Author: Sarapen

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Can’t sleep, clown will eat me

It’s the allergy medicine I took in the evening, I had to take a nap because it made me drowsy and now I can’t sleep at all.  Boo medication.

There’s really nothing to do at six in the morning.  I haven’t been awake this early without having pulled an all-nighter in god only knows how long.  On the up side, I can actually go to the Farmers’ Market here and participate in all that organic food cult business that they do.  They open at 7 and I’ve never gone earlier than 10 AM, when apparently things start slowly winding down.  They do have some very good food, but most of it is stuff I could never afford unless I sell my organs or something.  Yay for conspicous consumption of class.

Anyway, I have a plan for today now:

  1. Play video games very quietly for 2 hours
  2. Go to Farmers’ Market
  3. Have breakfast there
  4. Wander around looking longingly at food I can’t buy
  5. Get some tomatoes and salad greens, possibly some fresh bread
  6. Go home
  7. Write a bit
  8. Hope the scallops I laid out last night have cooked themselves, plus maybe also cooked the pasta and prepared the pesto that I bought, and possibly even made garlic bread while they were at it
  9. Eat the lunch lovingly made for me by my own food
  10. Afternoon siesta
  11. Wake up in time for dinner (watch Eye 2 dvd rental if get up before then)
  12. Watch whatever’s on while Battlestar is gone until December 2
  13. Off to bed, secure in the knowledge that I’ve had a full day of work

Yessirree, sometimes the world doesn’t suck.  And looky, sunny today.  I’ll have to remember not to go outside on Sunday.

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Note to self: do this after watching tv tonight

Walter Benjamin, One-Way Street
Post No Bills

The Writer’s Technique in Thirteen Theses

I. Anyone intending to embark on a major work should be lenient with himself and, having completed a stint, deny himself nothing that will not prejudice the next.

II. Talk about what you have written, by all means, but do not read from it while the work is in progress. Every gratification procured in this way will slacken your tempo. If this regime is followed, the growing desire to communicate will become in the end a motor for completion.

III. In your working conditions avoid everyday mediocrity. Semi-relaxation, to a background of insipid sounds, is degrading. On the other hand, accompaniment by an etude or a cacophony of voices can become as significant for work as the perceptible silence of the night. If the latter sharpens the inner ear, the former acts as a touchstone for a diction ample enough to bury even the most wayward sounds.

IV. Avoid haphazard writing materials. A pedantic adherence to certain papers, pens, inks is beneficial. No luxury, but an abundance of these utensils is indispensable.

V. Let no thought pass incognito, and keep your notebook as strictly as the authorities keep their register of aliens.

VI. Keep your pen aloof from inspiration, which it will then attract with magnetic power. The more circumspectly you delay writing down an idea, the more maturely developed it will be on surrendering itself. Speech conquers thought, but writing commands it.

VII. Never stop writing because you have run out of ideas. Literary honour requires that one break off only at an appointed moment (a mealtime, a meeting) or at the end of the work.

VIII. Fill the lacunae of inspiration by tidily copying out what is already written. Intuition will awaken in the process.

IX. Nulla dies sine linea * — but there may well be weeks.

X. Consider no work perfect over which you have not once sat from evening to broad daylight.

XI. Do not write the conclusion of a work in your familiar study. You would not find the necessary courage there.

XII. Stages of composition: idea — style — writing. The value of the fair copy is that in producing it you confine attention to calligraphy. The idea kills inspiration, style fetters the idea, writing pays off style.

XIII. The work is the death mask of its conception.

* “Not a day without a line,” i.e., writing a line — variously attributed to Horace, Cicero, Pliny, and a mess of other dead guidos.

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Surveillance doesn’t work if I don’t give a crap

The anthropology blogosphere has been quieter than usual lately, mostly because most English-language anthrobloggers are American and quite a few of them are attending the American Anthropological Association’s conference taking place right now in San Jose. But that just leaves more room for us non-Americans. I was saving this post for when I finally moved hosts, but seeing as how it might not be before Wednesday, when this issue of The Coast becomes out of date, I thought I should post this now instead while I’m waiting for my rice to cook (yes I cook rice at 3:30 in the morning, I want it ready for when I get up).

