Kritik

Michael Verderame, The Stuplime Object of Ideology: Report from MLA

2012-01-23T11:19:00.007-06:00

Projected European Coastal Changes after a Rise in Sea Level

[Below Michael Verderame, a graduate student affiliate in English and recipient of a Unit for Criticism travel grant last fall, writes about his recent experience at a panel on climate change and the humanities at the 2012 Modern Language Association annual convention.]

The Stuplime Object of Ideology: Report from MLA

Written by Michael Verderame (English)

Recently I randomly came across three news stories. One, an opinion piece, lamented the (by-now predictable) failure of the international community to take meaningful action on climate change. An article on tourism pointed out that Antarctic tourism has boomed over the last 15 years as the disappearance of sea ice has enabled cruise ships to penetrate more deeply into that most forbidding of terrain than ever before. And a political article described the attacks suffered by Newt Gingrich at the hands of some of his Republican rivals, not for any of his host of reactionary and half-baked policy proposals, but for the fact that a few years ago he had sat alongside Nancy Pelosi and articulated the need for action on climate change. Like Governor Jon Huntsman, who alone among the Republican presidential candidates affirmed that he believes the earth is growing warmer as a result of human activity, Gingrich may have paid a high political price for this short-lived dissent from climate-change skepticism, which has only recently congealed into orthodoxy on the American Right.

These stories illustrate the strange status of climate change as a political and cultural subject in the U.S. today. Every year scientific projections grow more and more dire, yet each year the likelihood of meaningful, coordinated political action diminishes. After the failure of a heavily compromised energy bill last year, it seems less and less likely that the U.S., regardless of which party controls the government, will address the issue.

At a panel I participated in at this year’s Modern Language Association convention, on humanistic approaches to climate change, fellow panelist Stephen Sipirstein (Ph.D. candidate in English at the University of Oregon) suggested some possible reasons for the inattention to climate change that went beyond the political and economic factors usually cited. He proposed a new theoretical frame for addressing the issue. Climate change as a cultural subject, he argued, is a textbook example of the phenomenon denoted by Sianne Ngai, as “stuplimity.” Like the sublime, the stuplime is overpoweringly vast to the point that our intellectual and sensory faculties are disoriented. Climate change occurs on a scale and timeframe that is so outside of our embodied experience as to be almost incomprehensible. Yet unlike classical formulations of the sublime by Burke and Freud as a source of energy and action, the distinctly modern phenomenon of the “stuplime” is enervating and stupefying, beating us into inaction through an accumulation of incomprehensible information. The stuplime is simultaneously shocking and boring. Each frightening new piece of data or dire prediction, each report of disappearing species or of freakish weather,vanished glaciers or rising sea levels, force us deeper and deeper into a kind of waking stupor in which we seem to lack all agency, rather than mobilizing us into action.

I found this an intriguing way of thinking about our difficulties in navigating seemingly intractable public policy problems such as climate change. Of course, there is nothing essentially “stuplime” about climate change—many people do become energized around the issue—but as a large-scale phenomenon it does seem to me to have some descriptive power, which suggests, as many humanists working on climate change have always maintained, that we need to understand climate change as a cultural subject as well as a technocratic and political problem. How we as a species navigate these treacherous waters may depend in large part on our ability to understand, diagnose, and address the unexamined structures of feeling that shape our responses.While outright climate change denialists (or skeptics, to use their preferred branding), who are marginal in the scientific community but who receive generous funding and media exposure, are usually cast as the principal villain, a recent column by Mark Hertsgaard drew attention to the perhaps more pernicious “de facto denialists”: “Serious people who actually run governments, or at least negotiate on behalf of those who do,” have negotiated an agreement that fails to meet the 2-degree Celsius target widely believed to be the absolute maximum temperature rise that can be permitted to have any chance of avoiding catastrophic climate impacts. Hertsgaard argues that we don’t need the likes of Ron Paul and Michelle Bachmann to derail meaningful action on climate change. The leaders of the world’s wealthiest and most powerful countries, all of whom affirm climate science and many of whom are aligned with center-left governments, are already doing a good job of that.

While activists have been doing innovative, visible, energetic and, to some extent, successful work around issues such as mountaintop mining and the Keystone pipeline, well-funded denialists manage to create enough debate in the public mind about the underlying science. Many of the denialists use science to claim that the lack of empirical evidence gives enough reason to doubt arguments by environmental activists. Facing a global economic crisis, political and business leaders, and the general public, choose to avoid the significant cuts in consumption and investments in energy alternatives that climate scientists warn are necessary but which might well have devastating economic effects. And the neoliberal ideology that has so thoroughly saturated our thinking makes it easy to conceive of environmental activism individualistically: if we all just drive a little less, change our light bulbs, and unplug our cellphone chargers, maybe the worst results will be averted.

A friend recently mentioned to me that his approach on climate change at this point is simply to hope for the best; so cynical had he, and many like him, become about the possibility of political action. This very cynicism, it seems to me, might be more pernicious than the denialism of the hard Right. And yet it is something of a puzzle. Why have many of us who recognize the science of climate change come to see inaction as inevitable? “Stuplimity” is one way of understanding this puzzling phenomenon.

Letter from the Director, Spring 2012

2012-01-23T10:08:00.007-06:00

Dear Colleagues,

As my previous mails may have already suggested, there is much good news afoot for the Unit for Criticism! Last week we launched our new Criticism & Interpretive Theory fellowship program (deadline 3/2); and our events for this semester include a February 10 winter symposium, The Ends of History, organized with the Trowbridge Office on American Literature, Culture, & Society; as well as a faculty/grad seminar, co-organized with IPRH and faculty in Art History and Sociology (about to begin on Thursday, January 26). The seminar will meet 5 times over the course of the semester for conversations in anticipation of BEYOND UTOPIA? Art, Theory, & the Coming of “Spring,” an April 26-27 conference on aesthetics, politics, and new revolutionary movements, featuring keynote lectures from Bonnie Honig (Northwestern), Saba Mahmood (Berkeley), and Eyal Weizman (Goldsmiths). On behalf of myself, Nicholson Associate Director J. B. Capino and the Unit’s research assistants, Mike Black & mc Anderson, I welcome you to take part in these events as well as to follow some of our doings on Kritik, the Unit’s weblog. I also want to mention that Mad World: Sex, Politics, Style & the 1960s, co-edited by Lilya Kaganovsky, Robert A. Rushing, and me, a project that began with a February 2010 winter symposium, is now in production with Duke University Press.

The Ends of History explores the interaction of formalism and historicism and includes papers by Srinivas Aravamudan (Duke), Stephen Best (Berkeley), Rachel Buurma (Swarthmore), Manu Goswami (NYU) , Heather Love (Penn), and Walter Benn Michaels (UIC) as well as a closing roundtable with Illinois colleagues in American Indian Studies, English, French, and History. The day before the symposium, on Thursday 2/9 at 3:30pm, Aravamudan will lead a seminar on “The Character of the University”: if you would like to register, there are still a few slots open (simply reply to this mail and we will add you on a first-come/first-serve basis). Later in the month we join the Program in Jewish Culture & Society to host a workshop with Eitan Bar Yosef (Ben Gurion) whose work-in-progress on Zionist fantasy and the modern urban landscape, is part of the semester-long BEYOND UTOPIA? series of events.

On Friday March 2, we partner with the Institute of Communications Research in welcoming Lawrence Grossberg (UNC)—one of the Unit for Criticism’s founding members—for a CAS/MillerComm lecture at the Spurlock Museum Auditorium. On Monday 3/12, Unit affiliate Maggie Flinn (French) speaks on “Banlieutopia” in 1930s cinema with a response from Tamara Chaplin (History). March closes with yet another collaboration: on 3/29 we join the Center for Middle Eastern & South Asian Studies in welcoming Joshua Landis (Oklahoma) for “Syria and the Arab Spring”—a second CAS/MillerComm-sponsored lecture at Spurlock. On April 2, Unit assistants Mike & mc host a grad student conference on “Technology in Theory & Practice”—paper proposals are welcome through 2/17.

In addition to the three keynote lectures, the BEYOND UTOPIA? conference includes papers from Mohammed Bamyeh (Pittsburgh), Romand Coles (Northern Arizona), Angelia Haro (Duke), Noha Radwan (Davis), Jeffrey Skoller (Berkeley), Phillip Wegner (Florida), and Rebecca Zorach (Chicago). The readings for the seminar, most of which are ready for downloading from the Unit’s website, include publications from all of these visiting scholars as well as selections from Fredric Jameson, Jacques Rancière, Mike Davis, Bernard Harcourt, and Slavoj Žižek. The seminar is open to all faculty and students and if you have not already “registered” I welcome you to do so by replying to this email. Along with my wonderful co-organizers, JB, Dianne Harris (IPRH/Architecture), Irene Small (Art History), Zsuzsa Gille (Sociology), and Markus Schulz (Sociology), I look forward to your joining us.

Please write to me, JB, Mike, or mc if you have any questions for us or any suggestions concerning the Unit’s present or future programming. It is always a pleasure to hear from you.

Lauren

09/05 Author's Roundtable 2: Kathryn Lofton, Oprah: The Gospel of an Icon Guest Writer: Sarah Moon Cassinelli

2011-12-16T14:05:00.010-06:00

[On Monday, December 5, the Unit for Criticism held the second of its Fall 2011 Author’s Roundtables. The Unit hosted Kathryn Lofton to discuss her book Oprah: The Gospel of an Icon. The below contribution is from Sarah Moon Cassinelli.]

“This Oprah is maybe not your Oprah:” personal narrative and commodity in Oprah’s world-making
Written by Sarah Moon Cassinelli (English)

Kathryn Lofton

For most in attendance at Kathryn Lofton’s roundtable talk, Oprah Winfrey is a familiar subject. The talk show host’s presence filled my childhood living room each afternoon. My mother was a devotee and I would watch with her. She and, later, my friends and I, enjoyed the show for the personal stories, the guests, and for the emotional catharsis that came just before the conclusion of each episode. The consistency of the episode formula, Kathryn Lofton argues in her recent book, is a major part of the show’s success.

Lofton opened her roundtable presentation with the same question that begins her book, “What is Oprah?” There are many ways to answer that question: Oprah is undoubtedly a savvy and successful business woman, a global philanthropist; whose work is particularly geared toward women and children, and the head of multi-media brand that began as a television show and which has become a cultural force. She is also an intimate and inspiration to her viewers and fans. But by asking what, instead of who, Lofton pushes her beyond exclusively discussing Oprah the person. Lofton is not a biographer and is less interested in pursuing the “underdog” narrative that predominantly describes Oprah’s journey to the top. Instead, she is more focused on the ways Oprah strategically uses parts of her personal narrative to construct a world where transformation is possible for those who buy into the confession-conversion-transformation model that each show offers. As Lofton states, “Oprah is a noun, a subject, an object of action. Oprah is an instance of American astonishment of what can be… Of her, of you, of what you could and might become.” Although Oprah has used her influence and brand to produce and promote numerous movies, authors, books, and even other talk shows, Oprah’s personal story of uplift and success is her oldest and best-selling product.

Lofton selected three different clips from The Oprah Winfrey Show: 20th Anniversary Collection , to punctuate the body of her talk. The first, “Stood in My Shoes,” featured a woman named Joni who once purchased a pair of Oprah’s shoes at auction. The shoes were much too big, but Joni would step into them to give herself a sense of hope and strength; the shoes—a former possession of the talk show host—gave Joni literal and spiritual connections to Oprah. This clip, according to Lofton, powerfully demonstrated the ways in which Oprah’s success rests in part in her ability to make herself “usefully universal.” Oprah’s well-known personal trials and triumphs act as the infrastructure that supports a world that diverse viewers can access and inhabit. Indeed, just as Joni stepped into Oprah’s actual shoes, so the show invites viewers to occupy Oprah’s world where there are almost limitless options for individual change. As Lofton states, “The world of Oprah Winfrey is that self-contained world, a world apart from the mundane and arbitrary rules of ordinary existence” (84). Hers is also a world with enough power and resources to offer the promise of transformation. That the purchased shoes act as a portal to Oprah herself is simple but striking example of how commodity and personal stories are the building blocks to Oprah’s world-making.

Oprah and Christine McFadden with her new twins

The second clip featured the more harrowing story of Christine McFadden. Entitled, “The Worst Day of her Life,” the video describes the murder of Christine McFadden’s four children by her ex-husband. Lofton used this clip to discuss commonly used features of The Oprah Winfrey Show: the personal narrative of a difficult event related through photo montage and snippets of media footage. The language of change and personal redemption are key characteristics of the show. As discussed in her chapter, “Diverting Conversions: The Makeover of Social Rite,” the power of language is crucial to transformation. Furthermore, it is the narration of the event and one’s return from darkness to light, and not the experience that changes the lives of those who witness it (91). For example, many women have appeared on Oprah to testify that they were no longer suicidal because of Christine McFadden’s story of strength. As viewers absorb the testimonies of those like Christine McFadden and the women she helped to save, and as the show focuses on the pleasures of transformation and personal strength, we ignore the fact that the tough questions have not been asked. For instance, what drives a person to kill four children? Why does Joni lack adequate job opportunities?

The last clip Lofton showed highlights the allure of the makeover and commodified self-improvement. The “Queer Eye for the Straight Guy” was a crossover episode that featured the five men of the 2003-2007 Bravo TV Show by the same title. Those who have received makeovers, whether the contestants get to be “princesses for the day” or are given an entirely new, apparently gay male-approved look, often comment that they feel like an entirely new person. This time, transformation is made possible through changes to one’s appearance which are powerful enough to positively alter the very core of who that person is. Oprah and her show unabashedly sell a version of “The Best Life” but as Lofton argues, what are the cultural, epistemological, and even moral stakes of such product pushing and self-making?

Diana Jaher’s (Theatre) response has been reprised on Kritik. But a second response by Dale Bauer (English) was organized around the question, “Is all pain the same?” Compelled by the show’s tendency to commercialize the personal and Oprah’s seeming ability to strike through all different types of pain with one equalizing blow, Bauer presented three very different examples of personal pain and challenged us to question the tenet Oprah delivers with each episode: that shared pain is therapeutic. The first example is from O Magazine. On the last page of each issue, Oprah offers personal reflections. In the August 2001 issue, Oprah mourned and reflected on the accidental death of her beloved dog, Gracie. Bauer then presented her second example, a piece entitled “The Aquarium” by Aleksandar Hemon (The New Yorker 81.17 13 June 2011). Hemon’s memoir about his infant daughter’s battle with cancer, two brain surgeries, and her death seems to crash head-first into Oprah’s tenets about pain, suffering, and salvation:

One of the most despicable religious fallacies is that suffering is ennobling--that it is a step on the path to some kind of enlightenment or salvation. Isabel's suffering and death did nothing for her, or us, or the world. We learned no lessons worth learning; we acquired no experience that could benefit anyone. And Isabel most certainly did not earn ascension to a better place, as there was no place better for her than at home with her family. (Hemon)

The comparison of an infant’s death to the loss of one’s dog was not lightly made. Bauer was not trying to expose Oprah in a negative light; rather, the Hemon piece meant to illustrate Bauer’s desire to “know that there are very different pains” in the world and to show that the experience of pain is not transcendental. The third example was an anti-sentimental take on her own trauma: her stroke and subsequent recovery process. As Bauer concluded her response, she reminded us that “Oprah’s world lacks irony or two ways to read a situation.” Instead, she urges us to embrace the complexity of experience and not shy away from what makes it distinct.

The third response by Mimi Nguyen (Gender Women Studies/Asian American Studies) is also reprised on Kritik.

Toward the end of the roundtable, Lofton acknowledged that it is “easy to do a critique.” Hers is not a project that simply attacks on Oprah Winfrey. Rather, she is interested in critiquing the depoliticized fairytale that Oprah’s show promotes. As Lofton stated, The Oprah Winfrey Show is “painfully unable to think or speak systematically” about the social and cultural issues it takes on with each episode.

09/05 Author's Roundtable 2: Kathryn Lofton, Oprah: The Gospel of an Icon Responses from Diana Jaher, Mimi Nguyen

2011-12-09T15:11:00.037-06:00

[On Monday, December 5, the Unit for Criticism held the second of its Fall 2011 Author’s Roundtables. The Unit hosted Kathryn Lofton to discuss her book Oprah: The Gospel of an Icon. The below contributions are from two respondents: Diana Jaher and Mimi Nguygen.]

Oprah Winfrey as Deus Ex Machina: Response 1
Written by Diana Jaher

James Frey on Oprah

When I read Kathryn Lofton’s chapter, “Diverting Conversions: The Makeover as Social Rite,” I was struck by how many theatre metaphors she uses to describe Oprah Winfrey’s talk show. She mentions the show’s “plot,” “performativity,” “script,” “stage,” “spectacle,” and “spectacular casting.” The confession motif that Lofton analyzes throughout this chapter takes dramatic form as guests such as James Frey, autobiographical self-embroiderer, divulge a closely-guarded secret or admit to some misdeed, repent, are forgiven, and then convert to the Oprah gospel-of-better-living through public penitence and moral transformation. Lofton describes this revelation as an “aha!” moment or the“climax” (another theatrical metaphor) of that day’s episode. She notes that the audience members – whether in the studio or watching at home – witnessing this moment of truth undergo a metaphorical purging of their own emotions and experience feelings of relief akin to those of the confessor who can finally let go of the burden of his or her secret.

"Princess for a Day" February 2003

In his Poetics, Aristotle notes drama’s ability to purge its spectators of the pity and fear they experience when watching a tragic or near-tragic situation. We also call this catharsis. And that “aha moment!” or turning point evokes Aristotle’s anagnorisis or “change from ignorance to knowledge" experienced by both the dramatic character and the audience. Theatrical metaphors also suffuse the first Oprah episode Lofton discusses in this chapter, “Princess for a Day,” which gives women living in straitened circumstances lifestyle makeovers. Each woman plays the role of protagonist; her financial setback, the antagonist; and Oprah Winfrey, deus ex machina – literally, the god in the machine – who comes down from on high when we need her the most and grants our prayers. For “Princess” Fannie Eugene, the answered prayer is a $23,700 minivan with which she can commute to work. Oprah’s divine intervention into these women’s lives turns the show into tragicomedy as she averts each woman’s potential tragedy by supplying a happy ending structured around monetary reward. Yet Eugene’s circumstances illustrate the limits of Oprah’s godlike powers for Eugene’s life continues after Oprah rings down the metaphorical curtain. In a later episode, we learn that Eugene’s home is hit by Hurricane Katrina. The minivan whisks Eugene and her large family to safety, but even Oprah, the divine icon, does not or cannot undo the federal government’s inability to strengthen New Orleans’s levees or FEMA’s incapacity to house displaced disaster victims adequately.

These episodes – which feature either confession, as in Frey’s case, or coronation, as in Eugene’s – are filled with theatrical conventions: they follow a familiar script; are staged on Oprah’s talk show set; and feature performances of abjection, gratitude, and humility. They embody the concept of theatricality. Theatre scholars use “theatricality” as an umbrella term, defining it as, for example, a necessary condition for performance, a nonrealistic mode of representation, an aesthetic style, or a (sometimes pejorative) synonym for either artifice or excess. Lofton’s book prompts us to ask what purpose Oprah’s theatricality serves. Do the guests’ performances draw us to them – allowing us to empathize with them and recognize our own emotions and experiences in theirs? Do these Oprah episodes illuminate and help us make sense of some aspect of the human condition and our place in the world – as the best theatre does? Or does the theatricality distance us by making us conscious of the performative aspects of self-presentation, making us question the authenticity of these confessions, these lived experiences, these emotions – even of identity itself by turning it into a kind of performance art? For some audience members, the answer will be the former; for some, the latter; and for many, both.

Finally, theatre events, religious rites, and Oprah episodes share one important aspect I want to conclude with: they are all dependent upon the spectators’ trust in and commitment to the performance that unfolds in front of them – or faith. And if Oprah embodies today’s religious experience, then that experience makes for great theatre.

Return to beginning of post

The 'New Sites' of Feeling: Response 2
Written by Mimi Thi Nguyen

Elizabeth Eckford and Hazel Brian

In the introduction to her talk last Monday, Kathryn Lofton invoked Oprah Winfrey’s “embodied endurance” as key to her now-ritualized story of suffering, survival, and salvation. As Lofton observes, Oprah is about moving you--her viewer--from one state to another. On “Celebrated Photos of Our Time,” an episode that aired in 2000, Oprah stages a scene of racial reconciliation between Elizabeth Eckford, famously photographed as the black high schooler being escorted through a mob of angry white youth, and Hazel Brian, whose contorted, snarling face had become a touchstone for their hateful expressions. The tremendous violence that met the occasion of desegregation –the dramatic upheaval of the racial order of the human after a Jim Crow century— is performed as now redressed by the intimate encounter between victim and perpetrator. Years later, as the two women recount on the show, Hazel confessed her sins and asked for forgiveness, and Elizabeth obliged – and they are now friends, which, we are led to believe, is the consummation of justice.

This follows the “common narrative trajectory” Lofton discusses in her chapter about “reading religiously:” “a woman experiences an enormous trauma,” “the remainder of the plot follows the character as she manages the psychological, material, or social aftereffects of this trauma” (163). Oprah’s “personalization [of every story] exists to encourage yours” (176). What does this mean for considering histories of social death or injury? From this story’s provocation, I follow from scholars including Sianne Ngai, Elizabeth Povinelli, Sara Ahmed, and Lauren Berlant about the culture of true feeling, which hangs upon suffering as a human commonality, and organizes ethical sociality accordingly. If Eckford’s story as a champion of healing, love, and forgiveness can be understood as a lesson for fostering a tolerant liberal-racial collectivity, the consequences bring home, as it were, an empire of intimacy – to reflect upon, as Berlant urges, the ways in which “this mode of sentimentality takes up the Enlightenment project of cultivating the soul of the subject toward a visceral capacity to embody, recognize, and sanction virtue, and it expands it into the collective activity of compassionate cosmopolitanism, which places affective recognition at the center of what binds strangers to each other. Yet sentimentality’s universalist rhetoric gains its authority not in the political domain, but near it, against it, and above it: sentimental culture entails a proximate alternative community of individuals sanctified by recognizing the authority of true feeling—authentic, virtuous, compassionate—at the core of a just world” (34).

Lofton observes that the “anxiety couch” (as it were) of Oprah’s show bears an analogous structure to the Protestant conversion narrative, “moving from contcontrition to humiliation to exaltation” (93). Analogy operates here through a logic of equivalence of feeling, thus articulating a proliferating series of (hoped for) comparable phenomena or social formations. In this instance the analogy is not located in the "visible" or substantial similarities, but as Foucault argues, in a "more subtle resemblance of relations. Disencumbered thus, it can extend, from a single given point, to an endless number of relationships" (21). In doing so, analogy extracts each element as independent of historical processes and also from interactions with each other, such that complicity and complexity disappears or fades into noise.

In the proliferation of stories of pain, we thereby find both the recognition of great particularity, on the one hand, and universal similarity, on the other. Or as Lofton observes so well, “Participants [in Oprah’s world-building] agree on the universality of suffering, of secrecy, of generational disappointment. They persist despite these downtrodden sentiments because of the opportunities for connection and the possibility of the lightbulb” (186). In this light, and that of the story told at the start of my comments, how might these analogies also cohere around the Christian dimension of forgiveness, as a personal journey of authentic self-making that nonetheless bears political resonance?
I ask this question as someone whose work is especially concerned with forgiveness and its often-times troubling resonance for settler colonial states; postcolonial regimes; after-wartime atrocities; civilian massacres; or racial violence including apartheid, Jim Crow, and other forms of deliberative social death? For Jacques Derrida, writing in the historical context of forgiveness as an ever-expanding idiom in law and diplomacy (especially after atrocity), genuine forgiving must denote the impossible – the unforgivable, the “crime against humanity.” This juridical concept, first formulated in 1907 at The Hague Court and subsequently institutionalized in the U.N. Charter and the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights, for Derrida “remains at the horizon of the whole geopolitics of the pardon…furnishing it with a discourse and legitimating it” (30). It is the geopolitics of the pardon that is for him contaminated by calculative reasoning, or the theater of pain. Indeed, Derrida insists that a rigorously ethical forgiveness must be heterogeneous to the order of politics and against historical finality, lest it become mere calculation, or worse still, normalization.

So, I’m interested in exploring further Oprah as a machine through which a politics of sentimentality --which as Lofton demonstrates so well borrows heavily from religious analogies of confession, ritual, and witness-- instrumentalizes the further extraction of supplement and surplus from a violated or abject body, which is also a body historically subject to religious or civilizational conversion (and which as Lofton also demonstrates, is part of the show’s appeal to transformation, to “moving on” through progressive time), through the incorporation of two supposedly “ennobling” moral obligations—confession by a perpetrator and forgiveness by a victim— into the circuit of Oprah’s gospel.

Claire Barber, "A Dearth of Disability…Studies"

2011-11-11T16:30:00.022-06:00

Tiresias, from a production of Oedipus Rex

[Claire Barber, a Unit Affiliate and PhD Candidate in English, critiques the Modernist Studies Association Conference she attended last month. To her surprise, she found a dearth of disability studies scholarship and suggests that the field of modernist studies could easily include such studies.]

"A Dearth of Disability...Studies"

Written by Claire Barber (English)

Three years ago, I attended my first Modernist Studies Association (MSA) conference as a starry-eyed second-year graduate student. I was thrilled that I had found a community like the MSA, one interested in British and American literatures of modernism, their social and political contexts, and critical theory.

Fast-forward to the present day.

A month ago, I presented a paper entitled “Polychromatic Chaos: An Autistic Poetics in Modernism” at this year’s MSA conference in Buffalo. As a Ph.D. student currently working on her dissertation, I was excited to enter into dialogue with scholars working in my two primary fields (British modernism and disability studies). While perusing the conference program, however, I was surprised at the lack of attention to disability studies at the level of the panel titles. Many panels could have incorporated disability topics under their broad titles, although very few appeared to do so. Only one panel, “Modernism & Disability,” explicitly addressed questions of disability at the level of the panel title.

In the first paper, “‘Keep my mind off’: Knowledge and Deafness in ‘Sirens’,” Maren Linett focused primarily on the relationship between deafness and knowledge in James Joyce’s Ulysses. (She also looked briefly at texts by Elizabeth Bowen, Eudora Welty, and Carson McCullers.) In the “Sirens” episode, Linett investigated connections between Leopold Bloom and the deaf waiter, Pat. Both men wait upon others and appear not to know what they know, existing in a suspended state of knowledge. In Linett’s argument, deaf characters are perceived as having access to different orders of knowledge because they use a different language. In communities that priviledge spoken language, the deaf occupy a position similar to that of foreigners. This connection between deafness and foreignness opens exciting possibilities for the question with which Linett ended her presentation: “Is Pat ‘deaf’ in the way that Bloom is ‘Jewish’?” I will be interested to see how Linett relates the argument developing here to those from her recent book Modernism, Feminism, and Jewishness.

