Cintron's "Discourse of Measurement"

Angels' Town by Ralph Cintron

Publication Date: November 1, 1998 | ISBN-10: 080704637X | ISBN-13: 978-0807046371

"As issues of power and social order loom large in Angelstown, Ralph Cintron shows how eruptions on the margins of the community are emblematic of a deeper disorder. In their language and images, the members of a Latino community in a midsized American city create self-respect under conditions of disrepect. Cintron's innovative ethnography offers a beautiful portrait of a struggling Mexican-American community and shows how people (including ethnographers) make sense of their lives through cultural forms."

discourse of measurement -- mapping and texting changed expansive land to something reigned, placed under control -- This reminds me of James Scott's Seeing Like a State with the idea of regimenting or making legible both land and people. But what is lost in this formal, structural, fictitious measuring of this ordering of that which is natural, and by being natural disordered? Prior to formal systems, indigenous people had a a concept of land that was cultural and community-based, not articulated through a discourse of exacting measurement (37). The "texting" that came to expansive nature -- the claim forms, contracts, bills of sale and even street names -- reduced overwhelming space (or perhaps the mystery of space which is not named or measured). Cintron talks about the discourse of measurement here in a way that strikes me similar to James Scott, but as Cintron's book is an ethnography, he also sees telling a story as a discourse of measurement. Such histories reduce time to visible space; the enormity to which the contents of this history point become fenced by the edges of paper. The history is contained in "an illusion of management. Question: how can we read with an eye on this illusion? To not walk away from the text thinking we "know" these people, that their story can be measured by the text, the pages? The author, the enthonographer, is acting upon texts, so the text itself is an example of an ordering of that which is messy or complex. Question: Ethics of authoring?


I am thinking about the movement in Guatemala with Maya revitalization: the Pan-Mayan Movement (http://www.culturalsurvival.org/publications/cultural-survival-quarterly/guatemala/pan-mayan-movement-mayans-doorway-new-millennium). What are the "fences" of this movement? What is the rhetoric? What will be the consequence of Maya lawyers, doctors, and poets in Guatemalan politics? What will happen to the milpas, chicleros, and weaving traditions? It seems that many Mayas in the highlands want subsistence living; they don't want to participate in the free market or politics, and educating their children for careers that place Mayas in the market economy, which is synonymous with government, will put the indigenous way of life in danger. Thus, have not the Maya been resisting the discourse of measurement all along? How has Rigoberta Menchu participating in the discourse of measurement (both the mapping and texting)? Cintron writes that the state cannot exist without a recorded relationship (maps and texts); they cannot manage individuals of the state without evoking the discourse of measurement. Thus, a major function of writing and other recording devices is this management of individuals and nature. However, it is merely a "representation of reality" in documents, documents that distance because of the lack of face-to-face contact (relationships). It is this distance(53) that makes genocidal atrocities possible, and it is this distance that also provides space for resistance and resilience. As Cintron talks to and about Valerio's wall, iconography, and literacy, I was thinking a lot about the indigenous Ka'quikel kids in Chimeltenago, Guatemala. Valerio's teachers wanted him to write "right"-- the structuralist approach that pervades all English classrooms -- they labeled him LD, and it took a lot of time and wounds to get him to believe he was, in fact, smart, and that he could, in fact, write his desires (rather than the formulaic paragraph). I am wondering what will happen when the children from the milpas get a pencil in their hands and begin to write their desires? If a page is blank but we (the measurers of the state) give them the page and the pen, are we writing on them ideas of modern desires? How long will these children stay in school? Perhaps long enough to read a little, write a little, and learn a little math - but perhaps not long enough. They will work with and for their family as soon as they are useful. And then, will they return to the milpa or the loom with ideas of "algo mas" (Fisher) and modernity? Will they turn away from the Maya ways because of school? Do Maya families desire education for their children or is that society's desire? I am now thinking about the poor public school system in Guatemala that provides an 8-12 day of schooling up to 6th grade (18% attend secondary school; 1% attend university). Is this measuring a mechanism for just enough participation in the free market economy but not enough to participate in the structures that control this economy? They are consumers in capitalism not participators in democracy --what Cintron calls a "warped citizenship" (126).

