5/31/2006

After Theory

Yes, I found Terry Eagleton's After Theory some time ago from the Waste Books in some remote shopping mall. In the book Eagleton traces the roots of cultural theory, and identifies three reasons why “cultural theory must start thinking ambitiously once again”: Capitalism has entered its most totalizing phase by becoming ruthless and global, “The gang of predatory, semi-literate philistines” and “semi-fanatical fundamentalists” who rule the United States are in danger of ending history as we know it, and, The West is under pressure to justify its way of life in the face of the Islamic fundamentalist challenge. And it is ironic, according to Eagleton, that “at just the point that we [as postmodern cultural theorists] have begun to think small, history has begun to act big.”

In reviewing Eagleton's book in Philosophy Now (http://www.philosophynow.org/issue55/55aoudjit.htm), Abdelkader Aoudjit writes as follows:

"After he has treated the fallacies of postmodernism, Eagleton proceeds to put forward his own version of cultural theory in the second part of the book. Drawing on both Aristotle and Marx, he argues that, like everything else in nature, man has a distinctive end to achieve or function to fulfill, which is to be good and happy. Eagleton also takes from Aristotle and Marx the idea that humans are political by nature, not only in the sense that one needs others to survive, but also in the sense that nothing one does has any meaning outside the human community. To fully realize one’s capacity as a human being therefore, Eagleton contends, one needs a ‘good society’, because “nobody can thrive when they are starving, miserable or oppressed.” It follows that only socialism ensures that everybody can develop their full potential, because socialism makes “human solidarity an end in itself,” and also because class division and exploitation undermine people’s abilities to live happy and fulfilling lives. “In class society,” he writes, “even those powers and capacities which belong to us as a species – labour, for example, or communication – are degraded into means to an end. They become instrumentalized for the advantage of others.” Eagleton finds support for his ethics in both Christianity and Islam.
Eagleton does a good job of introducing his readers to the current state of cultural theory, and in particular of laying out the historical and political elements which have shaped and continue to shape its development. Furthermore, his case for socialism is well argued and thoughtful. However, I think the most important insight of the book is the idea that morality emerges from corporeal weaknesses, needs and interests, so that if we had a different body, our experience of the world and morality would also be different."

5/29/2006

freewayblogger.com/

5/18/2006

The Night Undisturbed by Dreams

[...] Now if you suppose that there is no consciousness, but a sleep like the sleep of him who is undisturbed even by the sight of dreams, death will be an unspeakable gain. For if a person were to select the night in which his sleep was undisturbed even by dreams, and were to compare with this the other days and nights of his life, and then were to tell us how many days and nights he had passed in the course of his life better and more pleasantly than this one, I think that any man, I will not say a private man, but even the great king, will not find many such days or nights, when compared with the others. Now if death is like this, I say that to die is gain; for eternity is then only a single night. But if death is the journey to another place, and there, as men say, all the dead are, what good, O my friends and judges, can be greater than this? If indeed when the pilgrim arrives in the world below, he is delivered from the professors of justice in this world, and finds the true judges who are said to give judgment there, Minos and Rhadamanthus and Aeacus and Triptolemus, and other sons of God who were righteous in their own life, that pilgrimage will be worth making. What would not a man give if he might converse with Orpheus and Musaeus and Hesiod and Homer? Nay, if this be true, let me die again and again. I, too, shall have a wonderful interest in a place where I can converse with Palamedes, and Ajax the son of Telamon, and other heroes of old, who have suffered death through an unjust judgment; and there will be no small pleasure, as I think, in comparing my own sufferings with theirs. Above all, I shall be able to continue my search into true and false knowledge; as in this world, so also in that; I shall find out who is wise, and who pretends to be wise, and is not. What would not a man give, O judges, to be able to examine the leader of the great Trojan expedition; or Odysseus or Sisyphus, or numberless others, men and women too! What infinite delight would there be in conversing with them and asking them questions! For in that world they do not put a man to death for this; certainly not. For besides being happier in that world than in this, they will be immortal, if what is said is true. [...] - Plato, Apology, http://classics.mit.edu/Plato/apology.html

5/16/2006

Unite

5/09/2006

Living With War

Listen Neil Young's album from here, this address http://www.livingwithwar.blogspot.com

After the Garden of Eden, or Why Kent State is important today

By Michael Corcoran | May 4, 2006

THIRTY-SIX years ago today, Ohio National Guardsmen shot 13 college students at Kent State University who were protesting US incursions into Cambodia as part of the Vietnam War. Nine victims survived, including one who is confined to a wheelchair for the rest of his life. Four students -- Jeffrey Miller, Allison Krause, Bill Schroeder, and Sandy Scheuer -- were killed.