Michael Thurston, formerly a student at Illinois, presented the second paper: “Grabbing Vision by the Balls.” In it, he forgrounds T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land in the context of recent disability scholarship to revalue knowledge held by disabled individuals. His primary focus was Tiresias, a blind prophet who figures importantly in the poem. Using Freud’s essay “On the Uncanny,” Thurston pointed out the link between blindness and castration to show how blindness has been read as emasculating. However, people in this poem have insight despite—or because of—their inability to see in conventional ways; Tiresias’s blindness and female form facilitate his particular way of seeing. Thus, blindness—and disability, more generally—need not deprive an individual of her voice. In the context of the poem, Thurston’s argument emphasizes the breakdown of metonymy by which the sacrifice of a part can no longer rejuvenate the whole (e.g., a tradition, culture, or poem). I look forward to seeing him further develop this argument in relation to the access that a disabled individual has to different forms of knowledge after the “sacrifice” of a body part, such as the eyes.

Fiona Shaw as Winnie in a performance of Samuel Beckett's Happy Days from Beckett on Film

Plenary speaker Michael Davidson presented the third paper, “Every Man His Specialty.” (A longer version of this paper is available in the Journal of Philosophy: A Cross-Disciplinary Inquiry [Fall 2010].) Davidson explored what he called “the dialectics of dependency” within several works by Samuel Beckett, concentrating on Happy Days. In this context, one of the larger questions he addressed was whether we are truly as free as we assume ourselves to be. In an able-bodied society, individuals exercise power through their ability to independently control and satisfy their needs; thus, codependence gains a negative cultural connotation. According to Davidson’s argument, Beckett’s texts normalize disability and present codependent relationships that are contractual and beneficial to both parties. Davidson focused particularly on the relationship between Winnie and Willie in which Winnie depends on Willie to affirm her existence. While she becomes more and more immobile, Winnie maintains the ability to speak, a power that Willie does not seem to have. Thus, mobility and the appearance of autonomy do not necessarily convey power. With this paper, Davidson contributes to growing scholarship on disability in Beckett’s oeuvre, and I look forward to the possibility that he may expand this analysis in an upcoming book.

All three panel participants—and also the panel chair, Janet Lyon—indicated that they were working on books about disability studies and modernism, which makes the dearth of disability at the conference that much more surprising. Given the MSA’s promotion of interdisciplinarity and interest in alternative modernities, this conference would seem like an ideal forum in which to explore the modern conditions of disability. For example, Maud Ellman’s plenary address, “The Body in Parts,” contained the possibility for a critique and expansion of disability-studies approaches to literature. While engaging and interesting, the presentation did not pursue this direction. I do not mean to criticize the conference organizers or its participants for this lack of attention; rather, I wish to bring what I perceive as a surprising gap to the attention of the larger scholarly community. The current job listings distributed by the Modern Language Association reflect this similarly minimal presence: only one position (at Wisconsin-LaCrosse) includes disability studies as a desirable professional background. I am left wondering why disability studies is so slow to catch on in literary studies?

Many of the texts that we study depict disabled characters (Conrad’s The Secret Agent, Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury, and Bowen’s Eva Trout, among many others), while many authors are or may have been disabled (e.g., Milton, Nietzsche, and Woolf). These texts also reflect cultures, histories, societies, and nations with varying attitudes to disability. In Enforcing Normalcy, a canonical text for disability studies, Lennard Davis argues that the object of disability studies is not necessarily those labeled disabled but instead “the social, historical, economic, and cultural processes that regulate and control the way we think about and think through the body” (11). Thus, disability studies has much in common with other theoretical discourses of embodiment, such as phenomenology, critical race theory, and queer and feminist studies. All three papers summarized above linked their examinations of disability to concepts from these discourses. As these scholars demonstrated, embodiment affects our ways of knowing and the knowledge available to us, which consequently affects the texts that we form. Both Thurston and Linett argued that disabled individuals have access to epistemological orders that differ from those available to able-bodied individuals—what Thurston and others refer to as “cripistemologies.” These cripistemologies introduce normates or neurotypicals to unfamiliar ways of perceiving and engaging with an environment, which, in turn, affect their attitudes toward disabled individuals, the concept of disability, and their own forms of embodiment.

As this response hopes to show, disability studies has made great strides since the 1995 publication of Davis’s book. In March of 2005, PMLA presented a series of conference reports on disability (introduced by Michael Davidson) that surveyed the state of the field. The papers above show how it has progressed since that time. However, disability studies still deserves greater recognition within the academy. The title for this post points to the paradoxical position of disability studies: while disability is a constant presence and influence in our lives, disability studies has yet to become a prevalent critical discourse. I look forward to seeing an interest in scholarship of disabled writers and the conditions of disability continue to increase within fields such as modernist studies. It will happen—quite soon, I believe—just as almost all of us will find ourselves confronted with the reality of disability at one time or another.

10/24 Christopher Newfield, "The Innovation Conspiracy: Ruin and Rebirth in the American University" Guest Writer: Robert Mejia

2011-10-27T09:35:00.016-05:00

[On Monday, October 24, the Unit for Criticism hosted “The Innovation Conspiracy: Ruin and Rebirth in The American University,” a lecture by Christopher Newfield, professor of English at the University of California at Santa Barbara. The below contribution is from Robert Mejia. The event was the third and final celebrating the Unit for Criticism’s thirtieth anniversary.]

Christopher Newfield’s "The Innovation Conspiracy: Ruin and Rebirth in the American University"
Written By Robert Mejia (Institute for Communications Research)

Though familiarity may make our walks across the quad appear to be regular and mundane, we must remember that the discourses involved in sustaining a campus like the University of Illinois are anything but. I can recall my first experience of the quad, looking over it from the Illini Union Hotel and thinking, "here is a real college." Even though the space is hardly free from the excluding effects of class and race, the relatively free flow of bodies and the spontaneous interactions that emerge as a result is symbolic of the democratic promise of a public university. And so it was fitting that Christopher Newfield described his own morning walk through the quad when he began his October 24 lecture, "The Innovation Conspiracy: Ruin and Rebirth in The American University"—the last of the Unit for Criticism’s three 30th birthday celebratory events.

Those of us familiar with the campus know that the quad is often a crowded walkway fraught with various charitable and not-so-charitable organizations vying for our attention, or at least spare change. In this regard, the quad again functions as a physical manifestation of the state's disinvestment from the University. As Newfield noted, though public investment in education has declined since the 1960s, enrollment at research institutions like the University of Illinois and the University of California has quadrupled over that same period.

Public divestment from higher education poses an ongoing threat to the ability of public universities to uphold the promise of a democratic society. However fraught the promise may be, the public university system is a more accessible site for intellectual development and the maturation of social responsibility than private alternatives. Public research universities, for instance, reach over twice the number of students as private research universities and at only half the cost per student. If we are to continue to believe that public access to education is the cornerstone of a democratic society, then public interests cannot be left to private entities.

And yet, this is precisely what is happening. Universities, according to Newfield, are caught within the "death spiral" of an "innovation conspiracy." The conspiracy does not indict innovation itself, but rather the pretense that innovation is antithetical to collective modes of existence and vice versa—particularly the assumption that bureaucratic institutions like government and the research university resist innovation. Newfield's ideas on the individualist character of innovation are modeled on the legacy of Joseph Schumpeter. He notes that even though universities invest millions of dollars in innovation—wired and wireless campuses, for example—the notion that innovation must be foisted on them by outside entrepreneurial forces persists.

The key steps of Newfield's "cycle of decline" show how loss of public funding leads to privately funded initiatives that, while often good in themselves, do not serve the core educational mission—even though the result of sustaining them is typically increased tuition. As the public finds itself paying more for less, the result is a new cycle of public defunding.

To elaborate just one point in the cycle, universities raise tuition for multiple reasons one of which was the subject of Newfield's 2009 article in the journal Profession. The scenario Newfield describes is one in which universities lack the support to cover the overhead of grants. At the University of California, for example, the difference between net research funds and the total costs of research is a gap of 720 million dollars. (Grant recipients who hand over money for overheads to the university do not always realize that these overheads are insufficient to cover costs.) These uncovered costs must be covered from state funds or, failing that, student fees and tuition. This occurs at the same time that state funding is declining and private fundraising cannot be used for core operations. The examples of rising tuition Newfield cited showed increase of as much as 400% in the last two decades, compared to 250% for healthcare costs.

Though the solution is complex, Newfield suggested that a good starting point is transparency. Budget transparency is a crucial part of the picture, but it is not the only one. Another goal is to rearticulate education as a public good—an idea Newfield believes enjoys public support despite the increasing privatization of public education through high tuition and, thus, decreased access. In a less predictable light, Newfield urges teachers to make educational labor (their own and that of their students’) more transparent. This includes teaching as well as research. As Newfield drew a picture of pedagogy as a kind of professional craft, using the example of his own teaching and advice in a teaching abroad program, I was reminded again of the Illinois campus. At various spots along the engineering and main quads, placards can be found documenting the social contribution made from individuals and/or departments, such as Wilbur Schramm’s contribution to the establishment of NPR and PBS, or John Bardeen’s contribution to the invention of the transistor. These placards, as we know, are not enough.

How does one enact Newfield’s recommendation that we make our pedagogical practices visible? He argues that this can begin with the simple practice of documenting the learning process that transpires within the community of a public university. In the teaching abroad program in France, Newfield asked each student a question to help him or her formulate a research goal. Most students, he reported, had never been asked to describe the kind of research that might appeal to them—much less to create a research project springing out of these interests. When students are encouraged to think of themselves as scholars, and not as students taking one more step toward their ticket to a profession, the potential for making the collective gains of education visible becomes apparent. Teaching (and research) should be practiced as a form of education labor guided by a craft ethos. The benefits of education can be articulated beyond the acquisition of career credentials: as laying the foundations for a more democratic society.

10/3 Mark Weisbrot, "The Ignorant Elite: Neoliberalism and Its Consequences"Guest writer: Arnaud Pascal Perret

2011-10-07T13:50:00.027-05:00

[On Monday, October 3, the Unit for Criticism hosted "The Ignorant Elite: Neoliberalism and Its Consequences," a lecture by Mark Weisbrot, Co-Director of the Center for Economic and Policy Research in Washington, DC. The below contributions is from Arnaud Pascal Perret. The event was the second of three celebrating the Unit for Criticism's thirtieth anniversary.]

"The Ignorant Elite: Neoliberalism and Its Consequences"
By Arnaud Pascal Perret

Most politicians and media analysts who discuss the troubled global economy focus on high national debt, prescribing reductions in government spending and fiscal austerity overseen by policy experts like those at the International Monetary Fund. However, Mark Weisbrot, Co-Director of the Center for Economic and Policy Research and a recent Nicholson Distinguished Visiting Scholar for the Unit for Criticism, rejects this mainstream approach to current problems. In his October 3 lecture, “The Ignorant Elite: Neoliberalism & Its Consequences,” Weisbrot demonstrated a sharp decrease in economic growth during the period of neoliberalism’s economic heyday, 1980-2000. This pattern continues to affect the richest part of the world. Weisbrot’s October 4 seminar on US foreign policy in Latin America also illustrated the problems of right-wing ideology and its influence on Washington.

Weisbrot used a macro-economic perspective to show that despite much talk of an international debt crisis, economic growth is in actuality being hindered by implementation of neoliberal economic policies, especially in Europe. According to Weisbrot, the high unemployment and economic collapse of Greece, for example, is only worsened by the austerity approach of European authorities. The imperatives put forth by a “Troika” that includes the European Central Bank, the European Commission, and the International Monetary Fund, have created a vicious cycle in which fiscal retrenchment decreases revenues and thus makes necessary even more fiscal retrenchment—turning a once manageable debt-to-GDP ratio into a veritable crisis. At best, the elites recommending these policies are “ignorant”; at worst they are flacking for the interests of creditors who do not like alternatives such as money creation, slightly higher inflation, and currency devaluation which decrease the value of what they are ostensibly owed.

Weisbrot argued that neoliberalism should not be confused with a doctrine, an ideology, or a school of thought. It represents a “set of policies or reforms” that were implemented initially in the late seventies and with increased frequency during the eighties and the nineties. These reforms deal predominantly with fiscal and monetary policies as well as the exchange rate. In most cases, neoliberalism recommends tight fiscal policies and discourages budget deficits, even when they are necessary to counter recession, and is obsessively concerned with minimizing inflation. For example, the treaty of the Euro-zone allowed for deficits of no more than 3% of the GDP (Gross Domestic Product). In regard to monetary policy, the goals are to keep very low inflation even at the cost of high unemployment. Under neoliberalism more independence has been granted to the Central Banks—undermining democracy since elected representatives do not control the activities of these relatively autonomous financial institutions.

Weisbrot looked at macro-economic data for a set of 191 countries across a fifty year period divided into three distinct phases. Although he focused on one particular metric, economic growth measured as per capita income, he also described the many social indicators that correlate with economic growth. There was a sharp downturn in economic growth in the vast majority of countries from 1980-2000, during and after the period of neoliberal reforms. In the past decade, growth rebounded, but this was mostly because of the rapid growth of China and its demand for imports from many developing countries. His analysis led him to conclude that the exceptional growth of China has depended on statist economic policies including state-ownership of four major banks—this in contrast to a neoliberal prescription that curbs state interference except to preserve elite property rights such as patents.

Likewise, Weisbrot linked South Korea’s dramatic economic growth over the last half-century to the country’s use of non-neoliberal policies, and argued that Argentina’s default on its debts led to growth, not disaster. Ironically, Europe itself has suffered the worst results because it has adhered the most closely to neoliberal orthodoxy (in contrast to the US where the Federal Reserve has done what it can by keeping interest rates low and creating more than two trillion dollars since the 2008 economic crisis began).

In the seminar on recent US foreign policy in Latin America Weisbrot took a more political approach, albeit one focused on the Obama administration’s continuance and sometimes exacerbation of the Bush White House’s anti-democratic policies. Here Weisbrot followed the lines of his paper on the topic by describing US support of the coup in Honduras on June 28th, 2009. According to Weisbrot, while Latin American leaders saw Obama’s election as marking a progressive change in US foreign policy, they were soon disappointed. Indeed, Weisbrot’s study of US political discourse (in, for example, the Wikileak cables) suggests consistent support for military control of Latin America when it aligns with perceived US interests, along with a near total disregard for democracy and human rights violations.

Weisbrot believes that there is simply not enough political capital to be gained from a more progressive foreign policy while there remain certain risks. Only concerted grassroots lobbying of individual members of Congress, he believes, can help to reverse Washington’s tendency to continue its reactionary influence over the region. Nonetheless, many Latin American countries have become more independent form the US while strengthening relations among themselves. While a certain delinking can be seen in the adoption of economic policies that diverge from the neoliberal model, political independence shows up in the refusal, for example, to comply with US desires such as the recognition of the coup government in Honduras.

Weisbrot’s counter-perspective on economic and foreign policies certainly reveals a wide range of failures on the part of the US and Europe, such as the policies implemented by the governments of wealthier countries for the last thirty years, the elite that disregards the needs of the people, and also the failure of the media to challenge the opinion of economic and foreign policy elites. In furtherance of his belief that it is important for actual citizens to lobby their lawmakers he is involved in a blog, "Just Foreign Policy," devoted to informing the demos of what kinds of activities are being undertake for their supposed good

9/16 Author's Roundtable 1: Suvir Kaul, "Indian Empire and the Crisis of Kashmir" Responses from Antoinette Burton and Rajmohan Gandhi

2011-09-19T09:12:00.032-05:00

[On Friday, September 16, the Unit for Criticism held the first of its Fall 2011 Author’s Roundtables. Suvir Kaul discussed his recent analysis of Kashmir and the Indian Empire. The below contributions are from the two respondents: Antoinette Burton and Rajmohan Gandhi. The event was the first of three celebrating the Unit for Criticism's thirtieth anniversary.]

Thoughts on "Indian Empire and the Crisis of Kashmir" (followed by Rajmohan Gandhi's piece below)
By Antoinette Burton (History)

It’s a tremendous pleasure and privilege to have this opportunity to reflect, however briefly, on both Suvir’s work and its linkages – immediate and remote – to his time at Illinois as a professor of literature and as director of IPRH. Given the energy of his partner, Ania Loomba, in both life and in the life of the mind, it’s rare for me to have the chance to think of him and his work on their own. Their time together in Illinois was so profoundly formative for me, as I know it was for many others, that it’s often not possible to think about them except as Ania and Suvir, Suvir and Ania: inseparable if distinct in the way they move about the world of ideas and its intersections with social, cultural and political worlds near and far.

It was of course that partnership which helped to generate the collaborative project that became the Postcolonial Studies and Beyond conference and ultimately the 2005 book, and which drew in myself, Jed Esty, and Matti Bunzl as co-editors. The nature of that collaboration is worth lingering on. For although it’s fashionable to praise such interdisciplinary effort as the sine qua non of humanistic endeavor, in fact, we talk and think very little about how such co-mingling can and does proceed. In our case, the conference was built from the ground up in Ania and Suvir’s Champaign living room.

We had conversations, debates, and arguments about what to call the conference, how to organize it, and, most of all, how to shape it so that it didn’t end up doing what we feared it might: that is, reify an already stultified notion of what postcolonial studies were and, as importantly, re-instantiate where postcolonial criticism might be said to be happening – or where, in geopolitical terms, its critical apparatus might be applied. The question of how, and whether, postcolonial critique was mobile – how portable it could be, in the face of new historical conditions - was paramount in those discussions. I remember some very heated conversations with Ania about how and whether the “global” might relate to our take on postcolonial studies. She took issue with the very category, and our thrashing out the relationships between globalization and postcolonial studies would go well into the night (and on long, hot walks in Meadowbrook). Given the maw of the global as an institutional category (and so much more) into which we have all been thrust in the interim, that moment seems a very long time ago now.

And a propos, if you will indulge me in just one more memory of the conference itself: there was a moment of heated debate in one of the sessions about the role of American military-imperial power shaping the new global and postcolonial realities after 9/11. Someone from the audience stood up and said, do you realize the Bush administration is thinking of invading Iraq? A convulsive hush – if such a thing is possible – engulfed the room, since most of us, then – even the news and political junkies among us – had no idea that notion was even being considered in the bowels of Cent Comm. As I recall several people openly scoffed at the very idea. That’s how long and short ago 2002 was – and a discussion of the invasion that ensued made its way (fiercely, sharply, pointedly) into our drafts of the introduction to the conference volume, helping to fuel and to nuance our discussions about the value-added – or not – of postcolonial criticism in and for the fast-moving histories of the 21st century.

Suvir’s work on Kashmir can, I think, be seen as a piece of that project, though it’s not of course by any means co-terminous with it. The application of a colonial frame to that region, and its assimilation, in turn, to an imperial frame of analysis (as Suvir does so effectively in his EPW piece) feels at least in part like an extension of one of our aims in Postcolonial Studies and Beyond. That is, rather than continuing to rehearse the usual spaces and places of early postcolonial theorizing, we asked scholars in their respective fields to consider how postcolonial analysis applied, if it did, to their parts of the world or to their objects of inquiry.

So we had Daniel Boyarin on late antiquity, Rebecca Stein on Israel café culture, Florencia Mallon on Latin America and Tani Barlow on East Asia – each one pressing postcolonial theory and criticism up against its own geographical and even temporal limits, with some very interesting results. Suvir’s move to place Kashmir, an internal colony if not of India per se then a certain species of Indian nationalist thinking and ultimately of postcolonial policy is, I think, evocative of these moves.

For many Indians both in and outside postcolonialism’s interpolative ambit, this move might be considered an outrage: part of an unthinkable set of claims which places 20th century pre-independence heroes like Nehru and even Gandhi in uncomfortable proximity to promontory British views of the subcontinent and the “Indian” diaspora. It makes that space and those demographic flows available for carving up and re-segmenting into subimperial domains – through which “India” might be seen to be exercising para-colonial “power over” a variety of internal others. Such moves were part and parcel of Congress nationalist imaginaries of parts of South and especially East Africa at least from the 1920s onward, so it is not so surprising that Kashmir, despite being internal to Jai Hind, might be subject to the same operational apparatus. This is not entirely surprising given the kind of brahminical, caste-based subjectivities to which many (if not all) would-be leaders of postcolonial India implicitly or explicitly subscribed or given for that matter, the stakes that proof of sovereignty management – locally and globally – that Indian postcolonial territorial security made clear. Indeed, if Kashmir is part of an Indian empire, it was also a Hindu-imperial formation supported by a long line of Maharaja Singhs going back into the 19th century. Although British plans for a subimperial Indian empire failed in official terms in Iraq in 1916, they appear to have succeeded in Kashmir in part because the postcolonial state shared and extended that colonial vision.

In light of these questions I wonder, Suvir, what the reaction has been to your claims; whether those reactions can be categorized in terms of contemporary political positions and/or geopolitical (left, right, Non-Resident Indian, etc); and how such reactions shape, if they do, your own thinking on the questions you raise? For I have to imagine that to some, these claims about an Indian empire in Kashmir are fighting words. Or perhaps not? Either way, what do reactions to your work tell us about the shifting state of public opinion on these issues on the ground, with what ramifications for postcolonial governmentality in and out of India? Have you presented your work in India, in what settings, and to what kinds of responses? What are the parameters of un/speakability, un/thinkability around these issues?

At the risk of exceeding my time, I want to ask just two more questions. First, can you talk more about how your own biography shapes both your investment in these issues and the historical ethnography you do in the Social Research piece? As with the ethnography of poetry you so beautifully produce, your own positionality as a Kashmiri man, a Kashmiri Non-Resident Indian of a certain generation, is relevant here; I am sure you have a lot to say about how that impacts your method and your own framing devices as well.

And, second but not unrelatedly, I think this work is crying out for express attention to gender, to the apparent homosociality of the Kashmiri intifada and to the cadences of adolescent-to-man tropes in the poetry, whether Kashmiriyat or rap – and, of course, to the question of women’s participation – especially in light of the militarization of Kashmir. Nyla Ali Khan, in her book Islam, Women and Violence in Kashmir (2009), argues that despite being the objects of rape and abuse, Kashmiri and Gujjar women “are able to negotiate in small spaces” as “repositories” of cultural traditions and values and as political and educational agentshttp://www.blogger.com/img/blank.gif – though not, apparently “in the upper echelons of decision-making bodies." If Kashmiris have been “caught between terrorists and state terrorism,” women have arguably born the brunt of that cross-fire.

Interestingly, even in Khan’s book, which is ostensibly about women and gender, women themselves take up comparatively little space, which raises questions for me about the shared logic line of imperial, postcolonial and anti-imperial recovery methods: what they see clearly and unearth readily, and what remains interred – with interment serving as more than a metaphor here. Are there parallels with other postcolonial militarized zones to be drawn here? I am thinking of Nilofer De Mel’s book on militarization in Sri Lanka. She highlights militarization as a process through which ideologies of state violence are shaped in ways that make “militant solutions to conflict a part of institutional structures and ways of thought.” She “foregrounds militarization as activity and agency, capable of adaptation and transforming society in significant ways; and as a deeply gendered, contingent and shifting process.” And she, too, is interested in popular culture and its role in mediating the memory of armed conflict.

If postcolonial thinking about Kashmir reveals the continuation of vertical hierarchies of global imperial postcolonial power, what comparisons across horizontal space inside South Asia or across the “the Third World” can we make, should we make, of the suppression of women’s experiences in intifada narratives? And how do we do so without simply seeking to restore women, but rather to redirect our analysis toward questions of embodied violence, embodied terror, and embodied “debris”? Thinking through another context of violence altogether, David Roediger calls for us to “fully bring gender and empire into the conceptualization of a study, not into its editing.” How best to do this methodologically is something I am still thinking through – and will be doing so aloud in my upcoming IPRH talk as well – but I remained concerned that postcolonial studies has not been as dedicated to these questions as we might expect it to be.

And I hasten to say: I don’t mean to pose these latter questions as purely identitarian ones. I offer them, rather, in the spirit of a book like Sara Ahmed’s Queer Phenomenology, as a provocation to the question of locative position, of orientation. Nor are these merely questions of visibility or recognition; they are questions of method and politics in their most material form.

Let me end quickly with what I hope is a germane anecdote: while at a conference in Durban, South Africa this summer, I heard a paper by a distinguished historian of South African women, gender and medicine, Catherine Burns. She told the audience that there are 350,000 nurses in South Africa – majority African, majority women – and they outstrip, in sheer demographic terms, any other professional category bar none, doctors included. Yet all histories of these women (who represent a tremendously powerful social, economic and biopolitical force) are consigned time and again to the history of nursing.

Histories of these women rarely if ever open up and out onto “bigger” conceptual terrains like the state, democracy or, in our case here, violence and war. I don’t know what the solution to this problem is, but I have some ideas about its possible redress. Mainly, I have real problems with what category of women shuts down analytically even as I want to see women’s experiences and bodies more routinely at the center of discussions like these. I want this not only because they are there, but because they should inform our critique at every turn, not as the sacral center of our investigations but as the secular, principled and anti-colonial, anti-neoliberal, anti-neoimperial ground of our assault on the global military complex as a given, despite its local particularities.

In the meantime, it’s predictable, disheartening and ultimately provocative, in the most heuristic sense, that even our most critically engaged and agonistic engagements with phenomena like Kashmir can end up in this cul-de-sac. I know Suvir will agree, and I look forward to thinking aloud about these questions with him.

Return to beginning of post

"Comment on Suvir Kaul’s texts on Kashmir"
By Rajmohan Gandhi (South Asian and Middle Eastern Studies/Center for Global Studies)

The picture offered in the two texts is strong, the logic hard to refute, the language clear, the facts painful and, to an Indian, embarrassing. But this particular Indian has long been aware of these facts, though he has rarely seen them presented before in the perspective that Suvir provides. So I thank Suvir.

Question: why have Indians with a history of pointing out suppressions elsewhere been silent about Kashmir? Answer: Double standards are the norm in international affairs. In recent years, however, New Delhi has come closer to consistency by going silent also on Palestine, in sharp contrast to India’s vocal support for an independent Palestine during the final four decades of the last century.

There are other contradictions. In June this year, when the Delhi police (not the army) forcibly dispersed, in the middle of the night, Baba Ramdev’s anti-corruption rally, a woman was critically injured. On subsequent days, India’s national media gave wide coverage to outcries from politicians, including a charge that Jallianwala Bagh had been repeated, a reference to the colonial government’s atrocities of April 1919. In Kashmir, forcible dispersions and firings by military and paramilitary forces (not just the police) have been routine occurrences. Many are killed and wounded. But killings in Kashmir do not invite the Indian media’s attention.

New Delhi’s confidence that Kashmir will not be allowed to become a major world issue rests on what Suvir has brought out, namely India’s current role as one of the US’s strategic allies and India’s potential role as an important partner in a project of empire.

It has been argued that it will be increasingly hard for an India eager for global spotlights to turn off the lights on Kashmir. In other words, you cannot ask for a permanent UN Security Council seat and simultaneously evade questions regarding Kashmir.

How solid is this argument? Where China faces Tibet and Xinjiang, and Russia Chechnya, and the US, the UK and France are all keen on slices of the growing Indian market, especially the Indian market for armaments, why would any of the P5 bring up Kashmir? If the matter of new permanent members goes to the UN General Assembly, not many states would want to open up a discussion there on self-determination in "a part of a country," which is how India would describe Kashmir.

