When I was younger--like, ten to twelve, say--I was perfectly aware of how the word enigma was spelled and pronounced, and of what it meant, but for some reason most of the time when I saw it written I would misread it as engima, switching the g and the i, pronouncing it en-JEE-ma. In my head, without realizing it consciously, I worked up a whole definition of engima based on the contexts I thought I was seeing it in, which was almost, but (in some way I couldn't define) not quite, the same as the definition of enigma.
I've been typing up some quotes from Maria Mies' fascinating Patriarchy and Accumulation on a World Scale on my Commonplace (I'll get around to either discussing them or putting them in a digest here sometime around 2015, at the rate I'm going, but if you want to look at them now, have at it), and as I do it I'm starting to realize that in recent years I've been doing the enigma/engima switcheroo with the real word subsistence and the word-of-my-misreading-invention substinence, which of course means almost the same thing as subsistence, and almost the same thing as sustenance, but not quite the same as either.
My point? Why, you think I should have one?
Showing posts with label words. Show all posts
Showing posts with label words. Show all posts
Wednesday, August 24, 2011
Thursday, June 23, 2011
maclises
"you are not limited to one room - there are many rooms." - angus maclise from Astral Collapse
what angus maclise gave form to – in sound, in symbols, in living – is a departure. it stands outside in its strangeness, full of reflective creation. i know so little of what he did, but what i have been exposed to makes me happy. it’s a lens for me - one of many i’ve happened across recently, all important nonetheless. to me, it doesn’t impose a mode of life. it suggests one with many faces. like a diamond, residing among others, in the many rooms of being.
for those of you who don’t know of maclise, check out this blastitude article on him.
related - i only just came across the equally wonderful hetty maclise's old site. only skimmed it, but thought i'd pass it along: http://www.phantomlyoracula.com/
what angus maclise gave form to – in sound, in symbols, in living – is a departure. it stands outside in its strangeness, full of reflective creation. i know so little of what he did, but what i have been exposed to makes me happy. it’s a lens for me - one of many i’ve happened across recently, all important nonetheless. to me, it doesn’t impose a mode of life. it suggests one with many faces. like a diamond, residing among others, in the many rooms of being.
for those of you who don’t know of maclise, check out this blastitude article on him.
related - i only just came across the equally wonderful hetty maclise's old site. only skimmed it, but thought i'd pass it along: http://www.phantomlyoracula.com/
Wednesday, May 25, 2011
scattered and happy
the accumulations we are and deem as ourselves, see them as nearing dust - scattered and happy.
see your lot as yours to share and others as theirs - and only theirs - to offer.
see your lot as yours to share and others as theirs - and only theirs - to offer.
Monday, May 9, 2011
A word I don't want to use anymore and the way in which I don't want to use it
Words mean a lot of things, depending on the social circumstances in which they're used. One of the really magical things about language is that it is such a complex, nuanced structure and yet we use it reflexively, without any thought. As we use these words and don't think about them, the complex system of meanings that they have can blend together in our minds--most of the time this is a wonderful thing, but there can often be a very negative side. I don't by any means suggest that language shapes thought in any kind of strongly deterministic sense, but tiny little subconscious cues from the language do tend to carry weight, especially with repetition--if we use a word in a positive sense in one context it can carry that sense over to another context where the use should be less positive, say.
When you begin to think about the words you use reflexively, you can sometimes spot ways that your thinking has been colonized by the needs of the dominant society. On a more prosaic, but probably concretely more important, level, you can also start to see ways that what you say might communicate different things than you intend, depending on who's listening and in what context. I've been thinking about this a lot recently, and thought it might be good to write about some of these words. This may or may not be a series. Should you be so inclined, let me know what you think--about this particular word, about other words, about this whole idea in general. So, the word:
Pioneer(ing)
If you're a fan of any kind of art that at whatever time or place has been considered "avant garde" you've come across this. People frequently use it to talk about, say, early electronic music--Delia Derbyshire or Wendy Carlos or Louis and Bebe Barron or whoever are "pioneers" of electronic music. When people say this, they mean that these artists did things that had never been done before--"went places," metaphorically, that no one had ever been before.
