Courtesy of featuresblogs.chicagotribune.com

Although the real results of Vicary’s study remained inconclusive, more recent work has suggested that things for which we are not fully aware can indeed influence our behavior. For example, a series of studies on “nonconscious influences”  has suggested that stimuli that are too fast or otherwise weak for our sensory organs to consciously perceive may nevertheless still have a powerful effect on our thoughts and behavior. In one study in particular, researchers exposed some study participants to either an Apple logo or an IBM logo by flashing it in front of them on a screen for 2 miliseconds, below the point of conscious perception. Later, when asked to come up for uses for a brick (as a creativity assessment), the researchers found that participants who had been primed with the Apple computer logo were much more creative than those primed with the IBM logo. They reasoned that this happened because of the association between the Apple brand and creativity.

In addition to this study, there have been many other instances in which individuals’ behavior was shaped by stimuli with which they were nonconsciously primed with (and instead of providing the details of each of these studies here, googling “nonconscious influences” will lead you to find much of them). While the implications of all these findings are endless, I believe it is important to consider the consequences that nonconscious influences can have on our (and especially our students’) behavior. In a previous post, I noted how the average American is exposed to roughly 5,000 advertisements in a single day.

If the research findings in the nonconscious influence area have any merit, it’s easy to imagine the potential effects this can have. Although we try to teach our students well, we are also competing with 5,000 other stimuli they are exposed to, a majority of which they are not even aware they are perceiving. Perhaps it not our students’ fault when we get writing assignments that we deem to be “too dry” and uncreative. They may have been written on an IBM computer.

Although the issue of nonconscious influences may be a hugely complex phenomenon, I have often asked myself the question of whether there is something that I can learn from all this research, and use it to ultimately help my students in their academic endeavors. Ideally, I would love to have pictures of the Apple logo in every classroom I teach, but that doesn’t seem too reasonable or feasible, or even ethically sound. Additionally, if we educate students about the possibility of nonconscious influences on their behavior, is it even remotely likely that anything would change? And if so, what do we tell them short of cutting themselves off from all media? Thus, I invite others to provide their thoughts on this issue.

Example of a “Chinglish” sign

photo credit: Jonas in China

When purchasing tickets, would-be audience members are warned that this production is in “English and Mandarin (with English surtitles),” in much the same way they would be warned of profanity, violent content, or seizure-inducing strobe lights. My first thought was, “Why do we need a warning? Is bilingualism dangerous?” But my second less flippant thought was, “Why no Mandarin surtitles?” If this is supposed to be about the American misunderstanding of Chinese culture, just as much as the other way around, then why do we only read the English words, while hearing both English and Mandarin? Is this exemplifying the exact linguistic bias that Hwang is attempting to undermine in the play?

The purpose of supertitles (or as they are called in the warning listed above, “surtitles,” a term which I just discovered is a Canadian trademark) is ostensibly comprehension. Unlike on the dramatic stages of Broadway, supertitles are common in opera companies. New York City’s own Metropolitan Opera developed seat-back versions (the also-trademarked “Met Titles”) that resemble multi-lingual pager displays, sending lyrics to audience members in calming amber LEDs. The aria may be sung in a language that the audience member does not understand or using diction that is unintelligible to the listener. The words projected above the stage (or on the tiny screen mounted on the seat in front of the audience member) are supposed to make it easier to understand what is happening during the opera.

Supertitles before an opera

  photo credit: testastretta-999

I would be lying if I didn’t say that I use this technology when I attend operas. I tried turning it off once during a performance of Nixon in China (an opera sung in English), but there was the constant gnawing that I was missing something if I didn’t have the glowing amber lights translating the words that I supposedly understood. Does this technology in fact detract from the experience of the performance? I am watching and listening to the performance, but when my eyes flicker to the screen, I am no longer relying on the performer’s interpretation. I merely listen, while reading the text. The physical body of the actor is no longer important to me, and I just listen to the singer’s voice. Does this make me a lazy audience member? Or merely someone who privileges reading a translated meaning over the actor’s interpretation?

