Laramie and Tectonic's Codes and Power

Read more at Amazon.com

So, as a Christian who studies medieval literature, it's no surprise that I just love the writings of CS Lewis.    Sure, he was a bit of a stodge and didn't "get" how women worked until he was in his late fifties-- but for a conservative, stuffy old Oxford dean, he doesn't get enough credit for taking on and dismantling the linguistic codes of oppression of his own day.

For instance, in the sci-fi book Out of the Silent Planet, he basically takes on the entire linguistic power structure of white imperialism and rips it to shreds.  In the book, an interplanetary explorer named Weston tries to justify his attempted takeover of the planet Mars (which is a silly, pathetic attempt) in the name of white human imperialism.  This is how Weston justifies his murder of a sentient being (called a hnau in Martian) to the ruler of Mars:

Your tribal life with its stone age weapons and bee-hive huts, its primitive coracles and elementary social structure, has nothing to compare with our civilization—with our science, medicine and law, our armies…  Our right to supersede you is the right of the higher over the lower. (85)

Weston's adversary Ransom has to translate all this colonial-ese into Martian so that everybody can understand.  Here's how he does it: 

He says that, among you, all the hnau of one kind live together and the hrossa have spears like those we used a long time ago and your huts are small and round and your boats small and light and you only have one ruler. He says it is different with us. He says we know much. There is a thing happens in our world when the body of a living creature feels pains and becomes weak, and he says we sometimes know how to stop it. He says we have very many bent people and we kill them and shut them in huts. He says that we have many ways for the hnau of one land to kill those of another and some are trained to do it… Because of all this, he says it would not be the act of a bent hnau if our people killed all your people. (135-6).

 Oppression sounds completely different when you strip it of all the linguistic codes and speak it plainly, doesn't it?  The little linguistic codes of Weston's set about survival of the fittest and right to supersede (and elsewhere, the white man's burden) really are just a power play.  They separate the 'us' (that is, the elites) from the 'them' and make that outsider vulnerable to violence.  And Lewis' alter-ego Ransom, from his position of the Martian convert, cannot translate their nonsense into sense.  As the person with a foot in both societies, all he can do is expose Weston's brutality for what it really is. 

I hope you can see why this interests me.  Sometimes the little cliques and social boundaries we set up (which Lewis called "Inner Rings") only exist to render others powerless.  Others have are much more well-intentioned but eventually lead to the same thing, and language is nearly always one of the principal tools people use to do it. 

So, do Laramie residents have language codes to build barriers between themselves and who they have deemed outsiders?  Of course they do.  Everybody does to some extent.   But so does Tectonic Theater, as it turns out, and that's what I'd like to look at today-- how such languages of belonging and exclusion can be exposed for what they are, and who gets the benefit and who suffers the consequences.  

A short primer of Academic code

So, all this talk about code switching has got me thinking...  what are the verbal and non-verbal codes of the humanities?

I mean, I know pretty clearly what things make a person's speech "western" or "conservative" or "evangelical" (which has a vocabulary entirely its own).   But, what about the world I spend most of my time in anymore-- the humanities?  What codes do we use here?   So, I've just been listening to people talk for the last couple days to see what short-hand people in my environment use in everyday speech.  What I found is pretty interesting, and highly amusing in a weird sort of way.

Okay, so here are some words I've heard used to code disapproval or rejection:

Fox News / Glenn Beck/Bill O'Reilley
black-and-white thinking; binary oppositions
NASCAR
bumper sticker logic/sloganeering
speaking in soundbites
speaking in code  (ironic...)
framing/ frames/ framed discourse
essentializing
Wal-Mart
fanatical
brain-stem
Bubba
paternalistic
Imperialist/Capitalist
Othering
objectify/objectification
marginalizing
monological
tendentious
literalist/fundamentalist
shrill

Here are words we use to code approval or congratulate ourselves:

provocative
polyvalent
synthesizing
subtle thinker/subtle thinking
hermeneutic
semiotic
measured/thoughtful
critical
meaty/deep
performative
intellectual
humanistic
measured
postmodern/posthuman/post-Christian
self-referential
has gravity/gravitas

Words we use to sound smart and identify with the academic club:

dialectic
abject
agency/being an agent
queering/queer (especially as a verb)
deconstruct
slippage
Foucaultian
gender (as a verb)
ecriture
linguistic turn
hybridity/ hybrid
interstitial
dialogic
discourse/discursive
historicize
signifier/signified/signifying
Bakhtinian (quoting Bakhtin is like academic gold.  The same goes for Slavoj Zizek.)
meta-anything
base/structure/superstructure
fetish/fetishize
Oedipal
sublime 
Lacanian
post-colonial
Other/Othering
paternalism
subaltern
subjectivity
langue/parole

