hannah.arendt@MySpace.com

As everyone knows, MySpace.com is a web-based communications network featuring software tools that enable its members to create “profiles” of themselves, that is, public personae, not only in the form of verbal information but also by means of a variety of expressive media such as digital images, video, and music. Indeed, the sheer act of presenting (or representing) oneself is a central activity of MySpace members. In addition to profiling themselves, however, members may also attract other members, who become their “friends,” and contact friends already in their network. Contact takes the form of posting commentary and testimonia on profiles (which are retained or deleted at the profiler’s discretion), which may then be commented on in turn by the profiler or others. The effect is to bring into being a “community” – if that is the right term – that is powerfully centered on individuals and their performance, through the expressive media available to them, of their own personalities. There is nothing necessarily “confessional” about this, though the occasional confession may take place. The atmosphere is more akin to the theatrical: what matters are the style, the stance, the intensity, and attraction of the personalities who appear to one another. Because the performances of their identities are “witnessed,” albeit virtually, by others, the question of who one is has as much to do with the opinions of others as with the raw data of one’s own profile. Seeing and being seen, in other words, or what the social interaction design theorist Adrian Chan characterizes as “presence” – presence constituted through the participation of witnesses who form judgments and comment on what they see – is what matters.

What sort of a “space” is MySpace, then? Some have pointed out that it is not a public space, because the kind of talk that goes on in it is anything but rational deliberation aimed at reaching a consensus on a matter of common concern. (When I asked my 16-year-old daughter whether anyone on MySpace discussed politics, she looked at me in silence but with an expression of grave concern for my mental well-being.) But this is to invoke an overly narrow conception of public space and its value.

For a more expansive perspective, we can turn to the insights of Hannah Arendt. For Arendt, the point of establishing a public space is to enable the experience of freedom and the appearance of individual distinction. Freedom ¬– that is, spontaneous, creative, unscripted activity in speech or deed – is possible to the extent that purely instrumental enterprises, activities that are valuable and meaningful only because they contribute to the achievement of a pre-established goal, are excluded. That exclusion is in large part what constitutes a public space. The participants in a public space come together for the sheer intrinsic pleasure of interacting with one another – seeing and being seen. Since nobody is in charge, there are neither leaders nor followers, but only peers who are at the same time actors and who might, if they are sufficiently impressive, become leaders of a sort and for a time. What matters here is the quality of an actor’s performance, above all his performance of his identity. That, of course, is a matter of taste, an aesthetic judgment, and Arendt insisted that the kind of commentary appropriate to what goes on in public is closer to literary criticism – how does this or that strike us, what does it mean? – than to the application of universal principles in accordance with the rules of rational argumentation.

To a great extent, this is the world of MySpace. Undoubtedly, there are many members who are more concerned with blending in than standing out, and so have little interest in what Arendt characterized as the “fiercely agonal spirit” that dominated what was for her the exemplary public space of the ancient Athenian polis. Nevertheless, agonism is very much on offer in the drive towards self-display, to distinguish oneself from others, to be noticed, to attract an audience, and to do so, again, in freedom – in a non-regulated environment where the only authority is that constituted momentarily by the expressed judgments of witnesses, such that whatever consensus might temporarily be achieved could be undermined at any time by the introduction of a fresh point of view.

As the digital communications theorist Danah Boyd has pointed out, it is no accident that it is young people, primarily teenagers, who have flocked to MySpace. Of course, they call what they do there “hanging out” and being “cool,” not the enactment of freedom. But perhaps they should. Their lives are, after all, profoundly characterized by the two elements that Arendt found most inimical to freedom: subjection to an external, undebatable goal, and regulation by means of rulership and rules. From school to home, this picture changes very little for today’s teenagers, for whom the steady parental and political drumbeat to organize their entire lives according to the imperative of enhancing their future marketability must be very close to unbearable.

Readers of Arendt, however, will no doubt be thinking at this point that Arendt herself was adamant that children must be protected from the potential calamities of the public sphere and its freedom. The public sphere is, she pointed out, essentially anarchic, because no one can predict or control the consequences of what is said and done there. Who one is as a public figure depends on reputation, and a reputation can go overnight from good to bad. Adults can decide to take on the risks of appearing in public, but children need a stabler, safer, more predictable world.

