Author: asitoughttobemagazine

ART THEORY

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agnes_martin_1960

Agnes Martin, White Flower, oil on canvas, 1960. Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York.

AGNES MARTIN, WITTGENSTEIN, AND THE QUALITY WITHOUT A NAME

by Felix Macnee

“There is a central quality which is the root criterion of life and spirit in a man, a town, a building, or a wilderness. This quality is objective and precise, but it cannot be named.”1

A simplicity attends the writings of Agnes Martin, Wittgenstein, and Christopher Alexander. Each is concerned with certain types of architecture. Alexander addresses towns and buildings, the physical spaces that make our world; Martin investigates the architecture of form and feeling in art and the nature of inspiration; Wittgenstein pursues the architecture of language and form to arrive at the structure of worlds. And within each discussion is a kernel of each of the other elements. This relationship articulates a triadic system whose vertices are these architectural ideas. If this triad is regarded as an isomorphism of semiotic structure, one notes its tendency to collapse into a dyadic or even monadic system, each term stacked atop the other (this is possible in a non-geometric space). Here then the discussion is not concerned so much with the terms as with the translation, or lines, between the terms. Finally, the supporting ground, the space within which this collapsing triad exists, can be regarded as the “quality without a name.”

“I hope I have made it clear that the work is about perfection as we are aware of it in our minds but that the paintings are very far from being perfect — completely removed in fact — even as we ourselves are.”2

Words are about meaning as Agnes Martin’s works are about perfection. Several of Wittgenstein’s propositions address the “aboutness” of words (2.173 specifically addresses the picture, which is itself a type of word):

3.11 — “We use the sensible perceptible sign (sound or written sign, etc.) of the proposition as a projection of the possible state of affairs.

“The method of projection is the thinking of the sense of the proposition.”

3.12 — “The sign through which we express the thought I call the propositional sign. And the proposition is the propositional sign in its projective relation to the world.”

3.13 — “To the proposition belongs everything which belongs to the projection; but not what is projected. …”3

2.173 — “The picture represents its object from without (its standpoint is its form of representation) …”4

Distance from perfection, a perfection of meaning, defines “about.” This distance is inevitable and necessary. In fact the concept of meaning itself contains the necessary element of distance. Perfection is such that it can be intellectually understood only by remove. (I make this distinction because there is a type of understanding that is non-intellectual, and not filtered through translation. Every religious text refers to this understanding, though none provides it. We infer its existence just as we infer the existence of consciousness in others.) If perfection were present we would imagine it weren’t. Paradoxically, it is present. But we don’t come to know this simply by stating the fact. Stating the fact removes us from truth, by an increment equivalent to the thickness of the sign circumscribing the experience.

On the other hand, knowing itself, the unframed state of being, is an instantaneous sensation, an internal “quality without a name.” It is the sensation pursued by artists, philosophers, and mystics, et al, and its temporary apprehension (“apprehension” is not the correct word, but there can be no correct word, since it will always slide between its object and the reader, and in so doing, silently, falsely ascribe this same circumstance to the depicted action) is always registered with a sense of giddiness or even loss. Something profoundly impersonal inheres in the great work of art, the great thought, the great belief. This is the root of its difficulty. Good works of art can be personal — but to move beyond them we must move beyond ourselves, our sense of identification with or possession of the work of art. To become the servant of art in this sense marks the advent of true progress. We must constantly leave ourselves behind.

“The limits of my language mean the limits of my world.”5

Clearly, by “language” Wittgenstein here means any depictive faculty or system, that which translates being into the known. (The glib use of the word “known” is not meant to assert a delusional belief in some completeness of apprehension; rather it intends to convey only the nominal sense in which things are ordinarily “known.”) The word “world” now comes into question, for we see that its dimension apparently is fluid. Of course this is only true to the extent that a world depends on a language. Wittgenstein seems to make the dependence total — but this is defused by the modifier “my.” As soon as we lose “my” we lose this dependence.

So language is a translator (though it itself must be translated), but what is mysterious is not the often hazy product of translation, but the action of translation itself. It is essentially blind and inferential; it points backward in time through itself to being (even where we conceive of the knowing as instantaneous). This is why a common philosophical view equates being solely and rigorously with the known — in order not to travel backward in time. Another mystery is the form of language itself, how one can truthfully assert its remove from reality, yet equally well assert the creation of universes from linguistic structures. Language is a property of arrangement whose inception follows intent, but whose conception outstrips expectation; its grammar is a physics, and its words are uncracked atoms.

“I once saw a simple fish pond in a Japanese village which was perhaps eternal. A farmer made it for his farm. The pond was a simple rectangle, about 6 feet wide, and 8 feet long; opening off a little irrigation stream. At one end, a bush of flowers hung over the water. At the other end, under the water, was a circle of wood, its top perhaps 12 inches below the surface of the water. In the pond there were eight great ancient carp, each maybe 18 inches long, orange, gold, purple, and black: the oldest one had been there eighty years. The eight fish swam, slowly, slowly, in circles — often within the wooden circle. The whole world was in that pond. Every day the farmer sat by it for a few minutes. I was there only one day and I sat by it all afternoon. … It was so true to the nature of the fish, and flowers, and the water, and the farmers, that it had sustained itself for all that time, endlessly repeating, always different. There is no degree of wholeness or reality which can be reached beyond that simple pond.”6

This is the wholeness that comes from inspiration, breathing in the eloquent unknown, that which is the true self and allows the ungovernable aspect of this to articulate itself. It is a listening without category. Francis Bacon describes this sort of material listening in a discussion of his approach to painting:

“It’s an illogical method of making, an illogical way of attempting to make what one hopes will be a logical outcome — in the sense that one hopes one will be able to suddenly make the thing there in a totally illogical way but that it will be totally real …”7

This rejection of logic is really a deference to its container, that which is beyond the parameters of concept. We conceptualize a quality, and in so doing remove and falsify it. But only in our minds.8 It is just as we are able to point to some object, and on a practical level actually refer to that object, not to our sensory perception of it, though this latter, forever incomplete version is all we ever know. Even sensory reference is a function of remove. Life can be seen as a convolution of being. And if this is the case one may legitimately question how or why complexity of this sort arose. It seems as though confusion were invented as a portal to wonder.

Artists have constantly striven for higher degrees of verisimilitude, refining their languages in order to more closely represent a particular truth or set of truths. They have employed objects and methods as various as “abstract” or occult symbolism, as in the religious art of ancient cultures, cubism (where the goal was to simultaneously present as many aspects, or facets, of an object or relationships of objects as was aesthetically possible), the hyper-realism of artists such as Duane Hanson, and the one-to-one relationship of art to object in the use of “readymades.”

