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Insurgent American <http://www.insurgentamerican.net> An Elaborate Hypothesis of the The Suppression of Active-Pattern-Recognition by Stan Goff DISCLAIMER - I will ramble. The Squirrels Where I live now, drivers are frequently obliged to stop in the middle of the street to avoid squashing squirrels. I live in North Carolina, and the Eastern gray squirrel has a scientific name, Sciurus carolinensis, that suggests I am living in their biological epicenter. These rodents are - by best accounts - around 30 million years old, making them our great great great grandparents in evolutionary terms; and their adaptability to multiple climates, as well as urban landscapes, suggests they will be around long after we have figured out how to commit collective suicide. They are so thick in my own suburban neighborhood that we could harvest them for meat now without putting a dent in ther population. Our abundance of white oak trees sheds tons and tons of acorns each year - a squirrel staple - and squirrels are voracious omnivores, even occasionally indulging in cannibalism. They have adpated through changing coloration almost before our eyes, with black varieties emerging in urban centers in our lifetime; but their behavioral patterns are more ancient inscriptions. Cars have been around for a century, more or less, with an explosive proliferation in the last 50 years. The result is a fatal mismatch. Squirrel defensive patterns emerged to cope with other threats - hawks, owls, weasels, racoons, foxes, coyotes, bobcats, and big snakes. Today, we can add to that, dogs and cats; but they themselves are still behaviorally etched with hunting patterns they carry from their feral cousins. My own dog hunts them relentlessly in the back yard, and the squirrels win around 99 times out of a hundred. whereupon they bark back at the enraged pooch from the trees. What the squirrel has perfected over the aeons is a combination of deception and footwork that matches the predators' tactics. When faced with a potential threat, the squirrel shifts her tail back and forth, flicking it in the same way a fisherman jiggles an artificial lure to attract the predator's eye, or the way a bullfighter agitates a cape to deceive his victim. A squirrel's tail can be bitten off fairly easily, leaving the rest of the squirrel intact to live on; and predators typically orient on movement. Squirrels can even heat their tails up to fool pit vipers, serpants that orient on thermal signatures from their prey. In conjunction with this tail-deception, the squirrel does a kind of rapid-rewind two-step dance as the predator closes in, weaving back and forth like a boxer to set up a repetitious pattern of oscillation by the predator. At the last moment, in a kind of rodent jui-jitsu, Sciurus carolinensis breaks the rhythm of the back-and-forth, and dives 45 degrees lateral to the accelerating predator. The charging animal overshoots the squirrel, and by the time she can turn to remount an attack, Sciurus has scampered up some vertical surface, whereupon she can leap from tree to tree, or roof to tree, or tree to power line, and make her escape. Over 30 million years, the species itself has recognized a pattern, and adapted its defensive tactics all the way into a fixed neural pathway. When the squirrels on my street see an oncoming car, this amazing adaptation fails. They are reacting to a conscious predator, and the car is neither conscious, nor a predator. It's just a car. The Gotcha Two-Step that lets the gray squirrels run up trees to talk trash back to my mutt doesn't throw the car off at all. It is simply a terminal display without an audience, unless the driver sees the squirrel and slows down. The Mirrors There is an intuitive contradiction between the notion of intent and the kind of instinctive pattern embodied in our exemplary squirrel. If the behavior cannot change, then the idea of what the squirrel does or does not intend to do is silly. Intention implies the ability to choose between alternative courses of action. We also know, from experience, that humans can, in fact, make choices that demonstrate what we call "intent." There is a bewildering myth that these choices are unconditioned and decontextualized - to which we will return further down - but we can deliberate and choose between A and B, or even A and B and C, et al. And this intent - which corresponds to and interacts with bipedal locomotion, manual dexterity, symbolic memory, and language (also highly symbolic) - has augmented, altered, and in some sense atrophied our instinctive, or heritable species pattern recogntion. If we place a resident of the same street that proves so hazardous to squirrels in a hypothetical situation matching that of an ancestor a mere 200 years ago, that modern person is unlikely to thrive for more than a few days. Place them in a situation similar to that of our own species 5,000 years ago - an evolutionary blink - and s/he would perish in short order. Yet people in the planet right now, people who are in every sense members of the same species as us, who actually do live in circumstances that are similar to the conditions hypothesized above, and who get by. What this strongly suggests is that human nature is not plastic, but that plasticity is a key aspect of human nature. If we accept that suggestion, then it raises the question: What is the matrial basis of this plasticity, and this capacity for intent? Part of the answer seems to come from research on something called a mirror neuron. Vittorio Gallese, of the European Science Foundation, explains: About ten years ago we discovered in the macaque monkey brain a class of premotor neurons that discharge not only when the monkey executes goal-related hand actions like grasping objects, but also when observing other individuals (monkeys or humans) executing similar actions. We called them "mirror neurons". Neurons with similar properties were later discovered in a sector of the posterior parietal cortex reciprocally connected with area F5. The observation of an object-related hand action leads to the activation of the same neural network active during its actual execution. Action observation causes in the observer the automatic activation of the same neural mechanism triggered by action execution. We proposed that this mechanism could be at the basis of a direct form of action understanding. Further studies showed that in humans the multilocal concentrations of mirror neurons are highly concentrated and active. Moreover, they are somatotopically organized for actions that a subject observes and imitates in others; that is, when a small child sees an adult stick out her tongue, the child observes and imitates with the activation of particular sites in the brain that correspond to these points of the anatomy. one place "lights up" when the action is sticking out one's tongue, another area if the child is trying to imitate skipping, another