Gifts and Thefts: Married and Hitched?

Hitchcock analysis is not wanting for contributions. But here's one anyways. Hitchcock made crime thrillers. He was the master of the form, working out crime and suspense stories with precision and an impeccable logic. A logic that, it's been noted, included the audience for the first time, making him also a new kind of film-maker. Think of the scene in Rear Window when Jimmy Stewart, bound by a broken leg to his wheelchair, bends over to pick something up and as he does so, misses seeing a neighbor seen by all in the audience.
Hitchcock not only used the camera to let the audience in on secrets, he used the genre also.
Where the crime per se is normally solved, this bringing the story form to resolution, Hitch's crimes weren't Whodunnits (he's quoted as saying he never made a whodunnit film) Dunnitforwhoms. The thought I've now caught up to, then, is that Hitch in his way embedded theft within a kind of gift economy.
Hitch's films tend to be about two possibilities for relationship: love, or partnership. Oftentimes his romantic couples form, or subtend, a detective partnership first. We get caught up in the tension between two possibilities: will they get together? Kiss kiss? And then it's Bam! He goes and throws her off the train! Commentators have written that this ambiguity of intent, identity, purpose, and possibility is psychology rooted, for Hitch, in the ambiguity of his love relationships with women (yesmothering love, Hitch?).
Is theft not the opposite of Gift. Gifts are an object exchanged and a relationship reproduced. The proper move following a gift is a return. Reciprocity governs the gift economy, and the obligation binds people to one another. A theft has no bearing on relationships: in fact it's about material possessions and objects so much so that victims of the crime will often complain of a sense of violation, feeling having been violated in a profoundly anonymous manner. But the theft ends there, an event whose memory may leave a lasting thirst for revenge, or not. But relationships can't be built on thefts, say by thieves and their victims, unless perhaps things are taken back, retaken, taken back, and then, hey, it's kind of a weird society built on long-term loans.... Hey, there's an idea (I'm reminded here of an Eddie Izzard joke. Robin Hood is asking a man riding through (where else?) Nottingham Forest if he's not rich, and the man replies well no, I'm comfortable, and Robin Hood retorts well that's not going to swing, is it? I can't steal from the moderately comfortable and give to the modestly impoverished).
The theft in Hitch is far less important than the relations among his characters, relationships which are forged by the ambiguity caused by a violence whose meaning actually produces relations. These partnerships emerge out of the scene of the crime like a spiraling staircase, each step an act of trust or faith, a gesture of hope and commitment climbing on wobbly and weakened knees, a vertiginous swoon climaxing with a fall, or is it a push, from the Church's own mission bell tower... Crimes riding the thrilling narrative of romantic coupling, of partnership, of gestures, sacrifices, offerings forged out of uncertainty but in faith, building relationships where the key event is the taking. Modern man, that Hitch, and he saw correctly that it's better to give than to take away.

(Oh that sounded corny. Like that bell tower in Vertigo. That bell tower was matted in. There never was a second floor in that mission. To create the effect of zooming in while pulling back, Hitch required his own lenses (vision) and a long long staircase structure (they used a model). Some things are easier modeled.)

Acts of War, Acts of Terror

Things that have become muddled in the reasoning of our leaders, in their lexica, phraseology, in their presidential idioms, in the press, the media, and ultimately in our heads. To wit, I'm having a hard time this week distinguishing between the following. Are they clear to you?

An act of war
A terrorist act
An act of (self) defense
Pre-emptive strike
Preventive strike
An Insurgency
A terrorist
A Sectarian
Sovereign territory
Cessation of Hostilities

And conditions of the world today that worry me this morning...
--Russia's rollback of "democracy"
--America's rollback of "democracy"
--Iran funnels arms through Syria to Hezbollah
--Iran visits N Korea
--Japan would like to remilitarize
--China seems to have lost influence over N Korea
--Kim Jong Il's hairdo
--Bush might have borderline personality disorder
--Bolton, at the UN, has been on TV more recently than Condi
--Iraq is in civil war
--Sunnis and Shi'ites are in it for the long haul
--a radicalized Islam and an entrenched West seem headed for a showdown of historical proportions
--the world's resources are rapidly running out, and much of our oil is in unfriendly places
--a pandemic, natural disaster, or terrorist act could tank the US economy, rippling out into the world overnight
--we have no savings account for contingencies that are practically inevitable
--China sits on half our debt/currency
--we spend half the world's money on arms
--Afghanistan and Iraq, and now Israel/Palestine, have been failures of foreign policy of catastrophic proportion

In short, precisely when we need to convene around shared problems and challenges, we're using bullets, bombs, and shells as means of communication, unilateral action as a preferred mode of interaction, and executive privilege as reason and justification.