Okay, so our words-- those we use of others, and those we use to describe ourselves-- can tell us a lot of what we think about ourselves.  The funny thing is that a lot of things in the first list is classist, and it's demeaning specifically to intelligence or social class.  Everything in the last two lists are, for the most part, come from a very useful and interesting critical language that has clear benefit in the intellectual arena.  But that's not how we use them in coffee-shop conversation.  They're our codes of belonging, our secret handshake.  Nothing makes you part of the smart set like puffing on about "subaltern identites" or "the sublime," especially if you can work a little Burke or Habermas or Zizek into that conversation, too. Besides, how much fun is it to say "Slavoj Zizek?"  Tons. 

In a sense, I have no problem with the presence of this "club" per se.  That's the way society organizes itself, to be honest.  People with a common association share a common language.  But it's good to take a shot of our own medicine, apply some of that Lacan and Foucault to ourselves, and realize that our language is a tool that we use to manipulate the social order around us, too-- not just the people we don't like.  We use it to get a leg up on that other guy, the person with different political or philosophical beliefs that doesn't share our special vocabulary.  And that impenetrable wall of "discourse" that we erect can keep out those who have the brains and can argue back but don't know the lingo.  

So, perhaps we need to be wary of our motives when we employ the specialist language of our trade outside of the classroom: for unless we deconstruct our Oedipal tendencies and queer our postmodern  discourse, our phallocentric essentializing of the gendered postcolonial ecriture may threaten to objectify the Other into an abject body, subverting their subjectivity and historicizing them into a subaltern who cannot speak.  NASCAR.

 And ya know what's really funny?  That sentence almost works, in a bizarre, mind-bending sort of way.  *giggle.*


Oh, and if you have some free time, check out the Postmodernism Generator to see these codes put to work... in a really fun sort of way.

The Religious Codes of Tectonic Theater: Using Your "Inside" Voice

When people speak about certain issues, they always do it from within a limited point of view: are they looking from without or within?  Each perspective is useful in its own way, but they're not the same thing.  Whether or not you consider yourself (or your conversation partner) inside or outside of your community can really affect the way you explain your view of things. 

Religious dialogue, for instance, is one of the places where the play has the hardest time breaking into, so to speak.  This is something observed by a "bench coach" for the original TLP, Stephen Wangh.  As I pointed out in a previous post, Wangh wonders a little bit whether or not Tectonic Theater found themselves unable or unwilling to address that society's "holy protagonists," and more often than not I find that I agree with him. 

But that's not entirely up to Tectonic Theater to decide; after all, those "holy protagonists" have a say in the matter, too.  For a variety of reasons, from doctrinal to social to political, each of these people can make a choice about where to align themselves in regard to Tectonic Theater.  If we look at how different people speak about the religious community-- Unitarians, Mormons, Baptists, and Catholics-- can we see where they see themselves fitting in?  

As for me?  At one time, I was an insider in The Baptist Church.  And now, where am I?  Do I speak now as an insider or an outsider of that community?  Well, just look above for your answer...

Free Stuff! Yay!

Okay, so an important goal for this blog is to make it useful for others who are interested in The Laramie Project or Laramie, Wyoming.  One way I've tried to do that in the past has been to put together a running bibliography of useful literature on the plays.  So far, it has (rightly) been the most popular page on this blog, which makes me quite happy.

The next thing I wanted to do was provide visual materials.  It's hard to find pics of Laramie or relating to TLP that are actually, you know, usable for free.  It's mostly protected under full copyright.  There's not a lot on Flickr for Laramie that's under Creative Commons, so I took a bunch of pics while I was in Laramie this summer, and I'm currently cleaning them up and posting them.  These range from pics of the campus and the plains to a surprisingly close reproduction of the Vintage cover of The Laramie Project (which, if you've ever wondered, is the exit from I-80 onto Grand Avenue). 

You can access the ones I have up so far (and the list will be growing) at the links gadget on the right.  There's one page right now for pictures of the town of Laramie, one for the campus area, and one for landscapes.  These pages will be growing over time, so it wouldn't hurt to check back in a month or so to see what's new.

These are free for any non-commercial or editorial use, and you're free to print them without specific permission in any materials, as long as you're not specifically selling them.  (And if you do want to use them for sellable stuff, just drop me a note.)

They're protected under a Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike Creative Commons copyright, so that gives you a lot of flexibility!

To give you a sample, here's one of my more interesting photos-- a picture of the Matthew Shepard memorial bench being put to good use.  Enjoy!

Oh, for shame, fellas...

