on headaches (hat-tip to Barthes)

Prior to the Enlightenment, headaches were seen variably as a scourge of Guilt laid upon, literally, the head of the Sinner; as the entrance of a temporary demon into the soul of an impure heart; as retribution for some sort of indiscretion committed; as a momentary possession by the divine; and so forth. Variable mythologies of otherwise non-European origin held that headaches, alongside momentary reductions in sight or hearing or other sensation mutations, were cyclical, associated with punishment for having seen or witnessed, heard, or experienced, some sort of delicate to egregious wrong, but not necessarily having committed it. There is the occasional mythology which places a headache in the realm of the shamanistic, a primitive (if not bizarrely and uniquely postmodern) form of detournement that allowed the seer to understand by not being able to fully understand, to gain clarity through inability to focus on anything other than pain. Across cultures until the Enlightenment and the advent of modern medicine, migraines and intense visions - and migraine auras, neuropathies, and the like - were equated to, if not the Wicked entering the domain of the corpus, the entrance of the Divine into the body. Ecstatic visions through wild, illusory colors, migraine-induced synaesthesia, auditory hallucinations: these were the stuff of prophets and mystics (provided one was born into a class where this was the case, and not accused of witchery).

I suffer from routine headaches. I have for years. I could blame any number of things, psychic, psychosomatic, or somatic. I could rationalize this by my binge-coffee-drinking: caffeine, like all vasoconstrictors, wildly regulates blood flow, and therefore oxygen flow, to the brain: too much, and a headache ensues; too little or none at all, and the brain responds and reacts with a headache. I could rationalize this by my relatively poor and apparently fluctuating eyesight: muscle strain puts excess load on the optic nerves, which alters blood flow to one portion of the brain at the expense of others. I could rationalize this through a decade-old diagnosis of chronic peripheral neuropathy, where, again, because of intermittent failures or overworkings of portions of my nervous system, blood flow is altered and chemicals are stimulated in various parts of the brain to respond to tingling and loss of sensation, generating transient pains in the head. In one example, I was flying back from Detroit, and the span of time between meals was a little over fourteen hours; I was standing against the wall in the Charlotte airport, somewhat slumped over in a suit, my face and cranium burning with pain, all brought on, no doubt, by a sharp decrease in nutrition coupled with a subtly stressful experience; my blood had no new carbohydrates or proteins to carry around, so it was struggling for work. After a failed relationship a little over a year and a half ago, I had constant headaches brought about by not eating properly, self-medicating on melatonin and beer, and working about 60 hours per week in a loud, busy environment.

The commonality seems to be blood, through all of this. The mythologies around blood are vast: life-giving liquid, life-saving liquid; the poison of the evil man (viz. Bad Blood) or of the bitter, impudent individual; the overall regulator of our being in the physical. Among other earlier civilizations, the Nasca people held that blood was holy rain that the gods imbued humans with, and at times it was necessary to spill the blood of the strong in order to reciprocate the relationship with the divine and plead for climatic mercy in the way of dependable rainfall. We have the idiomatic phrases “to make one’s blood boil” and to “angry up the blood.” We have “blood-curdling.” We have “rush of blood to the head.” “To make/have one’s blood run cold.” The patterning of the blood-fetish is scattered throughout our language, holding on to the mythologies of Good and Evil, centered yet still on a complex fluid that at its root simply takes good things to places in our body and takes away bad things so we can get rid of them. Blood remains mercurial, and just as dangerous, and just as inculcated with symbolic worship. And, on the simplest front, blood regulates our pain, our inflammation, our suffering. The pathways and transmission of this Holy Water still controls our mind.

We have a great many instruments and vials of snake oil to cure the headache. Aspirin thins the blood. Ibuprofen muddies the blood. Naproxen Sodium compounds interfere with materials the blood carries. Codeine and Vicodin slow the speed of the blood, precipitously, dangerously, and the blood often craves it more at the behest of the limbic system. Herbal supplements and oils to control pain in the forehead act upon the blood in similar ways. Iron supplements, calcium supplements, fish oil supplements, in their blessed containers, for their intended uses, enrich or detract from blood, all in the mean of soothing discomfort. We can go for hours and hours, days and days, without acknowledging the pain, without acknowledging the radicalization of pain. We can be full, active, productive members of society, writ large, through our employment and interactions, through our creations of meaning. Manifestations of physical pain cannot be seen or tasted or touched and must be evaded every 4 to 8 hours or as recommended by a physician. Proper diet, enough sleep, exercise, a lower heart-rate: these appear on the checklist a few items below “medicate” and “erasure of pain.” We have altars, sacred covenant shrines, in our bathrooms, with remedies aplenty, redundancies abounding, to keep pain from happening, to act on the blood. We have a democracy of disavowal at our disposal: Advil? Alleve? Food-Lion-brand aspirin? Motrin? Tylenol? Yes. Yes. A thousand milligrams yes.

Bodies do not lie as they express to us when something is amiss, but of course this can be induced initially by non-corporeal factors. We have pills to treat stress, pills to ease the psychic discomfort of loss, jealousy, sadness; bottles and potions to counteract being lovelorn, or too excited, or even just being normal. We preemptively strike against the regulation the body provides us with; we bomb the fields of misery with panaceas of all sorts before we know there’s even a war afoot. We miss the aspect of self-care: these headaches, these improper motions and speeds of blood, exist to remind us to reconsider how we treat ourselves, exist to remind us how not to treat ourselves. They are punishments for not living well enough at that moment; they are punishments, as in the case of hangovers or caffeine overdosing, for living a little too well in one moment without regard to the next. While not essentially a mechanism to suffuse our lives with a mind-body (literally) Pavlovian response to self-inflicted mistreatment, and while no longer simply a vehicle through which to have holy visions, there is a kernel of truth to being punished, to being reprimanded.

There may still be some value to the mythology of cerebral discomfort. We cannot have our society without painkillers, and I cannot focus through a headache, and on my dresser stands the Golden Chalice of NSAID. I have been nursing a low-level migraine for three days, after having had a severe, but not migraine, headache about two weeks ago. I can point to the psychic reasons clearly, but so far, I have not acted upon them, and, as a matter of course, I am unable to act on them, for they are outside of my control. These headaches are entering into me, a spirit forcing me to turn inward, forcing me to think forward, a spirit that can only be exorcised with proper care as I invoke the words “Child-proof seal. Push down and turn.”

an essay: why aren't we rioting?

Why Aren’t We Rioting?

London is burning. As are Manchester, Birmingham, and exurbs of London. It may very well go the course of Brighton, Durham, Leicester, Surrey, and Leeds on the next go; I should not be at all surprised if riot activity took hold in every larger city in the UK. This comes on the heels of protests and riots in Tunisia and Egypt, amidst continued strife and disarray in Libya and Syria. These August riots are happening within months of student protests voicing anger at a Tory coalition in the UK that reduced programs, cut funding, and demanded outrageous tuition increases from students while the Crown squandered a good bit more than a halfpenny to pay for a Royal Wedding, only months after an angered Wisconsin electorate took to Madison and occupied the capitol, demanding that Scott Walker not sign into law a piece of legislation completely damning labor unions, undermining benefits, and blaming low-level government employees for budgetary losses. This same week (week beginning 8 August 2011) – and getting virtually no coverage from any mainstream media outlet – over 40,000 unionized employees of Verizon Wireless are striking, on picket lines, demanding that the company not reduce entitlements and salary, demanding that working conditions do not degrade. In this case, at least, this is a cosmic and perturbing reversal of what union organization attempted in the 1920s and 1930s: namely, to improve conditions and salaries, to receive benefits and a less-destructive workload.

So, why aren’t we rioting? Ultra-right factions and corporations – without any shame or otherwise any sort of occlusion or obfuscation – are blatantly blaming middle-class workers for the debt ceiling fiasco, for the massive American deficit, for the massive state and federal budget shortfalls. The governments, according to the oligarchies and their lobbyists-cum-politicians (or, vice versa), are spending too much money paying teachers, road workers, and the like, even in states like Alabama and Mississippi where teacher pay is among the absolute worst in the nation. The governments, they say, are spending too much money on dangerous entitlements like Head Start and Planned Parenthood. Medicare and Medicaid – while indeed needing administrative overhauls – become the whipping posts for radical Rightness, and social spending is in jeopardy of disappearing or being so severely limited as to becoming laughable, all while the top few per cent of Americans wield an exorbitantly high amount of wealth, all while these same said wealthy individuals are being taxed the least (in terms of effective tax rates) they have ever been since the 1950s. Corporations routinely find loopholes in the tax code to evade paying very much, if at all; and those who do pay, typically the largest corporations, find ways to get large rebates. Warren Buffet’s secretary pays a higher effective tax rate than Warren Buffet, and even Buffet has remarked that this is terrible policy. There is a cadre of wealthy individuals who are gathering steam to ask Congress to allow the Bush-era cuts to expire earlier than 2012 since, and rightly so, they point out that wealthy individuals and corporations are more likely to hold on to their money rather than venture into investment territory (and here I mean “creating jobs,” as the GOP bromide seems to go), and in fact when the government holds more capital they are more likely to push it back into the hands of individuals in terms of middle-class tax breaks, low-income-earner entitlements, grants and endowments, research spending, and the like. We do not have to go further back than 1996 when the US Government held a budget surplus, and until late 2000, unemployment continued to decline. We are witnessing now, in 2011, an erosion of wealth and security among average citizens unlike any we have seen since the Great Depression; we are striking and organizing not to plead for better conditions, but to demand and largely beg that they do not become worse. We are watching a GOP with hands in the pockets of powerful individuals and companies fight to cut entitlement spending, keep defense spending preserved (if anyone believes that the “Super Congress” that includes Boehner and McConnell won’t say a trigger has been tripped to scrap the 2 August debt ceiling bill, I have beach-front property in Kansas to sell them), rewrite tax codes to continue to ease up on the wealthy; we are watching a nearly-complicit Democratic party sit on their hands aside from occasional (carnival) barking and shame-heaving on an invisible, invented manifestation of popular anger through the Tea Party, a tiny contingent of old, white, rich (or so they believe, but not in comparison to Soros, Buffet, or the Kochs) people afraid of losing what they have through a black president that is largely a media-darling and empty, chimerical front for misplaced, inarticulate “popular” anger. There’s also the wonderfully radical-like-it’s-1967 Bernie Sanders who continues to spout something verging on common sense, but is ignored because he calls himself a “socialist” – about as socialist as Arkansas’s Governor Clinton was.

