Month of August , 2003

I am often surprised by the scorn that the term "postmodern" (and its variations) meets with, both in academia and in the general population. I find that "postmodern" is a term that is "bandied about" quite a bit without much substance or conviction behind it, in much the same way that a secularist like myself will yell out "Damn you!" without actually considering him- or her- or myself to be imploring a vengeful deity to consign one's interlocutor to Hell. Although I don't consider myself much of an expert on the topic -- I'm rather an interested follower -- I figured I take a crack at, if not nailing it down (a decidedly non-postmodern thing to do), at least injecting some meaning into the word(s).

"Postmodernism" is hard to define--made all the harder by postmodernism's rejection of fixed definitions. We might start by at least sketching out some rough borders, by laying out a few things that postmodernism is not. It's not a time period, despite the "post-" prefix. Although certain of its trends or tendencies date to the early '70s, postmodernism and modernism exist since then more or less side by side, and elements of postmodernism can be found as far back as the mid-19th century (many of the features of capitalism outlined by Marx we today see as hallmarks of postmodernism). Its also not "outside" of modernity or modernism -- postmodernism is more fruitfully thought of as a "phase" of modernity, or even as a "quality" of the modern. It is not "anti-modern" or "non-modern" or anything else--it is part of the modern.

Because the "postmodern" label was first applied to architecture, from which the label spread to other domains, it bears examining just what postmodern architecture is. The postmodern architects rejected the unadorned glass-and-steel boxes of the modernists in favor of an architecture that was more sensitive to concerns of place and use. Unlike the modernists who viewed their sleek celebrations of the latest building techniques as suitable to every milieu, the postmodernists designed buildings that explicitly referenced local traditions, local history, and the local landscape. They also rejected the modernists strict separation of habitable space from the functioning "innards" of the building, exposing air conditioning and heat ducts, plumbing, light fixtures, elevator cables, and other elements that the modernists had hidden from casual view. The "Discovery" in 2001 is modernist; the "Alexi Leonov" in 2010 is postmodernist. The difficulty in clearly delineating "modernism" and "postmodernism" is clearly apparent in the postmodernists appropriation of local landscapes, referencing the work of ur-modernist Frank Lloyd Wright.

Postmodernism soon began to "pop up" in domains far removed from architecture. In literature, post-structuralists like Derrida and Foucault set the stage for postmodernism in their challenges to narrative and discursive authority in the text. Where the New Criticism had separated the text from the life and times of its author, Foucault insisted that the text be understood not simply as influenced by the culture around it, but as a part of that culture, capable of exerting its own influence in the world. Derrida went a step further, privileging the multiplex readings any text can give rise to over the author's intentions. In challenging the idea that a narrative should give rise to a limited set of meanings reflecting an author's intentions, Derrida came up against the larger narratives that (attempt to) give meaning to entire societies, the so-called Master Narratives. If the internal structure of a narrative like Levi-Strauss' Tristes Tropiques could be upset or "put into play" as Derrida showed in Of Grammatology, so that meanings that seemed apparent were turned upside down and inside out until they seemed to mean the opposite of what the author intended, so to could the structure of society and of the narratives -- the myths, histories, and "common sense" ideas -- that structured it.

In political economy, the term was best invoked (in my opinion) in David Harvey's The Condition of Postmodernity: An Enquiry into the Origins of Cultural Change. Harvey uses "postmodern" to describe the economic system characterized by flexible accumulation, and in opposition to "modern" Fordism (the expansion of Taylorist production methods into a full-blown social order). Fordism represents not just the technical model of production perfected by Ford (the assembly line, the fine-grained deskilling of manufacturing jobs, the Taylorist disciplining of individual labor, products aimed at a single mass market, and so on) but the creation of a consumer market in which Fordist production could flourish. Ford's belief in a body of workers who could afford the products they made, his erection of worker housing complete with company-paid recreation directors, his purchase of and editorship over the newspapers his workers would read, and other acts worked to assure that off-hours Ford workers used their leisure time within the enveloping culture of the company itself, and recognized that workers were also consumers. In conjunction with the Keynesian state to carry the burden of a surplus labor force necessary to accommodate American industry's rapid but uneven growth following WWII, the Ford's model of an affluent worker/consumer society dominated American economic life until well into the '60s.

With the development of a host of new technologies, though -- computers to handle inventory and order fulfillment, automated production machinery to reduce the "changeover" time needed to gear up for a new product, television advertising and a sophisticated marketing industry to help target products more efficiently to the people most likely to buy them -- this model began to be eroded by a new model for organizing labor and consumption, flexible accumulation. The new technologies greatly reduced the economies of scale that Ford and his cohort had exploited to build their empires. Instead of offering one model in one color to the entire population, it was now profitable to offer several models or even several different kinds of products, to several smaller "niche markets". On-demand production made it not only easier to quickly retool to produce another product, but reduced the risks associated with production by filling orders as they came in, rather than producing a massive inventory up front, before the demand could be assessed. The most successful companies no longer produce anything at all -- companies like Nike don't own a single factory, instead controlling a web of contractors and sub-contractors. The everyday tasks of doing business -- payroll, order fulfillment, procurement, maintenance, and marketing -- are increasingly outsourced. The effect on labor has been marked: where the "model" worker of the '50s and '60s might have looked forward to life-long employment, union representation, and a fixed pension, the "model" postmodern worker is a temp or independent contractor with (if s/he's lucky) a 401k or IRA which (again, if she's lucky) might be worth something when s/he reaches retirement age (and, if not, there's always room for another part-time greeter at the local Wal-Mart).

