In “Percept, Affect, and Concept,” Deleuze and Guattari describe the task of the writer as congruous with that of the painter or musician: to “invent different procedures in the search for the sensation as being” with the “material” of “words and syntax” (What is Philosophy? 167). This conception of words and syntax, and even books, as “material” is important. For the philosophy of immanence they begin in Anti-Oedipus, the relationships between author/book, book/reader, and book/society must be determined materially precisely because there can be no exterior play of forces to the situation. Even so, it is common to presume apropos texts that the task of analysis is to denounce “fictions, illusions,” and “false apprehensions” (Bryant). Yet if the affect of a text upon the reader is a material relation, could it simultaneously be true that the fictions inside a text are immaterial and unreal? Or, more radically, does it imply that fictions themselves are, in some sense, real? To treat fictions as real objects would mean to reconceive the task of literary analysis away from one focused on denouncing these “false illusions,” but also necessitate new understandings of the political importance of works of literature. It would also invite us to investigate anew what type of object books really are. Deleuze points toward this when he writes that “a book is a little machine” that cannot be reduced to its status as an inanimate object of human use, nor purely to its interpretations (A Thousand Plateaus 4). Books themselves must “fabulate” (What is Philosophy? 167). These two tasks are the targets this paper seeks to explore. By advancing an understanding of books as agents that gather together diverse affects and sensations in an assemblage, this essay advocates an understanding of texts as productive entities – or, to borrow Levi Bryant’s terminology, “factories.” It will be argued that this understanding offers the potential of a powerful new investigation into the political agency of texts outside of a relation to their authors themselves. In this world, books can become properly political.

            To call a book an agent proper requires a few essential assumptions. In “A Treatise of Nomadology,” Deleuze and Guattari articulate a simple but important premise: “We know nothing about a body until we know what it can do, in other words, what its affects are” (A Thousand Plateaus 257). From this it could be said that a body, properly speaking, does not exist unless it affects other persons and things. Works of art obviously do affect individuals and create connections in their circulation throughout the world. Yet the artworks are also independent of human relationality, irreducible to a status as “constructions” of the human mind. This refusal to place non-human entities inside the being of the subject is called ontological realism. Simply state, it is “the thesis that the world is composed of objects, that these objects are varied and include entities as diverse as mind, language, cultural and social entities, and objects independent of humans such as galaxies, stones, quarks, tardigrades and so on” (Bryant “Introduction: Towards a Finally Subjectless Object”). Works of art are objects that manifest as “compound[s] of percepts and affects” (What is Philosophy? 164). For Deleuze and Guattari, the work of art would persist even without the creator or viewer: its destruction can only be realized through the disappearance of its material. The percepts and affects of a work of art exist as “beings” separately from human thought (164). But if an object has to affect other bodies to properly exist, how could it pass this test independently of human relations? Precisely because objects relate to each other in similar ways to their relations to humans – an inhuman affect. From this arises an important idea: works of art are agents with real affects beyond human interactions. This understanding of object “power” counters a long history of post-Kantian philosophy that largely situates thought and agency solely within the human domain. Jane Bennett calls this power of things to cause change “thing-power” (Bennett xii). We might say, then, that works of art – for the sake of this discussion, books – think and act too. They are agents and cause change through their thing-power. Yet Deleuze and Guattari draw a distinction between the thinking of art and philosophy: “Art thinks no less than philosophy, but it thinks through affects and percepts” (What is Philosophy? 66). Art and philosophy work on separate planes, yet ones that “pass into each other in a becoming that sweeps them both up in an intensity that co-determines them” (66). This co-determinacy is important: the affect of art can implicate conceptual personae, re-forming thought itself. This is equally true in the circumstance of an individual greatly affected by reading The Notebook as it is in the way the Harry Potter series has materially structured commerce and entertainment for large populations throughout the world.

            Having established the agency of things, the question becomes: “How is it, exactly, that texts have thing-power?” Eileen Joy explains the etymology of the word “things”: in medieval Iceland, a “thing” meant a gathering in order to solve collective wrongdoings (Joy). Books are, of course, things, and from this Joy makes a novel point: books are both gatherings and actively gather other things. Kafka can be used to explain this idea of a “gathering,” because for Deleuze he is the paradigmatic example of what he and Guattari term “minor literature.” As they argue, Kafka effectively deterritorializes the dominant German language through his use of minor ones: Czech, Hebrew, Yiddish, and Prague German. Kafka becomes “a sort of stranger within his own language” (Kafka 26). He makes the writing-machine work in non-standard ways: the “minor” languages become a form of literary revolution. Yet Kafka’s universality lies also in a complexity of metaphor and language that often become, literally, lost in translation(s). To combine this with the concept of things as gatherings, the brilliance of Kafka lies in the beautiful and horrifying grouping of these various, not just languages, but modalities of life. Kafka’s writings are, precisely, gatherings of individuals, places, times, and even fantasies, but ones that seem distinct from the movement of time itself. There are two common arguments about great literature: the first of which is that a great work is “timeless.” This is exceedingly true in the case of Kafka. Besides the appearance of a few now-anachronistic things, The Metamorphosis or The Trial could have been written today. This, however, far from being some impossible kind of fault, exemplifies one crucial aspect of the way texts function as gatherings: they gather together modes of life at different times. It is not just in the obvious way that antiquated books remind us of older times – a campfire, a model-T, how ancient! – but that the text itself establishes new connections among different chronologies. Derrida’s notion of time as torn between the present and the future-to-come is important here: texts gather together not just literal presences, but also the specters of the past and anticipations of the future. Is this not precisely the case of books that we later call “prescient”? Of course, rarely do works of literature actively predict a future catastrophe, invention, etc., but the temporal importance of the gathering is made clear precisely through a retroactive hindsight. This leads to the second trait of a great text: it can be said to have no proper predecessor. In a recent lecture, Slavoj Žižek argued this is absolutely true in the case of Kafka: while now we could point to a series of literary predecessors, it’s also undeniably the case that without Kafka there would be no straight line to his inevitable appearance. The point is that, to use Borges’ formulation, Kafka created his own predecessors. He was a “contingent possibility” that retroactively established his own “possibility” (Žižek). Part of the thing-power of a text, then, is the establishment of linkages between both its antecedents and its followers. In this sense, as well, a text does not just gather together particular things and ideas inside the confines of its pages, but moves diverse characters, items, and settings across the pages of disparate works. A text gathers together many disparate possibilities to create new affects.

