Mushin-Sho

I stand at the crossroads of theory and practice, between a universalizable conception and its particular instantiations, between utopian hopes and tragic visions. Yes, and I arrived at this singular (albeit repeating) moment through…

…a haircut…

Ever since moving down (south) to Detroit proper a few years ago, I’ve been going to the same barber (hair stylist). I never quite know what she will do to my hair, despite the repetition of the same requests, which adds unneeded excitement to an already unstable life. Off-center, uneven, too much thinning out–––I have very thick hair–––water down my back when washing and the most irritating thing, which happened again today: dull tools. Come on! Get the scissors sharpened, oil the clippers before customers come so that you won’t accidentally spray them into solidarity with sea lions after a tanker spill–––and give them alliterative fodder for their blogs. The clippers bit today; actually, they gnawed on my neck until even she saw the need for an alcohol wipe and aloe vera.

I’m done. Fuck it. I tried, I lived with the discomfort of excessive force and recurring nightmares for haircuts, but damn it, I’m done.

Here, however, an ethical angel lands on my shoulder (just a few inches from my sensitively red neck) and reminds me of a few things. Slight discomfort and vanity, the idealistic angel says, are small prices to pay for helping a local neighborhood business stay alive. The prices shrink even further when one thinks of her (my barber’s) circumstances, knowing that she has few if any regulars whom she can rely on. I, of course, am under no delusion that I am this woman’s guardian angel–––sitting in an adjustable chair rather than on her shoulder–––nor do I want to posit (loyalty to) local endeavors as the panacea to globalization.

However, life in a post-industrial city has a significant impact on one’s politics. So, if I simply stop going to this barber, which is precisely what I am going to do, am I being disloyal? If not, how did such affective ties to a business build so that I still feel disloyal? Are such affective ties, especially when they dictate one’s purchasing, necessary for larger political projects such as revitalizing a neighborhood, a state’s economy, or the redistribution of a nation’s wealth? What are the global consequences of thinking along, and feeling within, these affective relationships?

Is being an academic conducive to generating such questions out of a bad haircut?

Bruce Robbins has an interesting insight into the ethical implications of protesting capital’s flight form a particular space, precisely the phenomena I am participating in by leaving my current barber. I paraphrase, “a job lost here is a job gained elsewhere.” True. ("and the job that was here was also a job that came from somewhere else")

So, I am literally in search of a compromise, a new barber in Detroit.

    The shock of a blinking white cursor renews itself when one steps away form daily writing practice. Thinking of it as a practice, as a draft and open space for exploration rather than the academic drive to “produce” alleviates some of the pressure; yet, there still remains the internal overachiever neurosis to form gorgeous sentences, posts and ideas. Interestingly, although unsurprisingly, writing practice has a material spatial dimension that I am, as I write this, trying to take in new directions.
    My practice of late, whether it be for this blog or other work, is to write after my evening mediation, while sitting on a soft couch, my laptop’s screen illuminating the otherwise dimly lit room. The relaxed surroundings are meant to offset the intensity of formulating and articulating the thin strand of clarity dangling between the abstractions of a critical apparatus and specific object it is reading and being read by. However, these cozy conditions aren’t quite conducive to paper writing; my couch will not easily accommodate all the books that simultaneously need to be available, nor will the dim lighting aid in the already troublesome process of decoding. That is to say, the material conditions will not allow for thought beyond the vignettes produced in this virtual space. So, in an effort to transition to conditions more in line with actual academic production, I have placed myself in my ‘study’ (which is also my tv/ movie space, my dinning room and my library) and am writing this on my desktop. However, because this is a process rather than a leap, I have kept the dim lighting. What does your writing space look like?


    A few weeks ago, I was out to lunch with Kristine and began to tell her a joke from Family Guy. As usual, I was laughing and squirming even before I finished the story; despite her distaste for the show, she always laughs only because, I think, my own enthusiasm/ delivery is comical.

“You become a 12 year old when you talk about that show” she says.

Ah-hah. Yes, I do! I become giddy, enjoying (and trying to transmit) a space of raw joy that is self-perpetuating like nothing else I’ve experienced, save depression.  However, what struck me as amazing a few days later when we met for our Kant reading group, was that Kant took me to that same space, albeit via an entirely different route. Reading a few Foucault articles today took me there again and prompted this post. Although I don’t have the energy to use Kant to critique my own experience of joy in two drastically different objects, let me offer a strange example and some commentary.

“Even from a distance, one experiences Foucault’s death at fifty-seven as an event whose untimeliness affirms the violence and mercilessness of time –– the power of facticity, which, without sense and without triumph, prevails over the painstakingly constructed meaning of each human life.” –Habermas on Foucault

    Despite the rather morbid content of the quote, the beauty of its formal construction, the language and the abstract awareness it evokes all strike me as gorgeous. The abstraction of time, death and the ultimate negation of self-creation strike me as an amazing sequence that inverts its very content. That is, despite its seeming moroseness and, at the level of content, the reduction of all endeavors to ephemeral absurdities, the craftsmanship of the sentence itself affirms human projects, of lives devoted to the perfection of self-creation. Indeed, it is this latter space that functions as a performative affirmation, a torch of violence against the inevitable and a defiance of the cognizable abstractions we know will overwhelm us. In sum, fuck off death! Foucault lives!

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.

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:


(Standing ovation)

    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.

Want to witness a magic trick?

Yay! I love magic!

Ok, calm down zippy. This is a special trick that you can actually experience in your own life and self, given of course that you are not one who refuses the existence of an essentialized stable self based on some kind of Cartesian ontolotogical…

Umm…can we start the trick please…

(murmurs something evil) Ok. So this is what you do. For three straight weeks, get up around 6:30 in the morning, complete your entire morning routine and be at the office by 9:30…

I’m a burgeoning scholar; I have no need to play by bourgeois ‘work time’ schedule.

