Decisions! Decisions!

I haven’t blogged in forever, but this is going to have to be a flash blog post since I got TONS to do. Here goes:

The issue being raised is how to make decision. The complicating factor is whether institutional rules should prevail, or whether the human element should be considered. For instance, when running a program, it is important to maintain the integrity of a program and stick to rules, regulations, and other such discretionary policies. These outlined policies help guide people when it comes to making decisions, and they keep an organization consistent and well maintained. On the other hand is the human element, which takes subjective matters (such as one’s relationship toward something, the impact such a thing has on the group, etc) into consideration.

The case for human consideration is summarized in the philosophical challenges of egalitarianism. Suppose there was a train coming towards two groups of people, and you had control over how the train should steer. You can choose for the train to run over 100 people, or 10 people–which group would you choose to kill? If the ‘rule’ was to save as many people as possible under egalitarianism, then certainly, we would move to kill the 10 people. However, when you throw in the human element, what if the 10 people were your closest friends and family members? Would you still kill the 10? Or what if you knew that the 10 people were all extraordinary leaders who could bring world peace? What would you then?

So the institutional rule is convenient for making decisions, because the path to making decisions is defined and written in black and white. There is no extenuating circumstances, there are no extraneous considerations, there is no human element to consider. There is only the rules, and the rules are the rules to be applied to all people. But is treating all people as such considered just?

For instance, it is often argued that affirmative action should be used to redress the inequalities that have been persistent in the United States. However, opponents of affirmative action claim that such treatment isn’t considered equality and based on strict meritocracy. Yet, in order to take historical injustices into consideration, differential treatment (ie affirmative action) must be applied to balance the scales.  If treating everyone ‘equally’ isn’t considered right when thinking about ‘equity’, then would processing all people through simple rules and regulations be considered just?

I raise this question as one that is directly tied to one’s foundational life philosophy. In Rhetoric, it is important to consider every situation and circumstance based in its context. Decisions must be made in consideration of context. You can’t make the same speech to every crowd, just as you can’t bake the same pie and expect everyone to love it. You must tailor your speech, tailor your pie, depending on the audience you greet, the circumstances you’re in, the time frame in which you deliver. The contingent circumstance is a fundamental preoccupation in Rhetoric. Rules and regulations bypass circumstances and context and apply the same formula to all. But applying the same regulations for all is to ask people of all ages to listen to a speech on quantum mechanics–some people probably will not appreciate it, and most will probably fall asleep.

Basically, the point I am trying to make is that decision making based on rules and regulations have pros and cons. The pros include consistency, predictability, and reliability. The cons include not making the right decisions for the right people in the right occasions–a challenge that can bring frustration, injury, and sometimes injustice. How should one make decisions? How flexible should one be when making rules and regulations? When is being flexible going too far?

Ruminations

So it has come to this once again–the threat of extinction. If I didn’t blog in my post in another few days, my blog would have surely emaciated to a point past redemption. I’ve made up many excuses to avoid the arduous task of blogging, such as my having cut my finger, my responsibility of finishing The Omnivore’s Dilemma in the next few days, and my need to go on a mental vacation before school starts. But alas, I saw through these petty explanations as mere excuses and took my hand to the keyboard, to begin yet another session of transcribing my life and ruminations into the digital realm.

I will begin with a series of thoughts I’ve been having lately. First, freshmen are raining like cats and dogs all over Berkeley again, just in time for the start of Fall Semester 09. Seeing the families and freshies drop off their belonging in the dorms has definitely given the summer lull an electric jolt, and already, I can feel the blood begin to pulsate once again in the Berkeley machine. It was as if a period of hibernation has passed, and the muscles are beginning to pump oxygen into a system of weakening vessels.

In the midst of this excitement, however, I can’t help but feel that cliched nostalgia again–a deep longing for ‘doing over’ my freshmen experience. I don’t want to waste any further blog space ruminating over such a past, but I at least wanted to acknowledge this feeling and recognize its perennial hold over my psyche. It sucks. Perhaps that was why I wanted to be an “RA” for so long as a pathetic attempt at addressing this feeling of lack. But again, the ship has sailed. It’s time to move on.