If it were only a matter of reputation, we might be inclined to regard Arendt’s views on children as merely quaint. Today’s teenagers cannot avoid an education in freedom – that is, in imagination and spontaneity – for nothing less will equip them with the spiritual resources to find meaning in a cold and lonely society (certainly not Creationism or Intelligent Design). But as the news media and politicians have lately insisted, there are other dangers that come along with the freedom of expression and communication provided by sites like MySpace – though it is also clear that these dangers have been hysterically exaggerated. Education, awareness, and forms of accountability are clearly in order. But it would be a travesty if, in the name of safety and security, measures were taken to suppress the very features by means of which MySpace shelters freedom for self-assertion and self-development for a generation badly in need of it.

WAY awesome Bangladeshi kids (OR: Community Power and the Domestic Sphere, if that's more your style)

Utterly swamped with work over the past couple days, I hate that I left whatever readership the fledgling blog (can I call it a blogling?) has acquired at this point on a bit of a hiatus. But someone's got to make sure that crazy people don't become the Surgeon General. All the worse, I left y'all on a down note with the post on domestic violence. But fear not, I'm back and I have good news.

In an incontrovertible display of badassery, local Bangladeshi children intervened to stop one of their classmates from being forced into marriage by her father.

Classmates of a 13-year-old Bangladeshi school girl due to enter a forced marriage have united to stop the ceremony going ahead, police say.

Around 50 pupils in the town of Satkhira took to the streets to demand that Habiba Sultana's wedding be called off, they say.

Pupils even submitted a petition to police urging them to take action.

Apparently, the police actually acted on the demands of the children. After summoning the father and ordering him to cancel the marriage, they forced him to sign a bond in which he agreed not to wed his daughter while she was still a child. Child marriages are illegal in Bangladesh.

Though I certainly don't want to be read as saying that arranged marriages are morally equivalent to domestic abuse, I think there are grounds for comparison between what went right in this instance and what so frequently goes wrong in addressing domestic violence through the courts in the United States (see the post below for more on that).

In both instances, a powerful male is enabled by familial power dynamics to exert nearly uninterrupted power within the home. The article about Sultana notes that she did not resist the marriage herself because she was too afraid. Fear of violent reprisal from the abuser is a frequently cited reason for not resisting domestic violence - and a good one: women who attempt to fight with or flee from their abuser are more likely to be seriously injured or killed.

What makes all the difference in countering male power in the domestic sphere is the existence of a community power structure that women and children can access. The United States' divorce and custody courts, as the past article showed, are all too frequently not part of such a power structure. When they decide not to investigate claims of abuse, they cut off women and children from the possibility of intervention and leave the abusers power unchallenged. What went right in Bangladesh was that the police were willing to do just the opposite (although under considerable pressure - 50 of anyone at your local police station, even 13-year-old children would be difficult to ignore). But that also goes to show the importance of informal community power dynamics in protecting victims of mistreatment within the home. Because Sultana could relay her fear about her father and the marriage to her classmates, they could intervene on her behalf. Ultimately, what made the community power structure a benefit to Sultana, rather than the hindrance that community and state power structures so frequently are, is that there was synergy between Sultana's immediate social network and the state agency, which made the police susceptible to the demands of the community.

I think the moral of this story may well be the (not terribly surprising) revelation that democratic community power structures can alleviate domestic violence by permitting women and children to seek interventions which balance out the inegalitarian power relationships of the domestic sphere. Letting bureaucrats and judges make top-down decisions without any accountability simply doesn't give women and children the stake in the system that they need. So democratization all the way down, all around. (Though all said I'm not entirely thrilled by imagining a world where you can get your abuse claims promptly investigated but only provided you can marshal a batallion of angry women to kick ass at the courthouse). So that's the moral if your a theory hack anyway. A less academic lesson is simply that those kids are made of 100% awesome, and its always uplifting to see young people organizing to give power to the powerless. I hope their parents are proud.