Even this last correspondence is not exact, though, as Arthur Danto has argued.9 An ordinary object transformed into art — for example, Duchamp’s In Advance of the Broken Arm —is no longer exactly itself: it carries with it an interpretive “artworld,” as Danto puts it, who intellectually nail an aura, halo-like, above it, while ironically lauding the intellectual audacity of the artist’s act of discarding the aura as superfluous. This tip of the hat to Walter Benjamin nearly invalidates him. Fortunately for him, we only need one snow shovel in the museum. No one is arrested or declared a philistine for using any one of the others to shovel snow. “Art for art’s sake” seeks an equivalence with itself that still doesn’t escape the internal distance of reference. For it is both “itself” and “art.” But one needn’t despair. It is enough that we can point to the quality without a name, through whatever means. It is enough to know that its location is inside and outside, to know that the border between these two realms is a shimmering, dimensionless membrane called the mind, and that this too is a facet of perfection.

“Moments of perfection are indescribable but a few things can be said about them. At such times we are suddenly very happy and we wonder why life ever seemed troublesome. In an instant we can see the road ahead free from all difficulties and we think that we will never lose it again. All this and a great deal more in barely a moment, and then it is gone.”10

–Felix Macnee, 1999

Footnotes:

1  The Timeless Way of Building, Christopher Alexander, Oxford University Press, New York, 1979, pg. ix.

2  Writings, Agnes Martin, Kunstmuseum Winterthur / Edition Cantz, 1992, pg. 15.

2   Tractatus Logico-Philisophicus, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Routledge, London & New York, 1995, pg. 45.

4  ibid, pg. 41.

5  Tractatus Logico-Philisophicus, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Routledge, London & New York, 1995, proposition 5.6, pg. 149.

6  The Timeless Way of Building, Christopher Alexander, Oxford University Press, New York, 1979, pg. 38.

7  The Brutality of Fact, Interviews With Francis Bacon, David Sylvester, Thames and Hudson, New York, 1990, pg. 105.

8  “Many complain that the words of the wise are always merely parables and of no use in daily life, which is the only life we have.  When the sage says:  ‘Go over,’ he does not mean that we should cross to some actual place, which we could do anyhow if the labor were worth it; he means some fabulous yonder, something unknown to us, something too that he cannot designate more precisely, and therefore cannot help us here in the very least.  All these parables really set out to say merely that the incomprehensible is incomprehensible, and we know that already.  But the cares we have to struggle with every day:  that is a different matter.

“Concerning this a man once said:  Why such reluctance?  If you only followed the parables you yourselves would become parables and with that rid of all your daily cares.

“Another said:  I bet that is also a parable.

“The first said:  You have won.

“The second said:  But unfortunately only in parable.

“The first said:  No, in reality:  in parable you have lost.”

—Franz Kafka, The Complete Stories and Parables, Quality Paperback Book Club, New York, 1983, pg. 459, “On Parables.”

9  see The Transfiguration of the Commonplace, A Philosophy of Art, Arthur C. Danto, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, 1981.

10  Writings, Agnes Martin, Kunstmuseum Winterthur / Edition Cantz, 1992, pg. 68.

GUEST EDITORIAL

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50Anderson_Auction

Farmers crowd around the auctioneer at a foreclosure sale in Nebraska, intimidating potential bidders so they can buy the farm for a low price. Farms bought at such “penny auctions” were returned to their owners.

PEOPLE POWER PUSHED THE NEW DEAL

Roosevelt didn’t come up with all those progressive programs on his own.

by Sarah Anderson

During the Great Depression, my grandfather ran a butter creamery in rural Minnesota. Growing up, I heard how a group of farmers stormed in one day and threatened to burn the place down if he didn’t stop production. I had no idea who those farmers were or why they had done that—it was just a colorful story.

Now I know that they were with the Farmers’ Holiday Association, a protest movement that flourished in the Midwest in 1932 and 1933. They were best known for organizing “penny auctions,” where hundreds of farmers would show up at a foreclosure sale, intimidate potential bidders, buy the farm themselves for a pittance, and return it to the original owner.

The action in my grandfather’s creamery was part of a withholding strike. By choking off delivery and processing of food, the Farmers’ Holiday Association aimed to boost pressure for legislation to ensure that farmers would make a reasonable profit for their goods. Prices were so low that farmers were dumping milk and burning corn for fuel or leaving it in the field.

The Farmers’ Holiday Association never got the legislation it wanted, but its direct actions lit a fire under politicians. Several governors and then Congress passed moratoriums on farm foreclosures. President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, telling advisors that he feared an “agrarian revolution,” rushed through reforms that helped millions of farmers stay on their land. These new policies regulated how much land was planted or kept in reserve. Although it was eventually replaced by the massive subsidies that today favor large agribusiness and encourage overproduction, Roosevelt’s original program supported some of the most prosperous and stable decades for U.S. farmers.

This is just one example of how strong grassroots organizing during the last severe U.S. economic crisis was key in pushing some of that era’s most important progressive reforms. Social Security is another such case.

The Depression had been particularly tough on the elderly, millions of whom lost their pensions in the stock crash and had few options for employment. Roosevelt, however, felt the nation was not ready for a costly and logistically challenging pension program.

Then a retired California doctor named Francis E. Townsend wrote to the editor of his local paper, proposing a pension system that would also stimulate the economy by offering $200 per month to every citizen over 60, on the condition that they spend the entire amount within 30 days. The idea spread like wildfire. Thousands of Townsend Clubs around the country wrote millions of letters to the President and Congress demanding the pension system Townsend suggested.

Roosevelt, reportedly concerned that Townsend might join with populist Louisiana Senator Huey Long to challenge him in the 1936 election, eventually changed his position. Although he rejected the details of the Townsend Plan, Roosevelt pushed through legislation in 1935 that created Social Security, still one of the country’s most important anti-poverty programs.

Seventy-five years later, these stories offer important lessons for a country again mired in economic crisis. Neither the Farmers’ Holiday Association nor the Townsend Clubs got exactly what they wanted. But their bold demands and action moved the policy debate much further than it would have gone had these social movements not existed.

Like President Barack Obama, Roosevelt was an extremely popular leader, particularly among the disadvantaged who saw him as their champion. But it wasn’t enough to have a generally good guy in the White House. Likewise today, our chances of achieving real change have more to do with the power of social movements than with the occupant of the Oval Office. Obama has opened some doors of opportunity, but to go beyond economic recovery to a more just and sustainable economy, we’ll need to follow in the footsteps of Depression-era activists and organize around bold ideas.

Sarah Anderson directs the Global Economy Project at the Institute for Policy Studies.