If Pakistan raises Kashmir in the United Nations General Assembly, India can speak of Balochistan, and many Balochis will march outside the UN in support of an independent Balochistan. Yet international respect, which ultimately is what India wants, is more than a matter of counter-punches in debate. It calls for openness and for the readiness to examine realities hitherto brushed aside.

Then there is the question of India’s natural wish to compete with China. India likes to present itself to the world as a democracy, contrasting in that respect with China. If world opinion asks India to show that its rule in Kashmir has the consent of the governed, that would be welcome pressure on the Indian state. But is today’s India genuinely interested in global public opinion? Is it not more concerned with commercial deals with states and corporations, including defense deals worth tens of billions of dollars involving fighter aircraft, rockets, drones and battleships?

Despite this depressing context, there have been some signs, weak but unmistakable, but sadly not irreversible, that the government in India wants a Kashmir solution. Authorized interlocutors have been meeting or trying to meet Kashmiri leaders of every persuasion. The Indian government has indicated that almost anything the Kashmiris want can be conceded, but what is ‘almost’ and what is ‘anything’? Signs of this sort have appeared before only to vanish until a new set of signs appear on the horizon, and again disappear.

However, what is perhaps new in today’s world is the power of social media. Faced with protests – whether in Kashmir or anywhere else –the Indian government cannot act like, e.g., the Syrian government. It has to be more like the Tunisian or Egyptian authorities, who felt compelled to respond to national and world opinion. In the past the Indian government has indeed tried on occasion to ban the use of cell phones in Kashmir but has been forced to withdraw the ban.

It was many years ago that a top Indian general told Nirmala Deshpande, a Gandhian working for India-Pakistan reconciliation, that the Indian military was lucky because the Kashmiris were blind to a simple secret. If they just dropped the gun, they would get all they wanted. It was the gun that had alienated Indian and world opinion and enabled the Indian state to bring the huge weight of the Indian military to bear on Kashmir. A gun-free demand would become irresistible, he implied.

If a gun-free struggle would have been irresistible 20 years ago, today’s social media and even the anti-social or non-social media might make a nonviolent struggle in Kashmir very hard for the Indian state to suppress or discredit. A creatively-conceived nonviolent struggle in Kashmir might evoke widespread sympathy in different parts of India –and also the world.

Linked to this is the question of leadership in Kashmir. Suvir has touched on Kashmir’s complexities and also on the division among its numerous political leaders. The Indian state and the Pakistani state have both been wooing these leaders, at times with cash; and divide-and-rule is something that all empires and states are pretty good at.

- One is that Kashmiris firmly reject the gun.
- Two, they voice their demands with even fuller throats than they do today.
- Three, their leaders refuse to meet representatives of New Delhi or Islamabad until it becomes clear that those who send them are serious about finding a solution.
- Four, the Kashmiri leaders give up their ego clashes and large personal dreams, remain content with representing their people, and offer a united front.
- Five, representatives of the Kashmiri people draw up a simple, imaginative, clear, and escalating plan of nonviolent resistance -- one that causes minimum disruption to the daily life and livelihoods of the Kashmiri people.
- Six, they also present a clear picture of the new Kashmir they want and of the place in it for all of their people in all their diversity.
- And seven, through the social media they ask for the support of Indian and Pakistani citizens and people throughout the world.

An azadi front in Kashmir adopting this position and sticking to it is bound to influence public opinion in India, Pakistan and worldwide.

Return to beginning of post

Letter from the Director, Fall 2011

2011-08-24T18:44:00.007-05:00

Dear Colleagues,

Welcome back! This fall marks the Unit for Criticism’s 30th birthday and I have lots of exciting news to convey. Let me start by saying that this mail will be followed by an easy-to-use “Save the Date” e-memo that lists all Fall 2011 events. I also want to bring you up to date on the Unit’s staffing: our new Nicholson Associate Director is José B. (“JB”) Capino, a specialist in American and Philippine cinema, media studies, Asian American studies, and transnational and postcolonial theory. I’d like to take this opportunity to thank Rob Rushing for his excellent service as the first occupant of this position but also welcome J.B. whom I know will make a wonderful addition to our ranks. I also want to welcome a new Graduate Assistant, Maria Cynthia (“mc”) Anderson. MC, a doctoral candidate in Educational Policy will join Mike Black (English). While Kathy Skwarczek is no longer a fully-appointed GA, she will continue to work with us on an hourly basis.

Our first event for this semester is organized in partnership with the International Forum for US Studies. Giorgio Mariani, Professor of American literature at the Sapienza University of Rome will give an 8pm lecture, “The Rhetorical Equivalent of War,” on Wed. 9/7 in the Levis Center Reading Room. (As with all Unit events we are currently arranging for background readings to be available through our website but it will take a few more days before all links to electronic reserves are “live”). Our first 30th-birthday event is a Fri. 9/16 Author’s Roundtable with Suvir Kaul (U Pennsylvania) on the topic of “The Indian Empire and the Crisis of Kashmir” (4pm on the third floor of Levis). The guest moderator for this event is Zohreh Sullivan (English/African Studies) and she will be joined by two faculty respondents: Antoinette Burton (History) and Rajmohan Gandhi (South Asian & Middle Eastern Studies/ Global Studies).

In October we are excited to welcome this fall’s Nicholson Distinguished Scholar to campus: Dr. Mark Weisbrot, an economist who is Co-Director of the Center for Economic and Policy Research in Washington D.C. In addition to his Mon. 10/3 8pm lecture at Levis which is our second 30th-birthday event--“The Ignorant Elite: Neoliberalism and Its Consequences,” introduced by Ericka Beckman (Spanish/Global Studies/Latin American & Caribbean Studies)—Weisbrot will meet with undergraduates and hold a faculty/grad student seminar on Tu 10/4 (details will soon be announced). The last of our birthday events is a lecture from Christopher Newfield (Santa Barbara) on Mon. 10/24 at 8pm (Levis 3rd Floor), “The Innovation Conspiracy: Ruin and Rebirth in the American University”; Stephanie Foote (English/Gender & Women’s Studies) will introduce. Also in October, the Modern Critical Theory lecture series which begins later this month will feature a guest lecturer: on Mon. 10/31 (yes, it’s Halloween!) we welcome the very unghostly but spirited Robyn Warhol (Ohio State) who will lecture on Feminist Theory. (This year we are very pleased that Art History is joining English and German in affiliating their grad seminar in critical theory with the Modern Critical Theory lecture series.)

Our final academic event for the semester is a second Author’s Roundtable with Kathryn Lofton, assistant professor of Religion at Yale, and author of Oprah: The Gospel of an Icon. Focused on select chapters from the book, the Mon. 12/5 8pm roundtable (Levis 2nd Floor) will feature responses from Dale Bauer (English), Mimi Nguygen (Gender & Women’s Studies/Asian American Studies), and Diana Jaher, a grad student in Theatre History. And in case you were wondering, there will be one additional 30th-birthday event in December: a dance party to which all and sundry are welcome, the details of which are in progress.

Last but certainly not least, I want to thank Ravi Iyer and Nancy Abelmann in the Office for the Vice Chancellor for Research for their enthusiastic support of the new Unit for Criticism Research Fellowships Program. The program will provide four scholars (two senior and two junior) with $8,000 in unrestricted research funds along with the title of “Criticism and Interpretive Theory Research Fellow” for a period of two years. We are now preparing a detailed website and timeline for this new program which will begin accepting applications in January 2012 and I will write again as soon as everything is in place. In the meantime, I look forward to answering your questions about this exciting opportunity for multidisciplinary research and scholarship and, indeed, to seeing you at various events.

If you are a graduate student curious to know more about the Unit for Criticism and its programs for affiliated grad students, please join us on Th. Nov. 10 at 8pm in the IPRH seminar room (lower-level) for our annual Graduate Student Pizza event. Whether you are a faculty member, an instructor, a student, or anyone else with interest in the Unit’s programs and events, please feel free to contact me. I would be happy to meet with you, to add you to our listserv, and to welcome you to our events, all of which are free and the majority of which are fully open to the public.

With all best wishes for a spectacular fall,
Lauren Goodlad, Director

Photos from Freedom and Its Discontents, 4/28-29, 2011

2011-05-09T11:45:00.001-05:00

Photos from Freedom and Its Discontents: April 28-29, 2011

Audrey Kobayashi gives the first keynote lecture, "Connecting Freedom and Responsibility: Activist Scholarship and Geopolitcs."

Colin Flint (right) moderates the question and answer session following Kobayashi's lecture.

Jo-Marie Burt speaking on "Punishing War Crimes in Latin America"

Elena Delgado (left) moderates the question and answer session following Elaine Hadley's (center) and Burt's panel presentations.

Abdi Samatar speaking on "The Dialectic of Piracy in Somalia"

Jesse Ribot (right) moderates the question and answer session following David M. Hughes's (left) and Samatar's panel presentations.

Svetlana Boym during Thursday's keynote lecture on "Freedom and the Arts of Dissent"

Linda Zerilli gives the last keynote address, speaking on "Political Freedom, Value Pluralism, and the Problem of Judgment"

Jason Finkelman and Yosef Ben Israel provide an improvised musical performance reflective of their backgrounds in avant-world music and jazz traditions.

During the third panel, Scott Kurashige (left) and Cris Mayo (right) speak about the "American Dream" in Detroit and queer student associations in high schools, respectively.

The conference concludes with a closing roundtable featuring short presentations by (from left to right) Hina Nazar, Jennifer Monson, Chris Higgins, and Sally Perret

The audience responds with its own vigorous "roundtable" discussion.

Freedom and Its Discontents: "The Shape of Freedom and Its Discontents"Guest Writer: Sally Perret

2011-05-03T09:47:00.021-05:00

[On April 28 and 29, 2011, the Unit for Criticism partnered with the Social Dimensions of Environmental Policy Initiative, and the Program in Arms Control, Disarmament, and International Security for a conference, Freedom and Its Discontents. Below, Sally Perret, a Unit graduate affiliate from the Department of Spanish, Italian, and Portuguese, writes about the conference's keynotes, panels, and musical performance.]

"The Shape of Freedom and Its Discontents"
Written by Sally Perret (Spanish, Italian, and Portuguese)

The image of “Freedom and Its Discontents,” as the words appeared on the poster for this conference, proved to be a fruitful theme. Indeed, many of the speakers highlighted the fact that freedom is not something that can be obtained in some pure form separate from everything else. Rather, as Lauren Goodlad showed in her opening remarks using a clever example from Star Trek, in reality there are always “competing constellations of freedom” at work in a given society. Emphasizing the importance of the study of freedom, the seminar leading up to the conference asked: “Why should we study freedom?” The answer seemed to be: “Because we must. Because at the end of the day, the promise of social justice should matter”.

This same sense of urgency could be felt in the first keynote lecture, given by Audrey Kobayashi who reflected on freedom as it relates to responsibility, concentrating her analysis primarily on the dialectic of freedom as described by Jean-Paul Sartre. Contrary to popular opinion, Kobayashi argued that Sartre’s view of freedom was not concerned with the “individual’s will” but rather with setting the possibility of existence within a contingent future. For Kobayashi, Sartre’s theories suggest that the creation of freedom in any society necessarily implies an engagement with the other, as the quotation she read from Simone de Beauvoir implies: “to will oneself free is also to will others free”. According to this view, there is an urgent need both in academia and beyond to move from individual to action-based freedom.

Kobayashi’s talk was followed by an engaging first panel, in which Jo-Marie Burt, a political scientist, and Elaine Hadley, a literary critic, spoke about freedom in two temporally different contexts. Burt’s paper focused on the advance of human rights trials in the aftermath of dictatorships in Central and South America, while Hadley looked at the self-ruminations on freedom in Victorian Britain during the 1854-56 Crimean War. Among the various challenges of the human rights trials that Burt observed is their long duration and remove from original acts: efforts to prosecute those charged with violations of human rights may take years to materialize, while trials of high-level political figures who order but do not execute criminal acts may last for a decade. Hadley, looking at a war remembered partly for the incompetence of military leadership described the emergence of a different kind of liberal subject: not an elite individual, but the more anonymous working man who, like the nameless soldiers who died in the Crimean War, could be seen as the object of collective action and sympathy.

During the next panel, Abdi Samatar and David M. Hughes offered their own examples of the conference’s theme. Samatar spoke about how piracy was produced and how it has evolved in Somalia. In doing so, he showed how piracy began there as both a necessary response to the ungoverned spaces, weak laws, and poverty that plague Somalia, and as a form of resistance that came about as a rebellion against the exploitation permitted by these same conditions. Specifically, he showed how international responses to piracy in Somali waters over the last twenty years have actually contributed to its exponential rise more than to its decline. For Samatar, the solution to piracy is thus a political one: if we were to address the political situation in Somalia, we could potentially put an end to piracy. Afterwards Hughes talked about the concept of freedom in relation to the origin of oil production in the middle nineteenth century. Whereas other resources of the time, such as coal, were advertised as projects that freed people, Hughes showed us that from the beginning, oil was associated more with work than with freedom. Specifically, oil was originally understood as a commodity that offered a steady rate of return rather than a revolutionary good. During the question/answer period, however, several audience members pointed out that in today’s world, oil is often described in a language of freedom. Not only do many people associate the car with freedom, but many of today’s conflicts stem from disputes over oil in the name of freedom or autonomy.

In her afternoon keynote, Svetlana Boym, drawing on her work in Another Freedom, provided what she calls “experiments in thinking” about the limits of public freedom in today’s societies. Relying on the work of Hannah Arendt, Boym concluded that there is an urgent need to “pluralize our thinking.” Freedom, she argued, is not about individual sovereignty; rather, it is something that should be actively created by and for each new generation. Thus, Boym advocated the importance of thinking of freedom as a material struggle, but one that requires boundaries. The questions of who benefits, suffers, or stands up in defense of those who struggle are all necessary parts of freedom.

Friday opened with a few remarks by co-organizer Jesse Ribot, and a final keynote lecture by Linda Zerilli. Considering complicated examples such as the French burqa ban, Zerilli contemplated the relative nature of judgment, arguing that it is neither possible to conclude that “all judgments are valid,” nor that a single judgment can capture the complexities of any given argument. The solution, then, must be somewhere in between which, if we are to arrive at it, would require the existence of a common public space in which opinions and judgments can be made and not a place where decisions that already have been made are reenacted or performed (a position that she associated with the liberalism of John Rawls). Instead of merely following a set of supposedly self-evident truths, Zerilli (also inspired by Arendt) advocated that each citizen “think representatively”: that each try to take into account multiple perspectives on a given topic before arriving at a judgment. This type of contemplation, however, is only fruitful if such a diversity of opinions can be expressed on some sort of public stage.

In the afternoon, musicians Jason Finkelman and Yosef Ben Israel treated the conference participants to a live performance of improvisational jazz music using a wide variety of instruments, many of which were hand-made. The experience is difficult to describe, but it was a true pleasure to be there. The songs the two musicians played were all non-lyrical and varied in rhythm and intensity. Each beat came at the audience in an unfamiliar but welcome way and allowed the audience to experience pure creation. As Finkelman explained in the question/answer period: improvisational jazz is not just a freedom from formal rules but also freedom to create patterns and sounds not yet imagined. In this regard, the performance added a valuable dimension to our discussion of freedom by allowing us all to experience its worth firsthand.

The next panel featured Scott Kurashige, a historian, and Cris Mayo, a scholar of educational policy, discussing the need rethink the way freedom is ensured in the United States. In his presentation, Kurashige discussed in detail the work that he and well-known scholar/activist Grace Lee Boggs have been doing in Detroit to adapt to what they see as a paradigm change on three fronts: 1) the decline of the white majority, 2) the decline of US global hegemony in the world, and 3) the decline of industry and the resulting economic crisis. Instead of seeing these as being negative changes, Kurashige explored the possibly liberating effects of a decline in Detroit that has left many spaces open to creative political action. Revolution, he argued, is not a seizure of state power or simply a redistribution of the spoils of empire; revolution is a new beginning, a reconstruction of human relations form the ground up. Specifically, the move from market dependence to local self-reliance will ultimately connect people more directly to their material reality, instead of a reality mediated through globalized networks of power. Cris Mayo also discussed the obligation to rethink the way we approach social problems by focusing on the need to include discussions of controversial issues at an earlier stage in education. Currently, many discussions relating to sex, especially with regards to sexual orientation, are limited within, if not absent from, many schools throughout the nation but particularly in the south. Several Gay-Straight Alliance extracurricular groups have even been prohibited from meeting on school grounds. For Mayo, this trend is dangerous because it teaches future citizens that the voices of some in our society are not as relevant on the public stage as others. To combat this, Mayo suggests that we find a way to ensure that all LGBT kids feel welcome to be who they are no matter where they are but especially while at school, a space of growth and self-discovery.

The closing roundtable offered a few final thoughts on the conference’s theme, including my own reflection on the need for there to be some sort of system in place in order for freedom, Chris Higgins, contemplating the value of a liberal education in today’s world, and Hina Nazar describing her own research on subject-centered reason in British literature. These brief presentations were followed by Jennifer Monson’s delightful involvement of the entire audience in a kind of closing experiment which had us standing up as a group and sharing a few spontaneous utterances. The final question/answer period returned to some key questions: for example, the tension between thinking about freedom as an exercise in itself as opposed (only) to an end toward achievement of social justice. How might discussions of freedom help to resolve some of the world’s greatest problems? Are we free to make these decisions or do large-scale historical, cultural, or psychological structures make them for us? No matter what our answers to these questions may be, ultimately it will be our actions, more than our words, that dictate the shape of our future.

Freedom and Its Discontents: Lauren M. E. Goodlad's Opening Remarks

2011-05-02T13:31:00.013-05:00

Paris in 1968

[On April 28 and 29, 2011, the Unit for Criticism partnered with the Social Dimensions of Environmental Policy Initiative, and the Program in Arms Control, Disarmament, and International Security for a conference, Freedom and Its Discontents. Published below are the conference's opening remarks from Lauren M. E. Goodlad, Director of the Unit for Criticism.]

Greetings, everyone.

It’s my very great pleasure to welcome you here to the opening of our spring conference, Freedom and Its Discontents, which is the collaborative effort of the Unit for Criticism & Interpretive Theory, the Social Dimensions of Environmental Policy Initiative, and the Program in Arms Control, Disarmament, and International Security. I’m Lauren Goodlad, Director of the Unit, and I want to thank you for joining us this sunny morning.

As many of you know, every spring the Unit for Criticism partners with other programs on campus to put together a series of collaborative events, and this year’s group--with whom it has been my great pleasure to work since last summer, includes Jesse Ribot, Director of SDEP; Colin Flint, former director of ACDIS; Elena Delgado, affiliated with Spanish and the Center for Latin American Studies; Christopher Higgins, in Educational Policy; and Rob Rushing, associate director of the Unit.

These are the people who got together beginning last summer to think about freedom and its discontents and to figure out how it might make sense to take up the topic as the center of a multidisciplinary seminar and conference--the end result of which was the seminar which met for the last time this past Monday and today’s and tomorrow’s conference: bringing together geographers, political theorists, literary critics, critical theorists, and historians, and musicians working in a variety of methodological and regional fields.

Along the way we received the support of co-sponsors, large and small, without whose help we would not have been able to assemble the outstanding scholars we have here today from the United States and Canada.

On behalf of myself and my co-organizers I want to thank the College of Liberal Arts & Sciences, the Center for Advanced Study, the Illinois Program for Research in the Humanities--sponsors of this morning keynote lecture--the Center for Latin American & Caribbean Studies, and the following programs and departments: English; Education Policy, Organization & Leadership; Spanish, Italian, & Portuguese; Comparative & World Literature; Jewish Culture & Society; French; Political Science; History; Slavic Languages & Literatures; Latina/Latino Studies; and Germanic Languages & Literatures.

I also want to thank the Unit’s Grad Assistants, Mike Black and Kathy Skwarczek, on whom Rob and I rely for everything from the design of the lovely poster and program for today’s conference (among other events) to tech support and organizing details of every sort.

But a great deal of gratitude is also owed to the many faculty members and graduate students--affiliates of the Unit for Criticism--who joined us (several attending all five meetings during a very busy semester), enriching our collective discussion of this most familiar and elusive of topics: freedom.

When I was a kid, around 9 I think, my mom used to let me watch re-runs of Star Trek every night after dinner--with the result that my earliest and, to this day still, my most reflexive thoughts about freedom are from a particular Star Trek episode which I now know first aired in March 1968 and is called “The Omega Glory”.

If you are of my generation--or just geeky--you will know in this episode Kirk and Spock are on an alien planet, Omega IV, and are imprisoned along with this alien couple in animal skins. As they try to escape by loosening the bars in their prison,Kirk says that they must keep on “working...if we’re ever going to regain our freedom.”

To which the big guy in the animal skin, hitherto mute, speaks out--in a deep voice to which I can’t possibly do justice. “Free-dom?,” he says. “Free-dom?...That is worship word. Yang worship. You will not speak it.”

To which Kirk, never one to skip a beat when dealing with aliens in animal skins, replies, “Well, well, well. It is our worship word, too.”

As you will no doubt surmise, this is one of those many Star Trek episodes which offers not so subtle commentary on the current Cold War even while supposedly depicting the far-off future. Because Omega IV just happens to be the scene of a postwar apocalyptic clash between Orientalized warriors called “Kohms” and Teutonic-looking “savages” called "Yangs". And, as usual, there is a rogue federation officer who has “gone native” and abandoned the Prime Directive.

I’ll spare you the full details except to say that when Kirk shocks the Yangs by knowing the words to the Pledge of Allegiance, he and Spock deduce that the Kohms are the descendants of “Communists” and the Yangs of “Yankees” indicating that, centuries before, the Omegans had a conflict exactly like the one going on between the US and Soviet Union in 1968, only on Omega, subsequent biological warfare left the Yangs as savage bearers of the US liberal creed.

The episode concludes when Kirk is put to the test by being asked to repeat the words to the “E Plubnista” which at first he can’t remember--but which he eventually recognizes as the Preamble to the US Constitution--"We the People"--allowing William Shatner to read aloud the document with a hammy gravitas that should leave John Boehner weeping with envy.

At the end of the episode the Yangs are ready to regard Kirk as a deity, but he commands them to stand tall and listen to him read more of the Constitution aloud. These words were not meant to apply just to “Yangs,” he lectures them, but to “Kohms” as well; and on that note of blithe universalism the crew leaves, Prime Directive more or less intact, confident that that Yangs and Kohms will now cooperate in rebuilding their war-ravaged planet.

So one thing we learn from this perverse pop culture memory of mine is that reading the Constitution aloud in defense of freedom seems to have signified a soft, mainstream, TV-friendly liberalism in the United States of the Lyndon Johnson years (this would have been contemporaneous with the peak of American aggression in Viet Nam); whereas now, though the props have remained virtually the same--a flag, a white guy with a tan, and a copy of the “E Plubnista”--freedom seems to have drifted from the presumed universalism, sooner or later, of liberal values and institutions to the freedom from liberal values and institutions, Medicare, Social Security, and progressive taxation chief among them.

In our seminar this semester we considered conceiving these competing constellations of freedom as the positive and negative liberty that Isaiah Berlin sketched in his famous 1958 lecture--itself a reaction to Fascism and Stalinism though ostensibly a debate with the ethico-political legacy of Kant and Hegel.

What was clear to everyone is that while a proactive “freedom” can generate a host of discontents which we see, for example, in the cold and hot wars subtending Star Trek’s narrative of supposedly benign international federalism, the reduction of freedom to negative and individualistic perspectives has facilitated a host of discontents including racial and gender inequality; the political and cultural tyranny of powerful elites; the fomenting of neo-imperial violence; and the devastation of environments—physical, animal, and human.

But then, as we also discussed, there are other conceptions of freedom as non-domination which are neither purely negative nor positive in the overbearing sense Berlin described--for example, the kind of liberty that John Stuart Mill associated in 1859 with the freedom to participate, disagree, and even be eccentric; or the kind that Hannah Arendt associated with the faculties of imagination and judgment. And then too there is the kind of existential freedom that, as Jean-Paul Sartre believed, human beings were “doomed” to experience as the condition of living in a post-metaphysical universe, reminding us that there was more going on in 1968 than Star Trek.

“To raise the question, what is freedom? seems to be a hopeless enterprise" wrote Hannah Arendt in her famous essay, “What is freedom?”, and yet, as she well knew, raise the question we must since questions of freedom demonstrably underlie the major challenges including the call for human rights and civil liberties for citizens and non-citizens alike; the promise of social justice across races, ethnicities, nationalities, classes, genders, and sexualities; and the need to spread sustainable economic development, create peace and security for all, and ensure environmental flourishing across the globe—concerns central to the work of the scholars we’ll be listening to today and tomorrow.

So raise the question we will.

3/1 Seminar, Nancy Fraser, “Feminism, Capitalism, and the Cunning of History” Guest Writer: Jungmin Kwon

2011-04-15T16:19:00.007-05:00

[On Tuesday, March 1, 2011, the Illinois Program for Research in the Humanities and the Unit for Criticism hosted a seminar with Nancy Fraser of The New School. Fraser is a Nicholson Distinguished Visiting Scholar.]

Nancy Fraser’s “Feminism, Capitalism and the Cunning of History”
Written by Jungmin Kwon (Institute of Communications Research)

The seminar on March 1 addressed Nancy Fraser’s article, “Feminism, Capitalism and the Cunning of History,” published in the New Left Review (2009). The discussion that followed focused primarily on the applications and possibilities of her argument which anticipates the macrosocial analysis of the contemporary economic crisis which she outlined in her February 28 lecture on Karl Polanyi’s The Great Transformation.

In her introductory remarks, Fraser explained that the financial crisis that began in 2008 has exerted a huge impact on her intellectually, motivating her to periodize our recent history including second wave feminism—the topic of her article. She explained that she hoped to frame the relationship between capitalism and feminism and to imagine the possibility of a post-neoliberal moment in the future. Both the lecture and the article point out that feminism and neoliberalism share a common hostility toward traditional authority; emancipatory movements such as feminism are therefore vulnerable to the allure of a free market economy.

Most of the seminar consisted in open question and answer. One set of questions was about the implications of the periodization in her writing. Some participants expressed the concern that Fraser’s historical framework is limited in its ability to explain details and dynamics beyond its particular sociocultural context. Another participant questioned the concept of “crisis” as a discourse, observing that there has already been a transition from meta-theories to minor issues. Finally, the construction of Westphalianism was criticized because of its complicities with the history of Western imperialism.

Professor Fraser agreed that her discussion of what happened to second wave feminism and capitalism cannot be universalized. Nonetheless, she pointed out that we still should be able to glean “big patterns” that will allow us to imagine an open future. To this end, she wanted to provide a model for intellectuals and activists since “there is no way through to transformation except by actually thinking about criticizing and struggling against capitalism.”