Texts are thus productive gatherings: “little machines” that produce new relations to the world and new affects. Texts become not just combinations of pre-existing percepts and affects, but also factories of the new. This is the site of their political importance: a text that produces new modalities, that reassembles different assemblages, or transmutes affects is political as such. Returning to Kafka, is this not clear in The Metamorphosis? The story is political precisely in the ways it disturbs a seemingly normal relation between humanity and animality. But we do not read The Metamorphosis because we are frightened by the possibility of one day awakening to find ourselves insects – this would be an insane paranoia. Instead, I argue, it is because The Metamorphosis implies that the real risk is to wake up and find us fully human. The ambiguity in Gregor’s human/animal status makes apparent the invisible constancy of becomings-inhuman. Yet there is no purely universal relation to a text, a point that sometimes appears to get lost in Deleuze’s notion of “affect.” Which is to say that to treat books as “theaters of representation” in need of interpreting, by far the predominant trend in literary criticism, is to create a “beneficent God to explain geological movements” (Bryant; A Thousand Plateaus 4). In other words, because books are material objects made up of material pieces, there cannot be a singular meaning imposed upon the text. This is why Deleuze and Guattari are so insistent that “literature is an assemblage” that “has nothing to do with ideology”: the ascription of ideology to a text denies its productive agency and its multiplicity (4). Each little book machine affects each reader differently, but what seems important is that the text-factory creates multitudes of new affects, some of which hit the reader, even though others miss their target. The universality of a text lies precisely in what is gathered in and by it. With The Metamorphosis this is clear both in the multitude of Gregor Samsa’s in literature itself, but also in the way books, movies, and music have played upon and used the story in new ways. And these affects cannot be reduced to Kafka qua writer, but rely upon, instead the circulation and connection Tof text-factories. This is where the peculiar notion of a literary machine plugging into other machines begins to make sense: the work in the factories of book-things is the creation of new connections, through their circulations, that establish fundamentally new ways of relating to the world.

The most political literature, then, are the stories that can continually produce new affects regardless of, and perhaps even because of, their original setting. Yet how is it that a text-factory does this? To take an ancient example, “The Epic of Gilgamesh … after 3000 or more years … still signifies as a text. It is still able to function a factory, despite the fact that we know little of its context” (Bryant). The text-factories that can continue producing new affects, which challenge old concepts and inaugurate new ones, are precisely texts that most effectively circulate and form connections. The Epic of Gilgamesh, divorced from its historical reality, continues to create these affects. This is, I think, what Deleuze refers to when he calls works of art “monuments.” The point is not that a book contains images of the past, but that the book creates new affects that cause a becoming-past of the present, a becoming-animal of the human, etc. Books “fabulate” these new becomings and even new “percepts” (What is Philosophy? 167), depictions of the world outside its relation to the human. Hamlet is a phenomenal play, but it is also important precisely because after centuries it continues to produces fresh connections, affects, and percepts – it stays connected and forms new connections. To interpret a text in this understanding, however, cannot be reduced merely to a blasé historicism that tries to link a work to its latter, symptomal manifestations. Instead, interpretation’s goal should be to explore the ways in which the gatherings in/of a work manifest new affects both in future texts and, like Kafka, in their own antecedents.  This helps, also, to underline why the political importance of a text is not always immediately clear: in the most political writing, this importance grows precisely through new connections forged by time, reading, and interpretation itself.

This essay sought to understand texts as independent of human interaction in order to theorize them as factories of new forms of affect, percept, and relation. Books are things and, because of this, they are also gatherings. To treat books as gatherings in a diverse understanding of the term provides new avenues with which to approach the interpretation of literature. Yet this is only the beginning of an attempt to treat texts themselves as agents. The steps outlined here are thus necessarily vague. They probe the very clear importance, both politically and as aesthetic objects, of giving texts their fair worth and hopefully add on to an effort to begin to understand texts in “their productive power” (Bryant).

Works Cited

Bennett, Jane. Vibrant Matter. Durham: Duke University Press, 2010. Print.

Bryant, Levi R. The Democracy of Objects. Open Humanities Press. Online.

Bryant, Levi R. “Texts Are a Factory: Eileen Joy.” Web log post. Larval Subjects. 5 Oct. 2011. Web. <http://larvalsubjects.wordpress.com/2011/10/05/texts-are-a-factory-eileen-joy/>.

Deleuze, Gilles, and Félix Guattari. A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota, 1987. Print.

Deleuze, Gilles, and Felix Guattari. Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature. University of Minnesota, 1986. Print.

Deleuze, Gilles, and Felix Guattari. What Is Philosophy?. London: Verso, 2003. Print.

Joy, Eileen. “Toward a Speculative Realist Literary Criticism.” The Public School New York, New York. 15 Sept. 2011. Lecture.

Žižek, Slavoj. “The Ontology of Sexual Difference.” Psychoanalytic Practices. Yenching Auditorium, Cambridge, MA. 11 Oct. 2011. Lecture.

Written for my Middle East History class:

Orientalism is the construction of a discrete “East” defined by its differentiation from an also discrete “West.” To make this happen, orientalism requires both erasing the internal differences within the East and West, as well as overlooking the…

Always interesting comments from Tomby, even if his summary of Orientalism is a bit simplistic.

Introduction

To rejoice in the death of one’s enemies often seems as American as apple pie. As one of the few liberal democracies that still maintains the active use and threat of the death penalty, the United States has, despite contestation, held aloft a notion of justice that stretches back centuries: An eye for an eye. As September 11^th and the decade following have indicated, this Babylonian justice can as easily explain the criminal justice system as the predominant American approach to countering terrorism around the world: an eye (or as many eyes as necessary) for an eye. American counter-terrorism takes as a near-universal truth that violent force is the best response to terror. It employed that approach in a series of countries and conflict zones across the globe. And, as has been made all too clear during this same time period, the academic field of terrorism studies has often uncritically condoned and provided intellectual justification for this approach:

The notion of suppressive violence as the only effective response to terror has become not merely a mantra of contemporary terrorism studies but an orthodoxy – movement away from which indicates one has refused to accept a series of agreed-upon notions about terrorism. This discourse, and the knowledge/power relations that it establishes, “is reproduced, often with little deviation from the central assumptions and narratives, continuously in the field’s journals, conferences, and in literally thousands of publications every year by academics and think tanks” (Jackson 2009). This was as true during the Bush years as during the presidency of Obama: his speech following Osama’s death indicated that terrorists would be ferreted out and “defeated” wherever they might appear.

The targeted killing of Osama bin Laden seems to represent the apex of these orthodox notions about countering terrorism. It was an assassination – a method with which the United States has a deep and intricate relationship – aimed at demolishing and demoralizing Al Qaeda by eliminating the symbolic head of global terrorism. Or so we believed. As news headlines and official proclamations have made all too clear, however, global terrorism lives on. The mantra of a broad spectrum of political commentators and foreign policy “specialists” is that we are still all at danger. Bin Laden, then, far from the true leader of global terrorism, seems to be little more than a grand signifier of that threat, which now extinguished, must find new opportunities – new signifiers – to come into existence. Vis-à-vis Shakespeare, it is often catastrophic to weigh an “enemy more mighty than he seems.” Does placing such emphasis on a single individual not run the risk of underestimating the impact and power of those who are not household names, but nonetheless wear the mantle of jihad?