This piece was originally published by Yes!, June 5, 2009.

http://www.futurenet.org/yes/yes/issues/the-new-economy/people-power-pushed-the-new-deal

VINCENT VAN GOGH

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the_painter_on_the_road_to_tarascon

The Painter on the Road to Tarascon by Vincent van Gogh, 1888.

THE PAINTER ON THE ROAD TO TARASCON

by Matt Gonzalez

Laden with his brushes and props, one is struck by the spring in his step, his single-minded purpose. Yet anticipation hovers over the Provencal landscape, for one cannot help but guess what subject the painter will capture later this day. Straw hat firmly on his head, blazing sunlight cascading over the path… One can get thirsty looking at this painting.

But the thick, seemingly wet paint, masks an unexpected truth: The painting does not exist. For though the artist painted it, only technology, the very thing that today spoils the once calm rural landscape depicted, allows us to still view the painting. The original was lost during WW II, believed destroyed when Allied forces bombed Magdeburg, setting fire to the Kaiser-Friedrich Museum where it was housed.

Striding along a row of trees the painter is alone, but for the presence of his shadow that figures prominently in the lower right foreground of the canvas. His bold walking companion could easily pass for a bullfighter, but now runs alongside and only barely keeps up with his friend to whom he’s tethered.

Wearing a broad-brimmed yellow hat and carrying a camp stool and easel strapped to his back, rolled canvas also, and walking cane in his left hand… the painter on the road to Tarascon cuts the very image of the plein-air painter…off to find his ground, to peer at the world from. Painted in July 1888, it prefigures so much for Vincent van Gogh. Within a month Paul Gauguin will join him in Arles. By the end of the year he will suffer his first seizure, and within two years he will both sell his first painting in Brussels, and fatally shoot himself in the chest at Auvers-sur-Oise. Dead at the age of thirty-seven.

This rural thoroughfare then, running north from Arles to Tarascon, is his last peace before so much turmoil envelopes and overtakes him. But that is later… I believe the painter on the road to Tarascon to be content.

–Matt Gonzalez


I DREAMT OF MY FATHER LAST NIGHT

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reeltoreelprojector

I DREAMT OF MY FATHER LAST NIGHT

by Eve Toliman

I dreamt of my father last night.  He looked handsome driving the car; calm and steady.  I was young.  He was 42.  In a small, crackly voice, I thanked him for not killing himself.  I had to say it twice.  The first time, he didn’t understand and turned to me so he could hear.  I saw his unlined face, hair swept back as it always was, looking down at me as I sat in the passenger seat.  I thanked him for not killing himself.  I told him how much it meant to me and I knew it had been hard for him.

Then I woke up in the dark and I knew it wasn’t true.  He was still dead.  Most of my life, my father has been a ghost.

I have a handful of memories: riding on the back of his bike in Central Park; waiting on the stone stoop of our building for him to come up the stairs from the subway; peeking through the glass doors to the room where he painted, forbidden to us after I used his brushes and left them scattered and soiled.  I remember his paint-stained hands, reaching for them to hold mine.

I have imagined sometimes that my older selves visited my child self and that they kept her from dying after he did — that they soothed her into living.  But last night it occurred to me — then why didn’t they visit him and save him too?

I rationalized that his death opened worlds for me, that his ghost self showed me things a living father couldn’t — but when I feel like this I don’t believe any of it.  They’re just stories from a sad child’s brain.

The movie of my life is shown on an old reel-to-reel projector that breaks down at this spot, over and over.  My father is 42, the frames slow, skipping through multiple, similar images of his face turning toward me, hair swept back.  I am little, watching, waiting.

When I slept again, I dreamt of people in boxes and bags.  Other people held them captive for their own good; in cramped, dark spaces, arms and legs pushed up against their bodies.  They told me to sit on a box to keep the man from getting out.  When I sat down, the box felt live and hot.  My stomach hurt.

I dreamt that my father’s drawings, luminescent pastels of torsos and faces, were cracking.  I showed them to my son whose hands look like his grandfather’s.  I wanted him to see before they were all gone.  Then I sprinkled water on the dry chalk to see if that would keep the pictures from flaking off and crumbling.  The creamy pastel turned to grit.  A sandpaper face re-adhered to the vellum.  It was harsh, bleached and skewed, missing a piece of the eye, but still there.

Shortly after 9/11, I dreamt of taking a ferry across a muddy-brown canal.  There were no people in my dream just this destination.  I lost a sandal on the way, so I arrived barefoot, the strap of my other white sandal looped through my fingers.  The ferry dropped me at a concrete embankment.  I walked up the steps and entered a cool dark building.  I walked through the underground corridors and emerged in a gray daylight with round dirt hills stretching as far as I could see.  I walked for a long time through these endless, dead hills before I woke up.

After that I dreamt of a shiny, coal-black man with long wavy blond hair and piercing blue eyes.  He was naked, his phallus like obsidian, hanging to his knees.  Old men watched lazily from rickety, folding chairs as he walked, strong and upright, into a clear green sea bordered by three volcanoes, one live.

Through time, these kinds of dreams overtook me. I slowly slipped into the blackness that had chased me for years.  I slid into the void.  Since then I recognize a bit of death in everything.  These gaps feel like friends and I have grown to love emptiness.  I come home to nothing and feel peace.

But how to make my peace here, among the living and their ghosts?  This world that we have made together, it confounds me.  I want to give people beautiful, happy things that make them feel beautiful and happy too, not stories from a sad child’s brain.

Uneasiness follows me all day after I dream of my father.  Shame.  A sense of failure and doom.  I am caught in a box, my arms and legs pushed up against me, no room to move.

I have been trapped like this before.  I stop resisting.  I steep in the shame and failure.  Without mental defenses, there is a lot of space.  I explore the edges, lightly touching everything, searching for its quality.  The feelings spread thin and dissipate.  Physical sensations heighten, cold air on my face, the sound of paper, the sole of my foot on uneven ground.  The borders of my body become crisp as the borders of my mind and heart dissolve.

There is an article in the morning newspaper about the Indian cotton farmers.  Thousands of these farmers are killing themselves every year.  I cannot understand this number, it is too big for me to hold.  But I understand the expression of the woman in the news photo as she holds up a picture of her dead husband.  And I understand the unerasable feeling when something wrong can’t be made right.  Genetically modified cotton seeds promise great yields and look like a way out of poverty.  But these patented seeds and the many special conditions they require all cost a lot of money.  It’s a desperate gamble.  One missing piece, an unexpected turn of events and the poor farmer is plunged into debt so deep that suicide looks reasonable by comparison.

