Episteme

One of the things that is going on now in Mexico is that supporters of Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador (AMLO) are staging huge demonstrations asking for a full vote-by-vote count of the ballots in the July 2 presidential election because they think that there was enough fraud to invalidate the roughly 240,000 vote lead of Felipe Calderon. 240,000 votes just isn't that much.

So my two questions are - are peaceful protests really worth anything, can they really create change, and, not that I'm suggesting it, but isn't violence more effective? There was Ghandi, you'll say. But how many Ghandis are there? The recent student protesters in Chile got most of their demands by creating havoc for days. The violent riots in France finally caused the government to cave in and listen to the needs of minorities. So what's the good of the peaceful, law-abiding protest, really? Does anyone really listen, even if a significant portion of the population is unhappy with recent events?

Last weekend I was in Cuernavaca, a wealthy vacation area south of Mexico City, and as I was walking around I came across a citizen's protest. The people marching weren't the upper class of Cuernavaca - white, European-looking, fashionably dressed. These were darker-skinned Mexicans, most of them women, some with long, black braids down their backs. There was an old blue sedan driving in front of the marchers, and a woman inside was shouting through a megaphone all the group's claims, and in front of the car, there was a policeman on a motorcycle leading the procession. The marchers followed behind with a banner, and people following in lines, rather than a crowd like you might expect in the US. A little boy gave me a flier, which said that the extreme right was threatening the Antorchista movement, a group founded in Puebla in 1974 to fight radical social differences in Mexico.

The thing I thought was interesting here was how organized it was, and I mean this in the sense that the group coordinated itself well enought to gather a bunch of people and march through the streets peacefully with a common message, but also in the sense that their action was clearly protected by the state. They were allowed to take up the street so that cars could not use it, and a paid public employee cleared their way.

Now while I still question how effective these things are, I think it's good that people can get together and demonstrate. It's one of the basic rights of a modern democracy and even when nobody listens, it's still probably valuable for the public to let off steam, to at least feel like they have
some control.

But back to AMLO, the chances seem slim that there will be a full recount, even with evidence of fraud in the election. One of the reasons for this is that fraud has been significantly reduced here in recent years by the establishment of the Federal Elections Institute, which oversees the elections and has very strict rules for how they should be carried out. So if the people, in all their massivity, want something to be done in a way that doesn't jive with the current law, it's not necessarily good for democracy to do what they say, if what they say would delegitimize this new, specific process that's supposed to prevent fraud. It's circular, I know. I think everybody kind of knows that. But that's why I think democracy is so confined - it's not as if the majority, or large groups of people, can have what they want all the time. It has to be restricted - you can say what you want every few years when an election comes around, but apart from that, all you get is this sort of ymbolic right to assemble that doesn't really mean much unless you start robbing stores and burning buildings and putting poeple in danger.
I guess it's just the best we can do.

Posted by Kim at 05:00 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

"The essence of rhetoric is allegory," Foucault writes. Lovely words for a rather dreary morning on the coast. He says that in "This is not a Pipe", written about the famous painting by Rene Magritte. True, the painting isn't aimed so much at dispelling truth but rather calling into question our perception and understanding of symbols and languages and how that relates to art. But I see a wider application here. Think about it -- words interplay with art, how a word can be divorced from meaning, taken out of context, made to stand alone and be something other than what it is. I think of Ed Ruscha's words from the 1960s (from "Thermometers Should Last Forever" by Yve-Alain Bois from MIT's October 111, the whole issue a meditation on Ruscha and language, "Ruscha is more modest (than Mallarme), more laconic; he registers both the thickness and the shallowness of the forest of signs daily produced by the mass media, pointing to the absurd poignancy of these lost messages") and how they continue this tradition, surely started long before Magritte, but now a staple of contemporary and 20th century art.

Foucault takes examination of Paul Klee, another manipulator of language, in comparison with Magritte: "Words are not bound directly to pictorial elements. They are merely inscriptions on blobs and shapes..." I remember thinking now terrible it would be if these experiments in art, taken to their extreme, would render language completely meaningless. How could we communicate? I think what Foucault hits upon, in an indirect way looking at Magritte, is this has been a period of history where language has been stretched, manipulated, made opaque and altered to serve all sorts of purposes.

