The Banana Peel Project

alternate title: “How to use statistics for good instead of evil”

So here’s a little experiment.  Statistics are a tool of governmentality, a broad and messy tactic for imposing order on a chaotic world.  But if technologies are inherently neutral, if tools and techniques and arts are ambiguous actors on the social stage, then can’t they be used for all kinds of things?  I’m starting to think that there are two kinds of statistics: bad statistics, and bad statistics that you agree with anyway.  Let’s see if we can make this work.

Let’s pretend for just a moment that marijuana is a gateway drug, that taxing pot won’t help improve the economy, that cannabis causes cancer, and that legalizing it won’t hamstring Mexican cartels.  Let’s pretend that the war on drugs has made some slight progress in reducing the number of people who use marijuana.  And—just for kicks—let’s pretend that pot makes otherwise conscientious citizens into fiendish psychopaths.

Since so many commentators these days seem incapable of distinguishing fiction from reality, let me take a moment to draw the line for them.  It’s a shame that I have to, but here we go anyway:

• Marijuana is not a gateway drug.  Last week, in a bumbling defense of current federal marijuana policy, FBI Director Robert Mueller pointed out that “if you talk to parents who have lost their children to drugs, they will inevitably say that they started off with marijuana.”  U.S. Representative Steve Cohen (D-TN) immediately responded by adding: “They probably started off with milk and then went to beer, and then they went to bourbon, and then they might have gone to marijuana.  The gateway theory doesn’t work.  It’s a reality.”  I might have added that they probably went to marijuana before they went to bourbon, since under current federal law it’s much, much easier for a minor to get weed than it is to get alcohol.  Even in Tennessee.

• Taxing pot will help the economy.  Prominent legislators like Betty Yee, Chair of the California Board of Equalization, have argued that legalizing and taxing marijuana would generate more than $1.3 billion a year in California alone.  Plus, according to a study by Harvard economics professor Jeffrey Miron, local and federal governments would save nearly $13 billion a year in criminal justice costs, a savings which does not include the $6.7 billion a year that would be gained in taxes and fees on marijuana sales at the federal level.

• Cannabis does not cause cancer.  In fact, an upcoming study in the peer-reviewed journal Pharmacological Research confirms previous research showing that endocannabinoids—chemicals occurring naturally in the human body which help to regulate appetite, moods, and memory that are functionally and structurally related to THC, the active chemical in marijuana—may have “significant potential in gastrointestinal disease models that involve inflammation and cancer, including potentially, anti-metastasizing efficacy.”  What this means is not only that people with ailments like inflammatory bowel disease (IBD) might be significantly helped by taking cannabis but that cannabis might actually help prevent intestinal cancer.  And besides, smoking pot (which does, over time, cause pulmonary damage) isn’t the only way to get its effects—there are actually many kinds of smokeless delivery systems.  A 2007 study in another peer-reviewed journal, Clinical Pharmacology and Therapeutics, for example, demonstrated that vaporizers are “a safe and effective mode of delivery of THC.”

• Legalizing marijuana will cripple the cartels.  Arizona Attorney General Terry Goddard recently testified in the Senate that “The violence that we see in Mexico is fueled 65 to 70 percent by the [illicit] trade in one drug: marijuana.”  And Sidney Weintraub, a senior political economist at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, has pointed out that marijuana accounts for an estimated 40% of all illegal drugs sold by criminal cartels in the United States.  That’s perhaps $10 billion that would be taken directly out of the cartels’ pockets if marijuana were legalized.  Need I even mention what happened the last time a popular drug was harshly criminalized?  I didn’t think so.

• The war on drugs has failed in every possible way.  Of course we all remember Ronald Reagan’s remarks way back in 1982 announcing the beginning of the newest war to end all wars.

We’re rejecting the helpless attitude that drug use is so rampant that we’re defenseless to do anything about it. We’re taking down the surrender flag that has flown over so many drug efforts; we’re running up a battle flag. We can fight the drug problem, and we can win.

Reagan and his fellow drug warriors were wrong that it was a war they could win. The war on drugs has clearly failed to keep kids away from marijuana—or any other drug, for that matter—as indicated by a 2008 survey showing that 84% of high school seniors say that marijuana is still “fairly easy” or “very easy” to get.  But Mr. Reagan was right about one thing: he was right that it is possible to do something about the drug problem.  Because the real “drug problem” is not “drug use” but (as it turns out) “drug policy.”

