The question of the face is interesting. The face is very hard for people to disassociate from the rule, or the law. It provides a window of individuality in a conflict between groups. The face is telling; emotions are not easily hid, nor are other factors such as age, ethnicity or health. I have observed this many times when looking, in real life, or at photos of contemporary authority figures. A police officers archetypical accessory next to a gun and badge is a huge pair of sunglasses. Further, a modern day cop probably yields a mustache, and very short non descript hair. The face is obscured, and any other telling sign of individuality is made uniform. As Bratich notes, the blac bloc reveled and found strength in this kind of facial anonymity; “You are no longer you, you are one of us.”

Especially in the uniforms of modern day police and combat soldiers, the face is increasingly obscured. Both Bratich and Taussig allude to the new evolution of secrets becoming a spectacle of themselves. Bratich calls a Public Secret that which is in the open and can work even better at concealing a truth. Revelation is no longer an end to secrecy but now a catalyst for it. What I think Bratich means is that government organizations have wizened up to the pressure caused by absolute confidentiality and now, by staying many steps ahead of public knowledge, make it appear as though honesty prevails. I think of this also in terms of the face. Faces in politics are presented as being genuine and truthful even though the public knows that every part of its presentation is calculated. Where as there was a time when presidents could let their personality shine through and it wasn’t uncommon for a president like Harry Truman to rant and rave off the cuff at the podium on a tangent, the public relationships of government is much more calculated these days. Take for example president Bush, even his supporters couldn’t believe that every word and smile was not calculated and rehearsed. The robot politician is a manifestation of secrets addressed as truth.

Mexican Zapatistas have co-opted the power of anonymity and used it rather as a sign of solidarity. They also laid claim that their masking was a reaction to a “masked Mexican society,” a leveling of the playing field. If Mexican politicians and policy makers can wear masks, why can’t we? Fortunately, when the government tried to disenfranchise the Zapatistas, they only came back stronger. Largely do to Subcomandante Marcos and his postscript.

The question we are really asking here is age old: Is a free-market model (capitalism) or a regulated common system (communism) the best way to encourage a powerful, plentiful, and all around great society. This argument is obviously huge; philosophers have written book after book on the history, function, and future of both free market capitalism and classless, stateless systems of government such as communism. Marx, Trotsky, Stalin, Mao Zedong, John Locke, Max Weber, Milton Freidman, and George W. Bush to name a few. The biggest wars of human history have been fought over this “Paradigm conflict” and it is not something I can sum up or convince the reader of one way or the other in a 500-word blog. What we can do is examine the “water wars” happening right now all over the world from the different socio-economic standpoints of free-market capitalism and community ownership using Vandana Shiva’s article entitled Water Wars as a guide.

Shiva quotes Ismail Seragelden, president of the World Bank in 1995 as saying, “wars of the future are to be fought over water.” Seragelden is regarding the intense water shortage happening all over the world that is only projected to get worse. People are helplessly dying of water famine and in wars that Shiva claims are mainly over water. She goes as far to say that the Israeli/Palestine conflict is based largely on water control rights and distribution. I can’t really agree with her statement that religious separatism conflicts such as those on the Punjab riverbanks only mask the real issue being water, but can’t deny that these issues of water conservation and control are real and huge. Shiva relates the shortage to two causal paradigms: ecological, and social. The social paradigm is that the world has plenty of water to sustain its population but it’s control and distribution has been corrupted by corporate greed and privatization. The second paradigm, which comes usually from the large corporations of water ownership, is that we are running out of clean water and they are doing the best they can to supply what is left.

The common definition of capitalism and further, free-market capitalism, is usually considered to involve the right of individuals and groups of individuals acting as “legal persons” or corporations to trade capital goods, labor, and money (Wikipedia). The key words in this definition are “right” and “goods.” If capitalists/corporations have the “right” to trade capital “goods,” and goods include life-sustaining effects such as water, are we not giving corporations the legal right to give and take away life itself? Which is considered a human right by most any accord, including the constitution of the United States.

I think capitalism does have a place in society, for instance, the technology we have today allows us to do incredible things and would not be possible without cut throat market competition. Will free market capitalism produce a sweet mp3 player, yes. Will free market capitalism ensure that clean water is available to all people regardless of socio-economic status? Don’t think so. Corporations are obligated by their shareholders to do what is best for the financial growth of stocks.

When British water management company Biwater took over the water supply in England, water rates increased by 450 percent, company profits soared by 692 percent, and CEO salaries increased by 708 percent. By capitalist rules, this was a great success, the shareholders probably went out to dinner and bought large bottles of champagne to celebrate. The human affect was a non-issue; service disconnection up 50 percent, dysentery up six fold, and the British Medical Association claiming that water privatization is a health hazard (Shiva 99).