But that's not what a pioneer is. A pioneer is a colonist, a conqueror, a front liner in genocide. A pioneer claims to be the first to go where they go by virtue of redefining those who have already laid down the paths they bulldoze as insignificant, nonexistent in any meaningful sense. A pioneer "discovers" nothing, "invents" nothing; a pioneer is destructive, not creative.
Land is already there. Most of it has had human beings living on or near it for so long that, in terms that we can really feel, you might as well call it forever. Even that which hasn't is occupied--animals, plants, fungi, swarming bacteria, there's life everywhere*, and it's been exploring for a hell of a lot longer than we have--and without, I would venture to guess, this bizarre conceit that it's "discovering" anything.
*And even those places where there is no life--far enough below the Earth's surface, throughout most of the universe, whatever--those places exist, too, with their own perspectives, and have the right to be themselves.
Curiosity and even necessity need not partner with conquest. That we use the word "pioneering" to describe art that "pushes boundaries"--another deeply problematic formulation--reveals the extent to which we have been trained to view these things as inseparable. But the beautiful thing about art--and I use "art" just in the sense of any activity pursued for self-determined reasons--the beautiful thing about art is, or should be, that it's easy to be curious, easy to explore, without conquering anything.
When you begin to think about the words you use reflexively, you can sometimes spot ways that your thinking has been colonized by the needs of the dominant society. On a more prosaic, but probably concretely more important, level, you can also start to see ways that what you say might communicate different things than you intend, depending on who's listening and in what context. I've been thinking about this a lot recently, and thought it might be good to write about some of these words. This may or may not be a series. Should you be so inclined, let me know what you think--about this particular word, about other words, about this whole idea in general. So, the word:
Pioneer(ing)
If you're a fan of any kind of art that at whatever time or place has been considered "avant garde" you've come across this. People frequently use it to talk about, say, early electronic music--Delia Derbyshire or Wendy Carlos or Louis and Bebe Barron or whoever are "pioneers" of electronic music. When people say this, they mean that these artists did things that had never been done before--"went places," metaphorically, that no one had ever been before.
But that's not what a pioneer is. A pioneer is a colonist, a conqueror, a front liner in genocide. A pioneer claims to be the first to go where they go by virtue of redefining those who have already laid down the paths they bulldoze as insignificant, nonexistent in any meaningful sense. A pioneer "discovers" nothing, "invents" nothing; a pioneer is destructive, not creative.
Land is already there. Most of it has had human beings living on or near it for so long that, in terms that we can really feel, you might as well call it forever. Even that which hasn't is occupied--animals, plants, fungi, swarming bacteria, there's life everywhere*, and it's been exploring for a hell of a lot longer than we have--and without, I would venture to guess, this bizarre conceit that it's "discovering" anything.
*And even those places where there is no life--far enough below the Earth's surface, throughout most of the universe, whatever--those places exist, too, with their own perspectives, and have the right to be themselves.
Curiosity and even necessity need not partner with conquest. That we use the word "pioneering" to describe art that "pushes boundaries"--another deeply problematic formulation--reveals the extent to which we have been trained to view these things as inseparable. But the beautiful thing about art--and I use "art" just in the sense of any activity pursued for self-determined reasons--the beautiful thing about art is, or should be, that it's easy to be curious, easy to explore, without conquering anything.
Saturday, December 18, 2010
A sentence carefully constructed to communicate nothing
A Bank of America statement:
This decision is based upon our reasonable belief that WikiLeaks may be engaged in activities that are, among other things, inconsistent with our internal policies for processing payments.(By the way, The Kansas City Star, what I said to The Denver Post applies to you, too.)