to perform the manual actions of "patty-cake." The intent to imitate is reflected in brain activity in the same way that intent is shown "lighting up" certain neurons in macaques just before they reach for an object. At the very least, this implies a dramaticaly different species learning strategy than the more Pavlovian (or Skinnerian) system we observe in a squirrel. It is highly individual and malleable - therefore adaptable in a lifetime, and not an epoch. It is also - contrary to the libertarian ideological reading of this individuality - thoroughly social. Combined with humans' extreme infant dependency, this basic learning strategy of imitation serves as one of the key building blocks of social development and symbolic thinking. Complexes of mirror neurons create the neurological substrate for representational awareness. Action observation can lead to action simulation, even if that simulation is only mental. In a sense, then, the term "internalization" for learning is quite accurate. What human conversation, and see how many times posture, hand gestures, and vocalized sound effects accompany the symbolic narrative of words - literally, the body mimicking a perceived external reality. There is a relation - far from fully explored, and only dimly understood by this writer - between one's species position on a continuum between autonomic and Pavlovian behaviors - which we certainly still retain - and behaviors shaped through the social development of "understanding" (related materially to the performance of these mirror neurons) that determines the scope of a species' behavioral repertoire. In the case of humans, our proximity to the cognitive-affective (I'll explain that combination further down) pole of this continuum results in the plasticity and individuality of these behaviors. I will argue that this plasticity and individuality give us the capacity to survive in environments as diverse as the Amazon and the Arctic, and just as surely, make us vulnerable to phenomena like the "tyranny of fashion." It is also the basis for empathy, and its counter-identification, cruelty. We often talk about "emotional attachment"; well, that initial point of attachment is likely to be a mirror neuron complex. "Identification" with others has a powerful somatic dimension, so much so that we refer to the a strong emotional reaction as being "touched," to an emotionally charged action as "touching." The somatic basis of these behaviors is certainly reducible to what Gallese calls "an automatic, unconscious, and pre-reflexive functional mechanism, whose function is the modeling of objects, agents, and events." But the relational dimension of this phenomenon is "representational," and this symbolic capacity, it seems, is the basis of not only our capacity for abstraction and generalization, but our predispostion to "make meanings," and to "project" our understanding in ways we might refer to as goal-orientation. I made note above to the notion that individual decisions are ideologically and inaccurately represented as un-conditioned and uncontextualized. I also asserted a claim that cogntive and affective behavior are not separable. These two points are related, and both refutations are central to the point of this treatment: that active pattern recognition is indispensible to the kind of critical thought needed for human beings to avoid a catastrophic future, and that vested social power has created an ideological superstructure that privileges behaviors that are closer to the Pavlovian pole of our behavioral continuum. I use the term active as a modifier for pattern recognition here, because the cognitive pole of the learning strategy continuum is not characterized simply by pattern recognition, but by the disposition to actively seek patterns, as opposed to having patterns simply etched onto our psyches as part of a fundamentally passive learning process. A good synonym for "active" pattern recognition might be "critical" pattern recognition. Direct experience is located in the individual. The rise of industrial capitalist patriarchy - which concentrated power in the hands of a metropolitan male bourgeoisie - corresponded to an ideological (mis)representation of this fact. It developed a philosophical point of view that leapt from experience as an individual phenomenon to the notion of pure, almost Platonically abstract autonomy residing in the individual. This is the basis of classical liberalism, libertarianism, and paradoxically even post-structuralism (which traces its origins to an intellectual rebellion against precisely this kind of "modernist" reductionism). This point of view effaces the signficance of social learning, of childhood development, and of persistent patterns of dominance involving various social classes, e.g., men-women, manorial lords-peasants, capitalists-proletarians, settlers-natives, and so forth. This ideology also assumes the pretense that there is no behavior that is not intentional. Implicit in this pretense is a false dichotomy - that either people can choose or they can't. What connects this pure-autonomy point of view to the false (in my view) separation of the cognitive from the affective (the mental from the emotional) is its androcentrism. These are Male points of view, the term here applying not to a biological determination, but to a pattern of male socialization in a gendered and heirarchical division of social labor. Women mostly raise children; and anyone who has raised children knows very well that the question of choosing or not choosing is a grotesque simplification. This is an illusion that is only available to those who live most of their cognitively-engaged lives in environments composed mostly of like-minded, and equally abstracted (male) adults. The history of the analytical division of reason from emotion, and the gendered notions that underwrite it is so rich that I am disinclined to review it here. The evidence for the Reason-Emotion dichotomy being synonymous with the Masculine-Feminine dichotomy it is so utterly overwhelming as to be axiomatic. These ideologies - which are patterns of ideas that simultaneously reflect and reproduce patterns of actual social power - are impediments to making the points further along, so I feel compelled to set them out of our path here. Individuals, especially with regard to the behaviors that are nearer the non-instinctual pole of our spectrum, are more, not less, determined by their socialization. They are not the pure autonomists of the libertarian fantasy, without history or context, but thoroughly inflected by by history and context. This pure autonomist human would simply and quickly die. Moreover, the experiential representations that constitute the archives of our experience, our memories upon which our behavior is completely predicated, are not and never have been "objective" cognition. This "view from nowhere" that constitutes objectivity is the modernist (male-bourgeois-imperial) substitution