Getting To

  

“Getting to” is a way of taking ahold of a feeling you want to disavow, or deny, and staying with it anyway. Despite its negativity, taking it. This formulation of negativity is somewhat counterintuitive. As D.W. Winnicott writes, “Naturally the fact that the patient was becoming conscious of the destructiveness made possible the constructive activity which appeared in the day. But it is the other way round that I want you to see just now. The constructive and creative experiences were making it possible for the child to get to the experience of her destructiveness” (121). The point of interpretation is not, as Winnicott argues, about the object, but about to capacity that is yielded to “get to” the experience of destructiveness.

This February, Todd Cronan (Against Affective Formalism, University of Minnesota Press, 2014) gave a lecture, “The Medium Has No Message: The (Non)Politics of Medium from Kandinsky to Benjamin,” which highlighted something quite the opposite: not the negativity of interpretation, of taking on an object that allows you to make an interpretation you would prefer not to, but of the positive value of interpretations to illuminate “intention.” Asked “Why Intention?”  during the Q&A, it became clear that there was an agonistic or polemical political element involved in the term. In the name of defending the humanities against the sciences (as if there weren’t a larger problem of the university within which this division sits, and which overcomes it), he identified this interpretive quest as one that was there to produce the value of humanistic thought and to return deserved attention to the human.

It’s such a problematic formulation, for many reasons, but I’d like to think a little about the problem of this “return” to intention, as a return to “interpretation,” and the consequences of this model of the “intentional” psyche, which is a kind of parallel figure of the “paranoid” reader, which Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick describes in her essay, “Paranoid Readingand Reparative Reading, Or, You’re So Paranoid You Probably Think this Essay Isabout You.” For Cronan, there seemed to be an almost scientific certainty in the idea that we are all intentional—or perhaps better, that all acts or gestures are expressive of intention—and this then allowed him to generalize the practice of reading intentionality (and making a subjective interpretation about it) across the board. The affirmative aspect of this practice—its affirmation of the idea that meaning can be uncovered in a text by a critic-reader, and this, by the alignment of form and content in a relationship in which one is a cipher of the other—is so “negligent,” to use the word that Stefano Harney and Fred Moten use in “The University and the Undercommons,” because it is not able to provide any way of thinking about the current state of the university except in terms of splitting—the splitting of the humanities and the sciences.

It’s not surprising, although the psychoanalytic register of his thought is not addressed, that splitting is the predominant psychic device to be found here, because nothing is more “intentional” than splitting, even though it is often considered a defensive or regressive (and thus involuntary) mechanism. This may be true, in varying degrees, but the logic that is instantiated by splitting, and which we are turned to read if we are reading psychoanalytically, resides in the idea that what we put onto another is destructiveness, something that Melanie Klein calls “envy.” Indeed, splitting, or projection, is a provocative way to think about the way that psychic processes inform social processes, but it’s also this just at this point in the process that Cronan’s theory gets most negligent. What he disavows is the destructiveness that his theoretical approach to intention and the relative nature of interpretations has to take up in order to perform its reparative project, of reestablishing the kernel of intention that is there to be mined.

This destructiveness, which does not belong to the projective processes, seems to predetermine what can be registered socially (and therefore read intentionally), and is, for this reason, often considered irrelevant to “political” analysis. It’s a notion of destructiveness that is fundamental to human relating not because it takes shape in a drive or because the content of aggression already or retroactively implies a feeling, or an intention, or a subject, but because it establishes the very terms for human relating in the sense that the movement from the not-me to the me and back is always a registration of the production of exteriority, and, as Winnicott finds, this production of exteriority is first a form of motility, or appetite, that only later gets marshaled into other psychic functions, such as the projective mechanisms. This is important because we are then able to think of projection not as an absolute dynamic but as a contingency, something that will get taken up by individuals in many cases but that hardly governs—and much less thinly describes—our relations of interpretation, within and without the university.

photo: Where is the Human in this Picture?

postangst*

Robert Hullot-Kentor`s essay, ``What Barbarism Is?``, published in February 2010 in The Brooklyn Rail,  moves through a reading of Adorno`s concept of barbarism, rightly, of course, undertaking to elucidate how Adorno`s use of the term implied a criticality of ``culture`` itself. One point that Hullot-Kentor does not take up, even as he identifies how this once-critical concept (barbarity) no longer has any critical purchase, is the futility that Adorno himself identifies in being at this ``last stage`` of the dialectic of barbarism and culture. Being at the `` last stage,`` for Adorno, signals the fact that culture and barbarism are indistinguishable from one another, itself a form of horizonless society. As Hullot-Kentor claims, it is this perspective to which we are returning, now that ``the interregnum of the post-war years is over.`` Designating the post-war as a period of freedom from what he terms, the ``great fear,`` Hullot-Kentor exhibits how the idea of an interregnum is used to structure the contrast between a certain kind of freedom and the urgency or necessity of our current world-historical situation. In fact, there has been no such interregnum, as Adorno himself identified when thinking about the how the resurrected culture of the postwar is itself this last stage. What emerges from Hullot-Kentor`s study is far less about the critical capacity of barbarism and what there is left for the artwork to develop in terms of the criticality that has been lost (for which the sculptural work of Richard Serra serves as exemplary), far more about this urgency, the ``great fear`` of a ``renewed`` unchangeable world. The ``anxiety`` about this world, as Hullot-Kentor acts out, can be contained by en explicit turn to the artwork; this perhaps is the most interesting and telling part of his effort to explain the philosophical and aesthetic structure of ``not knowing what we know,`` but we might also think of this as an endlessly therapeutic work--one that can identifed with a defensive strategy of containment or management (suggested by Hullot-Kentor`s admission that he returns again to the writing of five or so great authors) that founds the high-culture elevation of ``great works`` and that itself also participates in the feeling that the world is not only unchanging, but also enclosed, unified, whole... 

[*post provoked after reading a preface...]

Outcast

Photographer Jacob Holdt presents some unresolvable quandaries for ethnographic photography. Since 1970, Holdt has taken tens of thousands of photographs of extremely poor, usually African-American people. His work has been included in only one U.S. group show, at MOCA Chicago in 2005; it is apparently well-known in Europe, and recently, Steidl has published a book of his photographs with an essay by Geoff Dyer. Holdt does not characterize his work as art, instead insisting that its value is sociological and pedagogical. Instead of pursuing museum recognition and commercial publication, he has presented it extensively in lectures and archives it on his website, American Pictures.

Holdt’s work is probably not avoided, however, because it is exploitive or nonaesthetic: a lot of work is exploitive and nonaesthetic. More likely, it’s because his tirelessly simple prose fails to furnish the kind of distance, revolutionary sentiment, self-reflection, or irony that successfully conveys exploitation to market. The artist's statements are an integral part of the work, being attached to it not only through Holdt’s lectures but in texts that accompany almost every photograph and extended narratives that contextualize them. The texts pin the images to reductive “sociological” utterances, call attention to Holdt as naive wanderer from Denmark, or both: “one night after a visit to such a sharecropper, on my 10-mile walk down a dead end road to my shack, I was suddenly ‘ambushed’ by a pickup truck with headlights turned on me and guns sticking out. I managed to talk my way out of this situation, but little by little I realized that such intimidation was deeply rooted in the violent system of peonage.” The problem Holdt presents is that of someone who strives for an ethical intimacy that he does not understand is unavailable, and of what to do with the images that remain regardless.

The photography collective Exposure Project points out the glaring liabilities of Holdt’s position: “Driven by exhilaration and moralistic excitement, he sets out to shoot a couple of thousand pictures of the life and suffering of black America. This constitutes a problem in so many ways right there.” As EP observes, Holdt feeds the concept of the African-American “underclass” that was ascendant during the formative years of the project (roughly 1970-1995). The notion of the “underclass” “served to newly stigmatize poverty. It became a frighteningly effective instrument in the ‘war against the poor’ . . . mak[ing] it possible to justify their not being normal.” Images of exoticized black bodies, however, are not obstacles to commercial success or critical consideration. A provocateur could secure the passage of the same images into art-critical discourse—as actually happened when Lars von Trier ended Dogville with a montage of Holdt’s photographs, and then recast Holdt's narratives of slavelike labor in the contemporary South as Manderlay (the thesis of which reverses Holdt's). As things stand, we have to be embarrassed that Holdt’s naivete can register as more embarrassing than such exploitiveness. The whole issue of exploitation in turn can be a way of deflecting the embarrassment of confronting the existence of the people in the photographs.

