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

Monday, May 9, 2011

posted under , by Unit for Criticism
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.
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Freedom and Its Discontents: "The Shape of Freedom and Its Discontents"
Guest Writer: Sally Perret

Tuesday, May 3, 2011

posted under , , , by Unit for Criticism
[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.
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Freedom and Its Discontents: Lauren M. E. Goodlad's Opening Remarks

Monday, May 2, 2011

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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. Read more

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