of The Objective. for God - another male authority figure that lives in outer space. Our actual life experiences are always simultaneously symbolic and affective. Tautology of Mind Theorists of human "intelligence" have - as I am doing in this paper - articulated their theories in a dispassionate form of discourse. This is an argumentative convention, and as such, it does have some positive value. One pattern that is easily recognized by most of us is that of someone who has personalized a point of view in such an extreme way that it is not only outside the confines of empiricist logic, but outside the "fuzzier" logic of experience and approximation. There is little point, for example, in debating with an angry man who is cursing and screaming and appears to be on the verge of committing an assault. So I acknowledge the value of constructing an argument in a way that confronts oppositional assumptions, and stands itself up for critique. This is part of a cumulative social learning process. Theorists of intelligence, however, have often engaged in the sacralization of the empirical, what has been called alternatively "empiricism" or "scientism," the suffix suggesting - accurately in my view - that this point of view has crossed over from interrogative method into the realm of ideology. We see this most blatantly now in standardized testing regimes in schools. "Intelligence" is "measured" using empirically validated responses to questions or procedural problems. Intelligence is the ability to assimilate empirical information, and so it can be measured empirically. This is a thoroughly tautological conception of intelligence; and it has tremendous political force. It is the basis of what Ivan Illich called the monopolization of knowledge, that is, the enclosure of certain kinds of knowledge, that creates the basis for "management" by "professionals" and technocrats. I went to training for a year when I was in Special Forces as a detachment medic and "physician extender," and while deployed abroad, I diagnosed a whole host of infirmities, and prescribed treatmewnts for them. successfully. One does not have to go into debt and attend medical school for eight years to learn when it is and when it is not appropriate to administer epinephrine for anaphylaxis or how to cure a case of hookworm. The real irony - in the context of this paper - is that in most cases, it is not the empiricism in which the licensed physician is trained that is employed even by the physician to conduct the diagnosis and determine the treatment. The logic that is employed is, instead, much like the logic we employ in our everyday lives - approximation and pattern recognition. This dimension of human intelligence is not only not empirical, we could hardly get through a day in our actual lives if we were required to engage in empirical reduction before every decision. Empiricism is, in fact, a social sorting mechanism to winnow people into their proper places in existing hierarchies. That does not mean that empirical studies and research are valueless. It means that there is no dimension of human learning that is value-free. Empiric-ISM privileges the roles of empricists within social heirarchies, and devalues the experience of those who are further down these heirarchies, including the approximating logic we use in our everyday lives. It attempts to subordinate pattern recognition as a learning strategy to technocratic knowledge, to special and specialized knowledge. This kind of paper, in fact, is seen as "academic" or "theoretical" primarily because the content of this argument has been placed off limits, de facto, by an intellectual division of labor. even though the author is not himself an academic, nor is this written for an academic publication. This type of work is circumscribed by customs and institutions - and, in fact, uses a great deal of synthetic thought based on approximate forms to logic. The area where approximate logic - pattern recognition - has been driven out of the public sphere is in the cognitive lives of the majority. As in the case of the decontextualized abstraction of the pure autonomist, refered to in the canon as Rational Man or Economic Man (the gendered terminology is not unimportant), the masses are compliant within a system to the degree to which they have internalized its ideology. The citizen-subject must make choices that are prefabricated, and must be trained to see those choices as "natural." >From this perspective, that is, from the perspective of institutionalized and customary social power, the free-standing human ability to recognize patterns carries a dangerous potential. It can become the basis of the kind of critical consciousness that sees the patterns in the system itself, and thereby raises embarrassing questions about social power. In her canonical (and essential, in my view) work on eating disorders, Unbearable Weight - Feminism, Western Culture, and the Body, Susan Bordo first describes the very real challenges that were presented to empiricism by thinkers from Mary Wollstoencraft, to Karl Marx, to Michel Foucault. With Foucault, the most contemporary of the three, and Jacques Derrida, an academic movement called post-structuralism, or post-modernism emerged. While the purpose of the latter two was simply to do what philosphers do - not inaugurate a new academic trend - and stood "against the ideal of disembodied knowledge and declare[d] that ideal to be a mystification and an impossibility." By this, she was referring to the Objective standpoint, the "view from nowhere, " that had replaced God as the arbiter of truth with the emergence of "modernism" (hence then term post-modernism). They were confronting scientism, or empiricism. Life itself was teaching people that pattern recognition is in many cases a more useful form of logic than empirical logic, and with the socio-economic and political destabilizations of the 60s and 70s, the categories of thought that accompanied them were destabilized, too. Moreover, as the Vietnam War came to a close, the world economy was reset on a revised foundation - one where the key and irreplaceable economic role of the US as a whole, was to buy, buy, buy. The virtuous citizen was no longer the frugal family member who saved and eocnomized; but someone who could define herself/himself by the act of purchasing. The post-structuralist challenge had to be diverted away from imperial capitalist patriarchy. These adjustments and conformations do not happen by fiat from above. They occur through an infinite series of accommodations to material power. In the case of post-structuralism, Bordo notes, this was accomplished by shifting from "the view from nowhere, to the view from everywhere." >From Nowhere to Everywhere Howard Gardener's theory of multiple intelligences - itself a challenge to orthodoxy on the question of human intelligence - lists Lingusitic, Logical-Mathematical, Spatial, Bodily-kinesthetic, Musical, Naturalistic, Interpersonal, and