Author’s Roundtable: Samuel Moyn, The Last Utopia: Human Rights in History
Guest Writer: Zachary Poppel

Thursday, October 18, 2012

posted under , , , , , , by Unit for Criticism
[On October 15, 2012 the Unit for Criticism held the Fall 2012 Author’s Roundtable . The Unit hosted Samuel Moyn to discuss his book The Last Utopia: Human Rights in History. Below is one of three responses that were delivered on Monday, by Zachary Poppel, a graduate student affiliate in History.]

Response 1
Zachary Poppel (History)

My brief comments focus on the middle and end of Moyn's book, The Last Utopia: Human Rights in History and I hope to suggest some connections and questions.


The middle chapter of The Last Utopia is about decolonization, collective liberation, and to quote the title of chapter 3, "Why Anticolonialism Wasn't a Human Rights Movement." For now I'll just say my question for Moyn is rather simple: does he think history can repeat itself? As the title suggests the key claims of this chapter are that decolonization was a period that saw the "globalizing" of claims to nationalist liberation, not a globalizing of individual liberation (86). In this story human rights come after anti-colonial struggles —in Moyn's words, "human rights experienced [their] triumph as a widespread moral vernacular after decolonization not during it" (117). Furthermore, the chapter turns on the idea that in the wake of decolonization and national liberation, the idiom of human rights displaced rather than fulfilled anti-colonial promises (116). Collective liberation went into crisis around the globe, and in doing so set the stage for human rights (87). It's also suggested that decolonization and anti-colonial nationalism were periods, rigidly bounded in time, rather than processes that could very likely, or could already, be happening again. If we push back a bit against this periodization, as I think we should, and against the book's suggestion that empire and some forms of racialized oppression ended in the 1970s, we might see the current uneven horizon of humanity against empire that today is both retro and original (118; 217). Briefly, I will discuss the middle of The Last Utopia, and do so in light of what Moyn offers us at the end of the book regarding the approaching choice between two different futures for human rights.


Dates of Decolonization World Map
My reading of this middle chapter, and of the book overall, boils down to a set of questions about what the futures of anti-colonialism, of collectivity, and of decolonization might look like from Moyn's perspective. I suspect he may have some ideas about how another round of decolonization, or another attempt to rattle popular conceptions of state sovereignty, might do to reveal a lean and mean, bureaucratic-proof, properly historicized relationship with human rights. Indeed it's the choice that Moyn describes at the conclusion of The Last Utopia making urgent the query about the future of anti-colonialism and anti-neocolonialism. The coming choice described at the end of the book is between a future where human rights is either a method for a more successful restraint of potentially violent global affairs, or a future where human rights is expanded artificially to displace or neutralize necessary political struggles. This is defined as a choice between on the one hand a "minimalist" human rights--conscious of its contingency, resistant to liberalization--and on the other hand a "maximalist" human rights--addicted to its teleology, run by a professional class that prescribe, rather than just edit, blueprints for political life and political solutions (219).

Though he offers many qualifications, Moyn thinks a minimalist human rights is more fair. He writes that the minimalist choice can more "honestly confront its lack of answers and acknowledge that it must make room for the contest of genuinely political visions for the future" (226). For Moyn then, human rights emerged because the idea was not "genuinely political"; it was, as he says, "born in anti-politics" and it "survived [through] neutrality" (213). And those conditions do not justify the maximizing, the scaling up of human rights to the level of the "genuinely political," a level reserved for unrealized or heretofore uncharted modes of liberation.

I conclude with my larger question, how would this minimalist version of human rights engage another round of decolonization and collective liberation? How does another round of fighting for concessions and fair jurisdiction change the core language of human rights? Since the 1970s is a crucial part of this core, my last silly question is whether or not Moyn is expecting a reenacting of the 1970s any time soon?
Read more

Beyond Utopia?: Response from Amanda Ciafone
“Practicing Utopology, Theorizing Praxis”

Saturday, May 26, 2012

posted under , , , , , , , , , , , , by Unit for Criticism
[On April 26 and 27, 2012, the Unit for Criticism partnered with the Illinois Program for Research in the Humanities for a conference, Beyond Utopia? Art, Theory, and the Coming of “Spring.” The last of our three closing roundtable responses is by Amanda Ciafone, a professor of international studies at Macalester College]


“Practicing Utopology, Theorizing Praxis”

Written by Amanda Ciafone (Macalester College)

To begin to open up a conversation between the papers of the last two days, I’d like to use Jameson’s argument for a pedagogical operation to read the Utopian impulse rather than the praxis of Utopia, and identify some of the dialectic and agonistic approaches we’ve seen during the conference.  And then I’d like to ask, quite sincerely (and not answer), why it is some of the most powerful theorists of the contemporary moment have seen neither Utopian impulse nor praxis in the “multitudes” and “horizontality” that has emerged in the recent social movements and Middle East "springs."