As far as the last part of our little fantasy goes—that marijuana transforms users into zombies, rapists, and murderers—what needs to be said?  If you, dear reader, haven’t tried marijuana yourself, chances are that you know someone who has.  In 2006, the U.S. Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (SAMHSA) estimated that over 10% of all Americans over the age of 12, and over 28% (yes, more than a quarter) of everyone between 18 and 25, had used marijuana in the previous year.  And almost 100 million Americans (yes, nearly a third of the entire country) have used marijuana in their lifetime.

But of course, most people know this.  Most people know that pot won’t kill you, that it makes some things easier (like intestinal cramps) and other things harder (like driving), that smoking pot doesn’t make you more inclined to shoot heroin, and that only George Romero can make a zombie.  So it’s still somewhat astounding to me that President Obama still hasn’t taken marijuana legalization seriously—even, as you must recall, going so far as to laugh at his most valuable constituency. The Prez:

There was one question that was voted on that ranked fairly high [on the online poll] and that was whether legalizing marijuana would improve the economy and job creation.  And I don’t know what this says about the online audience, but [giggles and smirks] this was a fairly popular question.

Indeed.  Well, I think everybody knows what it says about the online audience—and that’s exactly my point.

Marijuana is no longer a mystery, if it ever was.  Check out TIME magazine’s recent photo essay on the “legally hazy” cannabis culture, or last year’s special report in The New Yorker on the marijuana trade, or Andrew Sullivan’s ongoing blog series “The Cannabis Closet” for The Atlantic Monthly.   So, now, let’s stop pretending that prohibition works, let’s stop pretending that taxation isn’t a good idea, and let’s stop pretending that it’s really only slackers and deviants who use marijuana.  And now that we’re done pretending, maybe we can start to have a real conversation.

So, did it work?  Are you convinced?  Am I convinced?

Genealogy avoids the search for depth.  Instead, it seeks the surfaces of events, small details, minor shifts, and subtle contours.  It shuns the profundity of the great thinkers our tradition has produced and revered; its archenemy is Plato. (Dreyfus & Rabinow, Foucault: Beyond Structuralism and Hermeneutics, 106)

To write genealogy is to skim along the surface of things.  It does not look for a deeper meaning in the movements of history, but it acknowledges that a lot happens without us knowing about it.  It insists on the arbitrariness of rationalities, but it speaks the language of “categories,” “elements,”  “systems,” “codes,” and “techniques.”  It is the logos of genea, the reason of birth.

Genealogy as logos looks for differences among and within emergences.  Its objects (“events” and “assemblages”) are appearances, productions, positivies.  They are births in the field of thought.  Likewise, sociology as logos looks for differences among and within “societies”; anthropology as logos looks for differences among and within “anthropos” (Dasein or the human); and pharmacology as logos looks for differences among and within drugs, “remedies,” “medicines,” those forces that make us stray from our “general, natural, habitual paths and laws” (Derrida, Dissemination, 70).  In each case, logos is involved in the production of difference, the determination of a field of knowledge.  This is the function of genealogy.

Genealogy watches the interstices between things and thoughts.  It tries to locate the spaces within which problems form at different scales and at different times.  It asks the surprisingly simple question, How is it possible to say that, now?  It locates those spaces between fields of discourse where something new forms: “thought” or “memory.”  It is art, resistance, conscious purpose, a strategic movement with respect to everything in the world that is outside.

It is as if the relations of the outside folded back to create a doubling, allow a relation to oneself to emerge, and constitute an inside which is hollowed out and develops its own unique dimension. (Deleuze, Foucault, 100)

Thought occurs in this space.  And genealogy tries to identify where and how it happens.  From the inside, genealogy carves out a space where it is possible to think something new.

The play of forces in any particular historical situation is made possible by the space which defines them.  It is this field or clearing which is primary. (Dreyfus & Rabinow, 109)

The human ability to build wondrous spaces must be accompanied by an equally wondrous sensitivity to the needs of the other creatures that inhabit those spaces.  These other creatures are critters, coalescences, dreams, thoughts, lives, and words.  We have a responsibility to them and to ourselves.  And in order to behave responsibly, we

have to learn how to look.  You have to open yourself to the data.  TV offers incredible amounts of psychic data.  It opens ancient memories of world birth, it welcomes us into the grid, the little network of buzzing dots that make up the picture pattern…The medium practically overflows with sacred formulas if we can remember how to respond innocently and get past our irritation, weariness, and disgust. (Don DeLillo, White Noise, 51)

The world, our world, is teeming with meaning.  Thoughts and ideas and new encounters constantly scatter across our vision, bewildering flashes of colors and lights that leave us perpetually wondering if we’ll ever find our balance.  This “white noise” seems to lurk at the edge of everybody’s vision.  Maybe that is what we are so afraid of.  Maybe we do have to learn something new, or maybe we have to forget something that we’ve already learned.  Either way, there must be a way of finding our way through the storm, a way of watching and acting that is both wise and innocent.

