Welcome reader (yup, you’re the only one) to a category that I have been meaning to make for a long time; Academic Jedi. The name comes from this post, which garnered favorable reviews.
My ex-teacher would often say that the steepest learning curve occurred during the first nine months of practice, which would then be followed by incremental improvements with long periods of plateau between them. I think the theory was basically true but broken by those who, like me, were passionately attentive (obsessed) with details. The more details about a posture, form, movement, stance etc., the better. This attention to the practice rewarded me with an extended learning curve, one that took years to plateau, only doing so when I had exhausted all the resources available to me. My plateau also placed me in rarified air; I trusted all of five people in the dojo for information; the rest didn’t do x,y,z correctly, why should I trust them, even if they are senior students? Of course, this whole attitude is entirely antithetical to the practice, which at its highest is a drive toward oneness. This experience is also an inversion of my academic experience thus far.
In the eyes of an experienced, productive scholar, I am an academic infant stammering sounds and bumping into various objects whose designations are yet beyond my ken. The learning curve seems too steep to plateau because ever ‘deeper’ abstractions are available, more meta-critical moves are demonstrated and each position’s counter position evolves to defeat you. Antecedents only build; on reading Kant’s third critique, I realize that the first and second critique will be useful, as will reading Leibniz, wait, just being with the Greeks. The thrill of philosophical spaces, the immersive meditative pauses of understanding, of grasping, becomes the terror of articulating, deploying, positioning, of interesting juxtapositions, readings and counter-readings.
A current seminar on Time, History and Modernity has already awakened a new meta to be paranoid about, or in academic language, a new dimension of work that must be self-reflexively accounted for. The balance, it seems to me at this moment, is between entering a deep abstract space that allows you to see your own methodological choices, your assumptions, in relation to their critiques and performing the argument in a substantive, extended analysis.
In the first week of practice I remember asking a talented senior student about a basic technique. For him, however, the questions could not be answered simply without also being dishonest. He took me aside and demonstrated a few of the variables that would come into play when deploying that technique: distancing, timing, target, flow etc. The generosity of his reply overwhelmed me, leaving me convinced that I would never be able to account for all those factors so instantaneously as he did in that moment. A few years later, I would do the same for a junior student, purposely taking him to the edge of his comprehension so that he could feel the art’s scope. Those interim years, rich with peaks and valleys, yielded nothing less than a cellular understanding.
An interesting question that I ask myself is, “Given one billion dollars, how would your day-to-day life change?” I am happy to say that little would change in my life. I would still continue on with my Ph.D, which in turn requires days dedicated to reading, researching and writing. That is, the major frame of my life is precisely what I want it to be; the tiny details (shoes for example) would change.
If this answer seems either idealistic, or what amounts to the same, delusory, I am convinced to my bones that it is true.
A much harder question, however, is one I learned from my ex-teacher: “Would you still practice if you knew you wouldn’t get any better?” Practice here refers to both martial arts and scholarship.
Goodnight
I was almost laughing, despite being adrenalized, because the muggers used such a classic script and played it like so many of the dress rehearsals at the dojo. Indeed, the gun and knife defense seminars had prepared me well for the language, the sight of a gun and the body movements. However, I was completely unprepared for the post mugging moment-of-truth.
Walking up to my apartment I reviewed the incident, realizing with a surprise that I had stayed calm enough to ask questions, gauge distance; then, I wondered if I should call the police. The fact that they took my phone momentarily annulled that question but another deeper ‘logic’ announced itself with disturbing clarity. “What’s the point?” I thought to myself. “What am I going to say? Um, yes officer it was a black male with a gun. It’ll be a useless drop in the bucket, a drop that will vanish without distinction because it would be all too similar to hundreds of other cases in Detroit.” Within a few minutes my roommate came home and insisted that I call the police, which I did.
The next day, I asked my students if my thought, my reason for not calling the police was racist. Only a few answered yes, partly, I think, because they didn’t want to accuse their just-mugged-teacher of racism. My own answer to that question, however, is a resounding “Yes!” The thought was absolutely racist, but one that demonstrates the power of ‘naturalizing narratives’ and the intersection of structural and cultural discourses.
