Jamie Spatt
Drawing 1
Exhibition Paper
10/21/08
Between Flatscapes and Realism: Today Blue Smiles
Harold Gregor, a Midwest landscape artist from Illinois, when challenged by critics over his bold uses of color theory to describe the arguably plain Illinois landscape, he once said of his work, "A flatscape is not meant to be primarily a picture of a farm nor is it solely a color-formed space. Instead, it is meant to be both, and thus a new, more complex and dense kind of presentation. If I succeed, viewers should be able to enjoy the descriptive aspects of the work and the ordered color array simultaneously." For Gregor, It seems as though moving west from his previous home in Detroit Michigan, was a modern manifest destiny, true to the core of the classic American spirit and dream. Upon arriving amongst the sprawling Midwest farmlands, after just recently living immersed in the industrialist environment of the Automobile capitol of the nation, Gregor must have felt something very new and very strong take hold of his artistic vision. Just as Claude Monet felt deeply moved by his surroundings in nature so many years before, Gregor paints as though nature herself divinely inspired each brush stroke.
In Today Blue smiles, a watercolor by Harold Gregor, currently displayed at the Tory Folliard Gallery in downtown Milwaukee, a person can get lost in a world where realism and abstraction collide with a vibrant color scheme, leaving you thoroughly enchanted in it's aura. The scene, painted from a photograph took from a plane, is itself, in composition, a very orderly and realistic grid like pattern. There also are aspects of realistic subjects and features included in this work and other of his works that keep you grounded, not allowing you to become too disorientated as you wander through his decorative landscapes. The uses of color and the not necessarily 'exact' lines that you see in the field and sky provide just the right amount of freedom through abstraction that you need to be drawn in and emotionally and personally involved in the piece. Had he just painted another landscape completely realistically, it would be more difficult to grab your attention, and to play off your emotions as his experiments in color theory are able to do so well. Another fascinating aspect of this piece, and his other pieces, is that it doesn't seem to be saying anything about farms, farmers, farmland, or anything in the agricultural sphere, despite that being the 'subject' of his paintings. Instead it seems as if the forms themselves like a still life he chose himself, are the vehicles by which he carries out his artistic intent. So moved by the perfect forms and colors he sees in nature, and then altered on canvas for the audiences viewing pleasure, Gregor describes himself to us, and ourselves to us, in a way that's close to the heart and close to our relationship with the natural world we all are a part of.
Tuesday, October 21, 2008
Saturday, October 11, 2008
Jamie Spatt
English 102: College Writing and Research
Section 056
Erik Chandler
Assignment #11
Globalization is similar in its nature to fire. Fire is not in itself a good or bad thing; it can be used for many good things like cooking food, heating our homes, and sterilizing equipment as well as for many destructive and harmful things like burning down towns, homes, forests, or even destroying lives. As our society moves forward into a more and more globalized structure, we have to be careful how we are using globalization and what we are doing to control it and make sure it doesn't cross over from something helpful and beneficial to something dangerous and catastrophic. It is easy to see why globalization would be beneficial to society. Globalization has the potential to spread innovations in healthcare, education, government, technology, or potentially anything you can even think of, to the furthest corners of the globe. In the past 20 years, 200 million people have left absolute poverty behind. Advances in medicine, improved public health policies, and greater food supplies have lowered infant mortality and lengthened life expectancy. Countries who use child labor forces tend to move away from child labor practices with growing incomes that can stem from a globalized economy.
So how could globalization be considered dangerous and feared by many people despite the fact that many also accept and even strive for it’s advancement? Some of the major issues surrounding this aspect of globalization involve the fact that with the spread of globalized economies, many of the more urbanized countries begin to lose job markets to overseas workers instead of keeping the jobs close to home. This could be a detriment because for example in America there are many people who need jobs and we see more and more of our manufacturing and development jobs going overseas. Also a concern is that globalization is moving too fast and the only countries ideas to get spread are the ideas of the countries with the biggest numbers in population and in revenue. While it can be argued that that may not be the worst of problems, picture what it is like to be a citizen of a small country losing your heritage and culture to a few countries that seem to have all the power and don’t really care to preserve your culture in their race to globalize the world. Also if you’re looking at the ‘shark’ vs. the ‘minnows’ aspect you have to wonder how fair it is to have those few top countries have the majority of the decision making power when it comes to major issues in things like government, education, healthcare and technology. In some ways it seems like with globalization the middle class gets bigger and evens out which is not necessarily bad, but the rich and powerful get even more rich and powerful and so the world runs the risk of being run behind the scenes by a select few, who are most likely corrupt and saturated with greed and an unfair balance of power.