It is for this reason that Shiva throughout her two articles claims water cannot be called a commodity. That water is given free to the Earth by the sky and therefore cannot be sold by us to each other. She says water is intrinsically different from other resources and cannot be commoditized. Her examples reach into the ancient traditions of Indian piyaos, water stands set up in the street as an offering to the thirsty, where water is treated as a sacred right to all people. I believe in the sacredness of water, and Shiva’s but a system of free water is farfetched. We as a gigantic, complex populous need large and expensive systems of water distribution to sustain ourselves, the change is in their regulation. Although it would be great, the 8 million inhabitants of London can’t have free water.

Shiva believes in the common ownership of water rights, regulation, and control of water as a resource. In the upper reaches of the Rio Grande Valley in Colorado, water for decades has been a common that is regulated by the community. Shiva gives many examples of the successful common ownership of water in communities across the globe. What I think Shiva overlooks is the practical interchange of the terms “community regulation” and “government owned.” Community regulation is based on the utopian vision of democracy, in which everyone has equal say in how community resources are spent, we all know this is not reality. Perhaps the bigger and more poignant question is, “who do we trust, the government, or the corporations?” or “how do we usurp the inherent evil of both systems.”

In our first article, Frederic Jameson’s Utopias, he looks critically at the notion of utopia, mainly from the perspective of texts on the subject from both Marx and Thomas More. Next Susan Willis describes the intelligence-manufacturing economy of the Guantanamo Bay detention facility and the disenfranchising of its inmates. In Lauren Berlant’s article The Subject of True Feeling we see the politics of feeling and how identities of otherness relate to empathy. Finally Catherine MacKinnon exposes how legalism regards the feminine body second to male, and the how politics of rape juxtapose with those of war. All of these articles ask us to regard the political, and personal products of Legalism and how the Law is both a subjective and objective reality.
Jameson sees the notion of Law and Legalism in Utopia as somewhat of a contradiction. He says that in utopia, “politics is supposed to be over, along with History. Factionalism, parties, subgroups, and special interests, must be excluded in the name of The General Will,” that “utopia emerges at the moment of the suspension of the political” (Jameson 42). In contradiction, he also states that any system is inherently political and legal. That a “social system must include its own set of immunities.” In the description of utopia, Jameson wants us to suspend our belief in the Law and Legalism. That our current notion of Law is what holds us from true visions of Utopia. Not to suggest Anarchy is Utopia, but to see that our notion of Law relies on unchangeble systems.
In Susan Willis’ Guantanamo, She relates the detainees of illegal detention centers such as Guantanamo Bay as a Legal other, or in the words of Giogio Agamben, homo sacer. She talks about the commodification of information extracted from prisoners at Guantanamo and how this information feeds populations with a sense of security. For Willis it is this selective lawlessness, and the disenfranchising of selct humans that perpetuates law and order for other humans.
Berlant relates the Law and current state of global politics to morals and the subjectivity of feeling. She talks about the way American legal systems shifted during the 1980s to protect those that were part of a fanstastic breed of utopian American innocents; the Adult without sin, the abused and neglected child, “and above all the fetus.” (Berlant 109) These ideals she says shape the ways in which we now see general “good” or generally “bad” things, which is detrimental to the true triumph of justice.
In Mackinnon’s high energy feminist article on the politics of rape, she see’s “Sexual violation [as] law’s biggest challenge.” Being highly moralized and politicized, punishments are cooerced and patterns of dominance, and inequality are perpetuated.

Jade havesters in Mexico and Guatamala are in an interesting spot these days. Harvesting precious Jade from the hills of their native land everyday for long hours at a time. In their own communities the Jade is hardly worth more than say granite beacause their economy is low and demand for Jade is even lower. Jade dealers from the United states and abroad are often found perusing these communities, buying Jade from the towns people for pennies. Figures I have heard are say 5 dollars for a 10 pound stone. These dealers then turn around and drive to Mineral and Rock shows in the United States and elsewhere selling the same rock for hundreds of dollars. If there were a way to connect these towns people with Telecommunication technologies which allowed them to deal their own Jade over the internet, the benefits could be astronomical for those families and that community. It could be as simple as setting up one computer and ebay accounts for these villages. This concept stretches further into globalized labor and task oriented industies. The neo-capitalist jargon of saving impoverished communities from the horrors of an unindustrialized society could ring true if it weren’t for a middle man cutting all the profits…

