The Gendered Care of the Self

Foucault's discussion of the 'care of the self' has followed the same interesting path from a concern with how we are shaped and constrained by power to how we create our own spaces within the web of power. In his own words, from being 'acted upon' to becoming 'works of arts' of our own making... It's an interesting shift, which seems to me closely related to the whole post-modernist hype emphasizing our own power to act upon our identities, resisting prescribed values and recipes.

What I find really interesting however is the overlap between this scholastic attention to individual power and the neoliberal discourse presenting the individual as all powerful, able to do things and to make things only by virtue of being determined and committed. Think of all those Hollywood movies where the main character succeeds because of her/his determination.

The care of the self, the duty to take care of and to form yourself into a worthy individual becomes an act of will, of determination and of commitment. But it is so rare that we stop and reflect on exactly what are the ideals that we aim for, what are the values informing them, who gets to profit out of those values, and what are the sanctions applied to those who refuse or, for that matter are unable to conform to them.

Someone very close to me has this very nasty habit of reminding me of how I fail to take care of myself. I'm more and more reluctant to use nail polish or hair dye, mostly for health reasons. But in a world of appearances, my refusal to use certain products and do certain things to my body is seen as a failure to take care of myself. I'm no longer properly groomed, as if my colorless nails are not enough. Truth be told, you seldom have any reasons to reflect on the constraining tyranny of 'looking good' when you conform. The act of conforming isn't even perceived as such: you find those shinny, long, red nails so very attractive. As a child, you're fascinated by them; but as a teenager, you learn their sexual power. A power you may start craving for. And you conform. And your nail polish becomes your most pretious ally, helping you climb the social ladder. So what's the big deal?

Try giving it up. Try persuading yourself that your natural nails are just as sexy as your red ones. Try persuading the your partner of that. Just as you have come to terms with it, try facing the your close friends and family. Then, maybe, you'll recognize how powerless we are in the face of the mainstream recipes for taking care of yourself. Moments like this one remind me that Foucault's idea of the care of the self as an empowering act of creation needs more meat to make sense.

Anthropological Fieldwork in Refugee Camps

Culture Matters has an interview with Dr. Alice Corbet about fieldwork in refugee camps. We know so little about the everyday life of these camps that such accounts are indeed necessary to raise awareness. I especially appreciated the point made about the reasoning behind food rations: avoid making people 'want to stay' in camps. The underlying assumptions of such reasoning are so far away from humanitarian principles and so hypocritical, that it is hard to believe we do nothing to challenge them:

"Dr Corbet has spent over five years performing research with the Sahrawis in refugee camps along the Moroccan/Algerian border. She has faced cholera epidemics, landmines, dehydration, flying sand scorpions, faced slavery and even assisted in births and deaths in the most unsterile of conditions."

The Return to the Authentic Community: Gellner's Critique of Sartre

My friend is writing on issues surrounding a Native population, the Metis in Canada. This post has been inspired by our discussion on the topic. As with all colonized groups, sooner or later the question of empowerment - and what it means to be empowered in the context of colonized groups - emerged. And we did talk about the pitfalls of the concept, as well as its virtues.

One of the themes that came up was that of the dichotomy in which colonized groups are being pushed:
- be colonized, give in to the new ideologies and structures, and adapt, but loose 'yourself' in the process;
- return to their authentic self, the 'noble savage' or the 'exotic Other' (ie. 'wear your feathers, show us your dances, throw your tomahawks, but please stay in your reservations and accept your fate').

Like most other dichotomies in social thought, this one is false. There are many assumptions embedded in it, betraying particular ideologies at work (like for instance, the idea that all people in Native groups are defined by whatever we take as the essentializing and homogenizing traits of the group; or that there are only two choices, progress and under-development). But the point of this post has to do with the second option, that of the return to the authentic self. Just what is authenticity?

In his 1964 oldie but goodie book Thought and Change, Ernest Gellner compellingly illustrates the fallacy of the concept. Authenticity, he charges, is at the core of Sartre's existentialism (and, we might add, a close kin of Marx's alienation). For Sartre, says Gellner, to be authentic means to strive to be who you are - and that is mainly taken as a core, as an essence defining you.

"An 'authentic' X - writes Gellner - is ... a man (sic) who wills himself to be an X, freely and without the illusion of X-hood being some brute and contingent and externally given fact..." (p. 62, ftn.1)

There are three problems with this view, Gellner asserts:
- first, an assumption of identity as fixed, rigid.
- second, an assumption of identity is rooted within us, outside the influence of any external forces.
- third, an assumption that we change from being authentic to inauthenticity because we are forced by external circumstances (like colonization processes), and that the return to authenticity is desired by and intrinsically good for everyone.

"Could one not also accept authentically, the more complex role of minority-member-not-wishing-to-be such?" asks Gellner " And so on? Anything can be 'authentic', even self-rejection." (p. 62, ftn. 1)

When talking about colonization processes, and about empowerment strategies for colonized groups, it is important - I think - to question just what type of ideology is hidden behind our vision of empowerment. What is it that we seek? How is it that we look at the past? Were the social structures of the groups we seek to liberate really without fault? And for whom? Are there only two options, as the dichotomy would prompt us to think? Can we be ourselves without any recourse to a group past? Why is it that the group and its past haunt us? What makes them so relevant? And so on...