David Henry Hwang's Chinglish on Broadway

  photo credit: Mark Runyon

Back to Broadway and Hwang’s Chinglish. In this case, we are talking about a non-musical—something very different from the world of opera up at Lincoln Center—and, therefore, the use of supertitles differs from the operatic trope. Rather than projecting every word, only Mandarin words translated into English are supertitled. When an actor speaks in Mandarin, my eyes immediately go to the words which are projected onto the walls of the set. I am not reading the actor’s body language, only the meaning of the words. However, when actors speaks in English, no translation is provided and my focus remained on the actors—fully taking in their posture, gestures, eye-contact, and facial expressions.

This feeling of always being behind the action is described by an occurrence late in the second act. Next to me in the balcony, was a group of spectators who spoke fluent Chinese. At one point, Jennifer Lim (playing the role of Deputy Minister Xi Yan) was delivering a monologue. Before the words could be translated into English, a single guffaw of recognition came from a woman in the group. This single laugh seemed to encompass the production’s feeling of cross-cultural disconnect more than anything Hwang could have scripted. I knew that something humorous had occurred, and I was about to find out what. But perhaps it would not be laugh-out-loud funny to me in translation. When the English words were finally revealed a second later and I caught up with the meaning of what had been said, the actor had already moved on to the more poignant part of the speech. At this point a more demure English chuckle was all that could be elicited from the non-Chinese speakers in the audience, who were left wondering how the line must have been heard in its original language. That single laugh is something that could not be translated into a supertitle.

On the one hand, it is obvious how specialized knowledges frequently become intertwined with social hierarchies and used to prop up unjust divisions of class, race, and gender, among others. On the other hand, as someone dedicated to the preservation and development of certain fields of knowledge both academic and artistic, I cannot accept any simple equation between power and knowledge.

The idea that power and knowledge are two sides of the same coin has been powerfully articulated by Michel Foucault. Another way to say this, using the language of Pierre Bourdieu, would be that specialized knowledge is a kind of cultural capital, a form of power distinct from but analogous to money. Many of the contributors of Hacking the Academy seem to subscribe to this idea: Understand the political uses of knowledge, and you’ve understood knowledge itself.

Cartoon by Mark Stivers

I don’t agree with this.

Knowledge is political, but it is more than an incarnation of politics. This goes not only for dominant fields of knowledge but also for subjugated knowledge of every kind: neither can be reduced to the power relations that surround them. What then is knowledge, besides power? What is the internal structure of subjugated knowledge? Can such knowledge also be highly specialized and refined? And, on the other hand, can institutionally supported knowledges be extricated from the power that supports them?

In this post, I want to ask about the relationship between areas of knowledge and categories of political identity. In other words, I want to bring together some thoughts on democracy and social justice with some thoughts on epistemology. In doing so, it seems to me that there is an immediate problem: The structure inherently leads to specialization. This is a fundamental characteristic of knowledge and one that works against any easy integration between the impulse to research and the impulse to democratize.

What I mean by specialization is that knowledge is differentially accessible. Knowledge is structured in branching pathways because it is a confrontation with a reality that is not purely invented. Whether this reality is the abstract patterning of mathematics, the detailed records of historical archives, or the physiology of human anatomy, knowledge is exploration and discovery as well as creativity and invention. If you go down one path, you cannot go as far down another.

Drawing by Laura Lee

This means that fields of knowledge have depth. In order to understand advanced algebra, one should know how to count from zero to ten. In order to grasp advanced theoretical arguments, one must learn the vocabulary used in that field. Knowledge makes possible further, more specific, more specialized knowledge. While all knowledge is potentially available, it is not all equally accessible. Knowledge is not like a menu from which you can order any item. It is rather like a territory in which some places are easier to get to than others, given any particular starting point.