And in a parallel sense, has this focus on bin Laden not distracted the United States from the great devastation its own post-9/11 actions have caused to the world? As the United States make steps forward, it appears that the Global War on Terrorism always takes a few steps backward with each instantiation of violence aimed at creating peace. The invasion of Afghanistan established a new mission for terrorists and Osama’s assassination was followed by a series of devastating attacks in Pakistan. Is there not, then, something missed by these repeated attempts to eliminate all signs of “evil” from the world? Walter Davis calls all these efforts violent attempts at catharsis: to overcome the pain and trauma of terrorism, we attempt to kill our way to a new meaning; to kill the guilt and trauma inside ourselves. This paper, through a critical relation to Davis’ text, Death’s Dream Kingdom, and an investigation into the historical relation between state terrorism and non-state terrorism, argues that the bin Laden killing provides a critical opportunity to reformulate our relationship to the trauma of terrorism and begin to think the possibility of a counter-terrorism that does not endlessly recreate the very violence it tries to destroy. The danger in killing flies with a sledgehammer in the context of counter-terrorism is that it reinforces an autoimmune response that locks terrorism and counter-terrorism into a vicious, self-reproducing cycle. Our task, then, is not to end counter-terrorism, but to try to slow it down until we can get it back under control.

The Kiss of Death

A series of news headlines on May 12, 2011 carried essentially the same message: the secret trove of information recovered from Osama bin Laden’s Abottobad hideout revealed that he was obsessed with the United States. A Foreign Policy blog entry sums this up succinctly:

What makes this story and the flood of bin Laden-themed news so strangely comedic is that they reveal how equally obsessed with bin Laden the national security industry, the government, and the American public were and still are. Immediately following bin Laden’s death, a humdrum arose from commentators asking the “tough” questions: now that Osama is dead, isn’t our work in the Middle East and Central Asia finished? Shouldn’t we finally put an end to the war in Afghanistan, which has at last seen the results it lacked for so long? All this suggests the sickening possibility that America invaded two sovereign nations primarily to kill one individual – like an exterminator who fumigates an entire household to remove ants from the pantry. If two “overseas military engagements” and thousands of American and Middle Eastern casualties for the purpose of finding and destroying one man isn’t an “obsession,” what is? Why would bin Laden not have been obsessed with an America that was doing everything in its capacity – and expanding that capacity when it hit a limit – to eliminate him. And yet, as press release after press release indicates, the American public and the media seem repeatedly shocked that Osama was even interested in attacking us. It’s reminiscent of a quote from, of all people, comedian David Cross:

While killing bin Laden could have prodded the United States to “grow up” a little bit, instead the American public seems intent upon celebrating and fetishizing the death in its most minute details: we want to see the house; we want 3D models; we want to see pictures of the body; we want to know about his pornography. This was not limited to a particular socioeconomic or racial group: at Harvard University after bin Laden’s killing, hundreds of the brightest students in America paused their exam preparations to run around, wave flags, and scream savagely “America!” and “We got him!” Even further, the popular video game Counter Strike was updated shortly with a map of Osama bin Laden’s compound: we want to play video games where we can act out the role of the Seals who killed him. Many Americans aren’t satisfied that bin Laden is dead because they missed the chance to do the job themselves. This has played out clearly in the glorification of the Navy Seal unit that got “lucky” enough to do the job. Even the dog that took part in the mission has become a hero:

Western society has made heroes of successful warriors from Ancient Greece through the American Revolution and up to the war in Iraq. The SEAL Team fits squarely within that tradition: just a few Americans of incredible ability who dutifully did exactly what was asked of them. They knew their mission would be dangerous, but they were willing to give themselves up to a higher cause. And because of this, they earn a certain level of narrative honor. Spanos locates the beginning of this tradition in the Aeneid:

But it seems counterintuitive that a culture seeking to bring democratic peace to the world still revels so deeply in the success of violence. There have, of course, been those on both sides of the political spectrum who chide the celebration of bin Laden’s death, but the great psychological satisfaction derived from successful revenge was widely felt. A CNN opinion poll taken immediately after the news broke confirms this: 37% of respondents were “thrilled” at bin Laden’s death, while 42% were just “happy” (CNN). As a younger friend of mine said a few days following: “he was like every American’s psychotic uncle at the family reunion.” This broader cultural response to his death makes one thing painfully clearly: we didn’t kill bin Laden enough. In the face of his demise, the “civilized” American public became a mob like the creatures at “The Dawn of Humanity” in 2001: A Space Odyssey who have just discovered the power of the hand-held weapon: beating their enemy to death and beyond, over and over again, each individual gleefully rejoicing in the opportunity to experience violence for the first time. It’s no longer the death that they’re after, but personal involvement in continuing the violence.

So, in one move the public shows its bloodthirsty face, while in a parallel maneuver it falls back upon the easy and familiar trope of depicting itself as a nation of innocents who were the victims of an omnicidal maniac with inexplicable motives. Obama’s speech on the night of bin Laden’s demise makes that point clear:

This is not to say that those who died on September 11 were guilty and deserving of the fate that would befall them – though it does raise the question of whom Obama considers “guilty” in the United States. Instead, it is to argue that the record of the last decade paints a clear picture, not of inexplicable, one-sided belligerence against the United States by one actor, but of an Ahabian “war” between a country with a violent history and dirty conscience and an omnicidal group whose motives and logic are quite clear. It was, and still is, a “war” or a series of “wars” (if the term applies when the United States has made no actual declaration since World War II) that have caused tremendous economic turmoil and moved America’s focus permanently away from the possibility of a peace dividend. The “war on terror” in all its ambiguity made that dividend unimaginable: terror can never be exterminated, so the war will never end. Funds, then, will always need to be maintained for the near future. In all the recent fiscal debates in Congress, money for various overseas engagements remains sacrosanct and untouched, even as it eats a larger and larger chunk of federal spending. This was made clear at the end of the discussions over what funding should be cut to pave the way for a debt ceiling increase.