In a way my father was undone by a costly gamble too.  He was an artist.  But there was a glitch.  His feelings overwhelmed him.  The doctors offered what they had.  One new medication after another, each correcting the last, as his personality deteriorated and his desperation mounted.  The names of new drugs floated around our house like dust.  By age eight, I knew more pharmaceutical brand names than cereals.  His feeling capacity, the thing he needed most to do his job, was plunged so deep in debt that with the last of it he destroyed the threat of further damage.

To care invites discomfort.  It complicates things.  ‘They’ become ‘us’.  We are in it together, tangled and messy.  I didn’t know what to do for my father.  I don’t know what to do for the Indian farmers.  I don’t know how to make our world more humane.  But I wish I did.  I find a measure of peace in the void so that I can rest uneasy here among the living and our ghosts.

Today I will send cash to my friend who runs the food program.  I will hug my children and make us lunch.  I will take a walk.  I will try to be a little kinder than I know how to be.  And I will watch.  And I will wait.

Maybe my older selves are still looking for my father and maybe they will save him.  It’s just not done yet.

Or maybe his older selves found us both and as they eased him into peace they held me here in this uneasy place of care, visiting me in dreams and gaps.

–Eve Toliman

Further Reading:

Prodding Baudelaire by Eve Toliman, 7/28/09

Beneath the Damage and Apology by Eve Toliman, 7/24//09


WHEN JOHNNY COMES LIMPING HOME

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wounded-soldierIraq

Wounded American soldier being evacuated from a combat zone in Iraq.

WHEN JOHNNY COMES LIMPING HOME

Just as our Vietnam Vets reach retirement age, our nation is creating a whole new generation of ravaged war veterans

by Horatio Guernica

“If we had the Internet back in the ’60s, the Vietnam War would have been over in a matter of weeks,” a grey-haired peace activist once exuberantly told me as we marched through San Francisco in the early dot-com era of 1991, protesting another President Bush and another war on Iraq.

At that moment, I believed him. But here we are, 18 years later, firmly entrenched in the Internet era, and six years into another senseless and fraudulent war in Iraq (and nearly eight years in Afghanistan) with no end in sight, online or elsewhere.

July 2009 was the deadliest month for U.S. soldiers in the history of America’s war in Afghanistan, reported NPR last week. (But the “best month” in Iraq, according to the Pentagon – only seven dead – surely an empty ‘victory’ when the total U.S. death toll for Iraq is over 4,000.)

Forty-three American soldiers died in Afghanistan last month. This brings the total to 749 in “Operation Enduring Freedom” (Afghanistan) and 4316 dead U.S. soldiers in  “Operation Iraqi Freedom” (Iraq), according to the Washington Post’s “Faces of the Fallen”, for a total of 5,065 U.S. soldiers killed in both wars as of July 31, 2009.

(The number of dead Iraqi and Afghanistan civilians, however, is another matter — over 100,000.)

None of these numbers include the war wounded. Thousands more American soldiers are coming home maimed or scarred, some with brain injuries from which they will never recover.

So here we are with a new president, from another political party, and both wars are still flailing on, under the radar it would now seem, from our A.D.D media and equally distracted viewers. Late-night satirist Stephen Colbert recently took his show to Iraq to make this very point. He shaved his head in solidarity with the troops (and for a laugh, no doubt). All gimmickry aside, Colbert’s point was well-taken: We as a nation seem to have all but forgotten that we are at war.

Equally troubling and under-accounted for is the fact that even when the soldiers come home, the wars will not be over for them – or us.

As Nobel-winning economist Joseph Stiglitz and Linda Blimes reported in their 2008 book, “The Three Trillion Dollar War: The True Costs of the Iraq Conflict,” an enormous cost of the Iraq war alone lays before us—financial, emotional and physical. “…war is about men and women brutally killing and maiming other men and women. The costs live on long after the last shot has been fired.”

In the Toronto Star in March 2008, Stiglitz highlighted the health care costs of the thousands of injured soldiers:

“The administration has tried to keep the war’s costs from the American public. Veterans groups have used the Freedom of Information Act to discover the total number of injured – 15 times the number of fatalities.

Already, 52,000 returning veterans have been diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder. The U.S. government will need to provide disability compensation to an estimated 40 per cent of the 1.65 million troops that have already been deployed.

And, of course, the bleeding will continue as long as the war continues, with the health-care and disability bill amounting to more than $600 billion (in present-value terms).”

It’s agonizingly ironic that just as our nation’s Vietnam Vets are reaching retirement age, we are creating a whole new generation of war vets in this country, many with eyes ablaze or glazed, unable to ever connect with normalcy again.

These veterans are bringing home with them broken bodies and broken psyches from having been forced to serve multiple tours of duty in poorly justified and often very bloody battles. Some may have survived brain-rattling explosions thanks to the modern wonders of protective armor, but will suffer pain or brain damage for the rest of their lives.

And some are coming home and turning their nightmares into other people’s nightmares.

In a two-part article in the Colorado Springs Gazette this past week (July 26 and 28, 2009), reporter Dave Phillips recounts the costs of war to one unit of soldiers who have committed a disproportionate number of violent crimes once they returned home. Writes Phillips in “Casualties of War; part I: The hell of war comes home:”

“Soldiers from other units at Fort Carson have committed crimes after deployments — military bookings at the El Paso County jail have tripled since the start of the Iraq war — but no other unit has a record as deadly as the soldiers of the 4th Brigade. The vast majority of the brigade’s soldiers have not committed crimes, but the number who have is far above the population at large. In a one-year period from the fall of 2007 to the fall of 2008, the murder rate for the 500 Lethal Warriors was 114 times the rate for Colorado Springs.

The battalion is overwhelmingly made up of young men, who, demographically, have the highest murder rate in the United States, but the brigade still has a murder rate 20 times that of young males as a whole.

The killings are only the headline-grabbing tip of a much broader pyramid of crime. Since 2005, the brigade’s returning soldiers have been involved in brawls, beatings, rapes, DUIs, drug deals, domestic violence, shootings, stabbings, kidnapping and suicides.”

Phillips goes on to cite author Eric T. Dean, who makes a number of insightful—and disturbing—observations about the toll and consequences of war on surviving soldiers:

“Eric Dean, an author in Connecticut who specializes in war’s psychological toll, reviewed records from the Civil War for his 1997 book, “Shook Over Hell,” and found the same surge of crime and suicide that Fort Carson has seen.

“They have been in every war,” he said. “They never readjusted. They ended up living alone, drinking too much.”

They were “the lost generation” of World War I. They are the veterans of Vietnam who disproportionately populate homeless shelters and prisons today.

The psychological casualties may be particularly heavy in Iraq, he said.

“In the Civil War, if you experienced really traumatic fighting, chances are you didn’t make it,” he said. “Today, you can be blown up multiple times and go right back into the fight.”