Most broadly, I began by naturalizing Detroit and armed robbery, understanding the latter as the inevitable consequence of living here, indeed even an occasion that marks one’s official entry to ‘Detroit-ness’––a perverse loss of virginity. Criminality here takes on spatial dimensions as inherent to deindustrialized urban centers generally, and Detroit specifically. Spatial logic, however, is a deliberate political construction, as Thomas Sugrue’s text so wonderfully demonstrates. The contradictory drives of New Deal policy toward home ownership and public housing framed an intense race conflict that ultimately led to the containment of Black urban residents in specific areas. Such strategic segregation of Black citizens into dilapidated housing in turn “proved” that Blacks could not be trusted to take care of their homes, that they would ruin whatever neighborhood they entered. Racist structural policies fed cultural “scientific” (observable) proof of Black ‘moral’ inferiority, which fueled policies; no origins, no simple cause-effect relationships, only circles of political violence. Indeed, my thoughts after the mugging made much the same logical circle, relegating the incident as merely the lived observation of an already given criminality.
“The delinquent is to be distinguished from the offender by the fact that it is not so much his act as his life that is relevant in characterizing him” (Foucault 219-from the Reader). Spatializing criminality simultaneously racializes it because criminal acts-deviance-delinquency are understood more broadly as the inevitable outcome of one’s ‘biography.’ At a very crass level this can be stated as “what else will a poor black urban youth do?” Rap culture, ‘gangsterism’ and such are prominent cultural discourses, often taking the form of ‘biographies’ that themselves ascribe race and place to criminality; that these ‘biographies’ are historically situated in segregationist political practices is conveniently absent. The intersection of the cultural and structural is precisely in the biography, which is then ‘naturalized’ (and demonized) as the cause of criminality.
My initial thought, to not call the police, performed an a-historical conflation of race-space and biography, melting all three into the mugger as a ‘natural’, inevitable product.
‘’It’s unacceptable to think there’s any kind of comparison between the behavior of the United States of America and the action of Islamic extremists who kill innocent women and children to achieve an objective,’’ said Bush, growing animated as he spoke.
A direct cut and paste from a online chat I had with Aarthi regarding my being robbed a few hours earlier.
me: i’m walking home
Aarthi: ok ok
me: and in the alley behind my apartment…
the back way
Aarthi: parking lot way
me: a group of five black teenagers are heading the otehr way….yes…parking lot
Aarthi: (i kinda said it out loud…and my bro was like dude if anyone
shashi coudl have handled it…
glad you didn’t do it that way)
me: I try to fairly aware when I’m walking so I already …
hahahaha….
awesome…
so I already notice these guys …
one asks me for the time…
which is a classic "cut the distance" move…
they ask you a question to get you thinking about something so that you don’t notice that they are fast approaching..
i pause for a moment, realize that its a cut the distance move…and keep walking toward my place…saying out lout it’s 9:30…
keep walking though…
guy pulls out a gun…I stop…
I get a feeling that it’s a toy gun…but no risk taking here…
Aarthi: dude i’m on the edge of my seat
me: ...guy is smart…keeps a few feet from me so that I have no chance of doing anythign…
Aarthi: AND WOULD YOU HAVE
me: probably not considering he wasn’t asking for my life and there were 4 others around..
not financial defense…
"gimme your shit"
"You want my bag?"
"Gimme ya wallet nigga"
Aarthi: Thank god you didn’t have you laptop
me: surprisingly calm…I move to get my wallet…
Aarthi: OR did
you
me: "Hurry up"
which is a funny command becasue I was always taught to move slowly…no sudden movements right…
give him the wallet
Aarthi: of course… but they want it fast
me: "Can I at least keep my driver’s lisence? You don’t need that"
Aarthi: I WAS just gonna ask
me: Looks into the wallet…pulls out the $100 in cash….I never carry cash…but this time I had some…thank goodness…
another dude "and the cell phone too…"
"alright"
Aarthi: wait so they gave you your wallet back
me: they take it and run away…
Aarthi: without the cash
me: dude drops the wallet on teh ground after taking the cash
Aarthi: ok ok
OH my god
me: A little adrenaline rush but I’m almost laughing…
One way to experience Kant is through a deep meditative immersion that allows you to swim through the subordinate clauses, which are numerous, if of questionable importance, to be sure, but force an active reading, and endless re-reading. If the previous sentence attempted an amateur performance of his sentence structures, what follows is another performance piece I will call “InDallyMashedupKantAlley.”
