"Let There Be Light"

Interesting piece by Nebojsa Seric Shoba commenting on the startling presence of the United States in geopolitics, and its capacity to illuminate in contrast to the dark world over which it can illuminate, from which it derives the resources to illuminate:

State of Exception Discourse, It's Problems

Michael Hardt discussing how claims about "sovereign power" as based on "a state of exception" (e.g. Abu Ghraib, the new jurdical category of "enemy combatant" that enables torture, etc., preemptive defense) is always governed by a constitutionalist tendency, a desire for the rule of law, rather than any ethos that might be revolutionary, or transform the conditions for such exceptions:

Thinking New Political Prisoners

Stolen from our friends at Franc-tireurs:


"Firstly, a man, Tim DeChristopher, who disrupted the auction of public assets in Utah by making bogus bids has been sentenced to two years in prison. This sentence is clearly out of proportion with the offense. Moreover, we support his action, regardless of their legality. Somewhat similarly, a man, Bilal Zaheer Ahmad, has received 12 years in Britain for apparently threatening Western politicians, or rather encouraging others to harm them on the internet.  We have to be clear that in both cases, these men are political prisoners. Both of them have engaged in actions which are fundamentally threatening to the basic norms of our society, though different norms in each case. DeChristopher's action is a crime against commerce; Ahmad's is a crime against politics. DeChristopher's action threatens our ability to buy and sell at auction, and as such he received an exemplary sentence. Ahmad's action threatens the ability of politicians to pose as the representatives of the people, and as such he incited the vengeance of the state. In both cases, the rationale is that commerce and politics as they are conducted in our society are perfectly proper activities that need the protection of the state. This is not our position. Rather, we think that commerce and politics as they go on are anything other than proper activities. That is not to say that we advocate the deliberate disruption of either as a strategy: in neither case will this be likely to be productive. Despite the feeling that the pseudo-elected leaders who unleashed slaughter on the world deserve to be executed, this cheap moralism must be eschewed in favor of the sober judgment that killing politicians who support war will play precisely into the hands of the warmongers. I do not make a pacifist argument: it's not that all killing is counterproductive, just this killing, because it plays to the prevailing rhetoric of fear.  Still, these men are political prisoners, because their crimes are political. They are at odds, as we are, with the way our society operates, are a threat to it, and it is for this that they are in jail."

Measuring Racial Inequality in terms of Wealth

A Pew Center released today suggests that White wealth is 20 times that of African-Americans, and 18 times the size of Latino wealth, suggesting that economic racial disparity is worse now that it has been in a long time, and lending support to Rubén G. Rumbaut's claims about a growing "rainbow underclass." This seems to be more clearly the case following the Financial Meltdown. Kai Write at Colorlines writes:

"Certainly the recent explosion in the wealth gap is owing to the fact that the little wealth black and Latino families hold is disproportionately locked up in homes. White families are far more likely to have jobs with retirement accounts and investments in the stock market. Those black and Latino families that have wealth depend on the housing market for it. 

But that’s still more symptom than root cause. Black and Latino families are also far more likely to live in places crawling with expensive, deceptive consumer lending of all sorts, from car loans to refinance mortgages. They are more likely to turn to that lending because they make less money and because they already hold less wealth to cushion themselves in tough times. It’s an ugly cycle: inequality across the economy creates demand for predatory credit to bridge the gap, which in turn worsens inequality."

The Koch Empire and Venezuela

You may remember the Koch brothers from the recent outbreak of popular outrage over the liquidation of public employee bargaining rights by the current governor of Wisconsin, Scott Walker. The Koch brothers spent over $34 million dollars trying to undermine workers rights particularly of public employees seemingly in collusion with Walker. What you might not know about them is that last October they saw the fertilizer plants they owned in Venezuela nationalized by standing President Hugo Chavez.