On some basic level, we know all this. We know about the haves and the have-nots (but no one would identify, out of fear of stigma, as being a have-not). We know about the largesse of the wealthy in this country (but we typically observe the wealthy as people who “deserve” their wealth); we know about the financial obligations politicians have (but no one likes taxes). We know about the inability of the popularly-elected government to heed the call of the least of the society’s citizens. There is an undercurrent, a pulsation, especially from working individuals in the lower socioeconomic tiers (myself included), of anger, of displeasure, of a total lack of compassion for those at the top who lose millions in the volatility of the stock market yet cannot or will not give out a 20 or 30 cent per hour raise. There is a growing, mild, popular revulsion toward lawmakers who do not try very hard to hide their wealth or their proclivities to help those who are wealthy.

So, why aren’t we rioting?

The signs should be fairly prevalent as to why we should be.

In Europe, during the vast majority of the 20^th Century, cuts – drastic, austere ones – in social spending, cuts to educational programs, and a failure to rein in large business and wealth-individual revenue has indeed led to greater amounts of rioting, assassinations, and general chaos. [1] Protests are actually fewer and typically rarer during times of austerity, but those organizations that occur are far more powerful, far more structured, and far more fruitful. One need not look any further than Egypt this past Spring: a well-educated populace aged 35 or younger, with a 30% or greater unemployment rate, once convened, overthrew its authoritarian regime (yet the aftermath begat is still turbulent and chaotic, with residual protests and organizational entropy in the “what next” category). Here in the United States, we are facing massive cuts through the debt ceiling “deal,” and many states have slashed (or eliminated) funding for health and human services, education, and infrastructure in order to “save money” and close budget gaps. [2] In North Carolina, for instance, scores of educational and mental health service programs have been ended, with many struggling to seek outside donations; notwithstanding, thousands of teachers, teachers’ aides, health and mental health professionals, and administrators will receive or have received pink slips. In turn, service industries from restaurants to movie theaters to (ironically) state-run recreational facilities will bear the brunt of this sudden loss of lucre from those inclined to spend it, lessening revenue generation from companies and small businesses, lessening the effective tax intake for the state, county, and/or municipality, damning the system to repeat in a gentle, then sudden, downward spiral. Using this guiding principle, state governments will continue to trim spending (provided the same congresses remain in power) and state-sanctioned positions will continue to be lost until a null-point is reached: either a barebones workforce will remain in place, or revolt will come. Joblessness has to increase ever greatly.

Joblessness and loss of income is not exactly new, however. As of June 2011, there exists a 4.5 to 1 ration of job-seeker to vacant position; that is, for 3.5 workers out of the above 4.5, there are simply no jobs, no positions, no occupations. While this is down considerably from the June 2009 high of 7 to 1, this is still incredibly high, considering that during the “slump” period of 2006, there was a ratio of almost 1.6 to 1. [3] Growth will slow considerably under the debt ceiling deal – such as it was, with LEIs struggling to reach pre-recession levels, job creation a paltry 40 to 50 per cent of “necessary” (according to the CBO and DOL) at maximum, and a wildly volatile stock market – which will lead to slower job creation, if not a reversal and shedding of available jobs. [4] It is especially important to note that there has been at least a 4 to 1 ratio of seeker to vacancy since December 2008. I should know: I have been one of those people on and off (or otherwise counted in the U-6 index of underemployed/underutilized individuals) since May 2010.

The pinnacle of this melting iceberg comes in the harks and screams of economists – one after the other, it seems – who decry austerity, decry a refusal to raise taxes on wealth-holders, decry a refusal to revamp tax codes to hold onto more money, who decry attacks on government intervention. Political leaders are not listening to them; average citizens and people rallying to have smaller, less-invasive government are either ignoring or dismissing the ideas. Daron Acemoglu, an economics professor at MIT, advocates a number of steps to use innovation across fields as a means to invoke steady economic growth in the United States; whether there is a growth ceiling is uncertain, but Acemoglu (and he is one of many; I use his examples as they are clear and broad-reaching) challenges the need, real or perceived, for austerity, challenges the reduction in political and social spending, challenges the culture of wealth that draws talent away from science, humanities, and arts into a Wall Street world, challenges the glut of new technologies and advocates forcing private enterprise to compete for innovation financially as it arises from universities and other governmentally-sponsored entities. [5] He is not alone in these calls: Geithner, Goolsby, Krugman, Reich, et al, have echoed or promulgated these sentiments and directives, and neither private corporate industry nor Government itself has heeded these calls.

We should be on the streets banging pots and pans, crippling our employers, stopping the flow of goods and services, stopping the flow of cash into corporate and Governmental hands until saner solutions are taken – saner than quitting programs that teach 4-year-olds to read, saner than ending the flagship academic program for gifted students, saner than dismantling a decades-old, wildly-successful teacher-training fund. The world as it is seems on a course to get far worse before it gets better; all evidence of the praxis of austerity measures points to creating societies with high unemployment and abysmal wages. Yet, we’re not taking to the streets. We’re not tearing the world asunder. We’re not standing back and watching the world burn because we set fire to it: we’re watching gasoline being poured all over everything.

So, why aren’t we rioting? Why aren’t we invoking Paris in 1968? How come K Street doesn’t look like Brixton right now?

Zygmunt Bauman posits that the London riots are neither “bread riots” nor of “hunger,” but of what he calls “defective and disqualified consumers.” [6] Bauman outlines – distantly – the common conceptualization of the haves and have-nots, and touches on the unspoken dimension in late capitalist societies: shopping is the panacea, and acquisition of material leads to the illusory fullness of life. Bauman likens human dignity as a thing bound up with the ability to spend money and collect possessions. This is a classic trope, and Bauman does not fully flesh out fuller abjection of being unable to live in the consumerist dignity. Unspoken in Bauman’s piece is the loss of agency in participating in the bread-and-circus realm of conspicuous consumption, detailed only slightly by a description of barriers keeping the have-nots out of the temples of capitalism, and I contend that while these may not necessarily be bread riots, per se, the looting and destruction of the semiotic markers of modernity (plasma TVs, DVD players, items which themselves construct ephemeral and unreal images, themselves a self-contained system of signs to egg on the desire for consumption) becomes an elevated and detached symbol for sustenance: those who live without the ability to fully participate in the sign systems and human-dignity-as-spending symbolically destroy the symbolic order, the mediation mechanism that consistently reminds (and challenges) this generation that they do not have “everything” and in fact have less than nothing. A TV is not, of course, edible: but it does represent the ideal fullness, the hunger for more, the thirst for power and agency.

On Alternet, Bruce Levine posted eight additional reasons (though debatable) why Americans – especially youths – seem impassive to resistance and action. [7] They are, in no particular order: student loan debt; medicating people into quiescence; Kozol/Foucault in re: docile bodies and compliance; NCLB/ESEA II and Race to the Top; the class-based stigma of education level; normalization of surveillance; television (which seems like an easy, if not outdated, target); Religion/Consumerism. Much of the article is fairly one-dimensional and discursive, especially the attempts to condense decades of theory into one paragraph about Kozol’s “inert concern” and Foucault’s docile bodies, and the inclusion of student loan debt seems to preclude all other sorts of debt a young person may have – and on its own, it is not a fortifiable rationale for failing to act in visual, verbal political means. Nonetheless, Levine lucidly puts forward the middle-class, bourgeois (if not invisible) bias against “uneducated” people: they feel disenfranchised because they do not have the wherewithal and book-smarts to lead revolutions or be outspoken critics. While there be truth here, plenty of “educated” folks do not go out and instigate radical change, either, whether because of liberal guilt (“I cannot speak for those less fortunate or privileged than I,” “I don’t know what to do with my privilege,” etc) or because of other factors. Levine also makes an odd pairing of ESEA-II/NCLB/Race to the Top AND every other (largely failed) large-scale social control mechanism in the form of The War on Drugs, the Patriot Act, and others – while I understand the rhetorical flourish in the Machiavellian fear-instillation procedures, the erosion of critical inquiry and independent thought as a means to counteract convention and attain satisfactory answers to “why” and “why not” would have been plenty. Even so, and surveillance culture (cf Michael Parenti’s The Soft Cage) as a touchstone, narco-control and the idea of erasure of civil liberties are plenty enough even in the abstract to cow an individual so terrified of being on the wrong side of the law that, vaguely, should he speak out against Congress or the President, he could be held for up to 72 hours for no reason and potentially seen as an enemy combatant. Ignorance is bliss – bliss if you are a system you desire to be free of fettering from disgruntled citizenry.

