Projected European Coastal Changes after a Rise in Sea Level
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.
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Left: Guards lead a detainee at Guantanamo Bay Naval Base [In our continuing coverage of the 4/30-5/1 conference, BIOS: Life, Death, Politics, Michael Verderame writes on the afternoon keynote lecture by Paul Kahn (Yale Law)]
Written by Michael Verderame (English)
Paul Kahn’s keynote address focused on two categories often opposed to one another in legal and political thought—the enemy and the criminal. The crucial distinction between the two categories, for Kahn, lies in their relationship to the circle of social concern. Enemies exist outside the boundaries of society, and therefore the state can legitimately exercise violence, even lethal violence, against them. Criminals, on the other hand, despite their transgressions, retain membership in the social order, and the state is restricted in what modes of punishment it can properly exercise.
The preservation of the enemy/criminal distinction, Kahn argued, is crucial to the political imaginary underlying the modern liberal, paternalist state; the presence or absence of “love,” in his words, is what enables societies to tell the difference between criminals (deserving of punishment but still members of the social “family”) and enemies. The most egregious instances of torture and abuse of civil liberties arise when the distinction is collapsed or blurred, as in the case of treason against the state or the War on Terror’s new enemy/criminal hybrid category, the “unlawful combatant.”
Kahn’s intriguing and eclectic talk ranged from American Revolutionary War history to the constitution of the European Union (which, in its hypertechnicality, Kahn sees an attempt to eliminate the sovereign while retaining the rule of law) to contemporary films such as The Matrix, Taken, and Inglourious Basterds. The common thread in Kahn’s historical narrative is the use of violence, and the “sacrificial history” of wounded, maimed, and dead bodies, to symbolically reconstitute the law. This link was made explicit in Abraham Lincoln’s speech commemorating veterans of the Revolutionary War, in which Lincoln described veterans’ bodies as literally embodying a “religion of law.”
In the lively discussion following Professor Kahn’s talk, several people asked about the conspicuous absence of race in his narrative about the construction of enemies and criminals, and indeed at times Kahn did seem close to endorsing a narrative of progress that covers up racial difference. Kahn repeatedly situated his remarks in the context of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, but another contemporary political context sprang immediately to mind for me: the current hostility towards undocumented immigrants, culminating in repressive legislation in Arizona. Undocumented immigrants, like “enemy combatants,” trouble the distinction the state attempts to preserve between criminals and enemies. Marked as racially and ethnically other, they are defined both as “criminals” (for being present in the country illegally) and, increasingly as “enemies”—a foreign presence, almost an invading army, that threatens to transform the cultural character of the polity and is therefore undeserving of the due process protections normally afforded to criminal defendants.
I wonder how this increasing figuration of undocumented immigrants as “enemies” can be assimilated into Kahn’s narrative, which seems to paint the narrative of American history as over time broadening, not restricting, the scope of social concern.
It seems to me that the relationship between criminals and enemies has become increasingly porous in other ways in the last few decades. The creation of a homeland security apparatus, complete with color-coded terror alerts, explicitly militarizes the domestic political body in new ways. For the last few decades it’s been common to speak of America’s inner cities as “war zones” and for major cities’ police departments increasingly to adopt military tactics and procedures. Political responses to the September 11, 2001 attacks (sometimes coded as criminal and other times as acts of war) also highlighted the instability of these categories.
John Walker Lindh, the “American Taliban,” provides an especially intriguing test case for Kahn’s theory of parental love as underlying the distinction between criminals and enemies. The uncertain legal status of the prosecution of the white, upper-middle-class, quintessentially “American” youth who chose to take up arms with the Taliban, became a Rohrschach test of the limits of liberal paternalism. Was Lindh a “criminal,” who had violated his country’s laws but remained within its sphere of concern, or was he an “enemy,” who had aligned himself against the United States and forfeited his membership in the polity?
In the end, Professor Kahn steered clear of making normative judgments about the categories of criminal and enemy, instead charting the beginnings of a genealogy of how these concepts have functioned in our juridico-political imagination. But I wonder if it possible to envision a state which classified neither criminals nor enemies, or must both categories be classified in order to constitute a state in the first place?
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(These comments, slightly edited, were delivered in the public comment section of the University of Illinois Board of Trustees meeting, November 12, 2009, in Springfield).