The change in production techniques was paralleled by a change in consumption, too. With the social fragmentation of the '60s, both the rise of ethnic identity politics and the nascent Me Generation's clamor for ways to stand out from "the rest of the crowd", there no longer existed any single market. Instead of "keeping up with the Joneses", the consumer of the early '70s sought ways to distinguish themselves from the Joneses. Ethnic groups, having long subscribed to modernist universalism as the ticket to equality, began to celebrate their differences from the white majority, and producers stepped in to meet this growing need. Rather than a single mass market, there emerged a multitude of niche markets, smallish "clumps" of demand often formed in direct opposition with other niches.

As in architecture, the arts also experienced a postmodern opposition movement, set off in the early '70s by the feminist movement and pop art and later expressed through the incorporation of folk art and other "outsider art". In something of a reversal of postmodernism in literature, in the arts postmodernism entailed a return to narrative following the modernists total rejection of narrative (along with figurativity). If the color field paintings of Rothko or the drip paintings of Pollock stand as the height of modernism, the paintings of Lichtenstein stood explicitly as "slices" of a hinted-at narrative. The total negation of self in the finished work of the modernists (one critic, though which one I can't remember at the moment -- maybe Greenburg -- defined modernism exclusively in terms of the diminishing visibility of brushstrokes, the mark of the painter's presence preserved in the surface of the finished work -- prompting Lichtenstein to reply with a series of paintings depicting brushstrokes) was rejected by women and minority painters who explicitly drew on their own life histories and ethnic identities for source material, as in Basquiat's incorporation of urban street graffiti and Black history and personal life events. Another difference between modernist and postmodernist art lay in the attitude towards the medium. Modernist painters like Pollock reveled in the sheer "mediumness" of their medium, essentially making paintings of paint. Their postmodern descendents include photorealists like Chuck Close and Richard Estes whose work so closely emulates the world around them that it is hardly recognizable as paintings at all.

Irony is a common thread running through all domains of postmodern life (and rumours of its death have been, I fear, greatly exaggerated). A sense of ironic detachment is a central survival adaptation in a world dominated by mass media, market-speak, and profit-driven newsrooms. The postmodern citizen lives in a world constructed almost wholly of lies and image: 4 out of 5 dentists do not recommend sugarless gum for their patients who chew gum (nobody ever asked them), the newest toy advertised on Saturday morning will not do half the things it is shown doing, drinking beer will not make you more attractive, whatever product is mentioned in the 11 o'clock news program's scare segment will not kill you or scar your children, neither Cosmo nor Maxim will make you a better lover, neither "the leading brand" nor its competitor will get grass stains out of your pants, and no matter what you buy you will generally not be a happier or healthier person because of it. We live in a world in which the only choices are products and brands that have made ridiculous claims that we know to be false, but we also have to eat, drink, wash our clothes, and so on. How else but ironically can we buy Palmolive dish soap when we know, absolutely know, that it will not make our hands softer?

This goes somewhat deeper than just our response to consumer products. The rise of the self-help movement, for instance, and its cousins in New Age philosophy and Oprahaic therapy has filled our everyday vocabulary with a host of platitudes and cliches that we know are simply not true but which are all we have with which to construct our verbal responses to the tragedies that befall ourselves and others. How can we loudly and repeatedly profess our disdain of money -- "Money isn't the only thing in life", "Money can't buy happiness", "Money is the root of all evil", "The best things in life are free", and so on -- when almost all our actions in life are focused around money? Irony. Irony allows us to refrain from laughing when a supervisor describes our workplace as a "family" and speaks of loyalty to a company -- a company that, we know, will lay us off without the slightest hesitation if a reduction of "redundancies" (i.e. workers) will boost the next quarter's profit margin. In the postmodern world, earnestness is lethal -- to truly believe in something, without the slightest reservation, is to make oneself vulnerable to all sorts of disappointment, from the pain of the "painless" Epilady to the shock of finding one's insurance cancelled as one faces a grave illness.