Cintron talks about Beth Roy's idea of "implicit ideology," and I think this is was I am pondering above.Bodies of ideas or ideologies can become so internalized that they disappear as ideas but reappear as emotions and truths -- a common sense understanding of the world so ingrained as to be beyond question and, at the same time, outside consciousness. Let's think about ideas about food and family, for example. The Maya who reside in the Highlands, have a family milpa that may be an hour or two walk from where they live. This milpa provides the corn they need to feed their family for the year and a little more for trading (for other food, medicine, soap). The family clears the milpa, plants the milpa, harvests the milpa. The milpa is an idea that became a truth of the Maya. As measuring changes -- zoning, taxes, sales, transportation -- the implicit ideology shifts. The Maya had to see land as "owned" by the state and were forced to accept the mapping and be marginalized by the "texts" that accompanied such mapping. I could go into this further as one way of thinking about the escalation of mapping and marginalization (and ultimate murder) of the Maya.

Cinton's work ultimately asks how one creates respect under conditions of little or no respect, and while he is exploring how the cheros, Cecilia's continuum of modernity in the neighborhood (222), and how they create respect in the discourse of measurement, I think his study has generalizable features. He writes, "We might imagine a variety of societies, then, urging their citizenry toward the modern in a variety of ways -- and, therefore, simultaneously defining the backward in a variety of ways. Of course, those defined as backward may also, in turn, resist the modern in a variety of ways. And so it goes, the plethora of ways that modernity can take" (227). I saw, for example, widows who are using their traditional dyes and weaving methods as a way of supporting their families: they started a co-operative with other widows to pull together their textiles, rent space in a market, and save money towards the purchase of a building. They have business cards and a website. While most speak the native Quiche, some of the women are bilingual and have enough education to read, write and do the necessary math for their cooperative. They are maintaining their tradition and participating in the market. Chicleros have also reclaimed their craft and have begun a cooperative that no only sells the raw chicle to companies in America (like Glee Gum who advertises this heavily), but one cooperative actually manufacture a fully biodegradable gum marketing it as that which will save towns the clean up costs of the biodegradable, synthetic chewing gums.

Here we see Cintron's second point about the discourse of measurement. He writes, "The discourses of measurement tend to belittle other knowing systems -- implicitly, if not explicitly -- or at least to make a prior discourse of measurement obsolete. ...These displaced ways of knowing and talking represent a precision that may now be taken as one more sign of backwardness when compared to the discourses of modernity" (213). Indeed the discourse of measurement that regimented the expansive Maya land, and the state or plantation land that Maya families cannot afford to buy back (to expand their milpas to provide for their growing families) has pushed Maya ways of knowing to extinction for some families, specifically ones that have to travel to work in factories or move to live in factory towns (abandoning all traditional methods of life and living). This leads into Cintron's third point: "The security that a discourse of measurement offers may increase dependence and a certain anxious expectation concerning the power of its control" (214). Indeed, the government might like for all Mayas to abandon their milpas and come to the cities where they can be made legible (be measured). The land and life they abandon in the highlands will leave a great deal of fertile land for the major corporations,and the people will be thorough absorbed into the economic sphere (Cintron's fourth point about the discourse of measurement) -- the sphere subsistence farmers have avoided for a century.

However, the Maya have worked hard not to make their prior discourse of measurement obsolete. Some Maya (specifically Tecpan) allocate a portion of their milpas for export crops (a risky shift that requires knowledge of cultivating new crops, understanding fertilzation, the distribution business, and new taxes) which allows them a semblance of their traditional subsistance farming; or, as mentioned above, using their skills previously used for subsistence living to participate in niche markets (textiles, gum).