Anyway, I was reading The Coast, Halifax’s alternative newsweekly (Canadian home of Dan Savage’s column) when I came across an interesting claim made in the current editorial. Halifax right now is obsessed over crime, at least as far as the local news is concerned. I think it’s partly a case of a manufactured moral panic (is there any other kind?), though it seems to be true that violent crime has been increasing. Regardless of whether or not the statistics say what people claim (I suspect it’s not so black and white), it’s true that people experience the world anecdotally, not through a judicious weighing of the evidence at hand. Constructed truths (again, are there any other kind?) have a reality of their own for the people who experience them, regardless of what a mythical neutral observer might see.

Now then, in the editorial I mentioned, it’s claimed that visible and public video surveillance hasn’t been shown to decrease crime rates. I don’t know if the data bears out this assertion, I’ll have to check the sociological literature later. But instead of preventing crimes by their presence, video surveillance cameras just help to solve them after the fact.. That touches upon what I said before, when I theorized that constant surveillance might make the surveilled upon uncaring of who’s watching them. If someone could always be watching, does it matter if you stab someone on the street or in a dark alley? Certainly not very 1984-ish. In fact, it sounds rather more grim.

Of course, there are other things to consider. The idea of surveillance as deterrence I think rests on the assumption that humans are more rational than they really are. Who acts after a careful assessment of the costs and benefits of action? People, I think, use more emotion when making decisions than suggested by the criminal justice system’s orthodox view of human behaviour.

Or it might be that people are actually more rational than given credit for. Violence against others is an extraordinary act, and if one is moved to actually commit violence, then perhaps it wouldn’t matter if one is being watched by others. Once you’ve decided violence is called for, then it might be so necessary to you that even the abstract threat of punishment is worth it. Put simply, perhaps by the time one has decided that violence against others is worthwhile, then at the same time one has also decided that the risks from using violence are acceptable.

I know, weak. I need to develop that more. There’s another thing to consider as well. Video surveillance as it’s conceived of takes the camera to be a proxy for the human gaze. The hope is that a publicly visible surveillance camera be seen as a human being in absentia, that the surveilled upon might experience the same disciplining effect that the direct gaze of others can do. However, perhaps video cameras are too difficult to anthropomorphize into a human being. Perhaps they’re too different from a person to have the threat of the gaze of others be anything more than an abstraction. In that case, what is to be done? Perhaps surveillance cameras should be installed in mannequins so that the gaze of others be felt more directly. You could even put a police uniform on the mannequins to make things abundantly clear. Or, to make it interesting, perhaps surveillance cameras should be installed in gargoyle statues. What gaze can be more terrifying than that of a leering monster made of stone? Isn’t the essential purpose of surveillance the production of fear in the surveilled?

I think it would be an interesting experiment, and even if it’s a bust, then you have interesting urban art to attract tourists with. A win-win situation! Actually, probably the simplest thing to do is install better lighting on public streets since it’s been shown to have a significant impact on crime rates, but I think gargoyles are better anyway. If I ever become mayor of a city that demands concrete measures against crime, I may actually implement The Gargoyle Initiative. And just to bring the whole thing back to panopticon, what if on a random basis, police officers dressed in gargoyle costumes should take the place of the surveillance statues? Think about it, an entire city whose residents are terrified that the statues around them might be alive. It would be the world’s greatest performance art piece. After all, what’s the use of power when it’s not absolute?

I’m posting this as a message of warning to the world. Don’t ever let me get any power, because I’ll be sure to enjoy it too much. There you go, now you’ve all had fair notice. Don’t come crying to me when you’re all forced to listen to broadcasts of my karaoke renditions of sappy love songs a la Nero.

It’s
the way you love me,
It’s
a feeling like thi-is.
It’s
centrifugal motion,
It’s
perpetual bli-is.
It’s the way you love me, baybee!
This kiss, this bli-is!
Subliminal!

Clap or you’ll be shot.