You might think this would be a story ripe for Fox News or various rightwing pundits to pounce upon. Here's why they kept the nationalization hush hush, from eXiled:

"The Kochs made hundreds of millions on every end of this deal…and even more surprising, bond markets cheered the nationalization. In other words, the free markets championed by the Kochs gave a big thumbs-down to Kochs’ negative influence on the value of the business, while at the same time, the free-market Kochs earned huge windfalls doing business with socialists. No wonder this story hasn’t made the rounds.

Here’s what happened: When Chavez’s nationalization of the plant took Koch Industries out of the picture, bond investors responded by driving up the value of the company’s bond debt by a whopping 33 percent. That means they had a lot more confidence that the debts would be paid back AFTER the free-market Kochs were out of the picture. As every business school flunky knows, price fluctuations of bonds are very much like those of stocks: the more they cost, the higher the confidence in a given company. And that means investors had less faith in the ability of the Kochs to run a tight business operation than they did in a bunch of Venezuelan socialist bureaucrats.

[...]

So for all the enterprising Americans out there wondering “What’s the secret to the Kochs’ success?” The answer isn’t pretty—especially if you’re one of the gullible Tea Party libertarians who believe the Kochs practice the free-market libertarianism that they preach. Their ability to reap billions and billions in profits year after year isn’t about buying low and selling high, but about buying subsidized-by-the-state, and selling subsidized-by-the-state. Using taxpayer money to cover the costs and ensure profits every time—that’s the simple formula to the Kochs’ success."

What's more is now the Koch's appear to be taking Chavez's government to court over the nationalization, before a investment dispute body in the World Bank. Check out this article from the Latin American Herald Tribune for more.

Tepoztlán and Movements for Autonomy in México

A Narconews report on a community's response to "a building project that would’ve turned communal lands into a golf course. When the people of Tepoztlán found out about the plan, they expulsed the mayor and the police and barricaded all entrances to the town. During the eight months that followed, Tepoztlán organized its own community police and elected an autonomous government, free of political parties.

[...]

After eight months of autonomy, in April 1996, the police killed a local campesino, Marcos Olmedo, near the spot where Emiliano Zapata was shot exactly 76 years earlier. The man’s death was followed by the cancellation of the construction plan. The townspeople, exhausted and mourning but also pleased with their victory, gradually allowed the police and political parties to return to Tepoztlán.

Tepoztlán’s struggle is not the only of its kind. The eviction of the golf course marked a renaissance of resistance movements in the state of Morelos. During the almost 17 years that have passed since Tepoztlán first declared itself a free town, autonomous municipalities have popped up in different parts of the state. They have an impressive track record of winning most of their battles, but those victories have often been, like the one in Tepoztlán, tinged with sadness: many of the movements have failed to bridge the gaping class divisions that characterize Mexican society. Many times autonomy has lasted only a fleeting moment."

Explaining Cultural Capitalism

Al Jazeera's Fault Lines on Ciudad Juarez

Documenting the extreme disparity in exposure to violence between El Paso, Texas with the lowest crime rate in the U.S. and Ciudad Juarez, now the murder capital of the world.

A Note For Those Who Advocate "English-Only" Policies

While putting together an encyclopedia entry on Latino struggle, I came across an observation from Rumbaut & Portes from their Ethnicities: Children of Immigrants in America anthology:

"Forceful assimilationism does not seek to expel newcomers but to integrate them as quickly as possible into the American mainstrean. English immersion and the rapid loss of languages and cultures promoted by assimilationist policies weaken immigrant parents' authority and help drive a wedge between generations [...] The paradox, is that, in seeking to make 'good Americans' out of the second generation, English immersion and similar programs undermine the single resource poor immigrant youths have to succeed: namely, the social capital inherent in their families and co-ethnic communities. In the programmatic scenario promoted by forceful assimilationism, schools and immigrant families work at cross-purposes, with negative consequences for both" (315).

This suggests the fundamentally maliciousness of English only policy that seeks to actually eliminate the possibility of upward mobility for immigrant communities and instead producing what the authors describe as a "rainbow underclass."