In Vietnam, most draftees did one yearlong tour. Since the start of the Iraq war, some soldiers have been deployed three times for 12 to 15 months each.

When a soldier faces constant threat of attack, studies suggest, the brain is flooded with adrenaline, dopamine and other performance-enhancing chemicals that the body naturally produces in a fight-or-flight response. Over time, the brain can crave these stimulants, like a junkie for his fix.

When the stimulant of combat is taken away, soldiers often have trouble sleeping, said Sister Kateri Koverman, a social worker who has counseled people in war zones for almost 40 years. They can feel irritable, numb and paranoid, she said. They can sink into depression.

And they can search for another substance to replace the rush of war.”

For peace activists of my generation, one big difference in our approach has been our attitude toward the soldiers. From the beginning, the millions of us who took to the streets to protest George Bush, Jr.’s  invasion—some as early as September 2002 before the ‘preemptive’ war began—did not criticize the soldiers. That was one lesson we learned from Vietnam. The soldiers may be shooting the guns and taking the hits, but they are not calling the shots. So to every war supporter who accused us dissenters of disloyalty to the troops, we replied with signs that said: “Support our troops–bring them home!”

We have been supporting the troops since before they were even sent to war. It was the Bush/Cheney administration and the hapless Democratic leaders who have kept them there.

Since reclaiming Congress in the fall of 2006, the Democrats have capitulated time and again, approving never-ending funding, removing provisions that mandated a timeline for troop withdrawal, all despite the declarations in 2006 that they would end the Iraq war, with Nancy Pelosi at the speaker’s gavel. But impeachment—the only real way to hold the Bush administration accountable for this travesty—was “off the table,” declared Pelosi. Even though the vast majority of Americans had long turned against the war, Congress let Bush and Cheney exit out the back door of the White House with no penalty for their actions.

Inexplicably too afraid to impeach a criminal president with a 28 percent approval rating when they had the chance, the Democrats must now finally show real leadership with one of their own in the White House.

But it remains unclear if the Obama administration will ever seek accountability for its predecessor’s actions.

It’s also uncertain when our latest government will finally bring the troops home. But when it does, for these beleaguered soldiers and for our society as a whole as it attempts to reabsorb them, the war in many ways will have just begun.

Horatio Guernica is the pen name of a West Coast Writer.

Further Reading:

Heckuva Job, Arne by Horatio Guernica, 7/22/09

GUEST EDITORIAL

Posted on by asitoughttobemagazine

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Presidential candidate Barack Obama made to look like revered Mexican president Benito Juarez (1806-1872) in this Spanish-language “change” poster by the Date Farmers, 2008.

OBAMA IMMIGRATION ENFORCEMENT MORE EFFICIENT THAN BUSH’S

by Nativo Vigil Lopez

Protests against President Obama’s immigration enforcement policies are beginning to sweep the country. In some areas the protests are directed at Department of Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano, the instrument of the enforcement policy execution, and in other areas President Obama is clearly the target. Some activists have argued that the main criticism and advocacy for a moratorium of such enforcement should be directed at Napolitano, the cabinet member responsible for defining the policy and taking it operational. Others argue that Obama is ultimately responsible for the policy and has in his hands the executive discretion to immediately put a stop to such rampant enforcement. The growing and pressing demand is for an ENFORCEMENT MORATORIUM until fair and humane immigration reform is enacted.

No other presidential administration since 1986 has enforced employer sanctions through the named I-9 audits of personnel files of employers as broadly and efficiently as has the Obama administration. The system of employment verification, short-named eVerify, which allows employers to verify the legal status of their employees against federal government databases, has taken on a new vigorous life under Obama. The fall-out of such enforcement has been massive terminations of long and short-term immigrant workers from their employment during the worst economic down-turn in the country since the 1930s. In one company alone, American Apparel, the largest clothing manufacturing firm in the U.S. with over 10,000 employees, an estimated 1,800 workers are listed for termination. The multiplier factor of Latino family size results in a devastating economic impact on close to 10,000 lives in the Los Angeles region.

Some have exclaimed that the efficiency of these “desk-top” ICE raids and deportations under this administration mirrors the efficiency with which candidate Obama ran his presidential campaign. These raids are more pervasive, sweeping, pernicious, and devastating iin terms of the numbers of individuals impacted than anything executed under President George Bush.

To the degree that the Obama administration declares that it is a crime to work, and pursues and persecutes those workers who are employed in millions of companies throughout America – making incredible economic contributions by their labor and paying the corresponding taxes – than the policy of this president is one of criminalizing immigrant workers and treating them as nothing less than common criminals. This is anathema to all that candidate Obama promised on the campaign trail, which now clearly contradicts the actions of President Obama. Which Obama is to be believed?

Nativo Vigil Lopez is the President of the Mexican American Political Association.

This piece was first disseminated as part of the Mexican American Political Association (MAPA) newsletter, 8/1/09.

See also:Obama loses immigration allies by Stephen Dinan, The Washington Times, July 30, 2009.


McCAIN’S NATURAL BORN PROBLEM

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John McCain, on the day of his christening, with his father and grandfather at the Coco Solo Naval Air Station in the Panama Canal Zone, 1936.

McCAIN’S NATURAL BORN PROBLEM

by Rod Ciferri

Even a cursory glance at Article 2, Section 1 of the U.S. Constitution proves John McCain was never eligible to be President of the United States. The Constitution requires that the President be a natural born citizen which is different than just being a citizen. Natural born citizen is sufficient for eligibility, while citizen is not.

The U.S. congress may, and has, come up with any criteria for U.S. citizenship it wants. This power was given to congress by Article 1, Section 8, of the U.S. Constitution. No law that congress makes, however, can change the requirement that the President be a natural born citizen. Such can only be done via constitutional amendment.

McCain sought a congressional mandate stating he is a natural born citizen because of the facts I discuss below. These are void however because these Congressional acts have no legal authority. Congress cannot amend the Constitution’s requirement that the President be a natural born citizen.

No act of congress can change the fact that McCain was born in an unincorporated U.S. territory, the Panama Canal Zone. No act of congress can change the fact that the Panama Canal Zone was NEVER part of the United States.

This fact can readily be attained by reading the Hay-Bunau Varilla Treaty, which first recognized U.S. rights in the Panama Canal Zone. It is indisputable that such treaty gave the U.S. only proprietary rights to the Panama Canal Zone. The treaty was akin to an easement. An easement is the right to use another’s land. Article 1 of the treaty is the guarantee of the U.S. to maintain the sovereignty of the Republic of Panama over the area of the Panama Canal Zone. Furthermore, Article 14 of the treaty establishes the amount of money the U.S. must pay annually for the use of the Panama Canal Zone. All political rights in the Panama Canal Zone remained with the Republic of Panama.

