David Harvey, “Rebel Cities”
Guest Writer: Katherine Skwarczek

Tuesday, November 13, 2012

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[On November 8, 2012 the Illinois Program for Research in the Humanities hosted “Rebel Cities,” a lecture by David Harvey, Distinguished Professor of Anthropology at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York (CUNY) and director of the Center for Place, Culture, and Politics. His talk is reviewed below by guest writer, Katherine Skwarczek, a graduate student affiliate of the Unit for Criticism in English.]

Katherine Skwarczek (English)


Harvey addresses a large audience in Foellinger
Auditorium
David Harvey’s new book, Rebel Cities, argues for the revolutionary potential of urban spaces, particularly as reflected in recent right-to-the-city movements. In his talk, Harvey explained the inherent—and under-theorized—relationship between capitalist growth and urbanization to which these movements implicitly react.

Because capitalism requires perpetual growth, it continually seeks opportunities for profitably investing its surplus and employing excess labor. Both now and in the past, Harvey explained, capital frequently locates these opportunities for investment in urban development and transformation. Harvey summarized the economic crises in the US by quoting a recent financial statement: to recover from recession, we build houses and then fill them with things.

Harvey emphasized the cyclical and repetitive nature of these historically intertwined processes of capital accumulation and urbanization, beginning with the 1848 revolution in France as an example. The uprising began as a crisis of capital, juxtaposing dire social needs with a capital surplus that refused to meet them. Such a crisis, Harvey claimed, is a revealing moment for capitalism, unmasking its inherent irrationality and absurdity. As conservative forces rallied to gain control over the new republic and suppress working class revolution, Louis Bonaparte, whose 1851 coup was immortalized in one of Karl Marx’s best-known essays, acted on the theories of contemporary radicals like Saint-Simon, by commissioning Baron Haussmann to re-build Paris. This vast urbanization project successfully absorbed surplus capital and labor, while also facilitating the overhaul of the French financial system. By creating new credit institutions that made debt-financing—and speculation—possible on an expanded scale, Bonaparte, who eventually styled himself as Napoleon III, was able to finance this massive urban project.

Haussmann’s renovations not only built new houses, parks, and boulevards, but also transformed the urban experience itself. According to Harvey, this new urban lifestyle, based on spectacle and commodity culture, was essential to the pacification of urban populations. Eventually, however, the property boom led to a speculative boom with an explosive finale: in the re-building of the city, the working class had been pushed toward Paris’s periphery. During the 1871 Paris Commune, workers sought to reclaim a Paris they had built but from which they had been excluded.


“The Paris Commune”
Harvey drew parallels between the crises of the Second French Empire and similar crises related to capital growth and urbanization in the United States. The Great Depression, he suggested, was preceded by a speculative boom closely tied to property markets. Recovery from the Depression in the late 1930s was spurred by housing and infrastructure projects, assisted by the re-organization of financial institutions and mortgage reform. Although World War II absorbed much surplus labor, anxieties about its return resulted in a vast postwar expansion in housing construction. The result was the suburbanization of America, and its attendant social, environmental and political effects (McCarthyism, for instance). These issues ultimately reached a crisis point in the urban riots of the 1960s and financial recession of 1973.

Harvey views the current recession as the most recent iteration of the cycle of surplus capital, urban development, and property speculation. China is perhaps the most recent example of a nation that has used immense urban development to spur economic growth, but this solution, Harvey cautioned, is temporary and fragile.
Chinese ghost city, from here

Though Harvey stressed the important impact of the capital growth “syndrome” on cities, by the end of his talk he encouraged us to see the reverse: the ways in which people can in turn make and re-make their own cities. Harvey’s working class is not the typical Marxist factory-worker but rather the city laborer, who produces the urban space, yet is often relegated to commuting in from its periphery. Urban dwellers can harness their considerable political and economic power to re-organize city life. Harvey cited as an example recent Miami organizations coming out of the right-to-the-city movements that were mobilized during the 2012 elections. An urban network, possibly on the scale of the worldwide anti-war protests of 2003, could potentially coalesce into a system of support and alliance for even greater re-organization of production and consumption.