Internships, Immaterial Labor Anyone?

Internships are becoming common requirements for graduation in many colleges and they are moreover are becoming standard (which is to say calculated into saved costs) budgetting at many US corporations



From Ross Borlin's Op-Ed in the NYT:

The uncritical internship fever on college campuses — not to mention the exploitation of graduate student instructors, adjunct faculty members and support staff — is symptomatic of a broader malaise. Far from being the liberal, pro-labor bastions of popular image, universities are often blind to the realities of work in contemporary America.

[...]

Far from resisting the exploitation of their students, colleges have made academic credit a commodity. Just look at Menlo College, a business-focused college in northern California, which sold credits to a business called Dream Careers. Menlo grossed $50,000 from the arrangement in 2008, while Dream Careers sold Menlo-accredited internships for as much as $9,500.

To meet the credit requirement of their employers, some interns have essentially had to pay to work for free: shelling out $2,700 to the University of Pennsylvania in the case of an intern at NBC Universal and $1,600 to New York University by an intern at “The Daily Show,” to cite two examples from news reports.

Charging students tuition to work in unpaid positions might be justifiable in some cases — if the college plays a central role in securing the internship and making it a substantive academic experience. But more often, internships are a cheap way for universities to provide credit — cheaper than paying for faculty members, classrooms and equipment.

Honduras: Continuing Unrest, Naked Statements

I really appreciated a recent article from the associated press that revealed the current Honduran president's sense of ownership over the current government of the country, responding to widespread protests and strikes lead by students, teachers, and healthcare workers.

He claims:

"They are trying to destabilize my government," Lobo said at a news conference. "All of this is part of an ideological strategy to provoke difficulties, especially now that there is the possibility of returning to the OAS at the next general assembly in June."

This reveals again the clientelist nature of politics in Honduras with its electoral power-sharing between liberal and conservatives and the way in which the changing of the guard always results in the reinforcement of the oligarchy's control of the nation.

Comments by the opposition support this analysis:

A coalition of Zelaya supporters called the National Front of Popular Resistance has called for a general strike Wednesday, threatening to escalate the conflict in the polarized and impoverished Central American country.

"Porfirio Lobo is once again revealing the fascist character of his government, which is trying to destroy popular organization and the gains of the people to impose an economic system that only benefits the oligarchy and multilateral companies," the front said in a statement.

In recent visit to Chile Obama elides questions about the U.S. endorsement of the overthrow of Salvador Allende.

In the words (read: command) of Richard Nixon, responding to the election to Salvador Allende in the 1970s: "Make their economy scream."

On the recent visit by Obama to Chile the The Latin American Herald Tribune reports:

Asked by a Chilean reporter about Washington’s role in the 1973 coup that toppled Chilean President Salvador Allende, Obama acknowledged that “the history of relations between the United States and Latin America have at times been extremely rocky and have at times been difficult.”

“I think it’s important,” he added, “that we’re not trapped by our history. And the fact of the matter is, is that over the last two decades we’ve seen extraordinary progress here in Chile and that has not been impeded by the United States but, in fact, has been fully supported by the United States.”

In recent days Chilean unions, student organizations and leftist parties asked Obama to use his visit to Chile to apologize for the backing of the then-U.S. government for the coup led by Gen. Augusto Pinochet.

Looking to the future, Obama proposed, as he repeated in his address later, an alliance of equals between his country and Latin America that would allow cooperation in such fields as student exchanges and the war on drugs.

"Trapped by history" in this understanding = to acknowledge the imperialist incursions on national sovereignty historically committed by the United States and the cavalier attitude with which it has approached Latin America in general?

Oligarchic Stirrings in the U.S. of A.

