Interracial Marriage, Chasing the Empty Balloon

I’m guessing that everyone who reads this blog is aware of two news stories from yesterday: the one that dominated the television networks for hours and hours about the boy who turned out not to be in the balloon floating 7000 above the earth, and the other that dominated the alternative internet sites about the judge in Louisiana whose policy it is to deny interracial couples a marriage license. My guess is that most would see these two stories as opposites — one the kind of hyped bizarre-ness common on Fox News, the other the serious, social issue addressed by the progressive Hungtington Post. But are they really so different? 

This morning, NPR’s Wait Wait… Don’t Tell Me! show’s criticism of the balloon-boy episode was predictable — the oft-repeated criticism that networks devote hours and hours of air time and labor to this absurd story and ignore all the important news such as in-depth analysis of the American economy or the on-going crisis in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. I’ve written about this standard lament about journalism before [here]. Of course, nobody would be saying this if it turned out that the boy actually were in the balloon and died. It’s only the emptiness of the balloon that symbolizes the emptiness (and “hot air”) of the stories that the media tends to chase and the consuming public tends to eagerly follow. And who can blame the networks since their ratings went up as all of America together chased this empty balloon? Hipper-than-thou indie-rockers everywhere must be penning lyrics about it as I write this.

In contrast, the websites about the racist judge all express almost unanimous outrage that something like this could still be happening in 21st century America. One can imagine someone saying that this is the kind of important news that the TV networks should be covering instead of the balloon boy. And one can also imagine Northerners muttering under their breath the standard stereotypes about the racist South – a stereotype that my fellow blogger Dr. J has worked hard [here] to complicate and dispell. After all, in support of Dr. J, it’s clear from the Associated Press report that Louisianans themselves are just as outraged at this judge as other people in the country. And where was the national outrage when swastikas appeared in the dormitories of St. Cloud State U. in Minnesota or the lives of black student leaders were verbally threatened at Penn State?

The issue of race and racism in American continues to be important, and I don’t mean to suggest otherwise. Being in an interracial relationship myself, this is something I care about. But the media does not really cover race – even when it pretends to cover it. Instead, it chases empty balloons, easy appeals to the mass public by presenting the judge whose extreme racism we can all define ourselves against. What I want to point out here is that the Associated Press never mentions what legal precedent the judge might be applying to this case. In the judge’s own mind, his policy is not only reasonable but also supported by the local black community. And we probably ought to assume that the judge — being a judge – had some legal principle in mind. Based on the judge’s answers to the journalist’s inquiry, my guess is that he is applying the “best interest of the child” rule that guides all no-fault divorce cases, and I will speak more about that in a moment.

In my opinion, the journalist should have mentioned what legal standard was being applied here, but doing so would have forced us to think about the legal system at large rather than just the racism of the individual judge. It always surprises me when journalists fail to do their homework, though I suppose it shouldn’t. I remember being interviewed once, and I discovered that the journalist only wanted a one-sentence statement of how I felt about the issue. I told the journalist that if he just looked at this publicly available website he could find all the documents and evidence he needed to expose the truth about the situation he was covering. He said he wasn’t interested in that, just in my feeling. He was obviously a young journalist, just a year out of college, so I pressed him why, and he said that’s what he learned in journalism school — to find the human angle…. the empty balloon.