A few participants then moved to explore her concept of an “open future”: How open is the future, they pondered? What is politically possible? What are we supposed to do? Fraser acknowledged that the Left has not made much progress recently as emancipatory desires and actions are often co-opted and rechanneled by capitalism. In her article, she hoped to resituate second wave feminism in relation to a potential upsurge of the Left. Using the example of the Tea Party’s appeal, she argued that Left politics can also be participatory, not bureaucratic.

Building upon Fraser’s belief in possibility, one seminar participant pointed to the “idea of the public” in Fraser’s article and argued that the crisis of capitalism in fact offered a chance for an open future. It is unnecessary to be pessimistic because, with so many boundaries broken, actors have a number of resources to help them navigate the flow of possibilities.

Appropriately, the seminar closed with another return to Polanyi. Professor Fraser was asked what she found in Polanyi to inspire her own longstanding commitment to the importance of struggling for redistribution along with recognition. Fraser answered by reinterpreting Polanyi’s conceptualization of the foundation role of market. According to Fraser, Polanyi appreciates that the power of the market in capitalism and recognizes that the state’s power must be mobilized for redistribution to take place. Needless to say, markets should be regulated and situated differently from their position in the current neoliberal geography. For her, the most important thing was not any single system, either state or market, but the relationships and connections among multiple systems.

3/28 Lecture, José B. Capino: "‘My Brother is Not a Pig’"Guest Writer Diana Jaher and Respondent Augusto Espiritu

2011-04-04T13:31:00.010-05:00

[On Monday, March 28, 2011, the Unit for Criticism hosted "'My Brother is Not a Pig': Philippine Cinema against Empire," a lecture by José B. Capino, professor of English, Asian American Studies, Cinema Studies, and Gender & Women's Studies at the University of Illinois. The below contributions are from the event's guest writer, Diana Jaher, and faculty respondent, Augusto Espiritu]

José B. Capino's "'My Brother is Not a Pig': Philippine Cinema against Empire"

Written by Diana Jaher (Theatre, Cinema Studies, Gender and Women's Studies)

In a talk derived from his book, Dream Factories of a Former Colony: American Fantasies, Philippine Cinema (U of Minnesota P, 2010), José B. Capino analyzed Philippine cinematic representations of the country’s relationship with the United States from 1947 to the present. He argued that the cinema (a thriving industry that produces 280 films a year) often depicts the Philippines’ complex postcolonial attachment to its former “benevolent big brother,” a relationship characterized by “deep resentment and lingering affection.”

The U.S. colonized the Philippines from 1898 to 1946, granting independence to this important ally after World War II. Throughout its occupation, the United States asserted that its role was not to conquer but to protect – what President McKinley referred to as “benevolent assimilation, substituting the mild sway of justice and right for arbitrary rule.” In his postcolonial readings of two films, Once a Moth (Lupita Aquino-Kashiwahara, Philippines, 1976) and PX (Lino Brocka, Philippines, 1982), Capino argued that the films' depictions of Philippine/U.S. relations subvert the image of U.S. paternalism and, instead, reveal a systematic pattern of neglect and abuse by the most imperialist of all American institutions: the U.S. military.

Both movies use the American air base (through which the U.S. maintained a military presence in the Philippines for decades after independence) to symbolize the violence inherent in imperial domination. Much of their cruelty stems from the United States’ insistence on maintaining sovereignty while occupying foreign territory. American G.I.s, for example, were not subject to Philippine law and were given immunity from crimes committed in the line of duty against non-Americans in or around military camps. Between 1952-64, G.I.s were suspected of killing thirty-one Filipinos; none was convicted. Showing several graphic clips depicting natives victimized by American aggression while on or near a base, Capino argued that the two films implicitly called for the closing of the camps, challenging the myth of the United States as a benevolent empire.

Once a Moth features Filipino superstar Nora Aunor as Corazon de la Cruz, a nurse whose young brother, Carlito, is mistaken for a boar while flying a kite near Clark Air Force Base and killed by American G.I.s. When an army official attempts to hand Cora a check for $787 and explains, half-apologetically, the shooter’s mistake, the young woman (uttering the most famous line in Philippine cinematic history) cries out, “My brother is not a pig.”

Capino noted that Carlito’s death illustrates Frantz Fanon’s theory that the native victim of imperialism is reduced to an animal (to heighten this connection, the film shows us an image of a dead pig with the boy’s murdered body), and that death at the hands of the colonizers is his or her usual fate. But Cora’s words demand that we acknowledge her brother’s humanity (he is not a pig, either literally or figuratively) in the face of global military domination.

Yet, as Capino argued throughout the lecture, Filipinos are deeply ambivalent about their former “protectors.” For example, during the funeral, Carlito’s grandfather (Paquito Salcedo) remembers a moment of United States/Philippine solidarity when he recalls the Bataan Death March. Images of the March – forced on U.S. and Filipino POWS by the Japanese (another foreign invader) – are intercut with frames of the murdered boy’s burial. Capino held that these memories of commonality deny Grandpa “the freedom to despise the United States and mourn his nation.”

Moth ends with a striking vision of reversal. Injured in a motorcycle accident, Carlito’s shooter depends upon Cora’s nursing skills to survive. The native woman redeems the ex-colonizer for his lack of “benevolence” by tending to her brother’s murderer. And, more importantly, she gains control over life and death – a power hitherto solely in the hands of the Americans.

In his analysis of the second film, PX, Capino referenced the Foucauldian notion of bio-politics for a second time: the base, once again, is a site of life and death. As in Moth, we see the youngest and most helpless characters die in acts of senseless violence. PX similarly revolves around a character with conflicted feelings for the United States: in this case, Lydia (Hilda Koronel), an Amerasian haunted by her paternity who dreams of marrying an American soldier like her father and immigrating to his country. Half colonizer and half colonized, Lydia possesses what Capino called a “divided heart:” a victim who demonstrates affection for her victimizer, she represents the Philippine colonial attachment to the fantasy of U.S. benevolence.

Lydia's criminal boyfriend, Isidro (Phillip Salvador), expresses similar “divided” feelings for the U.S. He puts his young brother through school to learn English, exhibiting pride in the boy’s ability to, as Capino noted, “speak the conqueror’s tongue.” But the boy falls victim to Carlito’s fate: he, too, is mistakenly shot by base soldiers. After the child’s death, Lydia and her boyfriend resolve never again to love the American who lives on the base. But his is one of several deaths; the others are prostitutes whose murderer(s) are never found (film image left). Death permeates the camp, attacking the most vulnerable (women, children) for it is the “throwaways” – Fanon’s “wretched of the earth” – who always die in greatest numbers, embodying the failure of imperial benevolence.

Clark Air Base closed in the early 1990s but Capino noted that the two films’ political influence is unclear (although Moth enjoyed economic and critical success – largely because of Aunor’s star power – PX did not). Yet incidents of colonialist violence still occur. The most recent – and notorious – episode happened in 2005 when Daniel Smith, an American G.I. convicted of raping a Philippine woman (“Nicole”), was smuggled out of jail. Pressured by the U.S. government who threatened to withdraw valuable monetary aid, the Philippine officials turned him over to the U.S. Embassy. Like the raped and murdered women in PX, Nicole’s native body is violated by an act of U.S. imperialism, her dignity deemed expendable by the military industrial complex.

In his response to Capino’s framing of Philippine cinema in the shadow of post-U.S. imperialism, Augusto Espiritu referenced some of the incidents detailed above, noting that the long history of Philippine/U.S. relations has been less than “benign.” Today, the U.S. still fails to acknowledge or attend to the neglect of Filipino bodies; they remain “throwaway” people. He also commented on the films’ reliance on feminine iconography (most of the clips featured female characters), arguing that the colonized woman exercises power – often on “behalf of the weakened colonial man” – over the white male colonizer. In the question and answer session, several audience members also mentioned this trope; Capino offered Rey Chow’s theory that the primitive woman often bears the burden of representation.

Espiritu concluded by noting that images of U.S. extra-territorial aggression can be found in many places other than the Philippines – Honduras, Okinawa, Iraq, Afghanistan – anywhere the United States maintains a military presence and violates native female and male bodies with impunity [read further for Espiritu's response].

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A response by Augusto Espiritu (History, Asian American Studies, Latin American and Caribbean Studies)

It was in 1995 at Ambassador Negroponte’s house in Manila that I attended a dinner hosted by the ambassador and his wife. To my surprise half the room was made up of American soldiers in fatigues. They were taking a respite from military exercises with the Philippine government in anticipation of a potential invasion of Taiwan by China. It had only been three years since U.S. control over Clark Air Base and Subic Bay Naval Base had been turned over to the Philippine government. I thought to myself then – they were back so soon. Had the Americans really left?

I also happened to visit the city of Angeles, Pampanga at that time and to see Clark Air Base for myself – we were there to shop in the huge supermarkets that had hastily sprung up to fill the vacuum of the old PX. I walked through the old base – it was a ghost town. It was covered in lahar, volcanic ashes that had rained down from the sky. All I could see were dark holes, like eyes, where there were once doors and windows. So much nationalist agitation and activism over decades of struggle could not dislodge the U.S. military, but this apocalyptic ash, which darkened the sky and choked one’s breath, achieved what no effort by the colonized or neo-colonized could do – sent the proverbial kanó packing. Or so I thought.

José Capino’s paper deals with the way two Philippine films, Minsa’y isang gamu-gamo (Once a Moth) and PX, argued for the closure of the U.S. bases, exposing their ills and representing their complex social ramifications even as the Marcos dictatorship negotiated with the Americans to maintain them, though for higher “rent.” Lupita Aquino Concio, or Lupita Aquino Kashiwahara, directed the first, while Lino Brocka, perhaps the greatest name in Filipino film-making, directed PX.

Once a Moth juxtaposes a despedida, or send-off for a young woman headed to the “States” with the shooting of her younger brother for trespassing in Crow Valley firing range, near Clark Airfield, while he was flying a kite (image left) and mistaken for a “boar.” Through the images of Cora crashing on the tinikling and her brother’s red-white-and blue kite, Concio gives us a picture of “stunted expression,” or better yet, arrested sovereignty, victimized by American naked imperial rights to “extraterritoriality” and at the same time lured by the promises of the discourse of “benevolence” with which it justifies its imperial presence.

PX is much more complex in plot – it involves natives and an American soldier banned from the base and yet, indeed by their very exclusion, made a marginal part of the imperial geography that radiates out from the base, which Capino pictures as exhibiting the characteristics of a concentration camp, a “place that is neither outside nor inside the sovereign sphere,” which combines a politics of life with a politics of death, indeed, “the politics of life as one of death.” Lydia, a prostitute of mixed race, becomes involved in a relationship with Isidro, a Filipino hit man under the employ of both corrupt Filipinos and Americans near the base, who is involved in a drug and prostitution ring. Isidro, nonetheless, puts his brother, Boy, through school, for Boy’s education embodies his hopes of being able to get out of the “throwaway” life that he and his family inhabit.

Lydia, who wavers between a love and hatred for America, “embodies the figure of the ex-colonized ‘as the living haunt of contradictions’” while Isidro embodies the Fanonian “figure of the native afflicted with a ‘homicidal melancholia.’” It also involves how George, a white American soldier, mistakes a young Filipino for an animal, shoots him in the Crow Valley firing range, and then himself becomes a scapegoat and is hunted down. In order to survive, he has to rely on poor natives and on the friendship of Lydia, with whom he becomes involved – a “fantasy of a special relationship.” Lydia becomes conflicted about his budding love for whiteness and the fact that the boy killed in the encounter was the brother of her boyfriend.

But on another level, armed with pointed quotes from Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida, and Giorgio Agamben, Capino’s piece is about the ways these films stage both the strange predicament of the biopower of the colonized woman over the white male colonizer and, simultaneously, thanatopolitics, the abjection of expanding circles of Filipino and Filipina subjects, their excretion from the body politic as prostitutes and as rape victims, the evisceration of their subjectivity, and their naked exposure to the material and discursive technologies of biopower.

In the case of the former, the nurse Cora, who is defeated in the courts, failing to undo the extraterritoriality law by which her brother’s death is left unpunished, treats a GI in desperate medical need after a motorcycle accident. As Capino writes, “Cora redeems the ex-colonizer from his lack of benevolence, for the sake of the future and for the sake of others who may yet require the benevolence of empire.” In the case of the latter, we are shown the fate of the three prostitutes murdered under mysterious circumstances: Tina, the young woman raped by multiple assailants; Luisa, the table dancer who wanted to go to America, took chances with American GI boyfriends, and is found stuffed with a trowel; and Josie, the confidant of Lydia.

José Capino’s work shows us that we cannot forget; we cannot subscribe to the view that the long history of United States and Philippine relations has been an unequivocally benign one, which the recent Bush administration so damagingly promoted. The Philippines of recent history has become once again a peripheral country and people from the ethnocentric viewpoint of the U.S. bases – it is but a useful lesson in counterinsurgency for the prosecution of the war in Iraq, never mind the concentration camps, the illnesses, and the tortures that attended that war and led to so much suffering. Here, Capino is saying to us that the “postcolonial” history of the Philippines and the United States has so far failed to attend to the neglect of Filipino and Filipina bodies, which had become and continues to remain disposable, “throw-away” people – the lives of children of mixed-race, prostitutes, poor people, women especially, and one might add, minorities on the base. And empire continues, in the guise of the extraterritoriality that makes the violation of vulnerable male and female “native” bodies acceptable, unpunishable.

The films he so ably interprets might stand as crying testimonies to unsolved crimes and remaining injustices, and in so doing, recall for us the mouths and bodies of so many women, as of a young girl raped in Okinawa or South Korea, or the cries of the women of Juarez and throughout Mexico, or the countless victims of sexual abuse in Honduras. They recall as well the lives of so many young people, victimized not by honest mistakes, but by “animalization,” and the twisted logic and geographies of these zones of presumed “sovereignty.”

It may be Clark Airfield or the Crow Valley firing zone this time, but it could just as well be the outskirts of U.S. military bases in Seoul or in Okinawa, Vieques, Guantánamo, or the new ones sprouting up in Colombia.

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Caroline Levine, Letter from Wisconsin

2011-03-04T13:29:00.016-06:00

[In this post, Caroline Levine, professor of English at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, writes about the on-going demonstrations and rallies in Madison, Wisconsin.]

Three views from the ground in Madison
Written by Caroline Levine (University of Wisconsin-Madison)

I. Personal
Born in 1970, I and my classmates missed the sixties. My schoolteachers and college professors never tired of reminding us of this. They were frustrated with what they saw as our passivity and complacency. Why weren’t we more riled up? I loathed Reagan and George H W Bush, who presided over my coming of age, as much as the next left-leaning teenager. I certainly wanted change, as did many of my friends. And yet, the radical political groups I knew seemed powerless and puny in the face of huge forces that dwarfed their efforts—trickle-down economics, global capitalism, nonvoting minority groups, reactions against sixties cultural politics. I couldn’t imagine how you sparked a movement that mattered, and I was annoyed that our elders blamed us for being born too late, for feeling helpless and hopeless.

The last few weeks in Madison have changed me. They haven’t changed my deep feelings of helplessness—I still worry that worse times are around the corner, and that we can’t do much to forestall them—but now, for the first time, I understand the feelings of the generation that taught me. I’ve been to seven rallies since Valentine’s Day, each one bigger than the one before. The first one, a small group of graduate students and faculty, marched on the State Capitol—a ten- or fifteen-minute walk from the campus. At first we felt too embarrassed to chant, most of us, and chatted about the gloomy state of the state instead, as we walked disconsolately along the sidewalk.

When we got to the Capitol itself, the graduate students led us inside, and there something felt a little different. First of all, it seemed surprising that no one had stopped us, a thousand or so people, as we crammed through the revolving doors. Then the students’ chants echoed off the walls, filling the space, and we all joined together in the center of the domed building. An electricity seemed to unite the space. The Capitol, a neoclassical building that is usually hushed and populated by a few tourists and some hurried-looking legislative aides, felt vital in a way I’d never imagined. “Whose house?” we chanted. “Our house!” I have done some writing about large modern democracies, where people who share a government never meet. Usually I experience democracy as an abstraction, mediated in troubling ways by newspapers, television and the web. But in that moment the people seemed to become a dynamic and pulsing reality—and I felt, for the first time, like a part of a living body politic.

The next days brought bigger rallies. On Wednesday, on the steps of the Capitol, we were joined by union leaders, nurses, and a lot of undergraduates. On Thursday the sixteenth, Madison schoolteachers called in sick in such large numbers that schools had to close. Teachers from around the state poured in with signs. “Milwaukee math teacher teaching civics lesson today.” “If you can read this, thank a teacher.” “100% of teachers have more education that Scott Walker.”

We sent up a huge cheer as firefighters in full regalia—exempt from the Governor’s plan to end collective bargaining—joined us in a gesture of solidarity. Over the next few days, corrections officers and electricians and teachers and graduate students called each other “brothers and sisters.” They crafted sincere and witty and rousing and absurd signs: “Enjoy your weekend? Thank a union!” “I protect your family from the criminally insane.” “We’re just trying to have a society here.” “Do YOU plan on shoveling the roads?” “Scott, this relationship really isn’t working for me.” “There’s still good in you (Sky) Walker.” One of the most moving sights I have ever seen was the inside of the Capitol building looking like a carefully crafted work of collective art, its whole interior covered with lovingly hand-made signs.

There is always something slightly comic to me, an East Coaster, about mid-Western politeness, but the thorough absence of any threat of violence or even rudeness made huge crowds of chanting, marching, outraged radicals immensely fun. People brought their kids; cops passed out food and water to the protesters. Friends saw each other and stopped for lunch at a local Himalayan restaurant, only to return for more chanting and marching.

My seven-year-old son came along with me to a couple of the big rallies. He’s a dedicated fan of Harry Potter and Star Wars, and I was surprised to realize how much these have taught him about politics. Not just about good and evil, but about democratic processes: in Star Wars, the Jedi support an elected legislature against the encroachments of a greedy empire, and in Harry Potter Dolores Umbridge suspends established procedure—including freedom of speech and assembly—for the sake of her own authoritarian rule. My son really does understand the problem of power grabs, and he was more interested in the nitty-gritty of state politics than I’d expected. But it wasn’t just a civics lesson that I wanted for him. I had a powerful desire for him to feel that passionate, electrifying, peaceful oneness with a living crowd.

For the first time, then, I think I understand what motivated my teachers’ frustration with us, the non-protesting generation. It wasn’t just reproach at our inactivity: it was that we were missing out on a precious experience of solidarity we couldn’t grasp or imagine. They weren’t just disappointed in us, that is: they were disappointed for us.

II. Statistical
Of course, throughout the past few weeks, it has been impossible to forget that we protesters do not speak for the people as a whole, that folks who strongly disagree live alongside us in significant numbers. I have a bad habit of reading the comments sections after online news stories, and I have been astonished at the venom being spewed at lazy, greedy teachers (I didn’t even know that feeling was out there), the contempt for firefighters who allegedly retire to six-figure salaries after developing carpal tunnel syndrome (wait, aren’t they heroes?), and the assumption that it’s the corrupt unions who are bleeding the tax-payers dry.

I felt nervous when I went out for breakfast in a western suburb of Madison where people move when the city schools get too “diverse” for them (even progressive little Madison turns out to have white flight). My son was flashing his “Derail Walker” button, and I warned him that someone might yell at him, or at me, because they disagreed with us. He seemed unruffled—when the Force is with you, you’re not thrown by a little shouting—but I realized that I have a desperate desire for civil, productive, and rational public dialogue, and that in my lifetime that has seemed increasingly out of reach. I worry that protests don’t always help that ideal along, since they solidify a sense of us against them.

So call me naive, but I have also spent the past few weeks wondering how we might talk to those who disagree with us. For now, we’ve lost some major battles in the rhetorical war: the right has hammered away at their message so long and so consistently that the option of raising taxes on the wealthiest quartile is off the table completely. Walker gets away with the claim that only drastic cuts to education, health care, and environmental regulation can balance the state budget in these hard times. How could we intervene in that?

Part of the problem is, of course, money. The billionaire Koch brothers who poured millions of dollars into conservative coffers in this last election know that people are swayed by advertising—even though each of us thinks that we ourselves are immune. By putting their money into elections, the wealthy reap double rewards: more power than other citizens over electoral outcomes, and easy access and influence over the government that takes power. That’s why Common Cause, which works to keep money out of politics, seems to me to be one of the most important organizations out there. (In fact, I’m going to stop writing and send them a donation right now.) Unions, for all their problems, are one of the few organized interest groups in US politics that represent middle- and working-class people. Their financial contribution is minuscule compared to corporate donations, and they have dwindled terribly in size over the past few decades. But they are among the only counterweights to corporate power over government that we have. My brother, who runs the non-profit organization CIRCLE, has some wonderfully lucid arguments on this topic.

But if we had the floor and could speak loudly and publicly, what would we say? What arguments would work best?

I have been thinking, first of all, about how we might answer the opposing side with hard numbers. The state might be “broke,” as the Governor likes to say, but taxes in Wisconsin are regressive: families in Wisconsin making less than $20,000 a year pay 9.2% of their income in combined taxes, while families making $388,000 or more pay only 6.7% of their income in those taxes. We could also argue that trickle-down economics has not actually spurred our economy in the past thirty years, but instead has allowed economic inequalities to grow. We can always point out that despite budget problems in Wisconsin, the Republican-controlled Legislature approved $48 million in tax breaks in January 2011 for health savings accounts, which are tax havens for the top income earners (the average annual income of HSA participants was $139,000 in 2005). We can mention that there are over 100,000 millionaires in Wisconsin, and ask whether it seems fair that the poor and the middle class should make all the sacrifices.

III. Historical
For the far right—the Tea Partiers—these arguments wouldn’t make much of an impact. For them, economic equality takes a back seat to what they call “freedom.” It seems only right to them that people who earn money in a tough, competitive marketplace should be rewarded for their efforts, not penalized with taxes. In their view, unions are corrupt special interests who protect mediocre workers and fat benefits packages at the expense of the very struggling taxpayers who keep the economy going. Any regulation of business slows growth, they feel, and it’s just a reality that some people will be altogether left behind. Either they can compete with workers in the global South at sweatshop wages, or they can pull themselves up by their bootstraps. The new legislation proposed in Missouri to change child labor laws suggests that a return to the economic scene of the nineteenth century—where children provide cheap labor instead of requiring expensive schooling—might not be anathema to conservatives.

Now, I’m a nineteenth-century scholar by training, so I know something about what the world looks like under a booming free market society with comparatively little government regulation. Victorian England was something of a Tea Partier’s dream. But would conservatives really want to live there?

Consider the following. Smart industrialists in the nineteenth century were keen to hire the cheapest workers, and they found that children could operate most machinery just as well as adults for a fraction of the cost. Children as young as 4 or 5 could be expected to work a day that lasted 16 hours. Since there were no laws regulating workplace safety, it was common for workers, overcome with exhaustion, to fall over into the machines, their limbs crushed, their bodies mangled. Employers were not liable for these accidents. No worker was entitled to paid or unpaid leave of any kind, and new mothers usually found themselves having to return to factory jobs 2 or 3 days after giving birth.

Since there was no government regulation of food, vendors mixed grain with chalk and alcohol with turpentine. Canny purveyors of pepper mixed the genuine spice with dust swept from warehouse floors, and quite a lot of gin, on examination, was found to contain sulphuric acid. Patent medicines containing any mixture of herbs and minerals—including arsenic and morphine—were available without restriction. It was common practice among poorer mothers to give opium to babies to make sure that they would stay quiet all day while they worked. Countless infants died from overdoses.

If you were unlucky enough to become disabled, or lucky enough to grow old, you relied on the generosity of family members. Employers had no obligation to workers as they aged, and often left them to die on the streets after years of service. Those workers shrewd enough to invest their earnings for the future quite often found that they had been swindled, since proponents of the free market objected volubly to all government efforts to intervene in financial transactions, including fraud.

Without a public sanitation infrastructure in place, newly crowded cities saw repeated cholera and typhoid epidemics that swept away lives by the tens of thousands. The average urban life expectancy dropped. A boy born in Liverpool in the 1850s could look forward to seeing the ripe age of 26. Unable to rely on a public education system, Britain’s poorest families sent their children to work to cover the costs of keeping them. Half of England remained illiterate until late in the century, which meant that there was little way for the indigent to pull themselves out of poverty.

So devastating were these conditions that the public pressed Parliament to intervene. In 1833, the “Short Time Committees” succeeded in limiting the workday for children between the ages of 9 and 18 and abolishing labor altogether for those younger than 9; after mid-century the government started to regulate food quality and the sale of poisons; and by the 1870s the nation had begun to invest in compulsory public education and clean water.

These reforms were expensive. And in fact free market capitalists fought even the tiniest regulatory moves, predicting economic catastrophe. They also warned of moral decline, arguing that people would grow irresponsible as they acquired the habit of looking to the government for help.

Neither the moral nor the economic arguments have gone away. And now they’ve developed such force that the clock is turning eerily backward. Do we really want to go back to 1850? That question seems like an argument for knowing a little bit about history. And the answer would require investing in education, which apparently, for now, is off the table.

2/28 Lecture, Nancy Fraser: "Marketization, Social Protection, Emancipation"Guest Writer: Ergin Bulut

2011-03-03T12:20:00.001-06:00

[On Monday, February 28, 2011, the Unit for Criticism hosted "Marketization, Social Protection, Emancipation: Re-reading Karl Polanyi in the 21st Century," a lecture by Nancy Fraser of The New School. Fraser is a Nicholson Distinguished Visiting Scholar.]

Nancy Fraser's "Marketization, Social Protection, Emancipation: Re-reading Karl Polanyi in the 21st Century"

Written by Ergin Bulut (Institute of Communications Research)

Per Zsuzsa Gille's introductory remarks, Nancy Fraser proved to offer a nuanced crystallization of Marxist, Foucaultian, poststructuralist, and Habermasian perspectives, as well as an insider critique of feminist theory, especially in relation to the threat of second wave feminism's integration into the neoliberal project, given the latter’s emphasis on choice and freedom. Fraser’s guiding question asked how we understand the crisis of contemporary capitalism, and she argued that our contemporary crisis cannot be thought of in an orthodox Marxist manner. Instead, she suggested that we go back to Karl Polanyi, author of The Great Transformation, and rethink some of his concepts.

”By all means, the crisis of neoliberalism should alter critical theory,” said Fraser. Academics, she argued, have stayed away from grand social theorizing for the last couple of decades because social critique based on capitalism has been labeled reductionist. Fraser cautioned that “with current rates of unemployment and the dire circumstances of recession, the crisis is still alive,” and in this respect the economic dimension of the crisis cannot be ignored, nor can the damage to human and animal ecologies.

Nevertheless, there are other dimensions to the crisis. While Fraser explained the social dimension with reference to Mike Davis’s Planet of Slums, she vividly described its political nature by taking us to the general crisis of the territorial state, as well as referring to the contemporary crisis of the US, EU, and the institutions of global governance.

It is clear from Fraser’s talk that critical theorizing needs to understand the crisis of global capitalism—but how? Some of the productive questions raised by Fraser include: How do we overcome economistic explanations? How do we expand existing non-economistic theorizing? How do we conceptualize the current crisis by historicizing economy as mediated by culture and geography?