Therefore, the U.S. only acquired proprietary, rather than political control over the Panama Canal Zone. The United States Supreme Court has confirmed that proprietary rights in a territory do not equate to the full political power necessary to make such a territory part of the United States. See, Downes v. Bidwell, 182 U.S. 244, 251 (1901).

While the United States eventually extended citizenship to those born in the Panama Canal Zone of at least one U.S. citizen, it did not, and could not without constitutional amendment make such a citizen a natural born citizen.

Like Obama, McCain is bound by the natural born citizen requirement of the U.S. Constitution in order to be eligible for president. That is, he must have been born in the country to parents (or at least a father) who were U.S. citizens. While he was born to U.S. citizen parents, unfortunately for him, he was not born in the country.

As a result of McCain’s natural born problem, he cannot be President of the United States.

–Rod Ciferri

Further Reading:

War is Over! by Rod Ciferri, 7/17/09

The Holy Trinity of Ineligibility? by Rod Ciferri, 8/10/09

COMMENTARY

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Columbia University’s Alma Mater (sculpture by Daniel Chester French) gazing toward Butler Library.

AN ARGUMENT FOR A CORE

by Nathan Birnbaum

Towards the end of my junior year in high school I entered the fray of the college admissions process, making decisions that would affect the course of the rest of my professional and academic life.  Quickly zeroing in on Vassar College in Poughkeepsie, New York I was excited not only by the class offerings at my fingertips but by its liberal minded philosophy towards a core curriculum, with students free to take their education in whatever direction they prefer.  Bound to meeting only a freshmen writing seminar, foreign language and quantitative requirement, I have been able to dictate what and how I learn.

But is this freedom beneficial on a wider scale?  Are there certain subjects and philosophies all students should be exposed to?  And if so, how do we decide what is taught and how?  By filtering out subject areas at Vassar that I am not particularly interested in – but which are necessary to gain a broader understanding of the forces that shape the American landscape – one could make a serious argument that I am hampering my ability to democratically participate as a global citizen.

As a starting place for discussion, lets compare the curriculum(s) of Columbia University and Brown University.  Columbia boasts a strict and structured core curriculum that is meant to introduce students to the “texts, ideas, and works of art that have deeply influenced the world in which we live, and that continue to shape how we think about ourselves and our society.  Brown University, on the other hand delegates the choice of a “core curriculum” to their students, with no required courses or types of courses necessary to graduate.

Slowly but surely, other institutions across the country have taken notice of Brown’s philosophy, and some are beginning to experiment with a relaxed, if non-existent, core.

I understand the merits and goals of this system of leniency towards a core curriculum.  College was always intended to allow students to break out of the structured education they had been confined to for the first 18 years of their lives.  Given this new freedom, it was assumed that they would find a subject, or subjects, that sparked their interest, leading to a life full of inquisitive study and passion for learning.  The problem is that this leniency virtue towards coursework has been placed on a pedestal and does not accurately reflect the usual considerations facing an 18yr old.

Most students leave college having taken in the range of about 24 classes (four classes a semester for four years).  Without guidance, it is unfair to assume that they would naturally pick a well-rounded schedule.  A college that lacks a core curriculum will only deliver as good an education as the free range of choices their students make, and not all college age students in America study at institutions as well-regarded as Brown.   But on a wider scale this freedom of education is overly idealistic when applied to the majority of college-age students across America.

Whereas I received a stellar education at a well-funded public school in Marin County, CA, other students aren’t so lucky.  American public schools continue to be grossly under-funded, which results in students having inequal access to studying materials and being taught by teachers with varying degrees of expertise.  This inequality will therefore translate into some students not necessarily being qualified to determine whether they have mastered the above subjects to a degree in which they should not have to retake them in greater depth at the college level.

The second, and most important, reason why a basic core must be in place is that students must be taught to think critically about a wide variety of subjects in order to evaluate and analyze the situations and questions posed to them in their daily lives.  One would hope, in turn, that this evaluation would lead to progressive thinking capable of changing our social milieu.  Admittedly this kind of education can be obtained by those who attend a university without a core just as much as it could be unobtained by one who has sat through a core.  But these types of truly educated and analytically advanced people I speak of are more likely to emerge if they have mastered a diverse range of subject matter.

Expecting college-age students to naturally gravitate towards sampling a diverse range of courses is, from my experiences at Vassar College, absolutely improbable.  Many of my peers –  and I for that matter – are comfortable with taking classes that only fit our interests, preferring to leave the “boring” subjects behind.  Taken at face value, this sounds like a swell idea to us.

But bearing in mind the reasoning above I think it is time we begin to seriously consider crafting a core curriculum that will be met by all students leaving America’s universities.  In my opinion, this core would feature simple requirements in the following areas: foreign language, math/philosophy, basic writing, art, economics, and English.

Every college student should take a course that teaches and expects fluency in a foreign language.  In an increasingly globalized world, we should no longer be taught to just understand our own country and traditions – breeding a dangerous espousal of American exceptionalism – but gain an appreciation for the diverse cultures, traditions, and beliefs of others.  Being able to communicate with one another is a key step in learning to respect one another as equals.

Mathematics, contrary to popular belief, is not just about numbers, but rather encourages a patter of logical thinking, forcing students’ brains to look for patterns and connections.  This type of brain exercise is closely linked to philosophy, where one must consider multiple routes of thinking to reach and understand a conclusion.  While many college-aged scholars despise math (I will admit that I fall in with this group), we should all benefit from the type of learning it encourages.

Moreover, too many students enter their professional careers with absolutely no grip on how to write proficiently.  Americans should be able to craft an argument and defend it on paper, as well as tell a fictional story birthed from their own imagination.  Being able to write would give students a better understanding of the critical process needed to comprehend and analyze what they read, as well as put a whole new group of people in contact with a form of communication which can beautifully and rationally describe feelings, situations, positions, etc.

Being a theatre major I am especially concerned by the fact that the arts have lost their value in the American curriculum. This must change.  Instead of open debate, discussion, or research, we should also be presented with an artistic interpretation of our common issues.  The creative process makes the exploration of the human condition more comprehendible, or in some cases, raises more issues for these student viewers to confront.

While our country’s unemployment levels skyrocket and the banking industry continues to game the system, more now than ever college graduates must come away from college with a formal understanding of economic theory.   To me, this means teaching both the tenets and failures of supply and demand, Marxist theory and socialism, fascism (yes it is relevant economic theory, not just Nazi philosophy), and Keynesianism (at minimum).  These theories are simply not interchangeable and are necessary to be an active citizen in our participatory democracy.