“Utopia,” Jameson writes in Valences of the Dialectic , “is not a representation but an operation calculated to disclose the limits of our own imagination of the future, the lines beyond which we do not seem able to go in imagining changes in our own society and world,” except of course in the direction of dystopia and catastrophe. For Jameson, this operation, or “utopology,” is interpreting what he calls the Utopian impulse, which does not correspond to a plan or praxis, but instead “expresses Utopian desire and invests it in a variety of unexpected and disguised, concealed, distorted ways” (415).  It therefore calls for “a decipherment and a reading of Utopian clues and traces in the landscape of the real …[where even] the most noxious phenomena can serve as the repository and hiding place for all kinds of unsuspected wish-fulfillments and Utopian gratifications” (416).  These “hidden traces and signs of Utopianism that lie in wait in the world about us” are much like what Raymond Williams would call “the emergent” of the future in the present and they become more visible in the disentangling of the negative from the positive in a process like Foucault’s “genealogy,” but instead uncovering the “genealogies of the future.”
Read more

Beyond Utopia? Art, Theory, & the Coming of “Spring”
Opening Remarks, April 27, 2012
Lauren M. E. Goodlad

Wednesday, May 2, 2012

posted under , , , , , , by Unit for Criticism
[On April 26-27 the Unit for Criticism, the Illinois Program for Research in the Humanities and affiliated colleagues in Sociology and Art History convened Beyond Utopia? Art, Theory, & the Coming of “Spring,” the end point of our semester-long faculty/grad student seminar on this topic. Below, the first post in a series from the event, is Lauren Goodlad’s opening remarks.]

"Opening Remarks," Day 2: April 27, 2012

 Written By Lauren M. E. Goodlad (Unit for Criticism/English)

Welcome everyone to the Unit for Criticism’s co-organized conference, Beyond Utopia: Art, Theory, and the Coming of “Spring.” I’m Lauren Goodlad, Director of the Unit and it’s my very great pleasure to welcome you here. Yesterday you heard from Dianne Harris who directs the Illinois Program for Research in the Humanities, and who, along with J. B. Capino, Nicholson Associate Director of the Unit; Zsuzsa Gille, affiliate of the Unit and associate professor of Sociology and Global Studies; Irene Small, affiliate of the Unit and assistant professor of Art History; and Markus Schulz in Sociology and Transnational studies (in Germany right now but still with us in spirit)—worked to convene the events of yesterday and today.

Since its first iteration by Thomas More in 1516, the term utopia has been marked by deep-seated ambivalence. Etymologically the word conjoins the Greek for “no place” with the homonym eutopia, or “good place.” The potential for making the world a “good place” has, to be sure, motivated a variety of modern standpoints including democratic, equalitarian, and socialist political philosophies; Cold War-era modernization theories; and even the fascist vision of a millennial Reich. In his 1967 essay, “The End of Utopia,” the German philosopher Herbert Marcuse defended the term against accusations of unrealizability. Post-structuralism and postmodernism ushered in new kinds of critique which saw universalistic notions like “utopia” as, by and large, eurocentric and teleological tools of the powerful.

Utopian ideals have continued to inspire movements aimed toward resisting economic injustice; decolonizing the so-called developing world; instituting human rights; achieving racial, gender, and sexual equality; stewarding the environment; and ensuring world peace. Yet, the idea has seemed unlikely to regain the central place in avant-garde politics and art which it claimed in transitional periods such as the late eighteenth century, the turn of the twentieth century, and the 1960s. In his 2000 polemic, The End of Utopia, Russell Jacoby argued the “dream of a future qualitatively different from the present” has all but died. His words came at the end of an era in which capitalism’s ostensible triumph over socialism had prompted Francis Fukuyama to proclaim “The End of History” in a much-discussed 1992 book.

Who reading Jacoby or Fukuyama could have anticipated the advent of popular uprisings in the Middle East alongside street protests and “occupations” across Europe and the United States? As the historian Mike Davis wrote last year, “the electrifying protests of 2011—the on-going Arab spring, the ‘hot’ Iberian and Hellenic summers, [and] the ‘occupied’ fall in the United States”—have provoked comparison to “the anni mirabilis of 1848, 1905, 1968, and 1989.” Yet, Davis also worried that “spring” was becoming “winter” all too soon.

In response these historical and intellectual currents our conference poses “Beyond Utopia?” as an open-ended question for multi-disciplinary exploration. Along with some of the most exciting scholars in anthropology, architecture, art history, cinema studies, art history, political theory, sociology, and the visual arts, we in this room want to consider the relation of art, politics, theory, and new social movements: asking whether how today’s revolutionary aspirations reaffirm, reinvent, or renounce the utopian conventions of earlier generations. I thank our distinguished guests for joining us today and you in our audience for being here.