Another idea I wanted to digest a bit further is my deterioration in style. For some reason, I feel my words growing clunkier by the day, as if they are growing baby fat from head to toe. I admit I haven’t been reading as many novels lately, but shouldn’t that just mean that my writing stays in place? I think this deterioration has a lot to do with how I think, as I sometimes find my words coming out in awkward and unpleasant formations. Occasionally, I would feel everything click as I write; but more often than not, the task of writing well has become quite a chore in itself. I wonder if simply reading more can provide the fix I need to restore my writing style to its previous flow.

Lastly, I just wanted to talk about reading Harry Potter. I never realized how heavily the HP series was saturated with progressive politics until I read it recently. For one thing, the whole racial discourse over Wizards, Goblins, Elves, Centaurs,  Wolves, Muggles, etc has taken on an eerily realistic feel. Not only am I reminded of ‘racial purity’ in the form of Eugenics and multi-racial identities, I also hear the echos of KKK white supremacy and Nazi Aryan domination playing out in the background. But the fun doesn’t stop here. There is also a distinctly call for political resistance against the established order, much like the call to resistance that is often embodied in Marxian politics. Additionally, the corruption in the infrastructure of Magic has a strange parallel with the corporate tampering in the current system of Democracy. Ultimately, I think the Harry Potter series was especially enjoyable for me not only because I resonated with the leadership characteristics of Harry and Dumbledore, but also for the progressive narrative that grounded the magical tale in the struggles and challenges of the present.

All the Difference

Recently, I discovered that pretty much every social critique I have been exposed to at Berkeley belongs on a continum of theories located in the overarching “discipline” known as “critical theory”. This has been a most exciting discovery, as now I can finally, FINALLY get a gestalt picture of how all of these different thinkers fit together on bigger scale. The reason why this has been an excruciating and frustrating ordeal is because critical theory is a conglomeration of most–if not all–of the social science and humanities type disciplines, including Economics, Political Science, Linguistics, Anthropology, Ethnic Studies, Literature, Sociology, Psychology, etc. Most notably, the fields of Philosophy and Rhetoric seem to form the most central foundation of critical theory, and the rivalry between the two disciplines supplies most of the richness that arises out of this study.

As much as I am excited by this newfound discovery, however, I am also quite aware of the potential pitfalls of jumping headfirst into the misty realm of abstract theory. First off, because critical theory is so interdisplinary, trying to learn it all comes at the risk of learning everything in the most shallow sense. It also means I won’t have time to dig deep in the various theoretical discussions unless I devote myself to such a practice for the rest of my life. Secondly, being able to call out a theoretical gesture and the counter-arguments is not a skill that is handy for finding a job–no employer is going to be impressed by my recognizing a certain theory as being particularly “Foucaldian”. This means that I will be accumulating impratical knowledge that won’t be used except in nerdy conversations about the state of the world. And thirdly, always being critical about the things I “consume” may be good on a personal sense (for my own clarity’s sake), but it will probably alienate me from the general public and the dominant tides of our consumer culture.

Basically, this means I will have to be prepared to some sacrifices. After all, the law of the “Opportunity Cost” says that doing one thing means you must give up something else. Spending a lot of time understanding the trajectory of various thinkers and building this theoretical scaffold will surely take much time. At the same time, I cannot be guaranteed that I will learn anything to satisfactory depth. To add insult to injury, the material I learn cannot be applied in any pragmatic way to provide for my financial security. Essentially, it has all the negative stereotypes of being a philosophy major without the institutionalized reputation of philosophy.

And so, with the ambivalence and uncertainty that Frost expressed at the proverbial crossroads in the woods, I will announce a similar, if cliched, sentiment as I embark on this path down critical theory:

“Two roads diverged in a wood–

and I, I took the one less traveled by,

And that has made all the difference.”

A nerdy video from the left

An interesting clip on Guy Debord. Who is Guy Debord? A critical Theorist in the lineage of the Frankfurt School and famous in his critique on modernity and its spectacular wonders. To him, I ask: How much is spectacle, how much is simply existence? Where is the point of intersection between the social imagination and the psychological construct? Enjoy.