The potential stakes of this re-organization are enormous. In seeking to radically alter the organization of city life and, thus, capital, these movements might ultimately halt the cycle of boom and crisis. Though the capitalist growth machine is embedded in urbanization, Harvey urged his audience to also see the potential power of urban life, and to consider the development of human capacity, and not the growth rate, as a true measure of social success. Read more

Seminar, Tricia Rose: Black Noise & Hip Hop Wars
Guest Writer: Kerry Wilson

Thursday, November 8, 2012

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[On November 2, 2012, the Unit for Criticism in collaboration with IPRH hosted a seminar with Tricia Rose (Brown) devoted to discussing some of her groundbreaking scholarship on hip hop.]

Kerry Wilson (Institute of Communications Research)

The Unit for Criticism and Interpretive Theory kicked off this year’s series of events on “The Eighties in Theory and Practice” by hosting a seminar, in collaboration with IPRH, with prominent cultural critic and Brown University Africana studies professor, Tricia Rose. Rose is the author of Black Noise: Rap Music and Black Culture in Contemporary America, Longing to Tell: Black Women Talk about Sexuality and Intimacy, and The Hip Hop Wars: What We Talk About When We Talk About Hip Hop—and Why It Matters. She also co-edited Microphone Fiends: Youth Music and Youth Culture with Andrew Ross . During the seminar, Rose lectured on and led a discussion about the cultural context of the 1980s as it relates to hip hop culture and the larger discourses of black expressive culture and mainstream popular culture.

Rose pulled from her books to emphasize the social and political structures present in the 1980s that were responsible for creating the conditions for hip hop culture’s emergence. During the 1980s, Rose argued, structural and cultural shifts changed the representations of African Americans in the popular discourse. She marks the year 1989 as especially significant in bringing together hip hop’s complex narrative structures with a noticeable inclusion of female voices and a large presence of local radio outlets and record labels devoted to African American audiences.


After 1989, deregulation increased the concentration of media and, thus, decreased the narrative space for African American cultural expression in the United States by commodifying a monolithic representation of African Americans. Yet, according to Rose, hip hop culture has expanded in other countries because of its centrality to the globalization and export of American culture. The global expansion of hip hop culture exacerbated the already polarizing debate about the merits of hip hop culture and became the impetus for The Hip Hop Wars.

The seminar’s discussion period focused on challenging commercialized hip hop through alternative means of cultural consumption and production. Discussants considered the Internet as a possible, albeit problematic, challenge to the mainstream discourse of a monolithic African American community in commercialized hip hop.

Rose implored the group to seek out alternative media and organizations as a way to subvert the control of corporatized media sources. She especially recommended Robert Glasper’s Black Radio to exemplify the kind of alternative media that still has the potential to inspire challenges to the status quo in the way that US hip hop did in the 1980s and 1990s. According to Rose, scholars who combine theory and practice are better equipped to engage with the realities faced by those outside of the academy and create new knowledge based on praxis. Read more

IPRH Symposium: "Resentment's Conflicts"; Colleen Murphy: "Resentment and Political Reconciliation"
Guest Writer: Luján Stasevicius

Tuesday, October 23, 2012

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"Ruin", section from "Too much world" ("Demasiado mundo") by Marina Núñez.
[On October 19, 2012 the Illinois Program for Research in the Humanities and the Department of Spanish, Italian, and Portuguese co-organized “Resentment’s Conflicts: A Symposium.” “Resentment and Political Reconciliation” was a talk given by Colleen Murphy (Philosophy). Her talk is reviewed below by guest writer Luján Stasevicius, a graduate student affiliate in Spanish, Italian and Portuguese.]

Luján Stasevicius (Spanish, Italian and Portuguese)

Colleen Murphy´s paper dealt with the topic of understanding the relations between resentment and political reconciliation in countries that have experienced dictatorships or civil conflicts. Murphy spoke about the large number of communities around the world that have attempted to transition from dictatorships to democracy, calling them “transitional communities." South Africa, Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria, Argentina and Spain were among the countries she described as “transitional communities.”