“Thus although it cannot determine anything a priori with regard to IDZ_IDZ_IDZ_IDZ_IDZ_IDZ___dnaaaa dna dna dnaaaa___IDZdna_IDZdna_IDZdnaa those IDZdna (objects), IDZdna Thus although it cannot IDZdna IDZdna”I think I will submit that to Joel for the Wayne Lit Review, along with this second poem:
Heart racing
Mind racing
Spring phone
Go home
(Standing ovation)
Alternate title: Foucault, Said, Marx and I hold hands
I find myself in an interesting intellectual moment, an octagonal intersection in which every direction pushes and pulls yielding both pauses and openness. As my two classes, themselves dense intersections of various concerns, begin to overlap and fight for primacy––I hope neither will win––the text before me is opening, constantly unfolding, refusing for the clean closure of a given ‘reading’. Although his essay “The emancipation of the West Indies” first allowed for a meta awareness of this condition, the moment’s text is English Traits.
As soon as this land, thus geographically posted, got a hardy people into it, they could not help becoming the sailors and factors of the globe. From childhood, they dabbed in water, they swam like fishes, their playthings were boats. In the case of the ship-money, the judges delivered it for law, that “England being an island, the very midland shires therein are all to be accounted maritime”; and Fuller adds, “the genius even of landlocked countries driving the natives with a maritime dexterity.” As early as the conquest, it is remarked, in explanation of the wealth of England, that its merchants trade to all countries.The excerpt was chosen for its brevity, but illustrates well the numerous strands that knot themselves in this thick account. First, positing England generally and London specifically as a geographic ‘center’, despite Emerson’s own extended discussion of previous imperial capitals doing the same, evinces a naturalizing logic that intertwines, paradoxically, with a self reflexive awareness of the relativity of ‘centers.’ This naturalizing logic extends to remove agency from the ‘hardy people’ by inscribing them into a geographic determinism (“they could not help becoming sailors”) that undoes itself by requiring hardiness.
Evidence of this natural hardiness, however, does not come merely from Emerson’s own observations but is the inevitable conclusion of the historical events, invasions-migrations, given in a section just preceding the given excerpt. The present conditions (its ontology understood broadly) are the expected conclusion of a teleological narrative, which is deployed by Emerson to give him discursive authority, power based on wielding accepted knowledge. Moreover, the sea industries are transformed into being “maritime” by a juridical proclamation which, because it follows the naturalizing logic described above, allows for the smooth slippage between geographic determinism and constructed legal claims. A similar logic frames Emerson’s deployment of Fuller’s statement, which, like the previous citation, has the pressure and authority of a ‘native informant.’ That is, both Fuller and ‘the judges’ are invoked in a citationary system that lends, simultaneously, discursive authority and ‘authenticity.’ Interestingly, Said’s concept is both reinforced and troubled by Emerson’s use of these sources because they are ‘native’ to rather than travelers through the space, but ultimately Englishmen, a discursive source already accredited.
The strategic deployment of discursive authorities to uphold a naturalizing logic of geographic determinism also subsumes English commercial success in its teleological narrative. Emerson’s notes the fading of “English manners,” elegance and nobility the further he ventures from London to the industrial spaces of Manchester and Liverpool. Despite this, the given paragraph is blind to the drastic disparities between industrial, agricultural, mercantile laborers and the landed aristocracy because it sees through the violent lens of the singular ‘English wealth.’ Moreover, the laborers are also infantilized as the physically enlarged versions of the children who “dabbled in water…swam like fishes…[and whose] playthings were boats.” They are and always have been such. Given this, laboring child-men can be tied to the “ship-money” by law simply because they are not doing maritime work but are being maritime, which is simply understood as being English.
