Hunger is a Political Condition

I've just turned in the first 10 (really 12) pages of my thesis, and I'm feeling excited about this work for the next few months!  I think that I outlined my argument pretty well, stated why this project is important, and even managed to define and not-define affect to my liking at this stage in the game.

So, now that I've been able to put words around my general ideas and make the necessary connections between subjectivity, technology, and citizenship, I'm about to delve into these issues more deeply.  One thing that I came across this week is this statement by James McGovern, representative from Massachusetts (and American University alumnus): "I believe hunger is a political condition. We have the means to solve hunger in America once and for all, but we haven’t mustered the political will to do so. Shame on us for not doing more to end this terrible scourge."  I came across this as I was confirming my graduation date and time because James McGovern is meant to be one of our commencement speakers.  So, I checked out his website to see what he is all about and found this statement in response to the current debates around Food Stamps. Of course, I found an immediate connection with my thesis because this is what I think about 90% of the time nowadays.

Basically, the argument that I am trying to progress in my thesis is that human needs and desires -- physical and bodily needs as well as spiritual and metaphysical needs -- are not separate mind/body needs, but holistic human needs and they are bound up in issues of citizenship.  The issue of hunger in this country, especially poignant as the country is also plagued by severe obesity, is only one example of this relationship.  By looking to address hunger as a singular issue, I believe that politics will continue to fail American citizens because hunger, for me, is not a singular issue and cannot be addressed simply with food stamps.  Obviously, food stamps is a necessary program that will alleviate some of that -- providing food stamps is an essential program, in my opinion, and I fail to understand how people who claim to have values can debate against this program.  But what I mean is that we all know that hunger stems from much more than just lack of food.  I think it stems from all sorts of structural inequalities from unemployment to racism.  Anyway, I guess my point that I'm working out right now is something about how addressing poverty as a purely bodily need and not as a bigger issue perpetuates the structural inequalities that lead to hunger in the first place.

And Science Fiction as a genre is eerily spot on about this assessment.  It's crazy to look at Sci Fi novels from the 1990's that warn against the increased use and distribution of pharmaceutical drugs, for example, and to see how many of those fears are playing out today.  So, I'm taking my cues from Octavia Butler here to learn more about this connection as opposed to the history of political theory or whatever its called.

Taxes Shmaxes

Is it just me or is it true that the older I get, the more complicated my taxes get?  I used to find doing taxes mildly fun.  I had a ritual of getting my tax booklet from the post office or public library and sitting down with a glass of wine (or two) to calculate all of the money I was going to get back in a few weeks time.  It felt pretty good telling the government that they forced me to pay too much and need to send some of that dough back my way. 

But that all changed this year.  I have tried doing my taxes three separate times so far this year and only on the third time did I actually complete them successfully.  The first time around, I sat down after a night out at happy hour and had my W2 and my 1098 in hand, which was all I thought I needed.  As I started to see the refund amount on the online tax prep software continue to shrink, I thought I had done something wrong.  So, I put it away after much frustration and decided that I would do it the old fashioned way and go back to the paper form.  I quickly decided that was too much of a buzz kill, so I found the free forms online.  Anyway, I sat down a second time, this time with just one bottle of beer, but I couldn't figure out which forms I needed to use for my education stuff, so after an hour I gave up again. 

Tonight was the night for that third-time charm.  I decided being hungover after my Mardi Gras party was a good way to ensure that I didn't desire a drink while powering through this task.  And apparently, my taxes have officially gotten complicated between having a job, being in school full-time, and having silly savings accounts that haven't earned anything, but I still have to report them because god forbid I forget to log the $11.29 that my savings bank "earned" on my account.  I finally finished it all...and the online program even checked out my "audit risk," which is apparently very low.  Phew.

I'm sad to say that I'm entering the class of people who hate doing taxes.  It used to be my hard-earned, but high probability lottery ticket, and now, it's just an annoying task for grown ups.

Catharthesis

Another friend here suggests that I should blog about my thesis.  And I will do just that.  I hope it makes sense since I'm still trying to form words around this mess of not-fully-formed-ideas in my mind!

