Mushin-Sho

And then I saw him, another Native man, leaning against a wall near the gift shop. Well, maybe he was Asian—lots of those in Seattle. He was a small man, pale brown, with muscular arms and a soft belly. Maybe he was Mexican, which is really a kind of Indian, too, but not the kind that I needed. It’s hard to tell sometimes what people are. Even brown people guess at the identity of other brown people.—Sherman Alexie

The best reply so far can be found here. My counter argument follows. Since it hasn’t been posted by NYSun yet, I might have to trim it down and resubmit. Anyway, the whole of it follows below.

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There are several important arguments you bring forward and I would like to address them in the order you make them.

First, the Maxim gun. You are absolutely right to state that there is no obvious military advantage to producing a “false” image of one’s enemy. Indeed, as you note, such misunderstandings have created protracted conflicts, including those you mention. However, my use of the phrase “false picture” was provisional and merely took on the terms Mr. Warraq used. That is, the “false” picture is not merely distortion for the sake of making those producing it feel better, i.e. more civilized, about themselves, although that is one entailment. More important for me, and for Said, is that the proliferation of Orientalist discourses helped dehumanize the Arab world so that doing violence to the people is not doing violence to human beings as such. They are flattened to targets, obstacles preventing the spread of rational civilization proper. This is not a direct military advantage, one that helps strategize the battlefield. Dehumanization, rather, is how one gets to the battlefield in the first place and I just described one path to get there. The “false” picture is, rather, something akin to an ‘ethical’ advantage––ethics is not the appropriate word but it is the only one that comes to mind at the moment––one that oddly allows for the eschewing of ethics altogether. That is, if the enemy we are fighting is not human but more like a plague, a virus that produces barbarism, then it is our duty to fight such a force. We, in turn, are allowed to use any means necessary to fulfill this duty.

Although I allude to mass bombings and atomic weapons in my last clause, it is very important to remember this (ill)logic is not the sole property of the ‘West’. Indeed, the Rwandan genocide and its use of machetes to cut down the Tutsi “cockroaches” is a tragic reminder that dehumanization and its consequences are not so easily isolatable.

Second, the rise of Eastern economies:  While I disagree with your overall assessment of both the historical and contemporary economic landscape, you do usefully point to a huge gap in Said’s analysis, namely the lack of attention to economic forces. Said is not blind to their influence, but does subsume them into a larger argument focused on particular discursive strategies and their affects. Scholars, even those sympathetic to Said’s basic project, have often noted this flaw and a lot of important, original work has been done to think through this gap.

My disagreement, however, does not rest there. Rather, your reading of the Meiji Restoration presumes some kind of voluntaristic decision made on the part of the Japanese imperial court. The presence of weapons was less a mark of Western superiority with which to contend than, say, a case of realizing Western belligerence in the sake of promoting economic interests. Indeed, there were already places in the world that served as living lessons for those who would doubt the possibility of economic colonization; Africa and India come readily to mind. My knowledge of American relations with Japan, and Japanese history is bare so that is all I can offer at the moment.

In regards to India specifically, and the rise of “developing world” economies generally, your argument rests on a similar assumption of voluntary action. They see Western superiority and are attempting to catch up with it, having learned from Japan. Of course, choosing not to follow this lead is not really available as a choice. The density and power of the world economic system overdetermines––that is, shapes them with pressure from multiple angles––national decisions. Governments must contend with world trade, find a way compete within it, or see their citizens languish in poverty. Even attempting to compete, however, produces poverty; producing cash crops, for instance, rather than basic nutritional foods for the local population is an all too common world reality. Lastly, economic development within these nations does not necessarily mean a cultural overhaul as well. That is, most nations in the midst of this process, and India specifically, are also battling to indigenize and adapt industrial logics to their cultural situations. They are not, in other words, simply kowtowing to “Western superiority,” but negotiating world economic pressure.

Finally, Iraq. Your assessment of the Neo-Conservative position and its opposition is interesting. There is, indeed, a logic in play that they are or could be “just like Americans;” overthrow the dictator and all will be well. There is, however, another logic behind this one. The presence of the dictator is a clear sign of the Arabic backwardness, which can and must be modernized/ civilized into a democratic sensibility. Of course, this quickly forgets the ways such regimes are and have been supported by the ones who heroically topple them. Arguing that these regimes are necessary to control some inherent Arab cruelty forgets that Iraq’s national boundaries were formed by the United Kingdom after WWI. Forget these histories and, yes, Iraqis are waiting to reveal their true American core.

