You air that serves me with breath to speak!
You objects that call from diffusion my meanings, and give them shape!
You light that wraps me and all things in delicate equable showers!
You paths worn in the irregular hollows by the roadsides!
I believe you are latent with unseen existences—you are so dear to me.
-W.W.
To frame your subjective relationship to the world around you as “experience” constitutes a fundamental misparticipation. The world and its things are not for you to probe or to test. In fact, arguably, any “participation” is false consciousness. I’d much rather dispense with that grabby-handed primate phenomenology.
It is not your place to take part; there is no part that belongs to you as yours to take. So, what instead? How else for you to be with an object, and not for it to be for you? You cut through misparticipation and generate a world of coincedent appearance—you appearing in the field of its incidence, and it in yours. Live there, and take nothing.
That shadow, my likeness, that goes to and fro, seeking a livelihood, chattering, chaffering;
How often I find myself standing and looking at it where it flits;
How often I question and doubt whether that is really me.
– W.W.
In rereading A Thousand Plateaus, I am mostly struck by the enormous accumulation of statements declaring that X “is” something, by its composition as a litany of assertions. This accrual of claims fascinates, but on what theory of Being does it depend…on what logic? What notion of meaning-knowing emerges from it rhetorically to drive it forward?
Five years ago, just before Thanksgiving, I was sitting outside in back of my little house at the edge of the woods. A flock of wild turkeys were pecking at the grass, pushing the leaves aside to find food, cautiously aware of me but not running away. Their gait, like that of most large fowl, seemed both ungainly and stately. As I watched, the two males moved slowly to the front of the flock between me and the smaller females. They stopped eating, fanned out their tails, and paraded about, watchfully. The females continued to eat, and would stop to look up at me or to look over at each other. When one of them strayed a bit far, the others called her back. Some were eating less, accompanying the others and grooming them occasionally. Awkwardness aside, bald head, reptile faces and all, they had me entranced. I could not stop watching them.
Later that day, I went to the store to get everything I needed for Thanksgiving dinner. In the meat cases, hundreds of neatly wrapped turkey carcasses, frozen in several bins, fresh in a few more. I already felt a strong sense of resistance to what I was about to do. But tradition seemed like it would prevail. I picked up one of the fresh turkeys by its nylon mesh handle, and realized that it was soaked in a cold, bloody juice. I put the carcass back down, wiped my pink-stained hands on my pants, and walked out of the store without buying anything.
When I got back home, I went straight to the basement, took off my jeans, and washed them. After the wash was done, I took them out of the machine, and threw them in the garbage. My road to Damascus was paved with beaks, blood, and offal. I have not eaten meat since.
There are plenty of TSA apologists who say that objections to the TSA’s invasive “pat-downs” are just whining from people don’t want to go through the backscatter radiation machines — we bring it on ourselves. But as we’ve seen, anything out of the ordinary — wearing a fabric pad during menstruation, artificial limbs, medical prostheses, etc — can send you off for a date with Doctor Jellyfinger, Junior G-Man extraordinaire.
By declaring war on the unexpected, the TSA has set in motion a policy that makes the lives of cancer sufferers, disabled people, people who’ve had major surgery, and many others who’re already having a hard time even harder.
http://www.boingboing.net/2010/11/24/menstruating-woman-s.html
http://blog.gladrags.com/2010/11/24/tsa-groin-searches-menstruating-woman/
Jung in the wake of Deleuze:
Even in the smallest point is the pleroma endless, eternal, and entire, since small and great are qualities which are contained in it. It is that nothingness which is everywhere whole and continuous.
Jung, “Sermo I,” Seven Sermons to the Dead, 1916
Earlier this year, the Congressional Biomedical Caucus – of which U.S. Rep. Rush Holt is a co-chair – hosted a briefing by Dr. David Brenner of Columbia University on the potential health effects of “back scatter” x-ray devices. According to Dr. Brenner, the devices currently in use and proposed for wider deployment deliver to the scalp “20 times the average dose that is typically quoted by TSA and throughout the industry.” Dr. Brenner has pointed out that the majority of the radiation from X-ray backscatter machines strikes the top of the head, which is where 85 percent of the 800,000 cases of basal cell carcinoma diagnosed in the United States each year develop.
According to Dr. Brenner, excessive x-ray exposure can act as a cancer rate multiplier, which is why Holt has urged the government to investigate thoroughly the potential health risks associated with this technology.
New TSA tactics bring the ethos of the factory farm to airport security. You must be processed, with as little dignity and compassion as possible. And I firmly believe that the degradation is part of the intent, rather than a simple side effect. Just as cruelty is intentionally designed into the system of handling animals, in order to reinforce the productization of our relationships to living beings as “commodities,” our relationships to our boides are being deliberately undermined, to transform the notion of citizens into that of products to be handled by the apparatus of the safety state.
I have a more visceral reaction to the TSA’a assumption of powers over our bodies rather than over air security. Too many stories of removed prostheses, excremental bodies, and other humiliations that evince a move toward a more violent biopolitics, a reduction of travelers to “bare life” (v. Agamben) rather than regarding them as citizens, as subjects of rights.
Nevertheless, Tyler Cowen makes two great points today:
The biggest flying/airport outrages are a lack of markets in allocating scarce resources, and the resulting unacceptable airport and flight delay problems in places such as JFK and LaGuardia. Next come airlines which ruthlessly screw you over, repeatedly, and lie to you and mistreat you. I do understand the trade-off and prefer the lower prices and fewer quality assurances; still, you can object to their behavior at the margin — it’s often unethical. Let’s get worked up over these problems first.
…
The issue reminds me of the taxation and spending debates; many Americans want low taxes and high government spending, forever. For airline security, at times we want to treat it as a matter of mere law enforcement, to be handled by others, and one which should not inconvenience our daily lives or infringe on our rights. At the same time, so many Americans view airline security as a vital matter of foreign policy and indeed as part of a war. We own and promote this view and yet we are outraged when asked to behave as one might be expected to in a theater of war.
November 22, 2010, Tyler Cowen, Further thoughts on the TSA debates, Marginal Revolution