Furthermore, there are other possibilities tied in with globalization that have the potential to lead us into dark waters if we don’t be careful how we act on them. One of them is security. "In a word, discipline wants to produce order, while security wants to guide disorder." (Agamben p.1 paragraph 3.) As the world moves towards globalization the issue of security vs. discipline gets harder to control and understand. Security in itself doesn’t sound like an all-bad thing, and it doesn’t need to be, but it can be if the leaders of a nation decide they want to use it to their advantage. For example, when 9/11 happened, some believe Bush used that state of emergency, uncertainty, and chaos for the American people to get us into another war on purpose, and some even think he and others in the government planned 9/11 itself. Not saying that that’s necessarily true, but it is a strong possibility, and if it didn’t happen with 9/11 it could easily happen anytime a major catastrophe occurs. This is why we need to be extremely careful about how we deal with these issues, and who gets to make these decisions, especially if the world is going to become more and more globalized and those in power become fewer and fewer in numbers and those under them become more and more in numbers. "Maybe the time has come to work towards the prevention of disorder and catastrophe and not merely towards their control...On the contrary, we can say that politics secretly works towards the production of emergencies." (Agamben p.2 paragraph 5.)
Another possibly dangerous aspect to consider when discussing globalization is the spread of technology and the influence of media on society. "Already today there is hardly and event of human significance towards which the artificial eye, the camera lens, is not directed." (Junger p.31) Globalization has also sparked a new way in which citizens see the world as they are able to see more and more of what goes on in other countries like the Abu Grhaib prison photos Allen Feldman refers to in his essay, "On the Acturarial Gaze." The context in which we are shown these types of imagery can easily be altered and changed by governments through the media so that people get a certain message from them and perhaps not the message they would get on their own if they were showed the complete truth of them instead. In a global sense, this can be very dangerous for some cultures because the ones with the most power, America being the strongest, are the ones with the greatest access and foothold on the global media. Also American citizens, if this isn’t reading too much into things, are probably the people who’s influence matters most in a global sense, and our media, being arguably the most advanced in recent times, is the one most being sought after to manipulate. "Since the gulf war. We have witnessed a global repositioning of the visual communication practices, utilities and technologies of the state and media as regards political mobilization, identity formation, geographic perception, political violence, urban planning, public safety, and human rights. The circulation, of anthropologically threatening images of violence, terror, covert infection and social suffering has intensified in our public culture." (Feldman p.1, paragraph 1) And certainly the changing of technology and communication has greatly changed or modern society and culture. And with those changes will come responsibilities in making sure these changes are for our benefit and not our destruction. The surfacing of images like the Abu Ghraib prison photos and others into our daily news is for us, as Feldman states, both an 'enchainment' and an 'enchantment'. This enchants us in a morbid sort of fascinated way, and it captures us and moves us to support whatever it is our government wants to do to handle it unquestioningly, and this part of it, the blindly following, is our enchainment. We lose our own sovereign rights to our right not to be subconsciously influenced by the media who intern are influenced by ill intentioned governments to get us to think a certain way in order to support their own twisted agenda's.
One of Feldman's sources, Junger, is quoted on page 204 of the essay saying, "As during the inflation, we continue for a time to spend the usual coins without sensing that the rate of exchange has changed." This quote is incredibly fitting. We continue today going about our business as usual without even realizing things are rapidly changing as far as or visual influences and where they are coming from and who's ideas and desires are behind them. Whether used by terrorists or non-terrorists methods of image making and imposition don't simply record an event but become the event by forcing onto our consciousnesses the political 'code' of people above us in the hierarchy of government officials. One might even say we are in evolving into people of double-consciousnesses, the newer harsher conscious having the possibility to see oneself as merely an object, and above and beyond the realm of mental or bodily pain. In this day and age we are more succumbed than ever to things that can harm us, even irreversibly, that we aren't even aware of. We continue to remain blissfully unaware of our greatest dangers as a society as they continue to elude us. And if America is greatly being effected in this way, and America is at the forefront of globalization, we have to be careful what we are leading people of other countries into in our work towards a single global community. We have to be careful what sort of plans and values we are carrying over into this type of worldly and united society.