All of this is, of course, a counter position to the NeoCons that does not rely on the Orientalist tropes you described: Islam is not fit for democracy, it’s “different” etc. But like the gunboat diplomacy you mentioned earlier, democracy isn’t really being offered as a choice. If absolute democracy were offered, my guess is that you would see three separate states, two of which look to Islamic law for guiding principles. No, this is not a possible choice. The only choice, to use your phrasing, is a “western-style democracy.”
 

I have recieved two more replies. Here is the first, and my response follows.

How is thinking about violence, both epistemic and bodily, a utopian project? And what is the teleology of this project, or postcolonial criticism generally? 

 

My post at the New York Sun prompted a response accusing me of being an apologist for the "inherent" curelty of the Arab world. Here is my response, which was an interesitng way to start my writing for the day.

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 To argue against you, Mr. Kaltenberg, I hope you won’t mind that I quote you quoting me.

"...The argument is reductive insofar as it denies the long and continuing history of Western involvement…."——thus whining is considered to be a valid proof of not whining?

If I understand your counterargument correctly, I am contradicting myself by reproducing the very critique I am attempting to debunk. Taken out of context, this would seem to be true. However, that sentence particularly, and a major part of my argument generally, was about locating the blame on Said alone. Hundreds of years of history cannot be laid aside for the sake of one scholar’s book that is a mere 40 years old. Said did not invent imperialism, or it’s bloody fallouts; rather, he describes one self-reproducing mechanism that allows for conquest without guilt. I am not sure how remembering, and articulating, the various histories that bring us to our present moment is “whining”?  

On the subject of vocabulary and sentence shaping, I happily admit my own inadequacies, but also ask you not to use infantilizing words like “whining” to describe a heated political situation.

But returning to the argument proper: Historical amnesia is clearly not something you are in favor of either, if your invocation of “the western apologists of Stalinist purges and the American & Brit supporters of the nazi regime” is any evidence. Aside from its polemical force, a comparison between “the inherent and inexcusable cruelty” of the Arab world and systematic slaughter by Stalin or the Nazi regime is hyperbolic and inaccurate to say the least. Strangely, the use of these examples gives us an insight into a counterargument used by various Islamists, militant or not. Their argument, or my approximation of it, goes like this: “You say we are backward and you are modern, that we are lacking and need to catch up. If, however, being modern allows for the rise of concentration camps, atomic weapons, and other forms of mass violence, then perhaps we don’t want to be modern.” The argument is pertinent and one that greatly troubled the greatest “Western” minds of the early 20th century. What does it mean to be “modern”? Is there really such a thing as historical “progress,” if forward movement in time has just created more elaborate means of destruction? These are key questions “the West” must ask itself to understand why “backward” peoples continue in their “inherent and inexcusable” ways.

The opposite side, one where I sympathize with you and Mr. Warraq, recognizes in liberal democratic societies a greater distribution of civil liberties (never inherent, always battled for), and greater access to advanced medicine. I use “greater” as a qualifier because I don’t believe that these traits are inherent products of Western societies; claiming so would forget the battles fought to gain such rights.

My own position is still in the process of being formulated. I have no desire to see human rights abused, in the Arab world or otherwise, but I cannot claim to sit on an impossibly clean throne from which I can decide the innocence or guilt of others. If I apologize for anything, it is simply for not being able wholly to laud or condemn “East” or “West."

I am writing final papers right now and in the rhythm of writing. The New York Sun, unfortunately, felt a part of these drum beats as I posted the following respone to this article reagarding one of my intellectual heros, Edward Said. The one available there, unfortunately, is not formatted properly.

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Let me respond first by noting that Said’s influential book is indeed deeply flawed, and in Terry Eagleton’s apt phrasing, is a "flawed classic." The fact that it is a classic and spawned, as noted in the article, the vast field known as Postcolonial criticism is, for Mr. Warraq, a major problem. Many scholars sympathetic to Said’s project have noted most of the basic problems that Mr. Warraq points to, those of historical accuracy etc. Moreover, Postcolonial theory and criticism has moved well beyond Said’s text; the newer iterations of these projects would provide more fertile ground for thinking the contemporary situation. That is my first point.

My second point is that there is, at least in this article, a deeply flawed understanding of what Said’s argument is. "If Orientalists have produced a false picture of the Orient, Orientals, Islam, Arabs, and Arabic society… then how could this false or pseudo-knowledge have helped European imperialists to dominate three-quarters of the globe?" 