If this is true, then we cannot hope to make knowledge democratic in the same way that a society can be democratic. Even as we fight to make education available to everyone, the structure of education entails some degree of specialization. A society can argue in the public sphere over which areas of knowledge should constitute its basic curriculum. But in doing so, it presupposes a “public” built on certain knowledges rather than others. There will always remain areas of specialized knowledge that are not common. Some will be aligned with the powerful and others with the powerless. So the relationship between power and knowledge will always be complex.

At a time when social protest and democracy are receiving new energy and attention through the chain of events that now extends from the Arab Spring to Occupy Wall Street, I want to ask about the intersection of political categories and specialized knowledges. A lot of excellent work has been done on intersectionality in politics, for example at the difficult but crucial intersection of feminist and anti-racist mobilization. It seems to me that specialized knowledge is another important piece of this puzzle.

Marya Wethers at Movement Research (photo: Ian Douglas)

This issue came up for me recently when Iele Paloumpis wrote about an evening of Movement Research at Judson Church. Paloumpis writes of being moved by Marya Wethers piece then goes on to criticize the rest of the evening (and the organization in general) for its apparent whiteness. I was reminded of this again when I sat at a meeting of the Bernard L. Schwartz Communications Institute and found myself internally critiquing its whiteness along the same vein. Yet I also found that could not put the Schwartz Institute and Movement Research into quite the same category when it came to this politicized critique.

Failure to diversify is a serious charge that can be applied to countless institutions ranging from Hollywood to the United States Senate. My goal here is not to interrogate either the Schwartz Institute or Movement Research on their particular successes, failures, or histories, but to draw attention to the politics of knowledge as it plays out in certain contexts of which these are two examples close to me personally. To begin with, I want to acknowledge that every successful contemporary institution has its own unique history necessarily tied to institutional power and that none can escape being more or less imbricated in the racist history of the United States.

What interests me here is that these two institutions are explicitly defined by their support of a particular field of knowledge: “movement” in one case and “communications” in the other. The Schwartz Institute draws its fellows from the CUNY doctoral pool, which means it reflects the demographics of doctoral students rather than undergraduates. And Movement Research, with its unique and in many ways politically radical history linked to avant-garde dance, likewise represents a specific community. Both communities tend strongly towards leftist politics while also depending on a significant degree of economic privilege to sustain themselves.

Ben Spatz at Movement Research (photo by Ian Douglas)

I am part of both communities and both organizations. I was one of the artists included in what Paloumpis called the “list of white choreographers” that made up the rest of that evening of Movement Research. And while I don’t mind being pointed to as an example of racial privilege, what was missing for me in Paloumpis’s analysis was the mission of Movement Research and what exactly it successfully represents. This is what brings me to the question of specialized knowledge.

At this point I can only offer a series of questions:

• How should we think about the intersectionality between what are commonly called “identity” categories (race, gender, class — but also size, age, religion…) and what are more often thought of as fields of knowledge or craft (dance, movement, writing, communications — but also math, science, literature…)?
• Is it possible to bring something to the ongoing and always controversial discussion of curriculum and pedagogy by approaching areas of knowledge as political (or politicizable) communities that intersect with those of “identity”?
• For example, could the conversation about English literature — how to define the field coherently while working against the legacies of imperialism — benefit from some of the critical tools put forth by the analysis of political intersectionality?

I do not mean to suggest that we should simply equate having specialized knowledge with being part of an identity group or social class. That would be as wrong-headed as trying to develop equivalencies between different axes of oppression. The value of intersectionality is that it views such axes as a distinct dimension, each adding an irreducible layer of complexity to any given issue. It is difficult enough to analyze any given event (or book, or advertisement) in terms of its intersecting politics of gender, race, and class. What happens if we add the question of specialized knowledges to this analysis?