The answer is in rethinking Karl Polanyi's classic work. In Polanyi’s magnum opus, The Great Transformation, the crisis is less about the economy than about ruptured solidarities and degraded nature. From Polanyi’s work we can borrow key concepts and terms, including the disembedded market, the fictitious commodity (i.e., capitalism’s impact on land, labor, and money), and the double movement between marketization and social protection.

According to Polanyi, the proposition of a self-regulating market vis-à-vis a moral and ethical society is not feasible. In disembedded markets, land, labor, and money are turned into fictitious commodities, triggering crisis. As in Marx, these three commodities are crucial for livelihood. To treat them as commodities is to undermine their crucial capacity for reproduction. In other words, the commodification of these three ultimately threatens to undermine capitalism itself.

Polanyi then looks at the response of social actors to the crisis capitalism provokes. People mobilize to protect their commons (land, labor, and money). This is the double movement: the marketization of what ought to be embedded in and regulated by society mobilizes social actors. Though as Fraser made clear, these social controls were and remain potentially reactionary, while marketization has liberating aspects. Polanyi, like Marx, emphasizes struggle but he focuses on forces favoring the market, whereas Marx focuses on cross class movements. In all these respects, Fraser said, Polanyi is a promising response to 21st century capitalism.

For Fraser, neoliberalism amounts to the second coming of the faith in self-regulating markets. Today’s crisis therefore invites the coming of a second great transformation. Indeed, Polanyi is an answer to the crisis, but only, Fraser cautions, if we read him critically. The goal is a new quasi-Polanyian approach that not only rejects economism, but also rejects romanticizing society. One of the flaws of The Great Transformation is its neglect of non-market based oppression. The book mostly focuses on struggles involving the market, but not the struggles and potential harm embedded in society. Therefore we need to embrace Polanyi only cautiously.

Fraser’s revision of Polanyi involves the addition of a third prong to the double movement: in addition to marketization and social protection, she added emancipation. Emancipation is about overcoming domination both in the economy and society. To speak of emancipation, Fraser said, means to introduce something that does not appear in The Great Transformation. Theorizing emancipatory struggles such as the anti-slavery and anti-imperial movements is a step toward overcoming Polanyi’s dualistic thinking, Fraser argued. For while social protection rejects deregulated markets, emancipation rejects all relations of domination.

Toward the end of her lecture, Fraser gave two examples of triple movements: the feminist movement and anti-colonial struggles. Both of these cases illustrate how social protection can result in domination. Emancipatory social movements seek more than regulated markets; they also ask: Are the institutions providing protection oppressive? Is the mode of protection participatory or not?

Fraser also addressed Polanyi’s particular relevance to present moment of crisis and to critical theory more generally. As marketization is championed by neoliberals, protectionism is defended by such diverse groups as nationally oriented unions, religious groups, indigenous movements, and anti-immigrant parties; and emancipatory movements include gay and lesbian movements, among others. Critical theorists should look at these three terms in ambivalence, thinking about the positive and negative aspects of social developments. In other words, the conflict between marketization and protection must be mediated by emancipation, whereas the conflict between social protection and emancipation must be mediated by marketization.

Finally, Fraser underlined the need to rewrite Polanyi in the 21st century with an emphasis on what new ethical battles would look like. These battles would be for the soul of emancipation and for the soul of marketization. They would require the re-alignment of both to social protection and, by doing so, the assertion of a broader understanding of social justice.

Jodi A. Byrd and Michael Rothberg, “Between Subalternity and Indigeneity”

2011-02-24T12:00:00.002-06:00

[The Unit for Criticism and Interpretive Theory has a long history of publishing edited books and special issues derived from events. In the latest of these, Michael Rothberg, former Director of the Unit, and Jodi Byrd, on the faculty of English and American Indian Studies, collaborated to produce a special issue of Interventions: International Journal of Postocolonial Studies from the Unit's 2008 conference, “Decolonizations: Subaltern Studies and Indigenous Critical Theory.”]

We are pleased to announce the publication of "Between Subalternity and Indigeneity," a special issue of Interventions: International Journal of Postocolonial Studies (13.1, 2011). This special issue, which we have edited together, derives from the spring 2008 conference “Decolonizations: Subaltern Studies and Indigenous Critical Theory,” co-organized by the Unit for Criticism and Interpretive Theory and the American Indian Studies Program. The special issue features an introduction by the co-editors and essays by Elizbeth A. Povinelli, Jodi A. Byrd, Gaurav Desai, Maria Josefina Saldaña-Portillo, and Robert Warrior. This event was one of the first ever to explore the relation between postcolonial studies, American Indian Studies, and indigenous studies. We hope the publication of this special issue will contribute to an ongoing dialogue.

Below is the opening paragraph of our introduction, “Between Subalternity and Indigeneity: Critical Categories for Postcolonial Studies.” The remainder of the introduction and the special issue essays can be found here (log in required).

In bringing together the categories of "subalternity" and "indigeneity" this special section of Interventions seeks to inaugurate a conversation that has been waiting to happen for at least two decades--at least since the definitive entry of subaltern studies and postcolonial theory into the North American academy around 1988. In that year alone, Ranajit Guha and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak published their co-edited anthology Selected Subaltern Studies, Spivak put out her own essay collection In Other Worlds, which included her first translations of Mahasveta Devi’s stories as well as her influential essay on Devi, "A Literary Representation of the Subaltern", and, perhaps most consequentially, Spivak’s "Can the Subaltern Speak?" appeared in the collection Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture, edited by Lawrence Grossberg and Cary Nelson. Some critics cynically read the inclusion of a school of historiography dedicated to the non-elite histories of the Indian subcontinent within the very different context of the Reagan/Bush I-era American academy as the expression of a depoliticized appropriation of radical thought, yet the travels of the subaltern concept have been very much a part of its history from the beginning. Drawing inspiration from Antonio Gramsci’s writings on the "Southern Question" in Italy, which adapted the military term "subaltern" to describe uneven national development, as well as from structuralist and poststructuralist theories of discourse, subaltern studies took shape in the 1980s as a project for rewriting the history of South Asia outside the bounds of colonialist, elite nationalist, and Marxist frameworks. The subaltern studies scholars sought to bring attention to peasant insurrections that had remained invisible in dominant and even much leftist historiography by developing alternative models of history and politics attuned to the agency of subordinated social groups. Spivak’s appreciative but critical engagement with the subaltern studies project brought the work of the collective to the attention first of postcolonial scholars and soon thereafter to scholars and activists engaged with ethnic and minority critique on a global scale.

Eric Dalle: "Last Train Home and Questions about Chinese Postsocialist Documentaries"

2011-02-14T14:40:00.002-06:00

[AsiaLENS is a documentary and independent film series hosted by the Asian Educational Media Service (AEMS) that holds screenings, lectures, and discussions every semester. The events are free and open to the public. Below Eric Dalle, a graduate student affiliate in Comparative and World Literatures and East Asian Languages and Cultures, writes on this semester’s first screening, Fan Lixin’s 2009 documentary Last Train Home about migrant workers and their yearly trip home for Chinese New Year. For more information about the AsiaLENS series and the screenings for this semester see the series' website.]

Written by Eric Dalle (Comparative and World Literatures and East Asian Languages and Cultures)

Last Train Home follows the annual homecoming of a married migrant worker couple, Changhua and Suqin, between 2006 and 2008. They work in Guangzhou in the textile industry and have two children living in a rural village of Sichuan Province who are being raised by their grandmother. The film offers a parallel description of travail: the physical and logistic difficulties of returning home during Chinese New Year and the emotional consequences of such a trip. The oldest child, Qin, now seventeen years old, begins to show animosity toward her parents and only credits her grandparents with having raising her. Despite her parents’ opposition, Qin leaves home and thus abandons all educational opportunities to find work in Guangdong Province. A deep animosity develops between the girl and her parents, ending in a severance of communicative ties. Qin wanders through various jobs in the manufacturing and entertainment industries. The rift among family members begins to take a toll on the father’s physical and psychological health, putting into question the family’s very reason for existence—earning money for the betterment of the children and once a year returning home to enjoy time together at Chinese New Year.

In her concluding remarks, Dr. Nancy Jervis offered insight into several cultural factors which need to be taken into consideration while reading this film. To begin with, the practice of leaving children to be raised by grandparents is not the recent byproduct of globalization. Since antiquity, it has been acceptable, and understandable in the context of culturally strong familial bonds, for grandparents to assume a fundamental supporting hand in raising children. Therefore, the "dramatic" fate of the Zhang family should not be seen as filial alienation associated with rapid industrialization, though work in industry provides the economic impetus for the mother and father to live elsewhere during most of the year. Rather, what is peculiar to this documentary is the festering and at times inexplicable hatred of Qin for her parents. Secondly, when Qin decides to leave home for work in Guangzhou, she forgoes all educational opportunities, which are administered through the local government, meaning that she has entered a point of no return. University is no longer an option. She has become a migrant worker.

Chinese documentaries have flourished since the 1990s. Part of this is due to the availability of digital technologies which facilitate filming and distribution. These new works have developed a distinctive style by shifting from the scripted documentaries of the 1980s (for example, the multi-part series Heshang, also released as River Elegy, 1988) as well as from the works of the 90s which are directly influenced by cinema verité, direct cinema, and other spontaneous documentary styles. By contrast to either, New Chinese documentaries have developed a particular feel of their own, and the term that has been conjured to best describe their intrinsic style is "jishizhuyi" or "on-the-spot realism."

The use of hand-held cameras, testimonials through interviews, and the general invasiveness of the filmic device into everyday lives crafts an interesting relationship between documentaries and the state. New technologies allow documentarians agency in avoiding censorship or control over their filmed subject, and the spontaneity of the works circumvents the the director's need to submit scripts to official channels. The works, though, allow the public to speak, and they are representative of the views of everyday people—harking back to practices encouraged by the Maoist-era state apparatus such as speaking out against landlords and the rich. The extent of the relationships between independent works and the state is not yet fully comprehended, and the notion of an "independent" work is problematic at best.

To clarify: the term "postsocialist" as used in this post refers to Chinese postsocialism which is at once a move away from the aesthetics of revolutionary realism (based on the Soviet model) and an attempt to represent postsocialist conditions—that is, conditions inherent in the era following China’s Open Door Policy to today. Much narrative film from the 1990s to the present by "6th Generation Directors" carry the term "postsocialist realist" to indicate an attempt at stripping away ideological representations of truth to capture the raw reality of everyday life on the ground. The on-the-spot realism of contemporary Chinese documentary, attempts, in my opinion, the very same program. Only the age-old cinematic conundrum remains—that is, to what extent can one strip away the old paradigms of ideological representation without replacing them with others?

A project like Last Train Home would not have been possible without the availability of hand-held cameras. Several scenes depict the physical discomforts that Changhua and Suqin endure as they brave the over-packed Guangzhou train station in order to push their way to the train and squeeze their bags through narrow entryways. The family’s second homecoming in the film occurs in 2007 when a fierce winter storm knocked out power and paralyzed travel throughout the entire country—stranding scores of millions of passengers. During this trip, which the couple make with Qin, the Zhang family wait for five days in the overcrowded station to catch the next train. Anxious passengers jump barricades, and the security forces can do little to stop the massive flow of bodies which are pushing to the platforms in order to desperately make the next departure. The camera sways with the pushes and shoves of the crowd while capturing the people being trampled upon, fainting, or pulled by security away from stampedes. The project of the film is to capture the difficulties of travel during Chinese New Year, and the use of the camera to absorb the shock of the stampedes offers a ground-eye view of the frantic and claustrophobic atmosphere.

The film begins with a right to left tracking shot from an elevated position over the Guangzhou train station. A caption appears on the screen indicating there are 130 million migrant workers in Mainland China who will be going home for Chinese New Year, making this event the largest annual migration on earth. As the camera moves left over the plaza, it captures the image of thousands of people squeezed together. The tracking shot emphasizes the number of travelers, yet though the shot is impressive in its ability to represent the enormity of the traveling experience, it also promotes an aesthetic inherent to the mass ornament of anxious travelers.

It is clear that Fan Lixin enjoys the tableau painted by this particular shot, because he uses a similar tracking shot later in the film. Right from the beginning Fan is at times less interested in the spontaneity of the travel experience and more invested in establishing carefully constructed representations of migration. He does not hide his active representation of the emotion he wants to portray: for example, Fan uses non-diegetic music at very particular moments in the film to echo the sadness of Changhua and Sunqin. During each departure scene, a melancholic piece is played on a toy piano narrating the psychological state of the couple who leave their family again for another year.

The most dramatic moment in the film occurs at the exact instant in which the apparatus breaks down and the 'truth of the situation' is revealed in terms of the relationship between the daughter and her father. During a verbal exchange during New Year, Qin begins challenging her father and the stated intentions of her mother to stay this year with her family. Qin curses her father, and the confrontation becomes physical. As he strikes her, Qin turns to the camera and shouts, 'so you wanted to see the real me?' as if challenging the intentions of the filmmaker. At that precise moment, due to the tussling between father and daughter as they try and hit and kick each other, the camera stumbles backwards slightly, the boom microphone drops into view, and the light projection falters, revealing that in actuality, the room in which the family is staying is much darker than appears on camera. Visual revelation of life on the ground has been proven altered by the cinematic mechanism. In this sense, this particular moment is the most and the least successful shot of the film. It is successful in that it breaks psychological barriers of its subjects when the daughter curses and 'reveals her true self.' She explodes in a series of epithets intentionally designed to infuriate her father, who without hesitation beats her into submission. At the same time, the exposure of the apparatus reminds the viewer of the concerted effort of Fan to construct his narrative. This is the only time in the entire film in which a subject makes eye contact with the camera. This is also the only time that one of the subjects speaks directly to the camera, as if she is attempting to speak through the lens and to us the audience. All other spoken moments occur through conversations among the subjects or through monologues as they give offerings and pray out loud.

The complex relationship of contemporary documentaries to the state complicates the manner in which the reception of these works is mediated through their very appeal to truth. It is no secret that the term 'banned in China' has become a branding cliché for film and is intended to attract viewership among predominately European and American viewers. The availability of these very works in China, however, follows an alternate trajectory thanks to many disseminating circuits, including the pirating industry. The 'banned in China' branding assumes with it a titillating assumption that what is on the screen is thus accurate, factual, and dare I say 'authentic' because it flies in the face of an authoritarian system. To my knowledge, Last Train Home never carried the 'banned' label. However, the search for raw, down to ground, non-ideologically represented truth inherent to the on-the-spot realist documentary style beckons strong critique in relation to filmic technique. This is particularly important when considering that the funding for many documentaries comes from outside donors whose influence on these documentaries has never truly been elucidated. Funding aside, if we assume that raw representation is indeed to the goal of Last Train Home, we see that the project defeated its purpose.

But I propose an alternate understanding. By allowing the cinematic mechanism to slip into view alongside the confrontation between father and daughter, the project experienced an epiphany and invited it to enter the blueprint, after which the film switched focus. The hatred and animosity, which had been brewing early in the film, forces us to ask why Qin would oppose all efforts to advise her future and wellbeing. Perhaps then, in the end, this documentary does not chart and document the travails of New Year homecoming, but instead looks at a particular instance in which an individual enters a postsocialist economic system in the form of a migrant worker. This decision is made through her own volition and against the expectations of her parents and grandmother—and one would assume against the wishes of her deceased grandfather to whose authority she defers throughout the film. Qin then enters a sea of statistics, as represented by the tracking shot which provides the exposition of the work. What is not answered is why she is angry, though simplistic answers could be forwarded. The film does not pursue an answer but rests upon its footage of the long distance train trip back and forth. As such, I personally believe that the documentary could have gone further.

Most importantly, I want to call attention to the manner in which Chinese postsocialist documentary approaches its subject matter. These documentaries offer profound insight into a society in the midst of great change, and as such they contain wonderful educational merit. However, one must also be a vigilant critic of documentary, though in my opinion, many of the documentaries that are coming out of Mainland China right now are coalescing into a fascinating era of film history.

Emanuel Rota, Riz Khan - Tariq Ramadan and Slavoj Zizek on the future of Egyptian politics

2011-02-08T12:39:00.004-06:00

[In this post, Emanuel Rota, a Unit for Criticism affiliate and Assistant Professor of Italian, writes on a recent debate over events in Egypt.]

"Riz Khan - Tariq Ramadan and Slavoj Zizek on the future of Egyptian politics"

Written by Emanuel Rota (Italian)

History is on the move in the Middle East. The elections in Iran, the riots in Algeria, Tunisia, and Egypt: can Libya and Morocco be immune?

Personally, I hope they are not. The dictators of these countries, Abdelaziz Bouteflika, Ben Ali, Mohammed Hosni Moubarak, had names unknown to the vast majority of the inhabitants of the West. Their ferocity, their violence, their corruption was kept invisible in the name of the stability of the region. Now, we are learning their names in the hope that what we learn are the names of past ferocity, past violence and past corruption. Of course, we no longer believe that the future will necessarily be a better place, but we can say, with Georg Christoph Lichtenberg, “I cannot say whether things will get better if we change; what I can say is they must change if they are to get better.”

In the meantime, we can learn from what is happening. All the talk about democracy in the Middle East will come back to haunt those who wanted to use democracy as an ideological weapon to maintain the region in a permanent state of submission. Israel is the only democracy in the region; I hope that Israel will be surrounded by other democracies, so that the peace process can move forward. I also hope that Europe and the United States will be forced to accept that democracy is a universal aspiration, even when those who threaten it are their allies. Today, questioning democracy in the region in the name of cultural relativism would mean choosing an alliance with the coryphées of constituted power. Personally, I am with the rebels, and I hope that they will teach me something new about democracy.

In the embedded video, two intellectuals, Tariq Ramadan and Slavoj Žižek, discuss the events in Egypt. At the center of their discussion, even at this early stage, is the significance that the events have for our understanding of democracy. Not what we can teach, but what we can learn, not as neutral observers, but as partisans of democracy, equality, and freedom. They disagree more than it is apparent in the interview, but they agree on the fact that these events are not staged. It is not the spectacle of politics that is represented, but a revolt that, so far, has no representatives. So far, the multitudes revolting in the Middle East, without pre-constituted leaders and political programs, seem to have only the desire to act in history and to retain this power --in other words, a desire for democracy. Cairo, the largest city in Africa and one of the largest cities in the world, can certainly teach us something for the future.

Letter from the Director, Spring 2011

2011-01-20T11:02:00.009-06:00

Dear Colleagues,

Happy Martin Luther King, Jr. Day and Happy New Year! I hope you are keeping warm and snug, and I know you are keeping busy as we all rev up for another full-throttle semester in Champaign-Urbana. This spring the Unit for Criticism’s organizing theme is “Freedom and Its Discontents” including a faculty/grad seminar that begins on January 25 (a separate announcement will follow with complete details), and a 4/28-4/29 conference co-organized with the Social Dimensions of Environmental Policy initiative (SDEP) and the Program in Arms Control, Disarmament, and International Security (ACDIS). Yet another highlight of the topic is a Nicholson Distinguished Visiting Scholar lecture and seminar with Nancy Fraser (New School) on 2/28-3/1 which SDEP is helping us to organize. As always at this time, we are updating our website with full details and background readings for these and other events and I will write again as we complete the process. But please read on for more detailed information about these and other events.

The Freedom and Its Discontents faculty/grad seminar—open to all interested Illinois scholars—begins on 1/24 at 8pm in the IPRH Seminar Room (lower-level) with classic readings by J. S. Mill, Hannah Arendt, and Michel Foucault. Four additional meetings are scheduled for 2/7, 3/7, 4/4, and 4/25 including readings by our keynote speakers: Svetlana Boym (Harvard), Audrey Kobayashi (Queen’s College), and Linda Zerilli (University of Chicago), as well as by five additional invited speakers (see below). Your hosts for the seminar—as well as the organizers of the Freedom and Its Discontents conference—are Colin Flint (Geography/ADIS), Elena Delgado (Spanish/GWS/Center for Latin American, Caribbean, and Iberian Studies), Christopher Higgins (Educational Policy), Jesse Ribot (Geography, SDEP), the Unit’s Nicholson Fellow Associate Director, Robert A. Rushing, and me. I want to take this opportunity to thank this wonderful group for their hard work, expertise, and inspiration thus far, and urge you all to join us for what promises to be a most rewarding multi-disciplinary seminar.

In February, the Unit is pleased to join the Trowbridge Office in welcoming Donald E. Pease (Dartmouth) for a 2/14 lecture entitled, “Re-Mapping the Trans-National Turn in American Studies.” (Yes, we know it is Valentine’s Day, and we at the Unit are all for love: so we hope you’ll splurge on chocolates and champagne after the lecture, never stopping to regret what you did for American Studies.) Along with IRPH and the CFA, we are planning a roundtable conversation on Graduate Studies at the University of Illinois for which the tentative date is 2/16—details to come. On February 19, the Unit’s energetic Graduate Assistants, Mike Black and Katherine Skwarczek, will join the British Modernities Group in hosting New British Geographies, a multi-disciplinary one-day graduate student conference. The month will close with Nancy Fraser’s exciting Nicholson lecture, “Marketization, Social Protection, Emancipation: Re-Reading Karl Polanyi in the 21st Century,” beginning with an introduction by Zsuzsa Gille (Sociology/REEEC). On 3/1 Fraser will share her work in progress during a luncheon seminar, which IPRH and SDEP are helping us to organize (details about registration to come). Please write as soon as you wish if you would like the opportunity to spend time with Fraser while she is on campus.

Also in March we are pleased to be co-sponsors of a 3/9 CAS MillerComm visit by Andrew Flinn (University College London), as well the hosts of the Unit’s bi-yearly faculty lecture, by JB Capino (English/Asian American Studies/Media & Cinema Studies). The lecture, “My Brother is Not a Pig: Philippine Cinema against Empire” will include a response by Augusto Espiritu (Asian American Studies/History/Latin American & Caribbean Studies).

In addition to the keynotes by Boym, Kobayashi, and Zerilli, the 4/28-4/29 Freedom and Its Discontents conference includes papers by a number of leading interdisciplinary speakers: Jo-Marie Burt (George Mason), a specialist in state violence, human rights, and social movements in Latin America; David M. Hughes (Rutgers), an anthropologist and geographer of Southern Africa working on the relation of culture, politics, and political economy on environmental and physical landscapes; Elaine Hadley (Chicago), a literary scholar of nineteenth-century liberalism and war; Scott Kurashige (Michigan), a historian of Asian American and African American urban history and social movements; Abdi Samatar (Minnesota), a geographer working on democracy and development in East and South Africa; and our own Cris Mayo (Education Policy), whose multi-faceted research includes a nearly finished project on gay/straight alliances in public schools. I am also absolutely delighted to announce a musical performance which will be part of the Freedom conference by percussionist Jason Finkelman (Dance) and bassist Yosef Ben Israel.

Please feel free to write with any questions about these events, bearing in mind that I will write again with sign-up information and a complete syllabus for the seminar, with word of our updated website, as well as an invitation for guest bloggers on Kritik. If you have not already done so, please have your name added to the Unit’s email listserv and/or consider “friending” our Facebook page. Let me add that, for me, the very best part of all of these events is the chance it gives me to work with so many of you. If I have not yet met you—especially if you have ideas you’d like to propose for the Unit’s future programming—please write to me or introduce yourself at the first opportunity. I am always keen to schedule a coffee with anyone interested in the Unit and its affairs.

With very best wishes for a wonderful 2011.

Lauren

12/9 Author's Roundtable 2: Dana Polan, Julia Child's The French ChefGuest Writer: Charles Byrne

2010-12-15T12:33:00.005-06:00

[On Thursday, December 9, the Unit for Criticism held the second of its Fall 2010 Author’s Roundtables. Dana Polan discussed his forthcoming Duke UP book, Julia Child's The French Chef. In our previous post we published responses by James Hay, Larry Schehr and Jing Jing Chang.]

The difference she made
Written by Charles Byrne (Philosophy)

Dana Polan’s talk on Julia Child focused on “the difference that she made” (the title of first chapter of his forthcoming book). Hearing last Thursday’s discussion and reading the two chapters available to us for the roundtable, I realized that the “difference” was a pretty substantial one.

Polan smartly ties Child’s “difference” into an impressive array of the cultural viscera of the 1960s and 70s. The discussion on Thursday repeatedly returned in various ways to Child’s “liminal” status but the chapters investigate a number of complex issues relating to Child’s place in history including, for example, the evolution of cooking shows; the division between “low” and “high” cultural artifacts; the place of public broadcasting; and the connection to fans. Child was “a liminal or transitional figure between worlds and ways of life,” in several ways including the food she chose to cook and help popularize; the structure of her TV show, The French Chef; and her own stand-out personality.

Child’s choice of French cuisine was tied up with her own experiences in France. But she took it upon herself to introduce ordinary Americans to the fare because she saw that what appealed to her in France – old world care and passion directed toward food preparation – pushed back against the increasing mechanization, commercialization, and haste in food preparation in the States, tied as it was partly to changing women’s roles (culminating, perhaps, in Peg Bracken’s I Hate to Cook Book in 1960). French cuisine was also making inroads in American culture, but was generally signified by “imperious,” intimidating spectacles like the French restaurant: Polan referred us to the 1953 I Love Lucy episode “The French Revue,” where Lucy, Ricky, Ethel, and Fred are unable to read the menus.

Respondent Lawrence Schehr pointed out, too, that historically, there has been less sizable French emigration to the US, so French cuisine seems more mysterious. For someone from the American upper class like Child, a more mainstream ethnic cooking, such as Italian, might seem somewhat vulgar – working class, garlic-infused, pungent. French cuisine, on the other hand, “is about uplift.” Still, Child was also practical in her suggestions (e.g., she allowed the use of canned stock, but only as long as spices were added). “Child brings French into America,” Polan noted, “but also America into the cuisine.” And she encouraged her viewers to believe that the French code could be conquered, that “failure is built in, but eventually you’ll succeed”; “if I can do it, you can,” she constantly reminded her viewers. Seen from today’s lens, Child’s cusine packs a horrifying caloric load, with single recipes including whole sticks of butter, cream, eggs, cheese and meat; on the other hand, Child used “ whole,” fresh, natural ingredients where possible, which certainly qualify as current “healthy” impulses.

The French Chef was filmed during a period of significant change–1963 to 1973– in television. Child’s show transitioned from black-and-white to color in the late 1960s. While far from the first cooking show – there were “hundreds” of cooking shows before hers, Polan noted – Child’s show was a new and vital force on the scene, and not only because of her personality. In fact, it seems to me that it took some time for Child to warm into the “boisterous,” “joyous” role that Polan and many others embrace; her earliest episodes show a far more sober and constrained Julia Child. When she pitched the show to public television, Child wanted it to be shot from the first-person point of view. While this idea was rejected, there were at least occasional overhead shots in the show that are suggestive of the first-person. The show itself offered far more movement than was typical; Child herself moved a great deal, rather than standing rooted behind one counter. The show would end with her procession to the dining room with the finished dish, which was actually consumed, unlike other cooking shows of the time, which rarely displayed the pleasures of eating - not to mention tasting along the way, which Child did often, to the horror of some of her germ-obsessed viewers). Her show offered touches of drama and comedy, as well as education.