Yet another area that needs concern when dealing with the globalizing world is ethnicity and ethnic violence. "There are surely other ethnocidal imaginaries in which forces of global capital, the relative power of the states, varying histories of race and class and differences in the states of mass mediation, produce different kinds of uncertainty and different scenarios for ethnocide." (Appadurai p.243) In relation to globalization the mixing of ethnic cultures becomes so huge and confusing, acts of violence are conducted partially out of fear and partially out of a personal anger because of the lack of an ability to understand and comprehend who’s who and who’s on who’s side because it can no longer necessarily be determined just by looking at someone and their skin color of other cultural features, whereas not too long ago that was possible. Violence because of ethnicity sometimes is also a way for certain violent cultures to see a person inside of something described as merely a 'body' that fits in with the ethnic whole. "The problem of fake identities seems to demand the brutal creation of real persons through violence." (Appadurai p.242) However sick and twisted these acts of violence are, they are a way in which some of these people try to discover real persons within bodies. Globalization can lead up to these acts of violence because it creates that confusion in some foreign societies, perhaps the less educated and less wealthy. So in a way globalization can be accredited to both the cause and the cure, as education with a stronger globalized force could bring these people to resort to less violent means in dealing with cultural and historical issues between peoples. One of the dangers we face as a society post 9/11 and the War on Terror is our growing unreasonable judgment of people of peculiar races, especially that of Middle Eastern decent. In this way the media and thorough press coverage of the war, of 9/11, of Abu Ghraib, have changed us for the worse. How many times since 9/11 have we seen people judge the person wearing the turban the second they see them walking through the airport or getting on the bus. On page 206 Feldman states, "We cannot ignore the violence generated by interventions to reduce harm." And this is a perfect example of this. It is because of this that the motives and reasons behind what is flushed into our media, however true must be analyzed for the greater good. While ideologies and agendas can be resisted, the power of the publics 'actuarial gaze' onto the intense, obscene, and threatening images in the media today cannot be denied. And this in it’s own way is a form of the new and globalizing ‘world’ society.
Globalization is in my own and many others’ opinion, inevitable. Whether globalization will as expected by the majority, turn out for our good and our benefit as a societal whole, or turn against us and cause us more difficulty and social struggles, is impossible to tell for certain. It is our job as a globally expanding community to be careful what the consequences are of our actions and do the best we can to ‘kindle’ globalization gently. If we cannot take control and make the right choices concerning globalization, we may live to see ourselves consumed by relentless fires of our own poor decisions and carelessness.
Works Cited
Agamben, Giorgio. "Security and Terror." Theory and Event 5 (2002) [online] available
at http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/theory_and_event/v005/5.4agamben.html
Appadurai, Arjun. "Dead Certainty: Ethnic violence in the Era of Globalization." Public
Culture 10 (1998): 225-247
Feldman, Allen. "On the Actuarial Gaze: From 9/11 to Abu Ghraib." Cultural Studies 19 (2005):
203-226
Junger, E. "On Danger." New German Critique 59 (1993): 27-32
English 102: College Writing and Research
Section 056
Erik Chandler
Assignment #11
Globalization is similar in its nature to fire. Fire is not in itself a good or bad thing; it can be used for many good things like cooking food, heating our homes, and sterilizing equipment as well as for many destructive and harmful things like burning down towns, homes, forests, or even destroying lives. As our society moves forward into a more and more globalized structure, we have to be careful how we are using globalization and what we are doing to control it and make sure it doesn't cross over from something helpful and beneficial to something dangerous and catastrophic. It is easy to see why globalization would be beneficial to society. Globalization has the potential to spread innovations in healthcare, education, government, technology, or potentially anything you can even think of, to the furthest corners of the globe. In the past 20 years, 200 million people have left absolute poverty behind. Advances in medicine, improved public health policies, and greater food supplies have lowered infant mortality and lengthened life expectancy. Countries who use child labor forces tend to move away from child labor practices with growing incomes that can stem from a globalized economy.
