Unpopular Dissent

It’s that time of the school year where I’m plagued by research and paper-writing, so if you’re a follower of this blog, apart from being surprised that you exist, I want to begin for apologizing for the lack of substantive updates over the last month.

On a slightly more positive note, my good friend Derek has written an exceptional entry on his website Doing Feminism about the importance of resisting the desire to remain silent. I feel that too often those of us who have potentially unpopular – but likewise potentially constructive – opinions keep those sentiments hidden to protect ourselves from conflict and physical aggression.

A very potent and visceral excerpt from his piece, A Note on Silence:

… I’ve become tired of engaging the ignorant and the uninformed. I’ve become tired of being the subject of other people’s anger. People don’t want to have their own shit shoved in their face for them to smell it, and they get angry when someone does it. That, I can understand. I don’t think it’s right for them to get upset about things they’ve said and done, but I can understand it…

I will most likely refrain from posting until after December 3rd, which is the last day I have a paper due – and coincidently, the last day of classes! Until that point, keep on challenging ignorance and systems of domination.

Get the full story from the University of Alberta student newspaper, The Gateway, here

Would someone please mind explaining to me exactly how shutting down the office called the “Office of Human Rights” (OHR) would ever make it easier to find where to go with a complaint of human rights abuse? The sections of the article I’m referring to are:

According to a memo released by the Office of the Vice President (Finance and Administration) on 30 October, the responsibilities of the OHR will soon be reorganized under a single point of access for all University human rights and resources concerns: Internal Audit Services.

The administrative decision to reorganize the OHR was designed to make it easier for those on campus to seek advice about equity, human rights, and safe disclosure services in one place, said Phyllis Clark, Vice President (Finance and Administration). (emboldened mine)

and

However, Dr Frank Robinson, Dean of Students, noted that these services have largely been, and will still continue to be, available under different offices, including the Student Ombudservice.

“I see this as a step of clarifying where you go.” (emboldened mine)

This is quite obviously a flagrant abuse of power in the name of profit and fiscal efficiency: shut down the expensive office in favour of consolidating its function with other offices.

What part of “Internal Audit Services” and “Student Ombudservice” indicate that “THIS IS THE PLACE YOU GO WHEN YOUR FUNDAMENTAL HUMAN RIGHTS HAVE BEEN VIOLATED” quite as well as an office that fucking called itself the “Office of Human Rights”? (Read: they don’t indicate it at all!) How does obfuscating the place you go at all “clarify” or “make it easier” to find where to file a human rights complaint? (Read: it doesn’t!)

Dr. Lise Gotell said it best:

“My concern about this is that once the OHR moves into Internal Audit, there’s no visibility attached to human rights on this campus… Good universities and good workplaces [...] have taken questions of diversity and equity very seriously, because they realize that in order to be economically successful, you have to be a good workplace, and good workplaces promote respect for diversity, they don’t hide it.”

While the memo regarding the closure of the OHR didn’t indicate why, exactly, the office had been closed, the excuse given was the office’s official role was complicated by its mediation between employees, employers, and students.

Boo-fucking-hoo.

The office’s role was to mediate between employees, employers, and students in a confidential setting! So you’re shutting it down because its job was too difficult? I’m sorry, but I call bullshit. The office was closed to save money. End of story.

The University of Alberta is an intellectual corporate entity, hardly a place of education, and this latest move to close down the only visible human rights office is yet another indication of the profit motive hard at work.

Anyone remember when they removed the option for students to pay with credit card because it cost the U of A spent one third of a percent (0.33%) of their budget to keep it available? They promised it would go back into enhancing student experience at the U of A. I don’t think anyone short of the Medicine and Engineering faculties saw any of that money, because they’re by far the most profitable faculties on campus. I also doubt the money went toward undergrads, and instead towards profitable research.

This post is not so much political as it has political implications.

With apologies to Michel Foucault:

We have all been made aware of what it means to be “overweight”. It’s not “normal”, not “average”, not healthy, the product of an inappropriate lifestyle, of a preexisting and ultimately arbitrary metabolic capability over which one has no ability to manipulate, caused by a compulsive mental illness. This is the story of the being of overweight, and it is reinforced by images of overweight buffoons, intellectuals, and unbeautiful people who regard their bodies with contempt and disdain.