How can the world, which is given as the object of knowledge, be at the same time also the place where the ethical subject of truth manifests and tests itself? How can we have a subject of knowledge that takes the world as its object through a techne, and a subject of self-experience that takes the same world, in a radically different form, as the place for its test [épreuve]? And if the task we inherit from the Enlightenment is to interrogate the foundations of our system of objective knowledge, then it is also that of interrogating what the modalities of the experience of the self are grounded on. (Foucault, The Hermeneutics of the Subject)

Let’s begin with the practice of writing.  Writing is, if nothing else, a problem.  A problem to be thought about, worried about, and—if all goes well—overcome.  Leaving aside any questions about whether such a victory can ever truly be fully successful, and at least for the moment sidestepping any doubts as to the value of such an exercise, I present a simple problem: How do you begin to write that which has not yet been thought?

It begins with a letting-go, a cautious release, a step into the unknown.  Setting the fingers to work with no discernible goal is, for the reflexive mind, a terrifying endeavor.  Who, after all, knows where such movement might lead?  Trepidation and uncertainty are surely understandable in such a situation.  Exposing thought for what it is—a haphazard, improvisational affair with no guarantee of coherence or clarity—is a kind of nakedness that cannot be concealed.  No, the nakedness of writing must be flaunted if it is to be anything other than paralyzing.

The activity of giving form to the as-yet-unthought demands that the writer be comfortable with chaos, with the threat of a possible dissolution or forgetting of self.  But the problem is far from resolved.  Spinning freely in the pregnant void of space, distracted and confused by the effervescent meaningless of mixed metaphors, something must eventually be grasped.

Writing, of course, is a form of communication.  A strategic selection of possible meanings of the word, excluding (as discourse tends to do) those designated obsolete and rare, yields the following:

communication, n.
•    Interpersonal contact, social interaction, association, intercourse
•    The action of communicating something (as heat, feeling, motion, etc.), or of giving something to be shared
•    The transmission or exchange of information, knowledge, or ideas, by means of speech, writing, mechanical or electronic media, etc.
•    Access or means of access between two or more persons or places; the fact of being connected by a physical link, or by a practicable route; connection, passage (between two places, vessels, spaces, etc.) (OED online)

Scattered among all of these definitions are metaphors of movement, of a transposition between entities, each of whom has something at stake in the exchange.  People, things, and places risk much in such encounters—stability, identity, autonomy, and security are all up for grabs wherever communication happens.  The act of writing is just such a destabilization, involving the movement of thought between diverse spaces and places.  It is the willful establishment of a relation of intra-action between writer and reader (even if this reader is simply the writer in another moment).

Writing is, in this sense, a “medium” or meeting place.  But it is a medium of a very special kind.  It is a form of working-together, of recognizing that neither writer nor (potential, present, or future) reader will be the same when the exchange is over.  And to understand the activity of writing in this way—to see writing as a medium of mutual creation—is to understand it as a form of communication.

There is another sense in which writing “works”.  It is a mode of production, a way of making something new.  Writing demands respect, both for the materiality of the practice and for its power to shape and re-shape the entities it touches.  It entails an obligation to recognize that it is impossible to say (or articulate, or write, or render) anything without transforming it in the process. It requires, like modernism, “a feeling of obligation to grasp and participate in the transformations [of things]”.

This sensibility takes the mode of a keen awareness that the taken-for-granted can change, that new entities appear, that our practices of making are closely linked to those entities, that we name them, that we group them, that we experiment with them, that we discover different contours when deploying questions and techniques…Such an obligation, once it becomes reflexive, can become an ethic of experimentation. (Rabinow, Anthropos Today)

Experimentation is, of course, just a word that grown-ups use when what they really want to say is “play”.  Writing is a practice of figuration, a creatively self-conscious activity.  It is the quiet clicking of keys, the constriction of the iris, the rhythm of neural networks, the concatenation of symbols.  The practice of writing must be constantly tested, against the world and against itself, if it is to continue to work.  To play with writing—not just in the sense of playing with words but in the sense of relentlessly messing with its form, its mode, and its object—is to keep it alive.

The end of all this experimentation is a re-membering, a reattachment of body parts which had been forgotten in the first few moments of spinning through space.  After floating around naked for a while, unsure of where my fingers were taking me, a toolkit has gradually been assembled, brimming with shiny new gadgets and tools.  And I seem to have written quite a lot.

Now, let’s go find some more problems.