I had higher hopes than for a "might makes right" foreign policy.


Technorati tags: politics, NorthKorea, missile, commentary, international, nuclear, israel, lebanon

Bush's open-mike, back-channel, gaffe diplomacy

I watched a bit too much news last night, eager to keep in tune (stay tuned in?) with the unravelling of the Middle East. Bush's open mike cursing was on every channel, the word sh*t always bleeped out (one commentator requested that the White House not appoint FCC chairmen who would fine them for playing the word on television that the President said through a live mike)... What a pity that Putin's G8 picnic has to take a back seat in the media to a presidentital gaffe.
Well, you see, that's how our president cooks up his foreign policy, and it being thin on insight and complexity these days, we take it as we can. And if that's with a chewed up, open-mouthed, Texas cuss, then sorry, let that polite and restrained Mr. Blair turn the mike off.
That Bush thinks a phone call placed in Syria to Hezbollah can stop this thing though, where'd he get that from? Does he really think the whole world works by picking up a phone? What a pity we don't surveill international calls, there'd be a lot of conflicts solved if we did! Condi knows better than to fly out there unless there's progress to be made. But with Bush dissing Annan out the side of his mouth to Tony Blair, it seems that even a President who refuses to engage "states that sponsor terrorism" (not to mention terrorist states) can squash peace efforts envisioned by those who do. Most of the rest of the G8 is behind a UN intervention.
This is not as simple as war by proxy, peace by phone. Every day Lebanon's cedar revolution is cut and logged; whether Hezbollah lose power, or Syria and Iran lose confidence, or countless more lose lives, it's not just a phone call. We're learning, that in spite of our power to project force, peace is much harder to win. The American way of intervening has not panned out. Turn off the mike, Tony. Chew with your mouth closed, George. Now, Europeans, how ever you have to do it, back channel, tap, type, semaphore, flash, if you have to, call, but please don't shell your way through some crisis resolution.

Technorati tags: politics, commentary, diplomacyl, G8, Lebanon, international, conflict, israel, war, Bush

Pamphlet for Social Change and revolution

The conditions for social change. I remember dodging Autonomen, clad in black balaklavas and German army (West Germany, that is) sweaters, Doc Martins, and coddling small cubes of brick pried from the sedentary and well socialized-sidewalks of Berlin as they upset peace protests to smash Kaufhaus windows and loot in opposition to Pres. Ronald Reagan's visit to the Wall.
Well Reagan left a suitcase (Kennedy left his heart; or did i get it backwards?) and the line from Anarchists to Brighton Mods was shorter than a fashion statement. Who would've seen it?
Times have changed since Dylan took Albert Hall and the Autonomen took Berlin. We no longer believe in Utopian social change. Change itself is claimed as a fight for environmental survival, a global understanding perhaps being a byproduct, but objectives, really, are fundamental. As Burton puts it in Night of the Iguana, social and political movements seek to preserve the reality plane more than they insist on realizing aims on the fantasy plane. (One could argue of course that this kind of re-jiggering of global system is a utopian fantasy.)
How do we get from here to there? What forces, if it's not the very flooding of IRS and other government parking structures, will show us what's going on, that it's time if not for an Ark then for a small dinghy and a whistle to blow. Will our systems absorb environmental events and adjust accordingly? Or will our systems lock down and prepare to defend the castle on the hill?
As power moves from its Western centers, the US especially, to South Asia, Russia, and China, do the fading powers screw up the transfer out of blind pride (and a well-stocked military) or do trans-national organizations and institutions (including multi-nationals) displace sovereign authority? Do the new world powers even have multi-nationals of their own that behave as multi-nationals, or are they gems of revanchist national pride cloaked in shareholder shares dispensed by ticker tape?
Any perspective on systems and their relations must know how power and force is distributed throughout. And must be able to see how transformation occurs within.
In human relations, change can come from direct interaction. Or it can be provided through indirect images and messages. Of the latter, we may have lost the image of a burning department store (probably for the better).
To wit: were's a comic reference guide for change from within.

http://mcstrick.livejournal.com/806969.html

Technorati tags: politics, revolution, humor, commentary, international, Packard Jennings, comic, cartoon

Tings, dey fall apart. Commentary on war, talk, and globalization.