Claire Potter, a history professor at Wesleyan, touches upon the ideals of meritocracy within the schooling system and uncovers a little bit of the meritocratic myth while pointedly, if only briefly, reminding us that despite our objections to the contrary the American psyche is fraught with violence. [8] We imagine ourselves as a peaceful people, Potter writes, yet we tacitly support structures that perpetuate forms and systems of violence that, through our silent complicity, we legitimize and even form political doctrine around. We are not a violent people individually, but rather structurally – but since we cannot imagine ourselves as violent or physically acting against the polite will of the State except for dark and terrible fantasy, we cannot be an activist population either, since this connotes a form of violence we are loathe to act out. Potter casts her argument, however, from a place of intellectual power as a career academic and professor, and maintains much of her argument centering on the reduction and mocking of the humanities and arts in higher education. While she is spot on in these analyses, and while she does invoke the necessity of the masses to perhaps momentarily throw off the shackles of Hobbes (‘he that in his actions oberveth the laws of his country’), she gives no further analysis or description as to why we are no longer an activist society in the United States other than a paltry anecdote concerning the commoditization of activism: while throwing money at problems has indeed sated and made lazy those segments of the populace inclined to rustle up political dust, it does not cover the whole of the issue.

I would like to contribute a few more reasons why the American populace seems content – or otherwise apathetic – to remain aloof, despite growing calls of outrage and controlled anger across social media and in conversation. [9] We may not be fiddling as Washington and by proxy the nation burns, but we seem torn between the distraction(s) in-hand and the growing, orange glow of danger just over our shoulder.

1. The Meritocracy Is So Damn Tantalizing

While Potter and Levine discuss the concept of subjugation by the illusion of the Protestant work ethic – toil hard, study hard, and you shall earn your rewards – but what is left out is a subtle ideal of helplessness and subjection to a restrictive system of “positive” reinforcement, and a fear of failure that becomes engrained in our young people – and remains, as psychological and pedagogical scars, within older people.

Activism and vocal protest are vehicles that convey some sort of anger, some sort of feeling that typically runs counter to prevailing systems of behavior and conduct. I am one of a large generation of children who came about when grades for conduct were handed out, and as an extension of perceived success, negative marks on my conduct record were tantamount to failing an exam or doing poorly on homework. Purchase embarrassment and shame would follow as I would be haunted by my reputation. This patterning of behavior remains with certain individuals – typically those who are smart but not naturally leaders – and for all the attempts to teach “leadership” skills to children, leadership occasionally takes on the sheen and the role of the rule breaker: loud talking, defiance, acting upon conscience. These are patterned codes of behavior that exceed Levine’s watered-down reading of Kozol and Foucault; these codifications of compliance with authority exceed, even, Foucault’s theory of docile bodies: these ideals punch the docile bodies by removing any agency that may be left in terms of self-expression or the ability to comment on wrongdoing or ethical dilemmas out of fear of chimerical grade-based control. Not only must one be silent and non-disruptive, but one must also be participatory and actively, visibly, do good for someone else; remonstration of anger or displeasure of any sort – the last vestiges of selfhood, even when directed at oneself (I would grunt or growl at myself if I got a question wrong, or was bored in class – which was often – and would typically get conduct points deducted for such behavior) – are not allowed. The self is not just an elastic good to be stretched for compliance in the system: the self is snapped so there is no more resistance. College students balk at participating in social and political causes due to absentee policies and missing work and missing opportunities to make grades to further their educational activities; high school students confront the prospect of the “permanent record” (which is sealed at age 18 or graduation and does not, in fact, either exist or follow them to college) and the same absentee policy and the same lacuna of work. But to run parallel with a criminal element, even for the most rebellious youth, brings a shamefulness if they have been fully coaxed by the system.

Moreover, for those students – and, later, workers – caught up in the mythology of hard-work-equals-success, the real possibility of failure from democratic organization is a deterrent. Not all social movements have generated the results they desired: the first abolitionists had to wait until the Emancipation Proclamation to revel in their ideological victory some two generations later – and, perhaps, wait still until 1963 and 1965 for the Voting Rights Act and the Civil Rights Act to pass. Suffragists had to wait almost a full four generations before the 19^th Amendment was ratified, and sticklers of history will note that – at least with North Carolina signing off on it as a technicality in 1971 – not everyone was on board. These political, social movements, while garnering capital and acolytes along the way, initially failed, and indeed repeatedly failed. The movement for the passage of the Equal Rights Amendment – if indeed it is a movement not moribund – is entering its fifth decade. Failure in some form or fashion is inevitable with a social movement, be it a failure to communicate the message through a rally or protest or a failure to pass legislation. As with any failure, there is room for improvement and recovery and resetting – cliché, perhaps, but one must learn from the failure in order to prepare for the next round. Schoolchildren and employees, especially those in the Helping professions and in service industries, are pummeled into believing that failure is not, is never, an option. This surrounds us in professional sports (didn’t catch the ball? Out!), in politics (human foible surfaces? Out!), on TV (didn’t get the right answer on Final Jeopardy? Out!), and virtually everywhere. Granted, I don’t want my brain surgeon to fail when he’s operating on me – but I want him to fail repeatedly in med school. We enter into a consciousness of total fatalism as it pertains to failure: to make even one mistake is to be worthless, to shed all propriety of worth of the duty or message. Failure is unpalatable. Failure is not wanted. But not every march on the State Capitol results in the governor abandoning an unjust bill: and we, as a populace, have been very well conditioned to avoid failure, of any sort, at any cost – even, paradoxically, if it means the failure of the democratic system we are charged with keeping in line.

2. Prolonged Adolescence in Gen-Y and Millennial Groups

A societal shift has occurred, and continues to metamorphose: as young people progress through college and through their 20s, they stave off making larger, customary, traditional life decisions that their parents and grandparents made by the time they were 30: career choice, marriage, children, property ownership, and the like. The urgency to “grow up” has been scaled back, for myriad reasons, and discussion of this shift is outside the scope of this discussion. Needless to say this slowing of adulthood’s pace has created a form of dissonance of duty, a generated momentary incompatibility between lives lived in late adolescence and early adulthood. This delay in coming of age creates a dualism of minor entitlement and minor (or major) dependency upon temporary structures: children complete high school and are told it is a high honor – but the reward cannot merely be intrinsic. Completion of college and graduate school are not intrinsic end-goals as there must be something beyond. Economic woes aside, young people are having a more and more difficult time holding on to the necessity of their studies and securing and solidifying their desires in adulthood. This could be a momentary questioning of the meritocracy the person has come of age into; this could be that plus a larger crisis of identity, an epistemological break as the transition continues. Persons wish to remain somewhat free of real responsibilities as long as possible yet yearn for the independence apparently granted by participating in the larger social system they have inherited. This is not just a class-based phenomenon, and as a rule may not always apply to persons aged 21 to 26: what it does is momentarily cripple the person into temporary solipsism as they look to parents, friend, family members, and other support systems as a means to clarify identity – there is no time, in the short lens, to be concerned with (longer-range) societal problems.

3. The Criminal Justice Complex and the Dialectic of Patriotism

These concepts of loss of contact with civic duty and responsibility and a fealty to the meritocratic method of living feed into two seemingly distinct yet intertwined facets of speech in the United States: the criminal justice complex, and a dialectic of patriotism – albeit a skewed one. The push and drive of paradoxically succeeding through grades and hard work while being a complicit and compliant docile body is by design a prevention from landing in jail: we hear the argument, perpetually made by white writers for “urban” television characters in a thoroughgoing paternalistic manner, to pull oneself out of the muck by the bootstraps, to stay in school and stay out of trouble, to get an education and get out of the “hood.” This ideation of scaring a person straight to prevent criminal activity – to become a supplicant to the controlling environment of a school in order to quell rebelliousness and curiosity – is in turn fed by, and reinforced by, a criminalization of any behavior not sanctioned by the Institution. This abstraction of criminalization becomes engrained and fetishized in order to, as Foucault serenely puts it, defend society. Against what?

George W Bush famously uttered the words, as it pertained to finding those responsible for 9/11, “you’re either with us, or against us.” At no other time in recent memory has such a diaphanous dichotomy – false entirely – been spouted. Zinn and Chomsky write plenty about this, but suffice it to say that the ideal of being against is something no normalized human wants to do within society; but in this very dichotomy, the essence of democracy is incalculably lost. The opposition, the dissent, disappears because it is now, essentially, criminalized. One must stand for country and follow blindly or open-eyed into war; to say otherwise is to be outcast, ostracized, to be in a manner of speaking stateless, and this generates a devastating dialectical tension. One is for or with us, whoever this phantom us is (not abbreviating the United States!); or, one is against or not for us, not with us. We are left with an agonizing choice of what the outcome could be – and disregarding elementary Hegelian structures for the moment, it becomes a choice between a perceptual criminalness and a perceptual goodness: who dares go on the defensive to explain why they are against the agency of society as a whole? Who dares maintain that a democracy cannot be folded into one methodology or praxis of thought? Who dares countermand the call of Patriotic Duty, whatever form that may take, without running the risk of being a citizen without a country? Stateless citizens are not tolerated, and persons not abiding our State are not allowed: undocumented workers and Palestinians can attest to such things, as can colonial subjects in adopted imperial fatherlands. These are criminals, or treated as criminals, or personae non gratae. They are imprisoned. They are sidetracked from achieving meritocratic goals. They follow – and are followed by – reputation and memory. Should we vocalize dissent, we are imprisoned in an architectural, spatial incarceration of metaphor; we lose social capital; we lose cultural capital through exclusion; we become alienated until we make obeisance to the social order, establish a new social order, or lash out against the dominant power. Lashing out perpetuates the cycle and denudes us of even more of the societal protections that complicity with the dominant order affords us. This is no different from a convicted felon being afforded no exculpation or assistance from the society to which he or she has paid a debt, and in desperation or because of the necessity to live within the social order must resort back to what initially created a felon out of that person.

