Battles with Integrity

First, I need to make some space, so that the bullets don't get eaten by my icon.

I think it's a failing of this particular theme.

Mayhaps I shall have to change the theme sometime. Here goes....

Hegel says these three things in order (paraphrased):

• In order to study world history philosophically, we must first ensure that we avoid any a priori assumptions about the nature of the world, or the nature of history, as historians are wont to do.
  
  
• There is a singular spirit that guides and shapes the history of the world that can be rationally understood through studious applications.
  
  
• This singular spirit is guided by divine providence, because the Bible tells us so.

Wait Georg, you had me with the first one, but then I lost you when you drove off the rails.

I have spent the last week trying to figure out what image to use for my assigned 3-4 page paper in the summer class on Visual Narratives of Race and Gender in Photography and Art. The paper is due Thursday, and so I kind of need to get cracking. There are lots of iconic images from which one could make a choice. I decided that I didn't want to take anything too pop-culture-y, or too new. After thinking on it for a while, I realized what photo I wanted to do. Having looked it up, I've decided that I this is the image for me:



Now just to put together a coherent narrative describing the disconnect between the fate of these children and the phrase with liberty and justice for all.

Note: I had originally intended this for the [acad] filter, but it seems to have grown a life of it's own, refusing to fit within the filter, or within any filter. Oh well, so it goes.

The following quote comes from The Concept of the Foreign: An Interdisciplinary Dialogue edited by Rebecca Saunders. This comes from Saunders' introduction.

"However widespread and consequential, the concept of the foreign is perversely difficult to define. There are, as we shall see, reasons for this: its relativity, its equivocal valuation, the heterogeneity of the terms that constitute it, its recidivistic metaphoricity. Derived from a Latin term meaning "outside" (foras), the word foreign designates a quality or an entity conceived relatively: the foreign is always relative to the inside, the domestic, the familiar, a boundary. No entity is inherently foreign; s/he who is a foreigner in one place is at home in another; as the familiar is altered or a boundary redrawn¹, so to is the character of the foreign: it is a linguistic and conceptual container with infinitely variable contents. Symptomatic of the relative nature of the foreign is the necessity of defining foreign negatively, a symptom exhibited by virtually any dictionary: to be foreign is not belonging to a group, not speaking a given language, not having the same customs; it is to be unfamiliar, uncanny, unnatural, unauthorized, incomprehensible, inappropriate, improper. As much the detritus of conceptualizing as a concept proper, foreignness must thus at times be approached à rebours (indeed one may be called on to comprendre à rebours: to misunderstand, engage in an anti-understanding.

Not only can foreignness not exist in a vacuum, it can't exist without something to compare it against. Actually it's the necessity of comparison that makes foreignness so powerful. Just as nationalism requires an outsider² (I'm tempted to throw in the word utlänning just to sound pretentious), so does the definition of outsider require something considered to be 'in'. This allows one to be foreign not only in another country, or even in one's own country, but amongst one's own peers, if one is somehow now on the outside looking in.

As someone who was raised Seventh-Day Adventist, I am foreign to people outside that particular branch of Christianity. I'm foreign to that church, as my beliefs do not coincide with any generally accepted Christian dogma. I am foreign to the nation because of my homeland in California, and to California because of my experience growing up in small-town Humboldt County. I'm foreign to the hippies in Southern Humboldt because I don't smoke weed, and because my family is from logger stock. I'm foreign to working-class Humboldt County because, well because I am. Partly, because of my welfare upbringing, and partly because I try to eschew provincialism which often, but not always marks much working-class thought, at least to my limited experience, at least in Humboldt County. I am foreign to the city because of my rural roots, and I'm no longer rural enough to fit in up north anymore either.

Foreignness isn't just about locality, but also about belonging, about class, race, food hangups (at least in my case), and about finding oneself in a place where one does not quite fit. Fortunately, I have largely been able to find a sort of fitting place amongst other folk, who for one reason or another, also don't quite fit. My people are foreigners, freaks, geeks, queers, and oddballs. We band together for mutual protection perhaps, but also because we see in each other, and in ourselves, that at heart, we share more important things than similar experience, similar tastes, and similar backgrounds. We're square pegs in round holes. We're monkeys in the wrench. We're strangers, as it were, in a strange land.

But it's not such a bad thing, really. I would not want it any other way.

¹cf. Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo.
² Something Gelvin talks about in Modern Middle East: A History when discussing Egyption, Algerian and Balkan (various) nationalism movements in the Ottoman empire.