Long ago when Condi was younger than I am now, than I was several years ago, I wrote an honors thesis while a student of international relations at Stanford arguing that trust in the international system could be accrued, in theory, as well through a regime of information transparency and communication. It was a critique of real politik, whose military bias led it to see power as held by states in the international system, balanced globally (read: Kissinger, think: dominoes), and protected by active military regimes (force projection, territorial protection).

A state's ability to inflict damage, over its susceptibility to damage = trust. In short, trust = offensive capability/defensive weakness. I wrote that trust = knowledge/uncertainty. Military means being the means of the former; communication and institutions being the means of the latter.

Things are falling apart. Our global institutions are not unbiased, communication has not proven a way out of conflict, be it actual or virtual, national or system, and a growing divide seems to be shaping up between those holding on to and protecting their historic influence and lacking natural resources, and those in possession of natural resources and thus possibly holding the keys to power in the future. Just look at the US, Britain, Europe, and compare against Russia and China. Honestly, it's not looking good at all. What we're seeing today is possibly just the beginning. Smaller states engaged in a taste of the proxy conflict that, if unchecked, could easily devolve into big power conflicts over energy, labor, and capital.

I used to think communication would lead us out of centuries of military conflict. But we're not doing so well at communicating. To succeed in establishing trust in the international system, communication must be honest. Understanding, and reaching agreement, is possible only if communication is truthful. If it's not truthful, it's strategic, manipulative, deceptive, and that does nothing but to obtain results from communication based on force and coercion rather than consensus and partnership.

I've been getting into systems theory again recently and yesterday I began to wonder whether capitalism (not my favorite organization of human relations) might be our only hope. If we take the assumption that every system, be it religious, military, political, social, financial reproduces itself by making selections from available information, making choices, in other words, then capitalism has two things going for it (and us?): it presumes linear growth and it's oriented to the future. The presumption of growth, even if it's a fundamentally cracked assumption, motivates future-oriented action. And we need to preserve future possibilities now more than ever. Religious, ethnic, territorial, political, and military forms of social organization carry a lot of historical baggage, heavy memories, and a perception of Self that's often de facto opposed to Other. Capitalism, by choosing possibilities of growth (some people read: exploitation), sees Self as inclusive of Other (some read: assimilative).

I'd like to keep thinking that communication offers a means of preserving and respecting difference while forging a common future out of trust, discourse, and agreement. But we're running out of time to reach agreement, and "rogue" states, stateless movements, and global institutions simply stall when they see that their communication partners are powerless (as we are vis a vis Iran and N Korea, Venezuela, etc.) Why have things not blown up with Venezuela? We buy their oil. And Iran? We buy their oil. Russia? We buy their oil.

The G8 (really, the G7+Russia) meet imminently and Bush is going to tell Putin that he likes Aquafresh toothpaste too. Toothless talk from a system that's got no bite left but the one it drops into a glass of water by the bedstand, nightly. I'd like to think that understanding beats profit. But if we don't have enough time? Capitalism still has its quarterly reports to prepare, and that's three months at least...

Technorati tags: politics, commentary, global, G8, democracy, international, conflict, globalization, war, capitalism

Agonistic Giving, Yochai Benkler, Warren Buffet, and Heaven's Gate

I recently posted this attempt at defining "agonistic giving" on the P2PFoundation's site. As Yochai Benkler describes it, "I give because I am great." I post this again here for reasons of simple synchronicity. Buffet and Gates popped to mind (though ironically, they might be counter-examples, their wealth in fact having been established and earning them already great power, giving is simply a transfer of funds if viewed strictly from a gift economy perspective, wherein all wealth belongs to the same economy!). I then came across this letter he wrote in answer to a suggestion he'd made that there were other ways to get into heaven. Well I didnt know he'd even brought up the possibility. Funny. How did Jim Morrison put it? "You cannot petition the Lord with Prayer?" Never mind. Save lives here on earth. Hear hear.


Agonistic Giving
The agonistic view of society emphasizes competition, performance, and difference over consensus and understanding, if an abridged definition can suffice here. Agonistic giving, a term used by Yochai Benkler, describes the kind of giving that increases the giver's power and status. Giving accrues stature to the giver by elevating him or her above others through generosity.

