If you can't taser students, who can you taser?

I wish I could taser my students. I would zap them every time they used the words "opinion," "stereotype," and "feel." Then I'd give them an essay exam and hope to get something out of them, some kind of rage or conviction. Maybe some would be outraged enough to have me fired or arrested. Anyone who said I was just expressing my opinion I'd taser two or three more times.

The most striking aspect of the tasering affair isn't whether the kid, Andrew Meyer, tried to set the whole thing up or planned to create an incident that could be videoed. Rather, it's the reaction of the audience. Many applaud as the cops drag him off. As Meyer tried to speak, the audience responded to him as to an obnoxious heckler disrupting the space and expectations of a lecture on a college campus. Meyer wasn't adopting the proper deference. He wasn't playing the game. He was trying to politicize the situation, to break out of the lecture format that secures and sanitizes everything Kerry says (as if more of that were necessary), to make the securing and sanitization visible as such by getting brutal police power to make itself apparent.

The audience, though, reacted as most audiences do when someone violates the norms of the situation. They became uncomfortable, ill at east. They wanted some kind of restoration of order. So they applaud. No one rushes at the cops to try to save him. No chant breaks out--let him speak, let him speak. People laugh and applaud--this is a cue that we aren't in 1933 anymore. It's already 1938, if there was any doubt. A few in the audience, it seems, yell in shock as Meyer is tasered, but the problem seems to be constructed more as that he isn't cooperating, he isn't playing by the rules, he is disrespectful. Consider this unbearably lame statement by New England peasants:

This kid was wicked obnoxious. The audience cheered when police attempted to remove him. Granted, if just being a jerk were enough of a reason to get tasered, I'm sure we could all come up with a few people we'd like to see zapped. But in this instance, he refused to cooperate with police and was warned repeatedly to stop resisting before the taser was used. Perhaps it was an excessive use of force - you'd think that six officers would be able to subdue one 21-year-old kid without having to electrocute him - but it's important to remember that in confrontations like this, the police aren't paid to fight fair. They're paid to "win" so they can return to work the next day, and not let some idiot injure them in the process.

Kerry tries to answer as the police drag the guy out of the auditorium. He doesn't yell at the police to stop or to let the guy go. He doesn't get off the stage and come and try to help. He's the ball-less leader of the ball-less herd, unable to do anything but try to keep up the pretense that his little civics lecture is the locus of politics in the room when Meyer has already exposed the politics of the situation--the police enforcement of what can be said, by whom, and how. Meyer tries to point out a stolen election, a pathetic Congress, and the wealth and privilege that connects the powerful to each other. But folks don't want to hear that. Enter the police. Power's obscene supplement stinks up the room. It coats everything.

Fortunately for skulls, bones, and the ball-less, communicative capitalism has a terrific way of bringing everything back into order. Once the event is online, it can circulate it myriad forms, becoming ever more depoliticized. The "don't taze me bro" remix is adorable--and lots of fun! The politics have been excised, remixed as marketable entertainment. Meyer will have his 15 minutes and the kids will have their new catch phrase. It will be great for a laugh. Folks will find all sorts of funny and unexpected places to insert it.

And it's a good thing that they have this catch phrase. They are going to need it.

Comments

[sixfootsubwoofer]

Having not attained the cynicism that seems proper to my age, I am continually disgusted by the flippant, sycophantic nature of those a few years younger than myself who would find this new catchphrase funny. Of course, I DO find it funny, as well, the kind of funny that should be laughed at once, and then retired immediately to the dustbin of temporary verbal tchotchkes....to be used the next time only in a "real" sense, not uttered but screamed.

Will this be the new "Why can't we all just get along"?

Beautiful post, Jodi. Thank you! As usual, your best posts only require a comment of praise and nothing more, but I couldn't restrain myself on this one. I would love to carry a tazer specifically for wearers of this particular tshirt.

[Charles R]

There were a few girls who did rush up to ask the cops why they were doing what they were doing.

Also, balls?

[pete]

i couldn't agree more, the audience reaction made me fucking livid. but the most frightening thing is that if i was there i probably would have reacted in exactly the same way (minus the clapping).

[Virgil johnson]

Perhaps some need an introduction to new technology when causes the stun gun to be totally ineffective -

http://www.news.com/Polyester-fabric-neutralizes-stun-gun-jolt/2100-1008_3-6057801.html

Just a thought for those of us that may be subjected to stun gun use.