Map of intersecting identities from CALCASA

If I feel that Movement Research deserves less censure than the Schwartz Institute for its visible whiteness, this is because I believe the field of dance/movement (and especially experimental dance/movement) is far more marginal and endangered in our society than that of communications, especially when the latter is tied to business education. In fact, there is some common ground between them, as both focus on embodiment as a medium of communication. But there is also a difference between the two fields: one that has much to do with power but which is not simply reducible to any other political category. In this case, the axis of power I am talking about is not one of gender, race, class, or any conventional category of politicized identity. It is about different kinds of knowledge and which knowledges are considered important or unimportant in a given society.

Again, this is not to deny the importance of bringing to bear on such organizations a critique that examines injustice across the categories of political identity. Obviously, the question of which fields of knowledge are subsidized is profoundly linked to the question of which communities hold power. But the two questions are not identical.

It is difficult to speak about knowledge and politics in the same breath. From the perspective of politics, specialized knowledge can look like an elitist ruse; while from the perspective of research, politics can look like a distraction. This is the case not only for established academic disciplines of specialized knowledges, like particle physics or medieval history, but also for marginalized knowledges of all kinds. Even if one has no institutional support to pursue one’s research, by framing it as research one already takes a step away from a purely political mobilization that would demand more resources for reasons of social justice. Indeed, this may be one way to complicate the dilemma faced by political movements in defining their constituencies without relying on an essentialism that is ultimately counter-productive.

Boondocks cartoon by Aaron McGruder

To conclude: Although institutions that support fields of knowledge should be called out on their social politics, it seems to me that such critiques might also benefit from a more complex politics of knowledge, one that understands knowledge and power as interwoven but distinct. After all, even an utterly tyrannical power structure can harbor valuable knowledge, including some that may one day prove essential precisely to those people who are mobilized against the tyrannical or unjust institutions that helped to develop it. An obvious example is the use of social media and cellphones to organize democratic protests — but can’t the same thing be said about knowledge in other areas, including movement and communication?

If nothing else, I hope that I have shown here that knowledge is not equivalent to power, even if the question of which knowledges receive institutional support is always a political one. It seems to me that working on this paradox is a crucial and defining task for many institutions both within and beyond academia.

How do these self-avowed leaderless protesters communicate to the world and to each other? To answer that, we must start by looking at the founding of the protests. Three groups with very different approaches to spreading their messages of social change sounded the initial call: Adbusters, Anonymous, and the NYC General Assembly.

Adbusters is an anti-consumerism group probably most well-known for its annual protest Buy Nothing Day (held on Black Friday). Its modes of mass media include many forms of culture jamming: an advertising-less magazine, “open source” shoes, and anti-advertising commercials. Art, message, content, and form blend together to create striking works of protest, whose purpose is to disrupt the viewer’s experience in order to begin a longer, more complex discussion about the effects of advertising on culture.

One of Adbusters's "classic" culture jamming anti-ad

Anonymous is most famous—infamous?—for two ongoing protests related to uninhibited free speech: one against the Church of Scientology and the other in support of WikiLeaks. Both of these protests included web videos declaring their stance, coordinated hacking and denial of service attacks, and protests in Guy Fawkes masks. While the masked protests have become the photographs associated with the group, they mostly organize online in “leaderless” internet forums.

Members of Anonymous at an in-person protest

photo credit: Anonymous9000

Blending the cooperative leaderless mentality of Anonymous with the organized critique of mass media of Adbusters, the third group, the NYC General Assembly, has become the core of the protests. More of a process than an actual group, NYC General Assemblies use both high- and low-tech solutions in order to reach consensus among the various (and there are many) fractions of the Occupy Wall Street protesters.

Certainly no one will deny the impact of Facebook and Twitter to organize the disparate individuals currently residing in Zuccotti Liberty Square—after all, the protesters like to compare their occupation to the “Arab Spring/Facebook Revolution” in Tahrir Square. There are other network technologies at play in the Wall Street protests: websites (of the pre-”Web 2.0” variety), Kickstarter campaigns (to fund specific projects of the occupation), Livestream (to broadcast live video from cellphones, laptops, and other internet-connected cameras), WePay (to accept micro-donations to buy food, although the fund was later moved to the Aliance for global Justice for 501c3 status), and even GitHub (a social media technology that allows to access to the technology that the protesters are using).

