Colombian exchange

It's a simple idea: the Columbian exchange. That means all the domesticated plants and animals that were exchanged between the "Old World" and the "New World" since the discovery of the ocean passage between Europe and the Americas. What immediately strikes my impressionist sense when I look at that list, is this: how much of life was simply incomplete before the Columbian exchange started! There is no cuisine on Earth that was not affected, or else completely transformed by it. Nations changed. Empires fell. A lot happened.

Postcolonial

February 24, 2023

It has always stuck with me once I heard it said: America is a postcolonial country that threw off colonial oppressors in a glorious Revolution. It brings with it a different perspective on the world that Americans exist in now to know this. 

Perhaps early Americans were more available to this realization, but it's not so simple that things have changed since then. Economic independence may have been reached to a significant extent but culturally and in norms of speech there is a pervasive influence that remains.

Politically, the reversal of the Americans being conditioned as subjects and the creation of a polity constituted as pure citizens was revolutionary, but has left aspects of our separation from Britain still yet left to do. So the Americans are a postcolonial people and the United States is a postcolonial country. It's a thought-provoking realization.

Technics

February 18, 2022

I want to talk about three separate but related issues here. This will altogether raise issues that are not only technological but political, and if they are not strictly speaking agrarian, they raise critical questions of information freedom nonetheless. 

The Democrats favorite canvassing platform, NGP VAN, was completely acquired by a British private equity firm recently. VAN had become the sole repository for most of the Democratic Party's campaign information, including the DNC's voter file information. The buyout firm "Apax" merged all the subsidiary entities into a new firm "Bonterra". 

Having British private equity owning U.S. voter data reminds one quite piercingly of the Cambridge Analytica scandal, where a British company was also the owner of American voter data. (There is a documentary on Netflix about that Cambridge Analytica scandal you can watch called "The Great Hack"). This time is at least slightly different because it is direct voter file data that was acquired by the British firm in question, and not mere Facebook data. In other words, it is data that is expected to be private. Nonetheless, the employees of this progressive data tech firm are concerned about their new owners. A great deal of action in the organizing space happens on VAN, and the Cambridge Analytica scandal, if you recall, involved voter data being used in "psyops": communication warfare technology. 

It's important to remember that technology is a category that includes broadcast, industry, and everyday tools. And we can learn a bit from that designation. Lewis Mumford, American author, gave a speech once (in 1963) saying that there exist two kinds of technologies: one authoritarian, and one democratic; he says: 

"My thesis, to put it bluntly, is that from late Neolithic times in the Near East, right down to our own day, two technologies have recurrently existed side by side: one authoritarian, the other democratic, the first system-centered, immensely powerful, but inherently unstable, the other man-centered, relatively weak, but resourceful and durable."

Democratic technics originate in the origin of Neolithic tool-making, but authoritarian technics arise from the period of political centralization and control, in the Near East about 4000 B.C. (Mumford says "No royal mace, no slave-driver's whip, no bureaucratic directive left its imprint on the textiles of Damascus or the pottery of fifth-century Athens," and, after all, this is true). Despite authoritarian power, it was not always possible to influence "technics", or, technology, in the distant past. Mumford continues on to say:

"So even the Roman Empire found it expedient, once resistance was broken and taxes were collected, to consent to a large degree of local autonomy in religion and government. Moreover, as long as agriculture absorbed the labor of some 90 per cent of the population, mass technics were confined largely to the populated urban centers."

This is no longer the case, and so the choice between democratic and authoritarian technics is more important than ever. So Mumford asks:

"Is it really humanly profitable to give up the possibility of living a few years at Walden Pond, so to say, for the privilege of spending a lifetime in Walden Two?"

I think this problem is more worth thinking about than ever. 

The final piece of the puzzle about technocracy for today is the realization hidden within the documents involved in the Fox News/Dominion lawsuit, where Fox News was outed for not thinking that the truth was suitable for their audience. Brian Stelter writes in the Atlantic about the moment it "clicked" for him:

"Inside Fox, the prime-time stars and senior executives raged against the network’s reporters not because they doubted that Biden had won, but because the truth was too disturbing to the audience that had made them rich."

We live in a reality papered over with curated fragments of reality provided from other quarters; to perceive reality is to accurately construct it; to construct reality from this requires a structure not consistently present in the distribution of these curations.

How situated a pedagogy of the oppressed within these discourses?

How situated a pedagogy of the oppressed within these discourses?

I want to reexamine the strange discursive moment of the Atlantic article in the style of Cormac McCarthy that described Republican House Speaker Kevin McCarthy's ordeal to obtain his position earlier this year. The novelist Cormac McCarthy is of course very discursively present these days: he seems to get more famous with age. I want to look at it from another angle: the production of the discourse - the aims, the motivation - behind the text itself. 

Paolo Freire, the author of Pedagogy of the Oppressed, postulated that certain individuals located at a critical nexus of political experience could use their own lived experience as a basis for their own education, particularly in terms of acquiring literacy. 

Could we take a hopeful look at this singular article as naught but the concrete manifestation of the current politics of a pedagogy of the oppressed? As in, as an attempt to make a living sense of the World, if not through lived experience, then through read experience. As we all struggle to make sense of climate change, and that on the farm, could it be that some sort of pedagogy of the oppressed has been activated and could be formulated out of our common desire just to understand what is going on in the world?