The focus on bin Laden, however, has allowed the United States to disavow its role in the violence of the world. First, in a literal way, coverage of bin Laden’s end shifted public attention from the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan to a focus on minor successes and dangers in Pakistan. Second, in a metaphorical sense, it moved the debate over the war on terror away from justifications and towards justice – less a battle between two actors, more the fair-minded police of the world doling out punishment where it is due. The public directly participated in this as members of a jury that could finally rejoice in having done its job properly. The social networking website, Twitter, indicates this perfectly: immense numbers of jubilant tweets from around the United States (and the world) followed the news of bin Laden’s demise. After all, “We got the fucker!” Bin Laden’s death gave the American public another chance to decide in what light it would see itself. Just as the period following 9/11, our decision was to play the part of the unjustly wronged – a role that America plays so well. Time and time again our hand is “forced” into righting the problems of the world – and we blame external entities when we don’t get the results we hoped for. This feeling of wrong arises, precisely, because the United States refuses to understand the possibility of resistance to the world it has attempted to create in its image:

Our response to 9/11 was one of pure outrage – not unjustified: no one should argue that the events of September the 11th were not tragic on a colossal scale – but it was an outrage that rejected self-reflection. It morphed into a monstrous resentment that led America to strike out at the world like an angry child: we don’t mind pushing over chairs in the world’s kitchen when things are not going our way. If we can’t have our toys: no one can. Does such a simplistic analogy make light of the events of 9/11 and absolve murders? In fact, I think quite the opposite: taking September 11 seriously compels us to place a critical lens on the actions of the United States. And not just the United States, but states themselves in all their manifold forms. The focus on the actions of singular individuals like bin Laden (the “terrorists”) plays an important role in forgetting the even more critical role that state agents have played in promoting and using terror around the globe:

State terrorism is, statistically, many times more destructive than the terrorism the general public typically contemplates: asymmetric actors with religious/cultural motives. Why does that matter? Precisely because the focus on bin Laden allowed state terrorism to land on Free Parking while bin Laden went to jail. The anger, outrage, and confusion following 9/11 were corporealized in bin Laden. He became more than a man: he morphed into the metaphorical embodiment of pure, irredeemable evil. To eliminate bin Laden, then, would be to extinguish the world’s quintessential manifestation of evil. This explains the monumental sense of relief following his death: relief at the possibility, albeit utopian, that evil had finally been extinguished. The impossibility of this metaphor, however, becomes equally clear in the indication that the war on terror will continue even without bin Laden. Newscasters and foreign policy analysts pore over the documents and intelligence procured from his compound in Pakistan, pronouncing that Osama was hardly the manager of Al Qaeda that many expected: he was more of an ideas man, while operational control was handled by deputies elsewhere. Is it not the case, then, that bin Laden, far from embodying absolute evil, merely represented, as a stand-in for all the myriad uncertainty and fear of terror, many of the possibilities of terror around the globe?

One thing that becomes increasingly clear from the uncertainty about Osama’s relative weight in Al Qaeda’s operations is that the narratives and stories academics and policymakers tell about terrorism have critical implications for how institutions and individuals respond to real events. Bin Laden, painted as the mastermind of global terrorism became a discursive trope in the discourse of war, justice, and safety in American politics. He was operationalized in election cycles and elsewhere whenever discussions of terrorism occurred; catching bin Laden became the critical indicator progress in the GWOT. “No foreign policy activity can develop in a vacuum,” because they all rely on particular discourses that both provide justification for and help frame the issues for “domestic and international audiences. What is more important than the discourse in which the foreign policy choice is implanted, are the discursive strategies used to formulate this discourse” (Yanik 2009). With regards to terrorism, Joseba Zulaika argues that the industry created around forecasting future terrorist events in many cases converts predictions of terror into self-fulfilling prophecy:

Timothy McVeigh’s plot was largely a result of media discourse on terrorism; the same could be said of Sheikh Omar. Did America ask for it? Not by intent, but the power of the terror discourse in creating the conditions for terrorism makes clear the importance of criticizing those narratives, and demanding from them a self-reflectiveness that has been remarkably absent from the post-Osama media coverage. As the narrative of Osama’s life, importance, and now death have been brought so forcefully and importantly into the public sphere, does the glorification narrative told of his death not play back into the very problems it sought to solve?

Invisible Violence and Becoming-Terrorist

After bin Laden’s death, terror warnings were raised for United States citizens around the globe. Almost everyone has long-since ceased to care about the color levels, but we were certainly in a red zone – the meaning of which has long since lost any impact on day-to-day activities. The logic behind the warnings is simple: we killed bin Laden, so his followers will be looking for revenge. What seems so peculiar is that these news alerts are a shockingly clear-headed acceptance on the part of the United States government of how our violent actions spawn more of the very violence they attempt to remedy. Borges’ mirror allegory, relayed by Baudrillard, is an important one because it acknowledges the ways in which actors in conflict “reflect” the actions of their others: it could be said clearly that both state and non-state terrorism often operate on a tit-for-tat basis. Terrorist attacks are usually done for impact, yes, but also in response to a perceived wrong. The Baader-Meinhof cell was predominately concerned with the American war in Vietnam, bin Laden with US military action in the Middle East and support for Israel, Al Qaeda Iraq for the violence done during the Second Iraq War – the examples could go on. Yet as interest in bin Laden’s death fades slowly away, as it undoubtedly will, so too will our reflectiveness on the impact of American violence on the world. It will become just another background to our “normal lives” – an epistemic wallpaper of sorts. After all: the war on terror – which is now taboo to refer to in those terms – will go on, with or without Osama. And this lack of reflectiveness has dramatic impacts that should not go unconsidered:

These “casualties” are meant to be nothing more than necessary accidents: yet it is precisely the “necessary accidents” of a history of state terrorism that need to be interrogated most forcefully. For Paul Virilio, these accidents, magnified on a globalized scale, have become defining features of the 21^st century experience: “There is an increasingly present cumulative reality related to a sudden globalization in which accidents and terrorist attacks have merged to become an anonymous undeclared war” (Virilio 2002). Counter-terrorism is, as even its clearest supporters will admit, an imperfect science: “We see these cycles renewed with every Predator drone that takes out the wrong target, with every wrong door that gets broken down in pursuit of the ‘bad guys.’ When war becomes the first rather than the last means to achieve security in the new global disorder, what one technologically can do begins to dominate what one legally, ethically, and pragmatically should do” (Der Derian 2010). When we become complacent and forgetful of the violence wrought by state terrorism alongside non-state terrorism, we elide over these “accidents.” And while it is undoubtedly important to not lose track of the macro-level violence – in critical theory as well as policy analysis, fields that share much more in common than is often thought – instances of micro-level violence that are easily lost and ignored are critically important. Not only because we lose track of the role that states play in clear instances of state terrorism – Dresden, Hiroshima, Cambodia, etc. – but because we also begin to ignore state terrorism with vaguer origins and intentions. We run the risk of theorizing our situation as one in which “normality is reduced to a harmonic stasis, continuously interrupted by sudden outbursts of inexplicable violence” (Policante 2010). Žižek made this argument forcefully in Violence:

While the clear forms of violence – subjective violence done by an identifiable actor – are often most noticeable, it is frequently those more insidious and more invisible forms of violence – objective violence – that cause the most suffering:

To bring the spotlight of analysis back to the state and its relation to terror is to firmly state that these instances of violence – with culprits both identifiable and not – all too often have origins in the state.