Some low-tech social networking?

photo credit: Brennan Cavanaugh

The means by which the protesters communicate, however, are not solely highly technological. As Sara Ruth Jacobs mentioned last week when discussing Navid Hassanpour’s paper on the Egyptian Revolution, the loss of online social media can increase active participation and connections between individuals in a shared location. And even though the protesters set up generator-powered charging stations in the privately-owned (but by law publicly-accessible 24-hours a day) park, computer technology doesn’t solve every communication issue. This is where low-tech social media help to keep the Occupy Wall Street protesters connected. While marches, chants, and hand-painted signs are the means of communication most often shown in news coverage, there are other less visible communication tools employed by the protesters.

General Assemblies and working groups use consensus building to determine the actions of the participants. Without consensus (defined by the NYC General Assembly in the organizing leaflet for the occupation as “no outright opposition”), no group action will take place and proposals must be revised for the next assembly. The means of achieving consensus with such a large group relies on two low-tech social media technologies: hand signals and a “mic check.”

Hand signals:

A manual version of the clickers familiar to those of us who have taught or taken classes in large lecture halls in recent years, hand signals quickly allow the group poll on a particular proposal. Four major hand signals mean yes or agree, no or disagree, point of process (similar to a “point of order,” meaning someone is not following the process), and block the proposal from passing in its present form (used only in extreme circumstances when you can’t remain a part of the group if the current proposal passes).

Hand signals from NYC General Assembly manual

While these are useful in measuring interest and passing proposals, the basic four hand signals are only a form of selection and not intended to engage the group in open-ended dialogue. This hole in the process of group communication has been partially addressed as protesters develop new hand signals specific to the situation. The yes/agree signal evolved into a related, “enthusiastic yes/agree” with the addition of “jazz hands” (or one of the American Sign Language signs for “applause”). One of these new signals, “I can’t hear,” would be a welcome addition to any event—how many times do I have to hear that annoying shout at a conference when a presenter isn’t speaking directly into the microphone? Another collaboratively developed signal, “loud noise coming down the block,” is useful in lower Manhattan’s labyrinth of twisting streets where cavernous skyscrapers play fun acoustic tricks with traffic sounds.

Mic Check:

A “mic check” is a method to allow anyone to address the crowd, as well as a means of disseminating information to the crowd. The effect sounds like a call-and-response chant that protesters use to get their message across to audiences standing on the sidelines during a march. However, the purpose of this call-and-response is internal, rather than external, communication. When an individual wishes to make a proposal to the group, that person shouts “mic check.” The crowd around the person replies “mic check.” This is repeated until the speaker is certain that everyone understands what a mic check has started ( once or twice is usually sufficient). The original speaker then starts the message he or she wished to communicate to the group. Broken up into short phrases of a few words each, this message is relayed through the same call-and-response chant that started the mic check. This serves as a way to not only amplify and transmit the message to listeners far away from the speaker, but it also reinforces the message in the listener-repeater’s mind. If someone hears the person next to them repeating a different phrase than she or he did, a mini-discussion can help clarify what was actually said.

Even famous philosophers can use the mic check to amplify their lectures (although more complex sentences can be difficult to transmit).

As the Occupy Wall Street protests solidify into a movement—with affiliated protests in DC, Boston, Seattle, Los Angeles, Tampa, Boise, and many more towns coming soon—the ability to achieve consensus will become more difficult. Hopefully these protests will not become merely the liberal version of the Tea Party protests—that is to say, a hierarchically controlled sub-set of one existing political party or the other. This narrative is already attempting to be applied to the Occupy Wall Street movement. To avoid falling into this trap, it will be necessary to continue the radical multi-tiered approaches to communication and social media in order to ensure that a plethora of voices can be heard.

