A meeting with my supervisor

I just met with my honours supervisor. Here's what I took from the meeting.

My thesis is on track but for me to do well - first class honours - I need to write with a wider audience in mind. At the moment my thesis reads as though I'm writing to myself which is precisely the case. I'm learning new theories and concepts and writing about them for the first time so my writing is a bit tentative. By writing to myself I avoid a conversation that might expose my theoretical soft underbelly and make me look silly or incompetent. I write the "how" quite well (the how I'm going to create an argument) but I don't write the "what" strongly enough. By staking a claim or argument I expose myself to critique that I think I fear. Maybe I'm just being arrogant and not speaking my mind. I'll be more mindful about the "what".

Connected with the "what", my super wants me to explain much more clearly the connection between Foucault's theories and Heather Armstrong's blog. At the moment the theoretical part of my thesis works well but it sounds like a Foucault love-in. I'm writing the theory, then picking a piece of Armstrong's blog and saying "see, Foucault was right"; and I could do that with almost any blog. I now need to be much clearer about why I've chosen Armstrong's blog and state what Foucault's theories (those I've included in the thesis) help me to say about Armstrong's blog.

I'll need to pare some of both the chapters back to make room for the intro and the conclusion. Once I start the analysis of the blog itself I'll get a better picture of which parts of the theory I can remove/edit. I'll need to write up to 12 000 - 13 000 words in the body leaving 3000 - 4000 for the intro and conclusion. Will need at least 1500 words in the intro to make it work properly.

The introduction and conclusion will be the keys to ensuring the thesis isn't a note-to-self. One way to achieve this is to introduce Armstrong's blog as having significance through the fact of her dismissal. Although her dismissal raises a variety of questions about fairness, ethics, and human rights, the answers to these questions are already and always confined to that which is available from within the discursive containers in which the questions are first posed. The rights and wrongs of unfair dismissal cases continue to be debated within legal and commercial frameworks and, therefore, to analyse Armstrong's dismissal from within these discourses would be simply to add something minor and incremental to the debate. What distinguishes Armstrong's dismissal from many others is that she was fired as a result of the contents of her blog. Her blog became the catalyst for her dismissal.

Based on the theories of Michel Foucault, my thesis, then, will be an attempt to develop an insight into the workings of power and subjectivity through which Armstrong's blog became pivotal to her dismissal.

The debate and commentary about Armstrong's dismissal is largely premised on an uncritical assumption of Armstrong as a rational, thinking individual, subject to power that acts on her by way of rules and behavioural proscriptions. From this premise her blog becomes an object that is separate and external to Armstrong's self. Through the critical application of Foucault's theories, then, I will propose an alternative view that posits Armstrong as simultaneously inhabiting a variety of flexible, fluid, and negotiable subject positions, some of which she performed in a very public in, on, and as her blog. I will further propose that these subject positions provided Armstrong with a variety of subject forms with which to articulate an intelligible and coherent self and as a means for resistance to a more generalised regime of individualising and normalising power. Viewed in this manner, the dismissal of Heather Armstrong through her blogging, poses questions about how, especially in capitalist societies, power works productively both to create and shape individuals as subjects.

12 000 words

I've cracked the 12 000 word barrier. Although that's not quite accurate count as the count includes references and block quotes it's still a milestone. If I wanted to hand my thesis in now I could. I just wouldn't get a flash mark.

Onward and sideways.

Censorship as a strategy of church power

Armstrong outlines one of the primary reasons for her leaving the church: the belief that she was not permitted to speak up against church doctrine. A strategy of censorship is one that supports the power of the church by silencing dissent and dulling resistance efforts.

Here's part of the text of this post:

And so, I guess to be honest and maybe as an attempt to continue healing, I'll tell you that this issue is one of the reasons why I left the Mormon Church. And although it may seem like an issue specific to just Utah culture, you have to understand that for a Mormon it's very hard to disagree with any Mormon doctrine or practice and still maintain good standing in the church. And I don't know if you can tell or not, but I have a hard time agreeing with anything.

Armstrong's strategy then was to leave the church in order to express her freedom and the recalcitrance of her will. Her strategy to continue to speak against the church provokes a dialectic that is productive of that which she is resisting. In the same way that church sponsored censorship contains within it its opposite so Armstrong's espousal of free speech contains within it a constraint and a censorship of the church.

Limits and swearing

Armstrong describes the first time she uses the word "fuck".

On March 12, 1997, ten minutes after opening a rejection letter from the admissions of one of BYU's graduate programs, I stood up next to the open window of my bedroom and shouted, "FUCK!" for the first and most precious time of my life. It was a euphoric rebirth, a ceremonial exit from the womb and refutation of everything that had tethered me to what I now regard as mythical nonsense.

It's worth noting the language about rebirth and the untethering of the self from the power operating within the church.

Sex and repression on dooce

Here's a fascinating entry relating to Armstrong's account of her first kiss. It combines a number of elements anticipated in Foucault. First, the post contains a quote from a letter Armstrong sent to a friend. Foucault would probably read this as a hupomnema or perhaps more accurately as correspondence. Letter writing is an important technology of the self in Foucault's technologies of the self. Second, the account documents a limit moment where Armstrong's bodily experience lead to the creation of new limits. She uses this experience as a source of reflection on her various relationships with power. Finally, she refers to her conscience at play as a result of the experience, a move anticipated in Foucault's understanding of power and subjectivity.

Here is a quote from the post:

David kissed me in I guess what he would consider sensual fury, what I
would consider beastly uncoordination. At about midnight I pulled out of his
driveway never to see him again, well, never to see him for a long, long time. I
was really messed up from the experience even though all we did was smooch. In
the eyes of the Church, I thought, I must be a heathen, a stiffnecked wayward, a
virtual Lamanite. For about three months I lingered on the brink of
self-destruction. David was gone forever far far away in a land called Caltech.
My innocence was gone forever far far away with Nirvana as my only
witness.

And then Armstrong reflects on her subjectivity at the time:

And then I remembered just how distraught I was at that first kiss, how I seriously thought I was going to hell because my tongue had entered another human being's mouth for purposes other than life support. And I so totally and completely don't want my daughter to ever have to go through that sort of self-loathing.


So I'm going to keep this letter -- a single-spaced account of my whole sexual non-history from ages 14-18 that is written in one whole paragraph and stretches over seven pages -- and hope that when the time comes I'll be able to teach my daughter about making healthy personal decisions about sex and about relationships, and about never using the word "uncoordination" because it DOESN'T EXIST.

Top 20 cars by green house gas emmissions

Top 20 cars from Green Car Guide from Federal Government website

Vegetarian IPCC Chairman Rajendra Pachauri Says Less Meat Will Slow Global Warming More

"Dr. Rajendra Pachauri, Chair of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (The IPCC and Al Gore were joint winners of the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize) is calling on individuals to cut their carbon footprints by transforming their diets at a lecture hosted by Compassion in World Farming lecture in London tomorrow (Monday 8 September 2008)."


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