Her focus was on how to achieve justice in transitional communities in which basic human rights had been denied for so long. For Murphy, the success of democracy is related to a discourse of forgiveness. She characterized this question as part of a moral debate, since the transitional communities must justify their responses to the past to present communities. Justice, she said, involves punishment and the infliction of pain on those who did wrong. However, in many of these societies, reconciliation involves the avoidance of punishment “for the sake of democracy, so it does not fail.” This appeal to reconciliation is also used to justify amnesty for criminals. Murphy equated such reconciliation to political forgiveness.

Reconciliation refers etymologically to the process of repairing damage, making this approach to justice not only a failure at reparation, but also one that urges victims to overcome their negative emotions about suffering. Repair is thus related to the achievement of forgiveneswhich is presented as critical for relationships in the long term.

Murphy raised three main issues arising from this model. First, there is an evident disconnect between the actual relationships under discussion and the model used to address them. During dictatorship, the model assumes, wrongdoing is the exception so that individuals can -- and should -- overcome their resentment. According to Murphy, this expectation is not only naive, but also complicit in perpetuating injustice. By expecting victims to change, this method shifts responsibility for reconciliation away from political forces and toward victimized individuals. The result is to overlook systematic violence and abuse of human rights on the part of the state

Colleen Murphy (Philosophy) speaking at "Resentment's Conflicts"
Requiring the victim to change -- to forgive and forget -- not only fails to address the violence the victim has been through, but also prevents a step forward at the level of the state toward ending violence. Finally, reconciliation entails using Catholic moral values such as forgiveness to measure success—a gauge all too subject to the continued oppression. In concluding her talk, Murphy argued that political reconciliation often fails to achieve forgiveness. In transitional communities, relationships are still damaged because the key values of reciprocity and mutuality are undermined, and these values require conditions that must be based on trust and respect for all participants.. The pursuit of a trust-based model of reconciliation which focuses on these necessary conditions will be more effective in truly addressing resentment.

After the talk, there were many questions related to specific cases in which political reconciliation had been sought without focus on forgiveness. A question was asked in relation to the usefulness of the category of "victim" in the discussion about social justice. Murphy’s answer addressed the need to think about relationships in general and not in terms of categories, so we can ask other questions such as “what does it mean for a perpetrator to do wrong?” Another comment connected conditions for reconciliation and the economic, asking if reconciliation was compatible with imperialism.Examples of Honduras and Paraguay ) were cited. Murphy answered that any successful reconciliation has to take into account the third parties involved, in order to make sure that reconciliation is not compatible with imperialism.

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IPRH Distinguished Lecture, Feisal Mohamed, “Republican Political Theology in the Age of Hobbes”
Guest Writer: J. Patrick Fadely

Friday, October 5, 2012

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The illustration to Thomas Hobbes' Leviathan
[On October 3, 2012 the Illinois Program for Research in the Humanities held its third Annual IPRH Distinguished Lecture in the Humanities. Feisal Mohamed (English/CSAMES), who is also a retiring member of the Unit for Criticism’s Advisory Board, presented a lecture entitled “Republican Political Theology in the Age of Hobbes.”]

Sovereignty, Sacrifice, and the Myth of Secularization

J. Patrick Fadely (English)

Professor Feisal Mohamed began his talk by describing a menacing political landscape. In the world he invoked, the sovereign's personal will trumped the rule of law, the force of revelation impinged on rational thought, and internecine religious conflicts threatened political stability. But he wasn't talking (yet) about an early modern England convulsed by religious strife and civil war. Rather, he was describing our own political moment, the latest installment of the dialectic of Enlightenment, in which the end of the Cold War has led not to the promised end of history, but to an era of terror and perpetual war.

Professor Feisal Mohamed, English/CSAMES
In this political climate, scholars have increasingly turned their attention toward the intersection of politics and religion. The works of Carl Schmitt, influential interpreter of Hobbes who was also a controversial conservative jurist (and eventual Nazi supporter) , have been particularly influential in shaping the resulting scholarly conversation. Mohamed's return to the age of Hobbes intervenes in current debates about political theology in two ways. First, it extricates Hobbes's republicanism from Schmitt's interpretive grip and second, it does so by way of exploring the work of Roger Williams and Sir Henry Vane, two of Hobbes's contemporaries. Their notions of republican political theology provide insights about the consonance between the early-modern and postmodern political situations that a narrow focus on Schmitt and Hobbes overlooks.