Tuesday, November 16, 2010
News from the corporate world #3: Doubleplusungood
While it can often be difficult to be certain with these things, I'm pretty sure that there actually is a real, not parody, corporate "inspirational" speaker whose website is located at www.goodthink.com. I'm not even kidding.
Friday, October 22, 2010
let x=x
questioning the assumption that our lives are equivalent to the products others choose to create is a wonderful impulse. what time we have and give to the demands of the world should be considered.
a problem is when people feel outrage over the inane instead of the miserably absurd. take for example those who are offended by pork-barrel spending. they deem the products - such as a "donkey museum" - to lack equivalence. what they neglect is the alternative: a system that fuels itself upon stripping the lives of others. this creates an endlessly widening rift between the value of one life to another.
this may be the main reason that those in power are promoting the economic strife expressed by those affiliated with the tea party. what is unfortunate is that the basis of that strife comes from a well-reasoned position. as i said before, it questions the value system placed on one's life by another. however, it is ultimately turned on itself and self-reflection is removed. that way it is possible to capitalize on a very emotional impulse with a specific, ethical logic while simultaneously creating an argument that goes against that very logic.
what's more, it lives by the argument.
just to clarify, my use of mo tucker's example isn't to mock her. i'm just little under the influence and felt like riffing off of that last post.
night!
a problem is when people feel outrage over the inane instead of the miserably absurd. take for example those who are offended by pork-barrel spending. they deem the products - such as a "donkey museum" - to lack equivalence. what they neglect is the alternative: a system that fuels itself upon stripping the lives of others. this creates an endlessly widening rift between the value of one life to another.
this may be the main reason that those in power are promoting the economic strife expressed by those affiliated with the tea party. what is unfortunate is that the basis of that strife comes from a well-reasoned position. as i said before, it questions the value system placed on one's life by another. however, it is ultimately turned on itself and self-reflection is removed. that way it is possible to capitalize on a very emotional impulse with a specific, ethical logic while simultaneously creating an argument that goes against that very logic.
what's more, it lives by the argument.
just to clarify, my use of mo tucker's example isn't to mock her. i'm just little under the influence and felt like riffing off of that last post.
night!
Wednesday, August 25, 2010
Nota bene
The word uniformed is easily misread as uninformed. Significant, though not as significant as I'd like. I'd rather a word like fatheaded crapface be that close to uniformed, but I'll make do.
Work is hell. Blugginess to resume tomorrow.
Work is hell. Blugginess to resume tomorrow.
Tuesday, August 17, 2010
Robert Musil, The Confusions of Young Törless, page 72
(Cross-posted from Commonplace)
It struck him that he had once, standing with his father before one of those landscapes, cried out unexpectedly, "Oh, how beautiful that is" -- and had been embarrassed by his father's pleasure. On that occasion he might just as easily have said: "How terribly said it is." It was a failure of words that tormented him then, a half-awareness that the words were merely random excuses for what he had felt.
And today he remembered the picture, he remembered the words, and he clearly recalled lying about that feeling even though he did not know why. His eye ran through everything again in his memory. But it returned unassuaged, again and again. A smile of delight at the wealth of ideas that he still clutched as though distractedly, slowly assumed a barely perceptible, painful trait...
He felt the need to persist in his search for a bridge, a context, a comparison -- between himself and that which stood silently before his mind.
But however often he had calmed himself with a thought, that incomprehensible objection remained: you're lying. It was as though he had to pass through an unstoppable division of soldiers, a stubborn remnant forever leaping out at him, or as though he was wearing his feverish fingers raw trying to undo an endless knot.
And finally he gave up. The room closed in around him, and his memories burgeoned in unnatural distortions.
It struck him that he had once, standing with his father before one of those landscapes, cried out unexpectedly, "Oh, how beautiful that is" -- and had been embarrassed by his father's pleasure. On that occasion he might just as easily have said: "How terribly said it is." It was a failure of words that tormented him then, a half-awareness that the words were merely random excuses for what he had felt.