As I am writing here, I an keenly aware of Cintron's argument about ethnography. Writing about a people is one discourse of measurement among many that attempts to shape or made order out of that which is overwhelmingly expansive and complex.

Testimonio

Zimmerman, Marc.  Literature and Resistance in Guatemala: Textual Modes and Cultural Politics from El Senor Presidente to Rigoberta Menchu. Volume Two. Ohio: Monographs, 1995.

testimonio

• reveals the hidden secrets of popular traditions in relation to questions of resistances
• provide access to situations and forms of thought unknown  or poorly understood by officially sanctioned culture
• bridges dimensions of the state, social class, and  military institutions (sociology) with , popular traditions and every day life (anthropology) 
• literary testimonio -- as an aesthetically  rich and generally linear first person narration of socially and collectively significant experiences, in which the narrative voice is that of a typical or extraordinary witness or protagonist  who metonymically represents  other individual or groups that have lived through other, similar situations or the circumstances which induce them
• collective representativeness -- intertextual dialogue of voices, reproducing but also creatively reordering historical events in a way which impresses as representative and true and which projects a vision of life and society in need of transformation (12)
• a genre marked by it status as a subaltern discourse, which came to speak from the perspective of middle or lower sectors frustrated, repressed, marginalized, or exploited under capitalism
• democratic humanism (Duchesne) -- the recuperation of those marginalized by the processes of capitalist modernization throughout the third world; the oppresses, repressed, and humiliated takes a stances against the dominant cultural forms and elaborates  its own discursive space; this process takes place with the mediation of an intelligentsia that by definition is lettered (a person who can read and write must mediate the story of the subaltern who is not lettered)
• so...is it mediated or unmediated? Can true testimonio be unmediated? Achugar says that it is inevitably mediated with the intervention of and for the benefit of the lettered; whereas, the left says it is an unmediated voice of a revolutionary-tending social subject constructed as the people.
• Zimmerman and Beverly say that it is a form that takes its place in the struggle for the middle sectors, which are so often crucial in supporting and opposing revolutionary struggles
• Beverly -- a novella-length first person narrative recounted  by the protagonist or witness to the events recounted; testifying or bearing witness and the overall narrative unit is a life or a significant life experience; defined by its conflictive relation with established literary-aesthetic norms and with the institution of literature itself
• often at the margins of literature -- representing women, the insane, the criminal, the proletarian -- excluded from authorized representation
• defined as a nonfictional , popular-democratic form of epic narrative, since the narrative "I"  has a metonymic function as part of its narrative convention and since the form implies that any life so narratwd can have a kind of representivity
• each given testimony  evokes an implicit polyphony of other possible voices, lives, and experiences, and testimonio then involves an erasure of authorial presences and intentionality which makes possible a "comradely complicity between narrator and interlocutor and/or reader" (14)
• interlocutor's function -- what if the narrator requires (which it likely does) an interlocutor with a different ethnic or class background to elicit, edit, publish, and distribute the text? The function can lead to a one-sided questioning  or editing that results in a reactionary articulation of the testimonio as a kind of costumbrismo of the subaltern or the smothering of a genuine popular voice by a well-intentioned but repressive notion of correctness; 
• the narrator-compiler relationship can stand as a figure for the possible union of a radical intelligentsia and the masses -- a combination which has been decisive in the development of third world movements for social change
• gives voices to the previously voiceless, anonymous, collective pueblo
• suggests not charity but solidarity between the intelligentsia and the masses
• audience -- the readinb public which is still class-limited in advanced capitalist  societies; the complicity the form establishes with readers involves their identification with what they may well have seen as an alien or at least distant popular cause; by breaking down distance, testimonio has been important in maintaining and developing the practice of third world solidarity movements (15)
• illusory -- the effect has been produced by a narrator and a compiler;  the direct narrator uses oral story-telling tradition and the compiler makes a text out of the material; a metonymic trace of the real
• novel -- private form; both the story and subject end with the end of the text
• testimonio - -the narrator is a real person who continues living and acting in a real social history that also continue; it cannot be analyzed as a text within itselfness
• calls into question the very institution of literature as an ideological apparatus of alienation and domination; "for the form to have become more and more popular in recent years, means that there are experiences in the world today which cannot be adequately expressed  in forms like the novel, the short story, the lyric poem, or the autobiography == in other words, which would be betrayed by literature as we know it -- Why
• extraliterary or even antiliterary discourse which is its aesthetic effect
• interlocutor -- interviewer as mediator, interviewer as creative and therefore distorting interlocutor, as censor, editor, conveyor of testimony to those whose literary, ideological, and political norms are shaped by the written word
• Zimmerman argues that given the complex play of international, regional, and national forces, testimonio cannot necessarily signify any decisive or definitive transformation.