Articles note that Holdt’s U.S. work reinforces Danish liberalism, and that U.S. critics’ outrage at von Trier’s use of it in Dogville, in turn, deploy von Trier’s and Holdt’s Danishness to avoid self-reflection. Wim Staat concludes, “a moral judgment about both in what appears to be the same terms cannot but result in the tu quoque reproach” of nationalistic pride (Wim Staat, “Dogville Characterized by The Grapes of Wrath: European Identity Construction through American Genre Conventions,” Framework: The Journal of Cinema and Media 48 [2007], p. 83). Holdt’s own texts assume that he was able to gain access to poor black communities partly because he was Danish and partly because he seemed so guileless. Between the two, he implies, the photographs were able to exist. As his narrative proceeds, the indestructibility of his unsolicited affection becomes more and more an issue. The narrative describes periods of internal change, self-questioning, and even self-shattering. But it does so in an unchanging tone of equanimity, and by means of a repertoire of humanist ideas that remains rigid over time: “My photographic hobby is really, when all is said and done, nothing more than an exploitation of the suffering, which will probably never come to contribute to an alleviation of it. But still I can't stop registering it, because in some way or other it must get out to the outside world. That strength I get by being together with these extreme losers, and the love I often receive from them, is what in spite of everything gives me a slender hope that my pictures will be able to speak even to society's winners.” So, the narrative recovers quickly when Holdt’s affection is declined: the time he is evicted from a bar and escorted out of the neighborhood by armed men; the man who “on the way home . . . suddenly stopped and said, ‘Hey, man, you gotta get out, understand?’"; and the “better-off black couple in Alabama” who

picked me up one day and were going to take me home, but when I showed them my pictures of the sufferings I had seen in the underclass I was let off with the words, "Don't you see anything positive in black people?" I quite simply didn't understand them then and was just as hurt as they since I felt that my photos clearly showed blacks as oppressed rather than incompetent. (“Foreword” to American Pictures)

By his own account, Holdt isn't satisfied with his project, yet his self-doubts can't penetrate to the outside of it; when he assumes that he "was just as hurt as they," he misses again his own main point. Carrying its valuable freight of recorded injustice, American Pictures becomes also an exposure of Holdt's terrible persistence. The chapter called “On Saying Yes” is the core of the simultaneously fixated and exposed quality of the work; its fantasy is that he can heal the abysses created by history by voluntarily giving all. Holdt explains the benefits of assuming “the freedom to throw yourself into the arms of every single person you meet,” detailing his enactment of this "freedom" in sexual encounters with men and women, including his self-exposure to rape. With men, Holdt “usually resign[s] [him]self to whatever happens”; with women, he writes, he realizes that he cannot accept all invitations indiscriminately without doing harm. (His strange underselling of the integrity of the male body, especially the white male body, is also a faith in its omnipotence.) For better and worse, his laconic nonmoral descriptions of violent sexual encounters in desperate environments are groundbreaking. The narrative comes to be taken up with a contest between Holdt’s supply of ego/eros and what he demands from his body. After describing a night of fending off the sexual encroachments of a homeless man in an encampment, Holdt writes:

He was one of those who are outcast among both blacks and whites. I was very sad, because I felt that I had destroyed something inside myself. I felt a deep irritation that I had not been able to give him love. In his eyes, I was a kind of big-shot and it would have made him happy if I had given myself fully. There was just something or other inside me that went "click" that night, so the whole next day I felt a deep loathing of myself. I am constantly finding many shortcomings in my relationships with people, but the worst thing is when my shortcomings hurt such people, who are already hurt and destroyed in every possible way by the society surrounding them. (“Credo”)

We can see here how it is difficult for Holdt ever to deplete the ego/eros that drives American Pictures. Reaffirmation of the project returns in the guise of self-loathing as soon as he questions--temporarily!--one of its terms (the centrality of intimacy), and "shortcomings" always means not going far enough in the same direction. Self-shattering, then, is already reincorporated. As Staat notes, von Trier’s career shows long-term interest in Holdt, whose lectures were a sensation in Denmark. Breaking the Waves and its complement, Dogville, dramatize the sacrifice of women who give themselves to rape in the name of love or social improvement. Set in Scotland and the U.S., transposed to female protagonists, von Trier’s films exhibit Holdt’s innocence/cruelty as two sides of a question about the value of openness to one’s own and others’ suffering that von Trier agrees is the question. But the beings and conditions that Holdt depicts dwarf him. His side of his relations with others is not the only side, and the mindset of the photographer is not their question, nor does it have to be ours. But then, the formalism and saleable criticality of socially minded art photography (Evans, Frank, Parks, Arbus) is not the answer. The photographic legacy from which Holdt disqualifies himself attempts to mediate inequality with technique. As we see in Holdt’s work, the impossibility is instead nearly total, as is the disaster it opens onto.

Scaling Algerias, and “what was elided or erased”

Nicholas Mirzoeff’s “’We Are All Children of Algeria’: Visuality and Countervisuality 1954-2011,” crystallizes some problems with the current rhetoric and practice of digital humanities. WAACA is a web-based project produced in Scalar, in association with the journal Vectors, as an extension of Mirzoeff’s book The Right to Look. The site figures its hyperlinks as stops along a “march,” like the 2011 demonstrations in Tunisia and Egypt or like anticolonial demonstrations during the struggle for Algerian independence. Despite Mirzoeff's disclaimers, there is an initial miscalculation of taste and ethics in the metaphor, as in other iterations of the “We are all ___” formulation that are always criticized. I don’t disagree with these criticisms, yet WAACA’s defense of metaphoricity isn’t what bothers me the most. You can’t stop a word like “Algeria” from becoming “a metonym for those processes [of independence]”; you can only hope for respect for autonomy and difference to be performed in and through its transformations. I doubt that respect is adequately performed here, but my concern is how it is pushed toward failure by the rhetoric of digital humanities' attempt to shift readers' values toward spatial performance. It's troubling that the conventions that have come to be attached to certain kinds of digital format highlight the technics of virtual object placement, asking the reader to relate to a text spatially at the expense of critique.

“Join the March! There is a march! A demonstration as they say in England, a manifestation in French. The Arabic is مسيرة. What is it? It is a means to put our bodies in space, where they are not intended to be and to make a claim.” This opening gambit establishes the idea that the hyperlinks “are” stops on a march, pointing to the analogy rather than any particular way of thinking about marching. “It is movement through space, a reclamation of space and a place where people and ideas meet. It allows us to be other than the objects of global capital.” Who says so? The substitution of the general claim for a quotation gives the impression that activists think that “movement through space” and meeting people is in itself against “global capital.” Stressing the form of “marching,” which aligns itself in turn with the sheer fact of marching, this declaration leaves aside what the march is about and who the marchers are; it makes it sound as though activists do not see themselves as objects of global capital; it acts as though objects of global capital are not capable of marching. It's fair to say that the logic of the march figure reflects what is emptiest in Occupy, but I doubt that any anticapital group, even Occupy's blandest sectors, has actually taken a stance this vacuous. In the foreground is the supporting claim, that hypermedia “is better suited to reclaiming and exploring these histories [of independence struggle] than the linear text-based narrative.”

Explanations of hypertext are saturated with praise of the format itself, as though I should waste time writing here about the virtues of sentences that follow other sentences and the democratizing effects of standardized type. The project links usefully to Eije-Liese Ahtila's video installation Where is Where? (2008), Vautier and Fanon’s film J'ai huit ans (1961), and other visual resources: that is convenient, not groundbreaking. Why should the novelty (what novelty?) of Scalar excuse an attitude of writing-for-young-adults, writing that would not elsewhere be excusable? “A full ‘read’ of this project would take some time. It's not about getting to the end, this is not a video game. It's about who you want to be, not as a consumer, but as a citizen: for we are all citizens of the International.”