Perhaps most importantly, the show managed competing needs. As a cooking show, it was necessarily utilitarian (Ernie Kovacs’s Deadline for Dinner, mentioned by Polan, is a possible exception to this rule), but Child made it entertaining and offered unpredictable touches such as dancing chickens. The show was shot live, but heavily planned, which resulted in an overall relative smoothness but also featured bungled camera cuts and cooking mistakes, such as her famous potato pancake mis-flip. The show is chronologically straightforward, but with limited “cheats” of cooked and finished recipes (offering a “glimpse of utopia” to viewers, as Polan puts it). Ultimately, The French Chef was both practical and entertaining, and while it operated under standard cooking show constraints, it was interesting enough to a figure like Lenny Lipton to be considered avant-garde (Polan referred us to David Bordwell’s conception of "sparse cinema"). Her show helped make the burgeoning PBS, Polan advised us, into that national broadcasting vehicle formed from numerous local National Educational Television (including our own WILL).

Respondent James Hay usefully pressed our standard conception of a benign PBS, pointing out that, while largely motivated to offer more substantive, educational fare to counter the increasing commercialization of the 1950s and 60s and the perceived dumbing-down of TV, this pushback against TV as “vast wasteland” was also strongly tied to upper-class white concerns about a degraded, vulgar culture. Did PBS valorize upper-class white elites who disdained TV? Child certainly has to be seen as part of a movement with mixed motivations, conscious or not. Hay also suggests that, despite Child’s own repugnance toward commercials or brand placement, the educational television movement of which she was part has been commodified into the explosion of today’s so-called lifestyle channels (Food Network, HGTV, etc). Child’s pasted-over product labels have morphed into Martha Stewart Omnimedia and Rachael Ray Nutrish pet food.

Polan doesn’t disagree, although he insisted that Child remains a mediating figure among all of these concerns. Unlike Rachael Ray, who can wear a cashmere sweater while cooking, Child’s show involved you in the whole process of cooking by including spills and missteps. It is also hard not to notice the seemingly inevitable sexualization of some of the most popular female cooking stars of today: Rachael Ray poses for FHM,“in short-shorts with an exposed midriff, licking chocolate off a big wooden spoon”; Nigella Lawson prepares herself for a late-night date with her “Caramel Croissant Pudding,” which she takes to bed. Child serves as someone more clearly mediating traditionally masculine and feminine roles, since her height and forcefulness are often read as masculine. Her history also shows a well-educated woman who served in espionage duties during WWII, married later than average, had no children, and enjoyed socializing and drinking. She “got men in the kitchen,” as one audience member pointed out, which was a great delight to her, not only because she trained with men in Le Cordon Bleu in Paris (despite the school’s initial resistance), but also because she was often dismissive of “housewifery” and what she saw as female flightiness in the kitchen.

For someone like Betty Friedan, The French Chef might have been seen as part of the old order, but for Child, it was an “opening up” for women who were willing to devote themselves to the task in a committed fashion. According to Polan, Child teaches us that cooking, often seen as a routine, trivial, but necessary task, can become one of life’s important projects. What makes a woman, or man, cannot be reduced to the simple fact that one is in a kitchen; it has to do with how one approaches life. This idea was one attempted moral of the project, and ensuing film, Julie and Julia.

At the beginning of his book, Polan notes that Child’s voice is hard to pin down: “Is it a breathless warble? is it a lilting and lifting vibration?. . . is it vulgar or marked rather by upper-crust emphases that resonate with the speaker’s social origin in the moneyed world of white-bread Pasadena, California?” French but also American, Child was “big, boisterous, strapping, visceral, messy,” midwestern even. Her American melting-pot-background might explain her complicated political status. The French Chef spanned some rather politically fertile years, but “you could see her show without seeing anything about the 60s,” Polan remarked.

Child remains a liminal figure. Is bringing upper-crust cooking to so-called ordinary Americans a radical act or an act encouraging upper-class striving? Is she merely the embodiment of the elite, or is she helping to make the elite accessible? Commenting from the audience, Lauren Goodlad suggested that having “no way to disentangle” the many, often contradictory sides of Julia is part of the very reason “why there’s such affection and nostalgia for her.” Polan calls Child a mediator, someone who “held together tensions.” Until or unless Jetsonian food pills and astronaut ice cream overtake us, cooking and eating will always be with us, and Child offers a view to finding meaning in them. This is something we have control of in a life seemingly filled with events and institutions beyond our control; hence, the difference that she made.

Polan references Antonioni’s film Zabriskie Point near the end of his book, drawing a sparkling analogy between the film’s infamous explosive ending and one of Child’s explosive cooking moments involving a mixer and copious amounts of sugar. There is a way of seeing, with benign intent, Child’s influence (and Polan’s work, in turn), as that moment in the film played in reverse, where all of the detritus of American consumer culture contract back into the singularity of that explosion.

12/9 Author's Roundtable 2: Dana Polan, Julia ChildResponses from James Hay, Lawrence Schehr, and Jing Jing Chang

2010-12-14T08:00:00.004-06:00

[On Thursday, December 9, the Unit for Criticism held the second of its Fall 2010 Author’s Roundtables. Dana Polan discussed his forthcoming Duke UP book, Julia Child's The French Chef. The below contributions are from all three respondents: James Hay, Lawrence Schehr, and Jing Jing Chang.]

Thoughts on the Birth of The French Chef as “Popular Pedagogy”: Response 1
Written by James Hay (Institute for Communications Research / Media and Cinema Studies)

There is much to sample on the table that Dana Polan has set tonight. I want to focus mostly on three issues pertaining to his account of Julia Child as a “popular” figure: her relation to television as a “popular” form in the 1960s and 70s, both her and TV’s relation at that time to “popular entertainment” and “popular culture,” and the legacy of these relations to the present.

Dana’s history and interpretation of Child’s popularity emphasizes, particularly in his presentation this evening, the production strategies and stylistic conventions through which her TV program made food preparation entertaining and dramatic. I want to rethink Dana’s historicization of Child, her products, and her media as “popular” or even “populist” by pushing a bit harder than he does the problem of “the popular” at that time, and by pulling in a slightly different direction his references to Child’s program as “popular pedagogy” that made instruction entertaining.

First, let’s consider (following some of Dana’s key points) how Child both problematized and helped overcome the problems associated with TV as a “popular” form in the 1960s and 70s. Although Dana’s explanation of The French Chef adopts the adjective “popular” in order to describe her, television, and the pedagogy of her program, he could amplify what was at stake in or problematic about the program’s relation to a historical discourse about “popular culture” and “mass culture.” These terms were certainly older than the 1950s, but they became central to various, often intersecting, explanations of TV as the engine or meeting-point of various social ills. Dwight Macdonald’s “Theory of Mass Culture” (1953) famously represented the historic precariousness of a United States that increasingly was dominated by “mass culture”--a “degraded” and “homogenous” culture, the epitome of which was television. For Macdonald and other U.S. intellectuals, the cultural uniformity was tantamount to nothing short of a social and political uniformity characteristic in the recent past by Nazi Germany and in the Cold War present by the Soviet Union. “Mass culture” was the pejorative description and negative potentiality of TV that shadowed TV’s positive association as “popular culture.”

Contemporaneously, TV was objectified in the rapidly growing post-war sciences of “mass communication” research, which analyzed the effects of communication “media” on relatively passive and easily manipulated consumers and citizens. In 1961, the year that Macdonald published his Masscult and Midcult and two years before The French Chef first aired, Newton Minnow, the Chairman of the FCC, delivered his famous speech warning broadcasters that commercial television in the U.S. threatened to become a “vast wasteland” of programming. The French Chef was born out of this reasoning about the destructive effects and social ills of television as a mass medium and culture, and out of calls for an enlightened response and alternatives to the excesses of mass consumption. While Child may not have channeled this reasoning, her program was rationalized as part of the campaigns for responses and alternatives.

Minnow’s description of U.S. TV as a vast wasteland lacked nuance since commercial TV programming frequently represented its relation to a “popular culture” by mediating its relation to “highbrow“ cultural forms. A 1956 episode of The Adventures of Ozzie & Harriet (promoted as “America’s favorite TV comedy” and family) involved the two teenage sons becoming subjects of a lesson from their parents about cultural taste and distinctions as the oldest son, David, imports into the household a classical music record from his high-school “music appreciation class” and his younger brother, Rick, seeks to drown out Dave’s serene enjoyment of the classical score with a “jazz” or rhythm-and-blues record that he has brought home. Each son’s battle over his right to play “his” music (as loudly as possible), leads the parents to a liberal solution: getting each son to “turn down the volume” and to appreciate the other’s taste. The construction of the TV home and family through programming that mediated the distinction between highbrow and lowbrow, European classical and American pop culture, Whiteness and African-American inspired music (which Ricky would translate on the show in subsequent years), played out across many zones of television from its inception.

Liberace appeared in various TV venues during the 1950s as a virtuoso, classically trained pianist who could mediate this distinction, even as he often was criticized (Dwight Macdonald’s Masscult & Midcult, for instance) for “popularizing” and degrading high culture. Little Richard, equally as flamboyant as Liberace but a Black performer of music unfit for TV, never appeared on The Ed Sullivan Show even though one of his hits was performed by Elvis Presley on Presley’s debut on Sullivan’s show. The French Chef was born out of and as one of many laboratories on TV for representing “the popular” not only by checking/regulating cultural distinctions but often by mediating the distinction between high, Western European-derived culture and its new place amidst the various strands of “mass”-produced and -distributed twentieth-century U.S. culture. As Dana has noted this evening, Julia Child’s popularization of French cuisine was predicated on her ability to translate it through a big, bold, unflappable, and decidedly un- “haute” style that could be construed as American.

TV’s demonstration of its capacity to represent and mediate distinctions between “high” and “popular” tastes occurred amidst efforts to reform TV by making it more of a “public good.”–particularly by cultivating institutions, initiatives, networks, and programming supportive of “educational TV.” U.S. TV’s development as a commercial medium, rather than as an institution of tax-subsidized “public” broadcasting (typical in the rest of the world), made it a lightening rod for charges by educational associations, education initiatives such as those supported by the Ford Foundation, and some policy makers (in an era of “pubic education”) that TV lacked the ability to provide intellectual and cultural uplift, for children as well as adults whose tastes resembled those of children. Minnow’s charge that TV was becoming a vast wasteland attested to the traction gained during the Kennedy years for educational TV as an alternative to commercial broadcasting.

The loose network of stations affiliated with the National Education Television initiative, which had developed during the 1950s, included the Boston station (WGBH) where Julia Child was interviewed in 1962 about her book, Mastering the Art of French Cooking (1961), and where The French Chef premiered the following year. The French Chef as “popular pedagogy”thus emerged as part of the campaigns that rationalized “educational TV” as a “public good” and as an improvement over commercial TV’s provision of a “popular culture.” As one front in the campaigns for educational TV, The French Chef brought U.S. TV viewers/consumers closer to models of European public broadcasting through instruction about French cuisine.

The introduction of The French Chef as popular pedagogy, and Julia Child as a populist U.S. purveyor and mediator of French/European cuisine and culture, were in these ways integral to the formation of a national institution/corporation of public broadcasting in the U.S. by the late 1960s. As Dana mentions in passing, Julia Child and The French Chef helped make PBS possible. One implication of this marriage which Dana does not pursue is the disciplinarity of The French Chef as popular education as it became articulated to the goals of public broadcasting. As Laurie Ouellette has noted, National Education TV had “valorized the sophisticated, college-educated, intellectually oriented, implicitly white minority who protested television’s cultural mediocrity while engaging its upwardly mobile aspirants in a pedagogic and frequently disciplinary relationship” (45). The French Chef’s place in PBS’s early prime-time schedule (its programmatic connection to Civilisation, The Forsyte Saga, and Masterpiece Theater) reinforced its operation as what Tony Bennett, following Michel Foucault, refers to as a “cultural technology”–the institutionalization and technical administration of culture, the harnessing of culture to programs of moral uplift and hygiene, and the targeting of unrefined (if not unhealthy) bodies and incomplete, uncultured subjects in order to provide the correct pathways and rules of self-improvement and good citizenship.

Moreover, to the extent that PBS TV programming was rationalized as correcting the lack of “diversity” and “pluralism” in commercial TV (a correction most vividly and famously represented by the PBS children’s program, Sesame Street), The French Chef and its place in the early PBS schedule made it “a site where Whiteness was celebrated and imbued with culture, lineage, and prestige borrowed from European aristocracy” (Ouellette 154). So while Dana is right to point out that The French Chef made French cuisine and culture fit for consumption in the U.S., and although the recipes that Child translated were typically not French haute cuisine, her program also acted on the perception and myth of French-ness as the highest form of Western cuisine and culture, and as something that the American public lacked. What difference would it have made had the program been titled The Italian Chef or The Mexican Chef?

More than in the chapters that Dana has provided from his forthcoming book about The French Chef, his presentation tonight emphasized how the program made food preparation “entertaining” and “dramatic” through a set of narrative conventions and filmic strategies–a visual style that informs even the most recent cooking programs on TV. However, it also is worth recognizing that the program operated (in ways suggested above) as much as “popular science and technology” as “popular culture” and “popular entertainment.” Culture and science are terms that for too long have been opposed, not only as part of the legacy of a distinction between culture and science that C.P. Snow identified during the period when The French Chef was born, but also through a kind of media and cultural criticism that emphasizes the style, representational conventions (genre), and textuality of media and its “culture” over the technical and institutional rationality of media/culture.

Julia Child’s historical relation to Jack Lalanne, whose fitness-instruction program was hugely successful in early U.S. TV, mattered just as much as her relation to “arts and culture” guides and performers such as Alistair Cooke and Liberace. And Lalanne’s mattering in TV’s mediation of popular culture had as much to do with his teaching of body technique and discipline as his show’s theatrical conventions or visual style. Recognizing the technical knowledge of The French Chef is a basis for thinking about the complex and changing ways that TV was imbricated in popular culture’s administration and government of daily life through the health, improvement, and well-being of consumer-students and the social body that they comprised. To the extent that The French Chef as a “popular education” in the techniques of food preparation provided guidelines for the cultivation and government of the self, Julia Child could be said to model a path to citizenship.

As a technology of liberal citizenship, The French Chef and its relation to the birth of PBS provide a useful point of reference for historicizing the subsequent proliferation of food programming and a Food Channel that support a regime of lifestyle-TV formats during the 1990s, as TV abandoned “broadcasting” in favor of “narrowcasting.” It was not that Julia Child simply became old on TV over the 1980s and 90s; she continued to appear in TV cooking programs through the 1990s, many of which were distributed through PBS, and these programs helped anchor her production of books as well as tapes and DVDs.

However, her productions mattered differently as “educational TV” became a dominant TV genre across a rapidly increasing number of cable- and satellite-delivered, commercial TV channels. The Food Channel’s success depended on its similarity to and difference from networks such as the Home & Garden Channel, the Learning Channel, the Discovery Channel, the Do-it-yourself Network, the Fine Living Network, the Arts & Entertainment Network, as well as a bevy of instructional programs on networks not primarily about teaching and learning. These programs and networks typically use instruction to manage lifestyle, and increasingly understand their audience/market as “lifestyle clusters” rather than as a general audience. In this regime, popular culture, and the “public” of “public TV,” have become the subject of new (and arguably more refined) apparatuses of counting–of population management.

Food TV also has been rearticulated through a do-it-yourself culture and a model of entrepreneurial(some might call it “neoliberal”) citizenship that, as Ouellette and I have noted, support and normalize lifestyle and instructional programming as a prominent vein of “reality TV”. Whereas Child began to branch out into other media and products, her enterprise paled in comparison to celebrity chefs such as Emeril Lagasse, Mario Battali, Rachel Ray, Nigella Lawson, Jamie Oliver, and Bobby Flay, whose brands became attached to cookware and restaurants as well as TV programs, books, DVDs. Child’s production of books and TV shows was certainly a prototype for the later TV chef as franchise-brand, but her program as “popular pedagogy” and “public TV” was more consonant with a 60's liberal rationality about food/instruction as welfare and cultural uplift for a broad population–about translating French cuisine for popular tastes in the U.S.-- rather than as one performative stage in the lifestyle of a particular taste culture.

Child’s (and PBS’s) provision of welfare was a template for, but operated differently than, recent campaigns such as Jamie Oliver’s Food Revolution on ABC, a reality TV series wherein the British chef attempts to revolutionize the eating habits of relatively impoverished West Virginia public-school students by demonstrating to them, their parents, the local school administrators, local media, and local policy-makers the virtues of a healthy diet. Whereas Child operated as an educator and translator of French cuisine and culture for a State-supported campaign of popular pedagogy, Oliver operates as a private enterpriser (and indirectly the agent of a media corporation’s “community outreach”) who mobilizes citizens to look after their own health and well-being while repairing the failing public institutions of education.

Child also is the cultural grandmother or godmother of WE-TV’s recent series The Cupcake Girls. As WE (Women’s Entertainment) TV, formerly Oprah Winfrey’s Oxygen Network, The Cupcake Girls is a reality TV series that follows the trials and tribulations of a group of women who attempt to transform their local cupcake business into a franchise. Although the series (following TV shows such as Top Chef) offers demonstrations of food preparation, it embeds those demonstrations in a narrative or contest/challenge about Enterprising women whose independence is performed through their ability to manage and expand their cupcake empire. So, even though Child may be their cultural grandmother or godmother, they are decidedly the off-spring of female media entrepreneurs such as Oprah, Martha Stewart, and financial self-help guru Suze Orman.

One final thought: The empires of celebrity chefs such as Oliver, or lesser known enterprisers such as the Cupcake Girls, are territorialized through a global economy of food/TV marketing and distribution that can be traced back to The French Chef but that is different in numerous ways from the one in which The French Chef was produced, circulated, and “put to work” culturally. Child’s importation and translation of French cuisine and culture made her a kind of “double-agent” in the age of the “British invasion” (e.g., Bond fiction and the Beatles). Her program was born in the New Frontier rationality that articulated welfare and public goods and services (such as educational TV) to an “outer space”–a re-territorialization of U.S. sovereignty in the world through, among other things, communication satellites.

The French Chef debuted the same years that the first communication satellites, Telstar I and II, were launched, and roughly a decade before HBO became the first satellite-distributed TV network. Oliver, however, belongs to an economy of global reality-TV formats and franchises (such as Big Brother and American Idol) that are reinvented for different national markets (Moran, 2009). In that sense, Julia’s instructions for “chicken cordon bleu” provided a recipe for both trans-nationalizing and nationalizing Food TV.

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The French Chef and the Jouissance of Food: Response 2
Written by Lawrence Schehr (French)

When I was thinking about my response today to the phenomenal chapters of Dana Polan’s new book, Julia Child’s The French Chef, I took out my dog-eared and stained copy of The French Chef Cookbook, and it was like a Proustian madeleine. As you know, in Marcel Proust’s magisterial novel, A la recherche du temps perdu, translated as In Search of Lost Time, Proust’s protagonist dips a madeleine – a kind of soft shortbread or dense sponge cake – in a cup of herbal tea and takes a bite. And suddenly, his entire past comes back to him. And that is how I felt reading Dana’s chapters and flipping through the pages of Julia Child’s books – for I had taken out my two weather-beaten volumes of Mastering the Art of French Cooking as well.

As a child in the late fifties, I liked to watch my mother prepare dinner, and, to her credit, she never threw me out of the kitchen when I was watching her cook, and she always gave me something to do to “help.” A few years later, my parents let me watch Julia Child on television. Now, this was not something that little boys were supposed to do in an era when boys were supposed to be training to become macho men. And look at the results: here I am, a French professor who writes on subversion, perversion, gender matters, and French food. I remember watching those shows intently, and they left as much of a mark on me as did the first appearance of the Beatles on Ed Sullivan in 1964 – and I remind you, in passing, that yesterday was the thirtieth anniversary of John Lennon’s murder – the marches and protests against the war a few years later, and the songs of Pete Seeger; Peter, Paul and Mary; Bob Dylan; and my personal favorite, Phil Ochs throughout the sixties.

So when I finally got to Paris in the fall of 1973, I knew there was a world that I could not wait to explore, one that I have been exploring ever since. Indeed, just three weeks ago, we were in my favorite restaurant in the world, a fusion restaurant in the sixth arrondissement on the Left Bank in Paris called Ze Kitchen Gallery, where we ate a glorious dinner and in which the final course was a spectacular white chocolate and wasabi ice cream. And I have Julia Child to thank in part for leading me to that experience and Dana to thank for helping to bring those Proustian memories back.

While Julia was broadcasting shows on how to make a coulibiac of salmon or “veal fit for a king,” there was an intellectual revolution going on in France as thought moved away from existentialism toward structuralism and, a bit later, toward deconstruction. To use two adjectives that Dana used on page 2 of his chapter, “prosaic” and “quotidian” events and issues suddenly were deemed far more complex, whether it was the understanding of “the raw and the cooked” – to use a title by the founder of structuralism, Claude Lévi-Strauss – or the metaphysics implied by the opposition between speech and writing or presence and absence, as defined by the work of Jacques Derrida. One of the early titles was The Pleasure of the Text by Roland Barthes, but the word pleasure soon gave place to a much stronger, sexualized word: jouissance.

And in retrospect, for me, there has been an intellectual jouissance in thinking about those broadcasts and in leafing through those books; for those events, reinforced by the three chapters of Dana’s book I have read, underlined the fact that, after the canned and frozen fifties, Julia was part of the revolutionary sixties. As Dana puts it, “many viewers ... were being offered lessons in a whole way of living and being and doing.” And, I hasten to add, Julia Child’s method did not only involve a representation of the French logic or method to the recipes – there is an old expression, “If it’s not logical it’s not French.” It also implicated the “French exception,” which, for me, is about that jouissance, the intense pleasure of the show, of the recipes, of the umami of the food that pleases all the taste buds and all five senses. Through Dana’s eyes, Julia Child subtly contrasted French savoir-faire, the knowledge of how to do things, with the Eisenhowerian “niceness” portrayed in the family sitcoms of the time: The Donna Reed Show, Leave it to Beaver, or even My Three Sons, with its tiny bit of gender bending.

Not only did The French Chef promote the glories and pleasures, indeed the jouissances of French food, it also underlined this French exception of savoir-faire combined with blatant sensuality, a very definite no-no in the puritanical United States of the time (outside major metropolitan areas, of course). So even if the waters were being tested in the same time period by films like Some Like it Hot, part of which was set right here in Urbana, the rest of the revolution was not to come until 1968-1969 with the international echoes of May ‘68, the protests at Berkeley and elsewhere, the Stonewall riots after the death of Judy Garland, the hard-hat riots (in which I found myself right in the middle after having protested against the Vietnam War with the “big kids” at NYU), and the like. But to my mind, Julia was already there, as she underlined the importance of gustatory jouissance, that ultimately, thanks to her and many others as well as the times that were “a-changing,” expanded by metonymy to a wealth of other sensory and intellectual areas.

While Dana admirably points out that Julia was “of her times,” he also underlines her difference, whether it is in her approach to food, to television, to her fans – I had the pleasure of reading chapter 6, where Dana talks, in part, about her singular relations to her fans – or to the surrounding culture. While reading the first part of the first chapter, I found myself thinking about the Kennedy Years, a political and social “great leap forward” (to use another expression of the time) after the doldrums of Eisenhower and the horrors of McCarthy, the House Un-American Activities Committee, and the blacklist. And thus, I was quite pleased to find that my mind was running along the same track as Dana’s when he referred, on page 15, to “the widely watched tour of the White House hosted by Jackie Kennedy in 1962,” and later on to President Kennedy. And while I would not put words in Dana’s mouth, I would personally say that Julia Child gave us a tour of French cooking, similar to Jackie Kennedy’s tour of the White House, in that it also opened up a world that was formerly unknown to viewers.

Striking for me as well was Dana’s discussion of gelatin and Jello, in part because Jello has always been anathema to me and in part because I made my batches of chicken stock and beef stock à la Child last week to keep us in good flavor throughout the winter. As I was reading his work and as I was cooking, I thought of how Julia’s recipes for stock (which was itself an anomaly in the age of Monsieur Campbell) implied a historical reference to Brillat-Savarin’s 1825 volume, The Physiology of Taste. Brillat-Savarin is perhaps best remembered for his aphorism, “Tell me what you eat, and I will tell you who you are.” In this epoch-making volume, the author mentions a mysterious substance he calls “osmazome,” a concept that is discussed, by the way, by Roland Barthes in The Rustle of Language. Brillat-Savarin defines”osmazome” as the essence of meat that is distilled into a liquid to produce a perfect stock. And this mysterious essence, or quintessence, to use Barthes’s terminology, also looks forward to a term recently borrowed from Japanese gastronomy, the word umami: the full-mouthed taste and the gustatory jouissance of food.

I was impressed by so many other aspects of Dana’s chapters, including his cogent analyses of camera technique and the “fun” of “instructional television,” just to name two, but what stayed with me the most – though I am curious to know if Dana discusses Julia Child’s espionage career during the Second World War – is the revolution in taste, the jouissance, and the umami, of the person, the show, the food, and of this wonderful book.

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Julia Child as American Icon: Response 3
Written by Jing Jing Chang (History)

Dana Polan’s Julia Child’s The French Chef is written in a very clear and accessible language. Just as Julia Child’s cooking show was boisterous and fun to watch, and just as Julia Child time and time again conveyed to her viewers that cooking was fun, I found Polan’s chapters a lot of fun to read.

The main argument of Polan’s book is that Julia Child represents the 1960s Americanized and Americanizing way of being. She was “key to the cultivation of modern American lifestyle and leisure culture in the latter part of the twentieth century.” Her uniqueness grew out of her personality and non-dogmatic “cooking pedagogy. . .which was against mechanical and slavish obedience.” She taught by showing, by doing, and by engaging in a full range of cooking on television, using her bare hands and getting them into her food. Yet at the same time, she was much more than an innovative teacher and cook; she was also a cultural icon of her times.

As “cultural icon,” Child was also part of the motifs of 1960s history, including the physicality of bodily experience. She was also part of a contemporaneous “cult of expertise,” which entailed television personalities becoming “popular teachers.” And as a television performer, Julia Child welcomed viewers into her kitchen through her visual rhetoric and the kinetic spectacle of her direct action, whether killing a lobster or showing her viewers her flaws and mistakes.

Her willingness to let us see her vulnerability allows us to feel intimate with and close to her but not because we’re physically close to her, as in the cooking shows of Nigella Lawson or Jamie Oliver in which the camera is so close to the action that you can hardly breathe. We feel intimate and identify with Julia Child because she is like the neighbor or friend next door. I agree with Polan that if Child’s original wish to shoot her show with the over-the-shoulder first person point-of-view had been heeded, then we might not have felt this sense of intimacy.

Finally, as a “caring instructor,” as well as entertaining performer, Child’s “non-dogmatic” approach to teaching empowered home cooks and provided not merely cooking lessons but also life lessons on how to have fun, American style. Indeed, cooking therefore was transformed from an act of monotony and entrapment to a productive, and perhaps even politically liberating act.