[William S]

Assuming attacking the police (to try and get them off of him) would be something one might do, I think it is interesting to think about what sort of personal discipline would be needed. It is like looking at tactics used at protests on a personal level, I imagine. I mean, is it enough that you "register" your protest by taking action? Or do you need some more general principle to inform your action? I do not mean a principle as in a political principle which motivates it, but something which structures the action itself - and not in the narrow sense of making sure the action is "effective". I guess the larger question is to what extent is it necessary to structure your person in line with political or other convictions (for lack of a better word). I often wonder about this, so I share it here, as it seems particularly relevant to thinking about how one might have intervened in an immediate sense.

I think also this is related to the question of whether or not one has balls, and how one demonstrates it. I think this is one of the great scandals and frauds of movies like the Bourne movies also - this fantasy of elegant, controlled violence mobilised by the individual, and where they never seem to have to train. It's just part of who and what they are. It is not for nothing that soliders are often practicing, and that is part of what it means to be able to mobilise violence the way they do. Does one have a responsbility, for example, to be able to mobilise violence on a personal level?

[Sinthom]

This event was one of the most disgusting things I'd seen in years. Perhaps that's a terrible thing, as there have been so many disgusting things recently. Yet, over at Larval Subjects, I argued that this event crystalizes or condenses all the problems with the Democratic party since Bush came to power. "Keep talking politely while the thugs knock everyone's teeth out." Really I'm surprised that it hasn't produced more of a response at this sheerly symbolic level (as you observe with the reaction of the audience). It's obvious at this point that the entire system is a mess, that there's little question of working with the "lesser of two evils", and that until money is gotten out of the process it's futile.

I've been waging a similar battle with the use of words like "opinion" (and belief, evidence, fact, etc). All of these words seem to be master-signifiers where thought ends. I tell them that if they use these words I'll come to their house and bite their kneecaps. That usually gets a chuckle and leaves an impression. In lieu of opinion, I command them to use the word "claim" every time they're tempted to evoke "opinion", and to speak of arguments rather than beliefs. Hopefully if they use the term "claim" they'll at least immediately think "claims require reasons" and start casting about for those reasons. Your teaching experience is far more extensive than mine (and I suspect you're working with more academically talented students), but I get the sense that students today seem to think in free-floating sound-bites divorced from any grounds or reasons. Everything is evaluated in terms of how it "feels" or liking and disliking (as if disliking is in any way relevant to, say, whether the reasons support the theory of evolution). Of course, in demanding they use the term "argument" I then find myself having to do all sorts of acrobatics to explain that an argument isn't a disagreement between two people, but providing reasons in support of a claim (which can take place just as easily in the privacy of ones mind as in a discussion). Sigh

[patrick j. mullins]

"I've been waging a similar battle with the use of words like "opinion" (and belief, evidence, fact, etc)"

What is wrong with these words, unless their clearly inaccurate. Especially 'fact'. If it isn't a fact, that can be credited or debited as having referred to a mere 'opinion' that was in no way a fact, but I don't see what is wrong with 'evidence' and 'fact' if they are that. Maybe you mean students use these terms when they are not hard and fast, in which case they just haven't proof for what they claim is fact. You may be talking about some current trend in the wrong usage of these words. The only one that is obviously somewhat suspect is 'feel', although is this when someone writes 'I feel that...' or 'a feel for something', obnoxious but not always off the mark.

[Jodi]

Patrick--my students called Valerie Solanas's manifesto her 'opinion.' They also call Plato's Republic his opinion. And, they think that a claim that Jews have horns is someone's opinion. There is a shocking flattening at work here where they discount a person's controversial claim to truth uttered so as to call a new militancy into being (Solanas), with an argument regarding the nature of truth, justice, and the Real (Plato), with a fantastic (and anchored in histories of hatred, violence, and exclusion) demonstrably false empirical claim. So, the universe of types of views and claims as well as the way such views and claims might be contested and validated is foreshortened so as to make critical, reflective thought and judgment impossible. It also makes irony and satire very difficult because all 'opinions' seem to have the same lack of grounding or context.

So, my experience is very much like Sinthome's here.

[patrick j. mullins]

obviously see what you mean, so is this rather recent? I don't remember this kind of thing when I was their age. In fact, never heard such weird uses of 'opinion'. I guess 'The Nutcracker' could be said to be Tschaikovsky's 'opinion' with this kind of deterioration.

[Jodi]

By George, I think you've got it. The Nutcracker as opinion...