This week’s readings focus on the relationships between people serving the roles of author/educator and student/audience. We must first ask what is author? We then must investigate what is a writer, or a work? How do we classify the audience? The people? These selected writings of Foucault and Paulo Freire ask us to reconsider our roles in the acceptance and dissemination of information. What we come to realize is that these roles may be less defined than we think and even more so are the relationships between them.
Foucalt’s article addresses the author and those whose writings we consider a part of our world and information pool. He first asks us to make the separation between an author and his work. He asks “What is a work?…If an individual were not an author, could we say that what has been wrote, said, left behind in his papers, or what has been collected of his works, is a work?” (Foucault 103). He goes further to ask what happens when an individual is deemed “an author.” How much do we keep, publish and circulate? “How can one define a work amid the millions of traces left by someone after his death? A theory of the work does not exist, and the empirical task of those who naively undertake the editing of works often suffers the absence of such a theory” (Foucault 104). So if what we call an author is so loosely defined, and what is considered a work of an author is an even more unfastened definition, then perhaps what Foucault insists is that all “works” are of equal validity. He notes that the anonymous postings on a bathroom wall have a writer, but DO NOT have an author. Authorship is associated with credit and with previous works, which associate with other works. This poses an interesting question about the classification of writings on a wiki or an anonymous message board. Are these posts discredited by their anonymity, or are we entering a new era of authorship in which credit comes from content and not the critical approach of historically Christian authentication in which texts are accepted or rejected based on a constructed notion of author? (Foucault 110)
Paulo Friere asks us to equate the roles of author/audience to the further definition of teacher/student and from there even further to the oppressed and their oppressors. Friere is interested in education as liberation, and believes there is an element of oppression inherent to the traditional system of teacher as narrating object and student as listening object, therefore uses a different system. Friere believes that students acting as the depository of teachers leads to a self-deprecation and lack of self-respect, which can also be applied to the artist-audience relationship (Finklepearl 261). He believed that education should not be based on this narrative and hegemonic formula and rather on a dialog. He classified a dialog as the “encounter between men, mediated by the world, in order to name the world” (Freire 88). He thought education should be this interaction of naming, exchange of love and commitment to each other. He said that in order to have this dialog you must share a mutual faith in human kind, which is an act of hopefulness towards creation. “Dialog cannot be created in a climate of hopelessness.” (Friere 92)
His methods of teaching were defined very tediously. Information was decoded in a group, Investigated by an interdisciplinary panel, demarcated, written about, and discussed. Friere was trying to create a new type of relationship for learning. One in which the opinions and personal spaces of students were equally valued in the dialogic creation of thinking. Both Foucalt and Friere show us that we live in a world more connected than we think and that the lines between authors, artists and audiences or students and their teachers need to be redrawn as circles in which all work is valuble. Faith in the creation of community is more valuable than the belief in a single author or teacher.

“The computer is not good or bad, it is simply a piece of metal that can be used for any purpose.” (Warshauer 203) This quote is an effective introduction to the argument made by Warshauer in his book Tehnology and Social Inclusion, which deals mainly with the trials and tribulations of bringing technology into communities where it has never existed before, and using technology to effectively address and combat social problems. He refers his argument to definitions of “hard” and “soft” deterministic standpoints. Hard determinism is the belief that technological change would automatically lead to social change; Warshauer debunks this standpoint by looking at two histories of the printing press. In ancient China, more than 400 years before the introduction of movable type printing presses in Europe, presses were invented yet hardly used. This leads him to believe in a “soft” determinist standpoint of technology where it introduces the ability and possibility of social change but does not form social change itself.
From this conclusion, we can take a critical look at the other two articles and the projects they represent. First, Ben Crowes’s Atlas of Global Inequality which seeks to use ITC as a means for displaying and mapping the different types of inequality that exist globally. While this project doesn’t really have to do with the introduction of new technologies into a community, Warshauer still applies. The Atlas of Global Inequality proposes to consist of huge quantities of information that will act as an informative illustration of global issues. According to Warshauer, the collection of data, programming, and implementation of a project like this is only a first step. The greater question is where, why, and how to implement this tool most effectively. Warshauer explains his theories in the “Sociotechnical model,” some examples: Use business models, and ecological views to entertain your project; how can the Global Atlas of Inequality use business strategy to promote itself into fruition, yet make use of common sense and ecological viewpoints to insert itself into communities? Make Interactive Communication Technology (ICT) implementations an ongoing social process; how can the Atlas become sustainable, growing and changing with the times and perhaps even become supported by those it represents? Technological effects are indirect and involve different time scales; how is the success of the Atlas measured, and by whom? There are potentially enormous repercussions from ICT; what are the goals and potential outcomes for the Atlas?
The second project read was Bruno Tardieu’s “street library,” a project consisting of large Commodore 64 computers set up on the street for local kids and adults to hang out with. His project is very influenced by the notion of social inclusion generally and within technology. He quotes a member of the Fourth World movement saying, “Lack of education and ignorance is a curse, but not the worst. The worst is that people ignore you.” By generating a space on the streets of New York where youth can use computers to contribute to a community project they are not only included, but taking part in the introduction of technology into their communites. He talks about the most effective terms of his project being the building of trust within the community and not the technology itself. He even relates to how the ancient plotter printers are most effective because they are easier for the children to understand. The greatest asset an ITC project can have is the understanding of its contributors.