No Asylum

Though the sentiment most associated with Guantanamo is certainly outrage, readers of Kafka can only greet the reports from the world-infamous prison with grim familiarity. The intractable tangle of bureaucratic language and legal jargon that has confounded what progress the executive is willing to attempt – trials canceled because what we once thought were “illegal enemy combatants”, already a dubious conceptual category, have not proven to be discernibly “illegal” but merely “enemy combatants” of a more vanilla variety – recall the unnavigable bureaucracy of the The Castle, while Josef K could only take Jose Padilla as kin.

But long before Guantanamo became the symbol par excellence of America's institutional nightmares and grotesque easiness with egregious human rights abuses, Kafkaesque tales of absurdity and horror could be heard. Or at least they should have been.

Imagine a prisoner. He is in solitary confinement, spending twenty-three hours a day in utter isolation. Typically unsupervised, he babbles to himself, pound the walls with his fists and head. He may come to occupy an entirely hallucinated world. Or he may attempt suicide. He may succeed. If he even consciously committed a crime, his memory of the event may have deteriorated alongside his other capacities. You wouldn't find this man in Cuba. You would find him in New York City. And not just in the past six years, when Guantanamo's dark odyssey unfolded, but at virtually any point in the past three decades.

Solitary Housing Units (SHUs) are the places that too many prisoners call home. They are not easy for anyone to withstand. But for the mentally ill, they are sites of unparalleled suffering. The Department of Justice concedes that 16% of America's inmate population suffers from a diagnosable mental illness. The American Psychological Association and Human Rights Watch estimate that the number is closer to 1 in 5. Depression, schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, and many other acute mental illnesses impact over some 300,000 inmates. For some, mental illness motivated their crime. For others mental illness emerged after imprisonment. But either way, the likelihood that mentally ill prisoners will end up in SHUs is extreme. As Jamie Fellner of Human Rights Watch explains:

They end up in segregation because their illness makes them less able than other prisoners to cope with prison life. They are more likely to be victimized and more likely to be injured in a fight. They are more likely to break the rules. They are more likely to behave in ways that annoy, disgust and even enrage security staff who have scant training in how to recognize, much less cope with, symptoms of mental illness.

Not only are they more likely to end up in SHUs, but solitary confinement is uniquely hellish for inmates suffering from mental illnesses because it virtually guarantees that their condition will deteriorate as their needs go unaddressed. Fellner continues:

The very architecture of SHU facilities, as well as SHU rules, keep them from receiving group therapy, up therapy, individual therapy, daily living skill training, educational and vocational programs, structured and unstructured group recreation and other activities that can play a crucial role in restoring or improving mental health—or at the very least in preventing further deterioration in the patient’s psychiatric condition.

Fortunately, the State of New York has taken action to close this disturbing chapter in the history of America's prison system. S333, once signed by Governor Spitzer, will amend New York's correction and mental hygiene laws so that inmates suffering from mental illnesses will not be eligible for placement in SHUs. All inmates being considered for SHU placement must first be screened by a board of professionals prior to transference. Those found to be suffering from mental illnesses will be placed into special treatment programs where supervision and close treatment are mandated by law. A simple attentiveness has saved hundreds of women and men from a hellish existence, and it is possible that more states will take thus cue from New York. It is certainly welcome news. But it is also a relatively minor step in correcting the sprawling system of bureaucratic shortcomings, institutional failures, and social aporiae that have brought about the system in which the inhumanities described above can occur.

America's health and human services system, sprawling beast that it is, has utterly failed the mentally ill of this country. The web of failed and flagging programs that has produced the deplorable status quo is so complex and mutually reinforcing that it is difficult to even begin the discussion. But one thing is certain: responding to the crisis of mental health care in this country will be impossible within an individualist paradigm. Reinvigorated communities and an ethic of care must have a part in the process – easy enough to theorize, but wickedly difficult to implement since the communities and caregivers in most need of solutions already have their resources stretched thin.

Americans, committed to an ideology where “equal opportunity” is seen as the upper limit on egalitarian obligations tend to downplay inequalities in outcome. And the mantra of “individual responsibility”has dealt plenty of harm to the robust redistributive and welfare-provision policies that would actually be needed to redress the dire inequalities of wealth and assets that cut across America's socio-political landscape.