It's been my contention with the interpenetration of marketing, money, and politics have moved the United States closer to what some Latin American government situations involve (as in, Honduras) where conservative and liberal elements engage in clientelism and electoral power swapping. Some numbers from the Center for American Progress appear to confirm increasing class war from the right. Also, Republican Maine Governor engaging in the cultural end of said class war by demanding the removal of a labor oriented mural from the state's Department of labor and the renaming of conference rooms, previously commemorating labor leaders and the first female U.S. cabinet secretary. The account from his administration:

We have received feedback that the administration building is not perceived as equally receptive to both businesses and workers -- primarily because of the nature of the mural in the lobby and the names of our conference rooms.

2010 Review Part 2

Promising elements of 2010:

1) After a discussion with Robert Perkinson, author of Texas Tough: The Rise of American's Prison Empire and associate professor at University of Hawaii, I had all but given up on the possibility of the emergence of prisoner led movements at all given 2 facts he shared: 1) the capacity of prisons to warehouse people and also use solitary confinement as a means of quelling prisoner dissent, was highly effective, and; 2) and Bill Clinton's reduction of requisite journalist/scholarly monitoring of prisoner conditions (as well as suspending all prisoner led reform cases) make the system almost opaque to reform-minded folk and the general public. Even as tougher laws continue to dispossess prisoners of basic citizenship rights and more and more adult American's (over 10%) are currently serving time, it would seem that even momentary fulminations of resistance should arise somewhere.

A recent prisoner strike in Georgia suggests a different picture that was both organized and peaceful. From Final Call:

Fed up with bad food, unjust treatment, poor education and inadequate health care, thousands of inmates in Georgia's prison system staged “Lockdown for Liberty,” a peaceful protest on Dec. 9, according to activists.

The Black, White, and Latino inmates from Augusta, Baldwin, Hancock, Hays, Macon, Smith, and Telfair State Prisons refused to leave their cells for work and other activities, partly because they feel the Georgia Department of Corrections treats them like slaves, according to supporters who are not jailed.

“I'm talking to these brothers every day, every other minute really, and particularly in Macon, Telfair, Hays and Smith, their decision is they're not going to stop this strike now. One brother told me, ‘We will ride until the wheels fall off,' and that's been the sentiment amongst the men when they started this,” said Elaine Brown, a spokesperson for the strike.

More specifically, the inmates are demanding: a living wage for work, opportunities for higher education, better health care without excessive fees, and an end to cruel and unusual punishment for minor infractions.

They also want more fruits and vegetables, more vocational training, an end to some restrictions on family access, and an end to excessive telephone charges and just parole decisions.

“Part of our purpose for doing this is that Georgia is the only state that does not pay it's inmates at all. Some guys in here work seven days a week and they don't get a dime,” said Dondito, one of the strikers, who requested anonymity.

He said despite reports by the Department of Corrections that no inmates have been hurt, several in Augusta have been beaten up to unrecognizable points, according to their families.

[...]

Ms. Brown, former chairman of the Black Panther Party, said she doesn't know how long the men are going to strike but doesn't believe they are prepared to give up after just after one or two days, despite the beatings in Augusta.

“The tactical squad went in to trash their property and give them a shake down to try and break their spirits and force them into some violent confrontation. They cut off visitation for everyone, and are really reacting very violently to what is a non-violent protest,” Ms. Brown told The Final Call.

Dondito said the prisons are doing all they can to break their spirits and the strike, like cutting off the heat and hot water, taking away recreation, feeding them cold sandwiches, and refusing to wash their clothes.

He said strikers intend to stand for as long as it takes to force a change in horrible living conditions, which include being beaten when taken to or in solitary confinement and receiving bad food.

2) Wikileaks continues to churn out important diplomatic leaks, as well as business/banking leaks, despite Amazon and Paypal's decisions to bump the site from their server and from accepting funds in the name of the organization.