The students were unarmed, and the closest was more than 60 feet away from the Guard at the time of the shooting. There was no warning shot; the National Guard never issued an apology; and no one ever spent a day in jail for the killings despite the fact that the President's Commission on Campus Unrest, appointed by President Nixon in 1970, found the shootings to be ''unwarranted and inexcusable."

Yearly, since the tragedy, Kent State students, alumni, and others have met on the anniversary of the shooting to reflect and remember. Alan Canfora, who was shot by the Guard, says, ''The students today act as the conscience of the college, and the country . . . just like the students did in 1970."

This year's memorial will come, as the last three have, in the midst of a war that has become increasingly divisive. While the memory of Kent State and other violent clashes from that time between protesters and authorities did not deter the incumbent president from leading the country into another unpopular war, it is important to honor Kent State's spirit of dissent and what it taught about the bloody consequences of intense division.

Halfway across the country, the lessons of Kent State are taught each semester in debate classes at Emerson College. J. Gregory Payne, associate professor of organizational and political communication and a Kent State historian, has been teaching students about history, advocacy, and rhetoric through the lens of Kent State for decades.

According to Payne, remembering this tragedy is important because ''Kent State is not about the past -- it's about the future."

Consider the similarities: In 1970, just as today, we had an unpopular president carrying out an unpopular war for questionable reasons.

Richard Nixon and George W. Bush embody many of the same divisive characteristics. Bush tells the world: ''You are with us or you are with the terrorists." Nixon's public statement after the shootings blamed the students: ''When dissent turns to violence it invites tragedy."

Again our civil liberties are being threatened. Bush has ordered the wiretapping of US citizens without a warrant and holds detainees indefinitely without trial; Nixon was spying on student activists and what he called ''domestic radicals."

But, perhaps the most telling comparison is the sharp division within the nation, both then and now. Americans are now, as we were then, split to the core on matters of war and peace, life and death, and cultural values. The President's Commission concluded it was ''the most divisive time in American history since the civil war." Bill Schroeder's parents received signed letters after the shooting saying, among other things, that their ''riot-making, communist son" deserved to die.

Today antiwar protesters are unfairly discredited by the administration as they were in 1970. When Cindy Sheehan took antiwar positions after her 24-year-old son, Casey Sheehan, died in Iraq, she was smeared by pundits like Bill O'Reilly, who said she was a pawn of ''far-left elements that are using her" and that Sheehan was ''dumb" enough to let them do it.

Of course, the absence of a draft now and its presence then may explain why the antiwar movement during the Vietnam War had a greater intensity then it does now. Still, as the protests in New York City last week indicate, the longer the war in Iraq drags on, the more vehement the opposition seems to get.

Musicians, once again, are singing songs of dissent. Last Friday Neil Young, who in 1970 wrote ''Ohio" in reaction to the shootings, began streaming a new antiwar album ''Living with War" for free on his website. Days later, Pearl Jam also released an album made up entirely of protest music.

My generation can't ignore the lessons of Kent State. The same mindset and failure in leadership that led National Guardsmen to fire at students of the same age and from the same Ohio hometowns is similar to what led US soldiers to torture detainees in Iraq.

Kent State should remind us of what happens when a grossly misguided war divides a country. If we can speak candidly and openly about our history and our present -- even the worst elements of it -- then we can ensure that the lives lost on May 4, 1970, were not in vain.

Michael Corcoran is a journalism major at Emerson College.

5/07/2006

Red Sunset

Police say arson was the cause of a major fire at the old Railway warehouses in central Helsinki on Friday May 5, 2006. The photo is taken by Petteri Sulonen and published here under the Creative Commons license www.creativecommons.org

5/01/2006

Bringing Capitalism to an End

"Radicals of every stripe believe that capitalist economies are incompatible with human liberation. That is, while human beings have enormous capacities to think and to do, capitalism prevents the vast majority of people from developing these capacities. Therefore if we want a society in which the full flowering of human competencies can become a reality, we will have to bring capitalism to an end and replace it with something radically different." Michael Yates -- http://monthlyreview.org/0304yates.htm