Producing a false picture is precisely how the imperial project was accomplished. That is, Said is concerned with the ways conquest is justified, or even more perversely, thought to be helpful. A part of his argument, then, is ‘Orientalizing’ the Arab world meant dehumanizing its population, casting them into particular types such as the lascivious harem female or the equally perverse despot. Such debased creatures obviously need the help of Enlightened European empires whose universal rationalism will clearly see beyond their opium-induced irrationality. This is merely a gloss of the argument, but one that I hope illustrates the ways imperialism comes to be justified as, what Said calls, "the civilizing mission." One does not need much imagination to see how such dehumanizing logics–––based on sound epistemological practices no doubt–––duplicate themselves in the genocide of Native Americans, the enslavement of Africas, et al.  Such logics, moreover, are not merely the scars of history but the present’s still bleeding wounds; the justification offered after invading Iraq, for instance, is a contemporary iteration of the ‘civilizing mission,’ namely the ‘democratizing mission.’

My final point, however, is less firm and more sympathetic to Mr. Warraq’s concerns. The question of how one avoids ethnocentrism without also collapsing into a toothless cultural relativism that remains mute to the persecution of women, homosexuals, and others, is a very serious one. Claiming, as Mr. Warraq does, that it is Said who paved the way for the Arab world to cry victim and hide cruel persecutions behind those tears is both reductive and historically inaccurate. The argument is reductive insofar as it denies the long and continuing history of Western involvement, often of the military kind, in the Arab world. More significantly, at least for Said’s case, is that a better part of the 30 year career following Orientalism was spent as an intellectual and cultural liaison. One article in particular, published in the Egyptian newspaper Al-Ahram, entitled "The Other America," admonished his readers to shatter their crude one dimensional images of America, or the West generally. In that same article, Said also describes his lifelong efforts with Arab premiers to think more complexly about the West, lest they replicate the same dehumanizing gestures he spent his lifetime critiquing.
 

A humanizing, if sentimentally written, article; a reminder of proportions

Suicide bombings often stop clocks nearby, throwing the delicate mechanisms out of balance. The minute hand freezes the moment that the bomber detonates, and cleanup crews find clocks hanging crookedly on walls hours later, with the moment of loss fixed forever on the clocks’ faces.

 

Announcing the resignation of Donald Rumsfeld following the Republican Party’s heavy poll losses in the United States mid-term elections earlier this month, George W Bush described the Defence Secretary as "a patriot who served our country with honour and distinction." Within a week of his resignation, a criminal complaint was filed against Rumsfeld and other top US officials, charging them with war crimes.

"Our clients—people who were the victims of horrific abuse and torture—have not yet seen justice," Bill Goodman, legal director of the New York- based Centre for Constitutional Rights (CCR), which represents many of the Guantanamo Bay detainees, told Al-Ahram Weekly. "The United States government has not only been unwilling to investigate and prosecute its high-ranking officials for the torture that they authorised and supervised, but it even attempted to immunise Americans from such prosecutions through the passage of the Military Commissions Act 2006."

 

Full article here 

“Nevertheless, people whose duties occasionally make them yawn may be less boring than those who do their business by inclination. The latter, unhappy types, are pushed deeper and deeper into the hustle and bustle until eventually they longer know where their head is, and the extraordinary radical boredom that might be able to reunite them with their heads remains eternally distant for them”

“If, however, one has the patience, the sort of patience specific to legitimate boredom, then one experiences a kind of bliss that is almost unearthly….Were this passion—which shimmers like a comet—to descend, were it envelop you, the others, and the world—oh, then boredom would come to an end, and everything that exists would be…”

 

I wish I could annul all citizenships, all belonging to any Nation-State whatsoever. I’ve remarked previously about my reluctance to engage or self-identify as “Indian;” at least in any way that marks me as that exclusively.

After reading this amazing article by Arundathi Roy, I remember all those small, painful, relatively insignificant but ideal crushing moments I associate with India. However, learned critical tools blunted by sharp empathy have enlarged my disassociate tastes; I want to carry the world’s violence one step further to complete violence: complete disassociation.I would love to say “disengagement” but there’s no outside to misery, deceit, jingoism, or fucking lunacy. No. However, there is the space of voluntary delusion; “there’s nothing wrong with the world…I have nothing to do with all that…in fact, don’t even tell me about any of that…”

The words are trite but the theory is pure violence. Disassociate completely. Repress absolutely. Drink. Do anything that excludes the bloody Real.