The question “How is Algiers separated in time and space” is presented: “How is

Algiers

separated in time and space?”

What does this mimeticism assume about writing, visuality, and the capacities of the audience? A “How to read” page notes, “The typeface helps to ‘call out’ key ideas and sequences of ideas,” as though Scalar had invented this function of typeface. What the spacing of “Algiers” says, then, is that in this project about Algerias, “Algiers” is a KEY TERM. Who is imagined to get the point better or more viscerally or more enjoyably because of this gesture? It’s impossible that potential readers of Mirzoeff’s Duke UP book would need to be told that “Algiers” is a key term in it. Is the gesture for students who might have stumbled across the site while searching for information? If so, they are grossly underestimated. The implication is that someone who might expect the project to be like a video game (but would they really?) will read it only because it’s on the web and has links and embedded clips. There are millions of books, articles, and films on the web and we’re all in favor of that; collecting and recommending is also necessary, in fact so necessary that it happens every second of every day without anyone’s being paid for it by the NEH or needing to be instructed in how to receive the suggestions. How is it possible, amid this, to “offer . . . practical guidance” of this sort:

“You should feel free to branch off whenever you're getting bored or tired. There are some great things to watch, if you don't like reading online.”

“For those of us who grew up with the codex form of the book, [non-linear reading] can be unnatural, even disturbing. That sense that we don't quite know what to do next shows how deeply ingrained the practices of the codex have become. That is to say, we take it for granted that a book starts at the ‘front.’ It continues in a linear direction, page by page, until the ‘end’ is reached at the back.”

One moment, readers might expect the project to be like a video game; the next, it’s as though we’ve never been on the internet before and are confused by getting off the “Main Route.” No one is in these categories; the staging and condescension of the instructions are fictive. The only guideline that it would be possible not to follow is this one: “The reader trusts the openings that the form presents, without overly indulging in a hermeneutics of suspicion about what was elided or erased.” Isn’t this odd? Why is criticality the only mode excluded in the self-description of what the format is good for? If there is no actual ninety-year-old video game player in the audience, for whose satisfaction are the faux instructions issued? Who benefits? At whose expense? USC pays Vectors’ staff about $30,000 to produce a project, the equivalent of two public university Ph.D. students’ stipends for a year. A list of links would have taken ten minutes and been as serviceable and less insulting, especially in an era in which original research is not supported.

I don’t quite know what to do next, so let me turn to the “Multiple Algerias” page. What does it mean to state that despite the disillusions of independence and after the Algerian civil war, “the ‘people’ did not forget, and in 2011 they once again took to the streets when least expected to remarkable effect”? They didn’t in Algeria, which is why “people” is in quotation marks, and why we’re talking about “Algerias.” It is not offensive to suggest that some effect of the former Algerian independence movements is still happening outside Algeria: it’s offensive to suggest, through the extreme generality of "the 'people'" here, that the fact that it is happening somewhere, anywhere outside Algeria overshadows where, why, or because of whom. The page “Where is Where?” states that “Algerian” has become a metonym for “immigrant” for the French Right, as illustrated by the career itinerary of Jean Le Pen. Thus, bad and good metaphorizations of Algeria are indexed. What can meet the requirements of this situation, though, other than critical analysis and the hypotheses born of it, in addition to indexing? Whether or not critical analysis happens elsewhere (such as in Mirzoeff’s book), and whether or not it occurs in visual, textual and/or hybrid forms, in pithy aphorisms or in lengthy papers, we still must answer the question: what are we actively doing here, on this “march”? If we are just looking at links to visual materials that are interpreted elsewhere, why pretend the research is also going on now, here? I don’t say that interpretations are not in the book; I’m asking how and why the project legitimates itself as a project, as more than a collection of visual materials related to the book's arguments. How can it do so, amid a celebration of movement through space as such? The need to promote the value of the latter seems to leave the project unprepared or unwilling to draw attention to its words. For doing so would immediately take the attention off Scalar.

Thus one thing WAACA refuses to do is link to any books or articles about Algeria, or give any sense of divergent critical positions about the transformations of the Algerian revolution. (The page called “Critical Theory” names some French theorists interested in Algeria; it does not perform any criticism of or theorize about anything.) In fact, just about any “linear text-based narrative,” i.e., article or book, electronic or not, would be better suited to exploring such complexities than a project working within the self-imposed rhetorical conventions--not actual physical limitations--of Scalar/Vectors. The interest of those conventions lies in dramatizing spatial arrangement as an end in itself. Another Scalar project, Evan Bissell’s “The Knotted Line,” is described as “depicting over 50 historical moments, all connected by a flowing, interactive line.” The fifty moments are represented in paintings by Bissell, and I understand that that must have been a lot of work and no doubt of much value. Still, the work’s value is not in the fact that it performed something fifty times or that the connections are represented by a mobile virtual line. The connections are there without the line, and the question is what is said any number of times, and in the relationship of what is said and performed to what precedes it. It isn’t OK to promote digital quantitative values any more than it’s OK to explain the interest of an article by saying that it includes over fifty references. In place of criticality comes a flat statement of the value of the existence of perspectivism, the value that digital humanities is literally invested in exhibiting: “Where, then, is where? It depends where you're looking from, I suspect.” That “Algeria” should then be made an illustration of this complacent attitude is what strikes me as particularly wrong. I don’t know anything about the Algerian revolution or its scholarship, yet I know to be offended by that.

The Humanities Zone Economy

On my campus, some of us following the flailings of the EU have been unable to help seeing its structural crisis on a toy scale in institutional political economy. Humanities is composed of three large departments and a number of small ones. At the beginning of the year, as one in a series of austerity moves in the wake of the global financial crisis of 2008, the Vice Chancellor’s office released a report targeting most of the smaller units in Humanities and one in the Social Sciences for their supposedly unproductive labor. These units were said to “need attention”; in the Orwellian terminology of the administration, “attention” means an indefinite hiring and resource freeze. The units “need[ing] attention” were all whose particular mission is to study interdisciplinary methodologies, race, gender, and difference: African-American Studies, Asian-American Studies, Chicano and Latino Studies (which is in the School of Social Sciences), Comparative Literature, Culture and Theory (the graduate program of the ethnic studies units and Women’s Studies), East Asian Languages and Literatures, and Women’s Studies.

The reasoning of what we call the “Needs Attention memo” is inconsistent. Classics, History, and Philosophy don't “need attention” although their faculty-student ratios are lower than those of some units named. The methods of counting are questionable. The assumptions of value are worse than questionable. Large units' heavy use of "contingent labor" is left out of account. But beyond the empirical and moral issues, there are also structural issues--and these are affected, in parodic miniature, by the blindness ravaging the Eurozone. It is a blindness that believes its own fictions of autonomy and financial metaphysical realism in order to overlook interdependence and shared responsibility.

The “Needs Attention memo” proceeds as though there really could be separate units of production in a campus where all funds flow from central administration and where the policies of any unit are approved by centralized bureaucracies. In such a structure, inequities and inefficiencies can’t be anything other than what the campus has wanted all along. This agency is obscured when administration writes a memo to itself, surveying the scene and saying not a word about its role in sustaining it. The function of the memo is to turn the longstanding grievances of the units--their lack of resources and hence their small size--into their faults. No small unit stays small by its own design. “Majors” aren’t apples that you gather in the state of nature. Majors reflect the university’s academic infrastructure: they are channeled into departmental pools by requirements, crosslisting and add-drop policies, undergraduate counseling, institutional conventions, local cultural norms, and large courses. They are held in place by the pressures of time and tuition. The main paths are the well-worn ones already supported by campus resources; if the course you are teaching hasn’t been large before, you can’t even book a large room to hold it in. Saying all this would be speaking the obvious to power, but the obvious is erased by the rhetoric of the “student credit hour,” the coin of the realm. By its logic, departments simply have resources commensurate with the student credit hours they buy them with, and they earn student credit hours through labor. Departments are poor when they don’t produce enough of this currency. But labor, like its rewards, doesn’t grow on trees. It grows in societies amid political forces that regulate it. Within the Humanities, one instructor’s student credit hour is another’s empty seat. Thriving in the eyes of administration can be no more satisfying than the message that a chair of English at Michigan sent the department there: “There’s no problem, because we’ve crunched the numbers and we’re a cash cow!” When the common project of the Humanities becomes drawing the student credit hour from “outside,” from the Social Sciences, we are simply renewing the fiction of national autonomy: the fantasy that the crisis can ideally be transferred or contained elsewhere. Our crisis is not a crisis of credit, in that no one ever extended the Humanities as a whole any credit during the bubble. It's a crisis of the desolating aftermath alone. The fact that we did not receive the credit, however, does not protect us from the effects of its crisis. We shared in the largesse for one day and that was on the day of its death.