Recently it has become popular to talk of the phenomenon of being “underweight”, as well. It has a similar narrative: “abnormal”, below-average, unhealthy, caused by inappropriate lifestyle choices, compounded by perhaps the mental illnesses causing anorexia or bulimia. We think of these people as “sickly-looking” and “corpse-like”. They, like the overweight, are misinformed about something.

What does it mean, then, to be “weight”? Can one be “weight”? Perhaps it is better to invent a term of being the “correct” weight, which I will call being “ofweight.” What is this ideal that so few people are able to obtain and/or maintain? How does one gain knowledge of being “ofweight?” I argue that being “ofweight” is an unattainable and ultimately arbitrary ideal, the purpose of which is to consume the consciousness of those who strive for it, as a way of maintaining control of bodies and occupying the active wills of those who do not as of yet embody the ideal (read: everyone); because being not ofweight is as much a psychological disposition as it is a social one, I propose constructing an account of the lived experience of a not ofweight person: a phenomenology of non-ofweight consciousness.

Lucky enough for my proposed endeavor, I have been what is termed overweight for the majority of my life. I have learned to regard my body similarly with contempt and disdain: I shower because body odor offends others around me, not because I mind; I dress because my body must be covered, not because I desire to be fashionable; I eat because I must do so to survive, so I might as well eat well if I’m going to be forced to do it at all. I am obliged to take care of my body by my social context, not my own desires; I am forced to be self-conscious because of others.

My body exists to continue the functioning of my mind. Almost as a direct result of this functioning, my mind is consumed by considerations of the operations of my body almost constantly. In order to keep my mind working, it must, by necessity, consider the interests of my embodiment.

I am constantly reminded of my being overweight: shopping for jeans and being unable to find a length, waist, and thigh which fit; the tightening of old t-shirts around my gut; the constant bombardment of the images of indie-hipster Arts students in the library who wear their size 27 skinny-leg jeans with pride.

The way this obsession consumes my thoughts reveals a more sinister aspect of the desire to be ofweight; that is, its ability to force subjects to discipline themselves accordingly: self-surveillance. Who does not want to be healthy? The juridico-medical discourse makes it clear that being overweight severely increases risk of heart-disease and other such circulatory ailments.

I must strive to make myself more healthy by obtaining the ofweight ideal. Who does not want to be “normal”, who does not want to be “average” when the categories of “below-” and “above-average” have such negative social connotations as being “under” or “overweight”? In order not to be disparaged, I must obtain the ofweight ideal. Yet this classification of being “ofweight” is assigned so arbitrarily by these medical and social discourses that an actual instance of the embodied ideal is so rare that it is almost negligible.

People in top physical condition are, as the moniker suggests, heavily conditioned in order to obtain an ideal. Yet, even the most well-defined body builder to the external eye must be self-conscious of all the places where their muscle definition needs to be improved, hence the turn towards steroids to bypass their reality. Even the most heart-healthy, cardiovascular athlete spends the majority of their time training to maintain their fitness, hence the turn to increased blood-oxygen levels to improve the affects of training and performance.

If it is so that I overeat, I feel it is because of the act’s ability to open up an escape route from obligation and reality. Some people smoke cigarettes, others marijuana, all the way from meditation to injecting intravenous heroin to escape reality. Eating allows for a time where I am not consumed by tasks and obligations that I ought to be doing. By eating more and more often, I am allowing myself to escape from reality more often, for longer periods of time.

We are all consumed by these unattainable body ideals, and they serve to absorb large portions of our time and effort. The very activities of pursuing body ideals is a method of control and normalisation; the fact that the ideals are unattainable makes the power all the more sinister. We know we cannot obtain our body desires, yet we focus so very often on this very process. Even the quite common notion of being made “self-conscious” of one’s weight is a testament to the existence of a notion of being ofweight, as well as being forced to discipline oneself accordingly to obtain this being. When one is made constantly psychologically aware of one’s being not ofweight, the awareness manifests itself in self-disciplinary actions.

This is essentially how Foucault’s notion of “biopower” functions. An instrument of regulatory regimes, biopower makes people aware of their embodiment (physically, Foucault focuses on sexuality) and works in ways which administer life. Reglulatory regimes are “life-administering”: not only do they work to make sure that life continues (as opposed to sovereign regimes which have the power to take life), but that this life is constantly under surveillance and is thusly administered norms through scientific rationality.