Back to the “best interest of the child” rule. Although the judge is clearly applying that rule innappropriately, it is a rule that (when appropriately applied) might seem perfectly reasonable to everyone. In the case of divorce, the judge has to decide which parent the child should be with, and so the judge generally decides what’s in the best interest of the child. Seems reasonable, doesn’t it? But, as Jane Juffer discusses in great detail in chapter five of her book Single Mother: The Emergence of a Domestic Intellectual (2006), feminist lawyers have for years challenged the rationality of this rule by demonstrating how “best-interest” is a culturally constructed notion that tends to be merged with notions of what’s normal. In other words, judges everywhere have tended to use this rule to discriminate against ambitious women, women in interracial relationships, homosexuals, and even women who choose to live in cooperative arrangements rather than in the “normal” nuclear arrangement with the white picket fence and dog in the back yard. The belief that guides this rule is that “normal” is better for the child, and lawyers can easily find simplistic sociological and psychological studies to back them up. In such studies, other sociologists and legal scholars have discerned an inherent bias — that the very standard of “normalcy” is the stumbling block for parents and couples, not anything unnatural about their alternative choices. More methodologically rigorous sociological and psychological studies present a more complex picture and suggest alternatives to a narrowly defined normalcy. We should be thinking critically about how to change our society and live better lives, not just thinking pragmatically about how to follow the given cultural codes, which remain racist as well as nuclear and individualistic. And while the judge appeals to his “black friends” who he claims agree with his policy, we should have the courage to (1) challenge his black friends for buying into a racist culture and (2) recognize the diversity of voices and successful lifestyles within any local community. Such standards of normalcy usually reign (hegemonically) wherever we are, especially within the liberal, academic community that imagines itself to be more open but in reality is not.

My point here is that the story about the racist judge and the balloon boy are both empty balloons that trigger emotions and may even address an important issue but ultimately allow us to avoid dealing honestly with our own anxieties and with the systemic injustices within our society.

teabagged on tax day

I got teabagged on tax day. It’s true. But it’s not what you think. Or maybe it is. As my blog-comrade Dr. J pointed out in her post a week ago, the teabagger tactics are a hilarious semiotic blunder by the conservative movement — unaware as they seem to be of the word’s sexual double entendre.

More about “teabagged on tax day“, posted with vodpod.

Anyway, as my other blog-comrade Dr. DRL noted yesterday, apparently some believe that “taxation with representation” is analogous enough to “taxation without representation” that they ought to channel the spirit of the Boston Tea Party. It’s funny and sad on too many levels…… and so, like many at my university, I came to work today and encountered a couple of teabags…  So as not to offend anyone, I will refrain from mentioning where I and many other of my colleagues encountered them…  

… and there’s an amusing coincidence here, because today in my class we were planning to discuss political tactics and how they connect with literary production and cultural identities. For instance, consider the strangeness of the Boston Teaparty itself — a bunch of white people dressing up like the native Americans. Why appropriate a Native American identity? And why do this when the white colonists had been killing Native Americans for centuries? Few are taught all of the “causes” of the Revolutionary war in their high school ideology classes (oops, I mean, high school history classes), but one of the reasons for the Revolutionary War was the desire of the very wealthy to speculate on land west of the Appalachians. Yes, indeed, this was the original subprime housing market fiasco. The British Empire was at that moment actually honoring its treaties with the Native Americans who lived there (not typical of the Empire, but sometimes they did honor their treaties)… So the irony of dressing up as Native Americans in order to symbolize liberty is a historically painful irony. And it’s no far stretch of the imagination to guess that the Boston Teaparty inspired one of the most terribly written novels to still be considered an American classic — James Fenimore Cooper’s The Last of the Mohicans, a novel in which a white guy becomes an American hero by somehow becoming a better Indian than the Indians themselves.

And now, the conservative moment has accidentally appropriated the sexual act of teabagging… Hmmmmm… More could be said, such as what has been said at The Huffington Post, but I think I’ll leave it at that.

Theory and Neologisms: the “Prosumer” or the Journalist

The other day, some veteran journalists came to my campus to participate in a panel discussion about the future of the news media. As everyone knows, newspapers these days are struggling to maintain themselves, and one of the panelists cited the statistic that approximately 12,000 journalists had lost their jobs in recent years (out of a total of 50,000 or so… sorry about the inexactness of the numbers, but I didn’t take notes, so I’m writing from memory.) What, unfortunately, none of the panelists adequately addressed was probably what was most on the minds of those in the audience — jobs. If newspapers are firing not hiring, then what kind of career in journalism can an English major look forward to? One of the panelists briefly suggested that graduating seniors should look to gain life experiences after college (teaching English abroad, for instance) that could lead to a writerly life, but sadly none of his options included a paid position in traditional newsmedia. His comment was meant to be consoling, but it was actually the opposite — quite scary to all those students in the room who were hoping to earn some money after college and could ill afford to spend it on more life experiences. Also sadly, all of the special projects to revive quality journalism that these panelists were discussing were exactly that – special. And by special, I mean receiving some special public grant or some special support from a university committed to promoting quality journalism for the sake of its undergraduates . . . um . . . so that they can be trained for jobs that don’t exist.  (Don’t get me wrong; I was very impressed by all of the panelists and wish the kind of work they do was supported even more than it is, but still, I am concerned about my students earning a living after they graduate.)