No, listen. You do this of your own volition so that you can 1) take care of all those bureaucratic loose ends 2) have a rigorous discipline that allows you to maximum space for productivity.

All right, you may continue.

So; you establish this schedule that allows for approximately 12 solid hours of work and another 4 hours for your meditations, martial arts practice and hygienic duties. You continue this for 3 really strong productive weeks.

That sounds good…

Doesn’t it. You will begin to build momentum, perform your tasks with greater peace and concentration, be more efficient..

Oh wow, is that the magic?

No no, that’s just the start. You begin to accelerate, grow more determined, and more convinced that this semester is going to be the strongest ever..

That must be the magic!

Nope. The magic happens when the universe shoves a barrel full of thick mucus in every breathing passage you have prevents you from thinking sleeping or functioning clearly makes you feel like you’re going to choke if you lay down announces drastic changes in plans so that you have rethink projects syllabi and plans gives you tremendously exciting prospects that will require the very discipline you began to instill before the crippling snot suspended all hope which surprisingly stays alive despite the overmedicated dull hazy consciousness you are slowly normalizing as your own mode.

Uh-huh. How is that magical exactly?

Quiet you. You’re just an imaginary voice used to create a situation where I can vent my frustrations in a clever mode and avoid the always annoying voice of self-pity.

Ah, am I the imaginary or are you?

I’m Keyser Soze biatch…

The article, the blog post, and the comments section about India’s caste system.

Two article excerpts:

“There was found to be great, and at times violent, intolerance of displays of well-being, or public celebrations by Dalits. In many villages, bans operated on wedding processions on public (arrogated as upper-caste) roads. In 10 to 20 per cent villages, Dalits weren’t allowed even to wear fashionable clothes or sunglasses. They could not ride their bicycles, unfurl their umbrellas, wear chappals on public roads, smoke or stand without head bowed. Restrictions on their entry into Hindu temples averaged 64 per cent in 11 states, ranging from 47 per cent in UP to 94 per cent in Karnataka.

The research established that such restrictions endured even after conversion of Dalits to egalitarian faiths. In punjab, 41 of the 51 villages surveyed reported separate gurdwaras for Dalit Sikhs. Dalits who worshipped in gurdwaras frequented by upper-caste Jats were served in separate lines at the langar and were not permitted to prepare or serve the sacred food. In Maharashtra, despite mass conversions of the Mahars to Buddhism, Dalits were denied temple entry in 51 per cent villages. In Kerala and Andhra, there are  divisions in the church between Dalit converts and others, and discrimination even against ordained Dalit priests.”

    “Untouchable” Dalits are a horrifying reminder of the absence of a global now, of a temporality that is devoid of lived praxis. A project last semester saw me investigate the heterogeneity of global time as evidenced by the existence of pre-modern (mob) social formations that, although coexistent with global capital, are built on codes that are antithetical to it. The phenomenon of untouchability, however, has greater if more personal stakes, through its embodied practices.

    Although I was very young when I lived in India, I clearly remember both the pride and distance I felt when old men, bodies creased with years of farming labor, would call me “Dorah” or “Chinna (small)-Dorah.” Translating the word is not within my ken, but it implied a title, a class based on landownership, weighed down by a tradition of respectful reserve that I did not feel justified invoking.

    Historicizing the notion of a “global now” would probably take us to the creation of standard time and the concurrent industrialization that needed such mechanisms. However, cognizing a singular temporality that we all share has the effect of both dehistoricizing the particularity of a lived present and subsuming the temporal ruptures in the grand colonial-industrial narrative of a past-backwardness and present-enlightenment. Moreover, this progress narrative is deployed as judgment and categorization based on the lived actions, which themselves are imbedded within other narratives (religious, political, caste). Less abstractly, the prohibitions on Dalits to wear sandals, ride their bicycles, smoke, etc., are simultaneously conditioned by social narratives, the lived praxis of these narratives, and reinscribed into the “global now” to evince their backwardness and justified persecution.
    The strange injunction against wearing fashionable clothing and sunglasses is based precisely on this logic. Such cultural signifiers would begin to close the temporal gap through bodily inscription, through a lived praxis, that announced their presence as constitutive of the present. Other prohibitions would be forced to shift away from the logic of “backwardness” and place greater emphasis on the historically rooted practices of exclusion, which in turn are troubled by the absence of temporal dissonance.
    Wearing sunglasses is admittedly being politicized in this context, but is certainly not being offered as a solution to the complex and deeply imbedded insanity of caste prejudice. Rather, I am attempting to think through the bodily inscription and lived praxis of temporality, which both ruptures and responds to the “global now,” while negotiating the particular exigencies of a situation.

    The swarming mosquitoes are scattered by the ceiling fan now turned to high and spinning so vigorously that I am sure it will dislodge and decapitate me. Thickening night and mating crickets are interrupted by a group of young voices whose eyes I just begin to see. I lift the flashlight (torch) next to the door and point it outside only to hear scurrying footsteps. On the bed again, I fix my gaze to the TV and wait for my favorite tv show. The young voices approach without distracting my awareness and are suddenly at the door. Children my age, dark and dressed in soiled scraps, lean in and smile. I launch from the bed and shoo them away, surprised by how naturally I imitated my uncles’ responses to stray dogs and beggars. Twice more, I run at the door shouting threats as they dart into the adjacent field; it’s become a game and I’m enjoying it.
    Dad returns from the bathroom and has one of the children by his side. I…pause, baffled. He goes back to the door and yells for them, “Come here! Come on!” using the ‘ra’ suffix, appropriate for a Dorah talking to others.
    Two or three sit next to me on the bed, five or six are on the hard cement floor and we all watch our favorite tv show.