As opposed to Schmitt, who situates Hobbes in a "grand narrative of secularization," Mohamed sought to return Hobbes to his own cultural and political context. He suggested three specific ideas whose influence in England Hobbes deemed pernicious to the state: classical and continental republicanism, theories of mixed polity, and the doctrine of liberty of conscience (which sought to curtail the crown's power in matters of religion). Mohamed suggested that reading the Leviathan (1651) as a response to these pressures, allows us to see what a Schmittian interpretation necessarily misses: namely that Hobbes's commitments to “decisionistic” sovereignty on the one hand, and the mechanical rationalism of the new philosophy on the other, are not mutually exclusive but co-constitutive aspects of his political thought.

Mohamed next turned to the Roman influences on Hobbes's political theology as a way of showing the cracks in the edifice of Leviathan. Hobbes, Mohamed argued, praised, yet failed to understand Rome's henotheism, which admitted the worship of a plurality of gods while maintaining a centralization of state power in religious affairs. Had Hobbes read his Porphyry more carefully, he would have realized that it was not Judaism, as Hobbes claimed and Schmitt enthusiastically echoed, that threatened this arrangement of the relationship between throne and altar; it was Christianity, whose confession of faith could admit no other and no higher locus of sovereignty than Christ.

Mohamed then turned his attention to the "Godly republicans," whose rejection of any state-sanctioned church and advocacy of full liberty of religious conscience make them diametrically opposed to Hobbes. The political theology formulated on these principles constitutes, for Mohamed, the "uniquely English contribution to the republican tradition." Mohamed enlisted Roger Williams, founder of Rhode Island Colony, and Sir Henry Vane the Younger, a British statesman, to represent this strain of republican thought. By examining Williams's correspondence, Mohamed showed how fervent belief in liberty of conscience can nevertheless underwrite the establishment of an ad hoc theodicy. This is because Williams and other Godly republicans who rejected the authority of the state in religious matters, maintained, nevertheless, a messianic hope "that non-interference [would] allow the saints to rise to their rightful reign in God's time.”

Henry Vane the Younger, by Sir Peter Lely
In the little-studied works of Henry Vane, Mohamed explained, one finds the most programmatic expression of Godly republicanism, bolstered by his status as a martyr for the Protestant cause (he was executed by the Restoration government for his politics in the Interregnum). Vane's work codifies, and his life instantiates, the three aspects of the political theology of the Godly republicans: an abstract sense of the locus sovereignty, a belief in the authority of a spiritual elect, and an eschatological historical perspective, in which a fundamentally corrupt present order awaits redemption in the fullness of time. This last aspect of Godly republicanism brought Mohamed's argument back to the post-secular present. He cited the work of Paul Khan (keynote at the Unit for Criticism’s Bios conference) and other recent scholarship on the function of sacrifice in the modern state in order to show how political authorities deemed legitimate draw on the millennial and redemptive aspects of the political imaginary in order to inspire subjects to give their lives up in the service of sovereign power. Such acts and the values they accrue are difficult to account for if one takes the sovereignty of the modern state to be essentially rational and secular, in contraposition to the irrational religious polities of the seventeenth century.

During the spirited Q&A that followed, Professor Bruce Rosenstock (Jewish Studies/Religion) picked up on this last point for further exploration. Rosenstock asked whether Mohamed was prepared to distinguish between a circumstance in which a subject sacrifices himself for a sovereign power whose will accords with the subject's sense of religious conscience, and a circumstance in which sovereign will and individual conscience were in conflict. Mohamed responded that these two circumstances resulted in two distinct but related forms of giving up one's life for the sovereign: martyrdom, in which the earthly power is conceived of as the enemy of God as true sovereign, and self-sacrifice proper, in which the two are understood to be consonant.