A Post on Vegetarianism

Lately, I’ve been asked why I am a vegetarian. Because I grew up in a vegetarian family, sometimes I forget that vegetarianism is not the norm, that not all people understand why vegetarians would choose to not eat meat as a life conviction. “Meat is too good”, some people tell me, “Can’t survive without it”. Others add, “How do you know meat is not good if you’ve never tried it?” It’s true, there are certain things I can’t say if I’ve never tried eating meat. However, what I can say is that there are moral, environmental, religious, health, social, philosophical, political, and personal reasons for why I choose not to eat meat. Since I won’t be able to discuss all of these points in detail, I will focus this particular post on the personal reason. Personally, I chose not to eat meat out of a respect for and an awareness in the processes in life.

In the world we live in today, technology and globalization has made it easy to create, design, package, ship, shelve, and store products at such a rate previously unimaginable. Such an efficiency makes life more convenient, and it provides consumers with many more options to choose from. However, this inundation of products creates an overload that removes us from the process of production. When we walk into a supermarket, we see the product, the price, but not the process. This technological expediency creates a gap in our awareness between the product/price and the process that was involved. This awareness about the process, I would argue, is significant to living a meaning life, and the lack of awareness produces behaviors that are less sensitive to the cost/benefits, political dynamics, and interacting relationships in the world.

All things involve process, and this process can be considered like “history”. A leader has a history of learning and growth (going to school, growing up with friends, developing mentors, and finally becoming the leader perceived today), a product has a history of production, and an animal has a history of maturation (as all humans do), etc. To lose awareness in understanding such processes makes it more easy to navigate in our busy world. However, this detachment also removes a deeper respect and appreciation for the things we interact with. If I don’t know a leader personally, blaring headlines about his/her sudden death would mean little to me;  if I am unaware of the production process of a product, the fact that such items were produced with child/slave labor would mean little to me; if I forget that animals also live life, that they grew up from little babies, the fact that they were fattened up in cages,  injected with hormones, and cut up in a slaughter house will mean nothing to me as I order my 99 cent hamburger. Only the price would matter.

The loss in social meaning that results from detaching ourselves from the history of things around us can be illustrated in the following twists: what if the leader who died in the scenario above was your personal mentor who changed your life? What if the cheap diamond ring you bought on ebay was cut from a relative who was raped and killed in a third world country? What if the animal that was gutted and served to you in a 99 cent burger was the pet you had since you were 3? These alternative scenario clearly highlight how differently you would feel if these objects revealed their history as something that was intimately connected to your life. Ultimately, an appreciation for these inherent histories, an awareness that they exist, and a respect for their inherent values are what lend me personal strength in my conviction as a vegetarian.

Barthes’s Mythologies

I’m taking the lazy way out on my Blog posting by attaching a Precis I wrote for Roland Barthes’s “Mythologies. “Interestingly, I felt like I was reading a manual on being “French”,  as if I were peeking underneath the folds of the “French Zeitgeist” and finding nothing but emptiness. Too bad “Mythologies” was written in 1910s–I wondering what a Barthes treatment of contemporary corporate media culture would render… I bet the entries would probably take up 1000 pages, if not more. Enjoy the Precis.

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The basic message that Barthes seems to convey is that all things which can be read as text (objects, people, pictures, etc, and other representations) can be made into “myth”. To be made into a myth is to be emptied of historicity, to be removed from the contingent present. Barthes describes a myth in various ways: a myth is a type of speech, a naturalized symbol, a text stolen of its expressivity. A myth is depoliticized speech that is removed from the interactions in the world and made into ideology that is static and deliberate.

One “myth” that comes to mind could be the picture of the “Tank Man” standing before an army of tanks during the Tiananmen Square massacre. The tank man has been emptied of his history—after all, the man probably had to go home after his act of defiance and eat dinner. Yet, rather than be viewed in its full dynamism, the image of the tank man has become a natural symbol for the resistance of Democracy in the face of oppression. No other interpretations on the image seems to be as compelling as the mythology that has been achieved.