The immediate response of many commentators, particularly on the right but also the left, to the arguments that the United States is bringing violence alongside its supposed “democratic ideals” is that our mission is a civilizing one: democracy does not come easy, but it is a gift that will ensure peace for centuries. A great deal of historical evidence about the viability of the democratic peace theory indicates that it does not usher in peace wherever it appears. Peace theory has difficulty explaining numerous violent conflicts between democracies: the Spanish-American War, Continuation War, Paquisha War, French-Thai War, Finnish-UK War, and the Kargil War are just a few (Nisley 2008). The fact that there is no time span or data sample for democratic peace theory amplifies the lack of verifiability behind it. Far from establishing non-violence, it often increases the likelihood of conflict, especially in transition:

Yet commentators remain tied to the idea that wherever American democracy raises its head, peace and stability ensues. Why? There is a tendency to assume that the American experience is universally applicable and the same as the experience of other states and individuals. As this paper has argued, there is a parallel national tendency (bordering on an obsession) to employ violently cathartic responses to trouble. Again and again, the government, with the people’s backing, seeks violent revenge for trauma, partly under the general idea that it is American interests and actions that are the primary drivers of international events:

With Osama’s killing, the Obama administration risks giving him exactly what he and the terrorists of the world wanted: the violence that drives their terroristic responses ever farther. A related issue seems to be the question of whether anyone in the United States government truly expected or planned to capture bin Laden. The evidence points to the contrary: that the highest-skilled military unit in the United States military could not safely apprehend an old man who was unarmed seems dubious at best. So it was most likely a targeted killing – fitting in squarely to the US counter-terror rubric of killing our way to meaning. But do we really expect to scare the terrorists into submission? In a contest of terror, the liberal, democratic system seems, at least hopefully, handcuffed and permanently one step behind.

Obama has admitted that the war on terror is far from over. How could it ever end? At what benchmark could victory finally be declared? For a while it seemed that capturing bin Laden was that benchmark, but we’re now past it with no signs of slowing. It seems quite the opposite: we’ve only sped up. Will we begin to slow down when violence has disappeared? A laudable goal, perhaps, but unlikely. Where will the “Mission Accomplished” banners for the Global War on Terror fly from? The failure of violence in bringing about the stability and end the United States so desperately craves calls into question the strategies that were employed to bring bin Laden to justice. This is where Critical Terror Studies stages its most crucial intervention: conventional Terrorism Studies have, for a long time, merely acted as institutional and intellectual support for the policies of the status quo:

Yet again and again, failure after failure, we continue to believe that more violence will end terror. It would be a mistake to act as if the United States has not repeatedly made benchmarks in the war on terror: jubilant news stories greeted the success of drone attacks in killing Al Qaeda deputies, zealous senators shout about the success of our overseas torture facilities in helping to pull out critical secrets; and now, to top them all off, Osama bin Laden is dead. Yet as we pass each landmark in the war against terror, what and who we are fighting gets fuzzier.. New cells emerge out of the sands of war – very literally in the case of Iraq – and new enemies rise up against America’s overstretch of global law – in the form of rival states and actors. Perhaps, then, Gandhi’s message is pertinent here: “I object to violence because when it appears to do good, the good is only temporary; the evil it does is permanent.” Perhaps a critical approach to terrorism must found itself in an objection to the immediate violence of counter-terrorism. Violence of even the best intentions has the tendency of begetting more violence, and often in terrifyingly escalatory ways. The American violence of the War on Terror is not, however, violence without intention: that intention is clear enough. The United States seeks to root out terrorism wherever its nasty head appears: to kill our way towards a meaning that we so often feel we’ve lost (Vietnam Syndrome, Gulf War Syndrome, etc.).

In the same way that the War on Terrorism contains a strongly symbolic component, its killing is not directed at a present terrorism of identifiable actors: 9/11 made clear that to be prepared for terrorism meant to eliminate terrorism before it could exist. The population at large became potentially guilty: of harboring terroristic intentions, terrorists, or just conspicuous use of cell phones. And thus, if whole swaths of the population are all at risk of becoming-terrorist, the goal of successful counter-terrorism is to ensure that domestic actors don’t become real terrorists, a focus that has become ever more prevalent since 9/11. Given the difficulty in pinpointing the threat – what it looks like, where it might appear – we have all in a very real sense become potential terrorists. The task of the State is not to stop the already existing terrorist forces from acting, but to stop the not-yet-present terrorist inside all of us from surfacing (Vaughan-Williams 2009: 120). Derrida calls the problem of terrorism and the responses to it one of autoimmunity:

Indeed, in our obsessive attempts to eliminate the “evil” in the world – first the Soviets, which caused us to arm and train bin Laden and his followers, and later the terrorists, the unintended results of which we are yet to discover – we have laid the foundations for a globalized becoming-terrorist in places beyond our expectations. A becoming-terrorist of not just the “Islamic extremists” but all those whose lives have been hopelessly, perhaps needlessly, perturbed and ruined because of post-9/11 American interventionism. Our frenzied autoimmune response to terrorism has locked the United States into an endless succession of terroristic violence.

State Terrorism Assemblages

Instead of this attempt to fill the voids of meaning with violence, 9/11 might have provided us an opportunity to reflect upon this history of United States conflict. It would be short-sighted to ignore a historical record of mistakes (like the coup d’état in Iran in the 1950s that set the stages for the fundamentalist government that we now see as the greatest threat to stability in the Middle East). Walter Davis writes in his book Death’s Dream Kingdom that:

That there were pre-Hiroshima acts of state terrorism seems clear enough: one immediately thinks of the Holocaust, the fire bombings of Tokyo, and bombing of Dresden. Thus Davis’s move to locate a broader societal psychology inside the effects of Hiroshima seems overly simplistic. For state terrorism is clearly not a monolith – it is instead the creation of many distinct and connected instances of state violence, large and small, widespread and highly localized. It is co-constitutive of, and developed on a roughly parallel track with, the anti-state violence that has assumed the mantle of “Terrorism” in contemporary discourse. Thus, Davis’ unicausal and historicized understanding of the trauma of state terrorism runs a risk of over-determining the historicity of terrorism itself. Unlike Davis, I want to locate this inescapable trauma not in a single historical event, but in the multiplicity of violence created by the United States around the globe and across history. Instead of following Davis in pinpointing a single historical situation, I want to begin to understand the trauma of Hiroshima, symbolic of, but inseparable from, the trauma of state terrorism, as a series of strains and links, each adding onto a larger body. To theorize state terrorism in this way leads us away from seeing it as a product of a specific time or place, but as a body, cancerous in many ways, spreading its tendrils and infecting the various apparatuses of government and society. State terrorism is an assemblage in the Deleuzian sense – it is composed precisely of “states of things, bodies, various combinations of bodies, hodgepodges; but you also find utterances, modes of expression, and whole regimes of signs” (Deleuze). Trying to locate the “origins” of a traumatic relation to state terrorism may be an error.  To see state terrorism as an assemblage is to see it as an interrelation of bodies and actions, of enunciations, and crucially of terroritorializations and deterritorializations. Adrian Parr locates a critique of Davis in precisely this Deleuzian vain:

To theorize state terrorism and its traumatic attachments and affects as an assemblage, then, allows us to decouple state terrorism from the distinctly historical and subjective relations that Davis sees, and to expose ourselves to a wider appreciation of the affectual relations created by this trauma, as well as the series of bodies and territorializations/deterritorializations that are constitutive of state terrorism. This was already Deleuze’s critical task in A Thousand Plateaus. The power of the notion of assemblages is to move questions away from the behavior of individual subjects to the connective tissues that underwrite these behaviors: to ask what it is that makes heterogeneous elements stick.