Finally, the interpretation of the “Great Books,” and English literature in general, must be integrated into any core.  These works give students a scope of human history and thinking, providing a basis for contemplating where mankind was, where mankind is currently, and what possibilities lie ahead.

Let me make it very clear: I am not arguing that the core classes must weigh on the minds of students throughout their entire tenure within a college setting; reasonableness would require that a core take up no more than a third of all units required for graduation.  The rest of a student’s energy should be tailored to focusing on their major and taking any elective courses of their choosing.

Furthermore, it is my hope that each college will advise their students to craft their well-rounded courses of study in different ways depending upon the individual universities’ tenets and backgrounds.  Thus, even an institution that preaches the virtues of a core would not prevent young adults from accessing the freedom that college symbolizes.

But to look at my course selections as they stand currently, and to ponder those of students who enjoy an education free from requirements and well-rounded areas of learning, is to wonder whether our generation, who has been trusted with placing their curriculum in their own hands, might be hurting themselves in the long run.  With all optimism, I hope not.

Nathan Birnbaum is a Drama major at Vassar College in Poughkeepsie, New York.

Further Reading:

“A New Era of Engagement”, But for Whom? by Nathan Birnbaum, 7/15/09

IN DEFENSE OF BABEL

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IN DEFENSE OF BABEL

by Okla Elliott

During Barack Obama’s presidential campaign, he once discussed immigration by saying that we ought to be less worried about immigrants learning English and more worried about whether our children are learning Spanish. He must have known he’d wandered into unsafe territory, because he immediately began enumerating the business advantages your children would have if they were bilingual. (It is always safe in American discourse to return to how something might make money.) Obama was attacked by Democrats and Republicans alike for daring to utter the unthinkable—that Americans need to be learning foreign languages.

As I write this, I am in Montréal, a city that has achieved nearly seamless bilingualism. Depending on the neighborhood, most signs, menus, etc are written in both French and English, and you can order at most places of business in either language. I don’t mean to suggest there aren’t tensions between those who consider their mother tongue French and those who consider it English. There are. Famously so. And one of my instructors, Jessy, at the language institute where I’m studying admitted to being reluctant to read Canadian literature in English (though she also happens to be nearly fluent in English, which indicates her resistance to the language isn’t total, and she seemed embarrassed to admit to reading only francophone literature).  And Jessy isn’t alone in her ambivalence. There’s a referendum every few years for Québec to secede from the rest of Canada, but it is always defeated, and largely because of the huge population in Montréal which always votes en masse to remain part of the larger country.

But there’s the brighter, almost ideal side. You walk up Rue St Laurent, lined with hipster bars and nice restaurants, and you’ll hear the people at one table speaking in French while those at the adjacent table speak English. My favorite scene, which I’ve seen play out several times in my few weeks here, is when a group of people is speaking one language, then someone shows up who is less proficient in that language (usually an English speaker, sadly), and the group simply shifts to the new person’s language of comfort.  It’s a seamless transition, and no one is put out by it.  For lack of a better word, I always think how civilized this is.

Those people in the US who are worried that English will disappear are either willfully ignorant or just insane.  English enjoys not only the 4th largest native speaker population on the planet but is also by far the most common 2nd language learned.  I’m sorry, but every time I hear someone bemoan the rise of Spanish as a second language in the US, I hear laziness or mindless nationalism.  There is absolutely no downside to learning another language, while there are numerous upsides.

But the paranoiac fear isn’t abating. Nowhere is this made more visible than on the US-Mexico border with the fervor for fence-building and of volunteers toting shotguns, excessive in their eagerness to “defend our borders” (from what, I always wonder, hard workers with a drive for self-improvement?).  William T Vollmann’s new book, Imperial, which will be released next month, is a 1,300-page nonfiction exploration of Imperial County, California, where many immigrants who have died in the journey across the border are buried.  There’s an excellent New York Times article about Vollmann and his new book here.

But instead of seeing the ugliness nationalism can cause and instead of embracing the positive aspects of bi- and multilingualism, many Americans are doing just the opposite.  Arizona, Idaho, and Iowa have all recently passed English-only laws, and Oklahoma is poised to vote on an English-only referendum on the 2010 ballot, one which is expected to pass by a large margin.

But what are the advantages of multilingualism?, one might ask.  Aside from Obama’s aforementioned job opportunities, which certainly exist, there are the joys other languages bring.  There is nothing like being in a foreign country and speaking the language.  The experience is so much richer, I have basically foregone visiting countries whose languages in which I don’t at least have some proficiency.  Language is so often the vehicle for culture, and there is simply no way to appreciate another culture without understanding its language.

But there are more immediate ones as well. The CIA has recently been running ads in an attempt to recruit Americans with foreign language skills.  Apparently less than 20% of the CIA staff has proficiency in a foreign language.  Pause for a moment and take that in.  Less than 20% of our international intelligence gathering organ speaks a foreign language.  Mama Elliott didn’t raise no geniuses, but I see how this might be a problem.  Now, I tend to think that most of what the CIA does adds to the misery in the world, so its being hindered in any way might be good in the long run, but there is an old Polish saying: “Know the languages of your friends well, but know the languages of your enemies better.”  Here, even the security-crazed people of this country have to admit that learning Arabic, Farsi, Korean, etc might prove useful.

But I’m less interested in talk of enemies, and I would like to rephrase that Polish saying to: “Learn the languages of your enemies in order to make them your friends.”  I remember when I was an undergrad and preparing for my first academic study abroad to Germany, I was required to attend several information sessions.  At one of them, the goals of the program were laid out, and one of them was world peace.  I thought, “Huh?  How can my improving my understanding of the dative case in German alter international relations?”  The counselor explained that people are less likely to support a war against a country if they’ve lived there or speak the language, and that the kinds of cultural misunderstandings that can lead to less than diplomatic solutions can be obviated if we have enough people here who know firsthand how to navigate those cultural waters.

The advantages, both large and small, are legion.

There are many jobs in legal, technological, governmental, and medical fields that require knowledge of foreign languages.  Studies show that studying a foreign language can reduce the chances of dementia in old age, can improve children’s comprehension of their native language, and even increase a person’s IQ.  There are the interpersonal benefits.  I can’t help but notice the tens of millions of Spanish speakers in world and can’t help but be happy that I have the means to communicate with them. Likewise with French; when I look at a linguistic map of Africa, my heart fairly flutters with possibility.  There are advantages for the activist-minded, such as Habitat for Humanity, Peace Corps, Doctors without Borders, etc.

And on, and on . . .

If being in Montréal has taught me anything, it’s that bi- and multilingualism can work and can have a hugely positive effect on a culture and business community.  It’s not a perfect model, but those tend not to exist in the real world.  It is, however, a hopeful example of what certain US cities could become or already are becoming, if only we embrace it fully and encourage it with the proper institutions and attitude.