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I ain’t not dead no more

Actually, it’s hard to tell right now if I’m alive or not. I’ve been working practically round-the-clock on this one funding proposal and I’ve managed to destroy my sleeping habits. It’s too bad, when daylight savings time ended I actually started getting up at 9 in the morning again. Spring forward, fall back, after all.

And you know what? This is the most work I’ve done in weeks. In fact, the amound of work I did for this proposal might even be more than I did for all of October. I’ve finally realized why my writing has stalled — quite simply, I’m sick of my thesis. Okay, maybe that’s too strong, but I’m definitely getting bored with it. But the project that I’m pitching to get funding for my PhD next year is pretty different from what I’m doing right now, and the books I’ve been reading for the proposal are stuff that I’m way interested in. To be honest, my project on Filipino bloggers right now was pretty much a fallback position since the idea I came in with was too big for a one year Master’s. I was going to do fieldwork in Southeast Asia (definitely Malaysia and maybe Singapore and Brunei) on Filipino migrant workers there. So it was going to be about migration from South to South and not South to North like most migration literature focuses on. And I’d found an article about citizenship in Malaysia, where the Malaysian government is quite aware of the presence of undocumented migrants but looks the other way anyway, extending de facto citizenship to these tax-paying and voting residents (Sadiq 2005). That’s exactly the kind of crap I’ve always liked. Just look at the abstract:

Why would a state encourage illegal immigration over the opposition of its citizens? According to the theories of immigration and citizenship, we should expect exactly the opposite: that states will monitor, control, and restrict illegal immigrants’ access to citizenship on behalf of its citizens, as has been the experience of most countries. I use my research on Filipino immigration to Sabah, Malaysia to show how Malaysia utilizes census practices and documentation to incorporate an illegal immigrant population from the Philippines. Illegal immigrants play an electoral role in Sabah because of the loosely institutionalized nature of citizenship, a
feature common to many other developing countries. Our examination of Malaysia reveals several elements of illegal immigration and citizenship that are common to migratory flows in other developing countries. I conclude by showing how this case is generalizable and what it tells us about illegal immigrant participation in the international system.

That’s some good stuff there and a nice jumping-off point for more research on related issues. Off the top of my head, there’s the gendered aspect of migration — which sorts of migrants are valued by the Malaysian state, and does that include female domestic workers being abused by their employers? Or what about how Malaysia is apparently decoupling the nation from the state? And maybe something about the types of citizens this kind of governmentality produces? Yep, this thing was rich in possibilities. But alas, ’twas not to be. The project was too big and I had to change my topic entirely. Not that I hate my project right now, but I’ve always been interested in power and the state and even now I keep trying to stick the political into my work.

But now that I’m trying to get into PhD programs, I get to design my dream project. All political anthropology all the time. Just look at the books I’ve got piled up beside my desk: The Foucault Effect by Graham Burchell (ed.), States of Injury by Wendy Brown, Neoliberalism as Exception by Aihwa Ong, The Anti-Politics Machine by James Ferguson, Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays by Louis Althusser, Anthropology in the Margins of the State by Veena Das and Deborah Poole (eds.), and The Coming Community by Giorgio Agamben. No, I didn’t actually use all of them in my proposal, but I absolutely loved reading through them just for the fact that they weren’t saying something that I’d been reading over and over for the last 6 months. And I still haven’t read Manuel Castell’s The Rise of the Network Society despite having had it on my bookshelf since last February.

So perhaps I should take an intellectual break every now and then just to remind me of why I thought a life of reading books 24/7 was a good thing to get into. I’m hoping I can keep up this rate of work with my regular writing because there’s really nothing more I’d like right now than to have this thesis done.

Oh, and Anthroblogs’ owner hasn’t gotten back to me yet. The constant hammering of spam comments is getting quite tiresome, but I figure that’s no reason to make a hasty decision on which blog host to go with, so I’ll give all my options the consideration due to them.

References

Sadiq, Kamal. 2005. “When states prefer non-citizens over citizens: conflict over illegal migration into Malaysia.” International Studies Quarterly 49, 101–122.