And today he remembered the picture, he remembered the words, and he clearly recalled lying about that feeling even though he did not know why. His eye ran through everything again in his memory. But it returned unassuaged, again and again. A smile of delight at the wealth of ideas that he still clutched as though distractedly, slowly assumed a barely perceptible, painful trait...
He felt the need to persist in his search for a bridge, a context, a comparison -- between himself and that which stood silently before his mind.
But however often he had calmed himself with a thought, that incomprehensible objection remained: you're lying. It was as though he had to pass through an unstoppable division of soldiers, a stubborn remnant forever leaping out at him, or as though he was wearing his feverish fingers raw trying to undo an endless knot.
And finally he gave up. The room closed in around him, and his memories burgeoned in unnatural distortions.
Sunday, August 15, 2010
All the cool kids do it
So I need to make fun of Matt Yglesias too:
Second sentence: Or, maybe, it would be irrelevant if "we allowed" people to eat what was grown in the areas they live, despite the fact that maybe people wouldn't be able to eat as many strawberries in midwinter or whatever the fuck.
Third sentence: It really pisses me off how everyone on the internet writes in exactly the same way. Ha ha unexpected use of "delicious" as a modifier for something it wouldn't usually modify!
Fourth sentence: And why the fuck do Latin Americans need to buy goods and services from the United States? What is wrong with Latin American goods and services??? In case someone's gearing up to answer this question: I know. It's covered in sentence two.
I don’t really have an opinion on whether genetically engineered sugar beets should be allowed. I do know that this whole thing would probably be irrelevant if we allowed Americans who want to buy sugar cane from Latin America do so freely. That would be a more delicious outcome as well as a more economically efficient one. And it would make Latin Americans more prosperous, giving them the income they need to buy goods and services from the United States."First sentence: You don't? Really? Even in the wake of the whole rapeseed thing?
Second sentence: Or, maybe, it would be irrelevant if "we allowed" people to eat what was grown in the areas they live, despite the fact that maybe people wouldn't be able to eat as many strawberries in midwinter or whatever the fuck.
Third sentence: It really pisses me off how everyone on the internet writes in exactly the same way. Ha ha unexpected use of "delicious" as a modifier for something it wouldn't usually modify!
Fourth sentence: And why the fuck do Latin Americans need to buy goods and services from the United States? What is wrong with Latin American goods and services??? In case someone's gearing up to answer this question: I know. It's covered in sentence two.
Wednesday, July 28, 2010
Hope
I hope they're getting this. The administration is not going to escape being seen as anti-business.....And I hope the ensuing discussion will lead President Obama to understand that the human and financial costs of continuing on this path far outstrip any conceivable security benefits....Let's hope the courts don't decide that we need to ratcvhet (sic) up the police state by siding with officers who hope to cover up their unprofessional and illegal behavior.....The sooner this country comes to grips with the fact that our mission in Afghanistan is overly ambitious, while excessively costly, the sooner there will be more and louder calls for disengagement. Let's hope this turns up the volume.....And let us hope some policy based in reality follows.....What I hope we're seeing is a rare example of the Democrats staking out a position on the left so that they can make a compromise in the middle.....I do detect some momentum gathering behind Tom Udall’s constitutional option for curbing the filibuster in January of 2011, which if it happens would revive hope in the legislative arena.....It’s always difficult to characterize the emotional state of a convention full of people. But if the 2007 edition of Netroots Nation was mostly angry, 2008 was hopeful, 2009 was anxious, and now in 2010 the dominant mood is depressed.
That last one, unintentionally, gets at the point I'm trying to make here quite well.
Raoul Vaneigem: "Hope is the leash of submission."
Derrick Jensen, Endgame, vol. 1: The Problem of Civilization, pages 329-331 (immediately after quoting the Vaneigem):
UPDATE Hahahaha, I just got home from the library and what to my wondering eyes should appear but a package from Derrick Jensen. Both volumes are now in my clutches. The need to think for myself has been averted!