4. Induction of Anger or Outrage over the Wrong Things

There has been a stronger inclination (especially post-9/11) for social movements – planned and ad hoc, sensible and senseless – to generate around what I call Phantom Actors.

A phantom actor is not a straw man and not symbolic for a larger issue, but a cause or ideal that a segment of society perceives as running counter to the shared, if liquid and heterogeneous, goals of society that needs to be targeted, illuminated, and eliminated, in order to preserve a society and protect it from invented, arbitrary wrongs. In short, it is an invented enemy and a quick and easy target for the manifestation of displeasure that detracts from other, larger, more pressing societal issues. The phantom actor is also occasionally a sporadic recipient of an ephemeral chaos, such as in the case of the riots in Vancouver when the city’s hockey team failed to bring home the Stanley Cup on home ice. While begun by only a few citizens, the bystander effect and mob rule settled in, and in a uniquely postmodern, information-age way, digital video and photos were taken of smiling Vancouverites smashing windows or standing next to smashed windows, all in the name of voicing some voiceless and imagined rage about an event that while it touches some small part of the psyche is inevitably doomed to illusion as it does not significantly affect or dramatically alter any lives (except for those who were playing for Lord Stanely’s Cup), or, verily, significantly or radically alter the course of history. The phantom actor here is, of course, failure: the hockey team personifies this failure; debility and inability to confront the personification results in a confrontation between objects in space, and with the geographic space the representation or synecdoche of the phantom actor, storefronts, cars, rubbish bins, and the like suffer the consequences of this abjection of Buber.

A better example of this phantom actor scenario comes into play with a string of relatively recent “protests” – led by Anonymous – against Scientology. Granted, Scientology is a pernicious cult that abides by a P T Barnum bromide and a proverb attributed to Thomas Tusser, but no less so than any other organization that creates wild metrics of belief in order to imprison weak-willed and deep-pocketed individuals: Scientology happens to have a very thin veneer that is easily exploitable by rational persons. The key here is “easily exploitable,” and as such, easy to subvert and call into question. That is to say: it is an easy target and a cheap shot. In 2007 and 2008, there were numerous, small protests coordinated largely by college students to stand up against Scientology, and some students have admitted to organizing and demonstrating just for fun. In 2007 and 2008, the first signs of the Great Recession were underway: why not protest TARP or various Wall Street bailouts? Why not assemble and protest in front of offices of sub-prime lenders? 2007 and 2008 also featured relatively bloody upticks in the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Where was the sanguine and righteous indignation that Bin Laden had not been found, that no WMD were ever found, yet American military personnel continued to die? Scientology, then, became a phantom actor – and the protests became a solution to a problem so societally small and negligible in terms of domestic and foreign policy, a call to action when other, much more long-range and pressing issues demanded political and societal outrage.

The best recent example would be the outcry in New York over the proposed Park 51 Islamic Center. Despite repetition from the Muslim community stating that there would be no “mosque,” and only a cultural center akin to the JCC on the Upper East Side, the proposal of this so-called “Ground Zero Mosque” drew the ire of many New Yorkers (some undoubtedly trucked in by FOX News), never mind the presence of Islamic centers and mosques scattered throughout lower Manhattan. The issue is already a Zeitgeist, with very few lingering protestors, despite Park 51’s plans to carry through the renovation of the space. This incidence of the phantom actor is a bit thorny, but still transparent. The proposed center became the straw man for anti-Islamic sentiment still harbored by a minority of New Yorkers yet traumatized by 9/11, but at the same time, Congress was wrestling with – and nearly killed off – a piece of legislation to pay money out to families of firefighters and emergency workers permanently disabled due to physical and psychological effects of working at Ground Zero on the day of the catastrophe and in the weeks and months afterward. Park 51 became the phantom actor for misplaced zeal and unresolved heartbreak from New Yorkers still searching for a scapegoat, still afraid of Islam: instead of picketing the Houses of Congress or Bloomberg’s office (or skyscrapers), citizens flocked to that which had the least bearing upon social and political outcomes for themselves and their fellow New Yorkers. The choice became: protest the White House to find Bin Laden; protest Congress for handwringing over the First Responders Bill; or protest a progressive cleric, his financial backers, and a proposed community center that happened to be Muslim.

5. Normalization of Decrying Earlier Populations who Took Part in Activism

The term “’60s Radical” has come – at least to my ears from those younger than I am – to symbolize the whole gamut of political activists and activism groups during the 1960s, and no longer just evoking the SLA or the militant wing of the Black Panthers or Abbie Hoffman’s Yippies or Edward Abbey’s later radical environmentalists. Similarly, we need not turn any further than South Park to see a popular revulsion against Hippies or people otherwise labeled “countercultural” with symbolic, paradigmatic markers and associations with 1960s culture writ large. “Hippie” has become a dirty word: it has re-entered the cultural lexicon as a pejorative epithet applied to modern-day children of entitlement and privilege; at its best, it is used to describe holdovers, anachronisms or residues subscribing to the evasive archetype of what a hippie may have been. “Anti-war” has come to be associated with draft-card-burning, sideburn sporting (and in 30 years, neoliberals with hedge funds) college students who “hate” their country. This language and empty duality of patriot/traitor has certainly existed longer than since the Vietnam era, but as such a defining moment in the history of recent dissent, the labeling of “draft-dodgers” and war protestors as unpatriotic – most clearly seen in the Nixonian rhetoric of the “Silent Majority” – became a method to subjugate dissent and normalize a code of behavior supportive of the aims of American foreign policy. This has historically become conflated with the dialectic of patriotism (above) as well as finding interpersonal resolution in an apparatus of Othering, but in an Othering of history: in the 1960s we find these diverse social movements, and since then no apparent analog because we are unable to imagine a new analog. The movements themselves have been ridiculed – by scholars and ordinary citizens – as idiosyncrasies, as an independent, unrepeatable moment, and, in the case of the Vietnam conflict, doomed to failure and fruitless as the shadow of the Other was cast upon those who balked at the War-Authority. The 1960s movements cannot happen again not just because we cannot imagine a new analog, but because they have been mythologized and shaped as monochromatic pushes to end injustices – injustices that in some form or another still exist – and as a sum-total shadow-self of polite, normal American society: indeed, the rebellious Other of ourselves we refuse to acknowledge.

6. People Can’t Afford to Organize or Are Otherwise Too Comfortable

There is a deceptive comfort in being solidly middle-class or bourgeois, and that comfort comes from the ability to have just enough time in one’s day to attend to everything else that does not pertain to an occupation or vocation. This slice of time diminishes by orders of magnitude when spouses and dependents are entered into the equation, and as time being the most precious commodity (in abstractum), it must be spent, one imagines and assumes, upon those things most central to a daily life. Organizing, rallying, picketing, and striking: these inexorably eat into the time-bank and are contraceptive to what is recognized as a “balanced,” middle-class life. Despite the amount of time put forward in the work environment, despite the amount of time dedicated to leisure, there is only “just enough” time in the day, or not enough, for bourgeois citizens to engage in all symbolic markers that solidify and reinforce their class and privilege. To-do-lists are impossibly long, our commitments to pushing our children through the meritocratic system too manifold, for us to be able to schedule or pencil in any time for civil retaliation or discourse of any kind. This is, of course, a fallacy, but one which we, as a comfortable society, refuse to acknowledge and comprehend.

This time phenomenon is also intricately woven with forms of architectural incarceration and geographic passivity in the forms of commuting, the use (or absence) of mass transit, and so on, as well as bound up with a fear of loss of borrowed time through the recrimination of speech by way of laws and by-laws that forbid such things as political activities “on the clock,” joining unions of any sort, and the doling-out of sick-days and vacation-days based on how many days in a row, how many hours in a row, one has sacrificed to the good of the larger system of employment.

Every American worker commutes, and the vast majority of workers commutes at least ten minutes, typically by automobile, from house to work. Quite often, work is not centered in the downtown or city center; work is rather situated on peripheries, on peripheries of peripheries, far separated from seats of governance and government, removed from the symbolic geographies of Power and Control. In order to voice concerns or assemble, one must travel, one must commute, expend additional resources (in addition to time-resources) on gasoline, parking, and so forth. For those who do have access to public transportation, there are very few citizens who hold regular employ who have access to perfectly free public transit, and then there is waiting, riding, disembarking, and so forth. These are paltry measures in cosmic scale, but for persons not equipped with long-term ideals, the inconveniences can be cumbersome and return back to feed upon the resource of time. Public transit in itself becomes a mild form of architectural and systemic incarceration since one is at the mercy of the timetables as well as the whim of financing and will of the workers responsible for the transit. Ironically, in places that do not have public transportation or have very poor public transit infrastructures in place, the absence of choice of transportation becomes its own incarcerating device. There is, of course, also the popular stigma of public transit (generated from real and imagined legacies of the American South and the working poor), a specter isolating the less well-adjusted from using the resource as a means to voice dissent in centralized places.