I think this opinion business is new. I started noticing it after 9/11 (I hate to say)-- as 'reality' became every more openly contested and manipulated (the key example is the denigration of the 'reality-based community'). I also see this as an instance of what happens when one's opponents (conservatives) take over one's positions (postmodenism)--but that way of putting it is pretty crude and imprecise.

[Sinthome]

Patrick, I don't disagree with what you're saying. The issue is how the terms tend to get used among the students. On the one hand, there's the usage of opinion that Jodi alludes to. This usage functions to halt any thought on the part of the student. If something is an opinion it is *just* an opinion, and the student doesn't have to get to work evaluating the *reasons* for that opinion. Opinion largely means "false" to such students or *unsupportable* (not unsupportED but literally unsupportABLE). It's not unusual for me to have students write, when asked about Plato's distinction between opinion and knowledge in an essay or exam, that opinions *cannot* be proven and that they *are* false. This gives insight into the way the term is functioning.

"Belief" functions in a similar way: "that's *just* your belief." If the student says "it's my belief" this functions as code or is an enthymeme that's really saying "I don't have to critically evaluate it or provide supporting reasons for it, because it is my sacred right to have beliefs and it is a supreme injustice to examine them." Given these attitudes are anathema to philosophy or what I teach, I forbid them in my classroom unless they're used in the actual texts we're reading.

The issues surrounding the terms "fact" and "evidence" are more complicated. On the one hand, there are strictly philosophical issues at work here. Fact and evidence refer to *empirical* or experiential grounds of knowledge, drawn from observation and physical things. However, many philosophers argue that there are other forms of knowledge not based on experience but arrived at through reason. If students restrict themselves to these grounds, they'll have a very difficult time understanding much of the material we're reading. For this reason, speaking of "reasons" is superior because these can be rational reasons as in mathematics or a rational proof for the existence of God, or empirical reasons drawn from observation.

In a broader sense, I think that often our language gets riddled with overused metaphors that become like worn coins. For the students, terms like "fact" and "evidence" function in this way. They're so used to using them that they no longer think about them or what they mean. Instead, they are pat answers that they give when an english professor, philosophy professor, political science professor, science professor, etc., asks why we should exercise caution and skepticism towards such and such a claim. "Because the author doesn't provide any facts!" "Because the author doesn't provide any evidence!" These terms function as all-purpose answers when the student begins to sweat from a question that's been asked. Of even greater concern is their generality, their abstractness, which invites the students not to look at the specific *details* of what it is that's being evaluated in a text, cultural artifact, or physical phenomena. For this reason I believe it's important to always struggle to find new terms that will be just foreign enough to the students to get them looking at the material with fresh eyes rather than just relying on cliches and habits of thought that they've passively absorbed from the media world around them and their prior education.

[Sinthome]

And, of course, my reference to worn coins is itself an overused metaphor.

[patrick j. mullins]

Very interesting, thanks both. Sinthome, that idea of 'just foreign enough' sounds excellent, and I imagine it's a constant battle to force one of those slightly foreign terms into regular use.

[William S]

I can't help but notice that everyone is avoiding the question of what it means to have balls enough to intervene in such situations.

[William S]

Is this not related to this discussion going on about involving students (or other persons) in the practice of justification and judgement? Students are encouraged not to use terms and phrases which isolate them from each other and which do not allow for judgement of the texture and color of claims, let us say, in the general sense that different sorts of claims can even be distinguished as such.

Can there be a process of judgement which would lead to a decision to use violence on the police? Because even if you see them as servants or instruments of the State, say, you are still interacting with them, on a personal level, in a way that essentially recognises and affirms a difference between you. This process of moving from opinions to claims and arguments allows what type of interventions? And what is one to make of the widely felt disgust that no one did anything?

[patrick j. mullins]

I personally, in my opinion, can't follow what William S is talking about. Balls needed to have been in factual possession of Senator Kerry, and he was really the only one who needed to show them. He's pretty used up by now, just like factory equipment as described in 'Kapital' (often not maintained very well, I thought. I couldn't tell if it was the workers or the foremen who destroyed things so quickly.) He's been displaying 'loss of balls' for some years now, but I can't see why anyone else should have been expected to understand the situation fast enough to do anything, nor is it even realistic except far from the situation to imagine that it would have been different in any era, in any place. The only real issue is the Tasering itself after Kerry refused to go far enough. That is as a result of his extreme insulation by too much money and radical comfort. All the politicians are used to major insulation. The guy clearly meant to be obnoxious, though, and is pleased with the whole thing. I frankly don't give a fuck about it, except for revealing Kerry as once again ball-less. Meyer is a little publicity-mongering shithead and, once he got started, was not going to stop milking it for all it was worth. I'm astonished at how much importance this incident is given. It doesn't seem to be of any importance except as an excuse for a kind of longed-for rallying cry, because those most outraged are not paying any attention to the manipulation on the part of Meyer.