So how could globalization be considered dangerous and feared by many people despite the fact that many also accept and even strive for it’s advancement? Some of the major issues surrounding this aspect of globalization involve the fact that with the spread of globalized economies, many of the more urbanized countries begin to lose job markets to overseas workers instead of keeping the jobs close to home. This could be a detriment because for example in America there are many people who need jobs and we see more and more of our manufacturing and development jobs going overseas. Also a concern is that globalization is moving too fast and the only countries ideas to get spread are the ideas of the countries with the biggest numbers in population and in revenue. While it can be argued that that may not be the worst of problems, picture what it is like to be a citizen of a small country losing your heritage and culture to a few countries that seem to have all the power and don’t really care to preserve your culture in their race to globalize the world. Also if you’re looking at the ‘shark’ vs. the ‘minnows’ aspect you have to wonder how fair it is to have those few top countries have the majority of the decision making power when it comes to major issues in things like government, education, healthcare and technology. In some ways it seems like with globalization the middle class gets bigger and evens out which is not necessarily bad, but the rich and powerful get even more rich and powerful and so the world runs the risk of being run behind the scenes by a select few, who are most likely corrupt and saturated with greed and an unfair balance of power.
Furthermore, there are other possibilities tied in with globalization that have the potential to lead us into dark waters if we don’t be careful how we act on them. One of them is security. "In a word, discipline wants to produce order, while security wants to guide disorder." (Agamben p.1 paragraph 3.) As the world moves towards globalization the issue of security vs. discipline gets harder to control and understand. Security in itself doesn’t sound like an all-bad thing, and it doesn’t need to be, but it can be if the leaders of a nation decide they want to use it to their advantage. For example, when 9/11 happened, some believe Bush used that state of emergency, uncertainty, and chaos for the American people to get us into another war on purpose, and some even think he and others in the government planned 9/11 itself. Not saying that that’s necessarily true, but it is a strong possibility, and if it didn’t happen with 9/11 it could easily happen anytime a major catastrophe occurs. This is why we need to be extremely careful about how we deal with these issues, and who gets to make these decisions, especially if the world is going to become more and more globalized and those in power become fewer and fewer in numbers and those under them become more and more in numbers. "Maybe the time has come to work towards the prevention of disorder and catastrophe and not merely towards their control...On the contrary, we can say that politics secretly works towards the production of emergencies." (Agamben p.2 paragraph 5.)
Another possibly dangerous aspect to consider when discussing globalization is the spread of technology and the influence of media on society. "Already today there is hardly and event of human significance towards which the artificial eye, the camera lens, is not directed." (Junger p.31) Globalization has also sparked a new way in which citizens see the world as they are able to see more and more of what goes on in other countries like the Abu Grhaib prison photos Allen Feldman refers to in his essay, "On the Acturarial Gaze." The context in which we are shown these types of imagery can easily be altered and changed by governments through the media so that people get a certain message from them and perhaps not the message they would get on their own if they were showed the complete truth of them instead. In a global sense, this can be very dangerous for some cultures because the ones with the most power, America being the strongest, are the ones with the greatest access and foothold on the global media. Also American citizens, if this isn’t reading too much into things, are probably the people who’s influence matters most in a global sense, and our media, being arguably the most advanced in recent times, is the one most being sought after to manipulate. "Since the gulf war. We have witnessed a global repositioning of the visual communication practices, utilities and technologies of the state and media as regards political mobilization, identity formation, geographic perception, political violence, urban planning, public safety, and human rights. The circulation, of anthropologically threatening images of violence, terror, covert infection and social suffering has intensified in our public culture." (Feldman p.1, paragraph 1) And certainly the changing of technology and communication has greatly changed or modern society and culture. And with those changes will come responsibilities in making sure these changes are for our benefit and not our destruction. The surfacing of images like the Abu Ghraib prison photos and others into our daily news is for us, as Feldman states, both an 'enchainment' and an 'enchantment'. This enchants us in a morbid sort of fascinated way, and it captures us and moves us to support whatever it is our government wants to do to handle it unquestioningly, and this part of it, the blindly following, is our enchainment. We lose our own sovereign rights to our right not to be subconsciously influenced by the media who intern are influenced by ill intentioned governments to get us to think a certain way in order to support their own twisted agenda's.