My name is Michael Verderame. I’m a Ph.D. candidate in English at the Urbana-Champaign campus. I’m also a graduate employee, working as assistant director of the professional writing program and a research assistant, and I’ve also taught eleven classes in the past 3 years. I’d like to speak to you about the University’s fiscal priorities and the state of the University in the wake of the admissions controversy.
As a land-grant institution, the University’s core mission is to provide an affordable and accessible education to the citizens of Illinois, and to serve as a center for world-class teaching, research, and public service. The admissions crisis this past summer has forced all of us to reflect on whether we are fulfilling our core values. We learned over the summer that some administrators played fast and loose with the rules to ensure that politically well-connected applicants received preferential treatment, including diverting hundreds of thousands of dollars in discretionary funds for scholarships. This was a particularly egregious violation of the university’s core principles, and appropriately it attracted national attention and resulted in new leadership. But in a number of other ways, the current administration is still acting in ways contrary to the university’s fundamental mission.
Tuition is skyrocketing, at the same time that financial aid resources are drying up. As you just heard in the University Treasurer’s presentation, tuition revenue has increased approximately 30% in the past four years. As a result, access to a U of I education is increasingly being phased out for students from poor and working-class families. This disproportionately affects students of color. As you heard today in the diversity report, African American enrollment at both the Chicago and Urbana campuses has dropped over the past couple of years.
At the same time that tuition is increasing, the administration is freezing wages for faculty and staff, curtailing benefits, increasing class sizes, and threatening furloughs and layoffs. For the majority of graduate students, who teach nearly a quarter of the classes at the University, our salaries pay well below what the administration itself estimates to be the minimum amount to survive in Champaign-Urbana over a nine month period. Both undergraduate and graduate education at U of I are becoming unaffordable to many students, and as a result our graduates increasingly enter the worst job market in decades burdened by unprecedented levels of debt.
These problems are all interconnected, and all have roots that go much deeper than the current economic recession. For years administrative units have received dramatic budget increases while instructional units are forced to make do with anemic budgets. For instance, in the current budget, while appropriations for instructional units went up less than 1%, appropriations for institutional advancement, public relations, and other administrative units rose between 10% and 12%. The already exorbitant salaries of upper-level administrators rise every year, several percentage points over inflation, while tuition goes up and wages and benefits are frozen.
It’s true that part of this is due to the state’s refusal to fund higher education in Illinois at appropriate levels. It is an absolute scandal that the state provides less than a fifth of the revenue of what is ostensibly a public university. A public university should be primarily financed by public dollars. And I urge you to continue to work with other stakeholders—students, faculty, staff—to lobby the legislature to provide adequate funding.
However, even at current funding levels, the resources that the university does have are often misused, as in the case of money thrown away on the ill-considered Global Campus initiative, or the $300,000 misused by Chancellor Herman to assist clouted applicants, or the half a million dollars the University has had to spend in legal fees because of the admissions scandal. While future state funding is still up in the air and a matter of concern, you just heard a presentation from the University of Illinois Foundation that showed that the University had one of the most successful private donation years on record, and that the endowment has outperformed our peer institutions.
The real problem is not a lack of money. The real problem is that the short-term exigencies of the current financial situation are being used as a pretext to accelerate fundamental changes in the structure of the university that have been gradually occurring over the last forty years: changes such as the defunding of public education and the resulting skyrocketing cost of attendance, the increasing corporatization and privatization of the university, and the trend towards reliance on disposable, contingent labor in place of tenure-track faculty. All of these changes have had severely deleterious effects on the quality of research and undergraduate and graduate instruction at the university, and will continue to do so unless these trends are checked.
At the University now, the upper levels of the administration, enriched by stratospheric salaries and abundant perks, have grown out of touch and unaccountable to students and other stakeholders. It is that lack of accountability that allows a major department at the Urbana campus, Chemistry, to withdraw tuition waivers for a hundred undergraduate teaching assistants, leaving them scrambling for funding in the middle of the year. It is that lack of accountability that enables interim Provost Easter, who makes over a quarter of a million dollars a year, to shrug off the notion of paying workers a living wage as an “extraordinary demand.”
This new Board of Trustees has the opportunity to redress the mistaken priorities of previous administrations. It must ensure that an affordable education is provided to the tens of thousands of students who come to this university to learn and better themselves. It must provide fair compensation to the people who perform the vital functions of the university. I urge you to return to honoring the university’s core commitments of learning and labor.
Thank you for the opportunity to speak to you today, and I’d be happy to take questions.
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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.