13 July 2009

Politweets


The disputed 2009 Iranian presidential election sparked an unprecedented amount of U.S. media coverage, which of course led to a curious amount of attention in pop culture. As I basked in the warm glow of various electronic screens, I couldn’t help but feel a strange sense that something was awry within the bombardment of images of, chatter about, and support for the ensuing political demonstrations.

Time for reflection has helped me get closer to uncovering what I couldn’t put my finger on before: the benefit of devoting mass amounts of media coverage to the Iranian demonstrations, and the specific type of attention it was getting in the United States, would ultimately have nothing to do with the state of democracy in Iran.

As they often do, a few words from Slavoj Zizek ring true for me and seem to speak precisely to such a phenomenon. Describing the techno-savvy, business-minded, yet cause-sensitive people who are at the forefront of capitalism’s recent evolution into a non-self-perpetuating (i.e. not driven by greed alone) system which is very good at making lots of money by trying to care about Stuff at the same time, Zizek notes their odd political ethos by sarcastically pointing out the way they have reworked Marx's observation about the steam engine:
What are all the protests against global capitalism worth in comparison with the invention of the internet?
We are apparently a step even further now, for the overwhelming sense I had when the protests in Iran and the coverage of them were at their peak was that the message we were intended to receive had little to do with Iranian democracy; the real message was, “What is the struggle against totalitarianism worth in comparison with the onset of Twitter?”

Indeed, let’s ask ourselves who the winners of the whole ordeal were: the Iranian people? Certainly not, as their potentially flourishing democracy remains restrained by a totalitarian theocracy. The Iranian establishment? Obviously, Ahmadinejad will always look bad, but even Khamenei will find it hard to possibly look good after suppressing an opposition with very real concerns over the legitimacy of the election. Twitter? The company quickly discovered what the neo-capitalists have known all along, that nothing is as good for business as a humanitarian crisis. This is not to say that Twitter’s end-goal was to exploit the situation of the people of Iran. Nor am I suggesting that the awareness the Western world was allowed via Twitter was not beneficial in some way.

However, I think the subsequent inane Twitterization of everyday life we have seen since that time is evidence that the web site walked away with much gained. From inconsequential celebrities to legitimate news programs, Twitter has suddenly become some kind of proxy journalism; journalism being the institution formerly made up of professionals who sought the public good by seeking out first-hand, the developments society needed to be aware of, in order to bring about change.

It’s not that I find Twitter annoying and pointless (which I do), I just find this growing trend toward e-politics troubling. I remember during the last presidential election in our own country how often I heard facebook and MySpace group numbers being cited on the news. The advent of e-campaigns was the true focus, not political change.

Just as the internet boom failed to translate into deep political change in our own democracy, it is no surprise that we witnessed the same impotency in regards to Iran. While the people of Iran risked their physical well-being to take to the streets and demand to be heard, we in the U.S. failed to do the same. The Western media in general failed to move beyond the fact that Iranians were tweeting, and thus missed why they were doing it. I hope would-be activists in the U.S. soon realize that we can't tweet our way to a better future.

04 July 2009

Race as Oppressive Social Construct?

Of late, I've become more and more interested in exploring the philosophy of race. After reading several essays by Cornel West--who for obvious reasons has a vested interest in the subject--and working extensively on theories concerning the identity of the Other in politics for my thesis, I continue to notice the complex ways in which a philosophy of race must necessarily be considered inextricable from a cultural theory of violence.

I'll admit that all these various ideas came crashing together very unacademically tonight as I watched The Late Late Show with Craig Ferguson (which, by the way is the second best late night talk show behind Conan). During a chat with Corkie Roberts about the self-designated supremacy of the white male, Craig made the comment, "Do you know we just elected a black president?"

In light of the context of the conversation, I suddenly thought to myself, But, isn't Barack Obama as WHITE as he is BLACK?

The simple illustration of a man with a white mother and black father being labeled 'black' seems to me an indication that we are talking much more than ethnicity when we talk race. This ironically coincides with a book I had just started earlier today, "Violence" by Slavoj Zizek. In the introduction, Zizek writes, concerning necessary distinctions between various types of violence:
...Subjective and objective violence cannot be perceived from the same standpoint: subjective violence is experienced as such against the background of a non-violent zero level. It is seen as a perturbation of the "normal," peaceful state of things. However, objective violence is precisely the violence inherent to this "normal" state of things. Objective violence is invisible since it sustains the very zero-level standard against which we perceive something as subjectively violent. Systematic violence is thus something like the notorious "dark matter" of physics, the counterpart to an all-too-visible subjective violence. It may be invisible, but it has to be taken into account if one is to make sense of what otherwise seem to be "irrational" explosions of subjective violence.
We Americans are acutely aware of the disturbing volume of subjective violence perpetrated as a result of racial tensions. But, if we take Zizek's cultural theory and examine race in this light, I wonder if the imposition of race itself is the latent systematic act of violence, which, like dark matter, physically holds together our conceptions of peaceful racial normalcy (which, as we know is itself rife with various forms of objective political and economic violence). This ties into an earlier comment of Zizek's that:
...There is a more fundamental form of violence still that pertains to language as such, to its imposition of a certain universe of meaning.
The universe of meaning associated with being black is a universe I personally can observe but never experience or fully understand. However, there is commonality between it and my own racial universe of being white in that both, in my opinion, are violently imposed from without, rather than arising out of self-revelation.

Resulting from externally imposed racial identity, the impulse towards self-segregation is maddeningly more common than I think most people realize, and it's evident everywhere from the locations we choose to live, to the language we use to even talk about race. Imagine, for instance, a white immigrant from Johannesburg who chooses to call herself an "African-American." The term carries with it all of the associations and prejudices of the term 'black,' so I find it puzzling that it is often seen as being more politically correct. While racial identity makes us comfortable by drawing neat lines between us, these lines seem to be the very thing that must be examined and questioned if we are to understand and effectively act against the violence perpetrated because of them.

Returning to the example of our new president, we see this in his own profession of being a black man, in that this identity is entirely a result of experiences resulting from the larger system of racial prejudice and violence which has pre-defined him as 'black.'

So, again, I wonder if I'm way off in thinking that racial identity is itself violent. For the record, I think a 'color-blind' system is equally violent by imposing some sort of neutral identity, over a self-revealed one which would of course include skin color and resulting conceptions based on one's treatment because of it. Yet, behind segregation (self-imposed, or forced), behind prejudice, behind political and economic oppression, the ultimate act of violence seems to be defining who is black and who is white.