Mindich discusses the ante-bellum debate over slavery in terms of Daniel Hallin's three spheres of public discourse: the Sphere of Consensus, the Sphere of Legitimate Controversy, and the Sphere of Deviance. (These are represented in the diagram in the book as three distinctly shaded concentric circles but they seem to have been blurred together in the photocopy in the reader.) Over time, he notes, issues can move from one sphere to another: "The support of women's suffrage, for example, moved over time from Deviance to Legitimate Controversy to its present position: deeply embedded in the Sphere of Consensus." (p.48) Pick a contemporary issue whose position in the three spheres is contested or uncertain: that is, an issue that some people insist belongs to one sphere and others insist belongs to another sphere. How does this issue contrast or compare with the status of slavery in the ante-bellum period?

Of the several issues of political controversy in contemporary American society, one issue whose position in public discourse has changed in recent years is the question of torture. Before 2001, torture was very much an academic issue in the US, and the idea of torture as an illegitimate investigative tool in law enforcement or the military would have fall generally in the Sphere of Consensus, with people generally agreeing that torture is a bad thing. With the hijackings of September 2001, many Americans' perceptions of the world, their safety in the world, and the measures necessary to maintain that safety changed drastically, thrusting the legitimacy of torture into the Sphere of Controversy, as debate began over 'ticking bomb scenarios', and the Administration worked to undermine previously held views of torture as something done by evildoers to heroes and victims, and inject into American discourse discussions of definitions of torture, something that would have been politically unthinkable previously. Similarly, the idea that torture is never acceptable has moved from the edge between the Spheres of Consensus and Controversy before 9/11, and now it has moved to the periphery of discourse to the Sphere of Deviance. While the national attitude regarding slavery evolved over time during the 19th century, national views of torture changed much more quickly in the wake of September 11, 2001.

[Posted on Brick's50-ver2, out in the world.]

I'm feeling pretty good right now about school. I'm in that magic zone where I have readings due, but little else at the moment. My next paper is three weeks away, and I have some ideas already about how to approach it. I've finished all my exams, and am free, as yet from the crushing reality of the grades for those exams. So, while I am still blissfully ignorant of my true position in the semester, I might as well enjoy the bliss, no?

Hope everyone else is having a good day, too.

Today I had the morning off from work, since the Chancery observes Columbus day. I don´t have the same day off from school, because Columbus is no longer the political hero he once was (to men of European stock anyway). Today we have a peer editing workshop for the second (of three) composition in Spanish. The first draft follows.

( Read more... )

...Dr. Nunberg mentioned that presentism also priveleged the present over the futre. He showed the picture below.

Dan Dare, Pilot of the Future Text: Dan Dare and Digby, his batman, are driving to Space Fleet HQ in answer to an urgent call from the Controller. Digby: I wonder if anything has happened to the 'Kingfisher', sir? The presence of the officer's batman shows an assumption that future society would, despite technological advancement, mirror the 1950s society that spawned the comic.

Curiously enough, when he asked the class what a batman was, only one student could answer. Subsequently, the term batman turned up on the Midterm review.

bat·man (bāt'mən)
n. A British military officer's orderly.

[Obsolete bat, packsaddle (from French bât, from Old French bast, from Late Latin bastum) + man.]

batman. (n.d.). The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, Fourth Edition. Retrieved October 03, 2007, from Dictionary.com website: http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/batman

From the OED:

A man in charge of a bat-horse and its load; a military servant of a cavalry officer. Now generally, an officer's servant.

1755 in S. M. HAMILTON Lett. to Washington I. 96 They have taken..another man who was batman to Doct. Craik. 1809 WELLINGTON in Gurwood Disp. V. 198 The care of the Camp Kettles is not only the business of the Bâtman of the company, but of all the Bâtmen of the regiment. 1844 Regul. & Ord. Army 271 A Bât Man is allowed to the Surgeon for the care of the horse carrying the Instruments. 1855 W. SARGENT Braddock's Exp. 206 The English loss was..a waggoner, three bat-men, and a horse. 1941 Aeronautics Oct. 60/3 R.A.F. officers in the future are to have the services of members of the W.A.A.F. for duties which have been carried out hitherto by batmen. 1955 Times 18 Aug. 5/1 Men employed as outside batmen in the married quarters were expected to clean and polish the houses, clean windows, cut lawns, fetch coal, and run errands. 1966 Times 9 July 9/7 Command Orders say a batman must now be dignified as an ‘orderly’.

clog_dailycal is the Livejournal RSS feed for the blog at the Daily Californian, UCB's school newspaper.

Whee!

(thanks for the pointer, rhiannonstone!)