30 September 2007

On 19 September 2007, the New York Post published Travis Reed's article, "Crazed & Tased: Student speaker zapped". In his article, Reed reports on (21-year old) Andrew Meyer's tazing and arrest for asking Senator Kerry questions at a Florida University forum. The infuriating thing is that Meyer did not even need silencing to say the least of the tazing! Kerry repeatedly stated that he would "answer the student's 'very important question'" and yet Meyer was still silenced in such an extreme manner.

On 23 September 2007, The New York Times published Peter Applebome's article, "In Court: When Clothes Speak To More Than Fashion". In his article, Applebome reports on (11-year old) Michael DePinto's wearing a button in protest against a "policy mandating uniforms for students" in K-8th grade. Applebome goes on to supply a brief laundry list of historical Supreme Court cases (as precedence) of similar incidents where clothing is a subject of controversial protected free speech.

On 30 September 2007, The New York Times published Jonathan D. Glater's article, "Between Free Speech And a Hard Place". In his article, Glater cites three protests at three different campuses: UC Irvine, Stanford, and Columbia. Especially with the case of Columbia, the decision to invite a guest speaker who denies the Holocaust and calls for the destruction of Israel can be seen to some as not an academic exercise of free speech in a protected public sphere of communicative action (Habermas), but rather as a ploy for "showbusiness".

Looking to Nicholas Handler's essay, "The Posteverything Generation," published in The New York Times Magazine on 30 September 2007, the advent of electronic protest can be juxtaposed next to the above forms of protest and weighed against the treatment of the Burmese monks. From expected agitation of a particular generation to an unexpected recourse to unwavering violent suppression with no apparent moral compunction, what is really being bandied about like a battered child is freedom of speech in the name of power, control, and legitimacy.

When morality comes into play, sharing the stage with politics, and violence ensues behind bloodied curtains, there needs to be a reassessment of the accepted doxa that structures roles, language, and legitimacy. When a student is shocked into silence in a seemingly 'free world' and in front of a congressman - a representative of the people - there is no one to blame except that leader and a system of structural representations and symbols that no longer carry meaning and fail to encode with any adequate or accurate correspondence. There are no 'figures of recognition' in a language structured for a past no longer viable, acceptable, and adequate to co-exist with this present.

This failure of correspondence is even more grimm in light of current measures - the veritable 'race' - to meld symbiotically man with machine and machine with man as a quasi-simulacrum of human analysis and computer intelligence. When priorities are monied towards a synthetic congruity and synthesis rather than towards one of human freedom and a peaceful world order, there must be great cause to pause and dawn on the critical eye of Reason revitalized by the postmodernist critique. Interject doubt, protest, dissimilutude, and banish duality, but at the very least, agitate against the copascetic blanket acceptance of this ersatz invention of artificiality qua synthetic!

This may not be an era of complete Postmodernity, however, we can not vanquish ourselves with our own blindness and willingness to bask in the warming absence of ignorance. When protesting, it is our responsibility to protest with a critical relevance and not shoot ourselves in the process.

There exists an ontology waiting in potentiality. Symbolized by hyphenation, is it not about time to acknowledge it so we can know it well enough to put into practice?

Hegel wrote of the Spirit mediating between past and present. Hartman constructed Hegel's Spirit as both concrete Idea and synthesis of Idea and Nature. Within Idea, Nature, and Time, we must mediate our Spirit to a viable History - one that continues to be dynamic, ever-present, and at all times, relevant. The same must be called upon for the Spirit of the doxa located precisely in Today.