This train of thought has by no means arrived at its final destination, as is the case with all of my writing. It is merely a textual photograph of my ideas at a certain point in time. There is absolutely no way I could write down all of my thoughts and developments in one sitting, so I have chosen to publish this article to my blog before it is complete* because I feel that the importance of the problems it addresses outweighs the rest of what I want to say. I will most likely come back to this writing in the near-to-not-so-distant

*“complete” is itself an unattainable ideal

If Barack Obama does not win the presidential election tomorrow, I won’t be surprised. Don’t expect to see me wallowing in misery or to hear me crying out resounding lamentations in the halls of academia.

No, if Barack Obama is defeated in the US Presidential Election, I will sit in silence, partially stunned, and partially due to complete and utter indifference.

Why? I’d say it myself, but someone I respect has already said it much better:

From Jason Netherton’s Demockery.org:

October 30, 2008. 10:00 PM:

Election Time/State of the Dis-Union/Forging Ahead
Ahh…less than a week…winding down now on the elections, and as mentioned, of course a Democrat is always favorable to another Republican and the Bush-era bullshit, but we all know the liberal “left” (embodied in the mainstream by Obama/Democrats) here is a joke, and while they mean well, they are ultimately just bourgeois puppets that talk a lot about helping the poor, but still end up chained to the systemic gridlock that defines DC politics. Here, they reinforce the status quo and serve the wealthy just the same -and that is what so-called “democratic” politics apparently represents- more of the same class divisions…so in essence, it might be a “friendlier” Clinton-type situation, especially for the world, but nothing will change about our class system, where 37.3 million people wallow in poverty in America, mostly out of the view of the public eye, in the most prosperous country in the world.

But, hey, I am not cynical! And when looking at reality, I just think of the possibilities, and what we can do (and have accomplished) in the last 200 years in this country (it’s just the timeline is so damn long). Why hopeful about possibilities? I guess I met some great people who were very inspiring, and I guess its just about fueling and feeding our curiosity and imagination. These are two attributes that fundamentally make us human and they need to be actively fed from a young age, getting out into the world and “living,” as we are supposed to (not just in the school-work-death way), is all a sort of ‘natural’ education, that can not be taught in schools, and once you tap into that, you question things, you read and get the critical scalpel slicing, and try and have fun in the process.

On this page (Demockery, that is), over the last 9 years, I have disgorged the ills of global society, culture, and economy, called attention to injustices, inhumanities and suffering, and attacked the institutionalized servility that is our global economy, detesting the reduction of human social relations to things, objects and money. I have damned the fact that we have erased our most basic human connections, and commodified them under unrestricted capitalism, thus turning so many of our most fundamental human relations into cold, economic relations, resulting in a culture of the absurd- where for example we don’t give health care to dying people unless they can “pay” for it! This is simply insane, and the fact that its “normal” here is what makes it even more surreal.

But the goal is to surpass this system (we are not at the end of history, or at the end of anything), and despite how impossible it seems- to just ‘know’ we can do better. Beauty, real beauty is everywhere around us, it’s a connection with nature and those we care about, and anytime you look up at the stars, the sunset, the birds, the smile of a child – there is real and substantial harmony with and among men and nature (when we are not ravaging it), and it’s the reason we go through each day, and even when you have the worst day and life is seemingly horrible, there is always another day to balance it out (sometimes you have to fight for it)…its natural to be miserable as it is natural to be joyful, they come in strange cycles, but its the balance of the spiritual order. So therefore, its very disconcerting and frustrating when you see the dark side of man come out and take over so often in the media, where the human spirit and its potential are suffocated with such cold calculation. So, in response to the elite legions of the negative approach, lets keep standing in defiance of “their story,” and lets champion our own story of what is good in man- and likewise, and with equal measure, continue to destroy the the forces that enslave man (and laugh along the way!).

If my complete indifference to the bipartisan, status-quo reinforcing political system in the United States is indicative of anything, it’s that the system is fundamentally non-representative and flawed.

And so, with apologies to Jason Netherton, who doesn’t know who I am, I implore you to reevaluate whether a two party state can really be considered democratic, when both of those parties have obvious biases in favour of preserving the status-quo.