It’s noon in Mumbai (Bombay for the nostalgic)

Although I’m more partial to Hockey and the Red Wings, Detroit sporting success is always shared—even if it is underappreciated by us bandwagoners. Anyway, Ryan was remarking recently that the Tigers have a distinctly working class feel to them because anyone is able to buy tickets for $8 and go watch them on any given day. Then I read this...

During the Oakland series, Jones spoke eloquently about the recent trying times in Detroit, with massive job losses due to problems in the auto industry. The Detroit players derived some satisfaction, Jones said, from giving the team’s blue-collar fans a three-hour respite each day from weightier, real-life issues.

Leyland, predictably, got emotional after Ordonez’s homer. But he wasn’t the only one at Comerica Park to pull a Dick Vermeil.

"You can’t go anywhere in this city without Tigers fans talking about their pride in the organization and the team,’’ Rogers said. "As players, maybe we don’t understand it completely, but we surely appreciate it. This is something we’ll take with us for a long, long time.’‘

All that’s left now is to seal the deal. As far as the Tigers are concerned, it’s two celebrations down, and one to go.

 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."

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 lost the link to this article but here are three key moments I found interesting.

Science, [William James] argued, is a methodology rather than a set of ontological conclusions.

There is no complete generalization, no total point of view, no all-pervasive unity, but everywhere some residual resistance to verbalization, formulation, discursification, some genius of reality that escapes from the pressure of the logical finger, that says ‘hands off,’ and claims its privacy, and means to be left to its own life.––William James

Discarnate:  a new word to my admittedly limited and usually poorly deployed vocabulary.

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.

 

For those who are attempting to make the movement of infinite resignation, of letting [them] go, here is a quote that I found timely. Courtesy of Gwen, this is a brief excerpt from an intro to Thich Nhat Hanh and Buddhist philosophy; this article, like the quote from Said, will lay foundational principles in my Fall and Winter classes.

“The elements that make up the world are patterns of dependency and interweaving. In other words, they are relationsips. When we are fully aware, we see that there are only relationships. All relationships are patters of interaction. So they are, by definition, dynamic; they are patterns of change. There are no individual things, but only ongoing processes. These processes are made up of other, constantly changing processes. All of reality is combinations of patterns of relationships in process.”

…and a part of that process is loss…

 

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. 

An ESPN special section detailing the work of an agency called "Right to Play" in Africa; certainly worth looking through the photos/ videos and article.

Although there is plenty here to critique and deconstruct, I have chosen to suspend that impusle briefly (at least for the first look through) so that I can see the larger benefits of this projet specifically and World Cup fever generally.

Despite the lack of rigor, this fantastically interesting article can be forgiven both because it is meant for a broad audience and because it takes up so many issues that I implicitly raise in my commentary on the kinetic beauty of sports. Also, I am using this writing as a way to reenergize my cognition.

Stanford’s Hans Gumbrecht has clearly been reading my blog and stealing ideas to create his new work, In Praise of Athletic Beauty. Using Kantian aesthetic theory, which I have little knowledge of, Gumbrecht argues that beautiful sports plays “give a distinct ‘impression of purposivensess’.” However, the article’s author argues, I think rightly, that a great deal of “aesthetic clout” comes from the context of an athletic feat; the buzzer beating shot, the overtime goal and such are, of course, much more ‘pleasurable’ than any shot, any goal, and heightened all the more when done in the playoffs, Olympics or World Cup tournament.

More interestingly, and in conversation with Kristine’s post on experiencing the self, the article engages David Foster Wallace’s attempt to reconcile “the incredible banality with which athletes typically talk about [their] extraordinary abilities and accomplishments.” Wallace concludes that neither a lack of intelligence or articulation explains this phenomena, but is instead a necessary condition of an athlete’s ability. That is, precisely because they move and perform in a space outside (beside?) the intellect they are able to accomplish the extraordinary. However, this space cannot then be communicated or explained in the intellect and must needs be relegated to banal commentary, i.e. “I feel great,” “I saw the shot and took it.” Wallace’s argument can best be understood in his own succinct language; “that those who receive and act out the gift of athletic genius must, perforce, be blind and dumb about it––and not because blindness and dumbness are the price of the gift, but because they are its essence."

