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Prime Minister Jibril at the White House: Sovereign Appeals to Sovereigns to establish Sovereignty

2011-05-13T18:50:00.000-04:00

Today, Mahmoud Jibril, the prime minister of the National Transitional Council (NTC), the interim government in Libya, met with President Obama at the White House to seek recognition of the NTC as the ruling body of Libya (See video here). Yesterday, the British government was the first to invite the NTC to open a foreign office on its soil.
As someone who spends much of her time considering what makes a political community a community, and thus, what constitutes true regime change, I am intrigued by this appeal of Minister Jibril. Of course, to call him Minister Jabril is to already grant what he requests, that the body he represents be recognized as the true representatives of the people of Libya and thus the rightful government of Libya. Nonetheless, the question remains open. When Aristotle sets himself to the task of defining political life he acknowledges that the question is a pressing one precisely in the context of regime change. It isn't clear whether the community should be held to its promises and debts incurred in a regime once it is overthrown. So people want to know what makes the community what it is: the shared territory or the rulers? If it is the rulers, it seems that the community becomes a wholly other community when the ruling regime changes. Aristotle will go on to argue that it is the rulers, but that the rulers must be understood to be the citizens, citizens are those who engage in rule. Changing the regime is changing who is a citizen. Or, when you change who the rulers are you are changing who the citizens are.
By speaking of the ruler in this way, Aristotle is able to speak about political rule without conflating it to master rule, or tyranny. This configuration is helpful for understanding the Qaddafi regime, which appears to rule under the clear definition of the tyrant: like the master of a slave, the tyrant rules for his own needs and ends and puts the people to work to achieve them for him. They are not for themselves, one could say, not setting their own ends collectively, but his. But while Aristotle's analysis seems like an internal one -- how are the community understood by those within it when there is a change in rulership, today's meeting pointed to the importance within nation-state relations of the external recognition of the government.
There are a number of pragmatic reasons that Jibril seeks recognition from the United States of the rebel governing body at this time. One reason is that Jibril and the NTC want access to the Libyan governments' frozen assets amounting to $180 million in U.S. banks. (There was a remarkable story on NPR this morning about the NTC finance minister, Ali Tarhouni, robbing a Libyan bank by tunneling into it.) But the obvious reason is that recognition of a government as the rightful government of a people by other governments, as we learn from Aristotle, is recognition of a new community.
In her book, Walled States, Waning Sovereignty, Wendy Brown explains sovereignty in a way that sheds some light on what is happening here. She argues that sovereignty has a split personality: it functions one way when it is focused inward and another way when it is focused outward. Focused inward, sovereignty is the unifying force that joins disparate groups and citizens to form a whole. Focused inward, sovereignty is not democratic but the power that stands above the will of the people (if that is what popular sovereignty seeks) because it is what judges, determines and executes that will. Thus, it is situated above the people. Yet focused outward, in relation to other states, sovereignty is what enables a state to have a democratic relation to other states. It shows the autonomy of the state and the equality of the state in relation to other states. Thus it is only between sovereign states that there is true democracy. Well, of course, even in the international setting, money and military might allow some sovereign states to move more freely across the globe and to pursue their ends with impunity more than others. But sovereignty as autonomy in relation to others is the states relation to other states, it is not the relation of the people within the state to one another or to the state.
Yet in light of all of this, what is so striking about this appeal by Prime Minister Jibril is the continued importance of recognition from others in order for one's sovereignty to be acknowledged. In contrast to a universal democracy, one that is found in various theories of collective action where to be here is to belong, the autonomous sovereignty of states must be won from others. Moreover, that some states' recognition is more influential than others suggests that some states are more sovereign than others. An apparent regress ensues wherein the autonomous sovereignty that faces outward still requires the same kind of sovereignty that is at work when the sovereign is faced inward -- there must be some position that is superior that recognizes who is autonomous sufficiently to be included. So Jibril seeks recognition from the more sovereign state of the United States, just as on the other end of this regress, some bodies are recognized as contributing to popular sovereignty because they are autonomous and others are not. Brown's inward / outward perspectives collapse into one another on this analysis.
I'm working on a project now (they're piling up) that aims to show the opposition between sovereignty and democracy based on different conceptions of border life. Putting the border life element aside for now, this appeal by the NTC illustrates the case that wherever there is sovereignty, there cannot be true democracy, even in international politics. There is more to be theorized in this appeal for recognition: for example, the revolutionary possibilities in seeking recognition from other states when there has not yet been official abdication of the previous ruler and the implications of the paradoxical situation wherein one must appeal to the undemocractic logic of sovereignty to establish a more democratic community. I'd like to see others thinking this through.

Proving Miracles: Religion's Own Science

2011-04-24T14:03:00.000-04:00

Good Friday being a day to think about things of God and not of ourselves, NPR ran a story about the science of miracles. In order to be beatified, the Vatican needs to believe that you are responsible for a miracle. I thought it was three, but the story didn't say. So John Paul II is going to be beatified next month because, as the story said, "The Vatican declared" that a woman who had Parkinson's was healed after praying to the pope. But most of the story was about how hard it is to prove that a miracle has happened. In order to make the case that a miracle occurred, and that a particular person is responsible, you have to show that it is otherwise "unexplainable," and that it occurred because of people's prayers to a particular saint.

So yeah, I can see how that would be difficult. How do you "prove" that something is otherwise unexplainable? It seems to me that this is something of a negative proof, a notoriously impossible position. To prove that something is not true, you have to have all the possible information from every possible perspective, at every possible time. This became particularly evident in the search for WMD's after the invasion of Iraq. It's difficult to prove that something is not there, and so claims could continue to be made out of professed ignorance that there was still a possibility that they were there. And it's true, there was still a possibility, there still is a possibility that there are WMD's in Iraq, and unless we could be everywhere in Iraq at once, we couldn't prove that they aren't there. We have concluded that there are no WMD's, but we can't prove it.

So to prove that there are no other explanations seems even more impossible. But this is an even more difficult task, because what we must prove is that what has happened has no cause, no knowable cause, and therefore, must be attributable to the saint to whom we prayed. It's not just that we can't figure out what the cause is, as so often happens in the medical field, but that we must be able to prove that there is no natural cause to the becoming healthy. I am reminded of Aristotle (of course, I am) who loved to use doctoring and health analogies to explain nature and natural processes. In Physics II.1, Aristotle says that nature is like a doctor doctoring herself. But, he explains, when the doctor doctors herself, she becomes healthy, not as a doctor, but as the patient. So while the doctor aims toward health, the patient becomes healthy from herself, not from the doctor. The analogy to nature aside, Aristotle suggests to us about the medical art, that the patient is the cause of her becoming healthy. The body aims toward health. Certainly, the medical art can intervene, but it seems like a specifically modern Cartesian notion of cause to suppose that if there is a cause, it is something external that works upon a thing. What this means for the miracle provers is that since they seem to hold this modern notion of cause, they will be better able to point to a lack of cause if they are excluding the internal cause of health.

Then there is Hume's argument against causation - that causation is a story that we tell because we regularly see x follow y, so we call y a "cause" of x, but we cannot know of any causal power that y has to lead to x. Hence, miracles for Hume are a disruption to the regular story of x following y, which leads us to say that x must have a supernatural cause, because while it usually follows y, this time it came without y. Hume, it appears, wasn't so much doing away with miracles, but his dismissal of cause seems like an attempt to show that miracles can be made sense of. Of course, if we follow Hume, the miracle provers are really out of luck when it comes to proving the other prong of their assignment--that what happened was caused by prayers to the particular person-who-wishes-to-be-beatified--since Hume won't allow us to prove anything is a cause.

But the problem here seems to be the conundrum of proving miracles. On the one hand, the rigorous process the Vatican demands suggests that it does think some sort of rational explanation, even if it is a rational explanation of a supernatural cause, can be offered for a miracle. This is a bit mind-boggling, since the Vatican would claim, I expect, following Thomas Aquinas, that the natural world itself is made by God and so is in a sense caused by God. To say that there is a supernatural cause and not a natural cause, seems to set nature and God at odds, which seems counter to the commitment to the Creator God. Perhaps the argument is that since the fall, nature has been corrupted, so at times God intervenes to change the course of nature so that it does not lead to suffering. So this would make a rational explanation for a miracle more consistent--God can be explained, the things that are caused by God can be explained. But this seems to strangely have defeated the idea of the miracle which in its very essence is that which we cannot explain. So if we can explain it, ie. prove it, then it is not what it claims to be -- that which cannot be explained.

The NPR story mentioned in conclusion that there is someone at the Vatican whose full time job is to try to poke holes in the accounts and arguments of those who are trying to prove miracles. This person has historically been called the devil's advocate. So it's the devil who tries to find natural causes, making the devil into something of a natural philosopher. But what this entire account ignores is that there may be things that happen, evental type things, that have no cause. They do not become things that we cannot speak of by having no cause, but they do become the things that disrupt the order of things, that institute new orders, new possibilities. On a day that celebrates resurrection, we should consider what it might mean to be open to radical disruption.

Separation of Church and State: Thoughts on Aporia Philosophy Club Meeting at UTPA

2011-04-07T19:12:00.000-04:00

I attended a roundtable discussion yesterday at UTPA sponsored by Aporia, UTPA's Philosophy Club. I have been talking to my classes about it today, and I think some thoughts on it might be helpful to further the discussion. The topic as advertised was "What Role (If Any) Should Religion Play in the State?" The discussion was organized and moderated by Dr. Greg Gilson who also did a great job presenting, so many thanks to him for the provocation that this panel proved to be.

First, I should say none of the speakers addressed the title question directly, which I suppose is fine. Gilson opened the discussion with some musing on whether humanism, since it is based on belief claims about the power of human beings to address ethical, political and scientific questions, amounted to religion. The implication of his claim was that if it is a religion then religion has a significant role in our state workings since we assume these claims in our governmental institutions. Gilson associated Socrates with the humanist tradition since Socrates is the first to call into question the power of the gods to set ethical measures for humankind. But I think Socrates is even more of a challenge to us, since Socrates calls into question even the human capacity to set these standards.

But reference to Socrates contributes to this conversation about the relation of the church to the state in more significant ways, I think. I wonder if Socrates is the first secularist (but not secular humanist). His argument is that the gods can't show us how to live, because we have the same problem interpreting what they hold to be good as we'd have amongst ourselves determining how to live well. So the problem of interpretation of the gods' will is a political problem, thus the gods solve no problem for us. This is not to say that the gods don't have a place in our lives, but when it comes to determinations amongst ourselves about how to live communally, we can't resort to the gods as a standard. Moreover, Socrates aims to ratchet down the religiosity of political discussion (eg. Euthyphro rushing off self-righteously to prosecute his father with no knowledge of the vice for which he is prosecuting him). The claims of certainty that people make in political life based on their religious commitments leads to great blindnesses in leadership -- I think Bush's unswerving certainty about things for which he had no reason to be certain is an example of this. Socrates questions the politicians because they think they know what they do not know and they do not know it. This religiousity is a problem in our leaders because it leads to tunnel vision and to unwillingness to re-examine policies in the face of their failure.

The second speaker, Neil Norquest, an area lawyer who has argued before the Texas Supreme Court, presented three questions for consideration each about the strange division between the way the U.S. Supreme Court treats the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment and the Free Expression clause. What I was most fascinated, and perhaps troubled by, was his final question regarding the role of the idea of a Creator God in achieving civil rights legislation. I was underwhelmed by this argument because a Creator God didn't give slaveowners a difficult time holding slaves for a long time (including Jefferson who wrote the line in the Declaration that "All men are created equal," even though the U.S. Constitution went on to count some men as only 3/5ths men) and people who believe in a Creator God continue to make arguments about the varying worth of men and women and straight and gay people.

The third speaker was the most distressing to me because he was supposed to offer the secularist argument and he instead presented a diatribe against religion and those who were religious. So it seemed that his claim in relation to the title of the panel was that the church had no role in the state because it had no role to play in life in general. As my students complained in class, he mostly insulted people with religious beliefs. I found this quite disappointing not because I want to defend religion, but because I think there is a case to be made for secularism, for the separation of church and state, and I think there are important problems that accompany the drive to secularism that we would be well served to address.

I'm going to address three of those questions. As as side note, before raising these questions, I think it'd be great to have a follow-up panel in the Fall and invite a historian who can give a wider account of this problem as it dates back to the middle ages and also as it works itself out in the early American self-understanding, you know, Puritans and Roger Williams and so forth.

Briefly, though, the Pilgrims and the Puritans left England because they wanted to find a place to practice their religion freely. They weren't always so interested in other people's right to free expression, though. The framers saw this problem at work about a hundred and fifty years later and sought to avoid the problems of the influence of religion in political life or discrimination of some for their religious commitments (Quakers for example), so the First Amendment of the Bill of Rights says that the government should "make no law respecting the establishment of religion or prohibiting the free exercise thereof." Jefferson, writing of these clauses, explained that a wall needed to be set up between the church and the state. But here's the problem, if I have religious commitments, I don't cease to have those commitments when I enter into political life. Even if I say I'm committed to this separation, I remain committed to some position outside of my commitments to the community (strangely, this is the opposite structure of Socrates who appears to be a traitor to the city by NOT being committed to its gods). Because, I would maintain, reason cannot be pure, uninfluenced by my desires, beliefs and prejudices, my thinking about political life will be influenced by my religious commitments. So as a leader of a community, I will have brought my beliefs into the state in my determinations of what is right and good for the community. So it seems that the separation of church and state is impossible in the person of both those who believe and those who strongly do not believe since both are influenced by those beliefs in their determination of what is good for the community.

Second, I think the outright critique of religion fails to account for what Rousseau calls the binding power of religion. Religion, it is becoming more and more popular to remind people, comes from the Latin, religare, meaning, "to bind." Rousseau argues that to form a people we need a civil religion that holds us together, and evidence for this is the historical power that religion has had in binding a people together in both the east and the west. However, it is clear, Rousseau, acknowledges that religion poses a problem because instead of "binding the hearts of the citizens to the state" it detaches them from it and from earthly things in general. So there are two problems: religion seems necessary in the state, according to Rousseau, to bind the people to one another and the state, but also the separation of church and state seems inevitable since those committed to the church are not committed to the earthly matters of the state. Or if not inevitable, those with commitments to religion seem committed to something beyond the state.

I've gone on too long. I will post soon about my third point: the problem with supposing that God takes the side of nations (If God wasn't a Tarheel fan, then why is the sky blue?).

Cesar Chavez Day: Fighting For People

2011-03-31T09:00:00.000-04:00

I have had a five month hiatus from this blog, but I thought Cesar Chavez Day would be an appropriate day to return. One reason for returning now is that what has kept me away has been a frustration and pessimism about the treatment of the Mexican and Mexican-American population in Texas, specifically in the area of education and higher education, and the sense that nothing can be done. Chavez is a good example of someone who didn't entertain that sort of pessimism, but just kept fighting and today we have the continued work of the United Farm Workers as a result of his vision. Unfortunately, we still have the need for the UFW.

As many of you know, Texas Governor Rick Perry has used the current budget downfall of close to $27 billion dollars as an excuse to cut funding at public institutions of higher education across the state. Naomi Klein speaks of disaster capitalism (see a review of her book in The Guardian) as the occasion that those in power take in the face of disaster--hurricanes, budget shortfalls, whatever--to privatize public services. Klein described the situation in Wisconsin as an instance of "disaster capitalism" on "Democracy Now!"

My university, the University of Texas, Pan American, which is already chronically underfunded, is having $46 million cut this year. That's 19% of the budget. About seven years ago, the university went to a three-three teaching load for tenure-track and tenured faculty in order to justify higher research expectations and to attract better faculty. I came to the institution with the understanding that this was the direction in which it was moving. Now there is talk of raising the teaching course load and / or raising the already high caps on humanities courses. The thing is, I'm not so much pissed off because I feel like this is a bait-and-switch, though it is. I'm pissed off because I know that this will mean a lower quality of education for my students who need the best education and the best attention they can get. If I am teaching more courses, I cannot assign as many papers. If I am teaching more students in those courses, I cannot give attention to student writing in the way that they need it. I try to assign two papers in every lower division course because I think students need a first go and then feedback and then an opportunity to try again. I like to assign reading questions that I carefully read and comment on in order to improve student writing and thinking as often as possible, but I will not have the time to do this if teaching loads are increased. The more obvious impact on students is the cutting of Texas grant money to low-income students which is expected to make it impossible for 2000 of our students to return in 2011-2012. This is it - this is their opportunity for higher education, and the State of Texas is actively taking it away.

The most frustrating thing about this situation is that the state does not need to be in a fiscal crisis, so the decision to "balance the budget" at the expense of a better education for UTPA students, 87% of whom are of Mexican descent, suggests that the state of Texas doesn't care so much for this population or for these students. Let me explain. The federal government has designated $830 million dollars for Texas, but Governor Perry refuses to take it because the money is earmarked specifically for education and Perry doesn't want to use it that way. Moreover, the state refuses to use the resources it has to make up the so-called deficit, like I don't know, having an income tax! So while the oil and gas industry has a tax incentive, which has amounted to $7.4 billion dollars in tax breaks since 2004 (which Obama's budget for 2012 ends and which of course Rick Perry thinks is the end of the world), the budget is being balanced by firing elementary and secondary teachers in the poorest areas of the state and undoing years of progress and development at regional institutions such as UTPA. Note that when Texas first began recommending these education cuts, the stock of Valero, one of the biggest oil companies in the state, hit their 52-week high. The only tax that has been even momentarily considered is another sales tax, the burden of which is always disproportionately placed on the poor.

Today at UTPA, students are protesting with a teach-in, walk-out against the recommendation of the Texas Higher Education Coordinating Board (THECB) to cut the Mexican-American Studies Major. While UTPA President Nelson has agreed to find a space for Mexican-American Studies, to give the director a course-reduction and to give funds for the establishment of a Center over the next three years, THECB maintains that the major, which has never been funded up to this point, has too few majors and so should not continue, even though this is a major that costs no more money than the university is already spending. They have their accounting machinations that suggests because students would be taking up spaces in those courses instead of in others, it does cost money, but it isn't as if the courses wouldn't be taught without the major. It appears more to be an opportunity to eliminate the places and resources for genuinely considering the effects of colonization, the prospects for decolonization, and the true empowerment of the population of the Rio Grande Valley.

Cesar Chavez said in fighting for the farm workers, "The fight is never about grapes or lettuce. It's always about people." Indeed. Indeed.

Institutions Against Themselves: Can This Really Happen?

2010-11-08T21:08:00.000-05:00

We all know by now that the Tea Party has changed the shape of the Republican Party and the Republican Party has won the House with its new "mandate" to slow down and shrink government. As a headline in The Washington Post declared today, "Republicans Map Out Agenda of Less." Despite the contradictory logic of the electorate who announced loudly that they were voting on the basis of the economy, thus stating that they do think the government is responsible for their woes, and hence, for solving them, this same electorate has swept into office a group of politicians who think the solution to the country's problems is less government. This amounts to saying that our newly elected Congress thinks that the government needs to get out of the business of solving problems in order to solve the problems. This approach does appear to be mind-boggling, since the shrinking of regulation, ie. government, permitted the kind of trading that led to the housing and then immediately following, the banking crisis.

Because of my ongoing work on the relation of the contest of politics to the instituting of politics wherein the instituting of politics is always conservative, I am looking forward to watching this Congress to see if their claims to shrink themselves, to give themselves less work, will come to fruition. When I say that the instituting of politics is conservative, I do not mean that it is fiscally responsible. I mean that by stabilizing the law that is the result of the contest that amounts to politics, institutions aim to preserve themselves, to preserve the law, to preserve the way things are. Rousseau explains in The Social Contract that the government is the setting into work the will of the people. What happens, Rousseau says, is that power sediments in government because it is more concentrated there. So the government becomes really good at protecting itself even at the expense of giving up its responsibility to put the will of the people to work.

The current political situation is just begging to be taken as an experiment in institutions. The first thing Rep. Michele Bachmann (R-Minn) has done after winning election is to run for the fourth-highest ranking position in the House. And already she has encountered the politicking that goes on to win such posts. What this suggests is that it is much easier to win on an anti-government platform than to govern on an anti-government platform. So I look forward to seeing whether the need to keep their jobs calls into question their capacity to remain "anti-government". Really, what I am interested in seeing is whether one can be critical of an institution by joining the institution, or if joining the institution gives one a stake in the furtherance of the institution and a person's own involvement in it such that the criticism becomes necessarily blunted.