Of course, we have to assert to be complete that this is not all, there is more Present and absent here than would be to make this only the pedagogy of the oppressed. But for those who see hope despite it all, there may be glimmers of it here, as a monument to a species reaching a new level of consciousness of itself...

Foucauldian Vietnam

January 22, 2023

The unavoidable question for the skeptic familiar with East Asia is: was Michel Foucault's work, even his attitude, a part of the "civilizing mission" of Imperial France in its colonial projects? My answer turns on the topic of the great rupture that occurred in the consciousness of international humanity in the 20th century, a situation that France and the United States shared, and that has loomed over all manner of discourse in the decades since it. This is, of course, Vietnam. 

Vietnam constituted an intellectual crisis in both countries. The involvement of both in the internal affairs of Vietnam was an imperialist crime of aggression, although that is a fraught term in Asia. But we should tone down the guilt by association, especially such tenuous association as through nationality. Foucault's work is more than anything a rejectamentalist commentary when it comes to Vietnam, and doubly a commentary on the failure of the French Left to constitute in its own mind the identity of Vietnamese and Southeast Asian culture. 

In one of his essays that mentions Vietnam ("For an Ethic of Discomfort") there comes this quote that I believe applies equally well to the traumatic experience of Vietnam:

"decisive moments when things begin to lose their self-evidence."

Anyone who's been to Vietnam can probably tell you that the country has that effect on our fundamental assumptions, and not only as Westerners but on people from other parts of the world too. 

It's not only the nature of politics but the nature of its people and language that creates this doubt about fundamental truths. Perhaps it is the time-honored resistance to outside pressures (from Chinese and Indic Empires in antiquity) that create this social force. Vietnam seems to situate itself as the yin to every yang in the world, the dark complementary to every ideology and culture, no matter its provenance. And this is exactly their point of pride, I think. 

There's another passage from the same essay: 

"a manifest truth disappearing not when it is replaced by another one that is fresher or sharper but when one begins to detect the very conditions that make it manifest: the familiarities that served as its support, the darknesses the brought about its clarity, and all those far-away things that secretly sustained it and made it "go without saying.""

This is Vietnam. And it's through this uncertainty that the solidarity of the Vietnamese with each other is constituted, I believe. So it's a mistake to portray Foucault as an apologist for French intervention in Vietnam, I contend. (His stance on Algeria and other issues is more clearly no.) I will limit the scope of this to these observations. However, as a general matter I think it's misguided to label someone so fundamental to modern left-liberal discourse as representing something antithetical to it.

(╯°□°）╯

Ownership of all the products of labor

January 20, 2023

I have already mentioned the economic theory that a craftsman has absolute ownership of all the products of his labor. It resounds in Locke's labor theory of value, among other places. It strangely enough could be extended to the State, by saying, if money is a product created by the state, then, the State has the absolute right to print more of it for any purpose. I have heard that espoused before. I wonder what Locke would think about that. I wonder what would Silvio Gesell. I wonder what Modern Monetary Theory would make of it.

Without deproblematizing Foucault’s work, but properly problematizing it

January 14, 2023

Foucault looms large in contemporary discourse, not the least because from his time and position, France was the last colonial master of Vietnam before the Americans fought the Vietnam War. Because of Foucault's insistent focus on the grain trade, and because of common sense with the important Farm Bill this year, ask: how delicate is this? The US is involved in some grain trade politics trying to institute a stronger domestic farm. This is the year for the Farm Bill, and you cannot oppose the Farm Bill; that's not how it works. 

The financialization of the farm leads to the politics of agrarian tumult. From Occupy Wall Street to the present day, to what extent does all this become enmeshed in the legacy of the Vietnam War, the longer you look into it? In particular, the U.S. unavoidably took over French prerogatives in Vietnam during the course of the Vietnam War. 

How was physiocracy a resistance element to this, and how much was it implicated in it? There is a legitimate question about the structure of the state apparatus in Vietnam and the reminder to learn history or else be victimized by it. Imperialism is mercantilist in its most brutal face, but paternalist in its softer face, which involves physiocratic analysis. 

The physiocracy of Foucault is also the paternalistic concern for Vietnam implicit in its colonialism there, which might be a reason there is an aftertaste of imperialism in its theory. But that's simply the conjunctive presence of French imperialism on our history with Vietnam. When we hear statements like "rural America has been colonized by urban America" keep in mind that in the theory of physiocracy this is but an unfortunate coincidence of history, implying nothing eternal. 

Physiocracy is a medieval theory. Its use is that it is infinitely more advanced than the practice of agriculture as it originated. But it's more than the administration of agriculture. It's the politics of the grain reserves. What's interesting about this is how it involves statecraft and international politics and affairs. What is undeniable from the mature perspective is that sometimes commodities are spent like coin to create certain outcomes. 

Has the supply chain weirdness with Covid (soybeans), food aid to Afghanistan, even the Ukraine situation, and whatever else the grain reserves are going to, put us on a strong footing or back-footed with this new Farm Bill? That's what I think Foucault would be interested in: not to deproblematize physiocracy, but to properly problematize it.