Intra-personal as categories of intelligence. I would argue that what each of these intelligences has in common is the ability to differentiate and identify particular kinds of generally approximate patterns. I would also point out, by way of reinteration, that the basketball player who both recognizes, responds to, and performs certain kinesthetic patterns is not doing so in the hard-wired way of our suicidal street squirrels. Human beings learn more directly through the individual, far from the instinctive pole of behavior, suggesting that we are biolgoicaly determined not to be biologically determined. The challenge mounted by empiricism, and subsequently by post-structuralism, is a challenge aimed at the intelligentsia. The fact is, most people still believe in God - so the struggle between post-modernists and philosophical materialists, for example, is not on their collective radar. (The Enlightenment replacement of God with Objectivity was not coded for the masses as religious agnosticism or atheism, but as Masculinity.) The reason a basic conformity among the intelligentsia is so crucial is that this segment of society shapes society's mass ideologies. A renegade intelligentsia - or a feral, insurgent one - has the power and the intellectual "propficiency" to intentionally subvert ideologies by re-connecting them to practical activity. This capacity cannot merely be confronted - where it risks exposing the ideological character of the dominant belief systems; it must be met preemptively with innoculation. This innoculation process is the main purpose of both establishment education and cultural production. And that innoculation consists in large part of anesthetizing the independent and active pattern recogntion capacity of the people. The determinative role of metropolitan, especially US, consumer culture cannot be overemphasized in a description of this process; nor can we overstate the power of television - and to a lesser extent film - to standardize culture and consciousness into a compliant consumer passivity that is perceived as a life of active freedom. The last generations put their trust in doctors and lawyers and bureaucrats; and now we are in the hands of advertizers schooled in Pavlov. Bordo describes showing her class an episode of Phil Donahue. The topic of the program was a televeision commercial for non-corrective (cosmetic) contact lenses, designed to change eye color. In these commercials as they were originally aired, a woman was shown in a dreamlike, romantic fantasy - for example, parachuting slowly and gracefully from the heavans. The male voiceover then described the womanin soft, lush terms: "If I believed in angels, I'd say that's what she was - an angel, dropped from the sky like an answer to a prayer, with eyes as brown as bark." [Signficant pause] "No. I don't think so." [At this point the tape would be rewound to return us to:] "With eyes as violet as the colors fo a child's imagination." The commercial concludes: "Durasoft colored contact lenses. Get brown eyes a second look." The question posed by Phil Donahue: Is this ad racist? Donahue clearly thought there was controversy to be stirred up here, for he shocked his audience fullof owmen of color and white women to discuss the implications of the ad. But Donahue was apparently living in a different decade from most of his audience, who repeatedly declared that there was nothing "wrong" with the ad, and everything "wrong" with any inclinations to "make it a political question." Not only did the audience then mount a "what's the fuss about" defense of the ad; Bordo's students did, too. There was no capacity to see the pattern that connects the norms of femininity, the devaluation of women as they are (and of people with brown eyes), the the grotesque consumer objectification of women implicit in the verbiage of the male voiceover, the construction of female inadequacy, the identifcation of women's value with their appearance, womens' subordination within a male-dominated society. nothing. There was, in short, an utter failure of active-pattern-recognition; and the remarks that both Donahue and Bordo heard were predictable enough to have appeared from a playbook. But these responses were more than just igonrance of the patterns of social power that positively bristled from this ad; there was almost a disciplined hostility to "politicizing" the ad. that is, hostility to calling attention to those patterns. The discipline of consumer culture is one that makes politics synonymous with being the party-pooper, the drag that is spoiling everyone's collective fantasy. .there is a disciplinary reality that is effaced in the construction of all self-transformation as equally arbitrary, all variants of the same trivial game, without differing cultural valance. I use the term disciplinary in the Foucauldian sense, as pointing to the practices that do not merely transform but normalize the subject. a 1989 poll of Essence magazine readers revealed that 68 percent of those who responded wear their hair straightened chemically or by hot comb. "Just for fun"? For the kick of being "different"? Bordo called this the perfect "postmodern conversation." The self-same post-structuralism, or postmodernism, that pretends to be the decisive theoretical refutation of "modernist" empricism operates in precisely this way. It first equates identifiable patterns - women are subordinated within a male-dominated society - with generalization (all women are totally subordinated in a pure male autocracy), then it cites exceptions to the generalization. "Condoleeza Rice is more powerful than the average male." This is just the old empiricism dressed up in new "post modern" clothes. As postmodernism has ossified into a linguistially-opaque academic orthodoxy, there is a term that is often used by its acolytes as a kind of PM McCarthyism: essentialism. This epithet is deployed against anyone who has the nerve to challenge the dematerialized solipsism of this trend. Essentialism is the accusation that the identification of patterns in certain groups of people, women, African Americans, and so on, is tantamount to a biologically determinist generalization. Philosophy professor Ron Mallon noted that there are two strategies of anti-essentialism: skeptical anti-essentialism and constructionist anti-essentialism. Skeptical anti-essentialists will use the 'scientific' argument, for example, that there is no such thing as race, because as soon as you try to define it, there are exceptions. All people we consider to be Black do not have dark skin. Constructionist anti-essentialists will de-naturalize. Being Black is not a 'natural' phenomenon, but the result of being perceived in society as being Black. Both these approaches ignore the fact that in everyday life, we readily recognize Black people. White people recognize Black people. Black people recognize Black people. Latin@ people recognize Black people. Black