Any theory of the gift, of course, assumes a recipient. For a gift to be given, it has to be accepted.

Here then is where social relations come into play. Viewed only in terms of the giver's indvidual performance, agonistic giving would be an act by which the giver can increase his or her stature just by giving. Have Bill Gates and Warren Buffet done just that? Or is that how our media report their act, and present it to us?

In fact, the gift, to be a gift, must be accepted. The recipient must accept and acknowledge the giver's performance. Viewed from a social perspective, the giver is not simply free to create power by simply giving; recognition, visibility, and some measure of symbolic or meaningful (if not real) power and status must attach to the act. The performance would then mean nothing out of context, namely social context. A rose, given is just a flower handed by one person to another. But as a symbolic gesture, the rose is an expression of one's love, affection, perhaps even commitment. The recipient must accept the gift if it is to have the power invested in it. This binds the giver to the recipient. And to some social theorists and anthropologists, gift giving always involves the creation of a debt, a relation of obligation, an economy of reciprocity and circulation of debt. Debt being the future repayment and return of an obligation.

In other words, debt being in fact not the object, nor its "objective" value, but the relationship it binds. One can go as far as to argue that debt is the preservation of tradition and the anchoring of social relations in time, for debt as an unresolved and "hanging" obligation projects social relations into the future. Whether agonistic giving is something we do to get power, respect, and status depends on whether we're talking about the giver's intent or the social and cultural context in which the performance takes place. One could say the same for pure giving.

Commentary on Podcast, Blogged Commentary

For those of you who want "the voices in your head to be marketing voices" (willfully subversive signoff at the tail end of Jennifer Jones' podtech podcasts), a less schizophrenic and more organized view of user-generated content is covered by the director of global marketing communications for Coke in this podcast. It's interesting in a German kind of way. You know, where something sort of interesting becomes very interesting. (Disclosure, I'm half German (left side), lived there, speak it, and know them well, in a sort of interesting way). Podcast is here:Blogging The World Cup with Coca-Cola™

But aside from podcasting the war, the World Cup, and blogging the world cup, and all of that, much of which consumed days and days of June 2006, I've got to comment on commentary. It's terrible, for the most part.

I subscribed to 4 cup podcasts, all British, two of which were funny, one of which was downright illegal (sponsored by Dodge Caravan, no less), and they made my day. I wish the Cup were still on just so that I could listen in. Now i'm following the tour (de france, the other old European country whose cup ended ignominously half empty), and the toolheads hanging about the bikeshed are just not funny, not intelligent, not articulate (the elephant man spoke sentences of lyrical profundity by comparison, just a bit hard to make out), and not interesting, even in a German kind of way.

Please, podcasting is not blogging. It takes time. It occupies the space between one's ears in such a manner that a vacuum results therein from vacuous reportage... There is no other way to pay attention to sound than to listen. I've tried removing one ear bud and generally have to thumb my way counterclockwise and then back over the bits I heard while the cashier asked for my club card number and it just doesn't work... Please, blog if you don't know more about cycling than your average discovery channel viewer. But if you're podcasting the Discovery Team, don't tell us what the coach did on his day off. Tell us where they went. Where they started. How they fell down and got back up again. Who broke away, where they went, who chased, how fast, and whether they caught up with them! It's a race, not a game of backgammon. (And we won't even get started on the ESPN soccer commentary, which necessitated seeing the games in bars packed enough to drown out that drivel...)

Here Here Al Gore:

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The unthinkable bang it's hard not to think about