The Girl Who Played With Fire: The (Swedish) Movie

2010-11-07T14:04:00.000-05:00

The second movie made from Stieg Larsson's Millenium series is now available to watch instantly on Netflix. I encourage you to see it partly because the Swedish version gracefully avoids the Hollywood pitfalls of characters too beautiful to imagine in real life scenerios and too tough to really be sympathetic to them. What Noomi Rapace accomplishes is a toughness that comes from a place of vulnerability, a perspective that seems necessary to play Lisbeth Salander well. The New York Times calls her performance an "intense rightness," and I agree.

What I do not understand is the decision by director Daniel Alfredson and writer Jonas Frykberg to excise all of the obviously anti-women vitriol from the story. This is a change in directorship and screenwriter from the first film, and it seems obvious in the shift away from the focus on the "Men Who Hate Women" theme that was Larsson's obvious focus. In the second film, there is no anti-lesbian cop - a subplot that ran through the book and resulted in the woman cop, Sonja Modig, standing up for herself and for Lisbeth against this corrupt anti-woman cop who has been pulled into the conspiracy against Salander. This subplot is important for showing the misogyny and patriarchy that underlies the corrupt institutions that wish to dispose of Salander. The media circus is similarly underplayed, which is especially noteworthy because the media's speculation about Salander's sex life, sanity, and competency further contributes to the anti-woman sentiment that Salander must fight in the second novel.

Without this element in the film, the cohesiveness of the trilogy falls apart. The common thread between the first and second novel is obviously violence against women, and also the covering up of this violence. To downplay this violence in the second novel is to lose the cohesiveness of the trilogy and I think, to do Larsson a misservice. The third novel returns to this theme making Salander's defense of herself a defense of women's rights, led by a women's rights attorney. I'm concerned that the director will similarly play down this theme for the sake of intrigue and excitement. Such an oversight would be unfortunate, because while Larsson's trilogy is not great literature it does raise important questions about the relation between the patriarchy of institutions and violence against women. It'd be a shame if those questions were forgotten to make the movie more exciting.

Fiscally Conservative? Ha!

2010-11-04T12:26:00.002-04:00

Through this election cycle, and now in the wake of their "historic" victory, Republican leaders are suddenly thrilled to cut spending and shrink the deficit. Mitch McConnell, the Minority Senate leader, is all for it. John Boehner thinks this is the new approach the country needs. Due to the shyness of Republican congresspeople to actually name and commit themselves to particular cuts, the Heritage Foundation went ahead and did it for them. They propose funding oversight agencies such as the Food Safety and Inspection Service with user fees -- yes, because we saw how well that worked for the oil industry. They want to completely cut the Community Development Block Grant fund, because surely our communities are doing fine without government support. They want to eliminate both the Appalachian Development Authority and the Delta Authority, which is practically unconscionable since these are some of the most needy and underdeveloped places in the country. Of course, they want to trim education spending, by reducing Pell Grants and Head Start funding, and "scale back the Education Department bureaucracy" which is a euphemistic phrase for eliminate the Education Department a la Sharon Angle style.

But seriously, despite the worries that these cuts raise, I find it comical that Republicans are once again claiming to be the fiscally responsible ones among us. Dick Cheney told Paul O'Neill, Bush's first Treasury Secretary, "Reagan proved deficits don't matter," and Republicans have been spending as if they really think that is true. Zfacts.com reminds us that Reagan got elected just as these Republicans did, by claiming that the deficit was out of control, and then preceding to drive up the deficit, because really they think that deficits don't matter. Reagan went on to cut tax rates for the very richest and then drive the debt up higher than it had ever been. It is clear that the present deficit / debt crisis is Bush's legacy and has been years in the making as the New York Times explained last year. The budget surplus that the Congressional Budget Office estimated (when Clinton was leaving office in 2001) was going to be $800 billion a year from 2009-2012 has become a $1.2 trillion deficit! That didn't happen because of anything Obama did but because Bush cut taxes, including for the top two percent of income earners, and deregulated a number of industries who have wreaked havoc on the American economy. Bush was able to cut taxes because Republicans abandoned the budget rules put in place in 1990 so that they could cut taxes without constraint. The result was a continuous string of budget deficits under George W. Bush. As Rachel Maddow said on "Meet the Press," this summer: "If Republicans want to run as this fiscally responsible party, it's neat, but it's novel. It's not the way they've actually governed."

Somehow the Republican Party has convinced Americans that it is fiscally responsible, that they pay their bills on time, in contrast to those spendthrift Democrats. But as AmericanProgress.org has shown, the Republican "Pledge to America" will drive up the deficit and accelerate the growth of the national debt. I'm not an economist, and I know that people have arguments for both trickle down prosperity and for tax and spend policies, but either way, I know that initially both spending AND cutting taxes affect the deficit and we just have to be honest about that. That is what annoys me most. When I was a Republican, I thought that Clinton had the best spin campaign of any politician I had ever seen and I thought, oh, how wonderful it must be to be a Democrat. But when I became a Democrat, it seemed like the Republicans won over the spin machine. I'm not saying we have to get back to facts, surely there are only interpretations, but puh-lease, there are certainly more believable interpretations than others and I'd just like my fellow Americans to see that, too.

Texas: They Weren't Born Here But They Got Here As Fast As They Could

2010-09-14T16:09:00.000-04:00

Over Labor Day Weekend, I went to a wedding in Austin and while there I took the official tour of the State Capitol. Let it be said: I have never heard such an unapologetically imperialist account of history as I heard there. And for the sake of justice, I think these things should be made known.

First, the land that is now the state of Texas belonged to indigenous Native Americans until the 17th century. The Apache, Comanche, Gueiquesale, and Kiowa occupied much of the southwest. At the Capitol, they tell the story that we, the people of Texas, were colonized by many different kinds of people -- the Spanish and the French, for example -- though none of the family lines, I'm pretty sure I can say, of people on the tour, could trace their lineage back to those Native American tribes. Yet Texans still take pride in having fought against the colonizers. Texas was first settled in 1685 (by the French). But the French didn't keep it for very long and soon ceded Texas to the Spanish, and it was under Spanish rule, that Stephen Austin with Sam Houston established the first American settlement. The astute Mexicans, having seen what had happened to the Native Americans in the United States, worried about what the white man was doing to the North. So when Davy Crocket and David Bowie held out against the Mexican Army and Santa Anna in 1836 in the Texas Revolution, colonists had occupied the area for more than two hundred years.

The tour guide at the Capitol however will tell the story as if Texans were driving out the infidel occupier. She explained that Santa Anna's men killed everyone including the wounded and the women (she didn't actually call them barbarian, but everyone was meant to think it, I was waiting for her to show me scalps). The war continued and ended at San Jacinto where Sam Houston raised his hat and said, "Remember the Alamo!" (See picture above), and our tourguide kindly pointed out in the larger portrait that scene above comes from how Gen. Santa Anna disguises himself and escapes cowardly on a horse. Hilariously, the tour guide told us that neither Austin nor Houston were from Texas, "But they got here just as fast as they could," a common phrase that people say about Texas to show their Texas pride, but a phrase that shows clearly the lack of claim that they had to Texas. It is true that Texas was only governed by Mexico from 1821 (when Mexico severed its ties from Spain) to 1836, but this is in part because of the newly emerging nation-state model. It was not at all clear that Texas was more justifiably American or even independent, which still meant, belonging to those of European descent. Although during that time 3420 land grants were granted by Mexico to Anglo-Americans most of whom migrated from the northeastern United States. For those who want to know, there is an incorporated town in Texas called: White Settlement. Also interesting is that Mexico prohibited slavery, and it is perhaps for this reason that Texas fought to separate itself from Mexico. This point was not mentioned by our dear tour guide. Because the Mexicans are barbarians.

The tour guide continued by telling us how many people came to Texas from around the United States when Texas became a state in 1846. Also awesome was the tour guide's description of Texas succession while it fought the Civil War as a slave state. She said, "Texas left the Union in 1861 and was readmitted in 1870" (they took a long time to ratify the 14th Amendment, a condition of readmittance). No mention at all of the Civil War. Because Texans aren't barbarians.

9/11: Burning Korans and Other Acts of Cultural Terrorism

2010-09-11T11:45:00.000-04:00

I was incensed when I heard this week that Terry Jones, Pastor at the so-called "Dove Outreach Center" in Gainsville, FL, was threatening to burn the Koran on 9/11 which also happens to be Eid ul-Fitr, the Muslim holiday celebrating the end of Ramadan, and that his threat was directly linked to an effort to call off the building of an Islamic Cultural Center several blocks away from Ground Zero. I learned that he decided not to burn the holy book of the Muslim people when he reached an agreement with an imam in Florida who was said to be negotiating with Feisel Abdul Rauf, the imam responsible for the Ground Zero mosque, not to build the Ground Zero mosque.

This kind of threat, I will do something terrible and offensive to you unless you accept my demands, while not in itself violent (though calls throughout the world to call off the book-burning have suggested that lives might be at stake), looks like a terrorist act to me. While people have asserted Rev. Jones First Amendment right to burn Korans, I do not think this behavior is conducive of democracy. At first I thought, this is precisely what happens in a democracy - people can do whatever they want even when they as individuals in their action are harming not only the perceived image of their country abroad but also lives of soldiers. And this is the price we pay for free speech, but it is worth it. But I no longer think this is a matter of free speech. In a democracy, you do not threaten to do deeply offensive things unless you get your way. In a democracy you must engage in dialogue and debate and attempt to persuade others of your position. But this is how far we have come. We no longer consider free speech to be a way of persuading or dialoging; free speech has become a weapon of mass destruction.

This incident is particularly strange because Rev. Jones has called the Koran burning necessary to show Muslims that they cannot evade our laws and our system, and "not push their agenda on us." This last phrase is especially infuriating since that is exactly what Rev. Jones is doing to Imam Rauf.

But the story turns a bizarre corner when it turns out that the imam in Florida did not in fact agree to Rev. Jones demands. At which point, Rev. Jones demanded a meeting with Imam Rauf who publicly proclaims that he has no intention to meet with Rev. Jones. When Rev. Jones realized his demands were not being met, he put the Koran burning back on the table. With numerous calls from high-level officials, who were working out of the principle of persuasion rather than force, a la Rev. Jones, the Koran burning has officially been called off. Some Muslim leaders abroad said that the Administration was doing enough to call off the burning, but they were doing what one does in a democracy: engaging, attempting to convince.

I do not want to be yet another person publicizing a crazy person who did a crazy thing that no one would care about if we just ignored him, but since Rev. Jones has now become public and given a platform, we need to do the work of analyzing his particular brand of crazy, a dangerous brand, in my view. It's dangerous because it's tyrannical, and an attempt to make a slave out of those whom you want to do your bidding, which is what happens when force replaces discourse in public life, even if that force isn't with guns or bombs but threats to burn your holy book.

Thousand Autumns of Jacob De Zoet: A Review

2010-09-07T17:35:00.000-04:00

David Mitchell is fascinated by bio-politics. Two of his books, and one book that The New Yorker speculates owes its inspiration to him, explore the use of cloning or other means of controlling and proliferating human reproduction in the service of the powerful, the rich, or the so-called holy. What strikes me about each is that each story has a relation to the East. Cloud Atilas, Mitchell’s novel of stories set within stories, includes one story set in

Korea

about “fabricants” who serve “purebloods” in a giant cafeteria. Never Let Me Go, the novel by the English-born Japanese author, Kasuo Ishiguro, is about clones who grow up in order to have their organs harvested for nonclones to live longer. In his latest novel, The Thousand Autumns of Jacob De Zoet, Mitchell’s main character, Jacob de Zoet, who is serving on the Dutch trading outpost in Japan, [spoiler] attempts to rescue his love, Orito Aibagawa, from a nunnery in which the “nuns”—mostly deformed women who had spent their lives in brothels—are “engifted” by acolytes who then kill the newborn infants in an effort to achieve eternal life for themselves, while telling the women that they take the children to adopted parents in the valley below.

I have read three reviews in the last several months, in The New Yorker, The Atlantic Monthly, and the New York Review of Books, but none of discussed this significant aspect of Mitchell’s fiction beyond the mere mention of plotlines. In a sense, these novels could be termed science fiction in the best possible sense that science fiction speculates about what could happen, what we could become capable of doing, and how it might change the human condition (Arendt describes science fiction in this way in her “Prologue” to The Human Condition). One might be tempted to argue that The Thousand Autumns differs from the other two stories because in this novel the control of human reproduction is on the one hand, relatively natural (there is nothing “artificial” per se in the actual reproductive process, though certainly, women are raped to accomplish it, but there is no artificial insemination or the development of embryos in a petri dish), and on the other, this reproduction is solely for the sake of the destruction of life in the belief that those who can destroy innocent life can achieve immortality. It is not scientific, it’s superstitious. No change to the lives of those in power comes about for this effort (by the end of the novel, the head of the shrine is killed, to his unbelieving dismay). On the other hand, “An Orison of Sonmi-45” in Cloud Atlas and Never Let Me Go involve artificial means of producing life that materially support other, “worthier” lives. In Thousand Autumns, the focus is on the women whose bodies are in the service of reproduction for the men’s superstition. In the other stories, the focus is on those who have been artificially developed and the concern is for the kinds of lives that they must lead – human, but not quite, human lives, having human emotions, memories and desires, but without the rightful claim to those emotions, memories or desires, to have them recognized, to enjoy empathy from fellow humans.

Either way, Mitchell is obviously fascinated with the many angles of our capacity to make life, and the possible beliefs and dangerous ramifications of this capacity. It is not just the observation that this capacity will be misused by the powerful, or that this capacity will produce an underclass of subhumans who will make “genuine” human beings powerful in an entirely novel way, nor that the concept of “genuine” becomes complicated when it is impossible to tell by looking who is “genuine” and who is not, but more fundamentally, that we can no longer speak about that which we are capable of doing. I mean this in the Arendtian sense of speech as that which relates us to one another in a plurality and distinguishes ourselves as individuals. Mitchell and, if we follow James Wood’s view, his acolyte Ishiguro, are telling stories about what we can do but we cannot understand. We do not know what these capacities mean; we cannot make sense of them, and thus, we cannot speak of them. These stories show both how we cannot speak of them and the danger that presents.

But I’m particular struck by the Asian settings or roots of these stories. If it were one story, I don’t think I’d think anything of it. But this theme occurs in two of Mitchell’s novels and is taken up in the novel length story of Ishiguro. I’m hard-pressed to suppose this is mere coincidence. What are our underlying stereotypes of the East that lead us to associate strange rituals and population control and reproductive rites with it? Why do we want to make this effort, which in less extreme, but clearly efforts along the same road, have been at work for centuries, seem foreign in order to finally learn to speak of it? I’m wondering if it has something to do with the particular kinds of population issues that countries in the East have faced.

China

notably has legislated population control. Japan has been very aware of itself as an island country with only so much room, and yet set between very powerful neighbors from whom it has tried to protect itself by segregating its population from the world. China and India are two juxtaposed examples of two ways of dealing with overpopulation policy that have shown the differences between a socialist-communist approach and a democracy, though it’s not clear which is more effective by any stretch. I’d like to think that these are the reasons for situating these stories in the East, rather than the sense of foreignness that accompanies them and the effort to make the Orient seem once again barbaric. It seems clear that the barbarity in these issues is evenly distributed.

Dragon Tattoo, The Movie

2010-07-14T18:27:00.005-04:00

The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, which was made into a film in Swedish by Niels Arden Oplev, is now available for instant viewing on Netflix, so I finally saw it. Amidst growing talk of a Hollywood production, I was glad to see it as made by a Swede with an all-Swedish cast. Despite Nora Ephron's ridiculous mocking of the Swedishish of the book in The New Yorker, it struck me in the course of the movie how important Sweden was to the story. The Swedish landscape appears as a character, blisteringly cold, bleak, gray. Juxtaposed against this dark palette, the search for the truth by these somber characters serves as a glimmer of hope. But Sweden is also important to the story as a rich Scandanavian country often assumed to be one of the most forward-thinking in the way of women's rights. Insofar as the books expose the corruption that supports even this progressive society, keeping silent those who would think to tell its secrets, it gives the lie to the oft-held comfortable fantasy that the first-world, especially the European first-world, is no longer one of domination and control, of oppression and secrecy.

As Gregory Dew explains it in his review, the movie (like the book) shows how ineffectual efforts by members of the ruling class are to fight the crimes against society propogated by the ruling class. Hence, Blomkvist stands as an ineffectual reformer in contrast to Salander's character of the victim turned revolutionary--capable, self-empowered, cunning, and ruthless. No longer seeking protection from the law or any other authority. [Spoiler] So it is Salander who can figure that Martin Vanger is the culprit and how to find Blomkvist to save him.

As a Swedish production, the film does well to not cast any "Hollywood types." No one is strikingly beautiful or handsome. They are attractive, but in an ordinary sense, which seems appropriate for the book and one reason that I think a Hollywood version is doomed. Still, like any movie-based-on-a-book, the film makes decisions about what to leave out and some seemed important to the sense of the characters and the story, and their absence made the story too neat.

[Spoilers] For example, Blomkvist's affairs with at least three other women, and the extent of his affair with Salander were not treated much at all. From the beginning of the novel, we know that he is involved with his married co-editor who is in something of an open relation (restricted it seems to Blomkvist). This affair persists through the trilogy and it shows that Blomkvist is not an altogether good guy but something of a lady's man. I praised Larsson in an earlier post for refusing to paint his characters as white hats and black hats and I think leaving this part out makes it too easy to call Blomkvist a white hat and not to see his involvement in the problems that he is now fighting, the treatment of women in a patriarchal society. Blomkvist also has an affair (I think) with Suzanne, the owner of the cafe in the town across the bridge from the Vangers' estate and with Cecilia Vanger, who would be the cousin of Harriet Vanger, the woman who disappeared.

But also strangely, we aren't apprised of the extent of Blomkvist's affair with Salander. The two of them retreat to his cabin in the woods for a month or so in the novel. This is important because it shows that Salander, who has worked her whole life to become closed off and safe in relation to any other person, has become vulnerable. Perhaps she has even fallen in love. Without this background, it is difficult to understand why she is so closed off to Blomkvist at the beginning of the second book and through the third one.

I think this theme is significant to the story because it shows microcosmically what the narrative evidences macrocosmically: the ways that men take advantage sometimes without even thinking and the ways that the logics of "individuality" and "sanity" becomes abusive. I worry that the story is being cleaned up and so the full force of even the good guys involvement in what they fight is not felt. The film appears to even more fully contribute to such a white-washing by dropping from the film the part of the story where Blomkvist contributes to the covering up of Martin Vanger's heinous crimes and his contribution to the disappearance of his sister, Harriet. I look forward to seeing the 2nd film, but I worry that these intricacies that Larsson so carefully addresses that support the difficult aporiae of the story will be lost.

Hornet's Nests, Institutions and the Protection of Patriarchy

2010-06-29T18:59:00.005-04:00

I finished reading The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet's Nest, the last novel in Stieg Larsson's Millennium series, about four days after it came out back in May. I've been stewing over it and so have not until now posted. I'm not yet settled on my thoughts, but I am interested in feedback.

Some initial thoughts weighing on my mind: fighting patriarchy is expensive--emotionally, socially, and financially. For a woman to assert that she does not need a man as overseer, caretaker, guardian of finances, morals, intellect or emotional life, displaces the men who take that to be their role and, judging from the reaction of those men, is devastating to an extent that emotional and social retaliation, at least, is not abnormal. Even small efforts to fight patriarchy result in efforts to marginalize those who fight them with charges of insanity or immorality, both of which are found in this series, but also with astonishing regularity in the press and, it must be assumed, in the lives of individual women throughout the world.

In light of that cost, I think I was expecting too much from this third book. Besides that it was the last in the trilogy (as yet, but there are rumors of a fourth unfinished novel on the laptop of the late Larsson's lover) and so needed to tie up all the loose ends, I also expected it to answer the lingering questions I had about Larsson's own notions of the power of institutions. Did he ultimately think that institutions were worth recovering or that inevitably institutions in their efforts to preserve themselves would necessarily sideline those who challenged their authority? Could institutions exist that weren't always trying to protect their power and in that sense given to an inherent patriarchy? More immediately, I wanted to see how our heroine Lisbeth Salander would expose the institutions that had slandered and abused her without second thought for her entire life. I was disappointed.