The thing that comes to most people's mind in response to postmodernism is the jargon. Although postmodernism describes a much wider swath of social life than just the limited academic movement, it is the academic work struggling to comprehend and explain the postmodern that has become most associated with postmodernism. And that work is, by and large, admittedly difficult reading. A host of "hegemonies" and "always-alreadies" and "subjectivities" and other big-dollar words tend to scare off all but the most committed readers. Alan Sokal's postmodern hoax, in which a completely fabricated scientific paper heavy with postmodernisms was accepted and published, stands as the model of how postmodernist jargon is used to hide a lack of substance and insight -- which is not a totally fair assessment. Although surely a lot of hot air is made intellectually acceptable by postmodernist language, I would venture that this is no more common that it has been in any other field of endeavour, from middle-age scholasticism to Enlightenment-era scientism to 19th century scientific racism to high modernism. Tom Wolfe's The Painted Word mocks the pretentious language of high modernist art critics (and patrons of Pollock, Rothko, Jasper Johns, and the other great modernist painters) Harold Rosenberg, Clement Greenberg, and Leo Steinberg, accusing the modernists, like Sokal to the postmodernists, of using fancy language to hide the total lack of content in their favored art movements.

The denseness of postmodern theory comes from a number of sources. Of course, it's theory, and theory can be dense, no matter what the field. The same problems we might have reading, say, Baudrillard we would also have reading advanced mathematical theory, or physics. It's just not always possible to describe complex systems like society, culture, or economy in a simple, straight-forward manner. But I think a lot of the trouble comes from other factors. First, a lot of postmodern theory comes from specific fields -- philosophy, literary criticism, social science -- each of which has its own specialized style and vocabulary. Second, a great deal comes from France, which presents two problems for English-speaking readers. The French intellectual system is very different from that of the British, American, Canadian, and most other English-speaking peoples (with India being a notable exception, and Indian theory is, likewise, rather dense for non-Indian tastes). More important, I think, is that complex ideas in French tend not to translate well into English, and translators tend to make choices that act as barriers to English-speakers. Third, there's the politics of academia -- like it or not, for better or worse, knowingly or unknowingly, academics erect boundaries around their tiny domains of expertise, opening the gates only to those with the determination and talent to learn the "secret language" of the masters. Fourth, in a field founded on Derrida's distrust of narrative and Foucault's distrust of discourse, postmodern theorists are prone to experiment with language, to write in ways that often intentionally deny any fixed interpretation, to leave much of their argument implicit and open to interpretation. Sometimes this is pretentious -- "Let's see what they make of this!" -- but it can as easily be a product of humility -- "How can I pretend to have the answers in a world where there are no answers?".

Postmodernism is, by and large, a reaction to the universalizing tendencies of modernism. In its attention to the particularities of place, identity, and context, postmodernism denies the basic modernist orientation towards "Man" (or "humanity"). When Hollywood made The Diary of Anne Frank into a movie in the '50s, it expunged or downplayed nearly all the "Jewish" details in favor of a story with a universal message. The Holocaust was not bad because of what it did to Jews, and especially not for what it did to the specific young woman on whose diary the movie was based, but because Anne Frank could be any of us (as could her oppressors, as Hannah Arendt showed in another modernist work, Eichmann in Jerusalem). Today, Jewish people such as Elie Weisel jealously protect the Jewish specificity of the Holocaust (and the Broadway version of Diary of Anne Frank restores Anne's Jewish specificity to the tale). At the root of postmodern society is the growing recognition that what is right in one place at one particular time may not be right in another place or time. This is, I propose, deeper than the easy (and all-too-often dismissive) label "relativism" suggests, implying a kind of deeply-situated pragmatism in our relations with the world. In a globalized world without the benefit of a clear-cut path to "salvation" (or "success), for that matter), we find ourselves forced to reckon with all the varied ways of doing things -- with the full knowledge that, though they may differ from our own, they may well be better, or at least as effective as the ways that are familiar to us. Thus a kind of ironic detachment emerges even towards our own thoughts and actions -- we must act as if we knew our way was the "right" way of doing something, or risk a total paralysis. But we do so always knowing that others might do things far differently, and that in another context our own ways might not only appear strange but become, in fact, useless.

Finally, I conclude this piece with some random thoughts that occurred to me as I thought all this through, offered as illustrations of a sort. I haven't worked through all of the implications of these thoughts; for the most part, they just "feel" right:

• For modernists, the medium is the message; for postmodernists, the message is the medium.
• Modernists believe that racism will end when humanity accepts its similarities; postmodernists believe that racism will come to an end when humanity accepts its differences.
• Chock Full O' Nuts is modern, Starbucks Blue Mountain Blend is postmodern.
• James Joyce's Ulysses is both modern and postmodern. Go figure!
• "Leave it to Beaver" is modern; "Sesame Street" is postmodern.
• The American Melting Pot is modern; the American Salad Bowl is postmodern. Ironically, though, most initiatives that claim to celebrate the American Salad Bowl are entirely modern.
• Al Jolson's Jazz Singer is modern; John Zorn's Masada is postmodern.
• Free Market ideology, with its focus on individual choice and competition, tends to be postmodern, but the corporations and politicians that advocate the Free Market tend to be very, very modern.
• Jazz is modern; Hip-Hop is postmodern.
• Doctor's orders are modern; support group-driven research is postmodern.