My home college in Appalachia has a student-run newspaper that sometimes has trouble taking itself seriously, and the most common indication of boredom in the newsroom is when the staff starts screwing around with the headlines for some childish, Beavis and Butthead-esque humor.  One morning in a graduate class, I almost spit coffee all over the guy across the table from me when I read the headline  for a philanthropic showing of The Vagina Monologues:

'Vagina' Opens Tonight for Charity, Issues

I wonder what kind of 'issues' they had in mind...  anyhow, last year or so they got into serious trouble for a rather artsy headline in the sports section after our football team won a narrow victory over the USC Gamecocks.  (I'm sure you can figure out what they did with that.)  It was extremely unoriginal, actually-- just how creative can you really get with a fan base who already spent the entire game chanting, "Beat those Cocks!" at the top of their lungs?

Anyhow, I suppose the trouble they got into for that one has taken some of the edge off of the current staff, but apparently they have lost none of their subversive spirit.  When I looked to the Opinion section, I noticed that they have a section kind of like Newsweek's "Conventional Wisdom Watch" where they vote for or against things.  In a not-so-clever play off of the team's fight song, guess what they named it?  

Rocky "Tops" and "Bottoms"

I just about had an apoplectic fit of laughing when this struck home.  I'm wondering how long it's going to take anybody in the administration to figure this one out...

Codes and Community in TLP: Looking at Jed (and Jackrabbit)

So, we've been talking a little about how language is often a marker of certain social groups, that what we say, and how we say it, changes with one group to the next.  We code-switch into the codes of one social group into another.  When there's tension between those groups, like, say, the "town and gown" conflict in Laramie, choosing one's language is important because navigating between groups gets perilous.  And, if there's one character who is literally stuck in this divide in The Laramie Project, it's Jed Schultz.  

Jed interests me because I totally understand his plight.  Before I say anything else, let me assure you that Jed was a good kid when I knew him; he was always extremely outgoing and energetic, fun, easily overemotional, and he had a craving to fit in socially with the people he was around.  He also loves his parents.  Never doubt that.  I knew him a little bit from high school, but after I was baptized and attending The Baptist Church, I'd see him come to church with his dad occasionally.   I found him... interesting.  Jed still knew all the codes, from the shiny polyester button-down shirt and pleated slacks to the monogrammed Bible he carried in its nylon zip-up cover and handle, but he never seemed quite at ease.  Before that point, I had never known Jed to seem ill at ease anywhere. 

That sense of ill ease is where I can sympathize; I'm not in the SBC anymore, probably for the same reasons that he was uncomfortable in that church back then.  At the time of the first play, Jed was caught between two different societies, transitioning out of one and into another.  On the one hand, he was born into a Southern Baptist Convention culture with some pretty legalistic ties and proud of its religious independence and political conservatism.  I should know-- I was there.  On the other hand, he was heavily involved in theater in high school, which tends to be a fairly counter-cultural group anyhow, and then he was a theater major at the college.  Those two worlds can't be more opposite.  Again, I should know.  I spent most of my spare time in Fine Arts, just like Jed, and most of my friends were in dance, music or theater.  And in the course of the play, I think that Jed is trying to keep a foot in each world and having trouble figuring out where to stand.  His language, I think, betrays a little bit of that attempt to fit in.  Jed has to switch codes between different groups as he tries to navigate from one to the next. 

Why conservative Constitutional values might just be great for gay marriage...

Okay, so even though I'm moving to the center and even left-of-center on a lot of social issues (and especially those important to the GLBT community), when it comes to Constitutional law I can't help but see the world through conservative-colored glasses.  It's just the sphere I was born in, and I really do think that if you give the Constitution a fair chance, it's going to uphold equality and equal justice for everyone.

With that in mind, I just read a really interesting report in the Metro Weekly about the two new federal court rulings regarding the state/federal conflict regarding gay marriage and domestic partnership benefits.  The two cases are Gill v. Office of Personnel Management and Massachusetts v. U.S. Dep't of Health and Human Services.   The Metro article naturally focuses on the violation of equal protection by the federal DOMA regulation, but there's another, much more interesting argument here they don't mention: the federal government doesn't have the right to regulate or define restrictions on covenants.  That's specifically in the rights of the state.  So, if the federal government has to pay pensions or benefits to same-sex marriage in a state that says that marriage can consist of same-sex couples, they can't do a thing about it.  They don't have the right do define the terms of that covenant; they just have to pay out. 

That's right: Conservative arguments about state's rights prevent a federal DOMA restriction that short-circuits the state's right to define contracts.  Sure, it means that you can't just pass a federal gay marriage statute to force equality, but it means that if you win the fight on the state level, it might just stick. And conservatives, if they're really good conservatives, can't really fuss about it. 

So... um, here's for state's rights!  Woo-hoo!