Bathes makes many other illustrations of the myths present in everyday life, and the entire first half of the book is dedicated to this project of breaking down and analyzing daily mythologies. The second half of the book takes a different turn and instead provides the argumentative thrust for his “myth busting” essays.  Basically, Barthes breaks down the semiotic structure of language to demonstrate how “mythologization” works on a linguistic level. He describes in detail how signification is attributed to a “signifier-signified” relationship, how second-order associations are constructed, and how meaning is re-constructed to create the mythology.

Barthes’s project of deconstructing the myths of everyday life seems to be situated in a kind critical theory that is a post-Marxist interrogation of the “manufactured ideologies” that have become naturalized through time. This approach also seems quite Nietzschean, as it attempts to reaffirm the possibility of radical re-signification by focusing on the seemingly trivial objects and symbols in the contingent present (Wine and Milk, wrestling, children toys, etc). The audience of such a work seems to be those who are engaged in a similar project of re-evaluating the social norms.

A few questions I had while reading Barthes’s Mythologies:
Where is “myth” located on the trafficking between the literal and the figurative?
Is it considered “artistic” in Wilde’s sense for a symbol to take on the figure of “myth”?
Is there an author for “myth making”? If so, who claims authority? Can it be controlled?
Does Nietzsche’s “How one becomes what one is” relate to the project of myth making?
What are the social implications of consuming mythologies?

The Mysterious World of Cosmetics

I haven’t blogged in forever, so I thought I should at least post something before my blog slowly withered and died. I was watching some videos on resistance to internet censorship in China when I came across this one youtube video on women cosmetics. I don’t know what got me curious enough to check it out, but as I watched it, my jaw dropped and hung loose for the rest of the video. I really never noticed makeup on women. It’s something I kind of treated like the leaves rustling on trees and the wind blowing around me–something completely natural and normalized in my life. After watching this video, I realized why women apply makeup, as well as how tricky, artistic, deceptive, and intriguing the entire process is. Basically, it’s art on the face, on oneself, a re-creation of what is to depict a more perfect ideal. To put it crudely, it is essentially a mask that covers what lies beneath. But then again, isn’t everything we do in life (what we wear, what we say, how we say it, what we watch, Facebook) a social mask unto itself? Enjoy the video.

Stream it Live!

For this post, I’m going to attempt a stream of consciousness type of writing that doesn’t stop for the next 10 minutes.

I had some thick brown soup with many eggs and mushrooms. The black and the deep hue of dirt has a very resonate feel to it–it feels I am almost drinking nature itself, packed and shipped from the bowl to the mouth as bits and pieces of substance. Like always, I’m concerned about the kind of commentary I give on my posts. As a result, I often end up pulling at my hair more than I do actually putting word on paper. The experiment I am trying to do has no direction except up, down, left and right. It tries to be grammatically correct for as long and as best as it can, but often times, grammatically correct and expedient sentences come at the cost of coherence. That didn’t rally make sense, did it? Either way, for what it is worth, my sentences are trying hard to pull themselves up by their bootstraps and begin to take off running. Unfortunately, the standard conventions of habit are weighing them down like anvil, dragging their feet in the cold sand that is insanity.

Why insanity? What isn’t sane, what isn’t coherent, what isn’t conventional–these things have typically be characterized and stigmatized as being “in-sane”, as in “not sane”. But what is “sane” anyways? The word itself, “sane”, gives off such a pathetic hiss, like a tongue that has lost control and is wobbling around and frolicing with the wind. Writing this is particularly difficult if my “stream” of consciousness is constantly being broken up by the rocks around me–rocks like distractions, impatience, loud noises, and worse of all–people. It’s crazy, really, the kind of sanity that people can bring to your supposedly “in-sane” words. The roles of the two seem almost reversed in this sense, like two similar looking people leading dissimilar lives trading places to see what it is like to live in each others’ shoes. Sometimes, it like a paper-jam, or a printer-run-amok and spitting nonesense out, page after page after page, word after word after word. It’s the code of the matrix that has gone bonkers, the program that has exploded in a flurry of pop-ups and porn filling your screen. Sometimes it seems to never end as it keeps coming, one after another, duties, responsibilities, tests, blah. Othertimes, it seems to just all. Stop.