I remember seeing the film Julie and Julia over the summer on DVD. Meryl Streep once again proved to be the master of all accents. In order to mimic Julia Child’s 6’2’’ posture, Meryl Streep wore heels. This cinematic trick was hidden most of the time from the viewers until at the very end. Indeed, just as Julie Powell could not become the real Julia Child through merely cooking all the recipes from Child’s Mastering the Art of French Cooking, Hollywood’s biopic only reinforces how unique Julia Child was.

The kitchen set where Julia Child’s The French Chef was shot is now on display at the National Museum of American History in Washington D.C. To do justice to the authenticity of Child’s kitchen in the final scene, the camera pulls back to show the entire kitchen, and Meryl Streep as Child walks into it. As Streep enters, we notice that she is not as tall as she has pretended to be. In fact, she has been wearing 3+ inch-heels all along. At that moment, the fantasy of Streep playing Child was once and for all destroyed.

On the other hand, the personality of Julia Child, her exuberance, her quirkiness, her uniqueness really came through in Polan’s chapters, including her voice, and her 6’2” posture. From just the quotes that Polan cited from Child’s cooking show, it was as if I could hear her voice. What is the difference then between the Hollywood biopic and Polan’s analysis of Child?

Readers of Polan’s book feel intimate to Julia Child, and not just close to her in proximity, because of Polan’s the in-depth textual, contextual and intertextual analyses of both Julia Child and the times that she was part of and contributed to constructing. From the outset, Polan’s detailed description of “Introducing Charlotte Malakoff,” Episode 65 of Child’s The French Chef, draws us into the intimate space of Child’s kitchen, her “joyful, even whacky world.” Polan continues throughout to provide similar detailed descriptions of Child’s actions and words in The French Chef episodes.

Polan also did a wonderful job contextualizing his analysis of Julia Child by discussing other cultural texts and figures of the times: from Hitchcock, to Kubrick’s Dr. Strangelove, from Sharon Ghamari-Tabrizi’s The Worlds of Herman Kahn to The Twilight Zone. Child’s unique pedagogical approach was also highlighted along with discussions of other postwar culinary figures such as James Beard, Clementine Paddleford, and books and products such as Peg Bracken’s I Hate to Cook Book, the Knox On-Camera Recipes, and the fun products of Jello and Gelatin. So, not only did I learn about Child’s persona but also how her unique personality made a difference in the televisual and culinary landscape in postwar America.

I enjoyed reading the two chapters so much so that I want to learn more about Julia Child. At one point, Polan mentioned that there can be a risk of over-interpretation and over-intellectualizing Child. So, the questions that I will pose below might be pushing a little bit toward that direction. But I’m going to pose them anyway.

The questions I have are along three main themes: Child’s persona, the trope of domesticity and the audiences of Child’s cooking shows.

On page 46, Polan writes: “She was unique, she was different, and that very much made her an icon for the American sixties.” I would like to learn more about Julia Child and her “cultural status” and “cultural significance” beyond the 60s. For instance, What about her presence when she became older and appeared in other cook shows such as the one with Jacques Pépin, i.e. Julia Child & Jacques Pépin Cooking at Home? Did Julia Child still remain an icon for the American way of life beyond the 1960s? Or was she a cultural icon of the 1960s only?

As for the trope of domesticity, after reading chapters 1 and 8, I learned much about Julia Child’s role as a teacher, a television personality and as a cultural icon of American popular culture, and culinary landscape and discourse. These chapters focus primarily on what she taught her audiences in terms of not only cooking but also the American way of life and the potential of cooking in the kitchen and beyond the private space of the kitchen, the living room and the American home. I began to wonder whether “domesticity” can also become part of the political discourse in the U.S. In particular, I would like to know whether Child’s The French Chef could be read as part of America’s growing power not only in the political realm but also in the global media industry beyond the US? Is it possible to complicate our understanding of American-Foreign relations through Child’s cooking show?

I would like to end my response with a couple of questions regarding audiences outside of the U.S. Growing up in Canada, I remember seeing many reruns of Julia Child’s cooking shows. Perhaps due to my own ignorance, I had no idea that Child was actually an American. With her strange accent, I thought she was perhaps British teaching people how to cook French cuisine. If Canadians could watch Child’s cooking shows, were her television shows also distributed to European countries, such as the UK and France? If so, is it possible to learn more about the US in the 1960s by gauging the reception of audiences overseas of Julia Child?

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11/29 Lecture, Gabriel Solis: "Moving Beyond Preservation" Guest Writer: Patrick W. Berry

2010-12-03T12:45:00.002-06:00

"Sulwa" as performed by the University of Goroka Band (recorded by Gabriel Solis)

Moving Beyond Preservation at the University of Goroka

Written by Patrick W. Berry (English/Center for Writing Studies)

Amidst torrential rains last Monday night, Gabriel Solis, Associate Professor of Musicology and African American Studies, discussed competing views of local music. He argued for a shift from looking at local music as heritage and part of a reified past, to thinking of it as a living, changing thing.

While listening to his talk, "Moving Beyond Preservation: ‘Traditional’ Music, Arts Institutions, and Modernity in Papua New Guinea,” I was intrigued by his claim that universities—exemplified by the University of Goroka in Papua New Guinea—might play a role in creating such a shift in thinking. It reminded me of ongoing discussions about relevance and the university, something that Frank Donoghue addressed at a Unit talk last year, and offered a hopeful example that was unique to Solis’s study.

Solis at one point described a museum in Papua New Guinea in which musical artifacts gather dust, their histories reduced to representing past glories. Like similar museums around the world, with their local trinkets for sale, the collection appears not to be geared toward local people, and, Solis remarked, “culture presented as heritage loses its relevance.” Efforts at preservation of histories, he continued, can reduce usefulness. How might we make our archives useful? How might we put historical collections in the hands of young and old musicians? Answering these questions, Solis contends, involves moving beyond preservation, toward thinking about music as an activity.

During his research in Papua New Guinea, Solis observed a relevant shift in thinking taking place at the University of Goroka. Since the 1970s, the University of Goroka has been offering programs that seek to bring together elders and students to blur the dichotomy between past and present, traditional and modern. Its Expressive Arts program, as described on the university’s website, works to “enable students to develop literacies in the selected areas of study in the Creative Industries as a way to assist them to participate in and develop lifelong interest in the arts and to further broaden their understanding of and involvement in the arts in Papua New Guinea.”

One of the things that students in the program do is document music, recording song repertoires as they now exist. Through this work, the program provides students with a model for how to engage with local music using an approach that values local music and the contribution of elders. It is a program that recognizes the value of process, of collaboration, and of thinking about music-making as an activity that occurs over a period of time. As suggested by the familiar refrains in writing studies pedagogy, we need to attend to process, not simply to product.

At the University of Goroka, Solis saw possibilities that did not align with structuralist readings of culture like those suggested in the work of Marshall Sahlins. Moving beyond claims of continuity versus loss, Solis suggests that a third option exists. By looking at new forms of music-making, he found something that neither replicated older social structures nor simply reproduced Western modernity. It was in this third space that he found an alternative way of working with traditional music.

Solis also mentioned the Mulka Project, in which, through the use of digital media, Yolngu Aboriginal people produce and reproduce cultural representations. “We want to bring knowledge of the past to the present to preserve it for future generations and to understand what meaning it has in the present day and age”—these words by Dr. Raymattja Marika AM, the inaugural director of the Mulka Project (1958-2008), appear in an introductory video on the Mulka Project’s website. It is a statement that captures the need to preserve, but also to experience. Watching the music video that Solis presented, I saw the genre of mixing and remaking that carries commercial influences, while weaving in archival footage.

One record label in Papua New Guinea, CHM, plays a significant role in producing a commodified version of traditional music, a type of music from which the university has managed to keep itself separate. Solis remarked that he saw the Expressive Arts program’s work at the University of Goroka as being in resistance to the market and to companies like CHM. Because of the structure of higher education in Papua New Guinea, with students gravitating toward just a few schools, a single university can play a significant role in advancing the study of music in a way that moves beyond preservation. Solis suggested that the University of Goroka’s music initiative may well have long-term impact in the sense that it produces graduates, ultimately dispersed across the country, who bring with them an approach to music that resists the reductive binaries and engages with the processes of making music.

Following Jodi Byrd’s incisive response, questions from the audience asked about the meaning of the exchange between students and elders. One person asked if the remaking of the songs with new instruments was in fact a form of relegating tradition to the past. Solis suggested that working with traditional music was in the process, in the relationships between elders and students, and in the act of cultivating an approach to learning about music.

The discussion left me reflecting how the categories themselves—“traditional” and “modern”—can shape our understandings and readings of preservation work in general.

11/29 Lecture, Gabriel Solis Jodi Byrd, Responding to "Moving Beyond Preservation"

2010-12-01T13:30:00.007-06:00

Gabriel Solis (above)

[On Monday, November 29, 2010, the Unit for Criticism hosted “Moving Beyond Preservation: 'Traditional' Music, Arts Institutions, and Modernity in Papua New Guinea,” a lecture by Gabriel Solis, a professor of musicology and African American studies at the University of Illinois. Below we publish Professor Jodi Byrd's response]

Gabriel Solis' "Moving Beyond Preservation: 'Traditional' Music, Arts, Institutions, and Modernity in Papua New Guinea"

Written by Jodi Byrd (American Indian Studies/English)

In his paper, “Moving Beyond Preservation: ‘Traditional’ Music, Arts Institutions, and Modernity in Papua New Guinea,” Gabriel Solis raises a number of significant issues here at the intersections between and among Pacific Island studies, anthropology, ethnomusicology, and indigenous cultural studies, and in the process, offers us some important interventions to the anthropological notions of tradition and cultural preservation which have trapped indigenous cultural productions in the rigid binaries of traditional/modern, local/introduced, past/present.

What particularly intrigues is Solis’s dissatisfaction with hybridity as sufficiently useful to theorize what might be understood as an indigenous modernity in PNG and the place of Papua New Guineans within the larger, transnational scale of modernity within the Pacific. The problem with hybridity (and perhaps syncretism) as framing ideas to apprehend indigenous cultural practices, is that they both are givens, and they both reify “indigenous” and “western” into the very categories that the artistic and musical forms are trying to resist.

Indigenous peoples continue to be trapped by the structural logics within the ethnographies and historiographies that attempt to account for the violences and accommodations colonialism has produced within indigenous communities around the globe. In the North American context, the modern and assimilative is often lamented within the colonial nostalgias that produce anthropological historiographies as loss, death, and betrayal even as the continent remains a melancholic site for settler remorse over the colonial administrators and agencies that demanded and surveilled such assimilation: boarding schools, removal and reservations, and the state formations of enlightenment democracy which supplanted indigenous structures of consensus governance and transformed power and relation into sovereignty and citizenship. And as Solis reminds us, it is in these ways that the colonial encounter led to the development of modern subjectivities for both the colonial and the native in the first place, an argument that for me calls to mind Philip J. Deloria’s Indians in Unexpected Places in which he reminds us that within colonial narratives foundational to U.S. modernity, Indian people are expected as “corralled on isolated and impoverished reservations” where they “missed out on modernity, indeed, almost dropped out of history itself” (6).

And yet, it is the anomalies that Deloria points to, those moments in which modernity is revealed to be constitutive through indigenous presences rather than absences which disrupt the dialectics of modernity which leave indigenous peoples trapped a priori and ahistorically in a past-present lack on the world stage. Indigenous peoples are not distinct from these histories, Deloria reminds us, because modernity and its world “took as its material base the accumulation of capital ripped from indigenous lands, resources, and labor over the course of centuries” (231).

What I found particularly generative in Solis’s discussion of Papua New Guinea and his critique of ethnomusicology’s continued reliance upon a dialectic that renders certain practices outside and alien to modernity, or trapped within visions of change that either celebrate continuity or mourn catastrophic loss is the way in which he challenges the structural logics that shape the binary set of Melanesian or Western. Within those dialectics that Solis critiques reside the colonialist accompaniments epitomized by Marshall Sahlins’ attempt to encapsulate “how ‘natives’ think” about anything at all in the project of historical ethnography dependent, as Kanaka Maoli scholar Noenoe Silva has argued, upon the centrality of how “English” thinks natives might think in indigenous languages, epistemologies, and philosophies.

The problem that lingers is the problem of tradition as invention and indigeneity as other to modern world history, where anything authentic always already owes, according to Sahlins, “more in content to imperialist forces than indigenous sources” or the vice versa where indigenous modernity replicates indigenous premodernity (475). One of the things that gets lost through such structural renderings of indigenous modernity and the invention of tradition is the fact that tradition itself might be said to be the repetition of invention. If we are to understand within the three different strands of attitudes towards local music in Papua New Guinea which Solis delineates for us--the impulses and contradictions of the documentary, the salvage, and the root-stock resource for national innovation and creativity--then perhaps one of the possible directions that emerges for us is how indigeneity disrupts and refuses the binaries colonialism leaves behind. One of the key questions that rises to the fore in emergent forms of indigenous cultural studies is the question of agency, where finally, PNG culture and music are “living, changing thing(s).”

It is here that I think Solis diverges importantly and significantly from Sahlins to offer us a third possibility that is, in Solis’s words, “neither clearly replicating older social structures, nor simply operating within structures governed by transnational capital.” These third ways, (especially as they manifest within the University of Goroka’s art program and the work students produce), have, Solis compellingly tells us, “the potential to ‘do’ modernity in a way that is unlike other entities in PNG,” where the arts department explicitly serves nationialist goals, but in ways that confound, Solis argues, “any sense of Papua New Guinean people’s marginal position within the system of transnational capital as a problem.” His turn here, in significant ways, echoes and diverges from Arif Dirlik’s argument in his essay “The Past as Legacy and Project: Postcolonial Criticism in the Perspective of Indigenous Historicism” in which Dirlik pairs purity and hybridity to a self-same concern with an ahistoric essentialism. “Indigenous voices,” Dirlik writes, “are quite open to change; what they insist on is not cultural purity or persistence, but the preservation of a particular historical trajectory of their own” that is “grounded in the topography much more intimately” than settlers and “is at odds with the notions of temporality that guide the histories of settlers” (18). In other words, indigenous nationalisms and the doing of modernity might be framed not as a recovery of a lost past, but of imagining alternative trajectories for an active, living indigenous modernity that has been functioning all along.

Both the University of Goroka and the Mulka Project, Solis argues, resist structuralist readings of culture and “a yearning for a kind of pre-contact state of grace” and are instead enacting creative and innovative transformations of the salvage preservation of endangered culture into indigenous run institutions demanding a condition of possibility that imagines a present and future for Papua New Guinea cultural productions. The two examples Solis gives us engage in what Kahnawake Mohawk scholar Audra Simpson has articulated as ethnographic refusal dependent upon “a tripleness, a quadrupleness, to consciousness and an endless play” (74). That potential frame of ethnographic refusal might be said to reside in Solis’s point that the work of the teachers and students is “something other than a kind of run-of-the-mill World Beat hybrid form.” It is process oriented rather than commercially oriented, community-centered and depended upon people to create rather than consume.

In the end, Solis gives us a hopeful direction for indigenous cultural studies in the place of the pessimistic tropics, and one that pushes against the expected and oppositional indigenous/Western binaries that leave indigenous peoples as develop-men upon a world stage still expecting their arrival. Instead, Solis’s paper and examples point to alternative trajectories that confound and refuse the waiting room of history by foregrounding the on-the-ground and local appropriations the emerge where pop music and tradition transform into the doing of Papua New Guinea modernity.

11/1 IPRH Lecture, Ananya Roy: "Poverty Capital: The Subprime Frontiers of Millennial Modernity" Guest Writer: Ergin Bulut

2010-11-18T13:01:00.002-06:00

[On November 1, 2010, the Illinois Program for Research in the Humanities presented “Poverty Capital: The Subprime Frontiers of Millennial Modernity,” a lecture by Ananya Roy of the University of California, Berkeley]

Written by Ergin Bulut (Education Policy Studies)

“This was one of the best talks I have recently attended.” This statement reflects the opinion of at least five fellow graduate students, as well as my own. Roy’s talk masterfully combined geography, history, theory, and visual images, providing a great "feast" of what millennial modernity has to offer to the poor of the Third World.

Roy began her talk with the story of Felicita, a Guatemalan woman. The image showed us a smiling woman who had increased her production with the help of the microcredit. With this system of "bottom-billion capitalism," as Roy named it, we were actually witnessing the "democratization of capital and development." (Roy’s use of "democratization" is distinct in meaning from the spread of political democracy.) The poor, in the new configuration of global capitalism, were being included in systems of finance.

Roy then moved on to another strong image. The words "WTO" and "Democracy" were encapsulated in two arrows, pointing to each other. This was followed by the global campaign aiming to make poverty history. Here, Roy introduced another term, referenced by the title of the talk. Millenials, she said, were people who provided credit to the poor, “animated by global consciousness of poverty.” Such people include celebrities like Bono and Bill Gates. Roy argued that the work of these figures not only served to integrate the poor with the market but also to impact our collective imagination.

Speaking about Millennium Development Goals, Roy made another conceptual move, defining a "global social contract." According to Roy, the democratization of poverty affects imaginative conceptions and consumer choices. We are now asked to consume smartly and consciously. For example, organizations like CARE are influential in creating the millennial self. They produce "new geographical imaginations." It is exactly here that Roy pointed to the case of Africa, which is now presented as an active continent thanks to the work of millenials. As the slogan goes: Microcredit Africa works. As if it never did!

Why microcredit? First, Roy said, is the fact that it is everywhere. Second, it is the panacea of choice. Nevertheless, the central point, Roy asserted, is that "microcredit is the microprocessor in the circuits of capital," reminding us of the fluidity of capitalist relations. It is in these times that we come to see microcredit as good money as opposed to the reckless and bad money described in relation to the financial crisis. In short, microfinance converts human poverty into capital. It is at this historical moment that we come to see slogans like "The poor always pay back," which reflects the monetizing of poverty through Third World women. Microcredit, Roy argued, is the grand experiment on "the productivity of debt." It is gendered and racialized. It deepens the altruistic character of Thirld World subjects.

Suggesting a Foucaultian turn, Roy claimed that "microfinance produces knowledge." She demonstrated that "the poor are classified and categorized" through an example of a Boliviaian whose credibility for finance is codified through new Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs). Quoting the motto of the millenials, who say they want to treat the poor like themselves, Roy described the ideal of financial democracy as a part of "neoliberal populism." In other words, the millenials aim to maintain equality between themselves and the poor by actually capitalizing on that poverty.

History came into play during the most fascinating moment of the talk. Roy drew similarities between late-nineteenth-century colonialism and millennial modernity, showing us how surveillance of the colonial world expresses the desire to “know” the poor. These historical documents reflected the desire of the upper classes to map the poor as well as their fear of potential social upheaval. Inscribing race and gender into her narrative, Roy related the story of millennial modernity to colonialism and capitalist modernity. In an interesting move, she went back to 9/11 and the attempts by the U.S. to make Middle Eastern geography legible and governable through development. She read Hezbollah’s actions in the region as part of the same nexus: another pillar of millennial development aiming to govern through "data, debt and discipline."

By demonstrating the relations of what she called Washington-Wall Street complex, or circuits of truth and circuits of capital, Ananya Roy impressively and inspiringly reformulated the question of "civilization" and development in a transnational context as well as in their intricate relations to governmentality and integration with global capitalism.

Open Letter to Chief of Police Barbara O’Connor

2010-11-16T12:37:00.012-06:00

[The below post is an open letter to University of Illinois Chief of Police Barbara O’Connor which we publish at the request of several signatories. The letter responds to the use of the "Illini Alert" system by campus police.]

November 15, 2010

An Open Letter to Chief of Police Barbara O’Connor:

We write with grave concern about your recent use of the "Illini Alert" text‐messaging system on Monday, November 8, 2010 to report the assault in Forbes Hall and to search for the suspect in that incident.

The use of the system in this case was, at best, an overreaction to the incident, and, at worst, a misuse of police power that smacks of racial profiling. To tell every member of the campus community to call 911 if they see a “black male, salt/pepper hair, 40‐50 year old, 5’11, 170, med build” does not increase safety on our campus. On the contrary, through such a sweeping announcement, you have in fact put a considerable part of the campus community at risk, placing under suspicion valued colleagues, coworkers, students, and visitors solely on the basis of their race and gender. Given the local history of racial tensions, which seem to have increased dramatically over the past year, this kind of alert only exacerbates the very distrust that has been so corrosive on campus and in local communities. We believe that the use of electronic media such as text‐messaging and email to issue crime alerts has been profoundly counterproductive, with the accumulated effect of generating widespread fear and suspicion that all too often gets expressed through racial divisiveness.

The sexual assault of a student is a deeply serious matter and deserves a swift and thorough response by police and campus authorities. We are as concerned as anyone else on this campus for the safety of our students in the dorms and elsewhere. We also believe that it is important that such incidents be handled in ways that do not inspire panic or rely on racial stereotypes, but rather that educate students, faculty, and staff about the most likely scenarios for sexual assault and other crimes on our campus.

We condemn the use of the mass‐alert (text message) system to respond to such incidents. While it may be appropriate to use this technology to respond to rare cases of imminent widespread threat, such as a tornado or a bomb scare, the text‐alert system was completely inappropriate—and, indeed, reckless—in this case. We are extremely troubled that you could issue such an alert, given the appalling history of racial profiling in this country. We understand that the Clery Act requires the University to give timely warnings of crimes on our campus, but we believe that it is possible to meet that requirement via other available media. We expect you, as the police chief of a leading university, to take considerable care and responsibility when making a decision about when or if race should be mentioned in any communication. At a minimum, we urge you to use every opportunity to inform the public of the dangers of stereotyping and to remind us all of the tremendous contributions made by all racial and ethnic groups in our diverse campus community.

While you may have intended to protect students, faculty, and staff, instead you have done serious damage to the racial climate of our campus and local community. We want you to realize that electronic crime alerts, especially last Monday’s text message, undermine the ongoing and often difficult work that we do in our programs and organizations regarding race, gender, and sexual orientation, along with our daily efforts to make this campus a diverse, safe, and open‐minded place to learn and work.

We urge you to immediately revise your policy for issuing such alerts; to apologize to the campus community for this irresponsible use of police power; and to confer in meaningful and sustained ways with those of us who are committed to the pursuit of racial and gender justice and equity on our campus.

Sincerely,

Executive Committee of the Campus Faculty Association
Senate Committee on Equal Opportunity and Inclusion
Professor James Barrett, Chair, Department of History
Professor Merle L. Bowen, Director, Center for African Studies
Professor Jorge Chapa, Director, Center on Democracy in a Multiracial Society
David W. Chih, Director, Asian American Cultural Center
Jennifer DeLuna, Assistant Director, La Casa Cultural Latina
Professor Jennifer Hamer, Faculty Co‐Chair, Black Faculty and Academic Professionals Alliance
Whitney Hamilton, President, Women of Color
Professor Dianne Harris, Director, Illinois Program for Research in the Humanities
Professor Ronald L. Jackson, II, Head, Department of African American Studies
Rory G. James, Director, Bruce D. Nesbitt African American Cultural Center
Veronica M. Kann, Assistant Director, La Casa Cultural Latina
Tony Laing, President, Black Graduate Student Association
Professor Isabel Molina, Director, Latina/Latino Studies Program
Pat Morey, Director, Women’s Resources Center
Leslie Morrow, Director, LGBT Resource Center
Professor Chantal Nadeau, Director, Gender and Women’s Studies Program
Professor Lisa Nakamura, Director, Asian American Studies Program
Ben Rothschild, Undergraduate‐Graduate Alliance
Stephanie Seawell, Co‐President, Gradate Employees Organization
Professor Siobhan Somerville, Co‐Chair, LGBT Advisory Committee
Regina Mosley Stevenson, Academic Professional Co‐Chair, Black Faculty and Academic Professionals Alliance
Katie Walkiewicz, Co‐President, Graduate Employees Organization
Professor Robert Warrior, Director, American Indian Studies Program
Amaziah Zuri, Chair, Students for a United Illinois

cc:
Robert Easter, Chancellor and Provost, University of Illinois at Urbana‐Champaign
Michael J. Hogan, President, University of Illinois
Joyce Tolliver, Chair, Senate Executive Committee, Academic Senate, University of Illinois at Urbana‐Champaign

11/5 Lecture, Amy Kaplan: "Exodus and the Americanization of Zionism"Guest Writer: Ben Allen

2010-11-08T12:16:00.012-06:00

[On Friday, November 5, 2010, the Unit for Criticism collaborated with the Center for Advanced Study and the International Forum for US Studies in hosting "Exodus and the Americanization of Zionism," a CAS/MillerComm presentation by Amy Kaplan of the University of Pennsylvania]

Amy Kaplan's "Exodus and the Americanization of Zionism"

Written by Ben Allen (East Asian Languages and Cultures)

Amy Kaplan’s lecture, which she described as part of a nascent book project about “American Zionism,” examines the 1958 book Exodus, the subsequent 1960 film, and the roles of both in shaping American opinions and attitudes towards Israel and political Zionism at a key moment in the relationship between the still-new Jewish nation and its American benefactor. To Kaplan, the “unbreakable bond,” (to quote our current president) between the United States and Israel has become so taken-for-granted and hallowed, that it is difficult for people to realize that this relationship and the historical exigencies that surround it are the product of a historical moment.

Kaplan’s project then is to historicize the assumption of this supposedly natural relationship, and her analysis of Exodus is one key facet of that. As a scholar in American Studies, Kaplan is primarily interested on the American side of this dialectic, and Exodus, though it is “the dominant narrative of Israel’s birth” (alternately the “foundational myth”), is a book written by an American, for American audiences, in English, and later adapted into a Hollywood film for domestic consumption. In this regard, Kaplan has chosen a particularly pertinent and effective object of study.

To Kaplan, Exodus does some cultural heavy lifting in support of the Zionist political cause, presenting an unambiguous narrative of Jewish/Israeli righteousness that dovetails with American exceptionalism and American Cold-war self-image(s). Exodus explicitly compares the actions of the small, rag-tag group of Jews (under the guidance of Jewish paramilitary agitators) aboard the ship that provides the title of the book to the Minutemen of American Revolutionary history and imagination. This and other constructed similarities highlighted in the book and film create an ideological simpatico between the new nation and its far-off and quite different potential benefactor.

Opposed to this is the image of the Arabs, who, in Kaplan’s reading of Exodus are depicted as not even being worthy as antagonists. The latter role largely falls to the British, who are the occupying colonial power. Most of the film’s action, violent and non-violent, is directed against this sclerotic empire, rather than the Arabs with whom the Jews share Palestine, or will until the Nakba, the Palestinian narrative of these events. Kaplan describes this counter-narrative as haunting the mythic Israel-centered, American-inscribed narrative that Exodus represents.