folk need not conform to every single characteristic that might be associated with being Black (the capitalized version is synonymous in many circles with the term African American). The existence of an exception might disprove a generalization; but it does not refute a pattern. Mallon states that there can be "kinds" without "essences." One does not have to deny the kind to refute the essence. He is talking about patterns. It is perfectly possible for someone to exhibit a set of real characteristics that mark that person as Black or female, for example, without implying any kind of "core-essence" whatsoever. There is such a thing as being African American, and it is more than a mere socially constructed narrative, and this category is an embodiment of a speciic shared history and social standpoint. There is such a thing as being a biological woman, also a category thart embodies historcal and social patterns. The straw man of Essentialism implies that each woman, or each African American shares a set of individually necessary characteristics to qualify for 'membership;' that these characteristics are intrinsic; and that the actions of 'members' of a group can be explained by a set of shared properties that might not be directly unobservable. This is obviously false. Yet the anti-essentialisms, both skeptical and constructionist, do not do an effective job of rebutting this falsehood. One cannot attack the notion of Black-ness simply because all those who are considered and consider themselves to be Black do not have dark skin. No one uses one single individually necessary criterion to make such an assessment. My youngest daughter is very light-skinned, yet most people readily recognize her as Black, based on both phenotypic and cultural characteristics, and on her context (Raleigh, NC). A 'kind-group,' such as Black or female, is characterized by a constellation of features, which are recognizable as a pattern in a context, without any individual necessarily having all those features - features that are morphological, geographic, and-or cultural. If my daughter lived in a Puerto Rican neighborhood, she would blend in quite well and be mistakenly thought to be Puerto Rican. the exception to a pattern that would generally work. The problem is not the existence of kind-groups, from the point of view of a politics of liberation. It is breaking down false assertions that the kind-group is responsible for its own oppression based on an intrinsic defect or the idealization of a kind-group based on some mythical intrinsic property. Acknowledging that women and Blacks exist as women and Blacks is perfectly possible while at the same time rejecting racist and sexist essentialism. In fact, it is necessary to mount any politics of resistacnce against paterns of oppression against these grups. How do Blacks and women and their allies fight for social remedies aimed at women and Blacks (I use these two categories not to exclude others, but as examples), or for self-determination, once we erase these categories? The liberal politics of anti-essentialist 'equality' has already led us into this swamp, and it's where we met David Horowitz screaming reverse-discrimination. He does not claim Black people are genetically inferior. He says Blacks are culturally inferior. The other anti-essentialist strategy, of breaking with 'nature' and substituting the socially constructed narrative, is equally ineffective, and dangerous. The problem, with post-modernism generally, is its pig-headed rejection of the 'metanarrative,' that is, a pattern analysis that maps the systems of power that contextualize oppression. Showing that racism cannot be justified, because race is not 'natural,' has proven ineffective. Horowitz and his ilk have rather effortlessly redefined their racism in cultural terms, and mooted the constructionist argument against naturalism. And by reducing everything to identity (which is plain philosophical consumerism), post-modernists have surrendered any possibility of coordinated, collective struggle against oppressive systems. because they deny the existence of those systems. In a real sense, the post-modernist constructionist critique of essentialism itself falls back on skeptical anti-essentialism, because its fallback position is based on pointing out exceptions to generalization as a way of 'proving' the generalization doesn't exist. Empiricism. "There is a radical difference, notes African American feminist bell hooks (as cited by Bordo), "between a repudiation of the idea that there is a black 'essence' and recognition of the way black identity has been specificaly constituted in the experience of exile and struggle." Bordo's students as well as the vocal guests on Donahue were not engaging in this debate, however, by pointing to the hidden empiricism in anti-essentialism. They were reciting the mantra of consumer capitalism: You can be anything you want. What constitutes being, however, is highly superficial. It is a pose, an act, a script, a performance. All academic postmodernism has done is take this sales ptich and dress it up as philosophy. You can choose your "identity." It can be "transgressive." This rhetorical strategy has been employed, not surprisingly, to concentrate all agency in the individual (a reversion to plain classical liberalism with its pure autonomist) and ridicule the social movements of Marxism, Black Freedom, (materialist/radical) Feminism, et al - movements predicated on "meta-narratives" (patterns) of systemic oppression. Politics is not confronted by poststructuralist orthdoxy on its own argumentative merits, but expelled from a clique. If you critique the colored contact lenses, because they are the manifestation of a social pattern, then you are (gasp!) being a drag. You are. no fun. Power is redefined from being a social reality into an attitude. The plastic surgery made me feel empowered. As Bordo points out, even calling this tendency "postmodern" is pretentious. "Modern," by definition, is the latest in change. so how can it ever be "post"? This pretense is simply a way to evade the obvious. Postmodernism is consumerism. Pick you identity from the supermarket shelf. This is "choice." That's new? The Objectivist "view from nowhere," Bordo points out (citing Thomas Nagel) has just been replaced by the "dream of everywhere." This neutralizes the standpoint of real people in the real systems - constrained by time, space, and social power - from where active-pattern-recognition is apt to translate into social struggle to change those patterns. Referring specifically to gender, Bordo explains "certain feminist appropriations of deconstructionism": Here a post-modern recognition of interpretive multiplicity, of the indeterminacy and heterogeneity of cultural meaning and meaning-production, is viewed as calling for new narrative approaches, aimed at the adequate representation of textual "difference." From this perspective, the template of gender is criticized