The dire implications for the mentally ill are made clear in this eye-opening report on mental health care in low income communities. Medicaid and Medicare programs that can't reimburse hospitals enough to even keep sufficient numbers of psychiatrists on the payroll make affordable mental health service hard to find. For uninsured Americans, or for Americans whose providers don't practice parity for mental health, mental health problems may go untreated until a serious lapse lands the sufferer in jail or in an emergency department (ED). Of course, EDs themselves, especially those serving low-income communities where huge numbers of people are on Medicaid or totally uninsured (and on avearage 20% of all mentally ill people are uninsured), have to cut back on which services they can provide and frequently send mental health patients away without treatment, as their emergencies are often easier to ignore than those suffering a physical emergency. Inadequate Social Security payouts are a problem, too. Currently, SSI payments average $632 a month. But a modest, single-bedroom apartment in the United States averages $715 a month. People dependent on SSI for income simply can't compete in the current housing climate. And, of course, many of America's mentally ill, unable to find consistent work, are in precisely that position. So they end up untreated on the streets, often facing prison as the ultimate destination. With all of these support networks – Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security, public hospitals – failing, is it any wonder the prison system has emerged as the de facto “solution” to the problem of mental illness – a solution that looks increasingly like reinstitutionalization?

Some necessary solutions are clear: Medicaid and Medicare must receive more funding, SSI payouts must increase, housing prices may need to be capped or controlled, and government-paid health care (that includes parity for mental health care), needs to become a reality. The government should provide people who cannot afford a place to live and the mental health care they need with the income and assets necessary for survival.

But a more fundamental shift is also necessary. It is interesting to observe the drastic differences in treatment between the developmentally disabled and mentally retarded on one hand, and those suffering from psychological illness on the other. Americans, defying the typical individualist ethos of self-reliance, have by and large stepped up to the plate to provide for the former group (Vladeck, 2005). Many of the coverage caps in Medicare/Medicaid programs have been addressed, and political advocacy has been more effective on their behalf. It seems that Americans can comprehend permanent disability, but the idea that a person may experience episodic mental illness that requires extending the offer of assistance throughout a lifetime, to be taken as needed, strikes many as a blank check for welfare. People must either announce “dependency” (perhaps the most loaded word in the wide lexicon of social policy) or strike out on their own. Gray areas need not apply.

Feminist critics like Iris Marion Young have long pointed out the obvious problem with this ideological construct: most everyone falls somewhere in the middle of the autonomous/dependent spectrum. Those of us who can find all of the care we need within the private sphere – through family or friends – are fortunate, but atypically privileged. Again, it is the most vulnerable, those for whom everyday support structures are inadequate or absent, whose cases force us to reexamine our public policy. But in any event, we should not make the error of believing that it is only those people who are dependent while the rest of us live autonomous lives. The binary cannot stand, and social services ought to be implemented with the diversity of cases in mind. The goal of social policy should be the creation of communities of mutual aid which respond to the emergent needs and crises of members, but perhaps more importantly, support and care for members in affirmative ways that make crisis intervention less and less necessary.

At the level of policy, this might look something like a flexible fund, perhaps created at federal or state-wide levels so that patterns of inequality would not leave the most vulnerable communities with the least funding, that could be applied to support EDs, aid needy people in finding housing, or pay for routine psychological wellness exams for all who consented to them. These types of solutions would encourage communities to come together and analyze their needs, rather than suffering under larger bureaucracies whose shortcomings only become clear in the wake of failure. A community-oriented approach would also empower the mentally ill to participate in and with community aid projects, rather than facing strictly medical/institutional solutions that dehumanize on the basis of condition.

In short, a socialism that is truly “social” will emphasize community and communication as means of empowering and nurturing the most vulnerable segments of society, rather than expecting the kind of harrowing systems that have been producing incomprehensible no-exit nightmares since Kafka's day to do the work of justice. Nowhere is the need for such a revolution in thinking more apparent than in the crisis facing the mentally ill today. With their fate so firmly in the hands of ailing bureaucracies, the mentally ill in America are often the hapless playthings of a system that is dully malevolent in its neglect. Where the status quo produces Kafkaesque vertigo, it is incumbent on all who see the social bond as a site of obligation to respond with care.