One of Feldman's sources, Junger, is quoted on page 204 of the essay saying, "As during the inflation, we continue for a time to spend the usual coins without sensing that the rate of exchange has changed." This quote is incredibly fitting. We continue today going about our business as usual without even realizing things are rapidly changing as far as or visual influences and where they are coming from and who's ideas and desires are behind them. Whether used by terrorists or non-terrorists methods of image making and imposition don't simply record an event but become the event by forcing onto our consciousnesses the political 'code' of people above us in the hierarchy of government officials. One might even say we are in evolving into people of double-consciousnesses, the newer harsher conscious having the possibility to see oneself as merely an object, and above and beyond the realm of mental or bodily pain. In this day and age we are more succumbed than ever to things that can harm us, even irreversibly, that we aren't even aware of. We continue to remain blissfully unaware of our greatest dangers as a society as they continue to elude us. And if America is greatly being effected in this way, and America is at the forefront of globalization, we have to be careful what we are leading people of other countries into in our work towards a single global community. We have to be careful what sort of plans and values we are carrying over into this type of worldly and united society.
Yet another area that needs concern when dealing with the globalizing world is ethnicity and ethnic violence. "There are surely other ethnocidal imaginaries in which forces of global capital, the relative power of the states, varying histories of race and class and differences in the states of mass mediation, produce different kinds of uncertainty and different scenarios for ethnocide." (Appadurai p.243) In relation to globalization the mixing of ethnic cultures becomes so huge and confusing, acts of violence are conducted partially out of fear and partially out of a personal anger because of the lack of an ability to understand and comprehend who’s who and who’s on who’s side because it can no longer necessarily be determined just by looking at someone and their skin color of other cultural features, whereas not too long ago that was possible. Violence because of ethnicity sometimes is also a way for certain violent cultures to see a person inside of something described as merely a 'body' that fits in with the ethnic whole. "The problem of fake identities seems to demand the brutal creation of real persons through violence." (Appadurai p.242) However sick and twisted these acts of violence are, they are a way in which some of these people try to discover real persons within bodies. Globalization can lead up to these acts of violence because it creates that confusion in some foreign societies, perhaps the less educated and less wealthy. So in a way globalization can be accredited to both the cause and the cure, as education with a stronger globalized force could bring these people to resort to less violent means in dealing with cultural and historical issues between peoples. One of the dangers we face as a society post 9/11 and the War on Terror is our growing unreasonable judgment of people of peculiar races, especially that of Middle Eastern decent. In this way the media and thorough press coverage of the war, of 9/11, of Abu Ghraib, have changed us for the worse. How many times since 9/11 have we seen people judge the person wearing the turban the second they see them walking through the airport or getting on the bus. On page 206 Feldman states, "We cannot ignore the violence generated by interventions to reduce harm." And this is a perfect example of this. It is because of this that the motives and reasons behind what is flushed into our media, however true must be analyzed for the greater good. While ideologies and agendas can be resisted, the power of the publics 'actuarial gaze' onto the intense, obscene, and threatening images in the media today cannot be denied. And this in it’s own way is a form of the new and globalizing ‘world’ society.
Globalization is in my own and many others’ opinion, inevitable. Whether globalization will as expected by the majority, turn out for our good and our benefit as a societal whole, or turn against us and cause us more difficulty and social struggles, is impossible to tell for certain. It is our job as a globally expanding community to be careful what the consequences are of our actions and do the best we can to ‘kindle’ globalization gently. If we cannot take control and make the right choices concerning globalization, we may live to see ourselves consumed by relentless fires of our own poor decisions and carelessness.