I do not want to reject Davis completely, however. What he indicates so clearly is our fundamental role in the creation and continuation of terror on a global scale, and the American ability to repeatedly forget. Bush was clearest on his feelings about history: who needs it? The wars that followed 9/11 were, in many ways, attempts to evacuate the guilt for our history of violence – perhaps most clearly exemplified in the horrors of Hiroshima – but also in a laundry list of overseas contingency operations and military conflicts, in the genocide against the Native American peoples, in our own bloody civil wars. Again and again, American foreign policy finds its “wars on terror” that are said to hold out the possibility of resolving the unspoken anxiety about our past, present, and future. But that anxiety – always-already growing larger, making further connections, spreading – cannot be resolved so easily, and certainly not through violence. For Puar, “after considering the connection between trauma and remembrance it becomes apparent that it is not so much a matter of deciding upon whether or not one memory is more accurate than another; rather we need to begin to address the authenticity conditioning the truth of memory and it is this authenticity wherein lies the utopian force of traumatic memory” (Parr 2008). Contra Davis, the focus on memory in particular historical moments creates a memory fanaticism of sorts:

It is this fantasy of images and memory that Terrorism Studies in particular is guilty of: “The problem … is the deterritorializing force of the raw material of memory that is turned into common property through the endless repetition of the same images and memory connections…. When trauma in all its concrete actuality is unavailable the drives find investment in the image, producing images of gratification” (Parr 2008). As Jackson makes so clear, it endlessly repeats and re-uses justifications so that they form a self-propelling machine of thought. The images of glorification – Bush on the carrier, “Mission Accomplished” – have a particularly privileged role in the way the media and public relate to terrorism and counter-terrorism. So perhaps, as James Der Derian makes clear, September 11 was “not so much the cause as the occasion for a transformation that had its beginnings much earlier in the art of warfare, the politics of identity, and the information revolution” (Der Derian 2010). If we are to engage state terrorism as an assemblage, not localizable to particular historical moments, but instead made up of connections, affects, bodies, and enunciations, it’s clear that “overcoming” that trauma is not possible and that attempting to kill our way towards meaning beyond that trauma is futile. The adventurist wars in Iraq and Afghanistan made evident that an external quest to eliminate terrorism would serve only to overstretch capacity, not to eliminate every possible instantiation of it. I caution against viewing the relationship of the United States to terrorism in what might be the predominant, postmodern straw man lens of “the American West is the cause of all violence in the world.” That viewpoint is naïve and ignores the role that individuals play and the ways singular decisions can have snowballing impacts on global events. It mirrors, in many ways, the neoconservative view of American hegemony – the two positions differ only in their perspective on the positivity of the results. But it is even more naïve to expect that the continued violence by our counter-terrorism forces across the globe, by our secret detention and torture facilities, and by neoliberal economic policies that target the poor will ever create a meaningful peace. It is autoimmunity that makes the body most vulnerable.

“We Got the Fucker!”

On the eve of the Gulf War, French theorist Jean Baudrillard wrote that the Gulf War would not happen. Baudrillard was mocked for his predictions about First Gulf War when it became obvious that there was in fact a ground invasion happening in the deserts of Kuwait and Iraq. Yet even after the war, Baudrillard stuck to his story: the Gulf War did not happen. Commentators on both sides of the spectrum ridiculed the philosopher for what they saw as a denial of reality — of course the Gulf War happened: tanks were on the ground, planes flew across the sky, and soldiers stomped through the desert. Critics immediately jumped onto Baudrillard’s vocabulary to prove that he had become lost in a world of images; that his concept of the simulacra had caused him to refuse reality entirely. Yet that response fails to give Baudrillard the credit he deserves as a theorist:

For Baudrillard did not reject the reality of the conflict: the Gulf War did happen physically. But was it a war? No. It was a massacre in the desert that attempted to create meaning for American foreign policy; to give it a new goal; to provide an escape from the desert of meaning inside ourselves. It attempted all of those things and succeeded at none. Yet this search for meaning is one that still continues today: it continues in the image of the global war on terrorism, in the wars fought in Iraq and Afghanistan, and elsewhere in events large and small across the globe. This is, precisely, the lesson one should gain from Baudrillard’s criticism of the Gulf War:

Contemporary war and intervention are both driven, and simultaneously undermined, by a narcissistic search for meaning and purpose. From the 1991 Gulf War, through the pursuit of armed humanitarianism in the Balkans and elsewhere, to the latest ‘non-events’ of the war on terror, the Western military has been sent into action against fake enemies whose defeat, it was hoped, could prove that the West must be engaged in a meaningful and important mission. Ultimately, as suggested above, these attempts have been unsuccessful: even their supporters have been unable to convince themselves that such wars are fully ‘real’. Instead what is revealed is the West’s own internal conflict, sense of vulnerability and self-doubt. (Hammond 2008)

We are at war: that much may be acknowledged. But what if so much of the time the enemy that we are really fighting is ourselves? The state terrorism assemblage that haunts the War on Terrorism will not be so easily forgotten, nor will violence ever excuse the lives lost from state terrorism or counter-terrorism. When Terrorism Studies, the media, and the government play with the fantasy of 9/11 – repeating its images, reinforcing its lessons, insisting upon violence as the necessary response – we become locked onto the path of continued violence and we forget about the trauma of state terrorism.

How do we respond to bin Laden’s death? That question, I think, prefigures that there is a “correct” answer. Bin Laden is dead, and even Al Qaeda has been forced to admit it. But will his death usher in peace? No. The outlook for the future looks as bleak as before, even if we have been able to rid ourselves of one of the great symbolic figures of evil of the 21st century. A Baudrillard interview shortly before his death is once again relevant:

Killing Osama may have eliminated one of the prime physical manifestations of terror, but it could not resolve the symbolic aspect of terrorism in its multi-dimensionality – in many ways, it could not kill, and seriously underestimated the power of, the state terrorism assemblage. In a discussion with British Prime Minister, Tony Blair, the comedian Jon Stewart makes a very similar point:

Are we condemned to living with violence? If human history is any indication, the answer is, in some sense, yes: terrorism qua resistance to power will never be entirely eliminated. It is a natural response to predominance that has appeared again and again throughout history. However, we can change the ways we respond to terrorism so as to mitigate the impact and possibility. That process begins in taking responsibility for the violence of state terrorism, in beginning to trace a disparate series of affective connections between the many historical and social occurrences of terrorism: in short, it requires slowing down counter-terrorism. Slowing down counter-terrorism not in the sense of some technical manipulation of strategy and technology, but instead in evaluating alternate possibilities for counter-terrorism. Not letting “soft power” do the work that “hard power” is currently doing – but in many ways critically embracing the traumatic history of state terrorism. To insist upon continuing on a path of violence will never take us where we want to go. Yes, “We killed the fucker!” but along the way we’ve killed thousands of “innocents” just like those who died on 9/11.   How many deaths will it take till we know that too many people have died? Meanwhile, the state terrorism assemblage keeps growing.