Now let me rush to Larsson's defense against my own disappointment by saying, first that I took great pleasure in these books and in the issues that they raised. I am thinking about how they might be taught in class and I recommend them to everyone I know. After I read the first book, I felt like I had to fight against violence against women whether in words or action (I still feel like this, but it was so palpable after reading the first novel) that I gave some guys a hard time outside of a bar in Philly for talking about "banging" women. I told them that was not appropriate and then walked away. They may or may not have called me a not very nice word to my boyfriend who was following just a few steps behind. (Strangely, they continued that conversation by wishing to argue about Nietzsche, which they pronounced NEE-CHEE).

Throughout my reading, I have been concerned with the treatment of institutions and I have wondered if Larsson thinks institutions are themselves retrievable but that they go wrong in the hands of nefarious folk. I have suggested that institutions, by virtue of what they are, tend toward patriarchy and we must be wary of this. I have not meant to say that we should not have institutions, but that we should not put our trust in them, but expect them to need continuous vigilance and reform. In my own work, I try to think through the kind of political community and institutions that might be more amenable to this vigilance. I do not think that there is a utopian solution, but I think that there are ways to make institutions more susceptible to criticism and openness. But Larsson seems to think that the institution itself is good, it just was taken by the wrong people. He has his characters go to upstanding politicians who appear to be above reproach in order to expose the nefarious shenanigans of corrupt civil servants. We learn, in a parallel to the history of the CIA, that there was a secret society within the Swedish intelligence agency that kept watch over the agency operating under emergency powers to do any thing and apprehend anyone if they judged that someone was a threat to the state or an action would prevent an attack on the state. The good guys, along with the unknowing and good politicians, exposed the activities of this secret society and showed how deep their corruption went into the government. Can we conclude anything other than secret intelligence agencies are good as long as we ferret out the devilish elements within them instead of supposing, as perhaps we should, that all such activities, performed in secret, tend toward self-preservation and further secrecy?

My other great disappointment was with the trial of Lisbeth Salander. I liked the idea of a woman defense attorney. I liked that the trial was meant to become a matter of women's rights and not whether Salander committed a murder. The case then becomes a matter of truth-telling and as thereby suggests that the truth will in fact set us free. But isn't this precisely what we have been led to believe can't possibly be true in this trilogy? Salander refused to talk to any of the authority figures since her initial violation (or act of self-preservation) because she knew that they did not wish to hear her. Why do they suddenly listen? It is hard to believe that something fundamentally has changed so as to change the situation so drastically that she will speak, she will be heard, she will be judged competent, and she will be acquitted while those she accuses will be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law. I'm not convinced that things have changed so much just by the arrest of these men in the secret part of the intelligence agency that now the truth can come to light. That point makes it seem that there was merely this problem, this error in the system, which has now been set to right so that justice may be achieved. Besides the fact that the trial seemed to be hyped up and then a bit anti-climatic, I wondered if Larsson just needed to finish the book and not concern himself with the subtleties that had been elsewhere in this trilogy developed.

Jill raised some of these questions in the comments on my first blog on the trilogy: why do women get pulled into the patriarchal oppression of other women? I did get the sense by the end of the trilogy that Larsson wanted to show camaraderie between his women characters -- there is that nice chat between Salander and Berger for example. At the same time, Larsson remains careful about not painting in too wide and easy strokes. There is a careful move toward friendship between Blomkvist and Salander at the end of the book, but Blomkvist remains something of a lady's man, and we're not sure it's healthy that he jumps into bed with every woman he has ever worked with. Salander still needs to fight her last battle alone and we are amazed that she can and a bit sad that she must.

Despite my criticisms, I am pleased to have found a complicated and confident women character to read and to discuss. I am pleased that the books sell so well, and though I acknowledge the point made by various critics who point to the entertainment value of the violence against women found in the books, as ironically written up in Entertainment Weekly, and therefore raise the question of whether Stieg Larsson himself had a problem with women, I am excited to see the problem of Men Who Hate Women take center stage in contemporary discourse. I don't think we'll be able to stop talking about it soon.

Strong Women and the Critique of Institutions or Larsson Del Två

2010-05-21T17:08:00.008-04:00

It takes about three-quarters of the book to realize how The Girl Who Played With Fire is a story about how institutions fail those they are meant to protect. Perhaps it was because I was so struck by that concern in the first book (The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo, see my blogpost here) and that I was told it was even more emphatic in the second that I was disappointed. It is about that, but it seems less about the patriarchy of the institutions as it is about the ultimate purpose of institutions being for the perpetuation of the state regardless of their stated purpose. More on that in a bit. First, let me talk about the things that I like about Stieg Larsson, the author of what has come to be called the Millennium series.

Larsson does not write simple books. He writes complicated characters who have conflicted motivations. Throughout he is interested in gender relations and gender power dynamics. He paints with a fine brush and has a keen awareness of the subtleties of gender interactions. It’s never quite so easy as, so-and-so is a chauvinist. What’s striking is that there are different and complex ways in which different characters are “men who hate women,” a phrase that was first used in the first book, but crops up here as well (and as I said in my first post, was the working title of the first book). For example, I was struck in this book by the way he depicted male police officers who had to deal with lesbian witnesses (or “suspected” lesbians) and the strong reactions and disgust that they had, one officer in particular. Larsson characterized the man’s disdain for those who had no sexual desire for him with surprising hostility, and showed how that hostility was reflected in the larger society by turning lesbian, and also so-called “deviant” sexuality, into a spectacle for general consumption.

Larsson is obviously concerned with how sexuality is used violently against women. Women who don’t comply are called whores; women who are helpless are forced to be whores. At the same time, he does not moralize about sexuality. The main character, Lisbeth Salander, engages in an S&M encounter with another character, but we are not led to conclude that it is oppressive. Maybe it helps that both characters are women in that situation? The promiscuity of the main character is taken by the authorities as a sign of her flagrant disregard for the mores of society, and therefore, a sign of her psychosis. Freud would agree that her sexual “aberrations” makes Lisbeth far from “normal,” but Larsson tells the story to show how oppressive “normal” is. But Lisbeth is not without concern for herself and her body, and here Larsson is good too. In the first book, Lisbeth’s sexuality seems to follow from her strangeness and isolation. At the beginning of the second book, we learn that she had breast-enhancement surgery, which we take to be a sign that she cares about how she looks. She takes pleasure in her altered appearance, but not because she gets new looks from other people, but because she gives new looks to herself.

I’ve come to find the main character inspiring. I agree with the critics that Salander is one of the most engaging heroines in recent memory. She is tough. She takes care of herself. She is small, but she is smart. She is tenacious. But she isn’t “good” at least not in an obvious sense. For much of the novel, she is suspected of three murders of people she had recently seen. Most people who know her well say to the authorities and to one another that if she did it, she had a good reason to do it. She is known to be violent, but out of self-defense. She does not defend herself to those whom she does not trust (practically everyone in authority), and as we learn, she has good reason not to trust them. She does not seek vindication from within the system because she expects it to be constructed against people like her – those attempting to defend themselves, but judged incapable and incompetent by the state.

This point returns us to the concern for institutions. Larsson is careful not to dismiss institutional apparatus as such. He is not an anarchist. There are trustworthy police officers who are willing to follow the evidence and not the hooplah. Some protect other officers who are wrongly accused of leaking information. Salander has been taken advantage of by the institutions she falls into, but the way Larsson depicts it, that advantage is not taken by nature of the institutions but when they have been corrupted for specific ends. I wonder whether Larsson pulled punches here. Salander is declared incompetent and kept confined in a mental institution not because of how she would appear as unstable and violent given the experiences of her youth, but because [spoiler] she could threaten a high-level operative who is important to the Swedish government. I think this backs off of the inherent patriarchy of institutions in the name of their own self-protection in the first novel. This second novel seemed to argue more for cleaning up the institutions, rather than challenging them at their root. So I return to my question of the first post. I asked there whether institutions were by virtue of being institutions patriarchal. This novel suggests that it is their corruption that poses the problem. The evidence of the first novel points us toward former claim. I think that institutions in order to overcome their patriarchy must remain open, recognizing the fragility of their ground and the possibility of needing to be otherwise. Or, institutions cannot be closed systems, or their drive for self-preservation will lead to oppression. Working that out in the world is the rub.

Institutions of Patriarchy

2010-05-03T15:44:00.007-04:00

Three separate stories in the last three weeks have turned my thinking to the ways in which institutions qua institutions are patriarchal. What I mean by this is that the institutions of democracy which are supposed to be free of prejudice and desire (as the partisans of the rule of law champion it in Aristotle's Politics, though we go on to learn from Aristotle that even the law is made by human beings and is so therefore infused with human desire and understanding) are not actually free of these prejudices. Rather, the institutions protect the status quo of society by encouraging the sense that women are unbalanced, not rational, not normal, hysterical, sexually exploitable and all in all, for the sake of the men who maintain the institutions, or even more, for the sake of the institutions. I say that this is patriarchal because it champions the elements that we associate with masculinity and the authority of men: rationality (which strangely comes to mean, having no response to pain or suffering), stability (which means remaining the same in the face of abuse), power (you are subordinate because you can be subordinated). What struck me by these three stories is how each relied on the apparent sanity and neutrality of institutions themselves. What I wonder is, what is it about maintaining community, or at least maintaining community as we understand it in the age of sovereignty, that repeats these situations? I do not yet have the answer, but my own work is aiming to present new accounts of community that do not rely on the concepts and logic of borders and rationality that lead to a hysterical and wandering feminine outside.

Stieg Larsson's The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo is a story about a woman who is a guardian of the state because of her alleged instability. Spoiler alert. Her new guardian demands sexual acts in exchange for access to the woman's own money that he has control over. She takes revenge. The larger plot is about her involvement in an investigation of the disappearance of another woman who had been abused by family members as a teenager, family members who continue to abuse, rape, and kill women whom they think no one will miss. Partnered with a man who treats the woman as an equal, her ingenuity saves both of them from unfortunate ends. Another side plot is the abuse of the state's social net by a corporate officer of a large business who uses his power to control the women around him. What strikes me about the book is how the court system, the social institutions established to protect citizens, and the journalistic world are all ultimately in the service of those in power. The truth does not reign. It does not come to light. Money and power control others, and only the private acts of citizens bring to justice those who need to be brought to justice. A friend suggested to me that every male in the book is either someone who hates women or a feminist, but I am not convinced that any of them are feminists. The old man who searches for his lost niece didn't have the time to hear her serious life destroying concerns because he was making business decisions; the reporter investigating buries the truth because of how he might be implicated and out of loyalty. If the tenets of feminism involve and require speaking the truth against power since it requires challenging the patriarchal institutions, it isn't clear how they are feminists. But that seems to me to only point to what I think is Larsson's larger point (keep in mind, I haven't read the second book, The Girl Who Played With Fire which I understand to be more explicitly concerned with the oppression of institutions), that these institutions remaining as they are prevent us even with our best inclinations from being capable of fulfilling even our stated commitments.

The second story, "Iphigenia in Forest Hills," reported by Janet Malcolm in the May 3 issue of The New Yorker, is the story of the trial of Mazoltuv "Marina" Borukhova for the murder for hire of her husband. As Malcolm reports it, the entire story is a character assassination of Borukhova whose daughter had been taken from her because for the "rationale" that she was not encouraging a more fruitful relationship between her daughter and her husband, a man who abused Borukhova in front of her child as well as sexually abusing the child. Borukhova is a physician from Uzbekistan of the Bukharan Jewish sect who was regularly and rudely called "Miss" by the court instead of "Dr." Malcolm's 28-page article carefully documents the various accusations against Borukhova that seemed to add up to her-reactions-were-strange, she-is-strange, she-must-be-guilty. Jurors said things like, "She didn't show any emotion, That's kind of what did her in." She didn't act the way a mourning woman should. To document the harm that was being done to her child when she was taken away from her (which the prosecution argued was her motive for having her husband killed) Borukhova had the transfer to her husband videotaped. The wailing child who cried for a half an hour turned out to be evidence from the prosecution that the mother was heartless for taping this while it happened. No one it seems cares about the daughter. Perhaps this is why Malcolm refers to Greek tragedy in the title of her piece, reminding us of Clytemnestra who made Agamemnon pay for his sacrifice of Iphigenia. Having just read The Girl with The Dragon Tattoo, I was struck but how similar the story of the institutions who are expected to be impartial actually work against those who seek protection from them. It was precisely because Borukhova sought the protection of the state against her husband and for her daughter that she was eventually led to the position she was in (whether that's what led her to kill him or that's what led the court to wrongly convict her).

The final story was reported in the Philadelphia Daily News by Barbara Laker and Wendy Ruderman who received a Pulitzer Prize for their reporting. Terry Gross discussed the investigation on Fresh Air today. In this story, Philadelphia police take advantage of immigrants who own corner stores (as we call them in Philadelphia, even though most people refer to these neighborhood shops as "bodegas") and sale plastic bags. Plastic bags are illegal to sell if you as the owner know they are being sold to someone who will use them to distribute drugs. Police officers would come into these stores, shut them down, turn off the surveillance systems and then take merchandise from the stores. Laker and Ruderman's investigation led them to further corruption in the police department when they found women who went on record about how one police officer sexually assaulted the women he arrested. We have heard this story before, but it continues to be especially egregious when those who are trained and trusted to protect assault and abuse women, especially when it is women who as those charged with a crime, seem to have no recourse against the abuse. Such is the classic example of the institution's abuse of its power. We fight abuse of power, but my worry is that abuse of power is part of institutionally-based community.

I recently reread Rancière's Dis-Agreement and it seems to be that his inclination is to consider politics as the disruption of the domination that the structure of institutions seem to require by excluding some element by virtue of what they are. He writes:

The outrageous claim of the demos to be the whole of the community only satisfies in its own way – that of a party – the requirement of politics. Politics exists when the natural order of domination is interrupted by the institution of a part who have no part. This institution is the whole of politics as a specific form of connection. It defines the common of the community as a political community, in other words, as divided, as based on a wrong that escapes the arithmetic of exchange and reparation. Beyond this set-up there is no politics. There is only the order of domination or the disorder of revolt (DA, 11-12).

But my reading of Badiou makes me think that we can have a politics that is formed out of the faithfulness to this disruption and to its continued encouragement. I do not think that what we should seek is a new institution that won't have this problem, but rather a politics that encourages this disruption rather than resists it, the disruption that comes from those who are structurally excluded and dominated by the institutions that cannot protect them.

The Wall: Part III, Asylum

2010-04-09T16:45:00.006-04:00

When undocumented persons are caught crossing or after having crossed, they can be held in Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) centers and then in detention without a sentence for a long time awaiting the determination of their future by a judge.

After 9/11, AG John Ashcroft, declared that all who were held in detention (many on completely legal visas) were considered terrorists suspects as part of the "Absconder Apprehension Initiative" that detained 2700 persons who were mostly Arab, Muslim and South Asian nationals.

At any given time, ICE is holding 20,000 persons for immigration violations and detains roughly 200,000 persons every year. Since these persons are held in "administrative detention" they do not have the same rights as criminals and so do not have access to council if they cannot pay for it on their own. Calling his book, American Gulag, Mark Dow remarks how, like the gulag Solzhenitzyn writes of, the immigration prison system works to hold certain unwanted persons within the country apart from the rest.

This no man's land of immigration detention calls to mind Arendt's analysis of the failure of human rights and suggests that undocumented persons occupy this position in the United States in a unique way. Arendt writes of the difference between the asylum seeker and the prisoner:

"Since he was the anomaly for whom the general law did not provide, it was better for him to become an anomoly for which it did provide, that of the criminal....For the a criminal offense becomes the best opportunity to regain some kind of human equality, even if it be as a recognized exception to the norm. The one important fact is that this exception is provided for by law. As a criminal even a stateless person will not be treated worse than another criminal, that is, he will be treated like everyone else. Only as an offender against the law can he gain protection from it." (Origins of Totalitarianism, 286)

Arendt's analysis does not quite apply here, since even legal immigrants in residence here can be deported for small criminal offenses (a recent Supreme Court decision requires these persons to be informed before they plea that this deportation can happen to them).

Administration violation accompanied by the impossibility of applying for asylum seems to place those held in immigrant detention prisons in a lose-lose situation -- they can't make a living at home, they can't remain and work here since they are detained. Political asylum has become quite narrow. Even well-off Mexicans seeking to leave Mexico given the current violence cannot easily have visas granted, and violence from other citizens is not sufficient for asylum. A national must have been persecuted by her government. If asylum is meant to admit those whose lives are in threat, this distinction appears arbitrary, but so the distinction between economic and political distinction. There does not appear to be a real difference between my country being able to protect my life and my country being unable to offer me the opportunity to sustain my life and my family's. Yet in fact, political asylum requires more than just demonstrating that my country can't protect me, I must show that my government is actively threatening my life.

As Arendt notes, the abolition of the right of asylum begins to happen before the Second World War with more and more stateless persons seeking to be admitted to other countries not of their origin. These immigrants seem to occupy the very situation of those who need human rights -- their country of origin cannot support their lives, yet no other country is willing to recognize them to ensure that their lives are protected. It seems like this situation is not likely to change within the current nation-state structure.

The Wall (Break on Through to the Other Side!): Part II: Citizenship

2010-04-05T13:05:00.006-04:00

What is striking about the wall and the discourse surrounding it is the assumption that citizenship means one thing and has always meant that for Americans. In this post, I want to examine the development of the notion of citizenship to show that the particular history of the United States makes it impossible to base citizenship in any kind of autochthony.

In Politics III.2, Aristotle questions the criteria for citizenship that is often used in various Greek city-states that judges one to be a citizen because her parents are. His point is that, at some point, the parents or parents of parents had to have some other criteria that determined them to be citizens, challenging the view that citizenship ever is justified by "we've always belonged" which is at the heart of the myth of autochthony.

The Naturalization Act of 1790 “opened the borders” to most of the workers of the world, saying:

“Any alien, being a free white person, who shall have resided within the limits and under the jurisdiction of theUnited States for the term of two years, may be admitted to become a citizen…and the children of such persons…shall also be considered as citizens of the United States.”

No doubt, the criteria is racist, but there is no sense that one must be from here in order to be a citizen. Or that the government would determine your belonging on the basis of where you come from (ok, just what color you are, certainly a problem).

By the mid-nineteenth century, when a larger "ethnic" immigrant population of a working class was found in the U.S. citizenship in the United States was separated from suffrage, and resident aliens were granted the right to vote without being granted citizenship. This is noteworthy, since it involved aliens in the political activities of the community, placing citizenship as an issue aside and making the vote more expansive. Allowing aliens to vote early on in US history encouraged assimilation and involvement in the new community. In 1840, Spragins v. Houghton, the Illinois court wrote:

“Intended to extend the right of suffrage to those who, having by habitation and residence identified their interests and feelings with the citizen, are upon the just principles of reciprocity between the governed and the governing, entitled to a voice in the choice of the officers of the government, although they may be neither native nor adopted citizens.” Spragins, at 408

In his book, Legal Aliens, Local Citizens, Jamin Raskin explains that no court ever found alien voting unconstitutional. Certainly, voting is not citizenship, but Raskin's point is that involvement in local politics is historically a part of the American effort to recruit and involve new immigrants.

In his book, American Gulag, about the detention practices for undocumented persons, Mark Dow explains the history of immigration especially in the West and Southwest. For the first one hundred years of the new American republic, immigration was regulated by local jurisdictions. Most refusals were based on failed medical examinations -- for example, most of the people held at Ellis Island were sick and therefore not allowed to enter the country. Through the 19^th-century deportation was rare. Federal regulation of immigration appears have been racially motivated, specifically to control to immigration of Chinese laborers in the late 1800s to build railroads.

Bonnie Honig explains that the the immigrant is the foreigner whose new arrival grounds the continued democratic project. The myth of the immigrant-citizen is of the one who comes over, works hard, becomes successful, educates his children. On the other side of this myth is the forgotten work the immigrant performed and the forgotten injury the immigrant endured. These two sides of the myth lead to an exceptionalist account of America -- we are the land of opportunity if you work hard enough, and the exclusionist account -- these alien outsiders are taking our jobs and ruining our cities.

It wasn't until the 1980s that immigrant law was tightened to deter people from crossing the border. With the Cuban and Haitian "boat people" trying to enter in the 80s, the Reagan Administration ordered the mass detention of Haitians who were economic rather than political refugees. From 1973 to 1980, average daily number of people in INS custody doubled from 2370 to 4062.