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My life in pictures

PhD Comics

From PhD Comics.  Edited for spelling and personal relevance.  Also for sense of personal aesthetics.

I also joined the LiveJournal community NaReWriMo, a horrendous name that stands for National Research Writing Month, a.k.a. National Write My Goddamned Thesis Month, a.k.a. November.  Come to think of it, it’s actually IntReWriMo since by joining I’ve just made the community international.  Anyway, joining the community means that you’ve committed yourself to writing something research-related everyday.  I joined on November 5 and I’ve actually managed to honour the fateful agreement.

I’m probably going to go with Blogsome for my new host if they ever get around to answering my question about importing posts using an XML WordPress export converted to a mysql dump.  Yes, those words mean something.  If not, there’s always Anthroblogs, the owner of which I still haven’t contacted.  More to follow later.

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Zizek zizek bo bizek, me mi mo mizek, Zizek!

I’m currently working on applications for funding and schools and crap.  I don’t have time to think about this blog, so changing hosts will have to wait until next week.  Late next week, in all probability.  Sorry, I actually have a couple of drafts I was saving to post on the new blog, so stick around and you’ll eventually see them.  In the meantime, have some Zizek.

By that I mean that I just saw the documentary on the philosopher Slavoj Zizek, titled Zizek!  I can only comment on the superficial stuff since I don’t have time for deep reflection.

First, I liked the film.  It only gives a very broad presentation of Zizek’s ideas, but you’d have to read him to really get him anyway.  The documentary was entertaining, just don’t expect to anything too, too deep.  I think it was pretty much a necessity for the movie to explore Zizek more than his work, otherwise it would be a glorified Powerpoint presentation of his ideas.  Second, Zizek is a rather engaging speaker.  He’s very animated when he talks and keeps waving his hands around.  By the end of each of his public talks he’s always dripping in sweat.  Third, Zizek has seen Armageddon (the movie, not the end times).  He’s also seen (and liked?) Hero, the Jet Li film, the politics of which always stuck in my craw — the filmmakers might as well have just addressed the audience directly and said, “So you see, this shows that unity is preferable to human rights and that therefore Taiwan should submit to China.”  Fourth, he types with one finger (not even two-fingered hunt and peck, just one).  Fifth, he keeps his clothes in his kitchen cupboards.  Sixth, my supervisor apparently knows him personally.  He’d once given a talk at King’s College, which is part of my own school, Dalhousie University, and she told me that he’d forgotten to pack clothes when he came over.  I know, how can anyone forget that?

So in conclusion, Zizek! — good to watch if you’re not paying for it.  Another excellent way to put off work for an hour.

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Newsflash

While I was egosurfing (i.e. checking out how popular Sarapen has become — admit it, you’ve Googled yourself before) I found out that this blog is apparently number 18 in Google’s results for the term “anarchist anthropology.” That’s because of these two posts about David Graeber’s pamphlet on the subject. I poked around and saw this post about the same thing but written last year. It’s rather critical of the piece, but I think it raises some interesting objections. To wit:

For I fear that here Graeber overly idealizes academia, and the discipline of anthropology in particular. Despite all his rote Foucault-bashing, and sneering at mainstream academics as “people who like to think of themselves as political radicals even though all they do is write essays likely to be read by a few dozen other people in an institutional environment” (71), he in fact buys into the authority of normative academic “knowledge” much more than I think is necessary or justified […] It’s not that Graeber doesn’t know that “the discipline we know today was made possible by horrific schemes of conquest, colonization, and mass murder” (96); but he seems to think that the “vast archive of human experience” possessed by anthropologists is uninflected by these origins, and only needs to be shared more publically in order to be efficacious.

I’m not sure if I agree, but anyway, check it out if you’re interested. Maybe I should make an “anarchism” tag, I keep bringing it up, or perhaps a tag devoted entirely to David Graeber.

Continuing on with this updating thing, I’ve found some more information about hikikomori, which relates to my post about the manga Welcome to the NHK. It’s an interview written in a journalistic style, so the article is really easy to read. It provides an added layer of depth to the hikikomori thing. I also didn’t know Italy had abolished mental hospitals, but apparently it has. I recommend Japan Focus anyway for its excellent articles on stuff relating to the Asia-Pacific region. A refereed and free electronic journal, good for whiling away the time on a Sunday afternoon.