Why Gen-Y Johnny Can’t Read Nonverbal Cues: An emphasis on social networking puts younger people at a face-to-face disadvantage.

This semester we read and discussed the recently released Red Cross report on US treatment of terrorist detainees, treatment which was conclusively shown to be torture. Once we got the basic history stuff out of the way, I asked students to think through whether such treatment can ever be justified — a little dime-store ethical philosophy thrown in to the history classroom. There are usually some who think there’s no justifiable use of such harsh tactics as have been regular lately. Others insist that, if torture could be known to be likely to work, then we have to leave moral absolutism behind for a more utilitarian approach — i.e. it just might be OK to do some pretty rotten stuff to someone if it saves thousands, hundreds or scores of lives. This is always an interesting discussion, but it’s one that also makes clear how much the understanding of the torture question has been framed for my students by popular culture (“24″ (the worst culprit) and the many other movies and shows we all can probably remember).

This year however, in two separate classes, something new arose: Students, on their own started advocating torturing people not to in order get intelligence that would prevent 9/11 Pt. 2, but as punishment. Eye-for-an-eye sort of thinking — you get what you deserve, and there are no real limits to what you might deserve except how egregious your own crime was.

I found this truly unsettling. How did we get here? I think that the way we got here is a good old fashioned slippery slope. On TV, the bad guys get tortured and either give it up or not, die or not, feel terrible physical pain or not — but they’re the bad guys, so in the verbal and visual rhetoric of trashy (and extraordinarily popular) TV, it seems OK to many viewers. Torture becomes a regular adjunct to justice.

In addition, there are movies every year which prominently feature torture of human beings either in the same context or as “horror films” (really sadism films), in which the torturers are bad guys, the enemy. In the second case, torture seems despicable, so in one evening of viewing a person could be treated to a rather schizophrenic overall depiction of the issue – the cruel device of the worst fiends and the necessary tool of the righteous. But also in the second case, the problem is not that torture becomes linked with justice, but rather that it becomes entertainment; it’s a fun way (apparently) to get scared for an hour or two before making out with your girlfriend or checking on the sleeping kids.

What separates us, ideally from the Taliban, among other things, is our idea that justice and vengeance are different things. What renders us humane instead of merely human is, among other things, the idea that there are some acts which are simply morally unacceptable. What separates adults from children, among other things, is that adults see the real social utility as well as the moral truth of the old saw that two wrongs don’t make a right.

As a culture, we’re letting go of these things by the way we accept depictions of torture, as both titilating and just. To have a torture culture is not just to accept depictions of torture without clear disapprobation; it is, as the term “culture” implies, to grow, to nourish torture. And so, I think, when you have a culture rife with torture perhaps you end up seeing the fruits of that tortuculture blossoming in your nice calm classroom one April day.

Every now and again, however, protocols are broken. But fortunately breaking the rules doesn’t always result in an international gaffe. When First Lady Michelle Obama met Queen Elizabeth at Buckingham Palace on Wed, she placed her arm around the Queen. Now, we Americans may not think of this as a big deal – aren’t people always reaching out to shake hands and hug our politicians and their spouses? This is particularly true on the campaign trail. But our politicians are mere elected officials, not monarchy. In England, one apparently does not reach out and touch the Queen. According to AP writer Jennifer Quinn, “When the former Australian Prime Minister Paul Keating put his arm around the queen in 1992, the tabloids dubbed him the ‘Lizard of Oz.’ When his successor, John Howard, was accused of doing the same, a spokesman insisted: ‘We firmly deny that there was any contact whatsoever.’”

Fortunately for the Obamas, the Queen appeared to be quite taken by Michelle, who stands about a foot taller. Perhaps even more shocking, according to British press, was that the Queen wrapped her arm around the First Lady as well, in a “rare public show of affection.” According to Rebecca English of the Daily Mail online, “In 57 years, the Queen has never been seen to make that kind of gesture and it is certainly against all protocol to touch her.” I guess she liked her.

Bravo to the Queen for breaking with tradition!