According to an internal EPA report released Thursday evening, "White House officials pressured the agency to prematurely assure the public that the air was safe to breathe a week after the World Trade Center collapse." Apparently, all EPA statements were vetted through the National Security Council, which is chaired by Mr. Bush, and which "convinced EPA to add reassuring statements and delete cautionary ones."

For those of us who live (or lived, in my case) in New York City during and after the 9/11 attacks, this is hardly news. WBAI, even in its temporarily eviscerated state, reported almost daily on air quality issues and the EPA's complicity in covering up the dangers to NYC residents. For weeks, a chemical tang saturated the air, making it difficult to breathe (or, indeed, knowing the source of the stench, to want to). Once WBAI's news team was restored, Juan Gonzalez made regular reports on the cover-up, covering it as well in the Daily News, such as this article from almost a year ago. People were suffering from a wide range of respiratory afflictions, ranging from asthma attacks to nosebleeds to nagging headaches--and being told, over and over, that the air was fine.

Now it's two years later, and the EPA -- moments after alleged conspirator Christine Todd Whitman, the administration's voice from inside the agency, has left the stage -- is finally starting to open up and claim some responsibility for its failure. But what next? Heads should roll -- but won't, not in this administration. People like myself and my 10 million fellow New Yorkers have already spent months snorting down this tainted air -- it's too late to change that, now. And next time there's a disaster? Who's going to believe the air is safe when the President (or George Bush, if he's still in office) pushes us to get out and shop?

"There are hard cases and there are easy cases," the judge said. "This is an easy case. This case is wholly without merit, both factually and legally."

So saith U.S. District Judge Denny Chin in dismissing Fox's request for an injunction against Al Franken.

In an unexpected move, Fox News also carried the story, exactly as written by Associated Press. Which suggests to me that either a) Fox has realized how embarassing this whole thing has been for them and feels that running the story is less embarassing than not running the story, or b) Fox News doesn't have anyone reading these stories when they come off the wire.

You Decide.

Over the last couple of days, the daily number of visitors to this site has roughly tripled. WHich would normally be nice, but all the new traffic is coming from web searchs for information on Ghyslian Raza, the "Star Wars Kid", who I've written about a couple of times now. 67 of my last 100 hits were searches of this sort.

What's the big deal all of a sudden? Back when the videos were at the peak of their popularity, I only got a couple hits a day like this--now all of a sudden I'm getting dozens?

Anyway, I think that's strange. And now you know I think it's strange. Of course, by writing about this, I am just increasing the likelihood that someone searching gor Ghyslian Raza will visit my site. Soon, I hope to be the Internet's premier clearinghouse for Raza information, all without actually ever posting anything about him. Isn't the "Net grand?

Steve Steinberg, guest blogger on BoingBoing this week, asks why maps don't work. Or, rather, why metaphorical maps don't work. Traditional maps, those that show geographical data, work most excellently, " especially," Steinberg notes, "if your objective is to slaughter a distant indigenous civilization." But the success of such maps in portraying the relationships between geographical features has led us to try the same thing for other domains of knowledge, from blogs to language to the Middle-East peace process. Although some of these maps can be strange and beautiful in their own right, they rarely do what they are supposed to do, provide a clear guide to an unknown region.

I've called these "metaphorical" maps because they all use the idea of a map as an organizing structure. Now, maps themselves are already metaphors, representing the rock and soil features of the world around us (or far away from us, as the case may be) in terms of ink and paper. Thus, metaphorical maps are twice metaphorical, forcing us to think of the relations between blogs or words or nations as if those nebulous ideas were things "out there", in the landscape, and then forcing us to imagine that the images in front of us represent those ideas and the relations between them in the same way that a traditional map represents places and the distances between them?

Now, it seems as if this kind of doubly-metaphorical spatial thinking comes more or less naturally to us. I can't say whether it is a universal trait or just something we have developed as a product of modernity, but in either case, most people tend to think this way. For instance, we discuss how "far apart" colors, sounds, tastes, or other qualities might be; we decide whether certain ideas move "forward" or "backward"; we "move" through history, time, choices, and any number of other processes; we break our intellectual life up into "fields"; we describe our families in terms of "distance" of relation; and so on. I don't think this is simply a factor of the English language--the French, for instance, used "avant-garde", an explicit spatial metaphor describing the troops at the front of an army's formation, to describe the relation of artists whose work challenged contemporary assumptions about art to those in the mainstream. So fully are spatial metaphors integrated into our thought processes that it becomes really hard to talk or write without using them, often unconsciously--think of the literal meanings of most of our prepositions, for example.

And maybe that is why most non-geographical maps fail. We are already so used to thinking of ideas in spatial terms that their spatial representation doesn't really tell us anything new. Or maybe it's because, unlike geography, the relations between ideas are always shifting, and more than that, are rarely the same for any two thinkers. We have a set of (near-)universally agreed-upon conventions for gauging the physical relationship between things in the landscape, and a set of conventions for how to translate those measurements and assessments into graphical forms on a page. But there is, of yet, no agreed upon way of experiencing or expressing the relations between ideas. How far apart are Derrida and Kierkegaard? How do I get from "cheese" to "elevator shaft"?