Ultimately no heroes emerged from Mohamed’s talk. While one might have expected Williams and Vane to provide a largely palatable alternative to the unsavory political theologies of Hobbes and Schmitt, Mohamed’s talk emphasized that all of the political theologies he discussed contain the seeds of their own corruption, and the potential to become instruments of oppressive authority.

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Author’s Roundtable 2: Response from Dianne Harris

Wednesday, October 28, 2009

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Written by Dianne Harris (IPRH & Landscape Architecture)

I should state at the outset that I choose to view Professor Donoghue’s book as a sobering cautionary tale rather than as an account of a fait accompli. There are probably not many among us here tonight who would argue that corporate business models did not begin to hold sway in universities some time ago, and I think we all acknowledge that they have had and continue to have a serious and often deleterious impact on the ways in which resources are allocated, on the direction of administrative action, and on higher education itself. As we approach the implementation of a new budget model that is largely driven by an accounting of the number of student bodies in courses, and that—up this point—has largely overlooked questions about the forces that drive student demand for courses, or the values that structure those forces, it is sobering to imagine the future consequences for humanities curricula. But as I thought about what to say tonight, I found myself alternately battling between refusing to admit defeat (which is to say refusing to admit that his books’ thesis is correct), resorting to the same language in defense of the humanities that Professor Donoghue critiques throughout the book, and searching for ways to prove him wrong, because I really want him to be wrong about our collective fate and that of the humanities—and I think he wants to be wrong too.
I imagine that in writing his book, Professor Donoghue must himself have been caught between the desire to build his argument forcefully and effectively, and by the simultaneous desire to have it be proven specious, flawed, or incorrect. So I therefore hope he’ll actually be heartened by the flaws I find in his text since it means that the career he has built, and the educational and scholarly endeavors that all of us work toward and believe in, might actually survive.

It is also worth noting that Professor Donoghue’s primary frame of reference for this book is the English Department. In a recent essay in the Chronicle of Higher Education, Michael Bérubé—who served as one of my predecessors as Director of the IPRH—wrote that “although people in English departments habitually forget this, English departments are just a tiny part of the university.” I am not refuting Professor Donoghue’s text on this ground, nor am I necessarily refuting it at all, but I am asking that the questions he poses be looked at from perhaps a wider range of vantage points. There are, after all, humanists in nearly every corner of this and many other colleges and universities and the experiences of those faculty vary tremendously. To teach, as I do for example, as a historian in a professional degree program, is to have a very different experience from someone who teaches the history of law, or from an ethnomusicologist, a classicist, a cultural anthropologist, or a scholar working in the newer realm of the digital humanities just to name a few examples. Funding levels vary of course, but so do departmental cultures and values, and all these have an impact on the issues taken up by Professor Donoghue. So the problems he outlines are real, but they are not equally “real” everywhere on a campus, and the issues humanities faculty face are far more diverse than those faced by faculty in English departments alone.

Professor Donoghue asserts repeatedly in his book that the humanities, and humanities faculty as we have known them, are essentially finished. He bases his claims on repeated references to corporate models that for him fix all the rules and establish all the terms of engagement. We, the professoriate, cannot win on the corporate playing field; indeed, we have already lost and are a dying breed. And we know enough, we see enough, to know to be afraid. We also know, I think, that as Professor Donoghue asserts, humanists will not gain traction by repeatedly asserting the significance of our endeavor. But might we not gain a bit of traction by instead examining the flaws of the very system he claims is triumphant? If corporate values, systems, and models of productivity and labor are indeed so ideal and so prevalent, why are corporations failing at a record rate? Haven’t we just witnessed the economic collapse of a financial regime based on the very corporate ideals that Professor Donoghue sees as inevitably taking over higher education throughout the United States? Corporate models have a nasty habit, it seems, of reversing on themselves when their singular adherence to profit causes an atrophy of leadership and a concomitant lethargy of the very levels of productivity so valued by that system. What we are already observing is that a system that cuts out its heart and its brain dies. And for that matter, shouldn’t we be asking why our universities are struggling financially—are in fact in economic crisis— if corporate business models are in fact so compelling and effective? The idea of the corporate university thus already seems somewhat antediluvian, and perhaps humanists can most effectively shape their future by insisting on and helping to formulate or design an entirely new model by doing what we do best: framing intelligent questions.