Let me thank just a few more people individually. As many of you know, every spring the Unit works with the director of another unit along with individual faculty members to create a semester-long faculty/graduate student seminar and an associated series of events leading up to a state-of-the art conference. This year’s theme was chosen partly to resonate with this year’s co-organizing unit, IPRH and their 2013 theme, “Revolution.” More than 50 grad students and faculty members, from UIUC and neighboring campuses, took part in the seminar in some fashion and it’s my pleasure to thank the participants who led the various sessions along with the co-organizers: Abbas Benmamoun, Kevin Hamilton, Sharon Irish, Hina Nazar, Melissa Orlie, and Bruce Rosenstock.

At the Unit I rely greatly on the help of JB and our wonderful graduate research assistants Mike Black and MC Anderson. I also want to thank Nancy Castro who became Associate Director of the IPRH a few months ago and has been a welcome member of this team. Finally, I want to thank the various sponsors who provided the financial support necessary to a conference of this size: The College of Liberal Arts & Sciences, the Center for Advanced Study, the School of Architecture, the Program in Jewish Culture & Society—both of which are co-sponsors of this morning’s keynote lecture--the Department of English, the Social Dimensions of Environmental Policy initiative, the Department of Anthropology, the Department of Sociology and the Transnational Sociology Area, the Department of Religion, the School of Art & Design (another co-sponsor of this morning’s keynote) , the Center for Global Studies with the aid of a U.S. Department of Education Title VI grant, the Department of Political Science, the Center for South Asian & Middle Eastern Studies, and the Sustainability Studies Initiative in the Humanities.

Without further ado, let me introduce this morning’s introducer.
 Read more

Eitan Bar-Yosef,"From Zionist Utopia to Imperial Metropolis:
Geographies of Ideology", Guest Writer: Zia Miric

Wednesday, February 29, 2012

posted under , , , , , , , by Unit for Criticism

A kosher provisions shop at 183 Brick Lane in East London (1910)
[On February 20, 2012, the Unit for Criticism co-organized a workshop with the Program in Jewish Culture and Society, “New Cities for New Jews: Zionist Utopia, Fantasy and the Modern Ur Landscape,” led by Eitan Bar-Yosef (Ben-Gurion University of the Negev). The below contribution is from Zia Miric.]

"From Zionist Utopia to Imperial Metropolis: Geographies of Ideology"

Written by Zia Miric (English)

“I say to you, therefore, that you must hold fast to the things that have made us great: to liberality, tolerance, love of mankind. Only then is Zion truly Zion!” With these words, Mr. Steineck, the architect of the “Prosperous Land” for the New Society in Palestine, closed his improvised electoral speech in the unruly moshav of Neudorf. While this fictional character (based on the Viennese architect Oskar Marmorek) could not win the election without reinforcement from “one of the people,” David Littwak (modelled on David Wolffsohn, Herzl’s successor as President of the World Zionist Organization), he did express the ethos of the cosmopolitan nation-state from Theodor Herzl’s dream. By mediation of Anglo-German science and technology, modern liberal culture was transplanted into Mediterranean geography, yielding an exemplary progressive and open society.

It is in the context of this kind of fin-de-siècle European culture that Eitan Bar-Yosef probes the Zionist urban imaginary in Theodor Herzl’s Old-New Land (1902) and Violet Guttenberg’s A Modern Exodus (1904). In conversation with Max Nordau’s critique of a supposedly degenerative modern culture, Herzl devised the New Society as the recipe for rebuilding the Jewish body and character and as a blueprint for the "New Jew’s" urban environment. Bar-Yosef focuses critical insight on Haifa figured as a dazzlingly successful model city in Herzl’s Zionist utopia, whereas in Guttenberg’s narrative it dismally fails to “correct” the Jewish character. Bar-Yosef posits the intriguing link between Zionism and the city in the utopian genre’s modelling of Bildung understood as the improvement of the Jewish body and mind.

 As Bar-Yosef’s research shows, the idea of the Jewish city, grounded in geography, genealogy and ideology, was articulated in the divergent but curiously congruent projects of Herzl’s Haifa and Guttenberg’s anti-Zionist dystopia. In Old-New Land, the cosmopolitan city reforms Jewish character because it is the perfect habitation for a “New Jew” who is stripped of Jewish traits. Bar-Yosef emphasizes two striking features of Herzlian urban fantasy: first, the prominence of department stores (to remove the threat of the vulgar peddler); and second, the absence of apartment buildings and coffee houses (to secure neat separation between public and private realms). That the urban landscape of Herzl’s futuristic city facilitates orderly, policed suppression of “undesirable” Jewish characteristics demonstrates one of Bar-Yosef’s key points. Herzl had so deeply internalized anti-semitic stereotypes that his idea of a Zionist utopia was city designed to eradicate the Jewish lifestyles of Diaspora communities.