Works Cited
Agamben, Giorgio. "Security and Terror." Theory and Event 5 (2002) [online] available
at http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/theory_and_event/v005/5.4agamben.html
Appadurai, Arjun. "Dead Certainty: Ethnic violence in the Era of Globalization." Public
Culture 10 (1998): 225-247
Feldman, Allen. "On the Actuarial Gaze: From 9/11 to Abu Ghraib." Cultural Studies 19 (2005):
203-226
Junger, E. "On Danger." New German Critique 59 (1993): 27-32
Tuesday, October 7, 2008
The quote Feldman uses from Agamben comes right at the start of his essay, as a tool to get people thinking. Thinking about things they probably never second guessed, as something maybe, they should take a closer look at. The quote he uses is this one, "While disciplinary power isolates and closes off territories, measures of security lead to an opening and globalization; while the law wants to prevent and prescribe. In a word, discipline wants to produce order, while security wants to guide disorder." This quote gets you thinking about security and the law perhaps in a scrutinous way you never have before, or at least it did for me. I never really gave a second thought to security and law and their major differences as Agamben discusses in his essay, "Security and Terror," and as Feldman thought was important enough to stick at the very start of his essay, "The Actuarial Gaze."
The difference between security and discipline and law, is slight but extremely significant. And it is because of the slightness of their differences that so many people today go on unquestioningly accepting the governments focus on security not realizing they are enabling the governing bodies to manipulate situations of emergency or chaos, such as happened on September 11th 2001. Not saying this is what happened for certain, but the government easily could have used the event of September 11h and the people fear and grief over it to get them to rally together and go to war, which later after gaining the peoples support to enter the war, the government completely changed and prolonged the purposes of the war and and who knows what other reasons they had for pushing us into the war all along. This is, I think, a good example of what Agamben talks about in relation to security in his essay. He talks about how security is used as a means to guide the situations of emergency and chaos that happen and attempt to 'control' them after they have already begun to happen. Taking stronger disciplinary actions and preventative measures would be Agamben's preferred approach to these situations. Why deal with trying to guide situations after they happened when you can take the upmost care to prevent them instead. As he says, "discipline wants to produce order, while security wants to guide disorder."
On the other hand, how would it even be possible to prevent an emergency like September 11th in the first place. In some situations preventative measures and stronger disciplinary actions could be very possible, and beneficial to us, but how to prevent something other countries do to your country seems almost impossible to do. The preventative measures it would have took to stop these events would have had to occur many many years ago because these actions of terrorists and other people are results of years and years of histories and struggles between religions and races. So security seems to be the only option in cases like this September 11th and acts of terrorism. However I don't think it's impossible to be more careful about the ways in which the governing bodies are going about dealing with security. It is up to the people to be more active and more aware of the truth about what our government is really trying to do, and we have to stop believing everything we are told be the people over us without questioning it first. We should always be checking and double checking everything we are told for the truth. As Agamben states, "Nothing is therefore more important than a revision of the concept of security as the basic principle of state politics." In the future we will need to be increasingly careful of the differences between things like security and discipline, and how they are being used either to help us or to control us.
Wednesday, October 1, 2008
1. Lelyveld, Jospeh. "One of the Least Known Countries in the World" in House of Bondage. p.7-19. Ernest Cole. Ridge Press Book, Random House Inc. 1967. New York.
One of the main points I think Lelyveld was trying to address was the absurdity of the white vs. black power struggle of South Africa in the 1960's, particularily that of the whites in charge treating the blacks in a ridiculously unfair manner. Trying to inhibit the spread of families and the growth of their populations to try and get the black communities to eventually and very intentionally die out. He also deals with how black stereotypes today are unfair seeing as how they stem from this type of environment where blacks get punished for crimes that aren't really crimes at all, and then placed in jail, or worse, for it. Also he talks about how the minorities in power sometimes are very good at having all kinds of reasons and laws and explanations for their various forms of oppression that can make it very hard to stop or prevent them from carrying out their power on the people in unfair ways for often trivial reasons.