Farnham: "Ethical Ambiguity" and Teaching about Atrocities

Farnham, J.F. (1983). Ethical ambiguity and the teaching of the Holocaust. English

Journal, 72(3) , 519-542.

Farnham argues for an educational system that tries to sensitize students to ethical matters and to cultivate both complexity and ambiguity in ethics.  His experiences teaching about the Holocaust through literature suggest that the impact of witnessing prisoners and victims abandon their moral codes and follow ethical values geared to survival can rupture a student's binary of good and evil.  Our socially constructed notions of what and who is good or evil come with us as we bear witness/listen to stories of atrocity. We expect an S.S. man to be a "moral monster" just as we expect the "victim to be good and innocent," so when students read about what the victim does to survive (see my notes on Never Fall Down), their preconceived notions/stereotypes interrupt "authentic, analytic responses." Farnham writes: "We honor victims more easilyif they are recognizably more innocent like...Martin Luther King, whereas we tend to say that victims whose qualities violate our own sense of morality deserve what they got" (63).  If we can select or lead students to inquiry about the "ordinary" victims -- ones who do not fit the hero or martyr stock character --  and if we can create a framework of ideas for students to critically engage -- we can trouble this binary. Farnham asks, "Do victims have to be innocent to make their death significant to us?" 

This might be a good place to refer back to Walter Mignolo's work in The Darker Side of Western Modernity (see my notes on that, too).  He talks about the rhetoric of Western modernity based on the logic of coloniality. Where this is relevant is that we -- students and teachers linked with Western rhetoric and coloniality -- come to bear witness as readers/listeners with the values of our Western culture.  Farnham, however, says that because the Nazi's, when speaking about Holocaust literature, "disavowed the Western tradition of the dignity of the individual person" that what was left was a "moral vacuum, a world without traditional ethical values, and it was within this world that the victims tried to survive, some successfully by abandoning their former ethical values in a world without culture, a world in which traditional ethical values, through no fault of the victims, were absent" (64). While I certainly agree that the camps were a moral vacuum, I am not convinced that Hitler was, in fact, not enacting Western ideology and working within the logic of coloniality. There is little in Western culture that values an individual or sees every human being worthy of dignity. Western ideology values the "1%" or what Mignolo identified as all but the 80% of the population living "without."

The "lamb-like" victims that Farnham argues students want to see when they read about atrocities is evidence of Western rhetoric, which has indoctrinated students with notions of America as good, with victims as innocent, with soldiers and guerrillas as bad; thus, when students encounter a victim surviving at the cost of stealing food from a fellow victim or digging a mass grave for another victim or even invoking a punishment upon fellow man for the sake of survival, students/readers/listeners face a crisis because for this victim to fit into the binary, the student must decide the victim was at fault somehow. And how can we say the victim can be held to the same moral standard when imprisoned in this moral vacuum? So the framework of pedagogy needs to provide support for making sense of why students experience this crisis, why they want to turn way or blame rather than reconstruct notions of good and evil  (the Gorgon effect from Clendinen). Farnham writes, " We are in no position to judge the actions of people forced to live without the support of their culture and its values" (64). Here, he is talking about the Judeo-Christian culture whereby to judge a deed morally is to interpret it without context -- and to an extent that is what our students lean toward. How does the logic of death -- certain and irrefutable -- fit with the cultural logic of ethical behavior? 

