on the increasing impossibility of general strike

or, mid-afternoon bowling break.

Just the queers and the retirees swizzling free rotgut coffee and ginger-ale.

The film 'A League of Ordinary Gentleman" documented, well, the downfall of bowling-as-national-spectacle, as well as the death knell of 'civic engagement,' localized dialogue, etc., sounded by the demise of the local bowling club -- but here, in Binghamton, where we tend to be about two decades behind all those 'deaths' prompted by the transnational cannibalism, the bowling league is still alive and well. Gentleman bowling in the lane next to us (team tag: "may guys" -- labor nod? perhaps...), one fully decked in faux-leather replete with a full-color Elvis head on the back, between the shoulderblades, officially owned, having honed their scores since Carter. Myself -- didn't do so hot. The third graders, firm ensconced to our left, managed higher scores than myself ("but they had bumpers" my bowling partner says. As if bumpers have anything to do with the deadly aim of an eight year old on a gym class fieldtrip).

cops/academia

Working on an essay for inclusion in a book. A real, tangible, hold-in-yr-hands book. Details forthcoming, more than likely. For now, though, some thoughts on conversations had recently at last weekend's "Knowledge, Violence, Discipline" conference, firstly: holding a conference which really attempts to engage the relation between policies of exclusion re: the university, the privitization of the university, the necessity of destruction of the myths surrounding the university as a 'last bastion' of 'free speech' in one of the most heavily surveilled university buildings I've seen seems, in retrospect, a bit counter-intuitive. Now, some factoids:

1) York University, in Toronto, has instituted a policy banning all 'voice-amplification' devices in order to quell campus anti-war protest. Notwithstanding thoughts as to the effectivity of campus protest in general (which strikes me, oftentimes, as a closed-circuit broadcast, wherein the only possible effect is a) irritating the administration (not an undesirable effect, certainly) and b) pissing off campus Republicans), this little bit of information is possibly more than enough to convince even the most starry-eyed, politically hopeful undergrad of increasing sanction and roll-back of -- what to call it -- 'freedom of speech'? As if that phrase meant anything, anyhow.

2) The U.S. Military is hiring social scientists, particularly anthropologists, for inclusion in the deployment of what's been termed 'Human Terrain Systems' -- a presenter this weekend drew links between this and Margaret Mead's Cold War research on the USSR. Disturbing, yes, but what's more -- particularly for someone who's interested in more surface/intensity-focused understandings of the body (to move away from the depth-oriented models which force organs and genes to speak an instrumentalist, determined subject -- see Grosz's Volatile Bodies) is the notion of the subject as 'human terrain,' the employment of a spatial metaphor I typically find more engaging, deployed in such a way as to fuel a notion of transparent mapping with reference to irreducible and opaque 'Others.'

All for now.

script flipping (script flopping)

From a paper I'm presenting in 24 hours:

"But what if we were to flip the script of medical photodocumentation and reception? What if we were to restore a certain libidinality, a certain sexiness, to the documentation of intersexed bodies? What sort of reception would this prompt? What sort of relinquishing of ‘common sense’ conceptions regarding sexed intelligibility, and further, sexuality/sexual politics would be necessary to view this sort of image while abstaining from the all-too-predictable guesses as to what one is seeing, guesses typically framed by an implicit assumption of a binary structuration of sex?"