Such maps may be useful, in their way--I'm not arguing against that. But, to borrow Steinberg's language, they don't ultimately reveal much about their topic. Some time ago, a map of "Weblogs -- Left to Right" was passed around. I don't know exactly wat the map was based on, but it doesn't tell us much about the blogs included. What does it mean that blog "a" is closer to blog "b" than it is to blog "c"? What do "right" and "left" mean in this kind of arrangement? Despite the name, "WEblogs -- Left to Right", the center is--as in most maps--what is really important. Maps of the world almost always have the country in which they are designed at the center (hence all the awkward placements of Alaska and the Soviet Union you remember from the wall atlas in grade school). The center of the map is a sort of position of privilege, telling us much more about the makers of the map than about the relation of whatever happens to occupy that place to the rest of the "world" being mapped.

I don't want to suggest that these maps are useless--but they do fail to do all that we might expect them to do. Sometimes they highlight interesting relations between ideas we might not have thought of as related (though just as often, if not moreso, they fail to reflect relations that are clearly there). They can be a useful step in attacking a problem--but are all too often presented as an end-product in their own right. Finally, given the way we think, I'm not all that sure that they can be avoided. Mapping seems to be the prefferred way of thinking about and representing data of all sorts, at least in Western culture. Ultimately, I have to ask, what better choices do we have?

eyeteeth posts a small piece of an article on the Fox-Franken "Fair and Balanced" lawsuit. I was especially intrigued by this bit:

Fox lawyers argued that "Franken is neither a journalist nor a television news personality. He is not a well-respected voice in American politics; rather, he appears to be shrill and unstable. His views lack any serious depth or insight."

Now, let me get this straight: Fox is suing Franken because they are afraid that a book by someone who is "neither a journalist nor... a well-respected voice in American politics", who "appears to be shrill and unstable", and whose "views lack any serious depth or insight" will be mistaken by the average consumer as a representative of Fox News?

Oh, wait, I guess that makes perfect sense.

Dr. Laura, who very publically embraced Orthodox Judaism a few years back, has just as publically debraced it. One commentator cited in the article accepts Schlesinger's defection fairly readily, saying: "Let her be just a garden variety, anti-choice conservative."

What's interesting about this story is that it seems that Dr. Laura--the family values and religious faith moralizer--has been incapable of fitting in with other Jews. Despite her incessant badgering of people to do as she does (or at least as she says she does), she just wasn't accepted. As a Jew, yes--even as she publically renounces Judaism and considers the smorgasbord of "very loving, very supportive" Christian faiths out there, the Jews interviewed in the article insist that she is still a Jew. But she wasn't accepted into any sort of community, complaining that "From my own religion, I have either gotten nothing, which is 99% of it, or two of the nastiest letters I have gotten in a long time. I guess that's my point -- I don't get much back. Not much warmth coming back."

I guess this is not surprising, even to people who know little of Dr. Laura's schtick. Today's conservativism, it seems to me, is very much about the individual over the community, about ignoring the problems around you except as they impact your own condition, usually in terms of your financial situation. "I'm not paying taxes so some homo can get free AIDS medicine", that sort of thing. It's easy to be Jewish, or Christian, or anything else, and hold these sorts of views, but if it's "warmth" you're after, some sense of communal togetherness, I just don't see how they're compatible.

Every time I hear Americans compaining about the UN, about how inefficient or corrupt it is, how it threatens "national sovereignty", I wonder how much they actually know about the UN. Probably 1%, if that, of its activities have any sort of public face in the US, while all over the world the UN chugs away in relative obscurity. Who is going to do all this stuff if not the UN, I ask its critics, and then sit back while the level of their ignorance becomes clearer and clearer.

Granted, the UN has its problems: some important issues are vastly underfunded or overbureaucratized, some initiatives take way too much time and energy to satisfy the interests of limited parties on isues that don't, ultimately, matter much. The Security Council has become a travesty, maintaining a severe power imbalance to the benefit of a handful of countries. This post isn't meant as a defense of the UN, but rather by way of introduction to one of the many things the UN does do, and does fairly well, out of sight and mind of the American public.

What I'm speaking about is the ongoing effort to draft a Convention on Corruption. I have sort of an "inside track" on the negotiations, as my partner has been working at the talks, writing reports for the European Commission's offices in Belgium, which explains why I even know about this, as a Google search doesn't turn up a single American media reference to this important event, proceedings of which are just wrapping up pending the release of the final Convention in December.