"Can there be a process of judgement which would lead to a decision to use violence on the police?"

That's one of the weirdest propositions I ever heard, but I suppose that in my opinion there could be, and that it would be split-second rather than parliamentary procedure, which is just a matter of some sort of slow opinion.

[patrick j. mullins]

Cindy Sheehan's recent ejection from a pro-Iraq War and threat of 'prosecution' seems far worse to me. She knows how to use the spotlight, but at least it doesn't smell of an artificially constructed scenario. Meyer could hardly have hoped for any more superb response to his purposeful and stupid obnoxiousness. He's managed to get it playing right into his hands. You could call it 'an attack on the police' itself, because it has succeeded in making the police look bad. If he hasn't anything better to do, I don't care if it makes the police look bad. But anything so artificial and contrived doesn't really drive any important point home about the police. The police 'are always right' just because they 'are the stronger' in practice, so this is really old hat crap. Meyer can be admired for his performance art, but that's all it was. You do not resist the police without expecting them to get rough with you. It is adolescent to expect the police to 'move back to a space of reflection' when they are dealing with somebody who definitely wants to engage them in some bullshit. They're not bright enough for that, and it's incredible that people who weren't there PASS JUDGMENT on those that were, like any of you would have 'done anything' either! To 'do anything' would only have made it much worse.

[William S]

I think any of the people there could have done something, but perhaps only the Senator could have done something such that he rose above the situation, so to speak, in that one assumes whatever he did the police would not then subdue and arrest him as well. But this makes having balls a virtue of the powerful only, no? Those outside a system of set of institutions of repression. And is this not precisely the point of looking at such events? That the circle of people who are outside gets smaller and smaller.

What I meant by the process of judgment leading to use of violence was whether or not you could have a rational process which led to justified use of violence. I do not care so much about this issue per se, but against the background of the discussion of encouraging people to think rationally, to shift them (it seems) from a space of communication to a space of judgement, where the features of that space of communication are retained in the sense that the rationality is only intersubjective. In the sense that to attack someone would be a judgment of their being so different that you could no longer "argue" with them, and on what basis could you make such a judgement if the participation of everyone in some system of rationality is a condition of its existence? In the sense that you do not attack people for their opinions, and neither do you attack them for claims “they” make or things “they” do.

So I guess the question is, what is the relationship between having balls and making judgments. And that if one entertains violence as an option (as I assume people who criticize others for not having balls do) then does one have a responsibility to be able to employ violence? To be able to employ violence requires a certain discipline, not in the sense of discipline of the will, but in the sense of basic physical discipline and shaping one’s sensitivity and ability to judge situations which has effects in other spheres of judgment and sensibility as well.

I don’t think any of the questions of how this guy is acting now or what he intended or whether he meant it are really important here. And the fact that the police will respond with violence if you resist, often even if you suggest resistance, is also not relevant. Or at least not in the sense you seem to mean. That is, it seems in many cases the resort to violence by those who are at a disadvantage is a an assertive recognition of difference, against the oppressive insistence that we are all governed by the same law and same customs and standards of decency and respect and that we all just need to speak to each other calmly and understand everyone is just doing their jobs and has a valid opinion. The basic question I am trying to pose is, I guess, what would it mean to have had the balls to intervene? I see a lot of emotion and outrage, but no discipline of that emotion, and no reflection on it either in light of what seem to be generally solid political committments. Or perhaps they are just opinions after all? Not meaning that they are not committments, but perhaps that this is all committments can mean.

[patrick j. mullins]

actually, I learn a bit more about Cindy Sheehan and she seems to have lost her mind. Nevertheless, she has really credibility for all her Crawford camping, and bringing consciousness in a big way about the Iraq War, even if she's bound to lose it at some point. She should not have been both thrown out of a pro-Iraq War speech situation and also threatened with 'prosecution' . I don't know what has happened since, but that would certainly be a far more worthy cause for police-state-type protest than this minor little stupidity in which there was no serious injury anyway.