"In actual practice the whole system is outraged by any evidence of talent or ambition or sensitivity beneath black skin. There is no black writer in South Africa today who has won any kind of public recognition. Invariably, recognition leads to exile, and just as invariably, the government places a ban on publication of anything that has ever been written by exiled writers." (p. 13)
"Officially the government considers Soweto a temporarily unavoidable social aberration in what has now been declared a 'white area'. Eventually - or so the theory of apertheid at it's most preposterous, holds - the entire black urban population will melt back into tribal reserves, thus when community leaders in Soweto meekly requested the right to own their own homes, a cabinet minister replied, : "If we allow freehold rights in Soweto that would be the anchor for Africans to settle permanently in our midst. That is against government policy." (p. 8)
This source builds on Sekula's essay because it's an example of how governments, even if what they are doing is completely wrong and unfair, are able to carry out the terrible things they're doing because they can and they are in power. It is also an example of how the government uses forms of media to change people. They use very at times subtle techniques to manipulate the media so they can remain in power over us. Like how the white South African government banned certain books from their people because they didn't want them getting certain ideas in their heads, and they didn't want to have the people be allowed to read anything that made them look bad because they are afraid of losing their position of power. We still today ban books in many of our schools and libraries in America as well.
I plan to use this source to further my investigations on societies, communities, and their systems of power and governance and how that relates to globalization and our expanding communities. I could tie this in as a way to relate modern practices and advances in the media's stereotyping and manipulating, to where they came from and to help further predict where this might lead us in the future as far as our communities go.
This source seems to be related to my other sources in that it deals with various societies and their struggle in dealing with a minority in power and their unfairness in governing them, and the shaping of their media to try and trick them into naivety about it all. This source also deals with these minorities in power unfairly stereotyping certain groups of people and using certain groups of people to their advantage whether the groups want to be used in this way or not, which is a theme I've loosely been able to connect within these sources.
2. Giorgio Agamben "Security and Terror" Theory and Event Vol. 5, no. 3, [online] available at http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/theory_and_event/v005/5.4agamben.html
The first main point I think Agamben makes is that governing bodies should be more concerned with installing preventative measures when it comes to national and major emergencies rather than 'security plans' which merely guide and control them after they have already occurred. By doing this we could prevent governments from using these catastrophes to achieve their own secret agendas we. the public, are left out of the loop on.
"In a word, discipline wants to produce order, while security wants to guide disorder." (p.1 paragraph 3.)
"Maybe the time has come to work towards the prevention of disorder and catastrophe and not merely towards their control...On the contrary, we can say that politics secretly works towards the production of emergencies."
This source build on Feldman's essay in that it looks at ways in which the government uses subtly different policies to their advantage in controlling the masses. By focusing on security, which in itself doesn't sound like a bad thing, and not on enforcing stronger preventative measures in society, they can use huge emergencies like war to try and get people to do what they want them to do to try and achieve their own purposes and goals that may not be the same as that of the masses they are attempting to rally together in the face of these emergencies. The state of human fear that is associated with these emergencies makes people pliable and moldable and very very vulnerable to any strong leadership shown at the time of crisis. This is source is something I'll be able to use in discussing globalization, as the measures of security cause a more globalized view. And this could be a dangerous thing if governments are going to use these plans of security to manipulate us in times of crisis, rather than work to prevent them altogether. A globalized world also places power more and more in the hands of a select minority of people, politicians, and the use of security in conjunction with terrorism seems to be a growing threat with these new advancements in more globalized communities.
This source is connected to my other sources in that it deals, again, with community issues and societal issues and their exposure to manipulative government actions in the media and other forms, and how as we move forward it becomes harder to recognize these manipulations for what they are, but still they are perhaps more than ever a colossal issue to be dealt with in modern society. It also discusses terrorism, Michal Foucalt who was a source in other places in Feldman's and Sekula's essays and his theories on society and government, and also he uses of danger and the states of catastrophe in the world that changes the state of mind of the people to that of fear and helplessness and how that helps governing bodies achieve a stronger hold on their rule of the masses.
3. E. Junger "On Danger" New German Critique, 59 p.27-32
The first main point I think Junger tries to make is that comprehensively within ourselves and throughout the world there is an increased intrusion of danger on our daily lives. This is nothing new as in the past the bourgeois valued security greatly. Also those who didn't were scarce or criminal. And around danger, artists, writers warriors, criminals and more, though they are few, thrive. People want everything to be safe and secure because they are afraid of the unknown. But if things are always secure and if there is no uncertainties in our lives we would become bored and may even "depart for the distances symbolized by strange lands, intoxication, or death." (Junger p.29) However Junger seems to associate the love of danger to the stronger people in society. He also discusses how besides nature and certain catastrophic events outside of our control, our own inventions are what can be most dangerous to us. And that humanity itself is arguably the most dangerous of all. Finally Junger talks about how we are not always conscious of the fact that things are rapidly changing in our opinion and experience of media, danger, security, and modern technological tools.
