the relevant details
[toward some framing for this]
i’m surrounded by very good storytellers. my friends traffic in narrative, always sharing something – some memory, a movie watched or music listened to, new projects. my storytelling on the other hand, especially on my feet, is not the best. i fumble for words, but before that, for details. the most challenging thing about narration is knowing what to include or omit – how to make what’s in my head make sense to the people around me.
it seems to be partly a matter of social engagement – simultaneous pressures to share something good or entertaining, to do so in the proper timing and key, so that these moments of sharing will be followed by more.
(i use a metaphor of exchange, but it’s specifically obligational and ethical. i listen so that they listen to me later; i share because they also give me a part of themselves. to refuse to engage is like an affront, and worse, a reason to stop engagement altogether.)
i recently watched the movie funny people, and what struck me the most was how good at storytelling the comedians in the film are, and how much thought they put into writing jokes: knowing how to set up the narrative and how to maintain interest through their work of description. i thought as i watched that i would really like to be friends with those characters.
give it to me gently (knowledge, i mean)
like in star trek, the recent one, when Future Spock transfers decades’ worth of memory and emotion into Not Yet Capt. Kirk’s head by mere touch, and kirk staggers away afterward disoriented and pained. or how in state of war maya lies hand-to-hand and body-to-body on top of her future daughter-in-law, to impart entire personal histories as a way of welcome into the family.
this is what i wish grad school was like: total knowledge import in a single sitting, and any accompanying pain dealt in one huge but quick blow.
instead my narrative is a string of discrete experiences of pain and joy, composed of moments in seminar when i say to myself, i knew that, i should i have said something; during particularly stimulating conference panels or talks when i’m awe-struck at a speaker and a potential future self, thinking, one day i’ll know enough to reach conclusions like these; and most frequently, when i listen to classmates and friends offer accounts that weave together our short lifetimes’ worth of knowledge into neat, intelligent packages, that make me wonder, how and when did you accrue all this knowledge and synthesize it? where was i? what have i been doing all this time?
and of course, those hours and hours of actual intellectual work – me in front of a book, at a talk, in an advisor’s office, sitting passive in seminar.
it used to be the knowledge itself that was torturous. (flashback to my first experience reading foucault: confusion and tears, ‘this man is no roland barthes’) now it’s the experience of acquiring it and seeing it at work that gives me palpitations.
just tell me how it ends
these days, a folding into myself, a resetting of fortified walls to surround, secret passwords to enter, enigmatic responses to decode: a series of protective measures.
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already there’s a tumult around what will likely be a jarring, out-of-body next few months — i leave for a 2.5-month trip to the philippines a couple of days after my oral exams in june. to anticipate your next questions: yes, i’m excited; and nervous, and dreadful, and uncertain.
let’s just skip to the end, can we? straight to the promises of a september after a long, unordinary summer: to catharsis in the form of a long drive down the i-5 and back; to some sort of synthesis of what has transpired and hopes for what will come; to reunions with familiar friends who will register for you how you’ve changed (and to assure you you haven’t changed at all); to naps in my armchair before lush trees on 10th st., sun and breeze reaching into the open window.
the joys of accumulation
npr’s morning news aired a series last week on debt. the second installment related the story of ms. love, a woman $21000 in debt who, with the help of a debt counselor (also interviewed), has made several sacrifices to start climbing out of the red.
this is clearly the individual, atomized counterpart of the large financial crisis. i’m sure the story and series are meant to give listeners a sense of how americans are dealing, and perhaps to assure the listener that she is not alone in her financial woes, and that it’s possible to see the light at the end of the tunnel.
love’s is a familiar story, familiarly related, and as such could use some investigation. if i were to begin some loose cultural inquiry into the segment, in the posing-of-a-how-question style of my advisor, i might ask: how do the questions surrounding financial crises — and thus the focus of responsibility — get turned from the state and collective responsibility to ‘what did you do wrong in your life’? how does it become atomized, and why do we allow it to?
there’s some difference, some affective work done, in the focus on the individual’s shouldering of responsibility, admittance of guilt, taking on of shame. the end result is a displacement, of course. any anger we might aim at large, face-less corporations and at the federal government for mis-managing their finances, for espousing socially immoral credit practices — this anger gets displaced onto our fellow citizen consumers for their inability to manage their own lives.
we might find this in the style of the interview, the manner of questions, the relationship on display between the counselor and the financially irresponsible. the woman is slightly ashamed, put on defense (and yet not defensive) when questioned about the accumulation of her credit cards. when it is revealed that she has whittled her debt by one-third in the span of a year and a half, the pride in her voice validates everything she had to give up to gain these steps toward financial independence, including her own home and presumably most luxuries. and in turn, the counselor is imagined beaming at this pride, matching love’s redemptive pride with her own sort of motherly pride, at having put another pilgrim on the path to (american) progress — a validation of her knowledge, of the economic and socially liberal frameworks that animate her job, her life.
the initial line of questioning about how love got into the bind she’s in rings of a sort of financial confessional. rhetorically, i see where the radio host is going — she tries to establish that love’s problems are common, the woman is like everyone else, trying make ends meet … and yet she’s also an extreme case that is difficult to wholly identify with if you’re the average npr listener (she is black by the sound of it, without the possibility of productive participation in the economy because of disability, and even potentially unproductive because of how deeply in the red she is.*) perhaps as a result of the paradoxical simultaneous market necessity of debt and the social unacceptability of excessive debt, the woman and her responses are shrouded in equal parts shame and the corollary feeling of hope and pride produced out of the redemptive process advocated by this particular radio segment. she has to be a bit squirmy about the question of how she came to have 11 credit cards. she’s forced to defend her consumption practices (’we didn’t just go out and buy a big plasma tv [with the credit cards]’), a line of questioning that aligns her with the welfare queen of the 80s, abusing another source of money. under the veiled accusations of financial indiscretion, love has to acknowledge the neutralization of her productivity due to her disability, and then explain that she was on state funds and still — still — could not make things work for her (and if there’s any obvious entry point for criticism of the state, it’s here, glossed over of course. but i don’t think this is the only or even most productive entry for such criticism).
in her shame, we are to sympathize, and perhaps for a moment during the show we might feel like we could have done (or already do) better. most importantly though, we feel shame through the ways in which we identify with her — overspending, over-reaching or taking advantage of our access to credit, essentially gorging when we shouldn’t be. but we feel no indignance at the wide availability of credit which isn’t just a matter of a free market, and we feel nothing for her lack of help from the state that would virtually force someone to use this credit as a last resort.
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*(but we know that this system of credit is indeed what makes this whole market system work in the first place, at least this current iteration. that is, being in debt, according to liberal social/moral philosophy is bad! and yet it’s necessary in the very mechanics of the market as we seem to know it. my lack of economic knowledge keeps me from further articulating anything clearly about this.)