In On the Edge of the Law, Richardson and Resendiz, argue that "Globalization tries to erase borders, while nationalism tries to reify them." The Immigration Reform and Control Act (IRCA) of 1986 made it illegal to hire undocumented workers but increased the flow of undocumented immigrants into the Rio Grande Valley (where I live) where many would be stuck between the official border and the Border Patrol checkpoint 60 miles to the north.

More specifically, the land that I now live on was part of Mexico a hundred and sixty years ago. Chacón and Davis explain the history in their book, No One is Illegal. Originally the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo in 1848 included provisions for protecting land and voting rights of Mexicans who lived in the territories that were ceded to the U.S. but at all levels, American courts ruled that these provisions of the treaty could be superseded by local laws. Federal Land Act of 1851 deprived Mexicans of their land and led state and local governments to establish something of a Jim Crow social structure in the Southwest.

The language now used to justify citizenship and the patrolling of borders is largely economic -- let cheap unprotected labor, cheap goods, and rich Mexican consumers come north. For this to occur, immigration must remain illegal and immigrants afraid. But it is not only economic, the language of borders and the protecting of boundaries is at the heart of nation-state sovereignty, where the government asserts its power and the need for it to have more power by continuing to show that the borders are fragile and need to be protected vigilantly. Policing the borders, like policing the law, in the end, must require some sovereign who determines how to apply the law, when not to apply it, and how to protect the border, and when not to protect it.

The Wall (Break on Through to the Other Side!): Part I, Reporting

2010-04-03T11:04:00.017-04:00

On March 26, 2010, some visiting colleagues and I visited the border wall at the Hidalgo Pumphouse about a half mile from the border.* I've lived about fifteen-twenty miles from the border (depending on where you cross) for almost two years and I had not yet seen the border, so my assumption is that most people don't know that much about it. The purpose of this post, then, is to tell and show people what we saw there and what we learned.

This first picture is the view of the wall that we had when we walked up to it from the Pumphouse. The Pumphouse is a historical landmark, a museum really, to steam-driven irrigation pumps located on what at one point was the Rio Grande (it has since moved, ceding about a half mile to the U.S.). It is also a "World Birding Center" to which visitors from all over come to see rare birds who migrate through this area and find their home along the river here. See this article in Newsweek from 2008 about why environmental groups oppose the wall. Seeing the wall from this historical place, we thought the wall serene, surrounded by verdant flora. Also, as you can see from this picture, the wall didn't really make much sense to us since it ended at both sides (and in the middle!) in such a way that did not seem to make it capable of preventing people from crossing. We learned in due time that it wasn't really meant to do that...

The first thing that should be striking to you about my first sentence is that this wall is a half mile from the border. This path, on the southern side of the wall, is still on the U.S. side of the border, but Mexicans walking here are not yet "safely" in the United States. It is here that they are hunted and pursued by Border Patrol agents, infrared movement censors, and helicopters. While walking here we saw empty water jugs, people had been there recently. It's hot. I was reminded of the Native American tribe whose members put water out in the Arizona desert for people crossing the desert and were fined by their own leaders more interested in being on good terms with the U.S. government than helping those who would surely die walking through the desert. Extreme desert conditions are found in the places where there is no border wall because the government fully expects people to die crossing and so sees no need to block crossing at those places. But even after these immigrants cross the wall, they are not safe. Another security point is fifty miles to the north, a place where another friend here told me she had seen people walking along the fields to get around the checkpoint.

When we passed through the wall (through the center opening) to the southern side, we saw why the wall didn't need to go out so far on the one side -- there is a concrete wall on the southern side that stretches all along the wall and looks impassible. From this side of the wall, it is not at all pretty. It looks industrial and menacing. There is a path through the middle (see picture above) that we were able to walk along, and we later learned that it is strewn with movement censors so that border patrol know where to pursue those crossing illegally.

That path above snakes around to this dirt path that trucks and bikes can travel on. While we were there a Hidalgo School District truck drove along this road. Looking for truants? The wall stops at the top of this road (the place from which the picture was taken) and we were told that the wall doesn't need to extend much further first, because what it accomplishes is funneling those crossing ("subjects," the border patrol agent said) to the places where it was easier to catch them. Since there was mostly marshland to the left of this picture, there didn't need to be a wall here.

Walking back along the path we came across a border patrol agent who had placed his truck on the opening at the end of the visible wall. Like good researchers, we peppered him with questions. He was friendly. He didn't seem like a menacing, unthinking person. He appeared to be of Mexican descent, but he grew up in Edinburg, the city that I live in where the university is. When he was asked if that was an issue, he said he lived in Edinburg his whole life. He didn't appear to see any conflict between his people's history and his job, but considered himself thoroughly an American justifiably keeping out those who were not welcome. He told us that about an hour and half before a group of about fifteen subjects had been picked up. About half of the people who try to cross, he said, get through. But most of them get picked up in their first year here, when they drive without a license or some small offense. He told us about people whose parents cross the border with their kids; their kids grow up as Americans, but are still undocumented; then, one day they get picked up and are sent back to Mexico, a country that they are told is their homeland, but a place that they do not know. Perhaps they do not even speak Spanish. Our friendly agent told us that when he picks up these kids, he tells them not to be mad at him, but at their parents who did this to them. Of course, there are also the other kinds of cases, where women come over when they are just about to have their baby, and then not only do they have their baby here, but they must be offered medical treatment. The border patrol agent was more sympathetic to the first situation than the latter.

Walking back along the northern side of the wall, we wondered about it's success. The agent had told us that they return those who cross and they just come back an hour later. The wall didn't seem like much of a deterrent. Perhaps it makes the agents jobs easier, because it reduces the places where people can cross. But it isn't really keeping anyone out. As one of my colleagues noted as we walked back, it seems clear that the wall is really meant for Americans, for those on the northern side of the wall who want to think themselves safe.

Look for Part II: Musings on the Wall coming soon

*Thanks to Meri Clark for the permission to publish her pictures.

Top Ten News Events of 2009

2009-12-11T18:22:00.004-05:00

So I realize that this may be jumping the gun because the year is not yet over and maybe just maybe Congress will pass groundbreaking health care reform by December 31. But we doubt that it will get passed by year's end and that it will be groundbreaking, so we are bringing you the top ten most significant news events of the year. Feel free to quibble.

Not even worth mentioning: Yankees buy the world series. A-Rod used steroids.

10. Illinois Governor Blagojevich indicted with 19 felony counts for attempting to sell Obama's Senate seat. In response to any suggestion the then President-Elect may have offered sans cash, Blagojevich remarked, "F*** him! For nothing? F*** him!" in true Chicago style.

9. Sarah Palin resigns as Governor of Alaska citing her commitment to Alaska. She cares so much for the state she was willing to stop governing it. We thank her. But not really, since that made her available for a book tour in the lower 48.

8. President Obama tells students to stay in school. Parents freak out and say their kids are being brainwashed. Sarah Palin tells old people healthcare reform means death panel. No one freaks out that their elderly are being brainwashed.

7. Greenland becomes independent of Denmark. Official language: Greenlandic.

6. June 25. Michael Jackson dies; Farrah Fawcett dies. Same day. Unfair distribution of news coverage. MJ's death eventually ruled a homocide. Doctor to blame for drug overdose. Health care reform starts here.

5a. January: Plane crashes into Hudson when pigeons flew into both engines at the same time. Everyone on the plane survived after an emergency float into the Hudson. Pilots honored at half time at the Superbowl.

5b. Guy who hadn't slept for two and half days crashes plane into house outside of Buffalo, NY. Kills everyone on board and the people in the house. FAA explores shocking possibility that it regulate all air carriers.

4. April: Somali pirates hijack US ship, Maersk Alabama, carrying food for the World Food Program, off the horn of Africa. Take pilot hostage. US Navy Seal snipers intervene, kill all but one hijacker. Every 8 year old in country learns real life is better than the movies.

3. Maine legalizes same-sex marriage in May. Six months later, citizens vote down same-sex marriage. Minorities question power of direct democracy.

2. First Latina confirmed to serve on the U.S. Supreme Court. Sonya Sotomayor. Turns out Latina women may have a better understanding of some issues than white men, but are told not to say so because no one likes a know-it-all.

1. First black U.S. president sworn in. Racism over.

Top 5 TV Series that I Watched on Netflix (and never finished)

2009-12-09T14:22:00.004-05:00

5. It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia

I stopped watching this because however funny it is, these people are annoying.

4. Californication

I stopped watching this when the 16-year-old stole the novel from the main character. It was too painful. And really, David Duchovny, we realize that you wanted to show that you were not Mr. Clean-Cut-X-Files anymore, but you don't need to be a whore to convince us.

3. Sports Night

Only two seasons, and great show, but I ran out of excitement half way through the second season. This show was the first to be scripted by Aaron Sorkin and you get that fun witty banter that is a Sorkin staple. The strong women characters are great, but I didn't think the men were interesting enough to play across from them.

2. Weeds

I don't know if I will keep watching. I stopped because there was no more automatic play. But I was starting to get incredulous. I admit at first I didn't know if I would buy into the suburban mom selling pot and setting up a large enterprise, but the first season was good and funny too. By the end of the second season, it really did seem like each character was deeply flawed, but maybe that is why it is worth watching. You don't hate them for the flaws, but you aren't really invested in things working out for them either.

1. Coupling

I did see this whole series. It is the funniest tv show I have ever seen. No lie. Apparently they tried to do an American version (it's British), but Americans are not as funny. So it never made it through the first season. Also, weird was that the American version used EXACTLY the same script. Anyway, Jeff and I regularly quote this show to one another.

Top 5 TV Shows that Jumped the Shark in 2009

2009-12-08T12:41:00.002-05:00

First, I have to admit that there might be things left off this list, because I don't watch so much television. So maybe twenty shows went down the tube and no one is watching them anymore now. But of the one's that I watch, here you go:

5. The Office

Argue if you will but I think ever since Michael left to start his own company and come back, I can't be sympathetic enough to watch. Now I just think all the employees are suckers who should find new jobs.

4. Desperate Housewives

This might be generous because this should could be said to have jumped the shark at the point where the family moved to town who kept the brother chained up in the basement. And I'll give you that. But it has only been this year that I just cannot and will not watch this show.

3. Grey's Anatomy

I was sad to see Berk go, even if the actor was an ass. I think he held things together on the show and now Private Practice, which I didn't think would make it, is so much better and less melodramatic. I don't even keep up anymore: George dies, Izzy has cancer, Izzy and Alex marry, whatever. I'm over it.

2. Brothers and Sisters

So maybe it was corny from the start that I liked this show. Something about a big family with lots of issues and lots of gossiping about one another to one another just made me feel at home. But Sally Fields is still Sally Fields and she always seems like she is about to cry and she is whiny as well. Again, peal back the melodrama people: Kitty has cancer, Justin and what's-her-face marry, Tommy and Julia are a mess, Kevin and Scotty are happy. I just don't believe it anymore.

1. How I Met Your Mother

I had such high hopes for this show, but here's the thing. If the premise of your show is that you are telling a story to your kids about how you met their mother, you cannot suck up their entire adolescence telling the freaking story. That the writers haven't got on with it makes the average viewer want to give up (you wonder how Ted's kids feel or maybe they aren't sitting on that couch anymore).

Top Ten Books I've Read This Year

2009-12-04T16:41:00.008-05:00

It's that time of year: Top Ten Lists!

I'm going to try to keep up a regular rotation of Top Ten Lists from now until the end of the year. Here's the first.

10. The Name of the Rose, Umberto Eco

Perhaps a bit overwritten and melodramatic (Dan Brown must have read this!) but Eco gives us a view into not only medieval life but the great philosophical tensions and issues and makes sense of the political investments behind those tensions.

9. The Legend of the Middle Ages, Remi Brague

I taught Medieval Philosophy this semester. I read Eco to get in the mood, and Brague to understand the difference between the legend and the reality. Brague works on Islamic philosophy of the middle ages and carefully distinguishes the myths that continue today about Christianity (peaceful) and Islam (also peaceful if we would just understand them) and shows that in medieval thought both were pretty pushy about their doctrines and that we should both appreciate that and not let them off the hook for it. I finally understood something about the difference between commentary and paraphrase, between the role of interpretation in Islam and doctrine and Christianity. Seriously, I read this book on vacation in August while I was sitting in the sun and I could not put it down.

8. Prep, Curtis Sittenfeld

Cheeky and self-evaluatory, like any adolescent I've ever wanted to be around, this novel about a not-so-rich-or-pretty girl in a New England prep school ultimately suggests that we all just need to get over ourselves, introspective nerdy girls included.

7. The Brothers Karamazov, Fyodor Dostoevsky.

I read this while I was traveling in Europe this summer. I had read parts of it before, but never the whole novel. I'm glad I finally did read the whole thing. Dostoevsky paints the picture of three brothers with their different notions of living well and how we might achieve a good life that lead to variously flawed lives. I don't think I would want to be married to any of them, if that is any judgment of how successful any of them are.

6. Assassination Vacation, Sarah Vowell

The sometime-contributor to "This American Life," Sarah Vowell, offers us a riotous account of the three Presidential assassinations in US history, weaving together the odd connections and interactions not only between those involved in each individual assassination but the ways these individuals were involved in overlapping assassinations almost to the point that it all sounds made up. That it isn't just shows how good a story-teller Vowell is.

5. Saturday, Ian McEwan

As I see it, McEwan fancies himself something of a Greek tragedian, bringing to light in the span of a single day the brokenness of individuals and their relationships to one another. The protagonist of this book has a run-in with some thugs one Saturday morning and they eventually break into his home and harm his family only to show up at the ER needing the protoganist to operate. It's a moving story, but McEwan has become predictable, if not in storyline, at least in structure.

4. Born to Run: A Hidden Tribe, Superathletes, and the Greatest Race the World Has Never Seen, Christopher McDougall

This was the first book I read of the year and my first blog post of 2009 discusses it. It changed my running stance and inspired me to run better and to distrust anyone who says, "The Human body was not meant for running." McDougall shows otherwise.

3. Theoretical Writings, Alain Badiou

In this collection of essays first published in 2004, Ray Brassier and Alberto Toscano bring together some of the most helpful and important of Badiou's writings to shed further light on his arguments from Being and Event and Ethics. I especially appreciated the discussions of Plato, mathematics and ontology in the first section. Of course, I've read a lot of philosophy this year, but this book is the one that has most enthused and challenged me.

2. (reread) Raise High the Roofbeam Carpenter, J.D. Salinger

I first read this book about fifteen years ago. Salinger is Salinger and little else needs to be said. Buddy Glass is one of my favorite voices in fiction and this story of him hosting a small party after his brother Seymore fails to show up for his own wedding because he is "too happy" is in class Salinger style an effort to recognize in ourselves that the snobbery by which we think we are set apart does not in fact set us apart. Do it for the fat lady. No, different Salinger. I hope he dies with file cabinets full of Glass-narrated novels.

1. 2666, Roberto Bolaño.

Ashley Vaught alerted me to this novel and I'm glad he did. Five related but relatively unfinished parts are gathered together to present a picture of a Mexican-American bordertown. Sometimes we are on the American side, sometimes the Mexican side. It's dark at times, but the stories are so well-drawn and their overlap sufficient enough to leave you less than unsatisfied (in contrast to say, oh, DFW's Infinite Jest for which I am still made at having fallen for the Jest by reading that book). Bolaño died before he finished the book so it seems fitting that the stories too though finished are incomplete, like life itself.

Freedom: It's Academic

2009-12-04T16:10:00.004-05:00

A recent article by the president of the American Association of University Professors reminded me of what we have have known for at least a decade: academic freedom appears to be waning. Following 9/11 and most evidenced in the denial of tenure to the Depaul University professor Norman Finkelstein, mostly at the constant badgering of Alan Dershowitz (best account of that feud can be found here), support for free speech on academic campuses has waned, and with it, more problematically the lobbying efforts of such necessary groups as the AAUP. As AAUP President and English professor at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, Cary Nelson writes, the AAUP has been increasingly satisfied to contest issues on merely procedural grounds and hence, it fails to fight the real assaults against academic freedom that can still be rigorously procedural. As an example, Nelson cites the case of University of Colorado, Boulder, professor Ward Churchill who incited conservative politicians and commentators by referring to those who worked in the World Trade Centers as "little Eichmanns" for their involvement in international finance. In response to such comments, a university faculty committee went back and considered his scholarship and found problems with it. The AAUP found that because a faculty committee had made the decision, no academic freedom violation had occurred. Nelson calls for a change to the AAUP's policy of examining procedure alone which supposes that faculty cannot or will not violate academic freedom and encourages the AAUP to lobby more strongly for these protections.

One issue that Nelson cites as particularly problematic is the requirement of "collegiality" for tenure. I can see what he means. Of course, university departments want to run well together, but it is not difficult to suppose that a judgment of non-collegiality could in fact be a judgment of distaste of a colleague's work, and the academic community should be invested in allowing faculty to publish and research in areas that may not make other faculty members comfortable. Certainly, departments must make decisions together, but departments should not make decisions over research of individual members and when collegiality becomes a marker for discrimination that is a problem. Or the standard of collegiality might be a way of silencing younger members of a department who wish to change policies or encourage more democratic governance practices. Of course, we all know that tenure decisions are subjective, and that they need to be to a certain extent -- colleagues judge other colleagues work, there is no given formula. And yet the insistence on collegiality might be a way of stymieing academic freedom. It's not difficult for me to imagine the case in which someone's regular insistence on a feminist perspective might be taken to be uncollegial -- this seems like a common complaint among those working in gender or feminist studies.

Another issue of academic freedom is the question of what kind of freedom is granted to tenure professors. With the budget crunch felt across the country, many universities are looking for ways to save money. One way is to re-evaluate course releases or course loads more generally and in effect, require tenured professors to increase their course loads if they are not producing. I understand this practice, and think it is important to encourage continued research. Yet I also worry that it robs tenure of its power. Tenure is meant to further solidify academic freedom, to allow faculty to take time to do original research without anyone looking over their shoulders. The concern is that these policies re-institute surveillance that inevitably leads to restricted academic freedom.

Freedom, academic or otherwise, must be practiced in order to be won. I agree with Nelson that we must be vigilant more and more so in order to protect freedom, even when it may be uncomfortable.

Thanksgiving: Ten Things

2009-11-26T12:09:00.007-05:00

10. My favorite colors are of this time of year. Being in Texas, I don't get to see them as often as I'd like. But Thanksgiving seems to bring them out in full force.

9. Cowboy bars. I finally found Hillbilly's in McAllen.

8. Cowboy boots. Newly purchased.

7. Good friends.

6. Running. Usually not away.

5. Settling in. I was talking last night with a friend of mine who moved to the Valley when I did about feeling comfortable and settled. I don't have to sell my soul to Texas to feel at home here.

4. Places that are far away where people love me and I feel loved.

3. Good books yet unread.

2. Still having something worth saying.

1. My love.

Out-Fascioning the Fascists or Critiquing Heidegger and Arendt, Take 73

2009-11-16T15:22:00.006-05:00

In the last several weeks a number of articles have come out addressing a number of the recent books released that attempt to rehash the extent to which Heidegger was a Nazi and what we should do about his philosophy as a result and whether Arendt is a self-hating Jew who just couldn't get over her dear old professor. What these articles and their partner books suggest is that few people are willing to do the hard-thinking that seems to be demanded by both these thinkers, but also a serious devaluation of the power of thinking.

Emmanuel Faye's new book, as discussed by Patricia Cohen in The New York Times, encourages us to expunge Heidegger from philosophy lest his books "spread sinister ideas as dangerous to modern thought as 'the Nazi movement was to the physical existence of the exterminated peoples.'" Faye suggests that we treat Heideger's work like hate speech and put warning labels on them like we do albums of explicit lyrics. Besides the obvious problem of who gets to determine what is called philosophy and the problems of eradicating from the history of letters all books that might offer up fascist and racist ideas (Plato, Aristotle, Kant, and Hegel, for starters -- though certainly careful readings can show the complexity of these texts, as they can for Heidegger), I am troubled by the idea that some ideas are too scary, too powerful, that they must be suppressed. The implication seems to be that some ideas cannot be combatted by equally strong and contrary views so they must be suppressed. Having recently read Dr. J's blog on strong relatavism, we should remember there is human freedom in the determination of values and that the work to defend and fight for ideas is never finished. To suppose that one idea is too powerful and wrong is to set up a kind of dark absolutism, where there is a position of knowledge or claim to truth that can't be combatted by argument and so must be silenced.