Whereas Herzl’s urban utopia resembles other late-Victorian and Edwardian projects, Violet Guttenberg’s narrative grows out of a body of sensational, melodramatic novels penned in the 1890s and 1900s that obsessively reimagined George Eliot’s Zionist plot, though more in the spirit of what Daniel Deronda’s creator disparaged as “silly lady novelists.” Notwithstanding the coincidence of both authors choosing to portray Haifa as the epitome of the modern Zionist city, the two works are strikingly dissimilar. Guttenberg’s dystopia responds to British developments such as the Royal Commission on Alien Immigration in 1902, which led to the Aliens Act in 1905, restricting the immigration and naturalization of “pauper aliens,” namely the masses of impoverished Eastern European Jews fleeing from pogroms and revolutionary disorder.

In Guttenberg’s Zionist universe, the messy urban space reflects the messy “Jewish” character, with the blurring of private and public spheres, and embarrassing religious and ethno-nationalist bigotry. Accordingly, Bar-Yosef points out that while Herzl and Guttenberg offer comparable constructions of “Jewish” character, only Herzl imagines a utopian city that can “correct” it. This difference is emblematized in the contrast between Herzl’s depiction of Littwak’s picturesque mansion Friedrichsheim and Guttenberg’s rendering of Montella’s semi-finished house, with its Christian mistress banished because of supposed Jewish intolerance. Guttenberg eventually converted to Christianity and though little is known about her she was the author of many conversionist fictions. Still, Bar-Yosef underlines, it was Guttenberg who got right the complex reality of the “Jewish” city, including hostile attitudes toward various Others. Likewise, the messiness that Herzl aimed to downplay erupts with a vengeance in Guttenberg’s Haifa: lack of regulation and coherence in urban landscape combines with greedy and petty tendencies to result in carnivalesque excess.

Bar-Yosef’s comparison of these two utopian fictions led me to want to explore what kind of social contract Herzl and Guttenberg imagined for citizens who successfully assimilate to Western standards whether it be in Palestine’s new society, or in revitalized Britain. This question loomed large in the lively discussion by the participants in the workshop who raised the possibility that Guttenberg’s novel actually advocates a place for Jews in the West (with key characters in her novel returning to London after their failed Zionist journey). In the largest sense both of these novels seem to be contemplating the question of Jews’ place in modernity, whether as assimilated citizens in modern nations like Britain, or as de-Judaized citizens of their own modern nation-state.

Near the end of Bar-Yosef’s paper, he shows how both Guttenberg and Herzl adopt the fashionable discourse of “desirable dosage” of Jewishness in modern Europe, as featured famously in George Du Maurier’s Trilby. One thread of discussion pondered the internal (Anglo-Saxon) racial question of blood, as it featured in the writings of prominent Victorians such as Benjamin Disraeli, Matthew Arnold, and George Eliot, leading all the way to Violet Guttenberg. British politicians and intellectuals were concerned with the nature of England’s racial composition and the aristocracy’s leadership capacity, variously drawing on Jewish/Semitic/”aristocratic” Sephardic mystique for revitalization. Combining race science and eugenic discourses with geographic and cultural determinism, late-Victorian and early-Edwardian writers were ready to authorize hygienic interventions and municipal reforms in order to shape modern cities that would counter degeneration. One possible intertext for Herzl, it was suggested, would be H.G. Wells’ A Modern Utopia (1905), which explores volunteerism and freedom in a planned society, establishing intriguing parallels with Old-New Land’s utopian project of urban redesign of the Jewish body.


Carmel and Haifa taken by the American Colony (Jerusalem) Photo Dept. in the 1920s.
Haifa in the Old-New Land is an international Mediterranean city, imprinted by Western technology, culture, and politics. And yet, when the lawyer Dr. Walter undertakes to explain “the effects of the Jewish mass migration upon the Jews who had remained in Europe,”(pg. 178) he enthusiastically emphasizes that “the less Jewish abilities were offered in the marketplace, the more their value was appreciated. The value of services always increased with their scarcity”—recalling the discourse of a “desirable dosage” of Jewishness which is neither too much nor too little. Guttenberg’s narrative dénouement reaffirms this conclusion: London, as the true city of the future, is revived upon the return of acculturated British Jews who were earlier expelled. Only the shtetl rabble remain back in Palestine, where they are unlikely to transform Haifa into a utopia. Hence, in Guttenberg’s utopian London, there is no place for Yosef Haim Brenner’s multitudes calling out of the depths of distress.
 Read more

Subscribe to: Posts (Atom)
top

total visits to date | come back again

© Kritik - Adapted from code by Jack Book and Dezinerfolio