"against the oppressive insistence that we are all governed by the same law and same customs and standards of decency and respect and that we all just need to speak to each other calmly and understand everyone is just doing their jobs and has a valid opinion. "

No, I don't think it. I don't give a shit about speaking calmly, nor even that the police responded properly, just that the police responded as police do, so attack them and don't argue with me, you can't attack the police that way. If you want to attack the police, who you are actually expecting to become intelligent and sensitive all of a sudden, then go figure out a way of doing. If you don't think you have any balls, then you probably don't. It's merely only practical that this show is worthless except for proving once and for all that Kerry has no balls, but over-analyzing with this sort of nonsense, viz., "But this makes having balls a virtue of the powerful only, no?" which not only makes no sense, but shows only interest in something general and not particular, the particular BEING the Kerry/Meyer Affair, who cares about the 'powerful', who frankly proved themselves not to if some clown like this can already defeat them so obviously. Because this is some nobody thoroughly winning the game. You should be celebrating, not lamenting. A jerk like this is worthless except as some sacrificial lamb to the cause of impromptu performance in which the police would look merely clumsy if the Taser weren't there. He managed to incite them to use the Taser, they look like idiots to people who want to talk about 'virtue in balls'. If you want to talk about balls, there is no virtue in talking about their virtue, because they are virtue-neutral.

I wasn't saying that 'you should understand that the police are just doing their jobs' by way of excusing them, but just that it is a waste of time to talk about what police should and should not be doing, when you damn well know already what they will do. That people have nothing better to rally around will, paradoxically, actually render the police much more powerful even if they are seen to have sustained a mild upset. This incident is so nothing, and means so profoundly nothing, that it defies credulity.

Didn't leftist students learn anything from the history of 60s protests? That they seemed to be nothing more than a symptom of a war (Vietnam) that was doomed already, not that they had much effect themselves, and never directly. If anything, the oppressive government has fully recovered from not only powerless students and impotent protesters, it is even immune from opposition within itself, and not only from the opposition party but from within its own. They don't take any of that stuff seriously. But this incident is far less than at least what students were protesting in the 60s.

You want the point that this incident seems to you and many to indicate, but you need a better example. This one is so evaporative nobody is paying attention. Of if they are, show us some balls, we're not averse to them.

[patrick j. mullins]

'against the oppressive insistence that we are all governed by the same law and same customs and standards of decency "

Yes, but we ARE unless there is a clever way of opposing these, not just a lot of carrying on about how this is so 'disgusting.' Until then, be grateful to Andrew Meyer, who 'outed police brutality' so that no one in the blogosphere could miss it. I did notice that the story disappeared for the most part otherwise--I know nobody outside blogs who is talking about it, and it comes as more of a '60's nostalgia' thing than anything else.

[patrick j. mullins]

I should tone down the rhetoric on this. While I don't see 'the police' as very important in this since they merely proved what they'll do when they are not given some strong directive, I think it's still wrong to think the audience really had the responsibility to do anything--it was entirely Kerry's responsibility , and he proved in this incident beyond a shadow of a doubt more of what his character flaws are than we had even thought.

To wit--it was the conventional wisdom that, even after all his flip-flopping messes, that he did out-perform Bush in the debates, that he did win them. Kerry did not win them, not any of them. I didn't know this till the Andrew Meyer incident. He was exactly the same passive leader--an oxymoron if I ever heard one--in the debates as he was in the Tasering incident. He just doesn't want to 'get dirty', I mean living on Heinz Ketchup for so long...So when Bush would really say one of the outrageous lies he was already famous for back in 2004 and before even, Kerry would show no outrage or even mild anger; he had no passion. He would smile and not even quite condescendingly. He seemed more intent on winning an election by appearing the candidate most likely to 'look civilized' in a modern-day version of some Edwardian Comedy of Manners. He was never not insulated in his emotions, even when he so 'heroically' announced 'Saddam Hussein did not attack us. Osama Bin Laden attacked us.' And we were all SO PROUD. Why? Because he had been so worthless up to that point, that we were relieved that he finally seemed to be authoritative--not that it was about anything that wasn't obvious, but rather that he at least did an amateur actor's reading of the facts. He had NO ENERGY, and has made blunder upon blunder since then, and is capable of nothing but steady descent into his incipient dementia.

We didn't even notice that Bush, for all his lies, got out there and was pissed off at Kerry, and he tried to win the debates even when he thought he wasn't. Kerry didn't care that much about being president, he was just going through some motions. After he lost the election, we STILL insisted that he'd won the debates, but he had not won the debates. Bush won the debates, no matter how much he had to act like a horse's ass to win them. He won them.