And the reason why he was held was the fact that he had the wrong permit. He was — he’s a hotel owner, and he has a permit that — as a merchant, meaning he goes into East Jerusalem or in Israel as a merchant. And on that day, because he was not — there was a closure that merchants could not go in Jerusalem, he needed a medical permit. The man was in an ambulance. For four hours he was held at a checkpoint between Bethlehem and Jerusalem. And then the only way to solve the matter after four hours of trying to connect to people was to call an ambulance from Jerusalem, where he was transported from that ambulance of the West Bank to an ambulance in Jerusalem in order to go to a hospital.

I don’t want to copy and paste the whole article so I recommend going and reading it. There is an interesting discussion of how 39 babies have died on the check points as well as other information about obtaining medical permits to get access to hospitals. I’ll leave you with Michal Sagi’s thoughts:

Continuing the occupation is destroying Israeli society. It’s harming us severely. We’re corrupting a second and third generation by occupying another nation. And by the way, I think it’s going to happen to you, as well, if — but that’s again, a different story.
AMY GOODMAN: Meaning?

MICHAL SAGI: Meaning, you cannot occupy a civil society and control a civil society and stay human and stay democratic and stay good human beings.

AMY GOODMAN: And you’re talking about?

MICHAL SAGI: Iraq.

To Watch (128k stream), 256k

The Freudian Script: Fox News

When I saw SusanHu’s diary about outrages it reminded me of some video clips I saw over at Media Matters. This website often posts video clips of Fox News at its worst hour. You might be thinking, yeah Deano, we all know “FOX News is a propaganda outlet for the Republican Party…,” but I would like to take the claims one step further!

Fox News isn’t just a biased news source, just another opinion, its gone too far. It’s not just another opinion to state:

MARKS: It [Edgeware Road] is an area that has a very large Arab population. Surrounding that station, a large number of Middle Eastern restaurants. So, it’s a further indication, if in fact these attacks were carried out by Al Qaeda-affiliated cells, that these people are, if necessary, prepared to spill Arab blood in addition to the blood of regular — of non-Arab people living in London. (emphasis mine)

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When I was watching this clip it reminded me of some sort of Freudian slip; it made me feel as if the spinster did not intend to say “regular people,” but that this was how the anchor truly felt.

This same notion came over me when Brit Hume made this remark:

HUME: You know, the market was down. It was down yesterday, and you know, you may have had some bargain-hunting going on. I mean, my first thought when I heard — just on a personal basis, when I heard there had been this attack and I saw the futures this morning, which were really in the tank, I thought, “Hmmm, time to buy.” Others may have thought that as well. But you never know about the markets. But obviously, if the markets had behaved badly, that would obviously add to people’s sense of alarm about it. But there has been a lot of reassurance coming, particularly in the way that — partly in the way the Brits handled all this, but also in the way that officials here handled it. There seems to be no great fear that something like that is going to happen here, although there’s no indication that we here had any advance warning.(emphasis done by Media Matters)

This may just be a Freudian slip with a sick attempt at a cover up. I have definitely said things sometimes without thinking. Just the other day I was teaching an art class and as it was the first day, the whole class was sitting in a circle playing a name game when we introduced ourselves and shared our favorite movies. One camper with long hair strolled into class late and what looked like a bikini bottom but with no top. The first thing I said to the camper was “Hey did you forget the other part of your bathing suit?” The little boy said, “No, I’m a boy, this is a Colombian bathing suit”. I made a mistake. There was nothing I could say to get out of that one.

But Brit Hume’s comments show his true colors. It doesn’t seem he just made a mistake. It seems THIS simple: He was thinking of profit and the market when innocent civilian bodies were incinerated. Maybe it’s a Freudian Slip or just one huge Freudian Script.

Clip in Quicktime and in Windows Media (Oh, and don’t worry there are plenty of more repugnant comments).