for its fixed, binary structuring of reality and is replaced by a narrative ideal of ceaseless textual play. But this ideal, I argue, although it arises out of a critique of modernist epistemological pretensions to represent reality adequately by achieving what Thomas Nagel has called the "view from everywhere," remains animated by its own fantasies of attaining an epistemological perspective free of the locatedness and limitations of embodied existence - a fantasy that I call a "dream of everywhere." Hubris of Youth & Pavlovian Stand-down In my own activist work, as well as in my role as a parent, I have hade a great deal of exposure to something called "youth culture." There is a vague sense among most people under 70-years-old that the demographic category "youth" and an age segregated "culture" associated with it are somehow a timeless (natural) phenomenon in human society. This is a false impression. When I was attending college during my first break in military service, I enrolled as an English major at the University of Arkansas at Monticello - deep in the Mississippi Delta region, in the "dry county" of Bradley, for which a hybrid strain of tomato has been named. Work at a nearby sweatshop would convince me to return to the welcoming bosom of the Army; but not before I had the opportunity to take several courses in Medieval and Rennaissance English Literature from Dr. Frank Reuter. I credit Dr. Reuter to this day with my own learned capacity to project my own point of view into that of others, across cultures and across time. This is not the same as the "view from everywhere" or "the view from nowhere," but is actually an ability that requires intellectual rigor and an attention span exceeding that of, say, a cat. There was an insidious process afoot even then to place universities on a corporate footing, that is, require them to quit "losing money" (a telling notion if ever there was one). One of the methods for ensuring the cash flow was to keep as many disinterested students as possible on the rolls - seeking their credentials - and this numbers game inaugurated a student-as-customer race to the bottom. One method to gauge the ability of teachers to keep students attending (and paying) was to allow students to evaluate teachers. While in theory, this seems a very democratic shift, the reality was that these were students who were products of their own superficializing youth culture, who were not there to learn but to get their sheepskin, their entry pass to higher earnings - and students used these evaluations to valorize the professors who were the least demanding. This trend dumbed down many a classroom, and allowed the most outrageous forms of "anything goes" interpretation. This was partciularly bad in the humanities, and moreso with literature still, because neither (most) students nor bean-counting administrators - both focused on money - saw how learning Chaucer or Shakespeare, for example, had anything to do with salaries or the commodities they would buy with them as they marched into their futures. Consequently, a form of "new criticism" was blythely accepted in which students would "study" these canonical works with zero reference to the authors' socio-historical context or biography. Frank Reuter was having none of it; and I was a post-traumatic Vietnam vet who couldn't give less of a shit about my long-term future or the credentials I might need to go there. I found I actually liked learning. Frank taught these canonical texts by first teaching the historical context. Chaucer employed a very strict convention in Canterbury that had a very particular meaning to his contemporaries. The Wife of Bath was not some proto-feminist figure, but an unnatural beast in the mind of both Chaucer and his contemporaries (the very idea that Chaucer, who was a member of the ruling-male stratum, was some kind of "feminist" is a notion worthy of ridicule). Shakspeare's King Lear was not experiencing "existential angst" when he went mad on the moor; he was showing the audience the sin of despair (a recurrent theme in the literature of Medieval and Rennaissance Christendom). Romeo and Juliet were not modern anti-heroes; they were a warning to audiences about both female irrationality and death (and eternal Hell) as the wage of sin. Frank showed us lithographs and paintings, explained the core beliefs of the day. about the Great Chain of Being, microcosm-macrocosm, the belief in bodily humours, the implications of Original Sin. he made us understand that, because the value of reading these texts was not to admire the Masters; it was to learn about ourselves. In particular, it showed us how throroughly we are all products of our time and place; and that to appreciate that, we had to develop the capacity to mentally step into these other places, other cultures, other epochs, as a way of understanding out own historical "locatedness," as well as the power of prevailing ideology to conform personality to social order, and the way culture transmits that ideology. Youth culture today - even moreso than when I was at Monticello, Arkansas - reflects much of the same superificiality and hubris that characterized the young people who gave teachers like Frank Reuter consistently negative evaluatons. They feel entitled to not only an opinion - no matter how uninformed or decontextualized - but to have their opinions valued as much as everyone else. In other words, having (possesive) the opinion is more important than validating it with persuasive evidence; and the accumulation of experience that comes with age is somehow levelled off at the precise moment that a young person reaches the legal age of majority. My point here is not to gloss over the fact that post-modernism has elements that were developed, as Bordo says, "in good faith," as part of a critique of Objectivist patriarchy; but to show how PM was co-opted. Similarly, my criticism of youth culture and youth hubris is not meant to apologize for the hierarchical disprespect and "power-tripping" that many elders direct at young people. Youth culture in the United States is a relatively new phenomenon. It emerged after World War II. Dick Hebdige, in his 1974 book, Subculture - The Meaning of Style, wrote: The advent of mass media, the disintegration of the working-class community. the relative increase in the spending power of working class youth, the creation of a market designed to absorb the resulting surplus, and changes in the education system. [contributed] to the emergence after the War of a generational consciousness amongst the young. "Youth," in short, became a consumer; and as such, youth was massivley targeted by advertizers with consumer ideology. This cultural age-segregation was anything but some timeless-teen phenomenon, and it was totally imbricated with the general re-indoctrination of American society (which "globaslization" is now spreading abroad like a drug-resistant virus) into consumer-ISM. Neiher advertizers