The most important advances so far seem to be standardizing relations between criminal jurisdictions in different countries. While many countries have traditionally preferred individually-negotiated extradition treaties (the US has 110), the Convention would call for a regularized agreement for countries to aid other countries in their investigations and execution of justice even when the two countries disagree on their definitions of the particular crime. That is, if something is illegal in Mexico but not in the US, US authorities would still assist Mexican authorities in prosecuting criminals who may have fled to the US. While this scares me a little in terms of "ordinary" criminality (for instance, I admire the position France and some other nations have taken, refusing to extradite accused criminals to the US in cases where they would face the death penalty), in relation to corruption it is essential, as all too many corrupt officials flee the country and enjoy relative immunity from prosecution under the current system--often taking with them huge amounts of illicitly-gained money and leaving behind economies struggling to deal with the effects of such a massive withdrawal of funds.

As a corollary to this, the new Convention would mandate the return of funds involved in embezzlement, bribery, and fraud to their country of origin, helping especially developing and transitional economies to recover from the often massive hits their economies can take from even a single well-placed, corrupt official.

Of course, as you would expect, the US is holding up the game. At issue is the relation of political parties to government. As you might expect, the US has been fighting tooth and nail -- and will probably refuse to ratify the final Convention -- to prevent any sort of interference with corruption within political parties. Article 10 requires member states to control both conflicts of interests and funding of political party through "illegal and corrupt practices":

1. Each State Party shall adopt, maintain and strengthen measures and regulations concerning the funding of political parties. Such measures and regulations shall serve:

(a) To prevent conflicts of interest;
(b) To preserve the integrity of democratic political structures and processes;
(c) To proscribe the use of funds acquired through illegal and corrupt
practices to finance political parties; and
(d) To incorporate the concept of transparency into funding of political
parties by requiring declaration of donations exceeding a specified limit.

2. Each State Party shall take measures to avoid as far as possible conflicts
of interest owing to simultaneous holding of elective office and responsibilities in
the private sector.

Since a great majority of our current administration's highest-placed people (although corruption is obviously not limited to the current administration) have made a career of reaping the benefits of "simultaneous holding of elective office and responsibilities in the private sector", and since "illegal and corrupt" fundraising practices have been raised to an art by our Democratic and Republican leaderships, you can see where the current administration would be especially reluctant to endorse such a position. My partner actually heard the US delegate tell the assembly that the US has no interest in this clause because "We don't have political parties in the US". She puts it this way: "Their argument is that in America money is allowed to follow good ideas...in other words, political corruption is allowed."

Yay, us.

Download posters, painting stencils, buttons, and stickers.

A long, long time ago (February '01, as a matter of fact), a member of the anthro-l listserv mentioned the then-new Cluetrain Manifesto (see the list's archives for a look at the original context in which it came up). I glanced at the website , but didn't have much of a response at the time. Since then, I've become a regular reader of Doc Searls ' and David Weinberger 's personal sites, linking to and being linked to by them. But though I've read through the "Manifesto" proper (95 theses, to which the book is exposition), I had never read the book itself. Then, as I was waiting for some work to be done on my car, I stepped into a remaindered-book shop, and snagged a copy for 5 bones. It turned out to be a pretty quick read, and I think I'm finally ready to answer the question posed on that listserv 2 1/2 years ago. Better late than never, I hope.

Although its authors are not, in any way I can discern, marxists, their analysis probably won't strike anyone familiar with Marx' work as unusual. The rise of industrialisation, and especially mass production, was accompanied (maybe accomplished) by the development of a business-consumer relationship in which businesses relied on consumers as passive endpoints in a one-way, controlled transfer of goods, services, and information. This is most aptly illustrated by the example of Ford's Model T "in any color you want so long as it's black"--and again by mass media's preferred model of interaction, with viewers or listeners as passive consumers of "content", shoved down a pipeline from corporate HQ to your living room.

Though the market has, in some crucial ways, changed--fractionalization into "niche markets", the incorporation and exploitation of minors as consumers, etc.-- this model of business-consumer relationship has continued to dominate commerce. "Content producers", as record labels and movie studios like to call themselves nowadays, scramble to maintain this one-way flow of product by introducing "innovations"--copy protection, encryption, digital rights management--that dictate how, where, and when their products can be used. Hardware manufacturers wrap their products in anti-reverse engineering licenses, and file suits against their products' users to prevent their products being used in "unauthorized" ways, such as hacking an X-Box to run GNU/Linux. Auto manufacturers obscure the diagnostic codes generated by the microchips on which modern engine performance depends, so that drivers are prevented from modifying their own vehicles, as well as being forced to use only the maintenance sites chosen for them by the manufacturer. Customer service is routed through layers upon layers of voice mail menus and unknowledgeable (but cheap) techs in order to get answers to questions that should be clearly explained in products' user manuals.