Well India's latest missile launch wobbled its way wayward and was as off course and harmless as so many shots on goal fired this weekend by the four teams remaining in the World's Cup, a sporting analog for power, nationhood, and respect, won by Italians and wasted by our man Zizou, the striker who's gone back into the cold.
I toyed with the idea of a fantasy match involving French and Italian film directors. Instead, this world cup final would have been directed by Wim Wenders, written by Peter Handke, a red-carded Slobo shamefully sent off the field, a bid for national pride having been squandered by a childish tantrum and head-butt to the chest of one Italian defender named something like maserati. Our American commentator in the box fond of describing him as charging the field with a "head full of steam," a head not so full of steam anymore, it seems. No more espresso for you, Zizou.
I slipped on a new word while enjoying an Irish coffee this weekend. Afreudance. Avoidance of people or associations having Freudian meaning.
Kim Jong Il, you little buffoon, put down those toy soldiers. Cheney, stop mocking his sandbox. Ahmadinejad, leave the party now and let the rest of your people relax. Slobo's gone, Handke's Yugo sits broken by the side of the road, there may be no poetry after Celan, no world cup worth drinking from, but if we're to think the unthinkable, make it Borges, Cortazar, or Marquez. MAD stands for mutually assured destruction, and you're all mad.
The anxiety of the goal keeper at the penalty kick was a German film, too much Wim and Vigor, and even French athletes, it seems, owe the Owens, who already 70 years ago showed the black card and the white card to be just that, markers in a game we're all here to play.
It's South Africa hosting the cup next time, and they'll be showing yellow and red, apartheid's black and white now to broadcast in hi-def color. Give us a game to watch, stars to believe in, play to be admired. The rest of you get off the pitch if you can't sing along. And give us back the Himmel uber Berlin.

Technorati tags: politics, NorthKorea, ICBM, V2, commentary, international, Zidane, worldcup, nuclear, Berlin, sports

Of rockets, the Fourth, Kim Jong Il, the Taepodong tumble and Beckham's arc

I've long admired the hyperbolic and parabolic arc that is the narrative of both Thomas Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow and the line of flight traced across the sky, screamingly (famously), from Peenemunde in Prussian Germany, across the Channel's choppy waters, the whiteness of Dover, to land, long after Brenn-schluss and with a smack that arrives only later, in London, east side.

Lately, Saturday, another hyperbolic arc was not delivered by one David Beckham, to return, across the channel's still-choppy waters, on yet another channel (ESPN2, or was it ABC?), one line of flight bowing to another, and did not dispatch the Portugese from their cup contention but did the English.

Not so silently did another rocket dispatch itself from the Floridian shoreline and at a migraine-inducing speed leave the earth's atmosphere to puncture the firmament and let the air out of a lovely July Fourth celebration, US democracy such as it is now requiring us to spend 50% of the planet's military to sustain power and might for the right to project either, globally...

And as a twin-engine Qassam rocket buzzed its way from Gaza deeper into sovereign Israel than the 6 miles normally achieved by Qassam rockets, fired as usual by Hamas, an organization that refuses to officlally recognize Israel's sovereignty and whose own sovereignty now clings precariously to life (under the tank treads of the occupier/displacer, or more accurately, the arms sold by those who support them)...

A Taepodong Two tumbled into the ocean 40 or so short seconds after lifting off the northern Korean peninsula. Kim Jong Il, no smarter than the dummy that played him in Team America (the animation by the creators of South Park, which sounds Korean but isnt) brought 5 extra and proven missiles along to shoot off to provide facial protection from an embarassment (they say in Asia it's shame) sure to come, the Taepong not being known to stay up for long (as a US ambassador put it)...

...and reflecting on the best moment in 13 days in October, that lengthy film about the Cuban Missile Crisis in which the actor playing Robert McNamara castigates a Navy general for firing a warning shot across the bow of a Soviet tanker, declaiming, proclaiming and exclaiming that "this was a communication system" and that Kennedy was trying to communicate to Khruschev and thus please dont fire another shot unless told to do so by me...

"This is not a blockade. This is language. A new vocabulary, the likes of which the world has never seen! This is President Kennedy communicating with Secretary Khrushchev!"

and knowing that Slothrop (Gravity's Rainbow's protagonist, who gets an erection every time a V2 lands in London, and who is thus the only means by which to predict where the rockets might fall, though as it turns out has an impressive number of one-night stands in London and spies following his nocturnal she-nanigans might easily be misled) would at this point be getting a hard on...

I wondered, where, really, international affairs had gone wrong for so many rockets to go off when there is so little intercourse in the intercourse of nations, and whether, possibly, there might be another way to escape the negentropic destiny of distrusting sovereigns, goons, and their bureaucrats, and whether they might come up with something to say besides "Do you see me?" and "Look at me" "Mine's bigger" and could there possibly be a cheaper way to obtain a line of flight out of this structure (facing death, as Pychon observers) this side of Beckham's salary, a flight-worthy Taepodong-2, Qassam, or Discovery. Might the message of the missile be written on paper, and not in the dirt?


Technorati tags: politics, NorthKorea, ICBM, V2, commentary, international