nor the enterprises they represent nor the "entertainment" media they subsidize to deliver their ads has any interest in promoting critical pattern recognition. Quite the contrary. Pattern recognition has to be suppressed, innoculated against, supplanted with prefabricated "patterns"; and the indoctrination of consumers, beginning with youth, is shifted toward the Pavlovian pole of our leanring strategy continuum. This sets up a kind of runaway dynamic. It is easier to sell candy to a young customer than it is to sell her fresh spinach. The solipsists may contest that statement; but parents and advertizers know it is a very reliable statement. This is not a gratuitous remark about solipsism. Youth itself has been trained into solipsism and rhetorical-fencing-fallacies, precisely to defend consumerism. This is exactly what Bordo observed on the Donahue episode and in her class. And even fallacy is seen as an entitlement. I am entitled to my opinion. That's the last word. Rebut that and you are declaring your hostility to my "freedom to choose." Whether it is valid or not is not even the issue. It's mine. In the same way that a cash-flow dynamic triggered the implosion of intellecutal rigor in the university, it triggered an emergent unfocused rebelliousness (don't get me wrong, there was much to rebel against) as a characteristic of youth culture. Focused rebellion that broke out with the catalyst of the Civil Rights Movement in the US was targeted against social and institutional power, be that Objectivist patriarchy, capitalism, or the national oppressions of African Americans and [EMAIL PROTECTED] The unfocused rebellion was directed against "old people," the "establishment," etc., and led many to believe that counter-cultural styles combined with a few drugs constituted resistance. The alumni of ths era are now around 55-65 years old, which means the majority of the population has now been effectively socialized through the consumer-training stage called "youth culture." And at each stage along the way, these perfomative rebellions have been co-opted and commodified. Everything you need to "go punk," you can buy at a WalMart. Hip-hop is rapidly snapped up by big business, and played on devices you buy at strip malls. In OXFAM's report, "Highly Affected, Barely Connected - Youth Culture and Youth Identity," authors Cara Heaven and Matthew Tubridy write: This "generational consciousness" formed the basis of demand in a new market where the culture industry functioned as an agent of supply: manufacturing the clothes, accessories and leisure time activities particular to the youth experience of the contemporary moment. The market place of the culture industry is the most visible manifestation of the relationship between youth and dominant culture. Dominant youth culture is the culture in which much of Western youth participate, and while its cultural practices and identities may feature distinct, and even confrontational, stylings in order to suggest a semblance of independence and alterity, they are predominantly a continuous part of the larger cultural tradition from which they emanate. Wikipedia: "In its modern usage, hubris denotes overconfident pride and arrogance; it is often associated with a lack of knowledge, interest in, and exploration of history, combined with a lack of humility. An accusation of hubris often implies that suffering or punishment will follow, similar to the occasional pairing of hubris and Nemesis in the Greek world. The proverb 'pride goes before a fall' is thought to sum up the modern definition of hubris." Youth culture permits a relatively swift and simple achievement of internally-advanced social status. Once one has mastered the slang and the styles, learned the list of status-conferring commodities, and has managed to acquire some of them, one has achieved a kind of citizen-status, a form of social recognition, that is associated in the larger society with more complex acquisitions - houses, professional degrees, job skills, children. Ths partitioned insularity of youth culture, along with the sense of social mastery, contribute to the so-called "generation gaps," those periods of temporary hostility between "youth" and "adults." Youth are easily led to believe that a sense of social mastery is the same as having acquired the necessary knowledge to be an agent in the world. In a certain way, this is temoporarily true. Consumer culture has, in many respects, progressively infantilized all of us. We relate to the world through our gadgets and our purchases. What adulthood, as a social phenomenon, has not been able to purge from the repertoire of "adult" experience is the inexorable accumulation of the direct experience of what we like to call the "real world." Those are experiences of social power that involve painful compromise, exploitation, survival-obedience, and humiliation; as well as the immense responsibility of raising children, caring for older loved ones who are infirm, and negotiating the bewildering maze of modern bureuacracies. Wikipedia's definition of hubris included a qualifier to "arrogance," and that is "a lack of knowledge, interest in, and exploration of history." Oddly enough, this dissociation with the metanarrative of history, cultivated by consumer culture as part of its internalized discipline, is also characteristic of rebellion against dominant historical mythologies; and it has led to the almost nihilistic tendencies latent in consumer-capitalist society that triggered the political reaction we now call "neo-conservatism." Neo-conservatism is a poltical movement that emerged in reaction to the fear of liberal individualism leading to an unravelling of the social fabric. David Harvey, writing in The New Imperialism, says: [Neo-conservatism's] primary objective is the establishment of and respect for order, both internally and upon the world stage. This implies strong leadership at the top and unwaivering loyatly at the base, coupled with the construction of a hierarchy of power that is both secure and clear. In a very real way, the emergence of neo-conservatism - even though it appears now to be hoisted on its own petard with the Iraq war - diverted politically active people from any direct confrontation with patterns/systems of social power into an emergency confrontation with this dangerously reactionary one. This was ready-made for young activists identified with youth culture; a direct attempt to impose more coercive authority was easy to see, and matched many of the patterns of adult authority against which they were still actively rebelling. In this world of youth political activism, however, the hubris of youth - and some of its attendant post-modern fallacies - has contaminated even the most politically engaged of young people, and in many respects paralyzed them. This paralysis will become more pronounced as neo-conservatism recedes from the national political stage. The paralysis is a result of seemingly endless