Finally, only because my energy is wearing, Emerson’s paragraph constructs a theory of time that, to misuse Derrida, is “always already.” In addition to the naturalizing discourse already analyzed, the paragraph’s form performs its theory of temporality with opening and closing sentences that privilege “the conquest” by “hardy people.” English-ness and English history began their earthly incarnation in that moment; time, like the middle of the paragraph, functions only to reveal and reinforce ever present, unchanging, unchanged English traits.
Unable to sleep because of a late coffee shot mixed with anti-histamines buzz, I began the day around 6 am and have been working since, save one small nap and a friendly lunch. Although much has been accomplished, especially in terms of reading and cognizing the trajectory of my 3010 course, the day does not feel particularly productive simply because no writing has been done. The avalanche of minutiae buried me in the shock/awe of its immediacy, leaving the more important destination cloudy in its aftermath.
My overeager side, powerfully addicted to the rush of accomplishment, urges me to consciously create an unbendable writing space. Although I have dedicated myself to writing a certain amount each day, the objective does not yet have structural support in my life/time table. Creating such a space will invoke a second major lesson, saying ‘no.’ Again, it is the minutiae that will interfere here, clouding time-space so that finishing another 50 pages of X text become more important than cultivating a disciplined perseverance in writing.
Writing is such an intimate space invested with a tremendous emotional energy that it does not yield to critique easily. Robert Aguirre’s opening talk in combination with “time management” advice demonstrated the need to override a “task finished” mentality with one that peacefully coexists with the “in progress/ draft.” The former is particularly symptomatic of my attitude toward writing, which does not allow for revision or reexamination once the first full document is produced; it is simply finished. I am striving toward the latter, to methodically, peacefully, inch toward an ever evolving document that only finds its end in a pre-established goal: ‘possible for conference’, ‘work up toward Masters’, or simply ‘cultivate intellectual ability to keep A,B,C in focus while using them to alter X theory and Y field’.
Aguirre’s main lesson for me that day, however, was that to be a scholar is to be sadistically addicted to feedback. He shared a story in which a professor’s manuscript was utterly demolished in a workshop, but her reaction was of tremendous gratitude. That scholar, in the language of this post, envisions her work as continually evolving draft, albeit one that has been in progress for over eight years. Imagining the emotional investment in such extended projects opened a space that allowed me to see the relative casualness of semester long projects; being playful and exploratory, voicing idiocy to get corrected, taking risks that drive toward the extraordinary should be constitutive of this experience. Obviously, I’m an idealist. However, it seems to me that such willingness to play calluses the spots scholars will need in order to bear the bruises of critique with gratitude.
An extended excerpt from an Chronicle of Higher Ed. article that usefully outlines and contextualizes Foucault’s contribution, while also raising the intriguing/ troubling question of the philosopher’s later neo-humanist bent.
In 1975 and 1976, Michel Foucault published two books that single-handedly reoriented scholarship in the humanities: Discipline and Punish and The History of Sexuality. Thereby, Foucault fundamentally altered the way we think about power.
For centuries, power had been associated with the negative capacity to deny or forbid. In spatial terms, it stood at the apex of a vertical axis. This view suited our modern conception of political sovereignty as a top-down phenomenon. Power reputedly consisted of a relationship between sovereign and subjects. It bespoke the capacity of rulers to censure or to control the behavior of those they ruled. That was the traditional model of power that Foucault vigorously challenged in these pathbreaking studies. As he remarked laconically: "In political thought and analysis, we still have not cut off the head of the king." By remaining beholden to an anachronistic notion of power, the human sciences, Foucault claimed, remained impervious to the distinctive modalities and flows of power in modern society, tone-deaf to the diffuse and insidious operations of "biopower": modern society’s well-nigh totalitarian capacity to institutionally regulate and subjugate individual behavior — via statistics, public-health guidelines, and conformist sexual norms — down to the most elementary, "corpuscular" level.
