Natural Links, Linking Nature

I've been on a reading kick lately, and the author's name in John Urry. Funny that I did a Google search for "deconstructing nature" and can't quite recreate which text I found that referenced Urry's work The Tourist Gaze. I then checked my local library and found several other titles that really interested me in my project of theorizing journal writing in our post-human, post-process moment.

Lately, Urry has been working with complexity and mobility as extensions of his sociological viewpoint. What interests me is not only how he situates "tourism" as increasingly blurred into other life activities, not only how he stresses that structures promoting mobility for some also stress fixity and stasis for others, not only his overall thesis that sociology has been too long focused on "static populations," but that all of this mobility has "the effect of reconfiguring humans as bits of scattered informational traces resulting from various 'systems' of which we are unaware" (2006, p. 222). To me, this is of course social, but also socio-natural.

Taken alongside Plato's emphasis on arrangement in Phaedrus, a dialogue that puts Socrates in "strange" arrangements -- outside the city, as madman, as rhetor -- only to demonstrate Plato's critique of Athenian urbanity, Urry's work points up the importance of thinking through New Media not as just a techno-social project, but as a socio-natural one. In other words, a lot has been done already on the techno-social aspect of New Media. I'm thinking everyone from Anne Wysoki to Howard Rheingold, George Landow to Jeff Rice. But all of this seems overly concerned with social environments and new arrangements of social bodies via technology. If, following Bruno Latour, we need to reassemble the social so that what we previously called "nature" is brought into our processes and integrated with our "dwelling" on the planet, then we need to recognize that part of that reassembling means looking at our socio-natures.

I've already begun part of this.

Tortured/ Torture/ Ecology

I'm teaching a summer course (FYC) which has all the impossibilities about it and then some. But I suspect what really concerns me here would happen in any writing class. One student is Congolese and was imprisoned and tortured for his role in student demonstrations against Mobutu Sese Seko in 1990. This student describes being beaten, sleeping on a wet cement floor, enduring harsh daylight with no shade, etc. before he was released through pressure from Human Rights Watch. Rather than write the expected, an essay condemning the horrors of torture and arguing for humane treatment of prisoners, his essay is about his coming to the realization that torture is, under certain circumstances, necessary in that it promotes social regulation and control.

Now, my intention here is not to silence this argument. For whatever reasons, Pierre (pseudonym) needs to write this. However, the question is really one of my response. I have tried to be authentic and "me" in pointing out that my understanding of torture 1) harms the torturer (both individual and state) as well as the tortured, 2) has a specious connection with obedience and control, 3) opens up political questions about the individual relationship with the state, and 4) needs to be moire clearly defined in just about all of these cases, including Pierre's. There is rather wide-spread consensus in many circles (all circles but the Federal Government and Republican party, it would seem) that "enhanced interrogation" is torture. It also stands that Pierre suffered in several of the ways described. While he may not have experienced waterboarding, there are also no doubt other traumas he is dealing with. But where and how do we draw the line between torture and harsh punishment? Is there a difference? Does it make a difference that Pierre's case didn't seem to be tied to the extraction of any information?

More importantly, what effects does torture have on the torturer and the state which condones such activity on its behalf? When we oppose torture, when we try to negate it, we run the risk of its return. To put it another way, what is the ecology of torture and how should instructors act to stop its effects if not oppose it?

Online Reading

I liked this article. 'Nuff said.

Younger than McCain

Pretty funny song, but I think the images make it funnier. It's a good use of multimodal literacies.