disputation taken straight from the academic post-modern playbook. It is probably no accident that many young activists are in university. One of the main discursive methods of these young activists is to continually confront every situation with every conceivable social standpoint (seen as "identities") in every siutation, in a way that confers illegitimacy on any strategy, campaign, or tactic that is articulated from a one major standpoint (metanarrative?). Much of this tendency is an understandable response to very real exclusions and unprincipled compromises that have been made (particularly by the left) in the past. Socialists, Black and Brown nationalists as well as civil rights activists, and liberal feminists really did engage in active homophobia, for example. There is a difference, however, in rooting out prejudices and oppresson within a movement, and attempting to make every tactic, every campaign, and every strategy be all things to all people. This becomes ideological litmus testing; but more importantly, it forecloses any strategically focused practice in a quest for an impossible radical pluralism. The hubris of this discursive method - oftentimes even its sanctimony - is not reinforced only internally by the assumption that the old-heads don't know about the real offenses of the past (many of us know very well), it is reinforced by the fact that in the face of dominant positions, e.g., conservative acquaintences and family members, their arguments easily trump the lack of argumentative sophistication and the utter insupportabilty of many of their positions. Note again, I am NOT generalizing about all young activists, but pointing out unexamined ways in which youth culture impinges on the ability of many young people to actively recognize certain social patterns and connect them to others: specifically, the connection between the acquisitive individualism of consumer-capitalism, into which we have all been deeply socialized, and libertarian notions of individual "agency" that fails to distinguish between "performative" resistance and social struggle. In no arena of politics is this more important than the struggle agaisnt gendered power; and on no issue is this confusion among youth-culture-infulenced activists more pronounced. In a workshop at the Southeast Social Forum a few months ago, on gender oppression, one young woman took offense at the use of the terms "women" and "men," almost spitting the word "woman," such was her contempt for it. "I don't believe in those any more," she declared. I was more than a little taken aback by this - because it is preposterous, for starters - but even more taken aback when I looked around the room and saw more than half the particpants nodding in agreement. Right in a room full of mostly college-educated people, I watched mostly young activists deny not only the biological fact of sexual dimorphism in the human sepcies, but deny the pattern of oppressive social power that is specifically directed against women. This is obviously such a marginal claim in general society that it would be dismissed out of hand. not because of any prejudice, but because people know very well that there are such things as biological men and biological women. In this room, this claim was obviously thrown down as a guantlet. and had anyone, including me, challenged her on this, the other business of the meeting would have been hijacked by a tedious and accusative debate. The foolishness of paid intellecutals in the Academy had trickled down into a political organization, and - in my view - betrayed all the work done over the past few decades by materialist and radical feminists to expose and confront patriarchy as a system that encodes biological difference with social heirarchy. These things matter. And what academics, as well as un-credentialied intellecutals, say and write has a profound if slowly-emerging effect. The underlying argument to this young woman's assertion (she would later complain that "femmes" have been ignored by LGBT activists) is that gender is not a system at all, but a shopping mall of "identities," with brand names that are constantly differentiating. There wasn't the slightest attention paid to the fact that almost all people, with or without their consent, will live their lives as men or women as those are defined by socialization; and their lives will be materially limited within those categories. How does one mount a social struggle agasint one's status by first denying the existence of that status? The glib answer from the shopping mall of identities is that resistance lies in rejection of the categories, or in "transgressive" performaces against them. This approach is deeply irresponsible. It is also an outcome of Pavlovian socialization designed not to counterbalance, but to suppress critical-pattern-recognition as a learning strategy. If this suppression has infiltrated our formations of resistance, how deeply rooted is it in broader society? The answer is not immediately optimistic. What's to be done? Just as the mismatch between automobiles and squirrels - based on the squirrels' heritable, hard-wired pattern recognition - has taken its toll on the intrepid little rodent, the mismatch between emerging conditions and passive (Pavlovian) pattern recognition - based on socialization within consumer-capitalist culture - will throw a generation of metropolitans under the wheels of the first tectonic disruption of that system. The preservation and transmission of active pattern recognition as a learning strategy and a skill, even among a transient minority of us, is a critical political task. Saying that is not enough. This paper is a kind of working hypothesis. It is herein submitted to any and all. For those who find themsleves agreeing with the central assertion and most of the rationale for it, I invite you to begin breaking this into bite-sized parts. There are at least four things I can think of to do with it. First, seek ways to test some of the underlyng assumptions and claims. This is a job for professional academics, especially graduate students. Second, describe multiple emblematic examples of the premises that would be familiar to most people, and develop plain language to begin infiltrating those premises into public discourse. Third, elaborate on aspects of this paper that were given too short shrift. As should be obvious, my own impulse to write on this was stimulated by reading Susan Bordo's book, Unbearable Weight. These kinds of intellectual bifircations at a minimum force us to explain our own intuitions to ourselves and at a maximum might generate a new insight or two. Finally, help all of us think about the pedagogical rescue operation that needs to be mounted on behalf of truly critical thinking. which is as essential as oxygen to any serious insurgency. *** January 16, 2007 C Copyright 2007, All work is the copyright of the respective creators. 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