I was asked to submit a brief bio for the Community-based writing initiative website.  

    After chitchatting with the Buddha about Tibet, Shashi Thandra incarnated in South India and was forced to spend eight years with the postcolonial savages learning the Queen’s English. He jumped at the chance to return to Columbus’ India, America, and has spent much of his waking life there. Shashi decided not to walk at commencement after completing his B.A at Wayne State University, fearing that the Phi Beta Kappa key would knot itself in the Magna Cum Laude tassels causing him to trip before receiving his English degree (with honors). He is a humble man.
    When Gwen Gorzelsky thoroughly whopped up on Shashi during a sparring session at the martial arts school they both attended, he realized that learning to live a peaceful, mindful life is only for sissies who are not interested in the amorphous, emerging field known as Globalization Studies. Shashi’s involvement in community-based writing is based less on a desire to practice and theorize the aphorism, “Think globally, act locally,” than to take revenge on Dr. Gorzelsky through the Honor students he will be teaching and whose program he hopes to shape at the departmental level.
    Shashi believed that he unraveled the question of Being while eating chocolate and shaping his Bonsai, immediately forsook his primary scholastic interest in alterity, but lost his realization when Buddha reminded him not be a ham in public spaces.  

And my picture:

 

What will post-globalization scholarship look like and say?

“Glacial pace;” the adjective has become nebulous and politically charged in the moment of global climate change.

How can I train my cellular structure to work consistently, with great concentration for 10-12 hours at a time?

Although I am deeply wary of “great man/woman” talk, this article about Roger Federer comes after watching him win a recent tournament. Various factors, including the procrastination that partly drives this writing, allowed me to watch the final match twice, to see again the kinesthetic brilliance of a dominant athlete. I instantly became a Roger Federer fan. More than refined talent, I fell in love with Federer’s whole one court persona, which, like Pete Samprass before him, exudes a poised quietude despite the overwhelming genius of his play.

The article is written by David Foster Wallace whose name sounds eerily familiar but eludes placement. Regardless, the piece is beautifully constructed and makes great formal use of the endnotes. More importantly, however, anyone who follows my writings in this space or has talked to me for a day or two knows my experience and fascination with physical-embodied aesthetics, the particular technical artistry understood through proprioception. Wallace does an excellent job relaying, especially formally through his injections of William Caines’ story, the strange –felt- awareness we are capable but often unconscious of. Although the felt awareness, the “thought that is also felt,” he invokes through the formal structure of the article is not the same quiet lightness experienced in performance, one does gain a basic sense of our possibilities. Most interestingly, especially for those readers who also practice an art, Wallace does an excellent job describing the flattening out of Time/Space, and the easy perfection that follows, through a slowed down glimpse into a tennis stroke. My own experiences of this same flattening, in hockey, in martial arts, even in reading at times, are carved into memory as a series of flashes, of perfect movements, of cellular understandings, of an embodied thrill that is experienced and reflected in a space outside of the conscious mind. Wallace’s article activated some of those starving neurons, simultaneously reminding me of the possibilities ready in the space of concentrated immersion.

On a related tangent, I have started my first Bonsai plant. My ex-roommate had been working on Bonsai for several years with varying degrees of success. Craig’s latest, named Tegreeno, began as a living archive of his relationship with Ishita, the love of his life. I had the scary privilege of taking care of Tegreeno for a month and fell in love with the process. So, after returning from my wonderful spiritual retreat, Craig helped me begin my own Bonsai, now named Tyger (pronounced like the Winnie the Poo character) in honor of Tegreeno’s inspiration and Blake’s Tyger, Tyger.

 

As we worked to pot and shape Tyger, delicately bending hard copper wire around the fragile branches to ‘train’ growth into a particular form, it became obvious why martial artists, and Zen masters of various practices would be so enthralled in the art of Bonsai. The sensitivity and concentration required in each step of the process is balanced with foresight, the vision to see both what you desire and the potential of the living being in front of you. Whether clipping branches, wiring, dekeing a goalie, side stepping a punch, or for Federer, hitting impossible angle shots, immersive experiences offer a organic time-space conflation that carve new possibilities for a cellular proprioception beyond conscious thought.

 

Temporal play has long fascinated me, ever since watching episodes of Star Trek: The Next Generation that offered a rethinking of the space-time continuum and the epistemic modalities encompassed within it. However, I have only recently become cognizant of my own slavish adherence to linearity in my practical affairs and the potential damage this has to my ability to be a high functioning academic. The stringent, assembly line like, focus is the consequence of an immature understanding of Zen in martial arts.

The notion of focus, complete and utter concentration, was greatly emphasized in my practice. I, however, began to interpret that as an avoidance of all other tasks, projects, spaces until my object of focus had been completely finished. This initial understanding has grounded much of my day-to-day life and its larger frame.

As I write this, however, a larger emotional tide has drowned me in the realization that linearity may have also cost me a relationship. Reading one book to the end before picking up another that is also due, finishing one paper before even beginning another, and other similarly small tasks may not be the sole victims of a rigidly linear mode. This part of my life is dedicated to X, while the next phase––post doctorate to tenure––will be dedicated to Y; this leaves no room for Y to show itself in the same room X is, thus shutting the door on possibly productive cognitive tangents.
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I hit random on my hip-hop collection and stumbled on a gem that I had long ignored; Mobb Deep The Infamous, specifically “Eye for an eye (your beef is mines).”