At my alma mater, The College of William and Mary, the entrance to Swem library had a quote from Thomas Jefferson that read "Errors of opinion may be tolerated where reason is left free to combat it." Jefferson seems right to allow all ideas, even error, to roam free and therefore free to criticism and disproof, otherwise the problem is inevitably a power struggle over who determines which ideas are dangerous (like the vote for the masses was said to be by Aristotle), but also a power struggle regarding who determines what counts as philosophy in the academy, a famed struggle in Emmanuel Faye's home country of France but just as much a struggle in the United States, particularly in philosophy where the question of what counts as philosophy is at times vitriolic and the regularly touted "I don't think what she does is philosophy" phrase gets thrown about. This is especially notable it seems in Faye's effort to disregard all disciplines that rely on Heidegger in any way which is essentially all the many manifestations of continental philosophy in the United States.

A better article on why to read Heidegger can be found in The New Republic. Two new books on Hannah Arendt, Heidegger's some time lover, have also been recently published to a similar sea of indignant reviews, indignant not about the books but the reputation that Arendt has in the United States. The worst, as far as I can tell, is by Ron Rosenbaum, published on Slate.com.

Like the reviewers of Heidegger, the readers of the books on Arendt don't actually appear to know Arendt's work very well at all. Not only are their reviews teeming with ressentiment flavored phrases, "overinflated, underexamined reputations," but they hold Arendt responsible for the at times vapid reception of her work. It is true that people misuse the phrase "the banality of evil;" I have even heard papers at scholarly conferences that do not appreciate the depths of Arendt's phrase. Contra Rosenbaum, Arendt does not think that this phrase covers "everything bad that humans do". In fact, Arendt is responding to a specific doctrine presented by Kant, one of "radical evil" that supposes that human evil is based on a misdirected will or an inversion of the maxims that we recognize when we choose our actions. This will be too summary of an account, but in essence, Arendt challenges the rationalism of Kant's explanation of evil and finds, disturbingly, that the perpetrators of the Holocaust were not actively and rationally following evil perverted ways that they could account for (following their own will instead of the good and hence, inserting exceptions for themselves into the categorical imperative). As many said at Nuremberg, they were just doing their jobs. Arendt's great concern is not to celebrate this shift to the "banality of evil," but to cause us to reconsider the often satisfying accusation that these are bad men, evil, and to worry ourselves with the understanding that evil acts can follow from rather mundane persons of rather mundane aspirations. Rosenbaum appears to pay no attention at all to Arendt's concerns when he writes:

"Eichmann was a vicious and loathsome Jew-hater and -hunter who, among other things, personally intervened after the war was effectively lost, to insist on and ensure the mass murder of the last intact Jewish group in Europe, those of Hungary. So the phrase was wrong in its origin, as applied to Eichmann, and wrong in almost all subsequent cases when applied generally. Wrong and self-contradictory, linguistically, philosophically, and metaphorically. Either one knows what one is doing is evil or one does not. If one knows and does it anyway, one is evil, not some special subcategory of evil. If one doesn't know, one is ignorant, and not evil. But genuine ignorance is rare when evil is going on."

Nothing in this passage suggests that Eichmann was not a banally evil person. Arendt's concern is that Eichmann was "not even stupid, thoughtless" and hence, his evil deeds did not follow from a carefully reasoned regime and could not therefore be guarded against by challenging such reasoning. Not to say that ideas have lost their force against the banally evil, but rather that such persons, did not think. One could begin to feel this way about Mr. Rosenbaum from his review.

Rosenbaum goes on to discuss Arendt's self-hating Jewishness in an ahistorical and uninformed way, paying little attention to her own discussion of Jewishness most notably in her biography of Rahel Varnhagen. Rosenbaum is responding to Wasserstein's essay "Blame the Victim—Hannah Arendt Among the Nazis: the Historian and Her Sources" in the October 9 issue of London's Times Literary Supplement so maybe this is Wasserstein's oversight. Regardless, Arendt struggled to think the relationship between human particularity and human universality throughout her work, and one imagines that this was deeply influenced by her own sense of particularity in ways that were both problematic and productive.

I admit that I at times take great issue with Arendt's work, with her analysis of the relation of the private to the public sphere and her reading of the ancient Greeks, but she is a fine and careful thinker and disagreement with her must be accompanied by matching her careful thinking rather than running roughshod over her work as if we cannot afford any error.

SEPTA and the Middle Class Strike

2009-11-04T12:54:00.008-05:00

This is not the first time I have blogged about SEPTA and I expect it will not be the last. I've blogged on myspace about SEPTA being a dangerous place with bus drivers pushing passengers out of the door and causing serious injury and about a student who was testifying at City Council about violence on SEPTA and got beat up on the way home. These are only two of many many only slightly more hilarious than pathetic stories about SEPTA which I invite readers to add to in the comment section. SEPTA's tagline for some time has been "We're Getting There" and then "Serious about Change." Many jokes can be and have been made about these slogans and we have to say we appreciate the naked honesty.

So now, SEPTA is on strike, and things must be considered. SEPTA went on strike in the middle of the night on November 2 after the last World Series game that is to be played in Philadelphia. The TWU 234 assured the mayor over the weekend it wouldn't strike, but when the workers agreed that they would not be satisfied with an 11.5 % wage increase over the next five years, a $1,250 signing bonus and increases in worker pensions was just ridiculously low-balling them and their average $52K salaries, the union walked.

Look, I'm sure it is not easy to work at SEPTA. I know this because it is not easy to ride on SEPTA and I imagine this is in large part due to the fact that the people who operate the system are unhappy. I also think repetitive tasks over hours, days and years are alienating. But I think we need to rethink the logic of the strike. Originally, the strike was the workers' last resort to cause pain and difficulty to the capitalists and politicians who would then recognize that they would rather cede to demands than suffer the hardships faced by their workers not working (this is why, I think, the strike is a tool of socialists rather than communists, since there is still an effort to retool the present system rather than change it entirely). In times of strikes, workers of all stripes would support one another. In this strike though, the logic appears to be reversed -- the TWU workers make more than $20K more than the average household in Philadelphia (which comes in at at $30,746). Fifty-eight thousand school children take public transportation to school. And there have been stories of newly hired low wage -earners who have recently re-entered the economy being threatened with loss of jobs since they can't make it to work.

I'd like to hear more from my Marxists friends about what seems to be a shift in the utilization of the strike. If the strike hurts workers more than those in power, can it possibly be effective? Are we expecting those who have bargaining power to actual care about the plight of these persons and by what mechanism? Fear of loss of jobs? SEPTA's board is non-elected. I suppose Mayor Nutter and Gov. Rendell have reasons to want to get SEPTA back on the road, but I'm underwhelmed by the impact it has had on them.

Certainly, we don't want to say that $52K makes you unalienated and happy in your job, but then $62K won't make you unalienated either, so you can't be fighting for unalienation. At some point, I think we should be permitted to turn to the unions and say, you have failed to serve the worker, and now you serve the petit bourgeois and we are not going to support you.

I would like to know what the reading public thinks.

"But You Look So Young," and other failures to take women seriously

2009-10-25T15:59:00.005-04:00

So I was recently among a group of people, strangers really, to whom I introduced myself as a philosophy professor and explained that I was sharing time and space with these people because I had given a talk the day before at the university we were all visiting. Upon removing myself from the conversation, I moved to a room not ten feet away and proceeded to hear these people talk about me. Now aside from the surprise and shock of hearing people talk about me, I was and continue to be frustrated with the course their conversation took. They all agreed that I looked very young. Some offered their impression of me when they first met me. Others introduced information to try to guess how old I probably was. But collectively they agreed that I was quite young to be a philosophy professor.

Even before I earned my degree, but especially since, I regularly hear people say "but you look so young." That remark upsets me every time I hear it. I have tried to dismiss it. My friends and sisters have told me that I should be happy -- that it means I will look good when I'm old. Others have told me it doesn't matter. But today at lunch, when I told this story, my lawyer friend of my same age, Emily, made it all clear when she said: "It's not acceptable. These people are just not accustomed to professional women having the authority that they have and being in the position they are in and these people just do not know how to respond. What they are saying is not innocuous, it is an attempt to deny that authority." In fact, she went on to say, men our age rarely get that remark. It's not that we are young, it's that we are women with careers and advanced degrees. We went on to assure one another that neither of us really did look much younger than our peers.

I really do think that women from about age 24 - 38 can look like they fit in any part of that spectrum and the generation ahead of us is less than accepting or acknowledging of the positions that women have achieved. I suggested that the only time I thought I looked young was when I was working out, and Emily took her point even further to say, no, people just aren't used to thinking that women of a certain age should work out.

So that's it. I'm not putting up with it. No more placating the "you look so young" faction, lobby,or heck, generation. I don't look so young. I am a professor. The only thing you need to know about my age is that I have a Ph.d. Thank you.

The Philosophical Politics of the Incommensurate

2009-10-15T17:38:00.005-04:00

I have become increasingly aware of the existence of incommensurate discourses and the effects such discourses have or fail to have between one another. When I recently supposed that a response to one such discourse could only be pacificism, I didn't even realize then what I was saying: that there is no conversation, only a winning or a losing and strategies to achieve that. So today, reading Badiou, I was struck with his example of a similar situation which I will here share in its entirety. Before that, let me say that I think philosophy demands certain things, Socratic acknowledge of ignorance for example that makes it particularly incommensurate with other discourses and I think one of the things philosophers are required to do is to consider how to respond to those whose denial of ignorance leads them to violence and tyranny:

From Polemics, "Introduction," by Alain Badiou:

This dialogue (Plato's Gorgias) presents an extremely forceful encounter between Socrates and Callicles. A philosophical situation is created by this encounter, which is, besides, arranged in a totally theatrical fashion. Why? Because the thought of Socrates and that of Callicles have no common denominator. They are two types of thought that are totally foreign to one another. The discussion between Callicles and Socrates is presented by Plato in such a way as to make us understand what it is to have two different kinds of thought that, like the diagonal and the side of the square, remain incommensurable. The discussion consists in a relation between two terms without any relation. Callicles maintains that right is force, that the happy man is a tyrant -- he who wins others over with cunning and violencce. Socrates maintains that the true man, identified with the happy man, is just, in the philosophical sense of the term. Now, between justice as violence and justice as thought, there is no simple opposition, i.e. one that can be dealt with by means of arguments submitted to a common norm. Any real relation is lacking. As it so happens, then, the discussion is not a discussion. It is a confrontation. And what becomes clear to everyone reading the text is not that one will convince the other, but that there will be a winner and a loser. This further explains why Socrates' methods in this dialogue are hardly fairer than Callicles'. Where there is a will there is a way; what is at stake is to win, and especially to win over the minds of the youths who witness the scene.

Callicles is eventually defeated. He doesn't acknowledge defeat, but becomes mute and remains in his corner. Note that he is the loser in a theatrical dialogue by Plato. Here we have probably one of the rare occurrences where someone like Callicles is defeated. Such are the joys of theatre.

As regards this situation, what does philosophy consist in? The unique task of philosophy here is to show us that we must choose, that we must choose between these two forms of thought. We must choose either to be with Socrates or to be with Callicles. In this example, philosophy confronts thinking as choice, thinking as decision. Its proper task is to make the choice clear. Hence, we say: a philosophical situation involves the moment in which a choice is proclaimed -- a choice of existence, or a choice of thinking.

****

This raises several important questions, including, can we find ourselves in community with those who have made different choices than we have -- those who choose for Callicles when we choose for Socrates? As philosophers, how can we make the choice clear even for Callicles -- and perhaps this is what Socrates doesn't do, what he finds impossible so he determines to win. But must this be so? I ask these as genuine questions.

Where is Rhodes? Pass the salt. and other philosophical calls to arms.

2009-10-10T16:48:00.006-04:00

When I was in my second year of grad school at Villanova University, I took a course on Benedictus Spinoza. Now the work of Spinoza remains interesting and influential to my thinking, but the single most important thing I learned in that class, I think my classmates would agree, was the Latin acronym: QED. Spinoza would make an elaborate and difficult argument and then finish his point with QED to show, that's just the way it is. QED stands for "quod erat demonstrandum," which means "that which was to be demonstrated" and is generally used to mean, "I have now made an infallible argument in support of my position, bow down and acknowledge!"

Over the years when we, my philosophy friends and I, would have arguments that got heated or saw a particularly good television commercial in earshot of one another, we might pronounce QED to show that a good argument had been made and nothing further needed to be said. Until today, there was no other single philosophical term that brought enjoyment even as it contributed to a girl's attempt to show herself to be right.

But all that has changed. Today, rereading Badiou's Being and Event, Meditation 17, "The Matheme of the Event," I found this gem of a philosophical phrase: "hic Rhodes, hic salta," which is Latin for, "Here is Rhodes, jump here." A quick google search led me to the full story. Apparently, the line is the punchline of a fable from Aesop wherein an athlete boasts that he jumped extremely well at Rhodes and he can produce witnesses. A bystander says witnesses won't be necessary since the athlete can show that he can jump there, "Hic Rhodes, hic salta." Hegel uses the term at the beginning of the Philosophy of Right and Germanifies it as "Hier ist die Rose, hier tanze," which can be translated as, "Here is the rose, dance here." This is not even a translation, and it's not even clear Hegel understood the first Latin phrase, but both phrases basically say, don't put off the demonstration any longer, do it now!

So next time you find someone claiming upon claim without any real substantiation, announce, "Hic Rhodes, hic salta." QED

300: An American Movie about America

2009-09-12T13:21:00.003-04:00

The other night I finally saw the film, allegedly about the three hundred Spartan citizen-soldiers who held the gap at Thermopylae against the Persians at the beginning of 5th BCE (around 481). I had put off seeing this film because I had been told that it was very violent, made by the same guy who made Sin City. But it wasn't really that violent, at least no more than other war movies like Braveheart.

From the very beginning, I found this movie highly irritating. At first, I thought my irritation was due to the basic errors in the depiction of Sparta. The ephors are depicted as gross and deformed horny old men who are ultimately at odds with what is good for Sparta. The oracle is specifically Spartan and under the control of the ephors. The Spartans talk about themselves defending their freedom and their free way of life. This is a gross misuse of the concept of freedom for the Spartans. I'm not even sure that Athenians at this time thought of freedom as a personal concern. Both Athens and Sparta would consider freedom as something to fight for only in so far as they wished to maintain the freedom of their city from rule by foreign powers. Athens comes to take this position further when it finds self-rule to be rule by the people, but Sparta was just as concerned with holding off the barbarian hordes from ruling over them. Language in the film refers to the Spartans as slaves who had become free and now wished to maintain that freedom. I'm not a Spartan history scholar, but I am an ancient Greek philosophy scholar and I have read a bit about Sparta and the Peloponnese and Arcadia and I think many people (particularly, Athenians!) who describe life in Sparta as somewhat slavish. I guess it's kinda funny that Aristotle thinks of the Spartans as licentious (Pol. II.9) since the majority of the population were brought up in military education that aimed to make them soldiers so that they could be killed at birth if they didn't appear strong. Anyway, the Spartan population was about 80% slaves or helots. So it is even funnier (not in a haha way) that the movie depicts soldiers fighting for the freedom of their city.

But as the film went on, I realized that what annoyed me was that this film is only a thinly veiled depiction of the United States as a militarized nation that needs to defend its constant need to go to war. I think the notion of fighting in order to keep the city free from foreign domination is in some ways difficult for Americans to think (not withstanding Cold War rhetoric) because we don't think of our freedom as collective. Someone actually says in this film, a woman, the queen who is hawkishly encouraging further deployment of troops to the Hellespont. "Freedom isn't free," she says, "it's paid for with blood."

Now I think once we can stop complaining about how this film is not about Sparta or Thermopylae it gives us fresh insight into American militarism and notions of freedom. I think Americans think that we go to war for individual freedoms. I am going to just come out and say it: I think it is logically impossible to defend that position. Even if we are going to say that we go to war to defend a way of life, what we are saying is that we wish to be free of rule from another government (even when we think that means taking over the rule of other peoples over themselves), we are speaking of wishing to be ruled by our own, rather than to be freely ruling ourselves. What we defend is a regime that might support a way of life that we have come to understand to be free. So no foreign power is ruling us, but we are no more free as persons for having prevented rule from other peoples. The citizens of Sparta kept themselves from being ruled by Persia but still had to give up their 7-year olds for military training. Interestingly, there is a moment in the film when the Spartans meet up with the Athenian army and the Athenians ask why they have brought so few and Leonidas makes much of the fact that they are better warriors because that is what they have been trained for (and also that the Persians are not good fighters because they are slaves) while the Athenians are not good warriors because they live lives other than military when not at war. Again, I take this to be a defense of American militarization and a standing army. Now the Athenians took it as a sign of their military and cultural superiority that they were free men fighting for their lives and did so as free persons who would return to non-militaristic lives. As Pericles celebrates, the courage of Athens comes not from the laws (which required Spartans to stand firm and not surrender as the film celebrates too) but from their way of lives.

Finally, one last thing, in the movie (and in Herodotus) the Spartans are eventually betrayed by a Greek, Ephialtes, who is deformed and was supposed to have been killed at birth (this is the film version) but his father raised him as a soldier. He asks to be included, but Leonidas refuses him and so he goes over to Xerxes and tells him about the mountain path. Here is another image of the American concern that our ultimate downfall will come from within so we must be vigilant and not forget those who might wish ill against us (rather than ceasing to do ill).

Medieval Philosophy: Why and Wherefore?

2009-08-26T18:22:00.004-04:00

A couple weeks ago, I was speaking on the phone to a friend who asked what I am teaching in the Fall semester. When I said, "I'm teaching medieval philosophy, so I'm looking forward to that," she said, "Are you serious or are you just saying that?" I had to insist that indeed I am looking foward to it. She told me incredulously that she had nightmares in which she was assigned to teach medieval philosophy. I understand that that which is unknown to us is difficult to teach, and I have certainly felt before that I didn't want to teach what I wasn't well-versed in, but I worry that my friend, who I consider a brilliant philosopher and powerful teacher, shares the common misconception that medieval philosophy is a dark and remote concern to be studied solely for historical reasons -- that is, in order to understand how we have come to have certain conceptions of the world that become more fully fleshed out in the Enlightenment or have been more fully overcome in the post-Enlightenment, but that on their own offer little that is philosophically interesting.
A colleague of mine at another university was recently explaining his interest in medieval philosophy in my presence by recalling his professor, who studied and taught medieval philosophy as philosophy, pertinent and worthy of addresses our contemporary questions, and that such an approach had excited my colleague about medieval philosophy. It is true, indeed, that the questions facing humanity haven't changed much in the last three thousand years. It limits the possibilities of thinking to suppose that contemporary questions are in fact new questions whose answers must be sought in contemporary texts. Medieval philosophy is especially poised to consider some of them in particular: What is the relation of the world and God and man? What are we doing on this earth? Is it a good thing to be on this earth? What is the power of the law and whence does that power arise? Can an atheist (read: philosopher) be a good citizen? (I find it noteworthy that Rousseau includes in that question, without dismissing it, whether a Christian can be a good citizen.) What is the foundation, and can it be found, for living well? What is the relation of theology to philosophy? What is the role of philosophy in politics? Does theology and or philosophy take us outside of politics or does it find its true expression in the very difficulties of political life -- that others must be persuaded and the ground for such persuasion is shaky? That is just another way of asking the question of how metaphysics is related to ethics and politics?
I look forward to a semester of examining those questions in Augustine, Boethius, Thomas Aquinas, duns Scotus, William of Ockham, Maimonides and Averroes. If all we can do at the end of the semester is better articulate these questions and what is at stake in them, then we will have found in medieval philosophy a worthy field.

Temporal Goods

2009-06-24T17:29:00.004-04:00

I was burglared.

I am teaching Augustine's Confessions.

I am growing to think that there is something to Augustine's notion that we cannot set our hearts on things that can be lost. I think in one way or another, I've always tried to think several steps ahead in order to prevent myself from feeling real loss: if I don't get a grant, I can think there are people who I like who will be around at that time so I will gain the time spent with them; if my love doesn't work out, I won't have to deal with the things that were difficult; if my friends stop calling, I'll have more time to do my scholarship; if my parents don't affirm me, I won't have to be overwhelmed by holidays spent at home. I plan ahead like this, if this goes wrong and that goes wrong, I'll still be ok, there's a bright side to every loss.