In the "ethical behavior" section, Farnham talks about the importance of education to sensitize its students to ethical matters of our culture. The ethics that I see in the schools are those of capitalism and free market -- those who work hard get ahead; those who prepare for and participate in the market deserve to be successful; those who are not rich are not rich because they didn't work hard; competition breeds greatness not fairness; and equality is based on opportunity not on the conditions of that opportunity. What Farnham argues in this section is that for a deed to be moral, it need not conform to external principles of authority ( I think he means Judeo-Christian) but that because it "contributes to another person's freedom can make that deed moral in itself (but isn't that a principle?_). I guess the idea here is to bring in notions of obedience and conformity as not necessarily being moral but that we are free to choose or to "determine the moral nature of our deeds" (65), which requires a critical consciousness (thinking of Freire here). 

Now we can think about how ethics reflect culture. I want to make a comparison here that might not work. In literature of atrocity, we can see the logic of ethics in a moral vacuum -- one of survival that is outside of the culture in which the victim lived or was raised.  Behavior may change when people lose the support of their habitual culture. Farnham writes, "...the Holocaust was a rupture in Western culture and thus in Western values." I know what he means here, in the sense that Western culture valued human dignity. However, and here is my comparison, can we begin to think how Western culture and Western values do not value human dignity? Can we talk about how what we see in literature of atrocity and testimony of victims is a consequence of Western rhetoric and the logic of coloniality taken to its logical outcome?  The "normal" environment from which the victims are taken might actually be a facade of sorts, that hegemonic forces constructed and allowed until....? So the argument from Farnham that people can still act freely and ethically without the support of authority holds -- yes, we can and should provide this framework for critical engagement. Mignolo would call this delinking, I think. But, I suggest that teaching about atrocities provides a framework for students to see the rhetoric that has constructed their culture. (I am now imagining if readers in third world countries would experience the same crisis reading literature of atrocity as Western readers. Would they be appalled or think the victims are behaving amorally as they struggle to survive? In McCormick's rendering of Arn Chorn-Pond's experience suriving the "killing fields," did she  impose her rhetorically shaped Western values in the theme about survival's guilt?)

As Farnham suggests that what is latent in the Western tradition in literature and thus student expectations is "the assumption that heroes in books should be models of good behavior," and what "good behavior" means is also part of that tradition, a tradition that schools cultivate, a tradition that, as I have been arguing, is about conforming to Western rhetoric and the logic of coloniality -- capitalism rather than social democracy.

• ·         An education system which does not try to sensistize its students to ethical matters fails
• ·         What materials do you use to sensitize students to ethical matters?
• ·         Ethical values are one of the voices with which culture speaks to use
• ·         Examples of individuals and groups whose moral behavior disintegrated when they were deprived of the support of culture
• ·         What happens when we lose touch with the morals our culture teachers and conditions us to observe
• ·         Not every deed to be moral must be performed in obedience to some external principle of authority; performing a deed because it contributres to another person’s freedom can make that deed moral in itself
• ·         Existential approach to ethics – a deed is good because it contributes to another person’s freedom to be, not because it conforms to some external principle of authority, our freedom being that which defines us as human
• ·         Simone de Beauvoir in the Ethics of Ambiguity – choice and the responsibility which dervies from free choice;
• ·         Michael Siegel, We want to encourage the growth of citizens who can say no to authority when they judge the response necessary
• ·         Ethical behavior is not necessarily obedient behavior, not merely conformity to an external set of values – when we practice our freedom, we make ourselves more available to error than if we were to obey a fixed set of values which brook no ambiguity
• ·         While culture may support us in acting ethically, we are free at all times under all conditions to determine the moral nature of our deeds, as long as we are not deprived  of consciousness and self-awareness
• ·         Surveys the literary texts where ethically ambiguous occurrences reveal ethical choices without cultural support –