There’s a painfully funny game we've been playing in which someone proposes which department is like which Euro country. (English is Germany. Comp Lit is Italy. Classics is Monaco. Lecturers are guest workers from Romania. Etc.) But are there serious connections, too, between the persistence of national literatures and the theories of sovereignty that ordered Old Europe, and between academic interdisciplinarity and a dangerously labile theory of global interdependency? Aren’t we, like the Euro Zone, caught between a liberal model in which capital seemed to work in the interest of the nation-state and a new model of mythologized global flow, where either model can be invoked against us as convenient? Isn’t it as though our comical institutional allegories were trying to articulate the macro political and economic logics that have passed before our eyes, as though we were murmuring in our sleep about poorly understood scenes from the daylight world? Years ago the English department literally argued from the “right of a sovereign department” to control its own destiny in order to remove from its requirements a couple of courses that were substitutable with certain “needs attention” courses. (Meanwhile, the same department chair said that he disliked the fact that every department had a vote on the Executive Committee because it meant “you have to deal with Rhode Island.”) What does it mean when the university replays logics we have described in our own books, about for example the critique of nationalism, yet no one acts institutionally on the knowledge they contain? In a truly late-Foucauldian sense, the freeze on hiring to replace attrition exposes the vulnerable units to the elements and lets them die. Dismantling or combining only the small units--a vision that no one claims, although it is the inevitable outcome of a freeze--forces them to bear the cost of restructuring for all. Serious restructuring for stability would instead mean redressing existing imbalances--reconfiguring the underlying infrastructure to support all units. Instead of talk of political centralization, which only means strengthening the political power of those who have economic bulk, there would be systemic analysis of the ways in which the “architectural design” of the Humanities Zone is built to fail (Mustafa Kutlay, “Stopping 'Blame Game', Revealing the Euro Zone's Design Faults: 'Complex Interdependence’ Within the Nation-State Framework,” Review of International Law and Politics 7 [2011], 87-111, p. 89).

Contemplating the problem from the perspective of stability, like this, is to call for the replacement of neoliberalism by socialism. It’s the position respectably presented by mainstream students, but no other groups within the university. And there is no Mario Draghi to find a clever way to recapitalize us, however temporarily (and however possible that might actually be). At a time like this radicals--again, mostly students, a different group of students--can feel the fascination and potential of catastrophe. It isn’t hard to imagine each flimsy firewall crumbling: the ones between temporary and permanent labor, between units, schools, and campuses, between the university and its outside, between city, county, and state, at the level of states . . . .

The analogy between figurative campus nationalism and actual nationalism is probably fanciful. The magnetism of the analogy is itself a symptom of the stress of the times. Still, can we, as we watch and hold our breath, ignore the other fact that the Euro crisis illumines, the fact that fascism is also already present, waiting among us for the collapse?

common knowledge

Despite being raised repeatedly (and in an articulate and pointed manner), the question of how so-called superfluous populations fit into the logic of cognitive capitalism went unanswered in the q&a of a talk given recently by Gigi Reggero in introduction of his new book, The Production of Living Knowledge: The Crisis of the University and the Transformation of Labor in Europe and North America  (Temple UP 2011). I would like to dwell on some of the implications of the impossibility of answering this question, because I think that although several answers were given, by Reggero and others, in response, the point of these questions remains obscured by the answers given (however satisfying these answers were). ``Cognitive capitalism`` is Gigi Roggero`s term for what in other arenas has been called the post-Fordist mode of production, referring more generally to the production of knowledge within the capitalist system, and thus to the mode of production that marked the last three decades of the twentieth century.

So the question, as it was initially asked, was about whether, given that there is increased important of categories such as superfluous or surplus populations, the term ``proletariat`` was at all useful as a concept. This was followed up by a question about whether the system that was being proposed could support an idea of the common, when there are so clearly groups of people that fall outside of terms of the common developed in the project (the example was given of the Foxconn suicides). And finally, this was followed up by a question about where material production was in the discussion of knowledge production (the example phrased here as ``where are the miners?``). The questions were kind of refuted, for example, in what was most interesting to me, as a kind of opposition between material and knowledge production, and although it was eventually agreed upon by some that there is a differentiation to be made between classes in terms of the way that labor enters into the capitalist system, based on a distinction between whether or not your labor can be objectified (yes, in the case of material, no in the case of non-material (knowledge) and then off the table in the case of those who do not enter the so-called workforce). For those there and involved in the discussion, the point seemed to be about class composition vs. the common (in which, as Roggero argues, the distinction does not pertain).

As in other discussions that posit a common subject, or the common as subject, this question is actually an extension of a more fundamental assumption about the way that the individual figures as a ``problem`` for Marxist discourse. My observation is that this is related to the way in which the limit of the common is thinking about surplus populations. As Roggero was careful to explain, self-organization was a problematic term, even as it described forms of organizing the common that are production. Its problematic nature arises from the use of the term ``self,`` which, Roggero explained, employs the rhetoric of neoliberalization. It brought to mind a phrase that I had recently thought about--the idea of debt being a ``collective phenomenon suffered individually,`` in which the individual remains a really central category through which to think about forms of subjectivity, but also about how the experience of debt can be turned around. It seemed to me that Roggero`s argument, too, seemed to assume that the project of refusing  the ``moral regime of financial capital`` was the single most important cornerstone of a political anti-capital project. Hence, the return to seeing the very mention of the ``self`` as a problem.  And it seemed that the intolerance of some of the individuals in the room of the very idea of material production outside in opposition to knowledge production was really related to this situation.

What I am getting at is the distinction between ``collective phenomenon suffered individually`` and ``collective phenomenon suffered collectively.`` It seems that the questions that could not be answered were all about how we can think about ``collective phenomenon suffered collectively.`` In other words, about individuals who do not experience the moral regime of financial capital as their most acute form of suffering. In contrast to the way that this discussion seemed to take place, that is, from the perspective of the system (of capital as totality), this difference and tension articulates not only the continuities and discontinuities within capitalism, but also proposes that qualitative differences in suffering can determine the very terms in which this suffering is described.

To return to within the system, to the common, to everything being ``inside,`` internalized, interiorized, integrated, anticipated--to the idea that everyone is included, to the beyond public/private--seems to be this kind of ontological hallucination whose blinding insight misses the very weight of the examples that are proposed. In not being able to think about the problem of the individual, expect as an instance of neoliberal rhetoric, for example, the common is not able to articulate any real idea about a morality that would defy the moral regime of financial capital, or to think as profoundly about the production of morality as it thinks about the production of surplus value. The apparent surpassing of the distinction between the public and the private is one of the more severe consequences, since it does away with the potential for a notion of the private lives of individuals that are not touched by the market, and with the possibility of individuals being able to conceive of the potential of their own radical activity. This seems relevant to ideas developed in ``Before the Revolution`` about the function of ``concrete possibility`` in radical thought that posits this as an alternative to having constructed the reality of the centrist liberal capitalist system, but this would require more working out.  Even if this subjective experence is only a illusion, it seems that it is one of the most important ones to maintain. Even though ideology acts here, even though it can, it seems, in the end, that this is not the place of mystification, even though it is the place of illusion.  