It goes without saying, of course, that wage-earners with families, or two-income families with manifold responsibilities that may also be wage-earners in the lower “castes” of industry and service can scarcely afford to miss work – routinely, in the case of prolonged social movements – in order to participate in visible outcries for change. Given the number of states with Right to Work legal policies, the populace has been terrorized into fearing the loss of their jobs for any insignificant reason, let alone skipping work in order to be a soldier of conscience. Sick Days and Vacation Days – if an earner does indeed have a position where such things accrue – must be scheduled in advance or proven necessary after the fact by medical, legal, or public safety personnel. The very possession of a job is itself a form of incarceration, replete with hierarchies and social mores that disallow interaction with conscience and demonstration, creating a subtler, more terrifying (because of a worker’s dependency upon it) docile body system. [9A]

So, why are we not rioting?

These conditions have a summed effect, and are greatly interdependent. While each relates back to some mechanism of social control and behavioral authoritarianism, each is its own subtle manifestation originating from a wide-ranging field, from the apparatus of dictated patriotism to the quelling of intellectualism and subversion of introspection and extroversion in schools to the policies and laws by which we live or are expected to comply with.

Certainly, many of these conditions, these criteria – mine and others – exist in England. The differences of educational systems are outside the scope of this essay, but the docile body is still present, if not prevalent, in grade schools in Dorchester and Kent. Surveillance culture practically originated in the UK – the borough of Wandsworth in London has thousands of CCTV cameras, almost one camera per three residents. The meritocratic ideal is still prevalent in England, if tempered by a socialized medicine system (in contrast to the American ideal of being healthy costs money, and more money is a result of hard work), yet stoked by incredibly prestigious institutions and severe competition for government funding across disciplines. There is still an Othering regarding patriotic duty and dissent in England, but nowhere near as normalized and rigid as the invisible system at work in the United States.

There is also an additional aspect to the riots in England presently: the legacy of colonialism and the dilution of communities of color within the UK. Summed up by a retort to a BBC Anchor, Darcus Howe remarked “have some respect for an old, West-Indian Negro” when asked if he was participating in the London riots and asked whether he had been a rioter before. The anchor: blonde, blue-eyed, and British. The rush to blame persons of color, encapsulated here, and the rush to accuse a criminal element has its legacy in paternalistic treatment of black émigrés to England from Trinidad and Tobago, Barbados, Jamaica, and other lands once dominated by The Crown: they were placed into occupations and realms reserved prior for “northerners” and lower-class, uneducated persons, creating at once a tension between the immigrants and the lower white classes, and securing a second-class citizenship through un-venial disaffection, despite aristocracy looking upon the tolerance of immigrants as a favor of sorts to escape the “hardships” of life on their native soils. Racism in England extends also to Indian and other Subcontinental immigrants and to the relatively recent influx of Muslims and Arabic-speaking persons into England, all quarantined and largely occupying spaces of service or helping professions, perpetuating colonial legacies.

Beyond race, however, lies the generational divide. While racial matters surely figure into being catalysts of the London (and other UK) riots, we must contend additionally with the fact that over a million youths aged 18-24 in England are unemployed – the largest amount since the mid-80s, and almost as high as the unemployment rate during the Great Depression. [10] Education, thanks to austerity measures, is out of the hands of these young people and beyond realistic financial reach for many socioeconomically disadvantaged youths. The riots transcend gender and ethnicity as well, with young women and persons of all colors participating in smash-and-grabs, vandalism, and creation of chaos without an ideological backing. Scholars and reporters are scrambling to find and create an ideological purpose (as Bauman does above) to these riots, but an overarching ideology – even if it is loosely that as defying the dominant capitalist order – implies caution, planning, idealism of some sort, and a purposeful outcome. What do these youths have to plan for, if we are to assume that they have “failed” at the meritocratic system by not being able to secure higher educational goals or occupations to keep them docile and happy? Why should these youths plan if they are the cast-aways of polite society? Meritocracies and capitalisms have their winners and losers: these youths are plainly the “losers” as they are not those wielding power. They have left only their minds and bodies with which to fight, and systematically denied of the ability to engage their minds, they choose bodies and physically manifesting perturbation. This exceeds Bauman’s idea of a deficient consumer or failed capitalist, and stripping away the avuncular veneer of the aging social theorist, what we have instead is a desperate attempt to not only lash out at the system of symbols and signs at work in the realm of conspicuous consumption and capitalism, but to come within a few inches of possessing those artifacts of the Good Life and seeing the illusion of the means of production and consumption, both forms of means that their society and their inheritance (or absolute and total lack thereof) have walled off to them, forms of means that shout and echo that they are societal failures. They have nothing and are reminded of it consistently: the last resort is to simultaneously take by force and destroy so that the property they have been denied – property they have promised through societal fallacies – cannot be enjoyed by others who have “made it.” Locke’s words of life, liberty, and the pursuit of property cannot be overlooked: these youths very well only may possess life; CCTV and forms of surveillance are omnipresent in the UK, and much post-capitalist, societal liberty is underpinned, underscored, and underwritten by financial capital, merging with the pursuit and propriety of property, creating the symbolic order of meaning of living in general: thus, in the conventional, consumerist sense, these youths are not just merely “defective consumers” – they are, in essence, devoid of worth in total and are damned to perennially remain worthless. There is nothing left to lose, and only everything to gain, the first such generation in decades that has looked upon the world and has come away from it completely wanting.

Additionally, observing the movements in the 1950s and 1960s reveals a vast difference in demographics: while today a relatively small proportion of Americans hold a bachelor’s degree or higher, a far smaller proportion of Americans were “educated” during these earlier decades. The resistance of college students – many of them first-generation students – to willingly go to war in Vietnam might be a direct result of evading a threat against educational and personal sovereignty: the prospect of attending college, finding better work, and securing oneself as solidly middle class came under fire as draft cards were being issued, and this prospective sacrifice overseas was unpalatable and incompatible with personal and broader societal goals of transforming the population into a securely educated one. The movements circulating the Civil Rights struggle were to allow access to educational and occupational opportunities theretofore unknown to and precluded from the purview of the African-American, and the struggle centered around not just the ideological goal of equal treatment of human beings, but of equal access to systems that were off-limits, of acknowledging the institutionalized discrimination that prevented African-Americans from gaining footholds and being able to engage with the meritocratic system whites enjoyed. The thrust of both larger movements symbolized the necessity to gain, not the fear of loss, and generationally, these movements occurred at the initialization of growth in college attendance and educational achievement that this generation is walking into. It is still widely held that to be a proper, middle-class American, one must complete an undergraduate degree; college attendance is now seen as the logical conclusion of K-12 education, as a mandate – and increasingly as a birthright – for Americanness, and is almost viewed as a given. The threat of removal of this mandate does not appear imminent – not yet, for there are still methods in place to pay for college as costs continue to soar. College is not yet “elite” enough, not yet expensive enough, and options to pay for higher education are still too many; there is no push for a generation of younger students or would-be students (or their financiers) to take to the streets, despite increasing student loan debt, despite increasingly-high private loans and second mortgages.

Unemployment in the United States is currently at 9.1% - doubtless among the highest rates of the past 75 years. The U-6 measurement currently sits at 16.1% [11]. The unemployment rate for African-Americans is 15.9%. [12] There are no actual new jobs being created: in effect, what is happening is that the residues left behind by Empire Building during the last decade are crystallizing and separating and allowing occasional employ to return. The largest sector of growth the past three quarters has been in the service industry, and at that, a majority of openings have been part-time. Thousands of people with master’s degrees and doctorates are wandering aimlessly in search of work, any work, to be done. A thousand or more people showed up to apply for about 300 jobs at an underway Caterpillar heavy manufacturing facility near Winston-Salem, NC, in addition to applications already received. Previously safe positions in governmental agencies are no longer safe. Yet, we have not met a critical mass. There have not been enough jobs lost for a long enough time for people to move beyond the psychological pain of being a meritocratic failure, beyond the misery of having no occupational purpose. There have not been enough comfortable people affected by the recession, and there have not been enough severe austerity measures – not to downplay recent state and federal-level cuts – to propel the populace into ire and to force them to live outside their lifelong conditioning and architectural incarceration. In short, things are not quite bad enough for us to be overturning cars. But this begs the question of when will things be “bad enough”? And will that time coincide with a critical mass of people willing to step outside themselves? Will it be the generations of persons born after 1980, those who appear to be most affected in this country? The meritocracy game is apparently the only game in town – but it too is failing by virtue of eliminating eligible players: illusion begets illusion, and just as there is no longer an end-goal that seems palpable or true in any sort for young people wishing to make all the right moves, the mirage vanishes. What more do those generations have left to lose? What could they possibly gain?

Those who have so quickly called the rioters in England a “criminal element” without regard to what gave rise to the criminal activity are ignoring the greater problems, and are blind to potential future challenges. It is deplorable enough that young, unemployed, chronically-poor persons in England are referred to by politicians and media as “feral children” – but were there not persons who attempted to "reform” Kaspar Hauser and educate him as to the ways of polite meritocratic systems?

What about the thousands of persons who graduated from college or graduate school or high school this past Spring with nowhere to go and absolutely no options? Are they not also Kaspar Hausers dropped back into the churlish sea of Recession and Zero Opportunity, set adrift to either cling desperately to a floating piece of debris, or sink to the bottom?

So, why are we not rioting? Or at least picketing, or demonstrating, or following our constitutional abilities and peaceably assembling as to petition a redress of grievances? My final explanation would come as a combination of the conditions and topics discussed above with the final piece of theory: we have lost sight of, and have lost care of, the conceptualization of societal justice writ large due to continued mild forms of oppression and false views upon the means to secure justice. We see justice as that guiding principle that steers our ship of the republic, yet it is continually denied certain portions of our population through institutional structures; wealth can and has and will purchase imbalanced amount of justice for the wealthy; the model of the Czar and the Serf are not cast into history, but alive and well throughout the American landscape as the working poor and working classes subscribe to the ideal of meritocracy, toiling endlessly, trying to advance in life, to unwittingly help the controllers of wealth advance a little more. Justice does not come in equal doses to those who were born women, black in America, multiracial in America, or homosexual in America as it does to those who were born white. And even then, those not born into wealth are not likely to ever encounter it in their lifetimes, despite how hard they work, despite how conditioned they have been to behave and be good.