Magritte's intentions in his painting where not nefarious and not sinister -- it had much to do with influence of psychoanalysis -- but I think the effects of them are in some ways: "Here, shapes are so vague as to be unnamable if they did not identify themselves," Foucault wrote. When do the principles of modern representative art enter the realm of everyday language?

Posted by Dawn at 09:19 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Standing in line, waiting for some ice cream over the weekend (a weekend full of swimming and hiking and thoughts on Nature), a chatty lady with a purple plume in her hat began a conversation. We covered our jobs, where we live, etc., and then, I can't remember how, we got on truth. Or Truth, perhaps. We didn't call it truth, but that's what is was, in a way. Remember the author of "A Million Little Pieces" being exposed being raked across the coals by Oprah, whose become the premiere forum for confessionals and purification?

We didn't talk about it in that way, but what the woman said, how James Frey lied, how what he wrote was peddled as truth but it was all lie, that surprised her so much she recalled it to me nearly seven months after Frey's public excoriation in the church of Oprah. But didn't the publisher insist in changing the book's genre from fiction to memoir in order to sell more books?

Maybe I'm making that part up but what does this say about our attitudes toward truth in a time of "reality TV" and 24-hour confessionals? With a war in Iraq, the origins and reasons of which are muddled, and world where language is made opaque by newfangled corporate adages and bureaucratic vernacular, how can we possible know what is true? Is Frey another witch burned at the postmodern stake? We aren't sure what's true anymore, perhaps. I need some more time think about this with Foucault.

Posted by Dawn at 08:05 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Is the inevitable conclusion of liberal democracy nihilism? We will become sick with the disease of relativism? Is a society based on equality where all things are believed to have great importance render everything meaning less?

I don't believe the world is anymore fractious to us than it was to anyone else living at any other point in history. We've become fooled into believing it is so because standing an inch from the mirror doesn't reveal much. Is the world like Edward Hopper saw it?

I was thinking about this today, after I heard an East German woman on the radio describe how she liked living under communism because she never had any anxiety over the future. Now living in a democratic system of government she was preoccupied with choices and the uncertainty of the future. She preferred centralized planning because it eliminated that uncertainty. Someone else made your decisions and you had nothing better to do than accept it.

OK, that aside, I am happy because I will be seeing Sufjan Stevens live. It’s not until October but barring an attack from North Korea, I see nothing to stop me from looking forward to it! I feel I need to publicly declare my love for people more often on this blog.

I also spent my July 4 holiday in the woods, 10 miles in, the whole time in a state I can only describe as bliss. Not only I was I repaired from spending four whole day outside and my companion was incomparable. We talked about "Leaves of Grass" – a topic maybe all too appropriate for such excursions – but that’s how it’s meant, for the air, the light, the water.

Posted by Dawn at 10:54 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

What happens when an election is contested?
We have a pefect example here in Mexico, where long-haired hippies and college students with rattles and drums along with disillusioned crowds of the working class are protesting the closest election in the country's history. Calderon apparently beat Lopez Obrador by 0.6 percent, but Obrador is saying that there has been foul play. Calderon has not been officially, legally declared president even though the Federal Election Commission came up with him as the winner. The country is in this weird state of limbo, although it's beginning to look like it will be a South-of-th-border version of the 2000 election for the US president, complete with a Nader-style scapegoat for the left.

So this is democracy, and it's working, but I'm starting to think that it's it's always, always, always imperfect.

My question would be, at this point, is some level of fraud expected in every election, just as there is a margin of error in every scientific experiment? How much is acceptable, and how much is not really going to affect the results? Should Mexico have built-in runoff elections with ranked choice voting, like San Francisco started using last year, or should they have a real runoff, Peru-style? Is it fair for candidates who have no chance of winning to distract people from the candidates who actually could win?

All this is part of the fine-tuning of a democracy.

Posted by Kim at 06:47 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)