I lost books when I moved down to the Rio Grande Valley and that started to make me sad. I always forget which books I lost so I go looking for one and it isn't there and I'm bereft once more. But there are libraries and tax refunds to fund book purchases so I was not too overwhelmed.

But over the weekend my laptop (and Jeff's) was stolen. I am sad for me and what I've lost and I'm sad for Jeff, maybe more sad for Jeff because in a more real sense than I, lost time by losing his machine. (new meaning to the term "time machine") It's the kind of loss that doesn't feel like it can be offset by any good thing that comes from not having what I had. (Does this mean there is no downside to owning a laptop?) Teaching Augustine this week (who startles me with his latent stoicism), I started thinking that maybe not desiring something that could be lost was the answer. But here's the rub: I really do care about my work and about the time it took me to do it and the time it will take me to recover it. I also care about Jeff's work and both of our continued sanity. Would we be less sad if we weren't so invested in our work that is on those machines? Perhaps, but I'm not sure we would be who we were, and frankly I think most people would consider it strange if we weren't upset by this loss. It's the oddest thing trying to recathect one's desire that has been invested in her work since her work is a part of her in a different way than one might think a lost love is. There's a real sense of something being broken off that needs to be reconstituted.

In the end, I'd rather be a lover of things, even lowly things, perhaps even beyond their proper due, than keep setting myself safety nets. So thanks Augustine, but I'm not sure I can do what you ask.

Today I'm back to work, at my school computer, more secure, perhaps, not much less invested in my work, rather annoyed that I can't reconstitute my edits of a week ago. People who say it's always better the second time around lie.

Born to Run

2009-06-07T14:29:00.003-04:00

My calves hurt right now because I ran 7-miles yesterday. Up until now, I've never had painful calves from running 7 miles. But this run was different because I tried to implement the advice that Christopher McDougall stumbles across and shares with his reader in his new book, Born to Run: A Hidden Tribe, Super Athletes, and the Greatest Race the World Has Never Seen. I'm not blaming him for my painful calves or for the fact that I found walking so difficult yesterday that my boyfriend, Jeff, told me that even though I looked funny he'd still be willing to be seen with me in the drugstore. Thanks babe! I'm excited to learn that there might be other ways to run that would take the pressure of a runner's knees so that she could run for a long time.

Here's the gist of the argument: western runners have been hoodwinked by the so-called technological advances of the running industry to think that they will run better the more their feet are separated from the surface on which they run. In fact, this seperation has led us to run in more painful ways than our bodies could ever sustain because we don't have to feel the immediate pain or pressure and so we sustain injuries that come in the wake of poor posture and poor form that our feet offer no resistance to because they don't feel the pain in the act of running. We need to learn to run almost as if we were barefoot. Let those shoes wear down. Don't buy new shoes for 5000 (instead of 500) miles, and you'll run like you were meant to: pronating, ultimately landing on the balls of your feet. The reason I had such pain in my calves is that my sneakers made it very difficult for me to do this so I ended up just not letting my heel strike at all and ran on the balls of my feet for seven miles and my calves were surprised with the work they had to do.

The most amazing thing that McDougall learns is that contrary to popular, medical and general running wisdom, running is not bad for you; you shouldn't have to quit at 40 from bum knees. In fact, human beings evolved to run! Not, as we have often heard, away from the possibility of running.

Some facts: Human beings are the only running mammals whose oxygen capacity is separated from their stride. So while most animals must breathe than stride, and so have only one breath per stride, human beings can have several breaths per stride. With better oxygen, comes longer endurance for running. Furthermore, the human cooling mechanism is not attached to our breathing mechanism but to sweat. So we can continue to run without overheating as long as we sweat, while other animals must stop or they will become overheated. It appears that for this reason human beings can run an animal to death as the Bushmen of Kalahari and the Indians of Tarahumari are known to do.
Also, unlike walking animals, human beings have what all running mammals share in common: our calves are connected to our feet with the Achilles' tendon. Animals that have evolved to walk do not have this connection.
Human beings get faster every year starting at age 19 and then peak at 27. But they don't return to the age 19 pace until 64 years old! We are able to maintain a running life for that entire time.
Strangely, running that enabled us to hunt down antelope and kudu required thinking like the animal, empathizing with the animal, becoming like the animal in order to predict future action: visualization, empathy, abstract thinking, forward projections -- the mental activities that create causal connections in the mind where we, unlike other animals who don't have to strategize to run down their prey, had to learn to connect dots not just in the world but in our minds, between that which did not or at least not yet exist in the world. So running led us to think well, and we run to develop our capacity to think well.

I'm taken by this as my calves can testify, but I'm also nonplussed. I run almost everyday. I can get on board with running better and more like our feet are intended to move, taking in the shocks by striking midfoot and rolling over to the balls of our feet, easy and light on our feet, changing our stride. But I don't hunt down my prey. I don't even have a running path very close to me that is seriously off-road. Can only ultra-runners on mountain passes achieve this relation to running? Am I doomed to fall short of my end if I can't run the way that my body has evolved for me to be able to run?

I'll have more to say about this subject soon when I see whether I can maintain this form, whether I can run like this in sneakers, whether I can run like this when I speed train, and what this had to do with how I live. Stay tuned.

Bordering on Boorish

2009-06-03T18:10:00.004-04:00

I just read today in the Houston Chronicle that the Brownsville city commissioners are permitting the US Government to build the so-called border wall along the Rio Grande as it passes through Brownsville. The city is hoping to maintain future possibilities of developing the riverfront nonetheless. The federal government will remove the "fence" -- which in the places I have seen it is a series of closely aligned 10-foot high poles -- when the city comes up with money to create something less obtrusive such as a levee. There is concern which seems like the obvious concern to me that this temporary fence will become permanent. You can link to the article through the title to this post. Warning: Some pretty obnoxious xenophobic reader comments. See the Brownsville Herald article here.

It's not just that this is bad for Brownsville which had hoped to use the waterfront for a place for community gathering, sure it'd involve some development, but Brownsville needs that and the mayor seems to be concerned about city planning which I'm beginning to think is a rare thing in the RGV. I'm frustrated that the Obama Administration insists on the continuing to build this wall, sometimes called the Wall of Death. In the primary debates, both Obama and Clinton backed off their support for the wall. Clinton talks specifically about the absurdity of the Brownsville wall last February. Immediately after the election, there was expectation in the border regions that the wall would actually be removed by the new administration, and this appears to be another instance of lack of change. It's not just that the wall won't work but as we are facing in the case of Brownsville, promises to undo what the federal government does are difficult to believe. It's frustrating to feel like we have the best possible administration we could and yet nothing can be done about this. Whither hope?

McAllen

2009-05-26T13:11:00.003-04:00

Some people have been asking me since I moved to the McAllen / Edinburg area of Texas what it is like to live where I live. I try to describe it as best I can, but you might be interested to know that McAllen has made the news a number of times in the last couple months.

Check out this link to the New Yorker article on healthcare. Also see this article from the Economist on the poorest part of Texas (Hidalgo County, where I live).

Mao, Mau-Mauing and States of Emergency

2009-05-08T15:32:00.003-04:00

So I was trying to think of a fancy title that played on Mao and Mau-Mauing and I went to wikipedia to look up the Mau-Mau Uprising and learned that it was an uprising by disgruntled Kenyans of the central highlands whose land was repeatedly taken from them by European settlers and there was no equitable avenue by which native grievances against settlers could be addressed. Having stolen their land, the settlers allowed the natives to work the land yet they had no real rights to the land even as the settlers encouraged longer and longer work weeks and days. These tenant farmers grew disaffected and left the highlands for Nairobi and in Nairobi began forming groups to seek political redress for wrongs and ultimately, Kenyan independence. Gaining power and challenging those they called British collaborators, the Mau-Maus, as the rebels were called, became a real threat to British rule and yup, you guessed it, a State of Emergency was declared on October 20, 1952. The state of emergency led to increased violence, duh, on the part of both the state and the rebels. This situation eventually led to the war of liberation with the rebels fighting as the Land and Freedom Army, since those were the two issues that prompted the resistance of the highlanders. Both the government and the Kenyans got more and more violent, attacked civilians and led to general chaos for some time in the early 50s until resolution that led to increased control both of land and political life by the Kenyans. In the end 32 settlers were said to have died and over 10,000 Kenyans.

The Mau-Maus were severely tortured by the British but they were violent to civilians as well, to the point where it seemed difficult to distinguish. When Tom Wolfe used the phrase Mau-Mauing he meant that those seeking handouts at a program in San Francisco did so with menacing tactics.

Which brings me to Mao. Slavoj Zizek says in his introduction to his edition of Mao speeches and letters that ultimately, the synthesis of capitalism and communism in the Mao-ist sense led to the worst and perhaps ideal capitalist state, where only in the context of communism, does capitalism, as described by Marx in its late stages finds the proper milieu in which to thrive.
Sizek writes:

So, ironically, this is the 'synthesis' of capitalism and communism in Mao's sense: in a unique example of the poetic justice of history, it was capitalism which 'synthesized' with Maoist communism. The key news from China over the last years is the emergency of large-scale workers' movements, protesting against the work conditions which are the price for China rapidly becoming the world's foremost manufacturing site, and the brutal way the authorities cracked down on it -- a new proof, if one is still needed, that China is today the ideal capitalist state: freedom for capital, with the state doing the 'dirty job' of controlling the workers. China as the emerging superpower of the twenty-first century thus seems to embody a new kind of capitalism: disregard for ecological consequences, repression of workers' rights, everything subordinated to the ruthless drive to develop and become the new superpower. (Slavoj Zizek presents Mao, On Practice and Contradiction, 18)

Capitalism is the new Mao-Mao.

Beyond Home and Housekeeping

2009-05-06T21:17:00.003-04:00

Marilynne Robinson, the contemporary author of some of the truest fiction I've read in the last five years, Gilead, Home, and Housekeeping, wrote a jarring and Calvinistically optimistic collection of essays called The Death of Adam. I recommend picking it up and not reading it all at once. I leave you one quote with which I resonated:

"I want to overhear passionate arguments about what we are and and we are doing and what we ought to do. I want to feel that art is an utterance made in good faith by one human being to another. I want to believe there are geniuses scheming to astonish the rest of us, just for the pleasure of it. I miss civilization, and I want it back."

Indeed.

States of Emergency or As the Swine Flew

2009-05-04T12:26:00.006-04:00

This flu is weird. It started with pigs, they say, but you can't really get it from pigs anymore. In Israel, they call it the Mexico flu so that people who get it aren't considered unkosher. Which is weird because I thought kosher was about food so I don't think the Israeli's are considered with the kosherness of infected human bodies. In my area, along the border, schools have been shut down for ten days even though there are no known cases in the area. We are about 650 miles from Mexico City. The epicenter of the flu in NYC is a well-to-do Catholic preparatory school. There are signs all over my university encouraging handwashing. And over the last week, the World Health Organization has raised the epidemic level from 3 to 4 to 5 and now there is talk of raising it to 6 with 1,000 cases reported worldwide.

I've been thinking how much the swine flu encourages us to think in terms of constant state of emergency. The terrorist alert is at orange all the time, and now there is a pandemic, and the state of emergency has come to be the norm. This doesn't really heighten anyone's awareness of alertness. I was at an airport last weekend and I went to get food and then to the atm and then to my gate and at my gate realized I had left my suitcase at the food line. Racing back the food line, as the p.a. system was encouraging passengers to report unattended luggage, I was relieved to find that no one was concerned or alerted by by suitcase that stood in line as if waiting to be served. I'm not saying that this state of emergency problem is a problem because no one is alert, because I don't think people can handle so much alertness. But I'm not saying that we should keep from such states in order that people be really alert when the need to be. But rather that states of emergency have extended beyond luggage to our actual bodies, washing our hands and so forth. And it almost seems like the bio-politicians are prophets.

Al-Khair Islamic Society of the Rio Grand Valley

2009-05-03T10:18:00.005-04:00

Over the last month, I've followed along with two field trips organized by professors in the history department to local places of worship. On Friday, we went to the local mosque of the Islamic Society of the Rio Grande Valley, a mostly Sunni Islam organization. Their building was constructed in 2005 when they had some of the decorative materials imported from the Middle East.

I was struck by two things in particular: the diversity of the worshipers and the similarities between their worship service and a traditional Christian liturgy. I do not know if mosques across the country have diverse populations. In my neighborhood in West Philly, there were three mosques or Islamic centers and they seemed separated from one another by populations: one was mostly African-American, one was Bengali. But this service included Pakistanis, African-Americans, Latinos, Arab-Americans and European-Americans, old people, young people, professionals and blue-collar workers, probably about one hundred people altogether. I don't know if I was more moved by the unity of these diverse groups worshiping together or if I was surprised to see so much diversity in the Valley. Either way, it's a good thing.

Second, I found it noteworthy that the service was so similar to the liturgical services of the Christian tradition. Friday afternoon is the regular worship service, but apparently, it is not understood as the Sabbath, which the Islamic faith does not practice. Similarly to Christians genuflecting and crossing themselves when they walk into church or take a seat, these men would all pray and bow in a carefully orchestrated order of movements when they came into the church. It didn't matter if they came in late, if the imam was in the middle of the sermon. Everyone started by bringing their hands near their ears and then bowing and then kneeling over to the floor and then standing up and then kneeling bent over to the floor again. I was particularly struck by this pattern of movements when a young boy went through them really quickly with his father. This practice seemed very much like the bodily movements we make in the Christian church, at least, in the higher churches. What seemed particularly similar was that this was clearly holy space and it was treated as such by others and this encouraged us to see it like that.

Of course, there were some noteworthy differences. All of the worshipers were men and the women in our group had to sit divided from the men in the group. But the sermon could have been heard at a Christian church or a Jewish synagogue or even a Hindi or Buddhist temple. It was about overcoming heedlessness and being conscious of ourselves and our world, things that we all probably need to hear. I wasn't sure if I would find that annoying if I were a worshiper, since I often find generic sermons frustrating and wonder, but what specifically does Christianity have to offer me along the way? So I didn't think I learned specific things about Islam and how the faith would have me deal with these issues.

What was The sermon was about overcoming our general heedlessness

2009-04-21T09:18:00.004-04:00

South Africans go to the polls tomorrow (April 22) to elect their next president and it looks like Jacob Zuma is going to have an easy win. This morning on NPR I heard the author of the book on South African politics, Bring Me My Machine Gun, discussing Zuma. Addressing a question about Zuma's lack of formal education, he quoted Zuma who said that it didn't matter if he didn't have a formal education as long as he surrounded himself with good advisors and made good decisions. I think the apparent lack of relation between a formal education and making good decisions should be addressed.

First, let me say that I am sympathetic to the argument that one can learn and become capable of good judgment without a formal education. A quick google search turns up an advertisement for a photographer who claims she can do more natural authentic work precisely because she lacks a formal education. I disagree with the notion that education de-naturalizes, probably because I find metaphysical that view of nature. Furthermore, I think it is great that Bill Gates runs Microsoft without a college degree (yes, he is a college dropout, but he dropped out of Harvard people, the guy is not without certain privileges).

I do believe that people can learn to think and to understand and to judge well without spending a day in school. But I also think that formal education is a more likely way to achieve those things, and I think it is for this reason that we should push for more opportunities for children and the poor. I worry that the argument that they can thrive in life without it will soften the urgency of helping people through education.

More significantly, I think Socrates would challenge Zuma's point that seems to concede that his lack of education puts him in a tight spot but that he can surmount this difficulty by appointing good advisors and making good decisions. As Socrates wonders at the beginning of the Protagoras, a student who has not yet learned cannot judge whether the person he goes to for learning is a good teacher. The person who does not know cannot know who a good advisor would be. Obviously this ignorance puts one in a seeming position of being unable to learn well since one does not know who can teach well. I wonder if Socrates' view of recollection is a way of suggesting that we all have a basic sense of what is good and proper and need to rely on that to choose good teachers and advisors. Regardless, I think a) it is going to be difficult for Zuma and b) formal education can teach you to think.

So Much Depends Upon the Weather

2009-04-14T13:46:00.002-04:00

There's this great line in "My Fair Lady," after Eliza walks out on Prof. Higgins and goes to his mother, Prof. Higgins having congratulated everyone but Eliza on her performance, which came after a failed attempt at the races where he recommended to Eliza she stick to two subjects -- the weather and her health -- when Mrs. Higgins, the Professor's mother, tells Henry to stick to two subjects (in talking to Eliza) -- the weather and his health. Well, I've already told you about my health (bum leg), so now I'll talk about the weather.

On Sunday, Easter, it was 91 degrees and I was privileged to experience an afternoon and evening of "Winter Texan" life. As you may know, there is a large population of retired Midwesterners who winter in the green and palm-strewn land of South Texas. On Sunday, I got a chance to see this indulgent life they live. Frankly, I think it's my new favorite part of the valley and I'm thinking about whether I could live in a mobile home for awhile.

So they all know each other and drive around on golf carts throughout the park, which is basically a big campground. And they stop and visit and have a drink or some food with a friend and then go off, and maybe come back with partners or friends. We sat outside for six hours, ate shrimp boil, drank beer and whiskey, relaxed and laughed, went for a swim, picked tomatoes. It felt like all my favorite things at once: warm sun, beer, people to laugh with and have serious conversation with, good food and warm sun. Citrus Valley Park, here I come!

Plan ahead, it's the only way you'll ever get one.

2009-04-09T17:04:00.003-04:00

I'm feeling like a monomaniac. I have come to learn about myself just this year that I love love love planning. Since my boyfriend lives 2300 miles away I like to plan to see him, and I like to plan how all the other things I have to do can some how involve seeing him (like attending conferences), but today and yesterday, all day long practically, I've been trying to plan the best way to get to Italy and now that I learned that it is actually cheaper to go through Paris and since we want to go to Paris after Italy anyway it seems like such a great idea, but then I have to see when trains and planes and friends will come and go and stop. And it's a whirlwind of activity, but somehow I enjoy it really more than anything. I think I should be a travel planner. I get to manipulate the world without feeling like I'm manipulating it. And then I've been planning how much work I need to do between today and December in order for me to do the work I need to do between this December and December 2015. Then I made some plans for arranging the speakers series at UTPA.
I think this all follows from my need to have things to look forward to and planning is a part of looking forward to things. Deep down I want to be able to just be where I am and content, but then how will I make things happen? And things really must happen, mustn't they?
Next year for Lent, maybe I'll give up planning.
I'm thinking more and more that all of this is related to the same economy that Nietzsche describes as that which requires humans to be calculating. That our rational being is calculating because we are trying to get something or reminding ourselves to give back and so the planning is a way of being caught up in the exchange.

On Stress (Fractures and Other sorts)

2009-04-08T11:15:00.003-04:00

So as many people know because I love to talk about it, I've run a lot. Over the last six weeks or so I've been noticing a pain in my right shin close to my ankle on the inside of my leg. It feels like a bruise on my bone. When I touch it it hurts, and sometimes when I am running it hurts, but it doesn't bother me otherwise. People have told me that unless I lay off and stop running as hard or as much it is going to take much more for me to recover and so I should go easy on it. Going easy has never been my strong suit so I ran this morning at 7 even though I ran last night at 7. I realize that this is pretty much how I treat things that appear to be going wrong, at least with my body. When I was younger I would get sick, say, have the runs or something, and just ignore it and it would go away. I didn't like to have to stay in bed or treat myself like I was sick so I just kept going and I think I just outran the germs. Incidentally, this practice of ignoring what is going wrong is generally how I treat my car. I am beginning to find this tendency to ignore what is wrong in my body ironic since I find it absolutely impossible to ignore even the hint of something-maybe-one-day-going-wrong in my relationship, or my work or other areas of my life. So if I see a potential hint of a pattern that might eventually bother me with the people I find myself in relationship with I think it must be held off at the pass, as we say. I don't want to do that with my leg because then I would have to stop running for a bit and I have come to rely on running as a way to deal with my stress, and in return, I have received from running a stress fracture, which seems rude.

Why are we such contradictory beings, we humans?