That last one, unintentionally, gets at the point I'm trying to make here quite well.
Raoul Vaneigem: "Hope is the leash of submission."
Derrick Jensen, Endgame, vol. 1: The Problem of Civilization, pages 329-331 (immediately after quoting the Vaneigem):
Hope, we are told, is our beacon in the dark. It is our light at the end of a long, dark tunnel. It is the beam of light that against all odds makes its way into our prison cells. It is our reason for persevering, our protection against despair (which must at all costs, including the cost of our sanity and the world, be avoided). How can we continue if we do not have hope?...To the liberals I quoted above, engagement seems to consist largely of closing your eyes and hoping, interspersed with occasional voting (which is by its nature essentially just a special form of closing your eyes and hoping). I admit that I frequently become paralyzed thinking about everything wrong with the world, and how powerless I feel--and that is exactly when my thoughts turn to hope. It's a sickness! Jensen continues:
Hope is, in fact, a curse, a bane. ...
More or less all of us yammer on more or less endlessly about hope. You wouldn't believe--or maybe you would--how many editors for how many magazines have said they want me to write about the apocalypse, then enjoined me to "make sure you leave readers with a sense of hope." But what, precisely, is hope? At a talk I gave last spring, someone asked me to define it. I couldn't, and so turned the question back on the audience. Here's the definition we all came up with: Hope is a longing for a future condition over which you have no agency. It means you are essentially powerless.
Think about it. I'm not, for example, going to say I hope to eat something tomorrow. I'll just do it. I don't hope I take another breath right now, nor that I finish writing this sentence. I just do them. On the other hand, I hope that the next time I get on a plane, it doesn't crash. To hope for some result means you have no agency concerning it.
So many people say they hope the dominant culture stops destroying the world. By saying that, they've guaranteed at least its short-term continuation, and given it a power it doesn't have. They've also stepped away from their own power.Incidentally, I'm returning the book to the library tomorrow morning, so I'm going to have to stop giving over my entire thought process to Jensen. At least until the copy I bought arrives. I hope it comes soon!
...when we stop hoping for external assistance, when we stop hoping that the awful situation we're in will somehow not get worse, then we are finally free--truly free--to honestly start working to thoroughly resolve it. I would say when hope dies, action begins.
Hope may be fine--and adaptive--for prisoners, but free men and women don't need it.
Are you a prisoner, or are you free?
UPDATE Hahahaha, I just got home from the library and what to my wondering eyes should appear but a package from Derrick Jensen. Both volumes are now in my clutches. The need to think for myself has been averted!
Monday, July 19, 2010
Moratorium
If I never, ever see anyone on the internet
1. Referring to formal logical fallacies by name,
2. Referring to Godwin's Law, or
3. Acting like either of these things mean that they "win" an argument,
ever again, I will be extremely happy. I mean seriously. If it is possible for conversation to get stupider, I don't know how.
I think "strawman" is my least favorite, mostly because the bulk of the times that I see people invoking it, all it means is that they're too dense to understand what the other person is saying, typically because they don't know how to see the world outside of their own tiny little sphere of understanding.
(Inspired by looking over still more comment threads at Pharyngula.)
1. Referring to formal logical fallacies by name,
2. Referring to Godwin's Law, or
3. Acting like either of these things mean that they "win" an argument,
ever again, I will be extremely happy. I mean seriously. If it is possible for conversation to get stupider, I don't know how.
I think "strawman" is my least favorite, mostly because the bulk of the times that I see people invoking it, all it means is that they're too dense to understand what the other person is saying, typically because they don't know how to see the world outside of their own tiny little sphere of understanding.
(Inspired by looking over still more comment threads at Pharyngula.)
Wednesday, July 7, 2010
Do I even need to ask?
Q. Do we really live in a society so intensely, oppressively focused on work at the expense of personal life that we have to invent the word daycation?