Chorus:

As time goes by, an eye for an eye
We in this together son your beef is mines
So long as the sun shines to light up the sky
We in this together son your beef is mines

Interestingly, I heard this song just after reading “From Citizen to Volunteer: Neoliberal Governance and the Erasure of Poverty” by Susan Brin Hyatt, which makes a compelling case for the complex social relationships already functioning within impoverished communities. “That is, informal structures of reciprocity…have long flourished among the poor. Such relationships of mutuality do not arise autochthonously but have emerged in response to the exigencies posed by state policy.”

A long running trope in hip-hop is the interwoveness of federal and state policy, especially in terms of police injustice—the “Jake”—and local solidarity organized around race, class and age—the ghetto black youth. I had never thought of gangsterism as a mode of social solidarity in the same way more ‘legitimate’ neighborhood organizations and efforts are cognized. While this struck me as interesting in itself, I was also struck with a new sense of aesthetic appreciation grounded in the radical political gesture such productions manifest; radical not for the notions of resistance, but for the politics of solidarity that are both a response to and a product of government policy.
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I went out to lunch with Kristine and had the briefest of conversations about a framed photograph on the restaurant wall; a series of smoke stacks that cast a shadow modified to look like classic Greek columns.

Me: “Why is everything so didactic?”
KFD: “Because that’s bad art.”

Indeed. However, a strange tangential rumination this afternoon bore a new thought. Perhaps such didactic productions are necessary as initial forays into self-reflexive thought. My command of aesthetic forms and their politics is minimal, so bear with me. When I pursued this line, didactic as necessary, it occurred to me that we have been influenced greatly by such productions, if only in the early stages of politicization, which is precisely the space that interests me here. At age 5 or 50, it seems to me that we have gone through a moment when such productions actually bore an insight into larger conditions and our relationship to them. Now, however, when such critiques  blaring a message that has already been internalized, they become are banal, reductive clichés.

There is an uncanny pleasure in watching someone you admire fulfill your admiration, confirm their greatness and your ability to appreciate it; thus it is for me with Said.

“Texts are protean things, they are tied to circumstances and to politics large and small, they require attention and criticism. No one can take hold of everything, of course, just as no one theory can explain or account for the connection among texts and societies. But reading and writing texts are never neutral activities: there are interest, powers, passions, pleasures entailed no matter how aesthetic or entertaining the work. Media, political economy, mass institutions––in fine, the tracings of secular power and the influence of state––are part of what we call literature. And just as it is true that we cannot read literature by men without also reading literature by women—so transfigured has been the shape of literature—it is also true that we cannot deal with the literature of the periphery without attending to the literature of metropolitan centers.” –Said, Culture and Imperialism 318.

I am going to offer this quote at the beginning of every semester I teach from now on; it will be my own little pledge of allegiance, my pledge of politicization-subversion–deconstruction if you will.

At the very brink of pedagogical sanity, the loss of belief in students’ abilities, in my efforts to ‘teach’ anything, come the student comments that save me from myself. During a recent meeting, a student said that the class has politicized his worldview, giving him both an alternative narrative and a critical apparatus/ space form which to examine the world.

    Another student, a former Marine with four frontline tours in Iraq, whose presence drastically changed in-class dynamics, told me today that our class has significantly changed his perceptions about American foreign policy, the Iraq war and his roe within that frame. The student said that he often discusses ideas from our class with his military friends and (former) superiors: dehumanization, the (possible) complicity of language in that process, and (his favorite) the Derridian dictum “as soon as you have the concept of the One, you have violence” (thanks Ken).

    Complements such as these deserve more than my usual response to them; a smiling nod and “I’m glad to hear that.” Unfortunately, I am terrible at accepting emotional complements, at other human beings stating that I have/ or had an internal impact on them; the possibility is paradoxically what I live and strive to achieve but one that is impossible to face in the moment of manifestation. Complicating matters is a tiny tyrannical voice demanding spiritual perfection, complete humility, and the rejection of self-aggrandizement. Then, Thich Naht Hanh’s soothing grandfatherly voice reminds me not to do violence to the emotional upheavals but let them float on breath’s stream. He also tells me it is ok to post the complements on my blog as long as I perform the, now canonical, postmodern meta-self-reflexive gestures.

  

The ‘celebration,’ the moment comes during a period of strange collisions, departures and the anticipatory fear of/ for new life. My latest mode of self-mockery and release is to announce that I have given up hope on human beings, that I reject all human life out of hand, especially claims of sentience and educability. I only express these strange, scary thoughts to those who will laugh at me because they know these statements are entirely antithetical to my nature and work.

When a perceptive friend questioned the dismissal of all humanity, its logical fallacy, I simply stated that I am at the vanguard of existence; all experience and humanity save my own is to be thrown out like so many plagiarized papers.

The silent explosions of an inter-neuronal war ravage the essential foundations, the infrastructure of a ‘normal’ dialogue with Being, leaving only the infinitely disposable flexibility of rubble.

“..but you’re so nice though..”

Strange: this mass of exterior fleshy matter seems to have no epistemic access to the source of this voice: strangers

I have just finished reading an incredible article by Liisa H. Malkki, “Speechless Emissaries: Refugees, Humanitarianism, and Dehistoricization,” which does nothing less than point me back to the core of my scholarship, of (dare I say) my calling.

This article was brought to my attention through a network of connections but, more importantly and strangely, a day after I decided to do a project on Hotel Rwanda.

I can only give you excerpts because I have no words available to me.

“…the examination of the figure of the refugee as an object of concern and knowledge for the “international community,” and for a particular variety of humanism…The central purpose here is to examine some of the specific effects of the contemporary dehistoricizing constitution of the refugee as a singular category of humanity within the international order of things.”

“…the camp was a site of intense historicity, and to be a refugee was a historicizing and politicizing condition…”

“There was a pronounced tendency to try and fix the “real” refugee on extralegal grounds. And one key terrain where this took place was that of the visual image of the refugee, making it possible to claim that given people were not real refugees because they did not look (or conduct themselves) like real refugees. This suggests that refugees status was implicitly understood to involve a performative dimension.”