Right now I am working on completing the first ten pages, which need to include the following: 1) an introduction to the reason I am interested in studying Octavia Butler's Parable of the Sower and Parable of the Talents, 2) my definition/understanding of affect and emotion and how and why I am using them for my analysis and 3) outline the argument that I plan to make in the subsequent 40 pages.  Believe it or not, #3 is by far the hardest for me to do. 

At this stage, I'm almost done with my introduction to why I'm interested in these novels.  Basically, I see that issues of subjectivity, technology, and citizenship intersect in interesting ways in the novels.  These are three fairly unrelated issues, so I am having to devote a good 4-5 pages explaining their relationship as I see it.  The biggest challenge I am having in moving the paper forward is making a strong connection between the way that violence is enacted on the body through technology and "citizenship" in similar ways.  It's fairly complicated, but the idea is that the consequences of legal personhood (citizenship) is related to abstracting people through rhetoric and other means, which reduces the real lives of people to their political representation.  This abstraction is thus a form of violence on the body and can be a slippery slope to oppression.  While technology also has great potential for violence in the novel -- pharmaceutical drugs, in particular, as a form of technology, does violence through inducing defects like hyperempathy syndrome -- because it is absorbed by the body and affects personal agency by reducing clear thinking, etc. 

What do these two types of violence have in common?  Well, I'm still working that out...I'm not sure right now.  Basically, it's a hunch right now, and I have to make a logical argument out of a purely inspired idea.  One way that they absolutely interesect is that, in the novels, drugs that do violence to the body also make users either too numb to be engaged with the world around them or make them so crazy that they enact violence as pyromaniacs (one example) and thus, wreck havoc on their communities.  I'm starting to think something along the lines of this: technological advances in pharmaceutical drugs rob people of their agency by incapacitating them in a similar way to how legal personhood robs people of their complete-ness/complexity/agency...I don't have the right word for what I mean right there.

Yowzer.  I have no idea if any of this is making sense.  If it makes sense to you...or, even better, if you have ideas that would make this make sense, please by all means get in touch.  Like immediately since this is due Tuesday :)

Motivation Problems

Yesterday I was having one of those days that wasn't outrageously annoying, on the one hand, or outstanding, on the other hand.  I'm finding that I'm having more and more days like this.  They weigh on me.  I'm not overly excited about anything, but I'm not overly frustrated either.  I'm just kinda blah. 
 

It might be the winter blues, and I certainly blame my job for the double-fisted lack of intellectual stimulation and high emotional investment it requires.  But the bottom line is that I have got to stop hating on my job.  No matter what happens with PhD programs or anything else, I'm in that job through the end of May at the least.  I can't spend the next 113 days complaining about a job that I know--before the day even starts--will include an extended grating of my nerves in some form or fashion.  So, I just need to get over it.

I think my problem actually lies in being too motivated.  I go into work everyday, and I actually want to do good work.  How do you turn off your motivation?  I'm trying to redirect all of it to my thesis, but when I am in the office for 8 hours straight, it just creeps up on me.  What is a woman to do in these circumstances? I've already got the 15 minutes late thing down...now I think I may try staring at the screen and spacing out like Peter from Office Space.

 

Charles Dickens' 200th Birthday

Let me be straight forward: I am not a huge Dickens fan.  I've only read ATale of Two Cities, and I started (never finished) Great Expectations, but I do intend to see the new movie with Ralph Fiennes when it comes out.  Like most people, I've watched A Christmas Carol, but I never read it.  I also watched David Copperfield and Oliver Twist, but never read them.  The funny thing is that Dickens' well-developed characters ensure that the movies do not usually translate that well.  But alas, I haven't invested in reading his stories.  I'm just not that into him.