A. Um, of course we do.
A. Um, of course we do.
Thursday, June 3, 2010
Ronald Reagan, Campaign Speech 1976
"I would like to be president, because I would like to see this country become once again a country where a little six-year-old girl can grow up knowing the same freedom that I knew when I was six years old, growing up in America."
---
"I would like to be a president. I would like to be a six-year old girl. A country can grow to like a six-year-old girl president.
Growing up old in America, where a president can be a six-year-old girl, I knew freedom. Again, I knew freedom... Can I know freedom? I would like to.
'Where can I see this freedom?' In this country. This America, where freedom can grow. Grow up, America!
I would like to see this country become a six-year-old girl once again."
---
"I would like to be a president. I would like to be a six-year old girl. A country can grow to like a six-year-old girl president.
Growing up old in America, where a president can be a six-year-old girl, I knew freedom. Again, I knew freedom... Can I know freedom? I would like to.
'Where can I see this freedom?' In this country. This America, where freedom can grow. Grow up, America!
I would like to see this country become a six-year-old girl once again."
Thursday, May 20, 2010
Imagine...
...how Digby would react if someone said something like this about a Democrat:
She's talking about Rand Paul and all the tedious "Is he a racist?" nonsense that's going around. If we even accept that such a question makes any sense to ask of anyone (which I don't), IOZ repudiates the hell out of it in a post that makes a few questionable assertions but which overall I feel no need to repudiate whatsoever:
UPDATE: There's absolutely nothing to repudiate in IOZ's latest on the subject.
Granted, there's no reason to assume that he holds views like that. But to he best of my knowledge, he hasn't repudiated them either.Such a stupid line. Incidentally, doing a search for "repudiate" on Digby's site is pretty hilarious. Calm down with that word, friend.
She's talking about Rand Paul and all the tedious "Is he a racist?" nonsense that's going around. If we even accept that such a question makes any sense to ask of anyone (which I don't), IOZ repudiates the hell out of it in a post that makes a few questionable assertions but which overall I feel no need to repudiate whatsoever:
A libertarian who hates Black people, thinks they are racially and genetically inferior, and would, given the opportunity, refuse to serve racial minorities at his own business could nevertheless be better for Blacks than any cruise missile liberal. Ending the drug war and closing prisons and not sending poor Black people to die in crazy foreign adventures based on hazy "humanitarian" principles is more important than paying lip service to the Civil Rights office at the DOJ. For realz.Although, I gotta say, in general the term "liberatarian" is pretty damned repudiatable. And come to think of it, I repudiate the phrase "For realz" with all the repudiation power in my body.
UPDATE: There's absolutely nothing to repudiate in IOZ's latest on the subject.
Monday, April 19, 2010
Thursday, April 15, 2010
Why Godwin's Law is the stupidest goddamn thing ever
I would like to call attention to the last of the excerpts from Are Prisons Obsolete? that I just posted, in which medical experiments performed on American prisoners between World War II and 1974 are glancingly described.
Medical experiments on captive populations. If you, like me, are a recovering liberal and still in the back of your mind keeping a list of things the U.S. hasn't done recently that make us* in some way better than the Nazis, you can cross that one off.
*"Us" in the sense of "me and a group of people that may or may not include some of the people I'm speaking to." I wish English could distinguish between "me and you" us and "me and them" us.
Medical experiments on captive populations. If you, like me, are a recovering liberal and still in the back of your mind keeping a list of things the U.S. hasn't done recently that make us* in some way better than the Nazis, you can cross that one off.
*"Us" in the sense of "me and a group of people that may or may not include some of the people I'm speaking to." I wish English could distinguish between "me and you" us and "me and them" us.