Saint Augustine once asked, “what are kingdoms without justice, but great robberies?”

The American people should know very well what sorts of kingdoms those are. The English youth might be on the path to figuring that out.

--

1. http://www.voxeu.org/sites/default/files/file/DP8513.pdf
2. The discussion of the “printing press” fallacy that adherents of an inflation-free, dollar-strong system is outside the scope of this essay, but it is worth mentioning that a society that creates money ex nihilo with no gold or silver standard – the same society that can fully expect outside interests to continue buying our debt yet controls the means of production (in absentia) of foreign producers for domestic goods – can afford to indeed create more money and flood the market: while it devalues currency to some extent, it devalues debt as well, and generating social spending will over time equalize this debt and glut of money.

3. http://www.epi.org/publications/entry/7441/
4. http://web.epi-data.org/temp727/EPI-TCF_IssueBrief_311.pdf
5. http://blogs.hbr.org/cs/2011/08/the_real_solution_is_growth.html
6. http://www.social-europe.eu/2011/08/the-london-riots-on-consumerism-coming-home-to-roost/
7. http://www.alternet.org/story/151850/8_reasons_young_americans_don%27t_fight_back_--_how_the_us_crushed_youth_resistance?page=entire
8. http://chronicle.com/blognetwork/tenuredradical/2011/08/london-calling-a-reflection-on-rioting/
9. This is indeed a paradox, but of small magnitude. I am indeed using the Internet as a means to put forward these ideas, and, as a matter of course, all of my information was gleaned from the Internet. However, and this may belong to any one of my categories outlined above, I have noticed a severe uptick in populist anger emanating from social networks. One can Tweet all day about the unfairness of systems and be a clarion for change, but I have yet to see (in the United States) a widespread usage of social media as a means to successfully organize and action some sort of change. Twitter, especially, seems to be a storm cloud that hits a mountain range of surveillance fear, impotence in organization and demonstration, or a fear of authority: the power is there, but, as it were, nothing is precipitated.
9A. I originally included additional rationales but felt these were well-covered already or fairly obvious. Compassion Fatiague / Lack of Empathy: Mediation of protest viz. social media, etc., creates a false sense of work or accomplishment; we have been inured by popular media and MSM to impassively stare, to be detached from our own gaze; coverage of civil unrest has decreased greatly and precipitously since 9/11, and current media coverage is laughable and ignores root causes. All these together collude to justify without our consent an absence of empathy and a tiredness of action and will. Cooptation and Commoditization of Activism: Join the ACLU or Amnesty International for X dollars a month; we expect gifts for contributing to causes; subcultures have been privatized; activism itself has become a form of commodity, absorbed by something it once attempted to ignore/outrun. Loss of Perceived Power of Organization: New Jersey teachers’ strike vs. NCEA rally; Vietnam mass demonstrations vs. Iraq war demonstrations (college students and 60s holdovers); organizing for political things now is only done in “elite” urban centers (in contrast to how the Civil Rights era took shape in smaller towns); satirization of organization viz. Colbert’s March to Keep Fear Alive, and Stewart’s Rally to Restore Sanity (sanitization); protest and outcry efficacy and potency has been watered down by misuse of the freedom to organize.
10. http://www.npr.org/2011/08/11/139521599/foreign-policy-britains-young-and-relentless
11. http://portalseven.com/employment/unemployment_rate_u6.jsp
12. http://www.bls.gov/news.release/empsit.nr0.htm

a little essay on a pointless subject

In the second time in as many weeks, a peculiar phenomenon has swirled around the Internet: the erroneous meme. [0]

Within minutes, it seems, of Barack Obama’s statement disclosing the death of Osama bin Laden, Facebook, blogs filled up with quotes attributed to Martin Luther King, Gandhi, and others about nonviolence, turning cheeks, and so on, particularly those that warned against taking joy or pride in the suffering or death in others. Primarily, one particular quote by Dr King became all the Internet rage, highly shared and published. Too bad it wasn't completely, or at all, Dr King's words verbatim, or even a close mash-up.

Flash forward a week. After the American public has come down from its cathartic high of an apparent end-of-a-chapter regarding the world’s (or, at least, America’s) most wanted terrorist, we see a new phenomenon spread across the ether in the form of remembering that there was a royal wedding of some sort or another in England recently. As such, posted all around the Internet-world is a photo – an apparent study in the uncanny – showing supposed similarities between the recent royal wedding and the Disney animated film Cinderella. Too bad that it, too, is a fake. Or, at least, in part. The comparison photo is doctored significantly to “factually” match the pictures from the royal wedding, but in the original film, Cinderella is a blonde, not a brunette; her enchanted gown is blue, not pristine white; the prince has dark hair – he’s no ginger or mussy brown-haired feller. The stepsisters’ gowns are likewise, obviously, altered to match the occasion. As one social media friend put it before

the facts were unleashed, “Disney must have a crystal ball.” While that could be true to a degree, the crystal ball needs some servicing. [1], and other social media across the digital realm sported – from humanist-minded individuals – a quote that has been misattributed to Martin Luther King. There is no evidence that King spoke those exact words, and at best, the quote is a conflation of various sources. The sentiment – to a humanist-leaning person like myself – is a beautiful one, but it was born out of inauspicious means as it takes portions of various speeches by King and throws them into a soup with other persons’ quotes.

The juxtaposition is below; underneath it are screen captures from the film itself.

My, my, my... I don't mean to sound catty, but it looks like you've had some work done.

The Original Ugly Sisters. (Not pictured: British folks) Yellow is the new red.

Our seeming lack of competition to debunk this faster than we raced to disprove the authenticity of the King quote aside, this speaks to a number of problems in how we absorb and understand information. Granted, these are no different from perpetual problems in journalism and historiography in general: how do we know what is truth? How can we compare records? What sort of research can we do in order to access actual facts? How do we know when we’re being lied to?

Rather, this attests to our seeming immediate acceptance of information without validating a source – and with a collective mentality of groupthink or sheer numbers outweighing the voice of reason, disproving the King “quote” or the doctored Disney pics becomes difficult in the face of a viral mimetic: if a person does not immediately spread the information and agree with a mass of persons who have already been sold to believing the information true and irrefutable, that person is seen as conspiratorially paranoid or cast into a bifurcated division. Or, worse, that person is seen as a non-actor, or a non-vector in a world of practically simultaneous information flow, and that person’s credibility as a source of information or an authority of any sort is questioned through demonstrated opposition to participating in perpetuation of a fallacy. Regardless the actual “truth” of the matter, that person, that non-vector, becomes diminished in the eyes of other participants.

This also attests to our submission of will to that of blind authority as well as to that of the benevolent lie.[2] Certainly, no one is harmed, per se, by altering a picture from a 1950 animated movie. If anything, just the opposite: a feeling of gratification, of familiarity, washes over the participant of the info-virus. It may even spur a few more sales or rentals of the film to see if the similarities are indeed that spot-on between Cindy and Prince, and Harry and Princess. If nothing else, YouTube will receive more ad revenue from people searching for copyright-infringing clips from the film or wedding. But, there is still something pernicious in this: some party knowingly alters a piece of information – something historically documented and very easy to verify or disprove with very little effort – in order to meld it with their own aims or agenda; or, in the King case, more innocently (perhaps), one person’s words are adjoined to another person’s words, and delineation – whether knowingly or unknowingly out of the heat of the moment or perceived immediacy – becomes unimportant, and, indeed, erased.[2,3] Again, this is nothing new. Tabloids, FOX News, MSNBC, “Journalism” programs on radio, the Internet, and cable – these all in some way or another alter, leave out, add, or decontextualise (or recontextualise) information in order to promote an agenda and promulgate a particular mode of thinking in line with their “core message” or their constituency (that is, the niche market that watches everything, commercial warts and all).

But here, we have an even more confounding problem: absent authority. The King quote started popping up rapidly on Twitter and Facebook without attribution of where it first originated. TheCinderella photo arose spontaneously, with no attribution of who created it. (Both things can be found through a lot of tedious backtracking) The democratization of information, ironically, has brought about (and this is just a pair of mild, recent examples) a democratization of authority [pi] ; paradoxically, rather than verifying or refuting each other in order to obtain the truth, we immediately accept as true and veritable that which can easily be shown to be untrue. This schizophrenic relationship invariably has existed for much longer than the past two weeks: snake oil salesmen, quack doctors, chain letters, and so on are but a few examples of blind or unknown authority, with greatly varying degrees of harm.[4] Still, the larger problem is that of a completely absent authority: a piece of information, a meme, something of the like is encountered, embraced as res ipsa loquitur, and disseminated immediately with a stark, stock reaction and greeted as factual – that is, until ownership, authorship, or creatorship is found, verified, vilified, debunked, or destroyed. Until such time, we appreciate and codify as true the piece of information without any apparent need or even desire to access authorship and creative ownership. [5]

Maybe McLuhan was ultimately correct in stating that medium is indeed the message.[6] And, to a quote I now attribute to Jim Nabors for no other reason than because I can, "you simply can’t believe everything you see [or read [on the Internet [or anywhere]]]." [7]

I should also, after the fact, editorially state that I am well aware that, at least, the Cinderella meme most likely originated from someone wondering aloud, "You know, this looks an awful lot like Cinderella," upon watching the Royal Wedding Highlight Reel and then potentially altering screen captures from the film and creating the "uncanny" juxtaposition document. However, it was most likely not presented as a hypothetical document, but proferred as a standalone, factual text that - regardless of disclaimers - was immediately encountered and assumed as truthful information by consumers and/or receivers of the information. And, as a true fallacy, it ballooned across the Internet like the dream of making $6000 a month working from home stuffing envelopes: a nice idea, sure, but impossible and rooted in benevolent deception.