Requiem for Books Lost by Land

2009-04-02T16:02:00.003-04:00

I moved this summer and lost books which saddened me greatly. I think about my books like friends especially the ones I have carefully annotated, the ones that I know where on the page I can find the reference I need. The worst thing about losing these books was I lost the two boxes that included books I used most often: Aristotle's Politics books and political philosophy books. I had a copy of C D C Reeve's translation of Aristotle's Politics that I've been marking up since my first year of grad school and could see in the marks my own development and understanding. Sometimes I found insights to things I was working on sent to me from my former self and I was grateful to that former self. For awhile now I've been thinking that the books were still out there and they would come (I lost them in the mail). But they haven't. So I just made my wish list on amazon and I'm going to use my tax refund to buy a big chunk of them (though I just calculated the entire wish list to amount to $854 -- not the cost of original books lost but of all the books I want).
Note to reader: it's really worth insuring your books.

Blogging Confessions

2009-03-31T16:42:00.002-04:00

I was just reading my old friend Zach Brittle's Blog and it occurred to me that the reason I don't blog is that it feels like such an overwhelming task. Profound things must be said and I don't have time to spell them out profoundly every week in light of having to teach and research and talk to my boyfriend and my friends at least once in a while. So I have a Spring resolution. I am going to try to publish TWICE a week. I know it's bold and crazy, but the key here I think is to take the pressure off. I'm not really going to publicize that I'm doing this. I'm not making a big deal of it. Just a couple short thoughts every week about something relatively meaningless, but still uncommon.

Confession: I have NCAA guilt. I love to watch basketball, and college basketball most of all because there is something just really goshdarn fun about boys who seem like real people playing really hard and gracefully and being sad when they win and genuinely happy, and not just because they are making money. So Villanova is in the Final Four, which is awesome because I just finished graduate school there and because a small Catholic school hasn't won since VU won in 1985. Villanova beat Pitt in a fantastic game that everyone has been talking about. I keep running into people who say, Go Nova to me and I appreciate that and wave and go on. but I have a horrible confession: I didn't see the game. In fact, I just watched the last 6 minutes on youtube so that I could write this blog. I didn't watch the game. I sat on my couch and read a book. And so I have been feeling guilty and pretending I had watched it to all those well-wishers when really, I hadn't. And now I feel like a faker. But I promise, I'm not. Though maybe in a way I am, because I still have more allegiance to my undergraduate alma mater's basketball team even though they suck then I ever have really had to Villanova. Even though I have cheered them on in many a tavern during March in the last eight years.
So it is.

Adriel Vs. the Elements

2008-09-24T14:09:00.002-04:00

My fan base appears to be clamoring for more posts. And what the fans ask for, they get. Occasionally. I know my last post was about fighting and erotic life, so this is going to be a bit of a change of subject. Or maybe it isn’t, because I think I’ve taken on a whole new kind of ultimate fighting, this time against the elements, and it’s not clear who’s winning.

Fire

My boyfriend, Jeff, and I created this categorizing system for music earlier this summer. We decided that all music fits into the following four elemental categories: water, fire, cowboy or God. One of our favorite pastimes is to figure out what song fits where. Water songs are pretty easy:

“Walk on the ocean, step on the stone…”

“Well the Mississippi’s mighty, but it starts in Minnesota, at a place that you can walk across five steps down…”

Fire songs:

“Light my fire”

“I’ve seen fire and I’ve seen rain” (fire and water)

Cowboy songs get a little more difficult, but it’s especially fun to find songs that don’t seem like they’re about cowboys, but c’mon, they are:

“I’m a cowboy, on this steel horse I ride…”

“Cuz I wanna be a cowboy baby…”

“Where have all the cowboys gone?”

“Save a horse (ride a cowboy)”

“Every cowboy sings a sad sad song…”

“Jimmy starred in movies, never killed a man, but the ladies died for his charms, Mary was a princess, never met a man like the cowboy in her arms…”

“Mustang Sally”

“Ramblin’ Man”

“Route 66”

God songs, well, this can be left up to various interpretations. I’ll give you some exemplary ones:

“Highway 61 Revisited”

“It’s not an angry God, it feels like her…”

“When the earth shakes, and the tide breaks, feels like a woman” (ok, good also be water or fire (“when the sun beats Satin blue sheets…”)

I would love to find the song that could be all the elements: water, fire, God, cowboy. So that last one from Zucchero is close because it has three categories. I’m taking suggestions…

This is just an introduction to my battle with the elements, which I like to think of in terms of these categories and I think you could take my two months down here so far in these terms. On this post, I’ll tell you a little about fire and then a story from last night about water.

So I moved to Edinburg / McAllen, Texas in the mini-van that I bought from my brother and filled with my last worldly belongings. Well, not all of them, I think more of furniture is presently in a house in South Philly than in my apartment here, but I hear it’s being well-cared for and I like to know that hints of me remain behind. About a month ago, the van started to be unhappy with its new climate, which I would loosely describe as HOT AS HELL and began to overheat. I refused, but absolutely refused, to spend the money to take it to a mechanic because I spent my life pouring water into radiators of my parents’ car. In fact, my younger sister, I believe at age 4, was pretending to drive our family van and, sitting in the driver’s seat, holding the steering wheel said, who’s going to put water in the car? As if that was a normal part of getting a car started.

So my good friend Cory agreed to help me do some fixin’ up. And we changed the thermostat together. I was psyched that Cory was helping me fix it and that I was making up for my lack of mechanical knowledge. When the bolts came off easily Cory said I wasn’t getting the full working-on-the-car experience, because just getting the bolts off was supposed to take two hours. So we replaced the thermostat, and ran the car for awhile, and everything seemed to be going swimmingly, until we realized that there was something leaking out of the thermostat area (ok this could also be a water story). When Cory went to examine the hose, we saw that the housing to the upper radiator hose had just broken clean off from the bolt that was holding it in place. Now I was getting the true working-on-a-vehicle experience. We went inside and Cory called some used car parts places and junkyards. The first several told us they’d have to order it and it would cost $40, $35 of which I didn’t have, so we kept looking and found a place that would sell it to us for $12 but we had to get there by 6, so we raced across town, I mean all the way across town and sat in the foyer of this full-of-personality junkyard while they got the part. Got it. Went back. Put it on. Good as gold. Fixed my car for under $20. And it hasn’t overheated since.

Water

So I was on a roll. Fixing things by myself. Yeah yeah, I can do this. Ain’t no thing. Nevermind that I didn’t actually fix the car by myself since Cory told me what to do at every step. But I was feeling empowered! So I’ve lived in my apartment for two months now. It’s nice. I like it. But I haven’t had hot water since I moved in. Now when I first moved in, my brother, Josh, was here with me and he fiddled with this water thing outside (see how extensive my knowledge of plumbing is!) and I wondered if maybe he had done something that accidentally turned the hot water off. This just made sense to me.

Up until now, I haven’t really been bothered by the cold water because the sun seems to heat the water during the day anyway so it doesn’t really get the cold. But it’s been raining more and things have been a little chilly in the morning, so I’m wanting hot water. So last night I go out to the water thing in the rain after my run and I think, maybe I just need to loosen this bolt. Because that of course is probably how you get hot water, loosening bolts. They teach that in all the best plumbing schools. So I’m turning the bolt to loosen it and at a certain point, it just shoots off and water starts gushing out, I mean gushing. I can’t find the bolt, or the other little johnny that holds the water in, so I’m just holding my fingers over the hold in the water thing and for some reason this does not solve the problem. So I’m sitting there talking to the water, no please stop, please stop. I’m cajoling it, but it does not respond. So I run next door to my neighbor and knock on the door, but as soon as I knock, I have to run back to the pipe to do my effective work of holding the water back, so Peter, my neighbor, thinks no one is at the door. I realize this will not work, so I run back to the door and knock and this time I wait for him and he runs out to the street to turn off the water main. And for just a second, I was perturbed that of course, he knew where the water main was. How come no one ever told me how to know where the water main is! Does this just come with an Y chromosome? Jeff assures me that it does not. So finally, we have the water turned off and we reattach the bolt and the stopper (I’m sure that is not what it is called). And I tell Peter that I was just trying to turn the hot water on and he looks at me like I’m speaking French because this makes no sense to him. He says, the hot water heater is in the attic. But I tell him I don’t know how to get up there, and he says, well, did you just try the breakers? It might just be that you need to flip the breaker. No way! Yes way. I go to the breaker box, flip the breaker. Now I have hot water. And very wet shoes.

Yes, There is Sex in your Violence

2008-08-09T15:58:00.005-04:00

So I promised a second post on my thoughts on ultimate fighting, this time taking up the relation between sex and violence. What struck me was how much the fighting of mixed martial arts required a working together and synchrony of bodies in much a similar way that making love does.

As I said in my previous post, the fighting begins in an upright position—a mix between boxing and kick-boxing—and it moves to the floor for the wrestling and punching in the head portion of the fight. Time after time, the winner would credit his win to his cardio workouts. It was obvious that winning involved perseverance and simply refusing to give up. In the meanwhile, before the fight is over, there are moments where the fighters are holding on to each other on the floor, both to maintain position and to slow the fighting down (or so it seemed to me). Actually, this stage can be quite boring, which is why my mind was free to wander over the event and begin to think of it as both an erotic and aesthetic phenomenon.

In so far as the fighters are trying to maintain their respective positions, they’re obviously working against one another, but in so far as they are slowing down the pace, there’s an obvious cooperation. (NB: After watching another match last night, I realized that the holds of jiu-jitsu are carefully orchestrated to use the resistance of the opponent and what appears to be cooperation is often a way of resisting the aggressor, so this point, which I wrote yesterday, may not entirely stand, but I'm going to let it be because it looks like cooperation and also, as my dear reader will see, I'm not sure that it matters that opposition is the intention in these fights.) The line between the competition and the cooperation is not so obvious. Regardless of what the wrestlers are trying to do (force the submission of the other or knock him out), they must work with each other’s bodies. They must submit their body to the struggle in order to approach the body of the other fighter. But even submission is not sufficient – it’s not just putting one’s own body on the line in order to encounter the other body – at some point, there does not seem to be so obvious a line between the one body and the other but a dance of bodies. At once, there are bodies in conflict and bodies harmonized.

I am no expert on martial arts, but I know that people often speak of using their weakness or the flow that follows from the attack from their opponent to bend one’s body so as to absorb the force and use it in a moving cycle back against the opponent. While mixed martial arts fighters do talk about submission holds and grapples, they are generally talking about forcing the opponent to submit. Yet from watching these fights, it is clear that mutual submission of one’s body to the fight is necessary for either fighter to come out on top.

This harmonizing of bodies contributes to the aesthetic phenomenon of the fight as much as the mechanics of winning. The bodies look like there is no line between them. Such an observation leads quickly to the eroticism of this fighting. But before I make the structural comparisons between fighting and loving, I should also note that this movement of bodies is just plain and simply erotic even while it is violent. At one point, two fighters were on the ground. Both were facing the ground. One had his head between the legs of the other and his arms grasped behind the neck of the other. I think that’s how it was. They looked inseparable and immobile and well, close. There’s no denying that the grappling and holding and moving and the closeness of the bodies makes it difficult to see where the line between violence and destruction on the one hand and the pleasure of bodies on the other hand is. If I’ve argued in the last post on ultimate fighting that there is no animal life, no pure body, it seems in this fighting it also becomes clear that there is no pure violence.

Well, just because mixed martial arts fighting is not pure violence does not mean there is no pure violence. This is true. But this does seem to be a kind of fighting that if there could be all out violence this would be it. Short of war, I thought. Yet I said this to someone the other night and said, this is not war and he said, and I’m sure he’s right, yes, but war is not pure violence. So I wonder if, among human beings who even when wrong, consider the world in terms of what is beneficial and harmful, just and unjust, and not merely what is pleasurable and painful, there can ever be pure destruction.

Finally, to the structural comparison to the erotic! The need for bodies to work together as much as in opposition in fighting is akin to the working together and yet necessary unpredictability of bodies in erotic life. Risks must be taken in the fighting as much as in making love, and the risk is always of violence, destruction. But only in the risk is winning or loving possible. The risk of fighting is in some ways the suspension of violence in order to overcome where that suspension erases boundaries between bodies as much as eros does. The risk of eros is the inversion where its openness subjects lovers to the possibility of annihilation – the disappearance of oneself, the dissolution of boundaries, ego destruction, the failure to connect. In these metaphors we see bound together notions of blending and dividing where both could be erotically productive or violent. And the success of the fight or the play of the erotic is in leaving these possibilities open. I don’t want to say that the possibility of violence is the condition for love, but I wonder if I am saying that and what it would mean if I did. Could it also mean that the condition for eros is the possibility for violence?

An even more interesting tack to take here would be to examine how eros and violence collapse into one another. As Anne Carson reads Sappho, eros is a violence, “foreign to her will, it forces itself irresistibly upon her from without”. Perhaps, but that might only show that the things that really do happen to us—beauty, love, thinking, as I mentioned in my previous post—are foreign to our will. But maybe only because we are foreign to our will and the very conception of ourselves in its terms.

(N.B. I watched another bout last night at my new friends' house, Dan and Rachel's. I learned first that I have much to learn about what's happening, that jiu jitsu is ground fighting, that when ultimate fighting first began it was essentially one martial art form against another and it quickly became clear what did and didn't work and apparently the earlier fights are funny to watch (I'll take their word for it, but also, I might be induced to get the first season of the tv show on netflix). I also learned that fights do go to judges' decision especially when they are equally matched. If I get ambitious, my next blog on this subject will take up dunamis and energeia and how such concepts would obviously come to mind were I an ancient Greek watching pankratia -- the fighting form that mixes boxing and wrestling and originated with the Greeks.)

Palm Trees and the Prestige

2008-08-09T13:54:00.004-04:00

I’ve been in Edinburg/McAllen, Texas for a week now and I’m settling in. I’m enjoying the green and the open space and the palm trees. Unpacking my books, I came across Elaine Scarry’s book, On Beauty and Being Just, and was willingly distracted from unpacking by sitting down and reading it. Scarry discusses the mistakes we make about beauty, both when we take something as beautiful and learn that we were wrong and when we fail to see something as beautiful and are suddenly converted to its beauty. She uses palm trees as an example of something she didn’t realize was beautiful and perhaps through Matisse, or maybe with no explanation at all, came to see beauty in the palm and its glorious dispersion of light.

I’ve been thinking about this conversion to beauty and love lately and how both exceed any rational tracing to causes. Scarry explains that she had, in a particularly gloomy climate, set Matisse paintings around her house. But she hadn’t even recognized the homage each pays to the palm until she had already been converted to the beauty of the palm, a beauty that enabled her to see the paintings’ beauty and structure anew.

As a philosopher, hell, as a person, I’m prone to seek reasons and causes for the disruptions (I’ve called them conversions) that have us see as beautiful what we have not and as beloved what we ignored. Like Kant, we tend to seek the concept for what throws itself before us transcending what we take to be our exhaustive conceptual apparatus for knowing the world. But I’m wondering if we aren’t destroying the event of the beautiful or of love by chasing after causes and concepts by which we can determine them and thereby show that there was no real conversion at all but just a finally realized fulfillment of some given cause. (I realize that I am betraying my Aristotelianism here (not in the sense of revealing it but becoming a traitor to these commitments), but one must follow the course of her thoughts and the possibility of thinking otherwise, as Foucault has said, if she is to go on thinking at all.)

My good friend, Dr. J., has this theory she was sporting about a year ago about philosophy and the film, “The Prestige,” that I’ve been revamping for my own purposes. In “The Prestige,” Michael Caan’s character describes the logic of a magic trick. The audience is presented with an ordinary object, that’s the first move. And then something extraordinary is done with the ordinary object, that’s the second move – the magic. But if the trick stopped there the audience would not be properly moved or effected. It isn’t until the object is returned to its ordinariness that the trick awes. In this move, what magicians call “the prestige,” we see that there is a trick, but it’s logic escapes us and our mind rushes after an explanation and this causes pleasure. Dr. J argued last spring that philosophy is the prestige, returning to the ordinary what has become extraordinary – making sense of the experience of beauty or love or thinking, yet still not denying that there is magic there. I was explaining this to someone the other day as I was thinking about how love might fit the same structure of the magic trick. He said, rightly it seems to me, that this structure explains precisely why lovers need to talk about their love, not to deny the mystery, but to make ordinary what is extraordinary as the mind searches after explanations that are never adequate.

I think this impulse applies as much to beauty and the joy of thinking as it does to love: the mystery does not disappear in the compulsion to speak it because it’s logic is not to be found in something outside of it but from within the experience itself.

Ok, I promise the next post will be Part II of the ultimate fighting thoughts.

Kiss My Texas Ass (or Beat the Sh** Out of It)

2008-08-04T19:07:00.005-04:00

Saturday night, my second night in the Rio Grande Valley, my brother, Josh, and I went with friends to see an ultimate fighting match (mixed martial arts). As we walked up to the convention center where the fights were held, I remarked that I didn’t know if I knew what I was getting myself into. We walked into the big open room where the fights (there were ten altogether) were held. There was a cage in the middle of the room and chairs and bleachers around. It seemed low-key which was surprising to me considering the violence I expected.

My new friend, Rob, who practices jiu-jitsu, told me the rules: everything goes except no biting, no kicking your opponent when he is down, no elbows (this was uncertain, however, because many elbows were thrown especially when the fighting had moved to the floor). If you haven’t seen ultimate fighting or mixed martial arts fighting before it tends to happen in two stages. The first stage is the standing stage that involves kicking and boxing. This is the part when the fighters try to position themselves to dominate in the wrestling or floor portion of the fight. At some point, one fighter brings or both together bring the other down to the mat and wrestling, peppered with punching, becomes the dominant approach.

Keep in mind that there is no “judges decision” in ultimate fighting. Maybe judges decide if both fighters get through three rounds and no one has surrendered, but that didn’t happen last night and as I understand it, it rarely if ever, does. What this means is no one is aiming to pin someone down or to land a punch but to force the other person to “tag out,” i.e. surrender, or to knock the opponent out. So one guy is holding the other guy on the ground and punching his face, over and over. Eventually the punchee gets out of the hold and tries to situate himself in the same way to punch the puncher. This makes the sport about inflicting pain and tolerating pain.

This form of fighting provides significant fodder for two things I’ve been thinking about. More issues than these could be considered, but it’s my blog so this is what I want to think about. The first is the way that this fighting might help us think about Giorgio Agamben’s distinction between bare life and living well and the second is the relationship between sex and violence (this will be addressed in a future post).

Agamben argues that the logic of the sovereign, particularly in the modern nation-state, posits a bare life that then becomes political life when recognized by the sovereign. Bare life is the life of the animal; the life of the one who only lives and does not live well; the life of survival. Agamben argues that this exclusion of bare life is a fundamental structure of political life. Certainly, the status of the “fundamental” here is in question, whether it is fundamental for this particular kind of community—the nation-state—or ontologically constitutive of all communities that aim toward living well. I worry that it is the latter, which suggests that bare life is also ontologically fundamental and not just contingently so for these times and these forms of communal life. Yet even if it is only the former, the problem seems to be that bare life is posited. And as a reader of Aristotle’s Politics, I’m convinced that it does not. Stick with me for a second: Aristotle defines the human as distinct from the animal because while the animal only has voice which permits the discerning of pleasure and pain and its signaling to others, the human has logos—speech, reason, language—by which she determines what is beneficial and harmful, just and unjust and this in language with others. Lots more argument could be made to get to this conclusion, but I take this to mean that there is no human who is not already aiming at living well where that is constituted by what is beneficial and just.

So back to ultimate fighting. What became clear watching these fights is that there is a pre-supposed dualism in any account of bare life that calls such life bare because it is fundamentally concerned with the body. Ultimate fighting, I think, shows how the life of the body cannot be reduced to living that is not concerned with living well. Or maybe it shows that even in this encounter that seems to be the barest most-unmediated encounter between bodies, even here, there is no pure body. There is no body without some concern for the living well that the body accomplishes. First, the fighters are cordial and respectful of one another. Several times, the winner hugged the loser or the loser walked over to the winner and offered his congratulations. They treat it as a sport and exhibit the sportsmanship that would follow. This is no WWF. Second, it becomes obvious as they are fighting, and fighting not for a pin or a certain number of contacts, that this fight stripped of all rules and mediation is about glory. You lose when you acknowledge the superiority of the other. Or when you’re so gone you can’t form words.

Here in this cage where it is body against body, power against power, it is not about survival (the end of bare life)—there are no lions in the den. Glory, rather than life, is at stake. Animals, it is true, might fight for supremacy—for food or for a female—but do they ever fight just for the win? For the display of their physical acumen? Precisely here in this fighting, maybe as in any sport, but clearly in this one, the body pursues living well.