While we’re on the subject of Japan Focus, have a gander at this article, “Invisible Immigrants: Invisible Immigrants: Undocumented Migration and Border Controls in Early Postwar Japan” [broken link, alternate link is paywalled unfortunately]. It certainly challenges the notion that immigration has not been a major factor in Japanese society until relatively recently and it nicely illustrates how states have the power to turn people invisible. Also interesting (and rather unsurprising) that immigration control was at first justified as a health initiative to protect the country from foreign diseases, though in actuality enacted to protect Japan from foreigners, period.

And that’s that for today. My search for a new bloghost continues, I’ll probably switch later this week.

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Urge to kill rising (i.e., I want to leave edublogs)

Whenever I write about blogging, I usually discuss the sociological aspects of it instead of the technical stuff, mostly because everyone and their dog already blogs about XML and Python and whatsit. Nevertheless, I have to start talking about that crap now because I’m getting more and more pissed off at edublogs.org. Why am I getting so much spam in my comments and why don’t you have an effective spam blocker up yet, huh edublogs? It’s been 2 hours since I cleared out all my spam comments and already there are 2 new comments extolling the virtues of online poker. I’m actually breaking my self-imposed rule of no computer use during the weekend because I don’t want to delete pages of spam on Monday.

Ok, screw this, I’m bailing. The only question is which bloghost I should go with. I like Daria.be [Link is now defunct] because it’s like edublogs, but better. It has more WordPress stuff like better spam protection, more themes, better site statistics, podcasting and Youtube support, daily backups, and you can even have your own forums.

Blogsome seems to have pretty much the same thing, but apparently you can tinker directly with the coding of your blog, which gives you a nice degree of flexibility. What say you, Blogsome users? And if anyone else has other free bloghosting services to recommend, do speak up.

I think I already know how to export and import a blog. This post from JAWW explains things easily enough:

  1. Go to RSS2MT
  2. Put in the URL for your blog’s RSS feed
  3. Save the crap that pops out as a .txt file
  4. Go to your new bloghost, which must be using either Movable Type or WordPress for their blogs
  5. Click the “Import” tab
  6. Import the text file that you saved
  7. World domination

There are a couple of klunky annoyances with the importing, as the original post mentions, but I’m sure they’re a lot less annoying than manually copying and pasting all of the posts that you have. My biggest problem is that it seems comments can’t be exported as well, which is too bad. Actually, I don’t have many comments, maybe I’ll just edit each post so that the comments are included within them. Anyway, the reason I’m being so detailed is that I’m putting this up for any other edublogs users who want to join me as I make a run for the fences. Property is theft, down with sexism, crush the Gang of Four, etc.

UPDATE:

Have been researching other bloghosts and have come across Blogiversity. They say that

Blog applications usually take 2 to 3 days to process. Why is there an application? Anyone can get a free blog these days. Our purpose is to create a community specifically for academic bloggers. We only want the best.

You have to tell them what subject you’ll be blogging about, which you pick out of a dropdown menu, and then you have to

Tell us a little about yourself (student, professor, research, hobby, etc.) and how you relate to this subject

Also, you have to give a sample blog post of 1-2 paragraphs. I’m not sure I like the whiff of elitism I get from this project. There’s always Anthroblogs, which is just for anthropologists. When I was deciding on bloghosts, I was actually considering either them or edublogs; maybe I would have been more satisfied with Anthroblogs. They could certainly use more people posting regularly.

UPDATE 2:

RSS2MT is flawed, it only exports a summary of the posts. However, since edublogs has just upgraded, you can just do Export now, and it exports everything too. So this workaround is no longer necessary.

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Hey what’s up, tell me whatsa happenin’

I recently had an interview for a job where my social science research skills were actually relevant (I know, quelle surprise). During the interview, I mentioned my participation in an ethnographic field school in Peru and that the interviewers could find the paper that I wrote about the project I conducted using a combination of my name and some specific search terms. I was rather satisfied with it, but now it seems rather naive and unpolished to me (I was a 3rd year undergrad at the time). I won’t tell you how to find the paper, but it’s really not that hard.