Anyone got any more?

My friend and I turned to each other at this moment and mouthed “Object-Oriented Ontology” which says an enormous amount about why we were seeing Harry Potter in 3D on a Tuesday night in the middle of summer, he for the second time, me for the first.

It’s an interesting example of the way in which very simple notions in Object-Oriented philosophy have clear “real world” examples. In a discussion on how to explain the essential tenets of the philosophy to the lay person, one commenter noted that many of the notions are easily confused with conventional folk logic, Levi Bryant notes that — “Of course objects have real effects on us…” Harry Potter is an example sometimes given as an example of a fictional “object” with real (a)ffects. It’s a funny coincidence then that inside the world of Harry Potter we see a nice example of the agency of objects in a way not entirely inconsistent, I think, with many main OOO thinkers. It’s not that wands actually think of their own accord and pick the user (though maybe this is hinted at more strongly in the Potter series than I care to admit) but that instead the wands have very real causal effects on users up to the point of affecting individuals differently. The other perhaps interesting insight about wands is that their agency cannot be reduced to human understanding:

This was more of a nerd-out moment than anything, but it was an interesting thought.

I thought for a long time about important life lessons that I could impart to everyone in the ridiculously minute time allotted for this speech. My time is probably already up, but since this is my last shot at really getting bang for my tuition money’s buck, I plan on going a little over.

One of my classmates asked me earlier in the year: “Why don’t you do more Pembroke stuff?” […] When I think about it, I don’t always consider what an incredibly eclectic group of people are around me, I think about me. Because life is a myriad of little experiences, all about me. And in my own little microcosm, I have the freedom to be incredibly self-involved. Here’s an example: I love spaghetti day. And when I go to lunch, it’s easy to shout “Oh hey Andy, I have a question for you” and cut the entire line. Or, I can think about the quiet girl in front, who might even be hungrier than I am because she skipped breakfast this morning to help her sick little brother. A lot of the freedom people think about when they think of senior year is the freedom to party, to choose a college, to spend more time helping the community, and the freedom to skip classes and homework. And I have done all of those things, much too liberally to admit in front of so many people who hold the power to “ground me for the weekend.” But as David Foster Wallace said, “The really important kind of freedom involves attention, … and discipline, … and being able truly to care about other people and to sacrifice for them, over and over, in [a] myriad [of] … little[,] unsexy ways, every day.”

See, for the longest time, Pembroke identities have been figured out in my head and in everyone else’s: Andy has been the leader; Tiffani, the star athlete; Isaac, the one guy who knows how to knit; Kate, the fashion designer; and I’ve been the “semi-funny, partially enigmatic writer guy,” which presumably explains why I’m in front of everyone today. We have all had the freedom to accept the easiest answers about our identities.

But this year, I started to look around my class. There wasn’t some instantaneous revelation — it took me a while to understand what I was noticing. It was when, after a long night of festivities, I looked up into the deep purple sky above the Stuckmeyer ranch, that I realized that all those stereotypes don’t mean much of anything. Carlton may not win as many Grammys as his beloved Alicia Keys, but he might end up a music teacher in a small, suburban high school, cursing the loud kids who come late to his class holding cookies (Am I right, Mr. Burke?).

Stereotypes are nothing but habit. Walter Pater said that, “It might even be … that our failure is to form habits: for… habit is relative to a stereotyped world, and … it is only the roughness of the eye that makes any two persons, things, situations, seem alike.” I failed, because I relied for far too long on the easy stereotypes at the risk of getting to know the people I’ve been sitting next to in math class for all of my life. And I think other people have too. When my inquisitive classmate asked why I didn’t do more Pembroke stuff, I wasn’t really “too cool” for it, I was just too scared to look past surface appearances and seek out those beautiful hopes and dreams we all keep locked up inside like a child’s diary. It’s natural to assume that your own problems are singular. But the truth is that everyone is sad about leaving their friends, their families, and their homes behind, and anxious about nearly every aspect of the future.

I wanted to try something really quickly with everyone, please stay standing. Stand up if you are a student athlete. Stand up if you skipped every Pembroke dance you could. Stand up if you were a member of student government. Stand up if you are the first person in your immediate family to attend college. Stand up if you’re a visual artist. Stand up if you are a musician, a singer, or a Thespian. Stand up if you volunteered in your community outside the required events. Finally, stand up if you are terrified of college. For all the stereotypes at the end of the day, we have a tremendous amount in common. We all came to Pembroke for an enriching education in a cozy classroom setting, a diverse and challenging student body, and incredible campus, faculty, and staff… and now, here we are, we made it, and we’re all immeasurably better for it.

And the talent we all have won’t be changed all that significantly by where we go to school. Some of us got into all the colleges we applied to; some of us got into almost none of them. But every college that graduates a Pembroke Hill student will be a fortunate place, and each of us will reminisce that it was the best place in the world. Because it will be. College will help us dive into subjects we’re really passionate about. Someone might even make the same mistake Mr. Griffiths did, and become a math teacher. But reading Cornell West taught me an important lesson: life doesn’t just start with learning that ends after college or graduate school. Life IS learning. And just like Plato said, the unexamined life is not worth living. Quoting a frequently cited ancient philosopher isn’t the end of my speech, I promise. What Plato didn’t clearly explicate, but my much wiser classmates inadvertently did, is that purely conquering knowledge is only one of the ways of examining life. Racing for money will only leave us lonely and over-consumed. Racing for knowledge alone will only remind us how dumb we really are. Perfect grades are invaluable in life, but so are perfect friendships, relationships, camp-outs, pranks, Saturday Hi-Hat gatherings, art shows, and more.

For way too long, I focused on the pure learning one at the expense of relationships, and I wasted a tremendous amount of time. I won’t remember the “F” I got on a math test freshman year, even if my mom will. I will, however, remember Dr. Graves constantly blaming Neal for the spelling errors on his TRTs, [accent] Mr. Beeler’s relaxation techniques, and Ms. Jones threatening to break my neck if I dared pretend I was Olympic curling her to assembly. It’s the memories we have and everyone that we go out of our way to help in big or small ways that will make all the difference, the moments when the person across from us acknowledges what we just did for them. When Pedro, at Gordon Parks, told Lewis and me that debate class on Tuesdays was the single event of the whole week that he looked forward to most. Those moments truly give life meaning.