Further Reading:

The Undividing Line Between Literary and Political by Okla Elliott, 7/15/09

CRITICAL THEORY

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Cover of Marcuse’s Collected Papers, Volume 4, published by Routledge, 2007.

THE RETURN OF THE REPRESSED:

HERBERT MARCUSE’S ONE- DIMENSIONAL MAN

by Anthony Torres

I recently came across an old copy of Marcuse’s One Dimensional Man. That find give me cause to revisit certain themes and issues, but what really was uncanny was that rather than seeming far removed and historically distant, the book seemed absolutely appropriate to the present:  the necessity of the elimination of alienated labor and reification, through political action and social transformation, which should be the first step toward a more humane society by creating conditions for the realization of human potential and conceivably aspiring toward a dream for homeostasis.

Decades have passed since Marcuse wrote One Dimensional Man, and yet at present, the capitalist structure of a social production for private accumulation is still in place.

In our current society (as when Marcuse wrote), technology and rationalization are used as a means to further the reproduction and maintenance of our society.  And while there is no question that technology is in and of itself apolitical, the technological apparatus operating currently, is by the conditions of its existence, still used as a tool for further subjugation and domination of the populace, and continues to perpetuate the alienated and reified condition through private property relations.  In fact, it can be said that today an even wider variety of cultural and ideological techniques for social domination continue to prevail, while concurrently providing a rationale for their existence, as well as for the destruction of nature as a prerequisite for the accumulation of capital.

As the productive forces in society have been altered and advanced, so too have the relations of people in production. And as the economic system has expanded, so too has the proliferation of administration and domination. Today, the advent of bureaucratization, of which Marcuse spoke, continues to create a situation in which the bureaucrat’s job is to administer things and people, making little distinction between the two, being far removed from both.  Separated in the vastness of the reified machine we call post-monopoly capitalism, the bureaucrat does not — nor almost any of us for that matter — see the whole of society or the individual’s place in it, but is instead merely a component part of a vast machinery of capitalist crisis and accumulation.

This complicated social mechanism in which everyone is implicated has been constructed to administer the technological machine, and yet the whole creation stands over and above those who created it, with people once again confronted with the products of their social dysfunction.

As Marcuse seem to predict (perhaps simplistically by today’s developments), the relations of people in society have been altered so drastically that it is hard for anyone to question or see beyond the destructive nature of capitalism, especially since  according to its own logic and ideology, it is increasingly capable of satisfying the needs of the populace through its organization, as it is able to supply more goods and satisfy more needs while at the same time seeming to provide — again according to its own ideological orientation — more civil liberties within the current status quo.

This logic thus undercuts any oppositional social demands as unnecessary and useless, if even desirable, since as long as the needs are being met, it makes little difference whether artificially stimulated needs and desires are met by an authoritarian or non-authoritarian government. Here, the seeming liberty and freedom to consume commodities that surround us in ever-increasing supply — presented as “freedom of choice” — serve, Marcuse argued, as a valuable tool of social domination.

In previous stages of capitalist development, the lines of demarcation between classes were much clearer.  However today, the proliferation of media technologies and the complex relations between status and power have blurred class differences, seemingly alleviating much of the perceived basis of social antagonisms.

In this context, the implementation of an array of forms of social domination fortifies against social resistance for qualitative changes that would bring about fundamentally different institutions and a new direction for the productive forces and relations of society, by developing increased means for satisfying human and ecological needs and priorities. This thus preserves the social forces that perpetuate the existing alienated condition and crisis-ridden social relations of society.

The current cultural apparatus thus reveals its political character, as it becomes a greater vehicle for new forms of more effective social control, creating a social system of consent in which mind and body, society and nature, are kept in a state of permanent mobilization and occupation for the defense of the existing power structures.

Here, as Marcuse suggested, we find social and cultural non-freedom, in the sense that people are subjugated through the ideological and reproductive apparatus and circulation of commodities. Critical here is that these social structures are perpetuated and intensified in the form of illusory liberties and comforts, however inaccessible, that are a necessary consequence of the economic apparatus, as business and the state develop new products and strategies to keep the economic system going.  In this way, what should be considered illusory liberties and technological advances function as tools that keep the populace occupied and distracted, and, as a result, indoctrinate and confuse the population with artificially stimulated needs and desires and at the same time provide the only avenues for satisfying them.

Thus, according to Marcuse, these artificially stimulated needs are actualized in the alienated consciousness of society, which, however problematically, sees no other option but the present system as a vehicle for taking care of these needs on a grander scale. This rationale repulses humane and ecologically friendly qualitative change, so that things seem to be getting increasingly better — if “better” means access to a greater variety of given products of a limited nature. However, it can be argued — especially today — that human social conditions, rather than getting better as a result of the reproduction of an increased array of goods and services, are getting increasingly worse, precisely because of this illusion that things are improving through the proliferation of goods and services, which is merely a manifestation of reified life activity in our contemporary capitalist societies.

Indeed, with the expansion of capitalist systems through globalization, the socially mutated existences of people in various societies has intensified to a full, all-embracing social alienation, where we are estranged from ourselves and others, from nature, from the determination of the forces of production, and from social control over our own destiny. This alienated condition has inverted our socially created world into a reified world that is seemingly completely out of our control, and that now controls, or limits, our own self-determination.

Ironically, the social and cultural apparatus that should theoretically have the potential to free people from labor, while providing more of the necessities of life as well as more leisure time, has become, as Marcuse seemed to foresee, a self-generating, self-devouring, crisis-ridden monster.

The question of a “human” existence versus an alienated existence has, through unbridled capitalist accumulation, moved from a question of personal and social alienation to one of utter social dysfunction and ecological crisis. The problem facing the human species, it seems, has moved beyond the degradation and devaluation of human life and self-determination or social control, to the more pressing issue of the potential for mass human detriment of the species through ecological disaster, as humanity increasingly submits to the means of destruction, and perfection of waste.  The alienated condition in which we find ourselves has separated us from our own acts to a point of destroying nature—the true vehicle of our own existence and sustenance—and to a point where, whether consciously or unconsciously, human life has become an instrument of its own oppression and destruction.  In an increasingly twisted dialectic, it seems that people have become so culturally separated from their acts that they find themselves in a potentially suicidal historical predicament — that is, unless we choose to do something.

Anthony Torres is an independent art critic and curator who has taught at Ohio State and UC Santa Cruz.

Further Reading:

The Personal is Political by Anthony Torres, 7/23/09

Theophilus Brown: Recent Abstract Collages by Anthony Torres, 7/16/09