Likewise with the King "quote" - the cobbler of the bastardized quote (who was revealed in the second link above) most likely meant no harm and was possibly not thinking of besmirching King's legacy - but rather a mildly opportunistic bent to have one's own words permeate the humanist-cybersphere (I know, I see the irony in it) was at play. Once the quote went viral on social media, it begat a kind of sanctity: it didn't look like King's words, or something looked amiss - but who, in a moment of national catharsis, whatever one's political or ethical ideals, is going to question such a pervasive object, or question the authentic authorship, without potentially invoking the sancrosanct (or sanctimonious) ire of the person reblogging or retweeting the quote? In a moment that generated a sort of undercurrent conflict through the apparent resolution of a larger, deeper, ongoing conflict, why stir up the waters and be seen as an attacker or discreditor of a text, especially if it is attributed to Martin Luther King - a legacy and personality we tend to look upon with awe and veneration?

Shrug.

***

0. I'm certain there are millions of erroneous or fallacious memes out there. The two discussed here are the only ones I noticed. So it goes.

1. In Disney's packaging,anyhow, Cinderella is the Beast That Takes on Many Forms: she is a redhead on the 1995 VHS cover; she appears as a blonde on the most recent packaging above – and she reappears with noticeably lighter hair in each sequel. In the 1950 film itself, she seems to vacillate between a run-of-the-mill blondie and at worst skews slightly ginger. There is also a fallacious, if not contrarian, assertion that the "wedding panel" in the comparison photograph originates from Sleeping Beauty; I don't buy it, because, well, it doesn't.

2. I refer in passing to a good deal of discussion in Sissela Bok's Lying and Secrets. In both, she deftly differentiates between forms of lying, actions versus intentions, and how we invariably strive but fail to ever attain or achieve such a thing as a "whole truth." So help us god. She also (in the latter book) discusses patterns of information flow and how we perceive, alter, diminish, or inflate information at every point during our existence, making ideals of truth-telling, confidentiality, and objectivity damn near impossible to ever attain.

3. Another interesting point of academic departure here is Zizek's characterization of secrecy and our knowledge - or lack thereof, willful or otherwise - of horrific ideals and actions. Using Cheney's half-hearted 2005 admission that there was indeed torture going on as contextual frame, Zizek calls into question the morality of what more there is to hide by making a feeble admission to an atrocity. This idea of "if you're going to do something secretly, why tell us" as a moral conundrum seems to fuel the sensationalism and apparent perfidy to truth as witnessed by the vast majority of "news" outlets: are we more morally reprehensbible because we didn't want to hear the truth, or are we more morally reprehensible because once we learned the truth - in whatever small, incomplete form - we were incensed and wanted to either unlearn it or end the truth? Zizek contends that through these actions and confrontations of partial truths, we slowly degrade a "spontaneous" moral consciousness - which seems to be a perpetual catalyst for compassion fatigue and disaffection. Or, maybe, this is a wild and elaborate way of saying that humans can only through perennial naivete retain a proper sense of shock at atrocities, crises, disasters, and falsehoods.

[pi]. DEATH OF THE AUTHOR! DEATH OF THE AUTHOR! DEATH OF THE AUTHOR! (Maybe?)

4. For a good time - if rather verbose and occasionally convoluted - I suggest Adorno's collection "The Stars Down to Earth," wherein Adorno dissects (too thoroughly) and problematizes the phenomenon of horoscopes as agents of blind authority and our willingness - nay, eagerness - to hear vagueness from unknown sources as auspicious harbingers for our daily mundanities.

5. Let's not get things like scientific or mathematical theorems, axioms, and the like mixed up with this. There are constant, fixed pieces of information that may or may not have authorship but can be verified through scientific and mathematical reasoning, and then there are informational pieces and elements of human experience that have creators: namely, for example, our entire recorded history.

6. Don't quote me on this.

7. Especially this essay.

young (or any) composers and how to work with others

Six guidelines for young composers regarding performances and working with performers and ensembles:

1. Always be gracious, even if you know that the performance is not going to transpire in the manner or to the level of perfection you desire for the piece. Graciousness ensures diplomacy; it also ensures that performers will want to work with you again, and that they will be more willing to perform another work of yours in the future.

2. Set reasonable expectations for what “perfection” is with a piece. I once had the pleasure of sitting next to Gerard Pape during a concert of his works where the Arditti Quartet was performing one of his pieces. A friend of mine asked him after the performance, “well, how close was that to what you wanted?” Pape responded: “about 50%, but I’m fine with that.” True enough, the piece was extremely difficult. Placing exacting standards onto performers or ensembles that inhabit a technical/musical ability echelon below what you want with a particular work will yield stress and irritability to you, and a resentment and recalcitrance from the performers. If the piece you composed is for a college-level orchestra and a high-school aged orchestra is performing it, adjust your expectations accordingly. By all means, challenge (younger) performers, but never berate them or condescend to them. (See point 1 for explanation.)

3. Always ask performers what they think of the work. Ask them what they like, what they don’t like; allow them to comment upon and be critical of aspects of your work that may indeed demonstrate a deficiency or area of improvement in your own writing; give them the agency over the piece, as an interpreter of the work, to understand your intentions, even if you yourself are uncertain of them.

4. Find a way to balance the performer’s agency with your own intent. Explaining why you chose particular pitches, rhythms, or techniques will yield much better results than merely telling the performer what you want. Help them understand what you want, and allow them to help you understand how they can accomplish that.

5. Never take a performer for granted. Compensate them, work with them, and be open to questions from them. I see no fault in asking them to comment or inviting discussion; I see fault in pestering them.

6. Never take a performance for granted, regardless of how hard you worked to secure it, or if it was selected for a performance where everything is out of your hands. It may be the only performance of that piece you ever have; it may be the last performance of that piece you ever have. Do everything in your power – if it’s logistically and financially feasible – to ensure that it is neither the only nor the last performance.

i'm not dead

It's been a while, I know.

Some reasons I've been failing to blog a lot recently:

1. There is a lot going on in the world right now a bit more important than anything I can contribute. Because I was too young to fully grasp the collapse of Soviet Communism in the late 1980s and early 1990s, and because Western media whitewashed the Balkan wars in the mid '90s (and widespread Internet access and a 24-hour news cycle were still in their infancy), I have been paying a lot of attention - perhaps too much - to the events in recent months in Egypt, Tunisia, Algeria, Libya, and elsewhere in the Middle East and north of Africa. Watching history unfold before one's eyes - veritably watching the world transform (and, yes, Western diplomacy and treatment of aforementioned regions will have to change in order to keep the world peaceful and stable) - in a sense takes precedence over my fumbling discussions of music or politics, and I cannot offer any compelling commentary on topics which do not have my full attention. This is not to say I've been glued to AJE or the BBC, but the bottle of glue has been on my desk since January 25. There's also that perpetual issue of that fucker in Wisconsin and my continued disappointment with this incarnation of the Democratic party and this administration and my secret wish for a progressive-populist Primary challenger and Faithless Electors for 2012.

2. I have been doing a lot of traveling. In the past several weeks, I have been to Detroit, Memphis, Greensboro, and elsewhere for conferences, performances, or (gasp!) job interviews. To be fair, only one interview so far; I should hear back within the week. I won't bore you with details, but it's fair to say that I really want the job and I think (well, finalists for such positions always think so) I'd be a great fit for the position. Otherwise, conferences and performances take time - travel, attendance (I am someone who pays undivided attention to the topics being presented, even if I don't fully understand or agree with what's being discussed - to hell with breaking out the laptop or the smartphone during someone's talk!), getting my bearings, working with performers, and networking. I've met and have had the pleasure of working with numerous fantastic performers over the past month, many of whom want me to compose works specifically for them. While I have a few weeks of downtime before the next bout of conferences and performances, it won't be long before I'm on the road or in the airplane again meeting fantastic people across the country - and right in my figurative backyard.

3. I have been writing, or trying to. I have a backlog of projects, and still many older pieces that need retouching before I release them into the world and put them in the hands of performers. A lot of my time recently has been used to organize older sketches, continue work on a piece for sax orchestra and get a sax/MAX and tenor/trumpet/organ works underway, and come up with a 15-month plan (arbitrary but not) for organizing and beginning/finishing projects. Naturally, when I meet one of the best violinists I've ever heard who asks me to compose a piece for solo violin, that project gets bumped ahead of projected larger chamber or orchestral/wind band works. Imminent performance is a much better motivator than a 1 in 500 chance of getting an ACO orchestral reading.