preference, debt, and the individual

In the past year, as talk of weather and revolution swirls, debt has come to be one of the defining terms, one of the things that everyone is talking about. As Amanda Armstrong describes in her essay ``insolvent futures/bonds of struggle`` in the Reclamations issue Generation of Debt: University Default and the Undoing of Campus Life, ``debt is a collective phenomenon suffered individually`` (5), and it is to this collective individuality that I would like to turn my attention. In his post, Debt Collectors: the Economics, Politics and Morality of Debt, Jason Read, citing this line, describes how the most pressing task of organizing around debt is to do away with the residue of ``the responsible and isolated subject.`` Citing Maurizio Lazzarato`s writing on debt, Read  describes social ideas of collective morality remain (literally) at the heart of the subject under debt. In her post, Return of the Living Debt Sara Nelson takes up the idea that the politics of debt refusal involves understanding how debt structures the infinity of social relations, including the ``production of subjectivity.`` These writings importantly address ideas about how to organize and and take action, and in attempting to think about how debt as a particular and weighty instance of a ``collective phenomenon suffered individually,`` I`d like address what is perhaps another aspect--just how it is that this form of individuation can be thought. For his part, Read discusses how the morality of debt leads directly to the two primary forms of depoliticized individuation in the consumer (whose choices are writ in the logic of the market) and the citizen (whose ideas are based on the false neutrality of the state and its attendant concepts of equality and liberty). I`d like to propose that individuation, and in particular, the individual who suffers, as Armstrong describes, a ``collective phenomenon,`` can be thought through the idea of preference.


Preference, which perhaps immediately calls to mind models of rational and consumer choice, refers to both the qualitative and quantitative aspects of liking (and wanting). From the latin magis volo (malle), preference involves ``wanting more,`` adding to the faculty of the will the additional idea that wanting is also comparative, a means of degree. As Ann Smock describes in ``Quiet,`` an essay on Bartleby, preference (Bartleby`s infamous ``I would prefer not to``) refers not just to desire or to will, but to the repayment of debt, as Smock describes, as when one is called ``a man of preferences`` (71). Preference in this sense involves the choice of a debtor to pay whom he prefers first, or at all. Smock writes, “But if to prefer means to incline toward one thing rather than another—forexample, toward quietness rather than loquacity—it also means to pay one amonga number of creditors before, or even at the exclusion of, all others.Preference means the act of so quitting a particular debt first, or the rightto receive what is owed to you before any other creditor does.” What Smock highlights is preference’s double meaning a choice amongchoices (an inclination) and a choice over choices (a discrimination). And while most theories of preference and choice focus on the former, that is, on the idea that preference involves the selection of one thing from a set of many, this alternative model seems to suggest that dispensing with preference altogether, like dispensing with the individual, is as much a part of the problem as it seems to be a potential solution.

In her writing on preference, Hannah Arendt also enacts these two versions of preference, proairesis, which she associates with the liberum arbitrium, or free choice, and malle, as I noted above, which she uses to describe the capacity of an individual to make a private or individual interest matter in a collective, or political sense. The unfavorable view of Arendt for thinking about radical politics is perhaps based on what some see as her assumption of a liberal subject, but as we can see once we get into her writing, the subject as she understands it hardly resembles that problematic isolated and responsible individual that remains the object of political organizing. In one of the final chapters of the section ``Willing,`` in The Life of the Mind, which also contains her explication of preference as an early form of the will, Arendt describes the conflict involved in taking the will as a model for thinking about human activity, which is that it is always in the minds of philosophers rather than in ``men of action`` that it is thought. But rather than rejecting the findings of the philosophers, Arendt understands the complexity of this contradiction in terms of the ``I,`` that purported liberal subject who also inhabits the position of being primarily a spectator, but of having the desires, intentions, and indeed activities of actors.

And so Arendt writes about the individual, about the withdrawal from the world that constitutes thinking, and about the individuation:

Just as thinking prepares the self for the role of the spectator, willing fashions it into an ``enduring I`` that directs all particular acts of volition. It creates the self`s character and therefore was sometimes understood as the principium individuationis, the source of the person`s specific identity. / Yet it is precisely this individuation brought about by the Will that breeds new and serious trouble for the notion of freedom. (195)

What Arendt points to here is the illusive, and in other contexts, deluded nature of the ``enduring I`` and the irresistibility of this illusion of the individual as subject. For Arendt, the individuation is the result of a process in which the roles of spectator and actor are confused, and one thinks oneself to be acting as an actor, forgetting--momentarily, permanently, temporarily--that he is also a spectator. This point is one that David Graeber makes as well in his book Debt: The First 5000 Years, when he describes how we persist in thinking of ourselves as ``both master and slave simultaneously,`` which is the paradox that Arendt highlights in Nietzsche`s understanding of the will--a paradox that results in this subjective illusion. Graeber writes,

Just as lawyers have spent a thousand years trying to make sense of Roman property concepts, so have philosophers spent centuries trying to understand how it could be possible for us to have a relation of dominion over ourselves. The most popular solution--to say that each of us has something called a ``mind`` and that this is completely separate from something else, which we can call ``the body,`` and that the first thing holds natural dominion over the second--flies in the face of just about everything we now know about cognitive science. It`s obviously untrue, but we continue to hold onto it anyway, for the simple reason that none of our everyday assumptions about property, law, and freedom would make any sense without it. (207)

Graeber indicates that retaining such illusions about selfhood, and perhaps more specifically, about philosophical thought, serves only to bolster the normative paradigm of debt morality. In doing so, however, he importantly points out that the persistence of this untruth functions in ways that exceed the reproduction of society, and this gets at Arendt`s questions about how and to what extent individuals find it either ``necessary`` or irresistible to hold on to the production of this illusion. Arendt`s idea that individuation presents potential problems for freedom points to the exchange of freedom for necessity that she understands as a danger for the revolutionary project, and that she sees as being one of the key problems in Marx`s concept of revolution, which argues for the essence of economic necessity and for inevitability of history. I think it is really important to locate Arendt`s criticism in this double notion of necessity, and to think about how such necessity becomes redeployed in revolutionary and counter-revolutionary ways. Preference intervenes directly in necessity, because it involves the capacity to discriminate and to make discriminations about things that are seen to fall outside of our ability to inflect--such as truth, social norms, beauty.

Arendt`s idea about how collective phenomena are suffered individually thus proposes to invert the relation that most writings on debt take to be primary--that is, that the individual needs to be ``heavily worked on`` (and I take this phrase from comments at a recent conference I attended about how Arendt`s ``liberal model`` needs to be heavily worked). Arendt writes, to this end, ``In other words, political freedom is possible only in the sphere of human plurality, and on the premise that this sphere is not simply an extension of the dual I-and-myself to a plural We. Action, in which a We is always engaged in changing our common world, stands in the sharpest possible opposition to the solitary business of thought, which operates in a dialogue between me and myself`` (200). Far from assuming the model of a liberal subject, Arendt describes the limit at which individually felt experiences meet our so-called inescapable and ``real`` experience of each other and one another in the society.

Ultimately, Arendt’s idea that there is a lot to lose in incrementally surrendering freedom to necessity is related to her perception about the consequences of mistaking these choices as criterion for the so-called endpoint of revolution. Preference, which I`ve called malle, magis volo (wanting more), defines itself against ideas about a choice between options (liberum arbitrium) as a choice of means, but not ends. As malle, or magis volo, it initiates the more radical activity of preferring-as-discrimination: the ability to choose, or “prefer,” the interests that inform this choice over and against ideas commonly held in society. Preference is then literally the choice before a choice (as indicated by the German “Vorliebe,” and by the Greek term Arendt takes up, “proairesis”), something like the middle ground between the a priori and the prior, and as a model of this disjuncture, it points to how it is the misperception of these choices as criteria for action that threatens the freedom of society and that, in moments of unfreedom, the artwork functions to protect.