How does postmodernism drive Consumer culture?
What Jameson fails to address is the “Chicken or the Egg” theory. Is it postmodernist ideas of combating complex, ironic, and academic works that are causing schizophrenic, pastiche, and highly stylized art? Or is it hyper mediated public spheres, drowning in the logic of consumer capitalism that drives artists to create this type of work? His main point is that the logic of postmodernism is a segue into the ideals of consumer capitalism, but I disagree. Art reflects media and society, just as media and society reflect art, there is no division. Jameson however does point out that art has incorporated media culture to the point that lines are increasingly difficult to draw (112).
In respect to the other articles, I propose this question: Is perhaps the commoditization of people, prisoners, immigrants, and workers, a postmodernist phenomenon? Is it the over saturation of image and culture that drives the human psyche to dehumanize and accept the idea of the Other? Or is it a product of our highly consumer based ideals? If everything must be sacrificed for the good of the business, humans are too an expendable resource. When humans become imprisoned for however minute of an offense, whether it be criminal or not, they become Others in our society, simply labeled as prisoners, workers, bodies. All other aspects of a person are overlooked by the simple fact that they are imprisoned, as a Haitian refugee, quoted in Dow’s article states, “Only one thing you know is that you are on the inside.”
The commoditization of inmates is further illustrated by Angela Davis’ chilling reference to the research of Albert Clingham, in which he is quoted in saying “All I saw before me were acres of skin” (Davis 90) when first visiting a prison. How does this relate to the concept of Genocide and Ethnocide? It can be proposed that perhaps that postmodernism “replicates or reproduces–reinforces–the logic of consumer capitalism,” (Jameson 125) and that consumer capitalism puts pressure on the self and individual sense of identity as a marketing tool, we all know that. The interesting connection is between the searches for self identity and violence, as we see in Appadurai’s article. His main interests are the events of large scale violence (usually against a racial or religious body) that plague our times. He argues that “social uncertainty is the main force behind ethnic cleansing and violence. My addition is the promotion of “social uncertainty” by consumer culture. I saw a great old TV show on youTube the other day with Norman Mailer and Marshall McLuhan discussing violence on many of the same terms that Appadurai does. They also delve into the idea of alienation in the electronic age, in 1967!

http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=5470443898801103219&q=Marshall+McLuhan+vs+

Norman+Mailer&pr=goog-sl&hl=en

It was hard to first understand the implications of Christina McPhee’s article Bare Life without a context. I did some background research on La Conchita and the La Conchita Mudslide to see exactly what substrate McPhee’s article rests in.

The small seaside community of La Conchita has a population of about 300. In January 2005 a giant mudslide wrecked through the town, closing Highway 101, and a subsequent mudslide killed 10 people. This traumatic event was an American tradgedy and also, a Californian tradgedy. When McPhee chooses to ascribe artworks to this place, discussions of artist/subject relations and photographic commodification are key. She creates shrines to La Conchita on walls and fences surrounding disaster areas and is turned a wary yet respectful eye, “People accept my presence warily but with some idea that I am one of their own because I am not a journalist. They express respect for the individual artist.”
McPhee is a physical witness to the aftermath and destruction brought on La Conchita, represented by her use of photographs. But also, as phrased by Kelly Oliver in her Witnessing artice, bearing witness to something she did not see and can only feel or believe in, represented by her digital translation of the photographs. She realizes both her observation and her artwork is a function of “hypermediated gaze.” McPhee gives her piece the name Bare Life, I think referencing the fact that without shelter, water, or communications, the citizens of La Conchita became denizens, Hopelessly watching as the powers that be took every decision into their own hands. She compares La Conchita to larger scenarios such as New Orleans, in which “conditions of emotional evacuation, physical persistence, and loss of control of ‘place’ in communities that suffer from both the media exposure secondary to disaster and the loss of personal rights.
Ambagen believes that this loss of rights is a regimented strategy used to usurp soveignty of naked life. Emergency is secretly posted as the norm in order to perserve the funcionality of systems that depend on it,“How could we think that a system that can no longer function except on the basis of emergency would not pay any price to perserve it?

This is the main linking topic to Sontag’s article, Regarding the Pain of Others in which she describes war and violence as norms upheld by powers invested to desensitize and placate populations. The concept of People and people is also explored by both authors. How a bare-life human, and sovreign citizen is stripped of all rights and transformed into a commodified other who can then undergo torture and atrocity.

Compassion outside the context of religion posts some interesting questions. Who deserves our compssion what is the purpose and niche of compassion? I read a book called: What’s Love Got to Do with It?: A Critical Look at American Charity by David Wagner that really had some radical things to day about charity and compassion.