"In this sense it may be said that we have already plunged deeply into new more dangerous realms without our being conscious of them." (Junger p.32)
"Already today there is hardly and event of human significance towards which the artificial eye, the camera lens, is not directed." (Junger p.31)
"The history of inventions also raises ever more clearly the question of whether a space of absolute comfort or a space of absolute danger is the final aim concealed in technology. Completely apart from the circumstance that scarcely a machine . scarcely a science has ever existed which did not fulfill directly or indirectly dangerous functions in the war, inventions like the automobile engine have already resulted in greater losses than any war be it ever so bloody. " (Junger p.30)
"From this moment on, the words peace and order become a slogan to which the weaker morale resorted." (Junger p.30)
Feldman uses this source in his essay, especially the end section about the camera and the artificial eye seeing everything to show how and elaborate on the ways society is changing and in lots of ways becoming more and more dangerous as people themselves and the things they create become more dangerous. Also he talks about, as Feldman does, the fact that we go on doing what we always do and don't stop to think or ask why and we are unaware then of the vast changes occurring in society and the way people are running it.
I can use this source help me show how easy it will be for governments as the world becomes more and more globalized, to manipulate the people through media. As he says in his quote, Junger explains how people go on spending the 'usual coins' without realizing the rate of exchange has changed.
Again this source relates to my other sources in that it deals with societies and people and their behaviors in relation to issues of security and the government. It differs in that it's more about humanity's struggles with danger and conflict in general and less with that of specifically governmental or ruling bodies but I definitely think it ties in.
4. Arjun Appadurai "Dead Certainty: Ethnic violence in the Era of Globalization" Public Culture (1998) Vol. 10, pp.225-247
One of the main points I think Appadurai makes in his essay is first to reveal to what extent ethnic violence really goes to and why. In relation to globalization he seems to be saying that these mixing ethnic cultures become so huge and confusing, acts of violence are conducted partially out of fear and partially out of a personal anger because of the lack of this ability to understand. Then also the violence is able to help them see a person inside of something described as merely a 'body' that fits in with the ethnic whole. However sick and twisted these acts of violence are, they are a way in which some of these people try to discover real persons within bodies. Appadurai also discusses how globalization can lead up to these acts of violence.
"These horrible counter performances retain one deep element in common with their life enhancing counterparts: They are instruments in making persons out of bodies." (Appadurai p.241)
"But it is precisely in situations where endemic doubts and pressure become intolerable that ordinary people begin to see masks instead of faces." (Appadurai p.241)
"The problem of fake identities seems to demand the brutal creation of real persons through violence." (Appadurai p.242)
"Yet globalization does not produce just one road to uncertainty, terror or violence." (Appadurai p.243)
"There are surely other ethnocidal imaginaries in which forces of global capital, the relative power of the states, varying histories of race and class and differences in the states of mass mediation, produce different kinds of uncertainty and different scenarios for ethnocide." (Appadurai p.243)
This build on Feldman's essay because it deals with similar occurrances to that of the Abu Ghraib prison stories. It backs it up with how and why those events might have transpired based on the confusion certain ethnic peoples feel in the globalizing world.
I can use this essay to further my research on globalization and the effects new technologies in this global setting have on us and the media. This is a good example of some of the negative aspects of globalization and how it could be used against people. The loss of certain histories of races and their identities may cause further uncertainties and confusion, which can then produce ethnic violence in various forms.
This source ties into my other sources because it deals with globalization and some aspects of people and their social behaviors, in this case specifically in relation to ethnic violence caused by the changing identities of groups of people which is stemming at least partially if not solely from globalization. It differs in that it deals with more exact examples of ethnic violence in several countries and the reasons why this happens and could begin to happen more in the era of globalization.
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