If this is true, if in this bloody arena of bodies there is no bare life, doesn't this question the existence of bare life elsewhere? Agamben may simply be arguing that states operate as if there is bare life and this fiction is deeply harmful for communities and persons. If he is, then I think ultimate fighting further illuminates the fictitiousness of such bare life.

Come back soon for Part II where I address the proximity between the movement of bodies in fighting and in sex.

Second Selves: The People of Philadelphia

2008-07-08T10:58:00.005-04:00

Ok, ok, I know. I’ve been remiss. I think the blog has become something of a parental figure demanding me to show up and do something and I’ve just been rebelling. Sorry to those of you who have been checking and hoping I was being obedient to the blog. I wasn’t. But I’m returning and I’m working on getting over “blog as superego” hangups.

It’s becoming increasingly obvious to me that the greatest thing I’ll miss about Philadelphia is the people. I love that Philadelphia is a metropolitan area that is small enough to run into people that you know everywhere. I had a day a couple weeks ago where I ran into six (6!) different people that I knew when I was downtown and in University City: an old friend from Kaplan, a friend from Williamsburg (VA), a friend I knew from junior high, a friend I hadn’t seen in more weeks than should be permitted, a friend who recently had a baby and so has been (understandably) AWOL and an ex-boyfriend. Yesterday, I was at the Jersey Shore with some friends and I ran into my mom! So maybe sometimes we don’t appreciate that, but it’s almost like Philadelphia (which let’s be frank, we all extend to the Jersey Shore) is a college campus where you’ll always meet new people and always run into those you already know.

Related to the “small world” feeling of this city is the proximity of people. Houses are close together. Coffee shops are a stone’s throw from my apartment. People use local parks as their yards. I’ve always appreciated the anonymity the city offers by just having so many people in a relatively confined space. Of course, it is calming to go up to the mountains or to travel to the wide open plains, but my city-dwelling existence often makes me anxious about those places and more relaxed and focused and at ease surrounded by tons of other people. I don’t need to be talking to them – hey, I don’t usually really even want to be talking to them. But there is a peculiar calm to sitting on a park bench among hundreds of people. I think this is why I like to study in coffee shops and libraries where there are other people milling about than at home where I don’t know what’s going on. Maybe I feel like I’m not missing something because I see what all the people are doing but I don’t have to be a part of it. Maybe it’s just good to know they’re out there. But I’m going to miss the feeling of being alone among others that only cities can offer.

I’m saying all of this just to put off having to talk about the actual people I will miss because, as I am slowly coming to terms with, I am really sad to leave the people I know in Philadelphia. I’m sad to leave my girlfriends who drink wine with me and talk about love and loss and work. I’m sad to leave the different elements of my graduate school community: my “buddies” who sit on porch stoops until wee hours laughing about the world and ourselves, my confidantes who let me laugh and cry and somehow seem to like me more than I do, and my arguing friends with whom all conversation is productive because polemical. I’m sad to leave my family especially my youngest sister who knows the world is not big enough for her. I’m sad to leave the people at St. Mark’s Church with whom I’ve had the pleasure to read everyone from Milton to Badiou and to share my wonder. However hard I try, I am no rock and no island, I have need for friendship and its laughter and loving. And if you’re reading this, whether you are in Philadelphia or beyond, it’s likely because I share that with you so thank you.

2008-06-04T11:57:00.004-04:00

When I was growing up in Philadelphia, we never really went downtown. It wasn’t safe, but it also wasn’t interesting (because I’ll freely admit, sometimes not safe is interesting). When I came back to Philadelphia in March 2000 after a six year hiatus, I was pleasantly surprised by the city—surprised to see so many people hanging out downtown, so many new restaurants and clubs and skyscrapers. Many Philadelphians ascribe the renaissance of the city to former mayor and now Pennsylvania governor, Ed Rendell. One of the great things that came of this renaissance was the development of interesting subcultures and the dive bars that had become their own scene. I spent the summer of 2000 living the high life on the GOP’s dime but I’ve been relegated to the dive bar scene ever since and frankly, it’s the better scene, at least that Philadelphia has to offer.

There are two kinds of great bars that I think are relatively unique to Philadelphia: one is the dive and the other is the excellent bar food bar. I think the excellent bar food bar is loosely of the same phenomenon as the dive bar – basically, I don’t want to have to go somewhere where I have to get all involved in the eating process and ritual. I just want good food and a beer – so you get Monk’s and Standard Tap and Johnny Brenda’s and Society Hill Tavern and Nodding Head and so forth.

Now sure ok, everyone has dives, but Philadelphia considers itself as a city a dive so the dive bar is like a dive inside of a dive. The thing about these kinds of bars is they are absolutely without pretension. Being without pretension is very big in Philadelphia. We don’t like our politicians pretentious, our athletes pretentious (witness the great fall of Terrell Owens who everyone knows really got kicked off the team because he was a pretentious ass) or, in the end, our bars pretentious. Artists too love this city for its lack of pretension. Sure, people go to Lucy’s Hat Shop, Continental and Rouge but we kind of doubt their Philadelphia credentials. True Philadelphians know where Oscar’s, Bob and Barbara’s, Locust Bar, Dirty Frank’s, McGlinchey’s, Tops, Skinner’s Dry Goods (which might be called Anthony’s but no one who goes there calls it that) and Tattooed Moms are. And not just because you can usually smoke there, though it helps (caveat empter: can’t smoke at Bob and Barbara’s anymore. And speaking of caveat empters regarding Bob and Barbara’s, last weekend we went there and realized that Bob and Barbara’s has become an entirely new kind of bar: the tourist dive, which is really no dive at all but a place where your grandparents visiting for graduation (the only old people in authentic dives are those sitting on the stool at the end of the bar who have never left that stool) and your brother-in-law and the wedding party can all go after whatever party they’ve already been to. We decided that it no longer qualified as a dive because the people were too clean.).

It would never occur to me to suggest meeting a friend at a non-dive bar and I can pretty much tell that I’ll have a hard time blending those friends who don’t go to dives with those who do. (This brings me to another typical Philadelphia attitude which we can call reverse snobbery: I’m proud that I’m poor, that I ain’t too proud, that I’m not pretentious, that I don’t aspire to “coolness,” that my city’s sports’ teams never win anything, and frankly the rest of you who are all those things have something wrong with you.)

These kind of bars say, come as you are. If you’re cool because you go to Continental, you’re cool at Oscar’s because it would never occur to you to be at Continental. There’s that line in the movie, Swingers, where Mike is talking about these speakeasy type bars in LA and he says, “You tell a chick you've been some place, it's like bragging that you know how to find it.” Well, you tell a chick to meet you at a dive bar, you’re saying, I don’t front, I’m not trying too hard. These bars say: we know the only scene here is the alcohol and whatever conversation you can produce yourself and we aren’t going to jack up the prices to make you proud to be here.

I expect if you’ve never been to one of these bars, you aren’t reading this blog. If you plan to visit one, ask for the Philly special, which will get you a PBR and a shot of Jim Beam for three little dollars.

SEPTA: We're Getting There

2008-05-28T15:25:00.004-04:00

Yes, it’s true. I’m leaving Philadelphia in a little more than eight weeks after a life spent loving and hating the City of Brotherly Love (tagline: The City that Loves You Back. Note my favorite variation, brought to you by an old-lady-shoving-SEPTA-driver: The City that Shoves you Back; see also the lesser known but more tantalizing tagline: Philadelphia’s More Fun When you Sleep Over). My parents moved to Philadelphia when I was three months old and we lived in a little twin in Olney with, eventually, my four siblings and moved to a huge house in East Oak Lane when I was fifteen. I left for six years to go to college in Williamsburg, VA and to work in Washington, DC and I’ve been back ever since. I’m sad to go. And I’m sure I don’t even realize yet how difficult it will be to leave. So to celebrate or to stave off the oncoming melancholia, I am launching a series on this blog for the next eight weeks entitled, “Things I Will Miss in Philadelphia.”

Now there are a ton of things and I will get to as many of them as I can: dive bars, broken sidewalks, good friends, my family, ingenious homeless people, being hit on (and once nearly pushed into the river) while running, the anonymity of crowds, big buildings, row homes, running into people you know all over town, outside bar seating on a Sunday afternoon, corruption that would be sad if it weren’t so funny, really good bar food, the Daily News, running on the river, St. Mark’s Church, West Philly, the Orange Line, booing the mayor, Santa Claus, and Destiny’s Child at Sixers’ games, Philly-based music, getting jumped or arrested (not me, but some people quite dear to me have engaged in criminal activity such as inadvertently hitting federal buildings with Frisbees, a serious no-no in a city with a murder rate that can compete with its graduation rate), parks that take up a city block and so on.

But what I want to talk about today is SEPTA. See most of what I, as Philadelphian, love about Philadelphia, is what is just slightly screwy about it. The great thing is that we Philadelphians know it and we’re maybe just a little bit proud. For example, for a long time, SEPTA’s motto was “We’re Getting There.” Now you could take that as a reference to transportation: they’re moving about the city and getting people where they need to go. But most of us took it as SEPTA’s admission that it isn’t quite “there” yet, where “there” is a reasonably-run, mostly-on-time, moderately-priced transit system. So they’re just getting there, and we appreciate their honesty. SEPTA has since changed its motto to “Serious About Change” which is amusing because it seems to lose the honesty of the former motto. Frankly, with rate hikes and service cuts none of us are entirely sure they are serious, unless that means changing fare costs and falling apart buses and trolleys. Whatever (or as Sarah Vitale is trying to bring back, quid libet).

But we all know the best thing about SEPTA is the sadly hilarious stories one accumulates as a frequent rider (many many blogs are dedicated to this topic, such as here, here, and here). I’m not talking about stories such as the one mentioned above in which a bus driver allegedly shoved a woman out of his bus causing her to break her shoulder or the perhaps too apt story of the student who went to City Council to testify about violence on SEPTA and was attacked on a SEPTA bus on his way home or the current spate of violent attacks, some ending in death, that have occurred in SEPTA stations. No, I’m talking about just straight crazy things you can only see on the public transportation system of a city that just can’t figure out what to do with itself.

I’m going to stick to the ones we can categorize under “substance abuse” mostly because one in that category happened today. For example, fairly early on in my graduate student career I was on the El going toward 69^th Street when I saw a guy doing cocaine on a seat about six feet away from me. The truly bizarre thing was that everyone around him knew precisely what he was doing and that no one thought it was weird. It was only slightly odder than the conversation I heard amongst three people sitting on the El going east coming from the meth clinic talking about strategies for staying clean (or just barely).

Today, I was riding the 34 Trolley west on my way home from the gym. I was sitting in the back and at 30^th Street, a bunch of people got on and just stopped and looked toward the back. I mean they just stopped and stood there. Being a good Philadelphian, I didn’t even turn around to see what they were looking at, but should have, because a second after I noticed all the people staring, this white college student looking type dashes off the bus and throws up in a trash can. At least, I think he made it to the trash can. I could see him throwing up but not where the vomit landed. The wonderful thing about it was that the people who got on the trolley obviously saw what was coming and waited patiently before taking their seats for the guy to rush off the trolley.

So yes, love us or leave us (sadly), we do love you back. We even get out of the way when you have serious business to take care of, and we’re pleased that you were a such a courteous Philadelphian, willing to exit the trolley to do what needed to be done.

I have to buy a car in Texas, and I’m sad to do it, if only because I’ll lose the “people-watching perk” that SEPTA so proudly advertises. But do keep riding and keep telling me your SEPTA stories and remember not to try to get off the bus too soon or you might get shoved off.

Academic Life as Post-Ivory Tower

2008-05-25T15:44:00.003-04:00

So we all know there’s this long-running story in the academy that pits those who are committed to rigor and traditional education and the praise of western civilization against those who challenge that discourse as exclusionary and marginalizing and in so doing to challenge the way in which the canon is accepted. I don’t want to have the canon conversation here, though I recommend checking out that conversation here (Dr. J’s blog). What I think is noteworthy is the swing in the pendulum in the academy from the critique of the tradition back to the argument that the politics of inclusion leads scholars to shoddy work in the service of political correctness.

An article appeared in the Chronicle of Higher Education this week that reminds us of this old problem. The gist of it is that a classics professor at Wellesley College, Mary Lefkowitz, who recently wrote a book detailing the tension between knowledge and politics (a point I will return to momentarily), attended a lecture with her husband (actually it’s not even clear if she was with her husband) by Yosef ben-Jochannan, author of Africa: Mother of Western Civilization. Ben-Jochannan claimed that Aristotle stole what we now consider his corpus from a library in Alexandria in Egypt. Lefkowitz’s husband said, not quietly, “Rubbish!” and a scandal ensued.

The scandal involved an accusation of a Jewish conspiracy against African progress and reciprocal accusations of politics parking on the steps of the academy and compromising academic freedom. You can look at the article to see more about Jewish conspiracy which frankly seems to just cloud the issue with anti-Semitism (an accusation which itself seems to prevent real conversation on the pertinent points) and I won’t consider it further here.

Here’s the thing: I think Aristotle probably didn’t steal his texts from Alexandria and the evidence does seem to support Lefkowitz on this point. But that’s not really the point here. There is something odd about supposing that the best way to overcome the serious marginalization of African thought, history and tradition that makes Africa the “dark continent,” and the repressed of western consciousness, is to win legitimacy by tracing back to Africa what is already considered legitimate by the West. I worry that such an approach still lets the West set the standard of what makes another culture worthy. We would say Africa has something to offer if we could trace what we take to be fundamental to our tradition to Africa. Doesn’t that still hegemonize western values?

This brings me back to the relation between the task of the academy and politics. Lefkowitz would want to say that it’s ben-Jochannan and Martin Bernal (author of Black Athena) whose work is politically motivated. And therein lies the rub. I won’t get into the problems of the notion of purity and keeping intellectual pursuits pure of politics, but it should be noted that such concerns, though not explicitly articulated in this article are the same ones that motivate multiple versions of racism and ethnicism. Lefkowitz’s effort to intervene in her colleague’s course is surely an example of the political investments in maintaining so-called purity. But doesn’t this get to the very heart of the problem of what intellectual work does? What does it mean to say that some work, and the argument that such work is good and true, is not at all affected by politics? Lefkowitz’s argument seems to say, I’m right because I have no investment in being right, these are just the facts.

Brendan Boyle, the author of this article and a classics professor at the University of North Carolina, calls the university’s mission “the production and dissemination of knowledge.” Yeah yeah yeah so we’ve read Foucault, we don’t believe this anymore. Anyone who has spent more than a semester in a graduate program or a public high school could tell you that academic life overflows with politics. The thing is we can’t get out of the politics, and we can’t say that there are some claims that are not political, which is just a rhetorical flourish. But that doesn’t make the academy useless nor does it make it an ivory tower that is merely self-indulgent. Every year we are treated to a diatribe on the status of higher education that usually includes a list of so called “ridiculous college courses”. Websites list such courses and most of them I’d love to take (eg. The Social Construction of Whiteness and Women, Black Marxism). A similar site lists with horror: Sex and Death, Race and Sport in African-American Life. The obviousness of the political motivations of such courses does not make it less political that American History and British Literature are generally required.

The task of academic life does seem to be to pursue the best argument and to keep going over and returning to it and showing our students how to do the same. To suppose that we can reach that end of that argument and call it quits, that we can at some point just serve up the same information over and over again, makes us not thinkers but automatons. Lefkowitz should continue to fight for the account that she believes the evidence supports. And we should keep fighting over why it matters.

Human Rights Even When They're Wrong?

2008-05-15T12:33:00.000-04:00

I’ve been resisting the blog craze for some time now. But, having now earned my terminal degree and landed a job in a far-flung red state, I can claim the authority to speak and the motivation to keep you concerned with my well-being. Though I’m not gone yet, I know, as a good Aristotelian, that people have to be habituated. So consider the next several months the habituation of my blog.

Today I think is a fitting day to launch a blog since it’s Bloggers Unite for Human Rights Day, a collaboration between Amnesty USA and BlogCatalog.com, which to my pleasant surprise is based in that very red state to which I move in less than three months. So here’s my contribution to that effort.

Now as many of you who are reading this probably know, human rights have fallen into hard times. This is not only because during 2007, at least 1,252 people were executed in 24 countries and at least 3,347 people were sentenced to death in 51 countries (see more here) or because just this week the power squabbles of countries such as Myanmar keep their leaders from allowing international aid to thousands of dying and needy persons in the wake of a natural disaster , (which pretty much everyone has noted for showcasing the hypocrisy of the Bush Administration in light of its response to Katrina) or because violence against women continues around the world, notably in Mexico and Guatemala or because the CIA is involved in torture or the United States still holds more than 250 prisoners without charges in Guantanamo Bay. Besides the further fact that such lists of human rights violations tend to read like indexes of undeveloped countries that make first-world bloggers and human-rights activists a tad self-righteous, the very concept of human rights has itself, in the last thirty years, come under much criticism.

The concept of human rights is a problem to those of us who wish to think about the world after the critique of metaphysics and the metaphysical subject because such rights seem to require some essence to which they can be appended. Once you require a right to be related to an essence, you start having to police who counts as an essence. Such policing leads us into murky territory where the very concept of essence, or the specific essence of human, serves to control those who might be candidates but just don’t quite make it by requiring of them that they look and act more like the determined essence in order to qualify and even further marginalizes those who don’t even make a claim to the essence but show up in their very denial of the right to have rights.

So this is all pretty well established as a problem by Foucault and Derrida and Agamben. But obviously this places those of us who are bothered by the violence and injustice against the unprotected in a bind. The conceptual apparatus used as a rallying cry to protect these people falls short. Yet these people still remain in serious need. I know there are those who wish to establish an “as if” humanism upon which we can attach the inalienable rights of the human. I don’t wish to put words in fellow bloggers mouths, but I think such a view might be propounded Dr. J. . On this account (for the record, this is my account of this position, not Dr. J’s, so don’t blame her), we recognize that there is not in fact an essence that defines the human, there is no givenness, or at least, there could be other ways of speaking of what it means to be human, but these are revisable, and activities more than states of being. So for example, where Aristotle says that we are human because we have logos, we would understand that not as having a potential that dictates an essence, but that we engage in the practice of organizing our pleasures and pains rather than just pursuing pleasures and pains. And we could think very broadly about what that organizing looks like. I’m very sympathetic to this view, and I like that it allows us to think of the claims of those who are excluded as themselves being evidence for their inclusion in the “human.”

Yet I worry that this account, as generous as it is, still shows that the concept of human rights depends on some central position of power that protects such rights. In fact, it seems that such a concept is historically concurrent with the rise of the nation-state: the nation-state protects human rights and the nation-state determines who qualifies for such rights. (Note that the Declaration of the Rights of Man was concurrent with the birth of the French nation). Even the way that we champion such rights with appeals to the states whom we demand to recognize these rights shows the importance of the nation-state in maintaining this concept. This element of this concept seems to me almost as pernicious as the exclusions that occur on its basis. This account shows that human rights cannot actually be protected without the state, hence, those beyond the purview of the state are precisely those who are in question and who need these rights yet have no one to appeal to for their protection.

As Hannah Arendt writes:

The Rights of Man, after all, had been defined as “inalienable” because they were supposed to be independent of all governments; but it turned out that the moment human beings lacked their own government and had to fall back upon their minimum rights, no authority was left to protect them and no institution was willing to guarantee them.

I’m pretty convinced that this language of rights needs the state, that it is a language and a concept that occurs reactively, in response to violation, and not positively, as a way of empowering (See Wendy Brown’s chapter “Rights and Losses” in States of Injury). But I see that obviously this analysis does not solve the problem that people are unprotected, orphaned, widowed, refugeed, killed without cause, raped, their homes destroyed, and this systematically. Now I will argue tooth and nail that thinking can change the world (expect to see more about that soon on this blog), but I’m not convinced that the denial of human rights, even where it might serve to weaken the power of the nation-state apparatus (which admittedly is significant, but I’m not sure if such weakening is effective for dealing with this problem if it only occurs one state at a time), has made one person’s life better. And that’s the thing. If thinking matters, then it matters too if our accounts permit and even enable passivity.

Look for a post in the coming weeks about how these injustices and human rights violations have come to seem distant and irrelevant from us, but in the meantime, I’d like to hear what people think about the critique of human rights and its effect on the problem of such violations.