The day before this panel discussion, my blog-comrade Topspun over at SevenRed recently posted a lengthy discussion of the word “prosumer” [here], a neologism that combines producer and consumer. Now, to be honest, I’d really never read anything about this neologism before, so I have to admit my ignorance, but it seems that we can relate the term to some of the economic and professional transformations of journalism.  According to Topspun’s post as well as to wikipedia (sorry, I’m being lazy today), the neologism “prosumer” was first coined in 1980 by Alvin Toffler in his book The Third Wave, a book which I’ve never heard of until now. The idea of the prosumer, basically, is that the traditional division between the act of production and the act of consumption does not hold today. Not only does the internet and other communications technologies enable production to be more responsive to the desires of consumers, but even a lot of innovative work (i.e., intellectual labor) is done by the consumers themselves rather than by men in suits sitting in office buildings or industrial park complexes. One example of the prosumer is bloggers — consumers of internet knowledge who also produce internet knowledge. Similarly, YouTubers. In a sense, bloggers and YouTubers are like unpaid journalists (through sometimes bloggers actually are paid journalists).

So, what’s my point? Admittedly, I’m struggling to get to it — and my struggle is reminding me of how my “intro-to-theory” students probably feel when they have to blog for my class about concepts that are as new and foreign to them as “prosumer” is to me. And as I am writing now, I expect that probably some of my students will have smarter things to say than I do about prosumption or whatever, but to finally get to the point of this blog, I think my main question is this: do we understand the word “prosumer” to indicate something that actually exists or do we understand it as a conceputalization of a problematic relation?

And here’s why I ask that. It seems to me that there are those who gleefully see the “prosumer” as the economic hope of the future and the spitting image of the postmodern, entrepreneurial, do-it-yourself, get-rich-quick individual. For an example, see this rather obnoxious book Pro-Sumer Power! that I just found on-line. (I didn’t finish reading its introduction, because it kind of made me nauseous.) For these people, the idea that the consumer can also be a producer is both liberatory and powerful, because production is no longer controlled by the capitalist owner of the factory, newspaper, etc.

But this seems to me to be an insidiouis ruse for two reasons. First, unlike laborers and employees, prosumers don’t get paid. Now, it’s possible that they might end up making millions of dollars if their blog or YouTube production hits the big time (such as the blogger Diablo Cody who later was hired to write the screenplay for the hit film Juno.) But of course, most don’t (and Diablo Cody was actually making money by stripping until she was “discovered” by the mainstream media), and so I’m sceptical of people who see prosumption as somehow “liberatory” or “powerful” or “resistant” to capitalism. If anything, it seems to fit perfectly with the interests of capitalists who ultimately want to increase productivity and decrease wages. And with prosumption, they get their labor for free.

This is insidious in the same way that the culture of Starbucks and Barnes &Noble are insidious according to Naomi Klein in No Logo. What is curious about that culture is that these companies enlist college graduates to work there because college graduates like coffee-house culture and books. In a sense, everyone in the place (whether one works there or not) is participating in the production of the socially meaningful experience of being there. And that is why Starbucks and Barnes & Nobel can pay its workers so little… because the workers are supposedly supposed to enjoy it. (And this reminds me of Slavoj Zizek’s jokes when he appeared on NiteBeat about the postmodern injunction to enjoy what one in reality has to to do anyway…. And it also reminds me of the condition of teachers who get paid so little and get so little respect because supposedly their jobs are so emotionally meaningful to them that the work is its own reward.) Likewise, to return to my original observation about the panel of esteemed journalists, today’s college graduates are supposed to do prosumptive labor not for a salary but for their own enjoyment and to gain life experiences.