Photo credits: Kathycsus

Obama, MySpace and the question of rights and governance in cyberspace

Well, this is not my usual obsession with constructing difference. This is about the question of rights and governance on the internet, and about the controversial discussion on whether and how the internet should be regulated.

It all starts with two seemingly unrelated events:

1. I had just finished a delightful book on the social dimensions of virtual worlds like The Sims Online and Second Life. As a researcher and resident in Second Life, I practically devoured Peter Ludlow and Mark Wallaces 2007 book The Second Life Herald: The Virtual Tabloid that Witnessed the Dawn of the Metaverse. Far from being your usual (read boring) academic book, this one is at the interface between academic concerns with virtual worlds and 'lay' audiences. It does a beautiful job, I think, in popularizing some of the major questions researchers have had since the explosion of the internet, while at the same time keeping a very personal tone and refraining from offering all-inclusive explanations or solutions.

For reasons that will become obvious later on, I'll quote here a passage which will move us to the next unrelated event that prompted this post:

"...the question of who was suppressing freedoms - a government or a software company - was entirely beside the point... threats to freedom need to be resisted wherever they come from.... But cyberspace has complicated the issue. By creating a place that exists outside the boundaries of nations, and thus outside the reach of national laws, the Internet has come to be regarded as a place where everything goes. The legal world does not yet have a comprehensive model for regulating what goes on in cyberspace, consequently few of its denizens feel they have the right to object to anything that goes on there" (p. 233)

2. As soon as I put the book aside, I tuned in to listen to the latest CBC podcast Search Engine. Coincidence? The first item was the story of Barack Obama's campaign row with Joe Anthony over a MySpace fan site of Obama's (May 2007). Apparently, Joe Anthony - a user like you and me - had created a fan site for Barack Obama, his favorite at the time, and managed to attract enormous interest from the MySpace community, with some 30,000 friends in 2007, according to the Guardian's coverage of the story. Now, I'll fast forward the details of the row, which you can read online (here and here), to the point where Anthony and Barack Obama's campaign, interested in taking over the site to control its message, do not come to an agreement. What happens next is the exact case in point for the above quote - Obama's campaign staff asked MySpace to close down Anthony's fan site arguing that:

... it became clear that we needed to have MySpace point people at something we had at least basic access to -- immediately. In MySpace, politicians, musicians, and other public figures have the right to their own name (www.myspace.com/barackobama, www.myspace.com/hillaryclinton, etc.), and so we asked MySpace for use of that URL and to ensure that any promotion of "official" profiles for candidates be directed to the new profile our team created.The community of the 160,000 still exists, and we've made sure that MySpace will let Joe have access to the community he helped build. And we hope we can continue to work with him to make that as effective as it can be. (From Joe Anthony's blog reproducing an official statement from BO's campaign)

Why was it becoming clear that control over MySpace was needed, and from whose perspective? Was the problem really the fact that the URL contained BO's name? If public figures have the right to URL's containing their own names, does it mean that nobody else is allowed to use them? Does this apply to books as well, let's say, if I print a book called "Barack Obama" then I should be Barack Obama? I remember once learning in school that public figures have to realize that the public status means they will always be in the public's eye (so the boundaries of their privacy are always an issue). And why is it that the campaigners did not make a true effort to resolve the problem with Joe Anthony, but jumped over his head and asked MySpace to 'give them something that was rightfully theirs'?

What follows next is predictable: MySpace gave control of the URL to Obama's campaign, then returned control over the URL to Anthony. But this is less important for this post. The important lesson to learn here is that indeed, decision-making on the internet - and in the computer business at large - needs to be questioned by each and every one of us. Is it possible that you give up all your rights onlly because you signed the Terms of Contract? Do you even have a choice? Lawrence Lessig's book Code and Other Laws of the Cyberspace argues that software engineers and companies make their own laws. And that such Terms of Contract cannot have any legal power because there is no true choice to negotiate their terms.

So what about freedom of speech? What about cyberspace as a tolerant, respectful, democratic place? How can these be achieved if users have no control, no self-governance mechanisms and are relinquishing any rights they may have under real life law by checking a box in a pop-up window? Who comes to control this cyberspace?

Power, Authority and Submission: Our Twisted Hero

I've recently read this tiny Korean novel by Yi Munyol. On the surface, it's the story of a school bully and some sort of resistance from one of his classmates, which ends up in submission. But as I kept on reading, I realized it is a beautifully crafted allegory about power, authority and our own dealings with them.

There are many books out there dealing with power and authority, with the injustices of totalitarian power and the multiple faces of authority, materialized in people, practices and institutions. But "Our Twisted Hero" is about our everyday life dealings with power and authority from within our own selves, with our attempts to resist what we perceive as injustice, and our submissions to it, once the price to pay for being a dissident becomes too high. Submission to an established order, which brings peace for the price of obedience should not be underestimated. Inability to deal with democracy and equality is also something to be considered, but then how are we to enable citizens to deal with the democratic exercise? And who controls the guardians of freedom?

After a revolution, after rejecting an authoritarian regime, people look for another authoritarian leader. I've seen this with my own eyes and couldn't understand it, but I realized that order and most importantly the feeling of being secure, of knowing how to handle things, is greater than the desire for freedom. And that the desire for freedom under authoritarian regimes is not matched by care for freedom once those regimes are being removed, but by a frantic search for the security of the lost order...

Photo credits: Amazon.com