the life of the mind

In her essay, "The Financialization of Student Life: Five Propositions on Student Debt," (Polygraph 21), Morgan Adamson describes how the student-in-debt is not only a victim of the current practices of the global financial system, practices which perhaps for a while (or still) seem to function at a remove from the abstractions of knowledge produced within the university, but how the student-in-debt is a counterrevolutionary figure. The theoretical insight of this description lies primarily in the construction of the student as a commodity or service from which surplus value can be derived. Adamson writes, "Student debt promises that the energy formed in the life of the student will be channeled into the production of surplus value. It is truly a revolution in reverse in that it speculates on, and thus frames, not only the present direction of a student's intellectual activity, but also the direction towards which future efforts will be channeled." The precision and incisiveness of this statement is the basis of understanding Adamson's larger argument against liberal understandings of student debt as a problem of the dismantling of the welfare state or of the corrupt practices of creditors. Debt is not just about the conditions of financial constraint that post-students must act under, but about the fact that the revolutionary potential of the student, "the energy formed in the life of the student," is transformed, or contracted, to the banks (p. 5). There are sub-theses here about the nature of this servitude, the way that human capital is contracted and invested in, and the clear contrast between infinite debt and the "form of life of which financial debt is only a symptom." This is also a discussion which holds when debt is construed with its double meaning in German, as Schuld, both "debt" and "guilt," and thus the notion of civilian guilt is here concretized. As Adamson notes, this form of life, indefinite life, is embodied in the figure of the "bankrupt," a term which becomes nominal, as in what someone becomes "from the moment she is unable to pay." This nominal subject is also, according the Adamson, the limit of infinite debt, and as such, a way of talking about the "brain" as "mind," or vice versa. She writes, "By operating on thought as an indefinite attribute of life, student debt places limits on the infinite expression of the common. By assigning measure to the life of the mind, student debt relegates it to an indefinite and controlled existence." This inverse relation refers to the way that the counterrevolutionary works upon the revolutionary as a force of neutralization, or liberalization. Following such a schema, entities like "thought" and the "life of the mind," the "energy formed in the life of the student" emerge as substance, not as fantasy. To be able to recover the feeling of such an ephemerality as substance, however fleetingly, is an accomplishment.

Fear of modernism

Two contemporary operas are playing in upstate New York: A Blizzard on Marblehead Neck by Jeanine Tesori with a libretto by Tony Kushner, and Later the Same Evening by John Musto, with a libretto by Mark Campbell. Both are costume dramas of modernism; Blizzard stages a scene between Eugene and Carlotta O'Neill in 1951, and Later animates figures from Edward Hopper's paintings of New York, including his 1927 Automat. The general idea seems to be to love modernism into nonexistence. Later is especially egregious: solitary characters from the paintings are given "stories" and eventually brought together at a Broadway musical(!). Hopper's point is not missed as much as negated: he wanted to show isolation that wasn't chosen and could not be alleviated. (Or so, at least, the contrast now makes clear.) The whole idea of having Hopper's figures sing is negating, since their solitude isn't articulable; their states of mind could only be captured in a Brechtian way, maybe, by the performers' singing things that the characters couldn't possibly know as individuals. Musto and Campbell, however, go so far as to have the young working-class woman in Automat claim that she enjoys being "lonely in New York." They also get confused about which they're evoking, realist painting or the aesthetic of the Broadway musical; the desire is to eliminate the conflict. And in this way Hopper's wordless depression gets to be a celebration of New York City cosiness. Blizzard is more competent at the same game. Kushner's casual profanity lets the audience feel knowing and edgy; we get to laugh when O'Neill observes, "Mary McCarthy is a tedious dyke." The story is based on an actual incident in which the O'Neills quarreled so violently that Eugene O'Neill left the house in the middle of a snowstorm and had to be picked up, almost frozen, by the local police. We see that the O'Neills lived O'Neillian lives and that by 1951, their auteurism was already kind of absurd. Like Hopper and even more so, O'Neill himself had middlebrow appeal, and was his own parody. But again, that doesn't seem to be enough now. In Kushner's retrospection the O'Neills ultimately do violence to one another as a way of loving one another; love is the reality beneath the violence. Given the conversion of modernist personages into characters in their own work, this conclusion functions as Kushner's reading of O'Neill as well. I don't see O'Neill as the most insightful writer in the world, but I don't think he implies that; something closer to the opposite.

on the moon

In a recent discussion with Amy Goodman and Slavoj Zizek, Julian Assange describes the vision that he has for Wikileaks to provide a full historical archive. He stated:

It has been my long term belief that what advances us as a civilization is the entirety of our international record, the entirety of our understanding about what we are going through, what human institutions are actually like and how they behave.

Assange described, in terms that are not so dissimilar to socialist realism, the method of collecting, not just some stories, but all stories. The narrative about civilization bounds his observations here that something like an entirety is possible. Not just an individual or two highlighted for a special narrative or spotlight and then taken as representative, but all individual stories and cases, exhaustively compiled. The fantasy of entirety is powerful and compelling--since it still takes place here as a countermeasure, as a negative, dystopian aspect of critical work. The fantasy of entirety is maintained by another idea that goes without saying in this discussion: the idea that representation, or the ability to be representative, is not longer a necessity in such a model. This is a compelling, if Brechtian moment, because it returns us to considerations about what constitutes the nonverbal and the impact that such modes of production can have on relations in society.

Assange goes on to discuss how the idea of entirety is related to communication, and although it seems at first like he posits an ideal of open communication, it is not necessarily clear that this is what he means (although he might, and he might make this clear elsewhere). But here, the emphasis seems to be on the impotence of speech, itself, as action:

Once we’ve gotten that type of volume and concretize and protect the rights of everyone to communicate with each other, which – to me – is the basic agreement of civilized life. It is not the right to speak. What does it mean to have the right to speak if you’re on the moon and nobody is around. It doesn’t matter. Rather the right to speak comes from our right to know.

The two of us together, someone’s right to speak and someone’s right to know, produce a right to communicate, so that is the grounding structure for all that we treasure about civilized life, and by civilized I don’t mean industrialized. I mean people collaborating not to do the dumb thing. To, instead, learn from previous experiences and pool with each other together to get through the life that we live in a less adverse way.

Assange contrasts civilized life with industrialized, but the negative example does more to indicate that the discontents of industrialization are also close at heart to those of civilization. His vision is grand, and one of hope: that civilization will win out over barbarism, the dumb thing. He emphasizes collaboration and pooling, actions which would not be possible on the moon. But I think behind these more overt calls for transparent collectivity, there is the implication that forms of communication that take place on the moon, ones that are decidedly nonverbal, might however be the forms that constitute the right to communicate. In other words, the right to communicate would be about communicating things that are not necessarily understood to be communicable, things which cannot be said, perhaps, or which are more effective not as said things but as shown things.

Killer of Sheep: Shame's Attainments

Charles Burnett’s Killer of Sheep is steeped in shame, yet concerned to find the limits of a feeling that at first seems all-encompassing. Set in South Los Angeles in 1977, it reflects on continuance in unacceptable conditions and the sense of inadequacy to which this situation gives rise. Burnett’s interest in bearing with the continuation as an end in itself contributes to the film’s neorealist leaning toward documentary and away from melodrama.

The film begins with two explicit statements of shame: a prologue before the credits in which a father berates his son for an insufficiently masculine failure to defend his brother, and a scene in which Stan, the film’s protagonist, complains of insomnia to a friend. Stan’s insomnia metonymizes his impotence throughout the film, and his friend calls attention to what looks like pathology by declaring “I ain’t ashamed of nothing I can’t help.” He therefore implies that Stan is ashamed precisely of what he can’t help. In contrast to guilt, shame is what people feel at not having done enough; in this case, it registers there not having been anything (else) to do. Yet in the same scene, Stan also credits himself with things he has not done. He feels as though he “might do somebody else some harm,” but hasn’t done anything “yet.” Stan hints that this inaction is his main justification for not committing suicide. Inaction, which just is his insomnia and impotence from another angle, is an achievement, something that he manages and maintains against the odds.

Stan’s shame is diffused and shared: just as it responds to things he can’t help, his wife, even more than he, is humiliated by his avoidance of sex, which is clearly no fault of hers. Their son, who is about fourteen, turns aggression against himself in a minor way when he pours inedible quantities of sugar onto his cereal and forces himself through it, then suddenly announces to his uncomprehending younger sister, “I need money.”