BUT today he interests me because Google is dedicating its graphics to him and also because so many people think that Dickens' stories are good morality tales.  In fact, philosopher Martha Nussbaum includes Dickens in a recommended diet of classic reading that she believes teaches people how to be upstanding and moral citizens.  Well, right now I'm on the verge of starting a career in studying the boundaries of literature and storytelling in effecting social change, which includes encouraging or conditioning people to be moral.  The more I read and think about this matter, the more I disbelieve that literature has that kind of effect.  The effect it is more likely to have is an internal feeling of change or affirmation in one's perspective, but think about it for yourself, did you ever specifically take action in real life based on a book or story that changed your way of thinking?

Toni Morrison's The Bluest Eye has been--hands down--the single most influential piece of literature on my life.  I've often said and still believe that this book made me see the gray area of moral dilemmas in a way I could only abstractly imagine before reading that book.  And yet, I fail to be able to trace this experience directly to anything other than my career path.  Now, that is a big deal, don't get me wrong.  But choosing a career path and discovering a personal passion is different than morality.  I believe in the power of literature to deepen and complicate the way we think about things, including moral imperatives, but I'm less convinced than I ever have been about how that thinking translates into specific action.  If you disagree, by all means, please leave a comment here explaining your position or even send me a personal email since I am making this argument in my thesis as we speak.

Anyway, I haven't really said much about Dickens here, but I guess part of what I'm saying is that I don't know that it really matters that I haven't read his works.  This is blasphemy for someone about to complete a master's degree in English, no doubt.  And let me be clear that I think reading matters--it matters a whole lot.  I'm definitely not saying that it doesn't matter; I guess I'm just skeptical of literature as didactic.  

Sssssnakesssss

When the people (or one person) talk(s), I listen, and that is why I'm writing about snakes today.  I had a dream last week in which my significant other brought home four snakes as a "gift."  Two of them were white, one was grey, and one was blue.  I was totally freaked out and not excited about having these creatures in my house, but he was insistent that this was something I wanted.  The blue one wasn't that scary, but it scared me the most because it kept escaping from the ice chest where it was temporarily housed and slivering toward me to get in my face.  It wasn't trying to bite me or anything, just looking at me and getting really super close.  Anyway, I didn't like the snakes one bit, and when I woke up, I asked my significant other why he brought snakes into my dream.  His response was fairly incredulous, and since I couldn't get him to answer it, I've had to do my own research to get to the bottom of this.

Apparently, dreaming about snakes is not a metaphor for poisonous people or anything like that (phew).  In fact, many people (or just Carl Jung and his followers) see snakes as a symbol of wisdom.  I sure could use that lately, so maybe the four snakes were some pre-conscious message from myself to myself ensuring me that I am smart enough to get into a PhD program.  According to an expert on Huffington Post, it actually means that I was particularly creative during the day before I went to sleep.  I'm inclined to believe this mostly because of the blue snake.  There is also an entire website devoted to dreaming about snakes: www.snakedreams.org.  According to this site, dreaming of snakes can basically mean anything at all: abundance or fear of losing something, feeling overwhelmed or healing.  Really, the snakes could mean anything!

So, why should my dream about snakes interest you?  I have no idea, but maybe because you also dream of snakes.  Or perhaps as an insightful friend you might have an interpretation to offer. 

Blah-ging

So, I haven't been blogging as much as I would like, and I'm not exactly sure why. I think part of it is that I just have a lot going on...and blogging used to be an escape from that stuff, but it just isn't lately. And then, it may just be because I have nothing to talk about. Which makes me wonder, does that make me boring?

If I weren't so inundated with life at the moment, what would I be talking about? I'd probably be talking about the Komen craziness or maybe about increased robberies this winter in the District.... I definitely would not be talking about the elections. Honestly, though, right now all I am interested in talking about is my thesis. When someone engages me on the topic of subjectivity, emotion, citizenship, or technology (in the context of literature) you can't get me to shut up. I learned that this week as the student search committee I'm chairing was interviewing candidates for a faculty position.

In an effort to be more interesting and well-rounded, I'm going to try to keep blogging. If you have suggestions for topics -- bring it. If you don't, then, perhaps my blogging doesn't matter anyway, right? Regardless, I'm going to give this another shot at regularity.