“In his or her case, wounds speak louder than words.”

“So the ideal construct, the “real refugee,” was imagined as a particular kind of person: a victim whose judgment and reason had been compromised by his or her experiences. This was a tragic, and sometimes repulsive, figure who could be deciphered and healed only by professionals, and who was opaque even (or perhaps especially) to himself or herself.”

“So, in a sense, they had to be cared for and understood obliquely, despite themselves.”

“[T]he political and moral history of displacement that most Hutu in Mishamo themselves insisted on constructing was generally rejected by their administrators as too messy, subjective, unmanageable, hysterical––as just “stories.” ”

“In this manner history tended to get leached out of the figure of the refugee, as imagined by their administrators. This active process of dehistoricization was inevitably also a project of depoliticization.”

“What emerges from this and other accounts is that the refugees were thought to be at their purest when they first arrived, and when their condition was visibly at its worst. So instead of refugee status imagined as a state of being attained gradually (as the Hutu camp refugees themselves saw it) or as a legal status that one has or has not, the administrators tended to imagine refugee status as a processual condition that was at its purest and most recognizable early in exile, and was thereafter subject to gradual adulteration over time. All this added up, in a subtle way, to the barely noticeable but nevertheless powerful constitution of the real or true refugee––an ideal figure of which any actual refugees were always imperfect instantiations.”

“The visual representations of refugees appears to have become a singularly translatable and mobile mode of knowledge about them.”

“This global visual field of often quite standardized representational practices is surprisingly important in its effects, for it is connected at many points to the de facto inability of particular refugees to represent themselves authoritatively in the inter- and transnational institutional domains where funds and resources circulate.”

“This vision of helplessness is vitally linked to the constitution of speechlessness among refugees: helpless victims need protection, need someone to speak for them. In a sense, the imagined sea of humanity assumes a similar helplessness and speechlessness.”

“One cannot help but feel horror and profound sadness, I think, in the face of such images or in the knowledge that such social circumstances do exist. But it is also possible and, indeed, useful to notice that in their overpowering philanthropic universalism, in their insistence on the secondariness and unknowability of details of specific histories and specific cultural or political contexts, such forms of representation deny the every particulars that make of people something other than anonymous bodies, merely human beings.”

“And yet the scene and the expert voice operate precisely to erase knowledge.”

“…I would like to make perfectly clear that….I am not thereby seeking to belittle the importance of the moral, ethical and political motivations that are clearly at the core of humanitarian interventions. It is necessary to state that these forms and practices of humanitarianism do not represent the best of all possible worlds…”

“It is a historicizing (and politicizing) humanism that would require us, politically and analytically, to examine our cherished notions of mankind and the human community, humanitarianism and humanitarian “crises,” human rights and international justice. For if humanism can only constitute itself on the bodies of dehistoricized, archetypal refugees and other similarly styled victims––if clinical and philanthropic modes of humanitarianism are the only options––then citizenship in this human community itself remains curiously, indecently, outside of history.”

I am moved to tears. 

me: am I really?

friend: uh…are you seriously asking me?

 me: yeah. I never thought of myself as a metrosexual

 friend: (rolls eyes) yes. the answer is yes.

 me: well, I’m not as bad as some other Indian males; they get their eyebrows done.

 friend: yea, you’re not as metro as that.

insideme: Hmm…I’m strangely offended by this.

For more fun with metrosexuality, or if you are looking to burn a few brain cells, take a look at definitions of the term here, here and here.  

 

blog: Where have you been?

me: Ummm…not sure; it was this really gray place with perpetual guilt and frustration.

otherme: Oh please! You’re just scared that your profs will wonder where their papers are if you keep the blog up.

blog: But I need attention too.

otherme: Quiet you! You’re nothing more than another avenue that draws the world-conquering perfectionism away from its needed spaces.

me: are either of you real?

otherme: are you? now mush

me; why are you so hostile?

blog: yea; you’re what’s preventing new pictures and links to be posted

otherme: That’s it! Shut this computer off and go grade papers, and for pete’s sake, quit trying to think of an clever close to this schizophrenic conversation you have going…what a weirdo…

“What’s it like?” I ask.

“Remember that Indiana Jones movie?” replies Love’s minion deceptively robed in white, “That scene where the oriental pulls that other oriental’s heart out, and it’s still beating despite being removed form the very space that allows it to function and be functional and or be useful, depending on your own terminological propensity …”

I gasp wondering how one could make such a long convoluted sentence….and at the image…

“A bit like that, except I enjoy a more nuanced extraction, namely through the nasal passageway, since that is a far more obscure method and, more importantly, because it is forced to undergo massive constriction fooling you for one, for me especially enjoyable, moment, into believing that it may have obliterated itself, but then expands again when it hits the nostrils and spills out in a glorious burst of pain and carnage made all the worse by, and this is my specialty, the cord of raw nerve that refuses to break despite the assault inevitable of coming into open contact with the outside world, inexorably leading you to question the very purpose of Being and just then…”

Whoa, I think to myself, who was this minion’s English teacher?