Some Worsts:

1) The failure of the DREAM Act. Let's be clear U.S. policy toward Latino, particularly Mexican, illegal immigrants has been an exchange of the promise of citizenship for status as cannon-fodder for various U.S. wars. This lead to some positive outcomes after WWII for example where veterans of the Mexican-American and Puerto Rican persuasion becamed disillusioned about their chances in already racially/ethnically stratified societies and in many cases this produced some radicalization, beyond assimilation. The Development, Relief and Education for Alien Minors Act, offered a disenfranchised, subordinate, and racialized underclass the same opportunity, with the added possibility of citizenship through college graduation. On the one hand the cannon-fodder element consistently suggests the value for racialized and immigrant lives and its consistent application suggests a continued devaluation of non-white, non-"native" citizenry. That said, the act's failure by five votes also leaves many who immigrated the United States as children without a path to citizenship and enfranchisment; producing an underclass much like the "sans-papiers" of France who remain unintegrated into the nation for generations.

2) Break-ups from long-term relationships can thrust your life into a series of deeply self-engrossed bouts of confusion and self-loathing. Avoid them (or prolonging them), when possible.

3) Haiti, 1 year later, according to community activist Jordan Flaherty:

One year after an earthquake devastated Haiti, much of the promised relief and reconstruction aid has not reached those most in need. In fact, the nation's tragedy has served as an opportunity to further enrich corporate interests.

The details of a recent lawsuit, as reported by Business Week, highlights the ways in which contractors – including some of the same players who profited from Hurricane Katrina-related reconstruction – have continued to use their political connections to gain profits from others' suffering, receiving contacts worth tens of millions of dollars while the Haitian people receive pennies at best. It also demonstrates ways in which charity and development efforts have mirrored and contributed to corporate abuses. 

[...]

The disaster profiteering exemplified by Ashbritt is not just the result of quick decision-making in the midst of a crisis. These contracts are awarded as part of a corporate agenda that sees disaster as an opportunity, and as a tool for furthering policies that would not be possible in other times. Naomi Klein exposed evidence that within 24 hours of the earthquake, the influential right-wing think tank the Heritage Foundation was already laying plans to use the disaster as an attempt at further privatization of the country's economy.

Relief and recovery efforts, led by the US military, have also brought a further militarization of relief and criminalization of survivors. Haiti and Katrina also served as staging grounds for increased involvement of mercenaries in reconstruction efforts. As one Blackwater mercenary told Scahill when he visited New Orleans in the days after Katrina, "This is a trend. You're going to see a lot more guys like us in these situations."

[...]

Haitian poet and human rights lawyer Ezili Dantò has written, "Haiti's poverty began with a US/Euro trade embargo after its independence, continued with the Independence Debt to France and ecclesiastical and financial colonialism. Moreover, in more recent times, the uses of US foreign aid, as administered through USAID in Haiti, basically serves to fuel conflicts and covertly promote US corporate interests to the detriment of democracy and Haitian health, liberty, sovereignty, social justice and political freedoms. USAID projects have been at the frontlines of orchestrating undemocratic behavior, bringing underdevelopment, coup d'etat, impunity of the Haitian Oligarchy, indefinite incarceration of dissenters, and destroying Haiti's food sovereignty essentially promoting famine."

4) Arizona's racist new laws were co-written by the prison industry.

Favorite new vegetarian and vegan recipe:

Chickpea/Seitan Cutlets, at PostPunk Kitchen. For those of you who are like me, and have been vegetarians for most of your lives the possibility of new alternatives to meat, are always welcome. This particular recipe combines ground chickpeas, various spices,, bread crumbs, with vital wheat gluten to produce some tasty fried alternatives to steaks.

Favorite new find, that is already not that new in really any sense:

Pissed Jeans, combining hardcore with noise rock in the vein of Jesus Lizard:



Favorite new accessory, that redudantly fills a need (although it's smaller):

The Scout Pack, by Duluth.

Favorite viral video of 2010:



Favorite DIY Porn Auteur:

Despite my general distaste for the world of twink, The Black Spark represents rather well shot and interesting, but also incredibly hot short films for x-tube, including actual filtering in lenses, play with color, and skilled use of handheld cameras.