Wednesday, April 14, 2010
Drunken Maria
the Monks often seem beyond belief to me. they achieve genuine unease through the filter of absolute mania. no other band can sound this joyous and menacing simultaneously. (i will admit that there are some that come very close though.) another thing that fuels my astonishment is that this music predates The Velvet Underground & Nico. a lot of garage rock was bold, but not like this.
take a song like "drunken maria" from their album Black Monk Time. under two minutes a scene of forced nihilism is shaped with unquestionable glee. in alternating commands - "sleepy maria, don't drink!" "drunken maria, don't sleep!" - they not only define this girl's existence, they deny her of it!
dadaist strains ran all through their music. (the chorus of their song "shut up" contains the absolutely brilliant line, "be a liar everywhere.") with that in mind, a dimension of "drunken maria" is revealed. this jaunty, little pop song is no less than a reaction aimed straight at the heart of the prevailing culture - a reaction which feels no need for a distinction between sincerity and insincerity. and why should it cater to this world? especially when it's laid down like this.
i may post more about the Monks in the future. the impact they continue to have on me is immeasurable. if you haven't heard Black Monk Time, check it out. i'll end here to keep things brief. that's it!
Monday, March 22, 2010
Opportunity
The other week I had to sit through endless training sessions about how to be sufficiently subservient to clients of the company I work for. "Empathy statements" and "vocal tone" and "to the client you are [the company]" and all that nonsense. Sometimes I suspect that by so extensively training their employees in specific ways to fake emotions they're trying to eliminate the real thing from us entirely.
Anyway, during these classes they would occasionally play us recorded interactions between people who have our jobs and the clients. Afterwards we were supposed to rate (and then discuss, which, ugh) how the "associate" did. Every time they read off the ratings choices, both my sense of elegant parallel structure and my sense of what words mean were struck to their core (my sense of dignity had long since departed). The choices were "exceeds" (as in, "the associate exceeds the client's expectations"), "meets" (as in, "the associate meets the client's expectations") and...."opportunity."
It actually took me a while to figure out what the hell "opportunity" meant. Eventually I realized that it was another word that corporate culture had redefined to suit its own twisted needs. Opportunity, in this case, means "the associate fucked up." There is opportunity to improve!
Once I realized this, I started seeing the word used that way all over the place. Bosses were saying it, stockbrokers were saying it, John G. Miller was tweeting it. And then I remembered uses like this. And I realized: when our corporate leaders refer to events like 9/11 and Katrina and other horrible life-ending disasters as "opportunities," they're not being soulless profiteers shock-doctrining their way into ever-greater personal wealth. They're recognizing exactly how awful these events really are: every bit as terrible as a call center phone conversation that doesn't go well.
SILLY UNTRUE THEORY ADDENDUM: Maybe this is why all the good liberals are so excited about the health care abomination. It's so terrible, it's an opportunity! This theory, while about as likely to be true as the one about Obama being a secret socialist with a Plan, at least has the advantage of explaining why all the liberals seem to think that this bill will lead inevitably, or at least more easily, to its exact opposite.
Anyway, during these classes they would occasionally play us recorded interactions between people who have our jobs and the clients. Afterwards we were supposed to rate (and then discuss, which, ugh) how the "associate" did. Every time they read off the ratings choices, both my sense of elegant parallel structure and my sense of what words mean were struck to their core (my sense of dignity had long since departed). The choices were "exceeds" (as in, "the associate exceeds the client's expectations"), "meets" (as in, "the associate meets the client's expectations") and...."opportunity."
It actually took me a while to figure out what the hell "opportunity" meant. Eventually I realized that it was another word that corporate culture had redefined to suit its own twisted needs. Opportunity, in this case, means "the associate fucked up." There is opportunity to improve!
Once I realized this, I started seeing the word used that way all over the place. Bosses were saying it, stockbrokers were saying it, John G. Miller was tweeting it. And then I remembered uses like this. And I realized: when our corporate leaders refer to events like 9/11 and Katrina and other horrible life-ending disasters as "opportunities," they're not being soulless profiteers shock-doctrining their way into ever-greater personal wealth. They're recognizing exactly how awful these events really are: every bit as terrible as a call center phone conversation that doesn't go well.