Professor Donoghue’s text also repeatedly asserts that the corporate university is inevitable, that the abolition of tenure is inevitable, that the transition from the university to vocational training schools is inevitable. But if there is one thing historians know, it’s that nothing is inevitable. As the Pulitzer Prize winning historian Gordon Wood recently wrote, “History does not teach lots of little lessons. Insofar as it teaches any lessons, it teaches us only one big one: that nothing ever works out quite the way its managers intended or expected....(History shows us that ) the best laid plans of people usually go awry.” This is so because the structures that come to bear on our lives are seldom monolithic, and they are seldom all-encompassing or absolute. Professor Donoghue has constructed a narrative that privileges structure almost entirely, and in which individual or even collective human agency is largely absent. And in denying individual or collective agency, he overlooks one of the most powerful and I believe paradigm-shifting phenomena of our time: the digital world.

For evidence from which we might construct a possible counter-narrative to Professor Donoghue’s then, we need only look as far as our laptops. By this I absolutely DO NOT mean to refer to the idea of the Global Campus, of distance learning programs, or of the University of Phoenix model. This is not what I refer to when I say that we should look to our laptops. But there is, after all, plenty of evidence in the digital realm that there is actually an enormous and largely untapped demand for humanities scholarship, much of which seems to have no immediate utility whatsoever (there are actually vast Shakespeare networks out there for example—if you Google the word “Shakespeare” you get nearly 49 million results. Some of that is ‘noise,’ but there’s also plenty of good stuff in there). Millions of ordinary citizens contribute to databases, to public history projects, and dare I say it—to “Wikipedia”—and they do so because they are passionate devotees to their subjects, and they are likewise often very knowledgeable. And contrary to Professor Donoghue’s point, they are reading our work because it is increasingly accessible in digital databases including the Google Books project (and this is a good thing). I don’t have time to cite all the evidence or data that corroborates this point, but the plethora of scholars studying this phenomenon can attest to its verity. Our problem as humanists is not that we’ve done a lousy job of explaining our relevance (though we DO need to be better at that, and to be more convincing as lobbyists so that NEH funding for example might increase), and not that we don’t attract enough funding to justify our existence in a corporatized university, thought these problems are serious enough. Just as important, if not more so, is the fact that we’ve neglected to recognize and tap into the huge demand for what we do, neglected to engage the general public more fully in what we do, and very likely been too concerned about questions of academic authority because we underestimate and therefore are insecure about our own value. What public engagement in the humanities via the internet and public humanities projects show us is that the humanities are not dying, and are not dead. Instead, there is plenty of evidence out there that demand for humanities scholarship is growing exponentially. But the methods by which humanities scholarship is produced, taught, and consumed, are undergoing a profound shift and that shift is not, inevitably, in the direction of the University of Phoenix. Professor Donoghue correctly points to a rupture in the humanities that is driven by a new economic and administrative model then, but it is not the only or perhaps even the most powerful one. Instead, the critical question for the future of the humanities involves reckoning with a revolution that is so big we haven’t yet been able to see it or to fully imagine it, and it involves questions about the role of citizen contributors to our fields, of shifts in what it means to be an “authority” in a field and of the boundaries of professional realms, and of the breakdown of the relevance of disciplinary boundaries that no longer work and are no longer relevant to scholarly inquiry. That, I believe, is the proverbial train that has already left the station. Our task is to try to figure out not only where it is going, but how to be that train’s Engineers, or at the very least to hop along for the ride.

Notes:
Michael Bérubé, “What’s the Matter With Cultural Studies?,” The Chronicle of Higher Education, September 14, 2009; and http://chronicle.com/article/Whats-the-Matter-With/48334/.
Gordon S. Wood, The Purpose of the Past: Reflections on the Uses of History (New York: The Penguin Press, 2008), p. 71.
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