“At a certain point, one loses the ability to distinguish between teaching and research; the dualism is a false one. Teaching at its best is a constant process of researching materials and ideas. Shared research is teaching.” ––Gregory Semenza, Graduate Study for the 21st Century

    Although I am all for destroying false dualisms, it seems to me that the distinction between research and teaching is quite vivid in early teaching experiences, namely graduate school. Interestingly, a professor recently advised me to never put my teaching ahead of my research, saying (quite rightly) that the profession simply does not value one’s teaching nearly as much as the writing. At its best, the desire to be a good teacher is (in the professor’s words) a “good person’s problem,” because it is fueled by the desire to educate, share and make a difference in people’s lives. At worst, teaching becomes another excuse to avoid the exhausting work of research and writing. My motivation wavers between these two extremes and is always in conflict with an insecurity driven overachiever mentality, which does not allow for anything less than excellence in all endeavors/ projects. However, I have definitely begun to incorporate my own interests and areas of research into my classroom; unfortunately, that practice has left my class lacking direction. This monologue is an attempt to catalogue my own pedagogical practice, flush out the too unconscious frame and its attendant gaps.
    I can broadly categorize my scholarly interests as Globalization studies grounded in issues of alterity. The impact of this broad focus (if it can be called a focus) in my classroom is simultaneously destabilizing and invigorating. Given a broad range of interests and concerns, there is too much material to taken in, make sense of, or even cover; this, in turn, can quickly deteriorate into a lack of orientation, of specific goals, and/or a general sense of disorganization. Conversely, laying out a field of sources, issues, and concepts can also be a wonderful way to garner student investment simply because they are forced to choose and make sense of the material according to their own predilections. I would like to believe that students enjoy the freedom and want to take charge of their own education; however, I also realize that Intro Comp is not an elective and is seen, at the outset, as a hoop to jump through. The logic of this pedagogical practice is grounded in my own (ongoing) experiences as a student/scholar; I teach how I learn.
    The drive toward destroying the false dualism between teaching and research is complicated by differences in the level of commitment and ability between teachers and students. This is not an effort to create a crude hierarchy that places instructors as the talented and invested few who must somehow break through apathetic students. Rather, it is an attempt to think through the instructor/ student dynamic given certain conditions, at least as I have experienced them. Since I have already mentioned something of the tension in my class content, let me say something about specificities of the form and their connection to a difference in ability. Training in various fields has augmented a natural propensity to shift from the abstract to the specific and back again. Throughout my day, I constantly examine various situations or experiences as symptoms or effects of larger abstracted phenomena, while also observing the subtle contours and shifts that particular experience has on those same abstractions. I often do the same in my classroom. That is, I spend a great deal of class time laying out various abstract concepts or connections often leaving my students in the difficult position of seeing/ making the connection with their own lived experience.

Excuse me; my research is on the other line.
    

    For those of you who follow this blog or my life closely, I apologize to you (and myself simultaneously) for not following through on the initiative I began only a week ago. However, this lack has conspired with, and is partly due to, a week’s worth of valuable experiences including a brief excursion up north with my family to produce the following exploration on the concept of “threshold.” My hope for this writing is that it will somehow balance both an attempt to reactivate my cognition and vent.
    I have long noticed the concept of a threshold at work in my thinking and living, especially during those periods of steep decline. My general observations thus far can be summed up in a single sentence: only when I have hit my pain limit, and only then, I make changes that are definitive and long lasting. Martial arts practice began after a long period of pain during which I could not connect with any friend, or any person, and the realization that I was too much in my head––questioning Being and other trivial matters––to have any sense of the world around me. The PhD I am currently pursuing, my excision of certain people from my life, and too many other life decisions have all been shaped by periods of intense pain culminating in a final moment of rupture, an encounter with an internal threshold.
    The broadest implications of this term, it seems to me, are found in its potential usefulness to explain revolutionary projects’ successes or failures. Without de-historicizing the specifics of any particular event, could we think of these events as markers of a reached limit? That is, the various Marxist revolutions or, more locally, the American Revolution, although vastly different and deeply mired in their own historical specificity, could also be thought in terms of a threshold, a point where the present situation simply becomes unbearable. Interestingly, the threshold––by my imprecise and implicit definition––functions internally and externally while affecting the individual and the collective. Simply said, my contemporary situation causes enough irritation that I act to change it; internal pain (violence as irritation) leads to external movement (violence as rejection of the situation as is). However, this internal—external dynamic occurs at the individual and collective level. I hesitate to assign a temporality to the individual/ collective dynamic because it cannot be reduced to a simple causal model––individual enlightenment leads to action, which leads to collective enlightenment/ action. Rather, we may begin to understand this dynamic (in the spirit of Foucault) as one that is reciprocally related––individual irritation interacts with other irritated individuals, spawning both individual and collective rupture. Perhaps.
    A revolutionary project’s failure, or the lack of a project, in this model would simply be explained as insufficient irritation. That is, individually and collectively, internally and externally, people simply have not hit the threshold. Of course, this is far too easy an explanation without understanding the complex historical situatedness of any particular event that is, or could have been, a revolution. What were the particular grievances of the various groups that momentarily coalesce for revolution? How did (or didn’t) these irritations become powerful enough to hit the threshold? I would reject out of hand the notion of a universal threshold, understood as either a transhistorical entity or a singular meaning that can be applied to all peoples involved in an event. That is, because the threshold operates at the individual—internal level, the archival project must begin with the microscopic minutiae.
    Although I am currently at several thresholds––or at least the approaching them rapidly––those real-phantom inhibitors commonly known as hope, social decorum and patience are preventing needed changes.

Viva la revolucion!

    The unfortunate ephemerality of reading, especially in the context of grad school where you are constantly ingesting and (in theory) digesting, is that waiting one-day too long to write about a text will dissipate much of the impetus to write. Such is the case with my reading of Brent Edwards’ The Practice of Diaspora: Literature, Translation, and the Rise of Black Internationalism. The text is nothing short of phenomenal for a number of reasons that I can only touch on, including of course the fierce elegance and eloquence that has won Edwards my ‘man crush’. In lieu of a class presentation like summary of main methods, arguments and stakes, allow me to engage in a kind of writing exercise. I have picked out three quotes, the first of which was random but incidentally pointed to a something I was trying to say during a recent discussion group meeting; I will offer them in the order they are found in the text and extrapolate from them; this is, mind you, an intellectual and writing exercise––be kind in your reading.