However, to return to my question about how we understand the word “prosumer,” my main point is that we should think of it as a conceptual tool for thinking about a problematic relation instead of thinking about it as a thing. In other words, not only should we be skeptical of those who think prosumption is liberatory, powerful, and resistant, but we should be skeptical of those who think prosumers exist. Certainly bloggers and YouTubers exist, but what does it mean to call them prosumers? What such pundits of prosumption are doing is taking a neologism and reifying it. Reification is when a concept is removed from its context and placed in another context in order to assert some kind of independent, a priori existence. Or, as Karl Marx says in his notes on alienated labor in the Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844 , the field of economics proceeds from identifiable facts (private property in the case of Marx’s chapter, prosumption in the case of this blog post), but does not explain those facts or how they came to be. In other words, it mistakes the effect (e.g., private property, prosumption) for the cause (e.g., a complex history of changing — and changeable — social relations.)

Instead of reifying concepts to assert their existance, I think the point of neologisms such as “prosumer” should be to conceptualize a problematic relation. (And the same is true for such neologisms as ”postnational” and “glocal” which I blogged about last December [here].) In the case of prosumption, the problematic relation is among capital, labor, technology, and social value. For the prosumer pundits, technology is what drives the new form of economic being, but of course they have taken prosumption out of the context of capital and labor and placed it in the context of technology.

And of course, getting back to Marx’s point, we all know that technology is as much an effect of changing relations of capital and labor as it is a cause. And this is why Marx goes on to say that the economist “conceals the estrangement inherent in the nature of labor by not considering the direct relationship between the worker and production.” Marx is asserting the estrangement (or alienation) of labor here, because the worker is in effect producing the very conditions that oppress him. The more productive the workers are, the more the capitalist can reinvest the fruits of their labor to expand, intensify, and control the economic relations of production. To apply Marx’s idea to the idea of prosumption, by doing labor for nothing, we are ultimately enabling the economic system to continue giving us nothing… and in the case of journalism, to continue cutting salaried jobs.

To explain what I mean about the difference between reification and problematization, consider this analogy. In formal poetics, the synecdoche is a figure of speech in which the part stands in for the whole. In good poetry, the synecdoche always alerts (or should always alert) the reader not only to what it stands-in-for or represents, but also to its failure to represent. In other words, in standing in for the “whole,” the part always excludes some information and always marginalizes other parts of the whole. Therefore, good poetry (in contrast to bad propaganda) will reveal the failure of its own figures of speech, because a synecdoche simultaneously indicates an identity and a non-identity.

I think we should think about all theoretical neologisms the same way we think about synecdoche — not as nouns indicating new phenonema, but as concepts alerting us to changing social relations and as concepts that always suggest an absence of identity at the same time that they indicate a new presence that can be identified.  So, in my opinion, neologisms such as “prosumer” should be taken to suggest not only new identities but also non-identities (or even the “lack” of a fully present identity.) The non-identity in this mix, of course, is how hungry and cold we might be if prosumption became the dominant form of labor in our society (instead of wage labor.) In other words, getting back to the comment made by the panelist about the future of jobs in journalism, the non-identity here is that most college graduates who decide to become prosumer-journalists will probably be living with their parents after they graduate. (And by my own reasoning, probably I shouldn’t waste so much time blogging like I’m doing now, because even though I use it as both a teaching tool and as an experimental space to test out scholarly work I might do in the future, it isn’t what butters my bread either.)

What I think is genuinely liberatory and resistant is not prosumption, but the social production of alternatives. In other words, working for nothing is not exploitative if one is participating in the social creation of the conditions that sustain life. I would admit that there is some potential in prosumption for alterity, but it seems to me that the prosumption pundits risk subsuming the alterity of prosumption to the interests of capital when they forget the basis for resistance and alterity in the first place.