This is precisely the paradox of an immersive experience, or experience generally, because an athlete’s success in those tense moments is built on the ability to shut down or void the thinking, reflective, critiquing self; athletes occupy another space which is voided the moment one tries to communicate it. However, there seems to be an interesting correlation between athletic or kinetic immersion and intellectual immersion, which at its highest level, produces the moment of insight. The clarity achieved in these moments is both immersive and perfectly self-articulate, but all within an interior space-time that mutates (if not annulled) in its contact with the external. In contradistinction to intellectual immersion, kinetic or bodily ‘wholeness’ achieves perfect articulation in the external through the perfect movement/ action but must remain internally aloof. Thus, rewriting Kristine’s observations into a question of athleticism, is it possible to be both kinetically and intellectually immersed? Is it possible to experience internal self-articulate insight while experiencing a, or perhaps through, kinetic immersion that achieves external articulation in its perfect performance.

The discussion of Zizek’s article “The Subject Supposed to Loot and Rape” went fairly smoothly in both classes. I was pleased to see my students pick up on Zizek’s insightful, but rather counterintuitive, case for the racism of post Katrina New Orleans reportage; “Even if what I am saying is factually true, the motives that make me say it are false.”

More interesting, however, was the conversation following my declaration of the course’s thesis statement, also found in Zizek’s article. “Of course, we never openly admit these motives. But from time to time, they nonetheless pop up in our public space in a censored form, in the guise of denegation: Once evoked as an option, they are then immediately discarded.” I claimed that comedians, specifically those artists we are concerned with, foreground the perverse logic of prejudice and push it to an absurd max. Enacting what I called the politics of absurdity, comedy pushes us into the “blank zone that offers itself as a screen for the projection of our fears, anxieties and secret desires.” However, through its structure of address (humorous, hyperbolic, cartoon animation etc), comedy simultaneously calls attention to the fantastic logic of its representations and the stereotypes grounding them. These formal features intersect content precisely through the wide range of subject positions that are caricatured (i.e. no one is safe). By offending us through a hyperbolic representation of our lives, cultures, heritage etc., we realize that all such representations are hyperbolic and efface the infinite particularity of a given person’s experience.

However, my students rightly offered the following critiques, which I left for them to answer:

Do people in fact take shows such as South Park, Family Guy et al., as a critique of our prejudices?

Do such shows instead propagate those very prejudices?

Does comedy offer a mode of empathy? (The moment we’re offended, we realize what it is to be offended and/or offensive)

Does it offer a release valve on societal pressures, or does it exacerbate that pressure? What are the political ramifications of either option?

Many thanks to my students for stimulating these thoughts and a special thanks to the ever-helpful KFD.

Posted on Isohunt.com, my favorite torrent search engine.

"Canadian artists such as Barenaked Ladies, Avril Lavigne, Sarah McLachlan, Chantal Kreviazuk, Sum 41, Stars, Raine Maida (Our Lady Peace), Dave Bidini (Rheostatics), Billy Talent, John K. Samson (Weakerthans), Broken Social Scene, Sloan, Andrew Cash and Bob Wiseman, have formed a new Canadian Music Creators Coalition (CMCC). They are speaking out against the same entertainment industry associations such as the RIAA and CRIA, who claims to represent artist rights. Stop the piracy! Feed the artists! Apparently that’s not the case according to the CRIA’s own study. Talk about irony. 

Canadian Music Creators Coalition wrote:

1. Suing Our Fans is Destructive and Hypocritical

Artists do not want to sue music fans. The labels have been suing our fans against our will, and laws enabling these suits cannot be justified in our names. We oppose any copyright reforms that would make it easier for record companies to do this. The government should repeal provisions of the Copyright Act that allow labels to unfairly punish fans who share music for non-commercial purposes with statutory damages of $500 to $20,000 per song.

2. Digital Locks are Risky and Counterproductive

Artists do not support using digital locks to increase the labels’ control over the distribution, use and enjoyment of music or laws that prohibit circumvention of such technological measures. The government should not blindly implement decade-old treaties designed to give control to major labels and take choices away from artists and consumers. Laws should protect artists and consumers, not restrictive technologies. Consumers should be able to transfer the music they buy to other formats under a right of fair use, without having to pay twice.

3. Cultural Policy Should Support Actual Canadian Artists

The vast majority of new Canadian music is not promoted by major labels, which focus mostly on foreign artists. The government should use other policy tools to support actual Canadian artists and a thriving musical and cultural scene. The government should make a long-term commitment to grow support mechanisms like the Canada Music Fund and FACTOR, invest in music training and education, create limited tax shelters for copyright royalties, protect artists from inequalities in bargaining power and make collecting societies more transparent."

I’m knee deep in paper research yet I am still concerned about blogging, or keeping up my blog even minimally. To this end, I offer this quote from Zizek who stole my idea of a teleological temporality that emerges from a typological reading of the world, couched it in psychoanalytic terms, made it relevant to the contemporary moment and finally published it in Playboy.