“To put it another way, the contradiction is that Maran, in employing the metaphor of the “recording instrument,” thereby speaks, and speaks as a black modern voice, figuring himself even as he claims with the same gesture to be silent” (92)

    First, this is a brilliant close reading by Edwards, made possible of course by his extensive archival and translation work. More importantly, the ‘recording instrument’ metaphor is a trope often engaged in encounters with the culturally Other, especially in those encounters made possible by an “expedition” away from the metropole. This particular encounter is especially problematic in the larger historical context within which it takes place, namely the search for and practice of Black internationalism. Such a project of solidarity is, obviously, subverted by a colonialist world-view that dismantles race consciousness in favor of a hierarchy that is based at once on geography and class. That is, a colonial subject is both spatially removed from the hubs of intellectual and cultural activity, while also class-ified as exploited without the privileged (revolutionary) role of a workingman.
    More generally, the idea of “recording,” especially those private thoughts and phrases of the Other, is a prevalent and problematic trope in travel writing. I have in mind Said’s extensive and foundational critique of British travel writers who would venture out into her majesty’s empire and report back all that was already known; those savages are lucky to have us there to help civilize them. Edwards’ dismantling of the “recording” metaphor’s logic helps elucidate the false transparency with which travelers speak, a falseness that is enormously useful in locating the ‘metropole’ subject even while they ‘hide’ it. The travel narrative’s structure of address, its intended and unintended audience, the logical and cultural assumptions, and (my favorite site of interrogation) the terms used to structure their encounter with the other (e.g. savage), all play a crucial (if unintended) role in locating the metropole’s phantom subject.

“But in a complex dynamic between the craze for jazz and the desire for a feminized exoticism, shows were constructed around Baker precisely to make the point that she could represent a kind of universal feminine colonial other…..Baker’s body was the consummate “ideological artifact”….[and] served as the locus of a metonymic operation: balck, brown, and yellow bodies were all incarnated in the writhing limbs and “sculptural” gesture of Baker as interchangeable objects of colonial desire” (162).

     Here is an introduction (or re-introduction) of the metropole/ colony encounter within the metropole itself. Moreover this encounter is gendered and recorded (“incarnated”) on Baker’s body itself. Colonial literature’s propensity to gender the encounter with the Other is a well worn topic, one that finds interesting manifestation especially in the gendering of the land itself. The Americas were often portrayed as a naked (at least bare chest) woman waiting for “penetration,” a word that was often deployed to describe the process of interior land exploration. Similarly, Baker, in her metonymic role, performs this ‘nakedness’ as the colonial other ‘exposed’ or ‘unveiled,’ revealing of course what ‘we’ knew all along. That is, to return to the earlier metaphor, she ‘records’ the metropole’s (sensationalized) view of the colony and simultaneously affirms the ideological grounding of such a view through her eroticized performance. (Baker’s presence and project, of course, is far more nuanced than the rather dismissive reading I have given here)

“The most complex point in Banjo may be this suggestive double entendre (“Everybody’s Doing It”) that points both to sexuality and desire and to bodily exploitation in the modern capitalist system. “Selling black bodies” here has to do with gender and sexuality, not just race” (208).

    Appropriately, we arrive at the beginning. That is, we arrive at the primary logic driving colonial expansion, capitalism. However, this is a capitalist logic that finds myriad expression in gender, sexuality, and desire, all of which are recorded, represented and re-presented to the very system that spawns them. More clearly, the gendered erotica of land waiting to be “penetrated” is recorded and represented in literature, maps et al. These representations are re-presented to the metropole, in one form, as Baker’s body ‘sold’ as a performance whose foregrounding of the perverse metonymic colonial logic is subsumed in the desire it creates.

…too tired…

1)    Zarqawi was killed but that will do absolutely nothing to stop or slow down the “insurgency” in Iraq.

2)    Installed a window mount air conditioner in my room; it has a freaking remote control! I see in this remote (for an air conditioner that is meant for a small space) the presence of the stereotypical fat American sweating while sitting in a La-z-boy and turning the AC on full blast––using the remote of course, so that the one calorie that would have been used in getting up will not be.

3)    A brief part of my last conversation with Kristine was about her paper on Brian Massumi’s work with art and poetics that don’t force your attention on them. Instead, the piece diffuses itself into a setting and opens a space for the passive engagement of multiple senses, their intersection and ultimate role in creating a kind of embodied memory and orientation. (This is a vulgar summation of work that I am not familiar with but am recounting from KFD’s synopsis).