These and other scenes of waste and dilatory action contrast with offers of enterprise that are criminal or venal, as when a white liquor store owner offers Stan a job, implicitly in return for sexual favors, and fondles his arm with her vulgar (shameless?) hand:


His 9-to-5 work in a slaughterhouse beats sexual slavery, in his view, but it contains only violence and nothing constructive, only avoidance of things that are even more violent and more destructive. Choosing shame and depression over what they help him both flee and suppress, Stan protects the “nothing” that happens over the course of the film. It’s not too much to say that he dedicates his life to its renewal. The family’s intimate conflicts never arrive at a crux; there is no turning point, twist, or fateful error. Burnett deflects the strong negative emotions of hatred, rage, and jealousy. No one dies. We experience instead a holding pattern that gains nothing in exchange for giving up nothing, and in this way Burnett validates a way of life elsewhere stigmatized as a mere failure, either of productivity or of expression. The action takes place over an uncertain period of time that, going by the ages of the children, must be less than a year; the scenes may not be in chronological order—because of the absence of teleology, we don’t know. Documentary scenes of kids playing in the street and leaping over a narrow gap between roofs make us understand how much activity is habitual and ongoing, and what it accomplishes. Like the music that often plays over the end of one segment and the beginning of another, their play organizes the world through repetition and variation, discharging, exchanging, and circulating tension. Things are kept possible because they don’t go anywhere, although the game is often warlike. We are allowed to find both contrast and continuity between this and the strategies of the adults. Strictly speaking, Killer of Sheep is anti-revolutionary in a way that divides it from 60's cinema, but it isn't liberal either, as it hopes for nothing. It coincides with the infamous period of “stagflation” in the mid-70’s, when unemployment was high and retail inflation reached 27%; but unfolding within the “permanent recession”* of African-American unemployment, the film takes an ironic view of a situation that, in other hands, could easily have played into the ideological romance of “crisis,” not to say tragedy.

--
*Algernon Austin, "What a Recession Means for Black Americans," Economic Policy Institute, Washington, D.C., January 18, 2008.

counter-directive

Denis Villeneuve's 2010 Incendies opens with a shot of desert shrub, the hillside of an anonymous land and moves back and within, inside the window of the building. This first gesture of framing, of moving away, has the effect of calibrating, as it were, the sense of movement that is also eclipsed. In this opening scene, the camera turns to the young boys waiting and being prepared in a blank building, an otherwise empty room. There is an obvious contrast between the serene and unoccupied hillside and the latent violence involved in preparing these young boys to fight--slowly, details are registered: small bare feet, large combat boots, worn and textured fabrics, the buzz of the razor, wisps of conversation between the boys. The smallest detail, then, reflects this desire to efface, to be effaced, to move away, as one that works against (or in a counter-direction to) the film's forward-spiraling Oedipal story, which in the end casts as tragedy all those moments that are nonetheless registered as atrocity. As Georgio Agamben notes, following Hegel, the question of shame involves a tragic understanding of the relationship between guilt and innocence that results in the "guilty-innocent person," or the figure of "innocent guilt" (Remnants of Auschwitz 96). Agamben continues: "What is tragic is, on the contrary, for an apparently innocent subject to assume unconditionally objective guilt. Thus in Oedipus Rex..." Agamben includes as a part of this logic "recourse to Befehlnotstand" at Nuremberg, not only as a matter of escaping condemnation but also of making their "situation appear in terms of a tragic conflict" (97). What the counter-directives perform in Incendies is a certain refusal of this tragic momentum, one which registers the impossibility of occupying these moments exactly by allowing the viewer this moment of interiority. From this perspective, what is feels impossible to withstand (or uphold) is something like the space between the aesthetic and atrocity. Nihad and Abou Takar are like the two figures of the survivor that are for Agamben one: "It is as if the symmetrical gestures of the two opposite figures of the survivor--the one who cannot feel guilty for his own survival and the one who claims innocence in having survived--betrayed a secret solidarity. They are the two faces of the living being's incapacity truly to separate innocence and guilt--that is, somehow to master its own shame" (94). Sandy cliffs release Nawal from prison; it is not shame, but the impossible injustice of guilt which presides.

picture: Lubna Azabal, Incendies

dark times for the wholly recent

One of the things that Dipesh Chakrabarty does not capture in his essay, "The Climate of History" (Critical Inquiry 35 (Winter 2009) 197-222), is the tone of scientists Paul J. Crutzen and Eugene F. Stoermer, coiners of the term "Anthropocene" (to describe the epoch in which the human has become an agent of geological change (following the Holocene--the "wholly recent" last 12,000 years); later notes say that Stoermer named it, while Crutzen popularized it?). It's possible that the tone of the more recent paper, "Living in the Anthropocene: Toward a New Global Ethos," authored by Crutzen and Christian Schwagerl, does not reach back to these earlier papers. Of course, there is some intended irony in the triumphant invocation of "We humans," but there also remains an excessive amount of the unintended. They argue that accepting the "reality" of "high speed" anthropomorphization of the world will help us change the world for good, as well as bad--laws governed by an economics of cost/benefit. In addition to several other suggestions for developing technology, they write:

"Finally, we should adapt our culture to sustaining what can be called the “world organism.” This phrase was not coined by an esoteric Gaia guru, but by eminent German scientist Alexander von Humboldt some 200 years ago. Humboldt wanted us to see how deeply interlinked our lives are with the richness of nature, hoping that we would grow our capacities as a part of this world organism, not at its cost. His message suggests we should shift our mission from crusade to management, so we can steer nature’s course symbiotically instead of enslaving the formerly natural world."

If indeed, as Crutzen wrote in 2002, "The Anthropocene could be said to have started in the latter part of the eighteenth century, when analyses of air trapped in polar ice showed the beginning of growing global concentrations of carbon dioxide and methane" (cited in Chakrabarty 209), then we'd also have to think that instead of now adapting our culture from "crusade" to "management," that we've already been long undergoing this process. It is this that Charkrabarty points to, in aligning the history of freedom with the history of the Anthropocene. If there is nothing celebratory about the Anthropocene for Chakrabarty, there is however, something about freedom that is. Humanity as an agent of geological change is a contingency, something we have "stumbled into," a stumbling which makes all actors equal participants, connected in the way that "different life-forms connect to one another, and the way the mass extinction of one species could spell danger for another" (217). The "shared" nature of the catastrophe puts a limit on the experience of freedom in modernity, according to Chakrabarty. This means, not that freedom is experienced differently or differentially, this is not one of the outcomes of the fact of the imposed "equity" of catastrophic ecological change, but that the idea of freedom, as a universal (?), must also take the history of the species, its deep history, into consideration. It's a devastatingly shallow conclusion, for all the notions included, since in effect, we don't ever get around to thinking about how this situation, if it is "reality," moves us to think about the realities of unfreedom that would seemingly be exponentially exacerbated in such a case. In the ambiguous parallel between the histories of contingency in the non-Western world and mass extinction, the assumption is that diversity is the value of freedom (Chakrabarty earlier quotes from Gadamer: "Diversity... was itself a figure of freedom" (207)). Encouraging diversity, rather than accentuating difference becomes all to familiar, as a call to arms. The history of "freedom" that Chakrabarty recounts has, according to him, been devoid of ideas of geological time, and what characterizes the early years of the Anthropocene is the transition from wood and renewable fuels to fossil fuel. This piece, the materialist-historical core of fossil fuel, which occupies the work of Timothy Mitchell (for example, in "Carbon Democracy"), becomes in Chakrabarty's argument, that which carries the weight of making all equivalences between political systems, between capitalism and socialism ("there was never any principled difference in their use of fossil fuel" (217)), and for example, between the West and developing countries, whose guilt is shared, the only difference being whether it is "retrospective" or "prospective." Putting aside for now the question of whether the idea of prospective guilt in the end calls the lie of even less ideal notions of freedom, Chakrabarty also says that critiques of capitalist globalization have "not, in any way, become obsolete," and he notes, democratically, that what all of this means anyhow is that inequalities will become exacerbated. Still, he does not move towards examining how these so-called parallel theories overlap to produce the exponential growth of inequality. In her discussion of the debate over the naming of the Epoch, Elizabeth Kolbert finds that those who are convinced of the significance of human impact find that it's a matter of the "degree of change" effected by humans (see "The Antrhopocene Debate: Marking Humanity's Impact" in Yale Environment 360). The logic of cost-benefit, the economics of the Anthropocene, thus sets up its ethos in this unsurprising way, seeking to reverse the footprint of "change," for which we have up to now been paying for political freedom, by recasting structural, social inequalities as shared catastrophe.

still

In 2008, below, I rested on the rim of the observatory, so that things would not move in time. such things become no longer imaginable. I liked the artificial emphasis, the exaggerated tone, in the voice of the planetarium curator, echoing a distant irony. Others did not, and either way, we left immediately afterward.