First Book Review Published

My first publication is here, at Reviews in Cultural Theory, a new online journal.

Edu-Factory

Check out Jeff Williams' review of education based left movement Edu-Factory:

Edu-factory is a new group trying to revolutionize higher education. It is a relatively small, web-based collective (around 500 on its list) but casts an international net. It began as a listserv of those doing radical criticism of higher education and has since published a book (Toward a Global Autonomous University), developed a journal (see Edu-factory.org), and sponsored occasional “days of action,” calling for strikes among students and faculty in universities. Its organizers are largely European-based, intellectually coming out of the Italian autonomist movement and historically spurred by something called the Bologna Process.

The Bologna Process sounds as if it might be a political thriller at your local theater, but it’s an agreement of forty-six European countries oriented toward standardizing college degrees. It’s not an act of the EU, but it arises from work issues in the EU. In many ways, its goal sounds reasonable—European universities have a cacophony of regulations and degree requirements, in contrast to the U.S. system, which is more uniform and translatable, particularly after the credit hour was formalized in the early twentieth century. But Edu-factory sees the Bologna Process as instrumentalizing higher education, operating in the interests of capitalism rather than learning, particularly in its focus on assessment and “outcomes” and its orientation toward the vocational use of a degree.

Supermarket Ideologies

So two useful lessons to my mind on ideology from your local grocery store:

1) The simplest first: I was thinking the other day how the air pumped into bags of potato chips is a useful metaphor for considering the function of ideology. Althusser in his famous, if incomplete essay (apparently there is a yet to be translated book on the subject, still in French), "Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses" discusses the function of ideology thusly,"the very element and atmosphere indispensable to their historical respiration and life." Ideology for Althusser is the necessary element that contributes to the reproduction of conditions of production under capitalism (the division of labor, extraction of profit from labor already in the world, etc.). Instead of being a "mistake" made, a blocking of "real" consciousness, for Althusser ideology was more of a practice. "Ideology," He writes, "represents the imaginary relationship of individuals to their real conditions of existence." Thus ideology, not only "distorts" or misconstrues the social relationships that undergird the persistence of capitalism (more than just the economic state, but also a social and political condition, a social order) which is actively reinforced by institutions, the family, etc. It is a practice of life and a kind of preliminary, limited, knowledge of life and the world, not generated by some malignant cabal working in an unmarked office somewhere, but an active framing by subjects in relationship to an overall order, thus it is a process of life, not the mere negation of truth as others may have argued in the past.

If we can consider potato chip bag, a finished commodity (fetishism aside), as a good model for this understanding of ideology, where on the one hand the air allows the transport of the bags of crisps/chips without much damage to the chips themselves seems logical, and well motivated, people certainly prefer whole chip slices to the debris left over from crushing and being tossed around, and at the same time the air produces the illusion of quantity, we can see the practicality, commonsensical qualities of ideology as well as its status as that which withholds, whose absence is productive but nonetheless some form of misappropriation.

Our reaction to just how many chips/crisps are inside the bag once it's been opened I think speak to this very problem of ideology, we feel slightly cheated by the reduced quantity than we had expected. As much as we know there will be a certain ratio of air to food content in the bag we are nonetheless disappointed by how this ratio actually plays out when we see the bag is less than half full of chips.

2) The Self-Check-Out Lane as Middle Class Ideological Practice

I think all of us have had a moment in the past where we've been in a rather slow checkout lane somewhere and thought to ourselves, "how hard can it be to scan and cash this stuff out. I could do this more efficiently!"

Any cashier of course would tell you that this is never the case, an experienced, and battleworn cashier is easily the most efficient as her/his job and those who tell themselves that somehow they would be more effective or could more rapidly take care of the cashier's job are deluding themselves. Anyone who has ever had a customer service job could easily tell you that there are a number of things that could go wrong, need attention, knowledges that need to be obtained (what to do if something goes wrong, if an item rings up incorrectly), skills achieved etc. before one becomes proficient at these skills.