    Interestingly, that conversation was followed by an exploration of my music catalog, which consists of a wide range of material but mainly of downtempo electronic artists like Thievery Corporation. K’s reaction to my enthusiastic offerings was mixed, a visible struggle to take the music on its own terms as the politics of its appropriation by bourgeois hip bars and stores (Banana Republic) beat the beats into silence. Among other points, K said that her aesthetic sensibilities were simply not in line with the band’s uber-smooth style (too easily consumed) and favored more dissonant, ruptured textures.
    Her critique, although far more nuanced, articulate and sophisticated, is one most people voice when asked about my primary musical groundings; “too mellow”, “can just fade into the background,” “I could sleep/ study to this,” “This a different track? Really?” or the most insulting manifestation, “I think I heard this at Banana.” What I found interesting in her commentary and what we linked to our earlier discussion of Massumi, is the music’s ability to fade into a setting, to be a background that doesn’t necessarily call for attention even while it helps shape the space. To point to the obvious for a moment, the music dictates one’s embodied orientation in a space, the feel of it, which in turn helps regulate other codes such as dress.
    Most interesting, however, was the link between the music’s (non) call for a passive attention, a diffused awareness that privileges no single sense but an embodied orientation, and Zen. The latter, as I know it in relation to martial arts, emphasizes both an attention to the moment and what my teacher used to call “flood light consciousness.” That is, despite the metaphor, no single sense or object is privileged for the sake of another. Rather one is called to be aware and feel a given moment, a given space, so that perceptions beyond the basic senses come into one’s ken. I would assume that most have heard this, and dismiss it, in its Star Wars incarnation as Obe Wan’s sage advice to feel and use ‘the force.’ Despite my raw ignorance of Massumi’s argument’s details, let me venture two basic departures in Zen.
    First, the call to be aware of the “moment” in Zen, although an embodied attention, also has a temporal component; place your attention in the here and now. Complicating this, lest one think that Zen masters do not care about the past or the future, is the broader meta-awareness needed to be in the here and now. That is, it’s not so much about what “time” you are thinking of but rather that you recognize that you are in that cognitive space; I am thinking of the past, but am doing it (thinking) in the present moment and because that is my present activity, I must be entirely focused on thinking of the past. Here, then, (note the play on words ;—) is the second of Zen’s departures.
    In contradistinction to “flood light consciousness,” my teacher used the term “spotlight consciousness,” which for Zen means to be entirely focused on a particular. I leave “particular” purposefully vague because the object of one’s attention can range from washing dishes to questioning one’s being to being itself. (Kristine’s post on experiencing the self discusses this in more detail) To be entirely focused on a particular, to the exclusion of all else, is extremely demanding but equally rewarding. The challenge of living this, it seems to me, is the ability to recognize when either floodlight or spotlight awareness is necessary and being able to shift modes quickly.

to Be (here), or not to Be (now)

...my bed needs my body’s passive attention 

I am strangely anxious about publishing the post below simply because this is a public space that both students and colleagues have access to. Regardless, I simultaneously swallow my nervousness and foreground it here to demonstrate that I pretend not to care what you think about how insane I possibly sound in the post below.

yours in human neurotic solidarity,

srt

    I apologize to my readers who were expecting another post yesterday on the ongoing reading and project work but I failed to mention an addendum this initiative; be open to the impromptu. That is, from far too much experience with the guilt and pain attendant in any deviation from a given plan, I have decided to include the unexpected in my plans. Yesterday, although I did not write my intended post, I had a wonderfully helpful, productive and simply fun conversation with Kristine; thus, in the great Western tradition of philosophy, I blame the woman for not being faithful in my promise. But I did get to eat from the knowledge tree.

    While I am aware of my own hyper self-criticism, I notice that my writing has taken a turn for the worse. Actually, it has taken a Wile E. Coyote kind of leap into the canyon. There is a general lack of sophistication but more importantly, writing for the moment is not the aid to cognition it normally is. In lieu of brilliance, let me attempt a moment of transparency with all the idiosyncrasies and clouded insanity that make up my half articulate thoughts.

    I showed Hotel Rwanda to both my classes today, which means that I had a double dose of the film’s beautiful, utopic melancholia. The film will function as a preface for our turn toward the international generally and Africa specifically. I have also narrowed the focus of our attention to language and its role in creating the self/ other binary that implicitly grounds too much violence in the world. These two turns, toward the international and toward language, were the substance of my introduction to the film, along with a brief Wikipedia article situating the 1994 genocide. My real desire was to say unequivocally, “If you don’t shed a tear during this film, you have no soul;” a thought that, for obvious reasons, never found expression.
    The film is profoundly interesting to me for a myriad of reasons: its ability to launch me into a meta awareness of the human condition, to evoke a visceral reaction and the attendant investment from my students, and (perhaps at the intersection of the two prior feelings) its capacity to shift energetically my focus from the day-to-day minutiae to the larger telos of my scholarship. The tears, the empathy, feelings of powerlessness, admiration of human selflessness and the desire to articulate the only phrase that makes sense even as you recognize its utter banality and meaninglessness, “But they are just other human beings like you;” the film forces all this on me. I am thrown into a violent negotiation with my spirituality, attempting to understand the real-unreality of genocide, to engage a universal solidarity with the intensity of human suffering but hold it in tension with disengagement, an aloofness that dismisses it as an ultimate reality or end. I want to slap God and sit in meditation for several hours. The euphoria of seeing “the killers” gunned down by the Hutu army shocks me with my own immature humanity and my Gandhian/ Satyagrahan sensibilities scold me for it. Is that student crying? They better be.
    Last semester, when I first showed this film in a class, I had to spread the viewing over three-days because of the short class period. After each day, I would see my students hurriedly pack up their bags, leaving me alone to dismantle the equipment and wonder if the film had no affect for them. In discussions about the film, many students admitted to tearing up and explained their rapid departure as a defensive move to prevent embarrassment. The conversations were so intense that I could feel the waves of panic, disgust and epiphanies as students discussed policy decisions that must evaluate the relative worth of each human life. Although the quality of papers improved only marginally, often parroting the critiques I offered, the investment in the conversation and the vehemence with which they wrote changed drastically. Teaching the film was, and is, a centering experience that allows an incredible alignment of pedagogy, scholarship and extra-academic idealistic aims.
    
I am running out of energy; writing about these experiences is emotionally taxing.

    Let me say, however, that at the deepest state of melancholia is a profound joy that recognizes, and empathizes with, a core human experience that all have shared. In this joyous sadness is the seed of a renewed awareness of my place and role in the world, a renewed desire to be of some service. Sharing this sadness with my students, glancing through the same rusty frame onto the ever-jarring images of violent, ephemeral humanity to find the beautiful within it, is the most positive thing I can do.