I don’t know where I intend to go with this piece. I’ve attempt to “stream” stuff, but the rocks that are people have been getting in the way, breaking off my concentration and directing it elsewhere. I guess that can be a fun and exciting journey in itself somtimes, even if it detracts me from the original direction I am intending to head. That’s the beauty of the stream, I guess: you can put stuff in its way, but once it makes its conventional splash or slight turn of current, it will return to where it came from and move as a single massive rush, running towards the horizon that is Ocean. Don’t ask what it is doing going in that direction, towards that great uncertainty called ocean. Just enjoy its flow and watch it run. Then meet with it at the ocean and watch it destroy your sandcastle.

10 Minute Watch

For two days, I neglected my blog and found myself unable to focus or concentrate much on anything substantial. I wish I had a good excuse–perhaps something like “I was trying to locate myself in the continuum of life”, or “I was re-examining the contents of my commitments”–but alas, those excuses are inadequate for justifying my temporarily discontinued project of making a spectacle of myself online. To be fair, I was having my share of mental tedium that left me wanting nothing but sugar, sodium, and lots of comedy–a kind of joker’s fever, if you will. But fortunately, a few laughs and poorly-spent mornings later, I find myself beginning to feel more alive and excited several new developments.

For one thing, I found that coming to terms with I’m truly absorbed by and passionate about is quite important. If I’m not interested in a certain activity (such as reading a Pulitzer Prize winning novel), I shouldn’t try to force it into the mold of an activity I am actually truly excited about for the sake of personal development. Doing so not only wastes energy by consuming more attention and self-discipline than is necessary, it is also inefficient, unsatisfying, and masochistic. Of course, I will probably become more and more used to performing an activity once I have habituated the tedium and normalized the repetition, but  I can only rationalize my ego so far. It’s like adjusting your watch 10 minutes faster: you may think you’ll never be late to an appointment again, but really, let’s not kid ourselves. Your mind knows full well the crap you just tried to pull, and it will remain loyal to the “true time” that was 10 minutes slower and reject the blinking cop-out wrapped around your wrist.  To force yourself to believe in the adjusted time on the watch for the sake of productivity is to perform Orwellian Double Think on your own mind–a feat that even big brother will find quite pathetic.

My conclusion is this: the path is not “out there”, and if I keep trying to look for such a path rather than forge my own, then I will always be lost in pursuit. Instead, once I take responsibility for my current state and recognize that this path is my path, then I am no longer lost, for every fork in the road I take from now, every trail I blaze, each journey will be sincerely mine. I will have freed myself from the lie that is the 10 minute watch and the big brother that is my own uncompromising mind.

Say What?

To start off, I just wanted to mention briefly the chaos going on in Iran’s post-election protest right now. After I woke up today and got some coffee, I found myself staring into a big photo on the New York Times in which hundreds of thousands of people were filling the streets of Iran in massive blots of heads and hands. Election candidate and supposed winner, Ahmadinejad, flew to Russia to “discuss issues on International Security” with the leaders there, leaving the country in a state turmoil. In the photo I was looking at, there was a sea of people, and in the middle of this vast ocean was the opposition leader standing with a group of people on a car. “Wow”, I thought to myself. “That’s oddly reminiscent of Mario Savio standing on a car on Berkeley’s Sproul Palaza gathering during the 60s Free Speech Movement”. Given the spirit of activism of the Iranian people, shouldn’t I also be out there protesting for some cause I believe in here in the US? After all, there are many things I could be fighting for right now, such as health care reform. What am I doing here!!?

Anyways, I have to say I’ve been beating around the bush for quite a while now.  The pursuit of happiness has become a joker’s rollercoaster, taking me on journeys that are sometimes closer, but oftentimes further from the destination I was intent on reaching. In trying to relax, I have been finding it difficult to relax. In trying to learn much, I have been finding it difficult to learn anything substantial. In trying to write this blog, to force it out like stale ketchup in a musty bottle, I have not been able to write anything worth reading about. I think I will let it go, and say nothing more.