The self-check out lane at your local grocery store is therefore an ideological practice oriented at precisely the class most fixated on efficiency, and the ostensible "unskill" of service oriented work, the middle class. What is really going on here is the casualization of paid positions that tap into precisely this ideological fallacy, that an unskilled middle class person can best handle the supposedly simple tasks of a cashier without much knowledge or skill.

From my experience, the reality of this change highlights precisely the problems with this attitude. Self-check out lanes always seem to take forever, and are packed with people, but instead of becoming frustrated at particular employees we are frustrated at the other patrons, if only they could be as skilled and efficient as we in accomplishing their purchase. Moreover, labor that was once a single persons position gets distributed to the customers, so hell bent are they on efficiency, and to a singular cashier who deals with all of the frustrations and problems and receives much of the blame and malign of irate, irrational self-check out users. So you've eliminated multiple jobs and redistributed labor whilst playing into middle-class delusions about its competence to run a register and its further delusion that it runs the society.

En Fin...

The way the qualifying/comprehensive exam process works in my program is we are supplied with 4+ questions at the beginning of a week and we are expected to select two, write two ten page essays in response to each, and then submit our answers to our committee members as well as 2 outside readers. After the committee and readers have taken the opportunity to read over the documents and your proposal (one element of the process that pushed the whole process further and further into the future for me) they meet with you for a span of one and a half to two hours in order to test your knowledge through your answers, bring other aspects of your reading and understanding the of the material to bear on the discussion, and to ask you to synthesize various schemas and concepts. After your orals then the committee and readers deliberate over whether or not you should pass and then move onto working toward your dissertation or whether or not you will need to do some remedial work in the coming months and undergo another examination.

I passed, but not without some impediments.

I haven't written anything for the last few years so my skills at making, as opposed to marking, arguments in a written form were a little rusty. As a result, I continued to face the radical variations in attention span that are attendant with high stress scenarios for me, coupled with denunciations of my examiners their poorly worded questions. The essays I think came out well in general, given some constraints that came from the coverage of my reading list and space in which to articulate my answers.

My mock orals with the other PhD students also went really well. I did blank on a question, but after I started going my momentum propelled the knowledge. They seemed to be claiming, that I was in fact ready.

The actual orals began with one member of my committee, however, communicating her displeasure at some of the supposed assumptions my exams were making about my field. The fact that they were locked into a particular set of historical circumstances (the legacy of the Monroe Doctrine, the militarization of the border, the rise of neo-liberalism, the possibilities for upward mobility in terms of new immigrant groups, etc.) that according to her didn't look at the long history of the concepts at work. Although I later realized that this reprimand was more directed at those on my committee and our deparment in general and seemed less to do with me specifically. Not having realized this right away I felt increasingly embattled as the exams proceeded, even though I never felt panicked, and I felt confident about my answers.

Anyway, the committee deliberated for what felt like 1/2 and hour (but was probably more like 10 minutes) and then congratulated me on passing.

Aftwards I felt relief but also a sense of loss. I've heard the state I'm in right now described to me as "postpartum," and I agree. There is something distinctly anti-climatic about the whole thing, and I've been feeling waxing and wanning sense of despair and then just orneriness. Also, I plagued with doubts about my performance, and whether or not I was handed, what is sometimes described as the "pity pass." All that said, I am excited to start working toward the diss and other projects I have in the works.

Tajility

From Alex de Waal describing the particular form of political patronage at work in Sudan:

“. . . political vernacular is tajil, ‘delay’, from which is derived the particular skill of ‘tajility’, strategic delay or the art of procrastinating until one’s counterpart is exhausted or removed.”

i.e. what I pretend to be doing when I'm actually supposed to be outlining exam essays.

David Harvey reminds, "Capital Cannot Solve it's Own Crises"