And then there's the ads. As Cluetrain's authors point out, there's no demand for advertising. Advertisers absolutely know this. They intentionally seek out "captive audiences"--people who literally cannot get away. If I want to see the newest hit movie, I have to show up 20 minutes to get and keep a seat. And these days, that means watching " The 2wenty ", 20 minutes of commercials splashed onto the big screen and pumped through the Dolby sound systems. Should I decide my time might be better used, say, taking a leak, I find an ad posted conveniently at eye level above the urinal. Maybe I give up and leave. I hail a cab, only to find myself face-to-face with a video screen showing, what else, ads. Frazzled, I tell the driver to pull over, pay, and get out. I decide to buy a pack of cigarettes at the bodega on the corner, and while waiting in line, I find myself facing another digital monitor playing out ads. Screw it, I say, and walk across the street to the Best Buy to buy the album whose hit single was embedded on a CD into the lid of my soda at the movie theater. While waiting in line to check out, yet another TV murmurs seductively of all the other Best Buy products I could be buying. I could go home, but there will just be ads on my answering machine I'll have to listen to just in case one of the messages is from somebody I actually know and my inbox will be filled with ads I'll have to at least glance at in case one or two e-mails are actually from humans. And so on.

The ad folks know--because they are, after all, people much like me--that there's no way I would willingly watch or listen to all those ads. That's why they're paid good money to find out what things I would willingly do, and make sure that wherever I go to do them, there's an ad. Or two. Or ten. The businesses that hire the ad folks know this, too, or they wouldn't hire the ad folks in the first place. But while I can allow myself the luxury of thinking of ad folks and their employers as humans more or less like me, they can't afford the luxury of returning the favor. To them, I am and must remain, like you, "a consumer", an always-open, ever-ravenous mouth at the end of a pipeline that exists only for them to fill with product for me to consume.

The immense effort businesses expend--advertising, PR, legal wrangling, political favor-buying, and so on--to maintain this relationship betrays its ultimate falsity. While corporate production has expanded since the dawn of the Industrial era to encompass almost the entirety of commercial life, customers (not consumers) have evolved ways of evading their role as mere consumers. Before industrialization wiped out the craftsperson and artisan (for everyone except the very rich), customers learned about products by talking to the person who made or grew them; with the replacement of local manufacture by distant (both geographically and psychologically) corporations, would-be customers learned to talk to their friends and family about those products--and not the companies that made them. This process has slowly accelerated and spread out, as new technologies and new social relationships enlarged the possible circle within which these conversations could take place, reaching a fever pitch with the wide availability and easy accessibility of the Internet that has become possible over the last decade. Few people rely solely on corporate sources for information about products they are interested in--not when Usenet groups, discussion forums, and opinion aggregate sites like epinions.com and amazon.com can connect them with the opinions of people like them who actually use those products. Likewise with support: a new computer user finds out pretty quickly that his/her problem can be answered far more quickly--and far more surely--by other users than by the company that made their computer or operating system; the manufacturer may not even admit that the problem exists, let alone tell you how to fix it. Some companies may not even *allow* you to fix it! And if, god forbid, you actually want to use a product in a way not officially authorized by its manufacturer, you certainly won't find advice on its website or from tech support--but you will probably find other people who have thought of the same thing you have, and figured out how to do it. And will tell you how, too. For free.

While the corporations have been fine-tuning their one-way delivery channels and treating customers as consumers, the people who buy and use products have been having conversations with each other, sometimes about those products, but more often about the lives in which those products play a role. Companies know this, but have so far spent their resources paying "trendspotters" to eavesdrop on these conversations and report back to the corporations, where conversations are turned into marketing materials and pushed back through the product pipeline. The thing is, while companies pursue business as usual, customers are moving on, a process greatly accelerated by the advent of the Web and its infinite possibilities for conversation. Tired of waiting for the features they wanted from a commercial computer operating system, hackers--most of them strangers to each other, united only by Usenet, e-mail, and hypertext--sat down and, for the sheer pleasure of it, made GNU/Linux, an industry-grade operating system that runs a goodly portion of the Internet these days and has Microsoft and SCO (a maker of Unix, on which Linux is based) running scared, often in a blind panic. Tired of watching great musicians struggle to be heard while the latest focus-grouped pop "idol" is shoved at us through every available channel, file-traders started opening up their collections of bootleg and official recordings over the web, offering listeners a chance to hear the music that either was not available through traditional corporate channels or whose value was not yet established. While big music companies were intensifying their efforts to control how and where their music was being listened to (you don't "buy" music anymore, you "license" it these days), independents were growing by leaps and bounds by giving music away. Likewise in publishing--as publishers slowly began to offer a handful of fake bestsellers as overpriced "e-books", newsgroups were flooded with quality scans of the books people really wanted to read, in formats suitable to their palm-pilots or pocket pcs, for free. While publishers spent their time and money cracking down on this trade in text, Baen publishing began giving away its e-books--and saw sales of hard copies skyrocket! While company after company tried to turn the 'Net into an extension of their one-way pipeline and failed, eBay made a profit from its first sale, by making it easier for people to find and deal directly with other people who had products they wanted, making it easier to complete your shopping list of 10 items from 10 different merchants than trying to find the online version of the brick-and-mortar outlet who could meet even half of the list. Cheaper, too.