I should sue that bastard…

Here is the underlying presupposition, the unknown known: Under their skin, all people desire to become Americans, and their violence against the U.S. is ultimately an act of envy and despair at their failure to achieve this, a failure caused by their racial or cultural backwardness. All that is needed is to give people a chance, to liberate them from their imposed constraints and they will join us in our ideological dream.  

Yea…that’s what I said…why aren’t I behind a playmate?

V.S. Ramachandran, an uber neuroscientist, on consciousness; link to full artilce

 I mean, if you ask anybody in my field, the underlying belief is that there are neurons and that their activity more or less explains, or corresponds to, what we mean by being conscious, being aware. Not all neural activity – there’s a lot going on in your brain which doesn’t emerge into consciousness – but a subset of this neural activity. And once you understand that, it’s a perfect one-to-one correlation. We then start asking, but what is red? You see, this firing explains when you see red and when you don’t, when you see green and when you don’t; but what is the actual sensation?

The standard answer of neuroscientists would be: that’s like asking you to explain all the properties of matter – the electrons, string theory and all that. And then suppose you ask what actually is an electron? The scientists will tell you that’s not a meaningful question. You’ll get a similar answer from any neuroscientist.

But that doesn’t mean the problem disappears. If you are a thinking, questioning human being, you always wonder about why you are here. When you talk about consciousness, it is also linked to questions like the meaning of existence – why am I here? Is it purely accidental that we are born? Is it, as King Lear said, that when we are born we cry because we have come to this great stage of fools? Of course, all the great poets, all the great philosophers, have written about this.

The only thing I will say is there have been all these revolutions in science. If you think about it, each of them has had a dehumanising impact.

First, for example, there was the Copernican revolution saying there is nothing special about this little speck of dust, which is what the earth is. That’s already humiliating – that you don’t have a privileged place in the cosmos.

Then comes the Darwinian revolution saying you’re just a hairless ape. That, again, is humiliating – that you are not the climax of creation, but are, in fact, the product of random processes of natural selection.

Then this Freudian revolution, saying you are not in charge, that your behaviour is largely governed by unconscious motives and drives.

And then the most recent thing, the DNA - that there is no vital spirit, it’s a molecule. As Watson said, there are only molecules, everything else is sociology. He was, of course, saying this tongue in cheek. And now the neuroscientist’s version – Crick’s astonishing hypothesis – that you are just a pack of neurons; that’s all a human being is. Now the question is: is that true? We don’t know yet. We have to remain agnostic. But we have to take that as far as we can. That’s the way science works.

Another interesting question is: why do we get such a thrill out of being humiliated, in being diminished in each instance?

They just found the Gospel of Judas!! Check it out here.

Although I doubt Zizek was the first one to say so, he is the most famous voice attempting to re-understand Judas as the most Christian precisely because he allowed the Christ-event to happen.

Now, we may have authentic textual proof of it.

From a NYtimes article: U.S. and India Reach Agreement on Nuclear Cooperation

Indians protested against President Bush today in Bombay.

Aijaz Rahi/Associated Press

Although I appreciate the powerful statement such mass gathering makes, there is something in this particular image that is quite disturbing to me; the complete effacement of individual presence in favor of a homogenous, reified, group identity. One can barely, if at all, decipher any humanity in this image; it might as well be a field of dandelions. They’re all the same anyway.

Admittedly, this may just be hypersensitive intellectualism coming through, a plausible claim to which I would offer the following as counter evidence.

Mr. Burns, the administration’s point man in the nuclear talks, added: “It has developed its entire nuclear program over 30 years alone because it had been isolated. So the question we faced was the following: Is it better to maintain India in isolation, or is it better to try to bring it into the international mainstream? And President Bush felt the latter.”

Isolation? Thank you dear President for bringing these bassackwards people inline with the rest of modernity.

And where the hell does this come form?

In one section of the field, a crowd gathered to burn an American flag. The crowd began beating the flaming flag. Then a young man lifted a boy named Shoaib over the fire and instructed him to urinate on it. He did, bemused by all the attention on him. He said he was in third grade.

Anit-Americanism as infantile attention seeking? The article brilliantly ends on this note that privileges America as an emigrant destination while retaining the potential ‘terrorism’ any non-western nuclear power is suspiciously capable of.

“Suppose Bush is here, said Sajid Khan, 25, a student. I will suicide bomb to Bush. If we could get a visa, we would go there and fight.”