Kaplan argues that America’s nearly unwavering support of Israel was not inevitable, and at the moment in which Exodus, in book and movie form captivated American audiences, public support in this country for Israel had not yet crystallized, Not coincidentally, Israel’s place in the Cold War geopolitical regime of the United States had also not yet crystallized. Kaplan is not arguing that these cultural products, and others like them, are alone responsible for the movement and consolidation of American public support for Israel. She also acknowledged the influence of the United States’ own strategic interests in the region as well as the well-organized and active lobbying efforts on the part of Israel and her domestic supporters. However, Kaplan is primarily interested in the cultural element of this complex interplay of forces that gradually helped construct the “natural” relationship between Israel and the United States, a construction which seems to hide its artificial nature through the claims of similarity to the American experience and strategic silence of alternative perspectives (such as the Palestinians’.)

Though Kaplan makes a solid case for her still in-progress arguments, there seemed two lacunae. The first is the question of millenarianism or utopianism. Although the presentation frequently used terms like “redemption” and “promised land,” Kaplan did not acknowledge the plainly millenarian and utopian cast of Zionism. This lacuna seems doubly curious in light of the centrality of Judaic theological models, the Jewish people, and the notion (and nation) of Israel in the genesis of millinerian and utopian projects, including (but not limited to) modernizing colonial projects such as those of the British Empire, a connection not lost on some of the audience members who posed questions at the end of the talk.

A second elephant in the room of Zionism which Kaplan also failed to mention is the Holocaust. Any discussion of Israel’s founding or of the 20th century experience of the Jews (in Europe, the United States, or the Middle East) seems curiously incomplete without at least a reference to the Holocaust. This is especially the case with a talk relating to Exodus, which wears the memory of the Holocaust on its sleeve. (Perhaps to say that the film wears the Holocaust on its sleeve is an understatement—the Holocaust is practically tattooed on the film’s arm.) While these two theoretical issues are not Kaplan’s focus, they cannot be wholly ignored, and her discussion would have been enriched by at least making reference to the significance of these issues.

In short, however, Kaplan’s ongoing project is sure to yield an important book, one that has the potential to be a significant intervention in the as-yet underexplored field of Israel in the American popular consciousness. As Israel exists in seemingly outsized proportion in the American imaginary, as in the political reality of United States policy, an in-depth investigation of precisely this sort seems long overdue.

John Claborn, "A Road: The End of Solidarity"

2010-11-04T17:08:00.000-05:00

“The Enduring Human Spirit of Free Enterprise in The Road”

Written by John Jimmy Reader *(Free Market Studies)

*Note: John Jimmy Reader, PhD. in Free Market Studies, lives in an alternate post-apocalyptic world where tenure and institutional loyalty no longer exist at the University of Illinois – and the Tea Party has taken over the UIUC administration.

Drawing on the critical theory of the Tea Party and the Stewarding “Excellence” Team, I see Cormac McCarthy’s The Road as an allegory about the spirit of free enterprise, even when faced with total nuclear annihilation and mass extinction.

End of the world caused by humanity’s intrinsic need to split Hydrogen atoms and manufacture 22,781 weapons of mass destruction.

Radical pacifist who split the atom and then used a wormhole to blow up the world on November 2nd, 2010.

The free market saves the entrepreneurial man and the boy from death, for they are protected from coercion by their employer because of the other employers for whom they can work. They are also protected from a life of existential horror because they can die.

The man and the boy engage in entrepreneurial activity.

The boy is thoughtfully generating more revenue. Killing the man and taking his food is one option, but that might prove a “bold investment.”

In the beginning, the entrepreneurial man and the boy freely decided to enter a business partnership that is mutually profitable and does not compromise their survival with solidarity.

The man and the boy negotiate the terms of their business contract. At this tense moment, negotiations almost fall apart because the man does not like the boy’s idea for an essay assignment, while the boy worries constantly about his $620,000 student loan debt. (note: $620,000 = a certain administrator’s salary)

The man and the boy have settled on a contract, and are now taking a more team-building approach with their stewardy-type management style.

While the entrepreneurial man and the boy work to build private business partnerships, the roving band of cannibalistic thugs (the Tea Party) roam the countryside searching for human flesh.

“Does this flesh have a birth certificate? I won’t eat it unless it produces one.”

The man stumbles upon a Bessemer and uses entrepreneurship to smelt a broad sword. He readies himself for the film’s climactic battle with the cannibalistic thugs, which he wins by using a strategy of sustainable resource stewardship, along with a few trusty Gatling guns and Sun Tzu’s The Art of War.

At the end of The Road, the Vice Chancellor of Bold Initiatives and the Stewarding “Excellence” Team appear out of nowhere. “There is a perceived lack of entrepreneurial spirit,” the Team chides the man and the boy for prudently surviving hand-to-mouth for decades(RG 13). “We need to make a paradigm shift in the way we conceive and manage our resources. These are certainly times that demand austerity”(RG 10).


“What are you willing to sacrifice?” The Vice Chancellor of Bold Initiatives approaches the man and the boy.	Stewarding “Excellence” Team lectures the man and the boy about creating a “culture of scholarly risk and return”(RG 5).

The man and the boy take a course in fiscal ninja arts and learn how to lick the jagged lids clean from all those cans of beans they ate. Guided by the Team, the entrepreneurial man evaluates his human capital (the boy) according to a “notional quantification of the value of [his] inputs and outputs” (RG 24). The Team lectured the entrepreneurial man: “your human capital’s tenure must be held accountable – and by accountable we mean how much cash he makes for this post-apocalyptic institution.”

The man and the boy part ways. The boy got tenure but his program was cancelled due to budget cuts. There just wasn’t enough money so suck it up kid.

And so the boy is dragged off to a laboratory where he is used for a human capital centipede, while the man suits up and enters his $1 million “intellectual excellence pod”(RG 19).

The script for the sequel to The Road, penned by the Stewarding “Excellence” Revenue Generation team, is available here. Find out more about the exciting research the entrepreneurial man will conduct in his intellectual excellence pod!

Promo for The Road 2: “This global campus needs to go interplanetary – and we need to start purifying our own urine!”

10/28 Lecture, Toril Moi: "What Does It Mean to Claim that Sex, Gender, and the Body are Socially Constructed?" Guest Writer: Claire Barber

2010-11-02T13:45:00.017-05:00

[On Thursday, October 28, 2010, the Unit for Criticism and Anna Stenport of the Department of Germanic Languages and Literatures hosted “What Does It Mean to Claim that Sex, Gender, and the Body are Socially Constructed?,” a lecture by Toril Moi of Duke University]

Toril Moi’s “What Does It Mean to Claim that Sex, Gender, and the Body are Socially Constructed?”

Written by Claire Barber (English)

Last Thursday, Toril Moi addressed the question “Does it makes sense to claim sex, gender, and the body are socially constructed?” After playfully warning the group that her talk was “pure theory,” she laid out her analysis of the sex/gender distinction from the first chapter of What is a Woman? And Other Essays(1999). She ended her presentation by applying a theoretical framework from Ian Hacking’s The Social Construction of What? (1999). I will present here the fundamental features of Moi’s argument. Then, I will pose several questions and propose an additional example of the body as situation which may complicate her conclusions.

Moi’s objective is to develop “a theory of the sexually different body” by revisiting Simone de Beauvoir’s proposal in The Second Sex, that we should view the body as a situation (4). This move departs from a trend Moi sees as problematic in feminist theory, which works within the distinction between sex (biological) and gender (social/cultural). In her presentation, Moi sketched out the genealogy of sex and gender difference, beginning with biological models of sex from the late 19th and early 20th centuries, and used the work of Beauvoir and Marcel Merleau-Ponty to complicate some later feminist responses to these essentialist models.

One of the main problems Moi sees with feminist theories that work within the sex/gender distinction is that they do “not provide…a good theory of subjectivity or a useful understanding of the body” (114). Moi located the distinction in Gayle Rubin’s 1975 essay “The Traffic in Women” and in Judith Butler’s books Gender Trouble and Bodies that Matter. Instead of arguing, as Butler does, that biological sex is as much a social construction as gender, Moi proposed that we focus on concrete bodies and the particular lived experiences of being embodied. The body, according to Merleau-Ponty “is fundamentally ambiguous” (qtd. in Moi 117), so only by examining particular bodies situated historically in their process of becoming can we gain any understanding of what it means to be a woman. This reading runs contrary to the abstract theories of embodiment suggested by poststructuralist feminists like Butler and also what Moi calls “the pervasive picture of sex” in early biological models (6).

Moi introduced new material to critique feminist theories asserting that sex, gender, and the body are socially constructed: what she called “the Hacking test for social construction claims.” (See Hacking 16 and Moi’s handout for additional information.) Moi used this philosophical framework to test the degree of commitment that social constructionists have to different aspects of the sex/gender system. She concluded that we should not reduce “sex” to mere hormones and chromosomes, and instead approach the body as historicists, the lived experience of gender as reformists, and the oppressive social relations of gender as revolutionaries.

That said, the Hacking test did not seem to do much for her argument; I saw the same final points emerge from What is a Woman?, and Moi left me wondering about the ultimate implications of her discussion of sex, gender, and the body. If we view the body through Beauvoir’s theories, then it is constructed partly by “the way in which the individual woman encounters, internalizes, or rejects dominant gender norms” (82). A woman does maintain some level of personal determination because a situation, according to Moi and Beauvoir, is “an irreducible amalgam of the freedom (projects) of [a] subject and the conditions in which that freedom finds itself” (74). Moi’s argument then seems to be that sex, gender, and the body are at some level socially constructed but not entirely. This conclusion shares some similarities with Hacking’s concept of the looping effect in The Social Construction of What?, and Moi’s presentation may have benefited from a discussion of this concept. But I wonder about the usefulness of the way in which Moi and Hacking hedge their conclusions. If we must, according to Moi, look primarily at particular cases of historically situated, lived experience, how or when can we extrapolate general conclusions from these examples?

One of the most interesting aspects of the presentation emerged during the question and answer period when Moi was asked how race factored into her reading of sex, gender, and the body. Moi elaborated an argument from What is a Woman? that relates race to sex as two different kinds of bodily situations (67-69; 79). One could imagine, she claimed, a society where race no longer had any social function, but could society transcend sexual difference in the same way? Moi argued that as long as babies are born helpless, society would have to find a way to organize itself to take care of these creatures. As she describes in the book, “[a]lthough biology places certain limitations on culture, our specific cultural arrangements cannot be read off from our biology” (79). An organization for the care of the young does not have to depend on sex, but it must exist in some form.

As I listened to Moi’s response, two important questions came to my mind: Is disability a situation or social category comparable to sex, race, and class, as discussed by Moi and Merleau-Ponty? And, if a society could exist that had moved past race, could one exist that was past disability? To address these questions, I must first locate the form of disability most appropriate to address here. Physical disabilities fit easily into Moi’s schema. I can certainly imagine a society that had moved past these situations—albeit one with more social services and a different understanding of “productivity” than today’s capitalist societies. Intellectual disabilities also seem like bodily situations society could transcend, with perhaps a greater level of difficulty and additional revision of “productivity” and “success.” Mental health issues or cognitive disabilities, however, may throw a wrench into Moi’s conclusions about the body.

To clarify my argument, let us turn to a particular example of this embodied situation, as Moi suggests. Pervasive developmental disorders (PDDs), including autism and Asperger’s syndrome, are diagnosed based on “delays in the development of socialization and communication skills,” according to the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke. Society has labeled these disorders “pervasive,” an interesting term when read with Moi’s analysis of biological models of sex in which researchers used physical differences (ovaries versus testes) to justify social differences between men and women. In the case of PDDs, biology, or the way in which the brains of these individuals are wired, does limit the effects of culture on their situations. Therefore, society labels these these bodies as pervaded by this disorder.

The primary characteristics of this disorder, as described by NINDS, lie in the lack of biological investment an individual with a PDD may have in socialization. Some autists, for example, do not recognize other people as significant elements in their attempts to process the environment in which they are situated. This choice is not a conscious one; instead it occurs because of the way autistic brains are wired. Perhaps it is true that “our specific cultural arrangements cannot be read off of biology,” as Moi noted above, but at a biological level, these individuals may not receive the same pleasure from communication as neurologically typical individuals. They may not, therefore, seek out such situations, leading to a breakdown in socialization.

Moi would likely argue that no individual would encounter and respond to social norms in the same way, but her argument about social construction relies on the fact that an encounter will occur. What if it does not? I must then ask, Does socialization ground this diagnosis because these individuals are not as responsive to the typical means of social construction? Does society worry about individuals who lack a desire to participate in it? A society that unconditionally accepted the means of socialization that individuals with PDDs may prefer is difficult for me to imagine. It would be radically different from today’s society and would require a redefinition of what “society” means.

This example of cognitive disability then functions more like sex than race or physical/intellectual disability, in terms of the difficulty that society would have transcending the social functions. Yet, Moi’s conclusion that biology cannot determine cultural arrangements does not seem to apply to this example. Perhaps I have taken Moi’s argument about the social construction of sex, gender, and the body too far, but I look forward to hearing your thoughts.

Philip Guston's, "Sea," 1980

"Well, what do you know?" Samantha Frost

2010-10-25T09:00:00.001-05:00

[Kritik is pleased to publish the third in a series of posts by Samantha Frost, associate professor in Political Science and Gender and Women’s Studies. As the recipient of a Mellon New Directions Fellowship, Sam is enrolled in undergraduate courses in biology and neuroscience with the aim of enhancing her research on materialist accounts of perception, judgment, and subjectivity. Last spring and over the summer, she took the pre-requisite courses in organic chemistry, basic physiology, and molecular biology. This semester, she is taking a further 12 credits of courses in biochemistry, cell biology, and neuroscience.]

"WELL, WHAT DO YOU KNOW?"

Written by Samantha Frost (Political Science, GWS)

Imagine this scenario: I drop my kids off at school, I set off to the grocery store to pick up a few things before my day begins, and then I find myself pulling into the driveway of my home, sans groceries… because I did not actually go to the store.

Has this ever happened to you?

The semester is galloping along and everything I am learning is so extraordinarily fascinating that it is difficult to know what to select to talk about. So I decided to share a neuroscience insight (courtesy of Paul Gold) that stands out because it explains some of life’s peculiarities.

Neuroscientists who are interested in the processes of learning and memory study which parts of the brain are involved in different aspects of memory formation. To this end, they train rats to do tasks that are known to use specific parts of the brain, they inactivate said brain area or hyper-activate others, and then observe what the rats do when confronted with the learned task again.

In many cases, if a task-specific brain region is inactivated, the affected rat will no longer know how to do the associated task. In some cases, however, the rat will know how to do that task—or a different one—even better than before. Such results suggest that different areas of the brain have characteristic strategies for learning and that these different areas can function antagonistically, cooperatively, or weirdly in tandem. It is this kind of weird—cool, complex, but weird—interaction that I want to highlight today.

Enter the players: the hippocampus and the striatum.

The hippocampus is a part of the brain that tends to be most active when rats learn to run a maze by orienting themselves via environmental cues outside the confines of the maze. Its prototypical instruction is something like: always run in the direction of the corner near the poster, no matter which way the maze is rotated in the room. This is called place-learning.

In contrast, the striatum tends to be most active when rats learn to run a maze by remembering which ways they should turn at a particular junction. Here, the body is the reference point for coordination. The striatum says, figuratively speaking: always turn left, no matter which way the maze is rotated in the room. This is called response-learning.

It turns out that rats are predisposed to learn either one way or another: my sense (although I could be mistaken) is that it is a fairly even split among the experimental rat population. And yet, if the rats are trained at the same task over and over, eventually they all habitually adopt the response-strategy. In other words, turning left or right is what they come to know.

This is the interesting part: Once the rats have been trained to this level of habituation (i.e. always turn left), if the striatum is experimentally knocked out, it is not the case that the rats then do not know what to do. Rather, they exhibit the hippocampus’s strategy—or place-learning. In other words, the well-trained rats rely on environmental or spatial cues and do the equivalent of always heading towards the corner near the poster.

What this means is that even as one brain area and learning strategy predominates (always turn left), the other brain area is nevertheless learning (always head towards the poster). We could say that the rats know both of these things. Yet, given the pre-dominance of the striatum, what it knows is what the rats know to do, i.e., what they exhibit in their behavior when the orientation of the maze in the room is switched. When the striatum is deactivated, what the hippocampus knows becomes what the rats know to do.

So—and here we make a transition from rat brains to human brains—when we are engaged in a task, different areas or systems of our brains are learning different things about what the task demands. We think we are learning one thing but our brains are actually learning several different things. And what these several things are can become evident when we find ourselves in novel situations—will you do the equivalent of turning left? or of heading towards the poster? These things that we know can also become evident when the function of one of the brain areas in question is boosted, distracted, or somehow underpowered.

Back to my non-trip to the store. It wasn’t that I was distracted; I wasn’t forgetting something. In fact, I felt I was doing exactly what I was supposed to do. At that crucial traffic light on Prospect Avenue, at the determining intersection, it didn’t even occur to me to turn west onto Springfield to head toward the grocery store. I knew what I was doing. I simply took a right and drove home. It appears to have been something akin to a striatal move: At this intersection, always turn right!

But of course, even as this neuroscience stuff possibly answers the question of why I sometimes miss getting to the grocery store—or whatever errand is on the agenda—it raises yet another: What is my hippocampus doing when I find myself inadvertently “turning right” instead of going to the store? Clearly, turning right at that light is a habit—hence the likelihood of the striatum being dominant in that moment. But why was the striatum dominant at that moment?

Apparently, the balance between the different brain systems is regulated by brain areas known as modulators—I haven’t learned yet what enables modulators to shift the balance one way or another, but it is coming up soon. However, it is clear that modulators, as well as the different learning or memory systems themselves, are variously affected by the chemicals released into our brains in response to specific task demand, anxiety, stress, the food and alcohol that we consume, as well as the other things we (and our bodies) are doing.

There is a complex chemical flux between the outside and the inside of our bodies—and the various parts of the inside—that affects what among the many things we know we happen to know effectively. In this context, Descartes’ argument culminating in “cogito ergo sum” seems not mistaken, really, but rather a gross misrepresentation of what is at issue in our knowing what we know.

Not only are we not self-mastering, self-transparent subjects—an insight that is still sometimes difficult to grasp at the mundane level even as it makes sense theoretically. We are also not possessed of a brain that functions as a singular, internally unified entity—although one must acknowledge that coordination among the bits is such that we often do end up roughly succeeding, and sometimes spectacularly succeeding, in the tasks to which we set ourselves.

My point, however, is that we can know different and sometimes contradictory things about, say, a task. And when we know that we know one of those things, we may not be aware that we also know the other. In other words, our brains are internally plural, with systems that function in competition, cooperation, or concert without our awareness and depending upon our state of hunger, stress, inebriation, caffeination, or hormonal calibration. At any given moment, what we know, and what we know ourselves to know, is in some sense beyond our ken and control.

When I consider this, I am profoundly aware of myself as an organism.

And that’s unsettling.

*****
These are some of the materials we read in class related to this issue:

E. McNay and P. Gold. “Food for Thought: Fluctuations in Brain Extracellular Glucose Provide Insight Into the Mechanisms of Memory Modulation”. Behavioral and Cognitive Neuroscience Reviews. 1:4 (December 2002): 264-80

P. Gold. “Coordination of multiple memory systems”. Neurobiology of Learning and Memory. 82 (2004): 230–42

P. Gold. “Memory-Enhancing Drugs”. In H. Eichenbaum (Ed.), Memory Systems. Vol. [3] of Learning and Memory: A Comprehensive Reference, 4 vols., ed. J.Byrne (Oxford: Elsevier, 2008), pp.555-76.

Mad World on Kritik: Mad Men Season 4.13 "The Blue Pill"

2010-10-21T09:15:00.009-05:00

[This second of two final entries in our multi-authored series of posts on the fourth season of Mad Men, in anticipation of publishing MAD WORLD: Sex, Politics, Style and the 1960s, is by Lilya Kaganovsky. The first post was written by co-editors Lauren Goodlad and Rob Rushing]

"THE BLUE PILL"

Written by Lilya Kaganovsky (Slavic/Comparative Literature)

In 2008, six years after The Wire first aired on HBO, Film Quarterly published a review of the complete fourth season on DVD, which described (in a positive way) the show’s fans as junkies and the show as a drug. Fans come to video stores, wrote J. M. Tyree, jonesing for a hit, desperate for another dose of a show that missed its audience only by finding it (much like Proust suggests a good novelist does) after the fact, when its five (really four and a half) seasons were nearly over:

There is a growing cult around The Wire, although many of its members do not subscribe to HBO, appearing instead like junkies at their local video rental stores months after the original broadcasts, and helping the show continue its extraordinary afterlife.

If Season 4 of Mad Men has been about anything, it has been about addiction. Cigarettes, alcohol, and sex appeared this season no longer bathed in the retrospective glow of nostalgia, but as vice, pure and simple, starting with Don’s masochistic sex with a prostitute in the first episode, and ending with Midge’s heroin addiction. As with so much television since the 1990s, and in the realist novel before that, smoking and drinking are used only to show weakness of character, a man (or woman) out of control. Pete, for example, who has been a much more upstanding citizen this season, doesn’t smoke and barely drinks, and the same goes for Henry Francis, as he holds his moral high ground against Betty’s fits of rage. “You need a drink? What are you, a wino? You need a drink?” he snarls during a memorable car ride home (“The Summer Man,” 4.8). No wonder Don vomits twice during this season: his very being is rejecting the thing he has become, while addiction itself is linked to cancer that eats away at you from the inside (another theme that begins with Anna Draper’s illness and ends with a possible anti-smoking campaign for the American Cancer Society).

But what, as Avital Ronell asks in Crack Wars, do we hold against the drug addict? What do we hold against the drug addict?

… that he cuts himself off from the world, in exile from reality, far from objective reality and the real like of the city and the community; that he escapes into a world of simulacrum and fiction. We disapprove of hallucinations. . . . We cannot abide the fact that his is a pleasure taken in an experience without truth.

Ex-stasis, going beyond/outside of yourself, the “high” of transgression. For pleasure to be what it is, says Ronell, it has to exceed a limit of what is altogether wholesome and healthy. Otherwise, “it’s something like contentedness, which can be shown to be in fact an abandonment of pleasure.”

Heroin is “like drinking 100 bottles of whiskey while someone licks your tits,” says Midge, poetically.

There has been some debate about what Mad Men has meant for its viewers. Its most vociferous critics have insisted that there’s something false about the show, that the emperor has no clothes, that Mad Men, like a variation of the Matrix, is a “world that has been pulled over our eyes to blind us from the truth.”

Morpheus: The Matrix is everywhere. It is all around us. Even now, in this very room… It is the world that has been pulled over your eyes to blind you from the truth.

Neo: What truth?

Morpheus: That you are a slave, Neo… After this, there is no turning back. You take the blue pill, the story ends, you wake up in your bed and believe whatever you want to believe. You take the red pill, you stay in Wonderland, and I show you how deep the rabbit hole goes. Remember: all I’m offering is the truth. Nothing more.

(“I want a third pill!” says Zizek about this particular form of forced choice. As an aside, we might note that the man dealing drugs here is called Morpheus, and that “truth” he is offering is a trip down the rabbit hole.)

Critics of the show cannot understand how others have become hooked, what keeps them coming back week after week asking for more. As one respondent to Jason Mittell’s post "On Disliking Mad Men" put it,

At first I was excited to see Mad Men. But my reaction was similar—a feeling of deep repulsion… I kept trying to sample it, hoping the drama/characters would “click.” When peers raved, I’d mutter something vaguely unenthusiastic, then have to listen to them “explain” that MM was really about the “crisis of masculinity” or some such.

Given “the horrendous peer pressure to love MM,” the same critic writes, we miss seeing the bad acting, the bad writing, the nonsensical characters with their inexplicable behavior. We are seduced by the set and costume design and so fail to notice that we are getting glamour without substance, surface without depth, simulacrum without truth. “Not only is it disingenuous,” she writes, “it’s repulsive.”

Season 4 of Mad Men ends with an inexplicable choice: in a moment of what can only be perceived as delusion or addiction, Don chooses Megan-the-secretary over Dr. Faye Miller. Surely he should know better by now! But the show, as we know, is not a Bildungsroman. Characters do not change or grow but, like addicts, repeat the same destructive acts because what they are addicted to is the fantasy itself. Faye offers Don a relationship “in the open.” She suggests that he can start trying to be a “person like the rest of us.” That he is a “type,” whose actions are known in advance. And Don even takes a step toward this new found “maturity” when he links his two names, Don and Dick, for Sally. And then he reverts, falls off the wagon, goes back for another hit. He proposes with another man’s ring, once again insisting on a fake identity over the real one. “I feel like myself when I’m with you,” Don tells Megan, “but—the way I always wanted to feel.”

Literature, cinema and television are about addiction. In order to be a good reader or a good viewer you have to allow yourself to be transported by the text, consumed by the fictions it offers. Children age 8, pediatric guidelines suggest, should have their TV viewing limited to an hour a day. Fiction offers us a way out of our daily lives, out of the monotony of existence, a way to move beyond the self. Ronell calls this “Narcossism”: our relation to ourselves structured and mediated by some form of addiction and urge. To get off any drug, she says, or anything that has been invested as an ideal object—something that you want to incorporate as part of you—precipitates a major narcissistic crisis.

Season 4 has been precisely about this narcissistic crisis. It’s been about trying to get off drugs—cigarettes, alcohol, heroin, bad sex, living a lie. It hasn’t been pleasant to watch. It’s been as if the show itself is trying to de-cathect its viewers by suddenly refusing to occupy that position of “ideal object,” as if the show itself is trying to resist “the horrendous peer pressure to love MM.” In essence, “Blowing Smoke” was the final episode of season 4, the episode where all the myths and fantasies of “Smoke Gets in Your Eyes” were seemingly rejected in favor of the “truth.” American Tobacco replaced by the American Cancer Society. Midge Daniels smoking pot replaced by Midge Daniels shooting up heroin.

But “Tomorrowland” is about something else. Let’s call it a “fresh start” because, like Don, we really only like the beginnings of things. There’s a wonderful episode of Buffy the Vampire Slayer (“Normal Again” 6.17) in which Buffy is offered a choice similar to the one Morpheus offers Neo, that is, between taking the blue pill and waking up a slave to fantasy, or taking the red pill and seeing the “truth.” The choice offered Buffy in “Normal Again” is similar: go back to the fantasy world in which you are a superhero and all your friends have superpowers, or stay in the “real” world where your delusional fantasies are just that—a sign of addiction and mental illness. Neo chooses the red pill. (We disapprove of hallucinations, says Ronell. We cannot abide the fact that the addict’s pleasure is taken in an experience without truth.) Buffy chooses the blue.

>Because to choose “reality” over “fantasy” is to give up on your desire. It means settling for contentment over jouissance, for Dr. Faye Miller over Megan. For the moment, Mad Men has pulled back from that particular edge, where it’s been heading all season long. The final coup belongs not to Don but to Peggy who not only singlehandedly breaks SCDP’s losing streak by signing a new client, but delivers one of the best lines of the entire season: “Well, I learned a long time ago to not get all my satisfaction from this job,” Joan tells her, in a moment of female bonding over men and a cigarette. “That’s bullshit!” says Peggy, exhaling smoke.