What would happen if we reconceived power as operating on a horizontal axis, wondered Foucault? What if the traditional vertical focus on sovereignty, governance, and law were diversionary, leading us to mistake power’s genuine tenor and scope? What if power’s defining trait were its productive rather than its negative or suppressive capacities? In that case, power’s uniqueness would lie in its ability to shape, fashion, and mold the parameters of the self, potentially down to the infinitesimal or corpuscular level. Following Descartes, we have typically been taught to conceive of the self as a locus of autonomy or freedom. But what if this autonomy were in fact illusory, concealing potent, underlying, and sophisticated mechanisms of domination?
That is the hypothesis Foucault sets forth during his later, "genealogical" phase. Just as Nietzsche, in Genealogy of Morals, tried to show that the Western ideas of good and evil derive from an ethos of weakness — specifically, from the "slave revolt" in morals against aristocratic society — Foucault, in a similar vein, seeks to demonstrate the compromised origins of the modern "subject." In his view, the illusions of autonomy conceal a deeper bondage. The so-called subject is merely the efflux of what Foucault construes as a totalizing "carceral society." From early childhood, the subject is exposed or "subjected" to what Foucault labels the "means of correct training": an all-pervasive expanse of finely honed behavioral-modification techniques that suffuse the institutional structure of civil society — schools, hospitals, the military, prisons, and so forth.
In this way, Foucault boldly upends the modern narrative of progress. What we have customarily interpreted as evidence of expanding civic freedom — that is, the triumph of rights-based liberalism — when viewed in a Foucauldian optic has in fact produced more effective mechanisms of social control. Foucault audaciously stands the standard, Enlightenment view of the relationship between insight and emancipation on its head. Knowledge, which we traditionally thought would set us free, merely enmeshes us more efficiently in the omnivorous tentacles of "biopower." The popular Foucauldian coinage "power/knowledge" suggests that the modern ideal of value-free knowing is illusory. Instead, knowledge is perennially implicated in the maintenance and reproduction of power relations. The reign of biopower is buttressed and facilitated by the scientific disciplines of criminology, medicine, public administration, and so forth. In Foucault’s view, moreover, the Enlightenment-inspired discourse of the human sciences is a prime offender. The so-called sciences of man function as the handmaidens of a nefarious "disciplinary society," furnishing it with data that serve the administrative needs of "governmentality": the Orwellian technique of turning citizens into pliable and cooperative "docile bodies." Little wonder that in The Order of Things — a manifesto of French antihumanism — Foucault unabashedly celebrates the "death of man" and implies that, in the aftermath of his disappearance, the world will be much better off.
Contra Hegel, truth does not yield "absolute knowledge." Instead, as Foucault maintains in a 1977 interview, truth must be reconceptualized "as a system of ordered procedures for the production, regulation, distribution, circulation, and operation of statements." As such, truth is "linked in a circular relation with systems of power, which produce and sustain it, and to effects of power, which it induces and which extends it." In his celebrated essay "Nietzsche, Genealogy, History," Foucault carries this analysis a step further, claiming provocatively that "all knowledge rests upon injustice. ... [The] instinct for knowledge is malicious (something murderous, opposed to the happiness of mankind)."
In The History of Sexuality, Foucault raised the alarm concerning the perils of "normalization." The notion that one should possess a normal sexual identity, he suggested, testifies to the workings of biopower. It is a mechanism of social control that reinforces conformist sexual practices and criminalizes "deviancy." In Foucault’s view, the 1960’s ethos of sexual liberation, as prophesied by Wilhelm Reich and Norman O. Brown, was merely another manifestation of normalization: Under the guise of sexual emancipation, we were instructed by "experts" to define ourselves in terms of having a positive and determinate sexual identity. Yet, as normative, all such conceptions are by definition limiting, exclusionary, and fundamentally repressive. The only way to counteract the pitfalls of "normalization," Foucault suggests (following the lead of Georges Bataille), is through an ethos of radical "transgression."