Anyway, I suddenly remembered that the interviewer could find this blog as well just by Googling me, and I thought, “Oh crap, have I written anything incriminating?” I felt the teensiest bit iffy about the anarchist sympathies I expressed in previous posts, but I thought I didn’t really have anything to hide. I got the job at the end of the interview anyway, but that brief moment reminded me how potentially vulnerable you can be online. I’m also reminded of what happened to a friend of mine when she was applying for Phd schools: one of the professors she was hoping to work with had found her blog and complimented her on it. There wasn’t anything incriminating there either, but she’s now gotten herself a new blog (just in case, I suspect).

Because the gaze of the Internet is potentially always present, many have likened it to a panopticon. The panopticon is a type of prison designed in such a way that the prisoners never know whether or not they are being watched by their jailers; since the prisoners do not know whether they are being watched, they will act as if they are always being watched and accordingly police themselves. Michel Foucault likens certain parts of “Western” societies to panopticons, since their power to discipline behaviour relies on the visibility of subjects to the gaze of others. The individual is always self-consciously aware of the possibility of being spied upon and will therefore change his or her behaviour accordingly.

However, it seems to me that people won’t necessarily police themselves in a panopticon system. Rather, I think it’s just as likely that people will start tearing down the wall between public and private in their own lives. If one is potentially always being watched, then does it matter if one farts in an empty room or in a crowded dining room? Perhaps someone will see you expel bodily gas when you are in your own bedroom, and perhaps no one will notice if you fart while having dinner with other people. What used to be private might start becoming public, and instead of a society where people police themselves, you might see a society where self-discipline is largely nonexistent.

The power of the panopticon also rests on certain culturally-specific notions of private and public. For example, there is a certain group of people in South America (damned if I remember which one — the Aymara? the Jivaro?) who traditionally lived in longhouses shared by several families. Because there will always be comeone in the longhouse, couples usually have sex in a secluded spot outside, perhaps in the jungle or an empty garden. For these people, then, the indoors is a public space, while it is outdoors where privacy exists. This is the reverse of “Western” notions of public and private, since “a man’s home is his castle”, “it is not the business of the state to regulate what happens in people’s bedrooms”, and so on.

Many people often speak of blogging as a panopticon system. The blogger is always under the gaze of the Internet. However, I don’t think it’s necessarily appropriate to call blogging a panopticon, since the gaze of the Internet is one that bloggers invite. The gaze of others in a panopticon is involuntary and unwanted, while the gaze of the Internet in blogging is one bloggers try to capture. There have been many news stories, for example, about bloggers being fired for criticizing their employers in their blogs. Blogging cannot therefore be a panopticon system, since otherwise the bloggers would have censored themselves. In a panopticon, the prisoners must be aware that they are potentially being watched by anyone on the Internet, which the bloggers who were fired obviously didn’t consider.

However, even if bloggers start censoring themselves, blogging still cannot be a panopticon. One of the implied requirements of a panopticon is that the prisoners be entirely revealed to their jailers, or else they could simply engage in their illicit activities while out of sight of the authorities. In blogging, whatever is visible about a blogger is visible only because the blogger has made it so. The blogger reveals only what he or she wishes to reveal, and therefore what is revealed is not the entirety of a blogger but a front that he or she has constructed.

It should be obvious in this blog that I reveal only a fraction of the things I do and think about. What you see is what I wish you to see. Hoever, how you understand it is beyond my control. Which takes us into a discussion of authorship, intent, and the death of The Author. But that’s as far as I want to go, so you’ll have to be satisfied with what I’ve given you today.

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3 down, 117 to go

Just for the heck of it, I’m sharing the outline of my thesis.  I welcome comments from any masochists who read it.  I’m too lazy to type in the changes I’ve written in the margins of the printed version, so this will have to do.  I’m still undecided on the title, the two I have are still just provisional.  If you want the abstract, I posted it before.