SILLY UNTRUE THEORY ADDENDUM: Maybe this is why all the good liberals are so excited about the health care abomination. It's so terrible, it's an opportunity! This theory, while about as likely to be true as the one about Obama being a secret socialist with a Plan, at least has the advantage of explaining why all the liberals seem to think that this bill will lead inevitably, or at least more easily, to its exact opposite.
Tuesday, March 16, 2010
Xe Part 2
Not Blackwater.
In the first part I mentioned that the awkwardness of the xe/hir construction was a major impediment to its ability to become unmarked. This brings me to my second feeling about the word, which is that I'm not sure how I feel about efforts, like this one, to normalize "deviance."
People who fall outside of our society's norms don't have many advantages as a result of their deviations, but a major one--one that, speaking as someone with a minority sexual orientation, I fucking love--is that it gives us a leg up in recognizing those norms for what they are (i.e., societal choices rather than natural law; often, impositions by and for the benefit of power) and rejecting them. To put it simply, we're already weird--we don't have to try. And given the absolutely untenable nature of the world as it is, we have to be weird--we have to reject it. All of us.
I'm a cisgendered man, so I understand that I'm coming at this issue from a position of considerable privilege. And I certainly think that these normalizing efforts are in many ways quite noble. Transgendered people are, obviously, people. People who, like everyone else, should have the right to not be exotic if they don't want to be. Just because I feel, strongly, that the world and all of its works need to be rejected fundamentally, does not mean that I have the right to demand it of other people just because they have non-standard bodies (or whatever else non-standard someone might have). And it must be really frustrating to go through daily life not even having a pronoun that comfortably refers to you. And I am well aware that frustration is the least of transgendered people's problems as they move through this crappy society of ours.
But I know that I'm extremely grateful* for my sexuality, because that aspect of my nature has been of great help in forming my view of the world. And for much the same reason that I'm ambivalent about gay marriage (it is of course ridiculous to have legal advantages available to some of the population but not all, but I'm not eager to hitch my sexual wagon to old-timey heterosexual patriarchal property transference procedures, you know?), I'm ambivalent about xe.
*Insofar as I can be grateful of something that no one gave me.
In the first part I mentioned that the awkwardness of the xe/hir construction was a major impediment to its ability to become unmarked. This brings me to my second feeling about the word, which is that I'm not sure how I feel about efforts, like this one, to normalize "deviance."
People who fall outside of our society's norms don't have many advantages as a result of their deviations, but a major one--one that, speaking as someone with a minority sexual orientation, I fucking love--is that it gives us a leg up in recognizing those norms for what they are (i.e., societal choices rather than natural law; often, impositions by and for the benefit of power) and rejecting them. To put it simply, we're already weird--we don't have to try. And given the absolutely untenable nature of the world as it is, we have to be weird--we have to reject it. All of us.
I'm a cisgendered man, so I understand that I'm coming at this issue from a position of considerable privilege. And I certainly think that these normalizing efforts are in many ways quite noble. Transgendered people are, obviously, people. People who, like everyone else, should have the right to not be exotic if they don't want to be. Just because I feel, strongly, that the world and all of its works need to be rejected fundamentally, does not mean that I have the right to demand it of other people just because they have non-standard bodies (or whatever else non-standard someone might have). And it must be really frustrating to go through daily life not even having a pronoun that comfortably refers to you. And I am well aware that frustration is the least of transgendered people's problems as they move through this crappy society of ours.
But I know that I'm extremely grateful* for my sexuality, because that aspect of my nature has been of great help in forming my view of the world. And for much the same reason that I'm ambivalent about gay marriage (it is of course ridiculous to have legal advantages available to some of the population but not all, but I'm not eager to hitch my sexual wagon to old-timey heterosexual patriarchal property transference procedures, you know?), I'm ambivalent about xe.
*Insofar as I can be grateful of something that no one gave me.
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