Cluetrain boils down to three fundamental principles: conversation, voice, and craft. Humans talk to each other--that's what we do and what we are; corporations, more often than not, just get in the way of that. Humans speak with a human voice, and are instantly recognizable; corporations, more often than not, speak with a recognizably inhuman voice, and are being increasingly ignored. Humans make things and share them; corporations employ people to make tiny parts of things, and then "distribute" them. People--customers--want to talk to other people about the things that really interest them; corporations want to talk to consumers about only those things they feel necessary to secure a sale. There's a huge gap there. The thing is, corporations need customers if they are going to survive; customers don't need corporations. At all.

Cluetrain is not, in essence, anything new. It seems new because it's about the Internet, whose growing role in our day-to-day lives is new, but it is basically the same thing Edward Sapir wrote in his 1924 essay "Culture, Genuine and Spurious". It's opposition of a face-to-face, conversation-driven society against the alienated, disaggregated world of corporate mass production has been a standard in anthropology and sociology, rooted in Durkheim 's work at the turn of the 20th century and perhaps most forcefully expressed in Robert Redfield's work of the '30s and '40s. What is new is the scope of possibility for such conversations opened up by the Internet. While we cannot (yet) speak "face-to-face" over the Internet with any regularity, we can and do speak honestly, openly, and in our own "voice", sometimes with hundreds, sometimes with thousands, and occasionally with hundreds of thousands and even millions. What's more, we do so at our own pace, not the Taylorist pace of the corporate clock, the Internet allowing us to dip in and out of conversations at our leisure as well as to "surf" other conversations that we might not even take part in.

The Cluetrain Manifesto is essentially optimistic about all the possibilities the Internet opens up, but it is important to realize that the battle is hardly won, that customers and employees are still, by and large, unempowered, and that the openness of the Internet has been maintained so far more by a lack of understanding on the part of business than by any inherent strength of the Internet itself ( World of Ends notwithstanding). As many people are beginning to understand, the Internet represents a "commons" comparable to the uncontrolled pastureland of England several centuries ago, and like those commons, our commons can conceivably, and probably fairly easily, be "enclosed" by the "owners". But enclosure in Britain set off centuries of struggle and revolt, and with their four-quarter fiscal year planning horizon, I don't see corporations being able to afford that sort of protracted struggle. As long as our society maintains even the marginally free market we have today (as much as that freedom has been attenuated by deregulation, monopoly capital, corporate merger, economic liberalization, tort reform and damage caps, and most of the other workings of the current corporate dominance), there is likely to always be someone willing to open up a space for human occupation. Since our commons are, unlike the British pasturelands, infinitely extensible, a small opening is all we really need to build a commons as large as our society.

And that's what I'm really talking about here. As much as Cluetrain Manifesto is oriented to marketeers and corporate management, as much as its examples are drawn from the business world, it's not really about the working of the market at all, but about the workings of society. This is especially clear in the success, so far, of Howard Dean's campaign (which employs one of the Cluetrain authors) is energizing and mobilizing a significant body of people traditionally considered outside the political mainstream. I'm not talking about radicals, here, I'm talking about the ordinary people whose place in political life has heretofore been seen by the major parties as "voters", in the same way that corporations view them as "consumers". While the more traditional campaigns deploy their fluffers to stroke corporate contributors for big wads of campaign cash (with strings attached, of course), Dean's campaign has raised more money, faster, from tiny donations given by readers of his campaign's blog , by attendees at Internet-organized "meetups", by recipients of forwarded newsletters and participants in listserv conversations, by instantly-empowered websurfers visiting his campaign site where individual donations are two clicks away (instead of 4 on Lieberman's site --and you have to know that donations are in the "Get Involved" section). Listen to the difference in voice between the two men's campaign sites (taken from the topmost article on the front page of each site):

Our campaign is about bringing people together. Every day more and more people are coming together to restore our communities and our nation's traditional role as an idealistic moral force in the world. Over 262,000 Americans have signed up for our grassroots campaign, and you can join them by clicking here: http://www.deanforamerica.com/signup

Joe Lieberman's campaign today launched a new website http://www.JoesJobsTour.com -- highlighting his ongoing "Joe's Jobs Tour" across the United States. The site features a map of Lieberman's tour stops, a state-by-state listing of the 3.1 million jobs lost under George Bush, photos from the trail, and Lieberman's proposals for getting back the jobs lost under George Bush and creating new jobs.

It's clear which of these sites is inviting us to join the conversation, and which is pushing pre-packaged information at us. What Cluetrain recognizes is that we are individual human actors who want to live connected lives in a humanized world, not interchangeable, passive consumers, workers, or voters noticeable only for our contribution to aggregate statistics. We don't want to be sold to or campaigned to, we want to be spoken with. Cluetrain presents not just a picture of business for corporations to try to emulate, but a vision of society in which alienation and apartness are overcome and conversation, voice, and craft assume (reassume?) their proper role.