What this year has really been about is cementing those relationships. It won’t work perfectly, because we each also have the freedom to never see this class again. But I figured out that throwing away so much work is the most foolish thing you could ever do. First, because I’m bad at making friends. Second, because it will be hard to ever make better ones. Watching everyone around me change since I arrived in Kindergarden has been incredible. When I first met Adam Mendehlson, he loved NASCAR more than Jimmy Stewart. If you don’t get that joke, it’s because Jimmy Stewart is a famous NASCAR driver and I still can’t figure out who watches NASCAR. Now, he’s an engineering genius and he’s moved on to bigger (and faster) things: jet planes. When I first met Erica, she was a middle school sports phenom. Now she’s a rising photographer in the art world. When I first met Cole, he had shoulder-length hair, pretended he was a skateboarder, and gave Mr. Dekker’s patience a run for its money, every day. Now, he’s certainly slightly better groomed and wants to major in physics. When I first met Elizabeth, she had baked over 100 cupcakes for the class for her presidential campaign. Since then, she has traveled the United States, the world, and has made the bandana into a fashion icon. She has been the glue that holds this class together: not just with her delicious baked goods, but her limitless spirit. These are friends it will be impossible to top, and I expect every one of us to stay in touch. Why? Because we can, and we should.

Sometimes I lie awake at night atop my comfortable, green plaid flannel sheets and I wish that I could stop the relentless forward movement of time. Everyone has those moments: regrets about tests not studied for, girls not asked to a dance, boys not invited to a party, games of frisbee skipped, books not read, movies not seen, steps not taken. But no matter how many times I’ve sat there, I haven’t been able to stop the second hand from lapping back to 12. Regrets don’t just disappear either. Our true freedom comes when we stop regretting and start acting; when we quit drawing artificial differentiations between each other and remember the time we slept inside the school and held hands under sleeping bags. Just because we could.

Here are two unrelated facts: When Raphael was 18, he painted the Baronci altarpiece; when Alexander the Great was 16, he fought back the Maedi resistance. Those are depressing statistics for someone who had trouble forcing himself to memorize 75 words for one of Ms. Lacy’s vocab quizzes. I’ve been chasing those kind of accomplishments like mad for all four years of high school, and I haven’t gotten close. But I also don’t have to, yet.
You get to these landmark times in your life, like high school graduation or college graduation, or your first real job that make you stop thinking purely about what your plans are for tomorrow, and start planning for all the tomorrows that will follow. It’s these moments that make you stop texting your friends for just a few seconds, put down your phone, and think. Every single one of us is at one of these landmark moments. In the Savage Detectives, Roberto Bolano wrote that “[we] walked backward . . . gazing at a point in the distance, but moving away from it, walking straight toward the unknown.” That’s what we’re all doing: we don’t know where we’re going, but we’re absolutely thrilled about it. Some people have it all planned out: attend a top-notch college, get a perfect score on the MCAT, rock their residency and start doctoring. Now, partly because jobs like Alexander the Great’s don’t quite exist anymore, some people, like me, don’t have the slightest clue. Even the future doctors can’t quite anticipate that required studio art course that will thrust them in a completely new and thrilling direction. Even as we take yet another step into the unknown, one response we can all throw out is that, whatever we do, we expect to do it with some of our oldest and best friends. Life is beautiful and fragile. While it lasts, the single most important thing is to enjoy every second of the journey itself.

Success is one of the most subjective words ever. With that in mind, I wish the class of 2010 the greatest success in the world. More importantly, I wish us all success in carrying out a little of what I talked about here at the party closest to the end of this ceremony. And, regardless of whether a student at Pembroke paints the next Baronci altarpiece, I wish everyone happiness. And no matter how steep things get, we will all have the freedom to keep sacrificing for, and reaching out to, one another, and I expect everyone to do just that.

Ge-Ge-Ge-Genealogy Time

The term capstone has a few possible derivations. Wikipedia suggests it might derive from architecture, but that’s nonsense. We’re talking about learning; not building buildings! The only other reasonable possibilities are cryptography and a medium-sized investment firm from Boston. Let’s light up our pipes, put on our plaid hats, and begin the investigation. Capstone is the “name of the government project” to develop advanced forms of cryptography that meet modern standards for safety in government and public use. This makes sense, because the reasoning for the existence and the guidelines for the capstone projects are cryptic. Example: one acceptable Capstone is to write a paper as well as extensive examination of a late 19^th century Austrian painter. Another acceptable Capstone is to write short stories modeled after a short story writer. Another Capstone is to paint paintings. If you don’t see a trend there besides my limited knowledge of what people are actually doing their capstones on (it would’ve been much more diverse, I promise, but I could only do so much research the night before articles were due), it’s because a capstone project can be anything — as long as you can pretend convincingly enough that it will be difficult! The key to the capstone journey isn’t actually picking the most interesting topic. Instead, a recent public opinion poll (New York Times/CBS) indicated that 105% of kids picked a topic based on its insane specificity and the arcane knowledge base required for understanding it. Diverse options for incredible visuals are always a plus, because everyone knows it’s easier to present about photography than Leo Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina. But at the end of the day, cryptography doesn’t make any sense either. So it must be the investment firm! Capstone Partners is “independent middle market investment bank, formerly the Boston branch for Arthur Andersen Corporate Finance’s M&A group.” What are capstone projects really about if not investing in OURSELVES!!! YAY SHALLOW, SAPPY METAPHOR! Now that we’ve figured out where the word comes from, how is MY capstone project coming?

AWESOME.

In fact, I’m reporting on the road to creating the greatest Capstone presentation ever. But instead of telling you anything about it, I created a list of the things that would be necessary to top my presentation/paper.

1. Laser-light show that includes more colors than green. I couldn’t find red or yellow or blue or anything, so people who can top that will win automatically.

2. Farm animals other than goats – Once again, acquisition accessibility was tough the bigger ones so you’re going to have to go out and lasso some steers and swine if you’re going to top this one.

3. Guest speakers who didn’t play on the ’97 Chicago Bulls – I’ve got this one covered. You would not believe how much Scottie Pippen knows about advanced quantum theory.

4. Environment-Shifting Machine – This would instantly be the coolest device ever created. Get working right now because you’ll need a lot of time to figure this one out, simultaneously doing it faster than the US military can find you to steal it.

I know that you’re sitting/standing/lying down reading this article after you flipped to what I wrote first (or second, maybe you flipped to another article I wrote first), still suffering from the sadness of a Brad-less last issue, and you’re thinking “what on earth is Brad’s project about?” But that is a question for another day. That “another day” being the day you sign up to watch my presentation. Until then, this is Brad Bolman reporting in from Pembroke Hill. Over and out.