4. I have been applying to practically every composition or theory/composition posting I see. While I've only received three bites - well, one bite and two nibbles - this cycle, this is all in all a better hiring/job cycle than last year's, by a long shot. I think at this point I have applied for 44 academic or para-academic positions, skipping only five positions I knew about (Wesleyan, because, well, no way in hell I can replace Alvin Lucier; two community colleges; Towson, because it was clear they wanted a senior god faculty; and a religious college I won't name that asked if I smoked/drank/had premarital sex and why¹). One interview out of 44 positions, though not enviable, isn't bad by this industry's standards (where there are as many as 200 applicants per position), but given this is almost twice as many positions as opened up in total last cycle - and the cycle still has a few months of life in it - I feel a little better about my chances this year. As such, though, tweaking and rewriting cover letters, tweaking and updating vitas, running scores and CDs, and filling out online applications (which, let's be honest, should be streamlined and centralized into a common app!), soliciting or ordering reference letters to actually finding the job postings: all of this takes time. Some weeks I've completed as many as 6 applications, and, granted each app can take up to 6 hours to prepare, this can be time-consuming. This does not take into account my fruitless searches thus far for temporary, legitimate employ in the interim, which brings its own troubles and time-consumption.

4B. Interview prep brings its own troubles and rewards. In the spirit of rather being overprepared and having to scale back than being underprepared and appearing foolish, many days in February were devoted to researching (and relearning) some aspects of my field and making sure I was ready: from proper question-phrasing, to cogent teaching methods, to remembering what I wrote in my supplemental docket, I made sure I was well-prepared to do as well as possible in my interview without it being forced or inauthentic. The interview itself had its twists and turns, but I ultimately felt in some sense a bit overprepared, which is probably for the best. At any rate, learning piano pieces and doing my own analyses (before raiding JSTOR for pre-existing analyses), creating presentations, and practicing speaking in front of a mirror (because, god love 'em, the hogs on the farm just don't appreciate Bartok) also takes time away from blogging. My druthers are clear.

5. I have been ill. Those of you who know me well know that I have a chronic (though rare-to-manifest and generally negligible) neurological impairment. It has been acting out a bit more these past few months, and in the spirit of the ailment, I have had numerous migraines and have had some occasionally severe kidney problems since mid December. Don't fret! I'm by and large fine, but the unpredictability has thrown me curveballs at unfavorable times. While resources are slim, I have visited with doctors and I do have a modicum of medication to assist when needed. It's kept me at bay occasionally, but a few of my longer previous posts and a fair amount of musical sketches happened from my bed (this sounds like I am forever bedridden: yes, if two weeks total out of 10 is your definition of bedridden; it is not my definition). However, and this is the public service announcement, water is your friend - and, driving at night on a poorly-lit highway with a migraine aura is not your friend. (To those of you who get here from Facebook or other social media: it's much easier to throw a link up or type 100 characters mindlessly about something than it is to discuss in earnest a complicated topic. Don't be fooled by my prolific stature elsewhere!)

So, hopefully, for those of you coming back often to see if I'm still breathing, I am. Just, as I'm sure you understand, other things take precedence. As much as I like rambling about things or writing about music (not mutually inclusive), my creative agenda is first and foremost composing and striving for performances, and my financial/personal agenda is getting back into higher ed after a short (LONG!) hiatus from it.

Don't begrudge. I'll put things here occasionally. Maybe soon an update on my piece progress and new/exciting piece/project developments. Joy!

***

1. This is not a boast, but my answer to all three is "yes." Rather, while I understand a private, sectarian institution can (and will) maintain ties to its principles and challenge its applicants to do the same, I find this unethical for a variety of reasons and places the applicant on the defensive for what are, ultimately, personal choices that rarely, if ever, have bearing upon performance in a classroom or other academic setting. I listen to Judas Priest and Opeth. Does this make me more likely to engage in ritual human sacrifice? Hardly. I'm a vegetarian. Have I ever slapped the turkey out of someone's sandwich? Never. Does having a beer with dinner once every few weeks make me an alcoholic? Clinically and socially, unequivocally no. Does this application in question at least open the door for inference? That is, by answering yes, will the committee think I'm an alcoholic, and addict, a satyr? This is laughable and absurd monochromatic thinking, and puritanical approaches are responsible for a lot of blood. By answering yes, will it point me out as someone who engages in risky behavior? Well, yes, on all accounts, but, come on. I'm a composer - I'm already engaging in risky behavior. The rest is just filler.

thoughts on process

Note: I've taken a break from posting new entries over the past week as my time has been equally split between composing and watching Al Jazeera's coverage of the Lotus Revolution (or so it has been dubbed by Saad Ibrahim) unfolding in Alexandria, Cairo, and Suez. Watching a populist revolt and all-but-overthrow of a tyrant takes precedence over slathering my nonsensical musings all over the Internet.

Nonetheless, I don't want it to look like I've abandoned this blog (again), and I'll bring you a few more entries this week. The first one deals with process, or, rather, my process of late when composing multimovement works. Later this week, I'll bring you such nuggets as a long-overdue record review (haven't written one in a while), and a comparison between 3D video technology, air traffic control, and electroacoustic music. Other entries, of course, ad libitum, including more thoughts on multimovement work.

I write long pieces. Let me just get that out there. Granted, not all of of my works are long. I have a fair number of works that clock in under the industry-standard (and contest-standard) ten-minute mark. I just happen to be a composer who, despite idolizing Ravel's music in my early years, never took to heart Ravel's repeated statements railing against - gently or not - excessive development.¹ There are some reasons for this, but I won't get into all of them here. The biggest reason, perhaps, comes out of my process: I envision multimovement works much more easily than I do single-movement forms.²

Part of this is associated with my process, or one that I've seen develop over the past few years regarding multimovement works. When I started composing, and for the next eight or so years until an epistemological and stylistic shift about five years ago, I started working on a piece from the beginning and went straight to the end. I collected my sketches, started at the first measure of the first movement and progressed linearly until the very end of the piece came about. Over my last few multimovement works (the viola concerto, inflection points, and so forth), I have noticed a trend: after sketches get set down, the sketches becoming more like fragmentary pieces of a jigsaw puzzle to reconfigure and reshape - is it cheating to cut off the nibs and corners? - I tend to start writing chunks of the first movement, and then set it aside and start working on the second or other internal movements, leaving those sketches somewhat fragmentary. Typically, the final movement is the first movement to come to fruition in full without serious immediate revision or clean-up; the interior movement(s) ends up being the one I work on last. Somewhere in the middle remains the first movement. Gone are the days of writing perfectly linearly and going back to repair the damage, linearly. (Please note that I do remain faithful, largely, to primordial conceptions of form and design in pieces and that I do typically conceive of a structure - which I treat as fairly liquid - before I put the piece together.)

This does a few things conceptually and intellectually. Intellectually, it seems to make the piece much more organic and holistic, and creates a stronger sense of unity across movements. By using materials derived from a chunk (typically the opening) of the opening movement, the final movement presents all of the possible materials in a largely developed form, and I can take those materials - including those established on the fly for transitional or contrasting passages - and use those to create the interior movement or movements, as well as presenting prototypical (or developed) forms of the material in the opening movement.

The problem I had with composing linearly was that I didn't know where to go: I didn't know how to finish a multimovement work, and I doggedly, indefatigably kept up writing in the start-to-finish manner that seemed too formulaic and seemed to exhaust me. Moreover, looking at my earlier multimovement forms in depth (which I am not wont to do, believe me) shows a sort of thematic wandering: pitch systems may remain the same, rhythmic mottoes may remain if only subtly, but new material would pop up in the first movement that wouldn't show up anywhere else; or, worse, new material would arise in the final portion of the work and seem to be unrelated or only tangentially related to other material, which often made the work seem unfocused or unpolished.

Since I'm prone to writing multimovement works - and am at work at several such pieces simultaneously at the moment - the new system I fell into intuitively seems to work much better: the finished works seem much more unified, and the dramatic arc of the work seems to be much more satisfying: there's a greater sense of departure and return.

This process seems to do something else as well: it limits me from going overboard with material. When composing fully linearly, I had the tendency in early drafts of pieces to just, well, take off in a straight line, tornado-like, gathering up more and more and more material and dispensing with too much, too liberally. Oddly enough, this is not at all how I approach electroacoustic works. With the exception of critical mass, my giant 40-minute-plus fixed media sonic rant, my entire goal is to use as few source materials as possible when composing a stereo, quad, or 8-channel work. My intermedia pieces (so far) rely only on the sounds made by the performer, whether recorded or processed live. There's plenty I can do with a seventeen-second sample of a garbage truck. When writing acoustic or conventional music, in the days of old, I would fill sheet after sheet of staff paper with ideas and try to pick and choose. Perhaps it's discipline, perhaps it's something else; still, it's always been easier for me to derive from extant material, to expand small pieces of material and ideas, than it is to pick and choose from a plethora of ideas and considerations.

Retrospectively, this seems like a no-brainer: approach composing like a trade-paperback suspense novel. Come up with a solid opening; using these ideas and themes, arrive at an ending that seems to tie up all the loose ends. Go back and fill everything else in. But, I don't think a lot of composers, especially younger ones, know or understand that they can write pieces "out of order". So far, it's worked well for me. Best of all, it seems to help expedite composing: the pieces of that jigsaw fall into place much more easily, but not in a formulaic fashion, and much more quickly once the pieces gather inertia.

Thoughts? I've thought about the idea of trying to write a piece starting from the middle, or pulling a Steven King and writing backward. I also have other ideas using sheer process procedures to create forms, but perhaps later: the primary consideration is creating a musically sound (no pun intended), appealing, smart piece that challenges everyone in the room. Once I manage to do that, I'll start toying with different means of creating works.

*****

1. Despite his own objections to developing themes and motives, and while he was a strident formal classicist, I can't see repeated thematic presentations and reorchestrations of themes in Daphnis et Chloë, at the very least, as anything but forms of development. But that's an intellectual conversation for another time.
2. I plan on talking about multimovement forms and their place and necessity later on. Stay tuned! Maybe?