Gram

That we are not in the flowerworks
and not about to be,
replacing burned-out irises
understage, not
flooding the white
screen, the back-
lit luxor in
which it appears

that seeing the night
through, even
though not to altogether
would be not to be
at all, still wouldn’t be "having"
anything—even saying
it is

almost as much

as keeping particles apart,
as keeping part,
as keeping.

Abu Dhabi 10003

It’s come to this: our friends are angling for jobs at NYU-Abu Dhabi (NYUAD), which admitted its first 200 undergraduates last fall on the way to opening a larger campus on Saadiyat Island in 2012. According to Inside Higher Ed, the new campus will eventually have 9,000 students and branches of the Guggenheim and the Louvre. It isn’t very hard to be ironic about global citizenship as taught through the liberal arts in the United Arab Emirates. Homosexuality is illegal in the UAE; according to Human Rights Watch, “only 6,600 UAE citizens, chosen by the rulers of the emirates out of a population of roughly 900,000 citizens (and 4.7 million foreigners), can vote” or stand for election; “a 1980 law still in force provides for the imprisonment of journalists and suspension of publication for publishing ‘materials that cause confusion among the public’”; and the migrants who “account for up to 85 percent of UAE residents” labor without a minimum wage or right to organize, vulnerable to abuses, nonpayment, and dangerous working conditions. Given these circumstances, it’s worth asking why the main question for academic critics of NYUAD seems to be whether academic freedom will be upheld on campus. What is “academic freedom” and why does it provide the terms for thinking about NYUAD?

Andrew Ross offers comprehensive criticisms of NYUAD and like projects in his excellent article “Global U” (Inside Higher Ed, February 15, 2008). “There is not even a pretense of academic exchange involved in this arrangement,” Ross points out, “in which education is little different from a manufacturing product designed at home, produced and assembled by cheaper labor abroad, and sold to consumers in emerging markets.” The logic of the academic freedom debate, as paraphrased in The New York Times, suggests that academics involved in the project (including, disappointingly, Immanuel Wallerstein) view it through the rationale of the cultural and economic engagement strategies the U.S. professes to use in regimes such as China and Russia. Courses in “Cosmopolitanism and Popular Culture” and “Tolerance and Relativism” address the student elites of the 39 countries represented in the freshman class (most heavily, the U.S., China, the UAE, and Hungary) from a perspective of hopeful transnational neoliberalism. In this context, the assumption seems to be that academic freedom is a worry because restrictions on access and speech would contradict the diplomatic content of the courses. So, NYUAD offers reassurance that financial aid is available to many of the 200 (culled from 9,000 applicants); and its Vice-Chancellor, Alfred Bloom, announces that as a Jew he is “emblematic of the diversity to which [NYUAD] is committed” (Inside Higher Ed, September 30, 2008). The New York Times reports that “the emirate has embraced N.Y.U.’s vision of a liberal arts institution with full access to ideas, books and the Internet” (June 20, 2010), yet simultaneously quotes a student, Laith Aqel, who says that a “civil rights club” is “almost a challenge because we can’t hold protests.” In any case, the rubric of academic freedom keeps returning the conversation centripetally to the space within the campus and whether it can instantiate “collegial zones of free speech” (Ross) that would theoretically influence the UAE and the other 38 countries.

The problem, however, is not only that NYUAD isn’t free to do anything it wants; the problem is what it wants, and what it gets. As Ross observes, “it is not at all easy to distinguish some of the new offshore academic centers from free-trade industrial zones where outsourcing corporations are welcomed with a lavish package of tax holidays, virtually free land, and duty-free privileges.” The deals cemented through these packages cannot hypothetically shift discourse within the host countries without revealing the emptiness of human rights discourse within the guest countries. The courses look like careful introductions to multicultural neoliberalism; they avoid the parochialism of nation in favor of the transnational appeal of the regional, and leave the impression that art and inquiry are just more forms of global economic development. The impression is self-fulfillingly correct. But even if the curriculum were more, even if there were courses on communism and feminism and queer studies, we would still need to register the fact that the UAE is paying NYU up to $100 million to help position it as a cosmopolitan power. Censorship is acknowledged to be "almost a challenge" only so that its falling short of counting as a challenge can be taken to nearly-absolve the structural problem of receiving $100M from the UAE for this purpose while the unrepresented millions of people wait outside.

The implication that it is inevitable and downright good to make the exchange is the content of the positive appeal the University makes to its location in Abu Dhabi. According to NYUAD, Abu Dhabi helps the University as it “prepares [students] for the challenges and opportunities of our interconnected world.” How could it do that without teaching, not only that no one can withdraw from the circulation of finance and thus from the influence of the post-totalitarian governments with whom U.S. corporations do business, but that no one should want to? NYUAD assimilates its willingness to accept "opportunities" from the UAE, despite its many "challenges," to the value of “interaction with new ideas and people who are different.” If more of the money was NYU’s own, and some of the “people who are different” were the dissidents themselves, its presence might signify something else. As it is, a certain profit-driven notion of engagement substitutes for the whole of engagement. What can student Mate Bede-Fazekas mean when he says “I can’t imagine a better place for becoming a global citizen, that I believe is the way of the future” (NYT, June 20, 2010)? He's descriptively right, it may be. But if Abu Dhabi figures the future “better” than São Paulo, Los Angeles, or Taipei, it does so by means of its position on the cutting edge of unfreedom. Bede-Fazekas seems not to be missing this point, but getting it.

Part of the shiny novelty of the edge is the luxury that separates the NYUAD global education from the brands available in Romania or Manila. One of its 200 incredibly highly-qualified freshmen, Stephen Underwood, writes in NYU Local that “NYU culture here in Abu Dhabi,” unlike in New York he assumes, “for now . . . is anything but cynical.” The reason he believes the NYUAD students aren't cynical, however, is that “as many of us are here for free, it’s kind of hard not to be” “in the honeymoon phase.” Underwood appreciates getting paid too earnestly to notice that that condition is what cynicism is, or would be if he were conscious of it. For the entirety of his dispatch—almost 500 words—he describes the physical amenities of the apartments: “the desks are accompanied by surprisingly comfortable swivel chairs . . . . Hard wood door frames are accompanied by marble window sills . . . . Every floor has a common area that is decorated as some non-American place yet still has a decently sized flat screen.” Underwood's tactic is another way of showing why--for the same reason finally, i.e., payment--Abu Dhabi is the premium place for learning global citizenship. His account of the "common area[s]"--"non-American" in decor, but fed much of the same mass media by Dubai One and Showtime--winds up being as "emblematic" as the convenient Judaism of the Vice-Chancellor. He doesn’t say anything about the city or the “people who are different.”

But, finally (dusting off Baudrillard) isn’t the ideological fantasy of NYU-Abu Dhabi that NYU itself is not NYU-Abu Dhabi? No one at NYU writes in to contest Underwood’s focus on the furniture. (Au contraire, they suggest that the Gramercy Green residence hall is as good or better.) NYU has 4,000+ students, and, as with almost all the private universities, the problem is far less that there is anything wrong with the education on offer than that accepting 4,000 of the highest-testing students does nothing for the millions of young people who need and merit a similar education, and instead leaves the entire dilemma to an increasingly abandoned public sector whose working-class inhabitants increasingly approach the condition of the non-voters in Abu Dhabi. Every large public university could make its problems disappear overnight if it accepted only its "top" 4,000 applicants, many of them able to pay high tuition without aid. Of course, making a significant dent in the U.S. education problem was never the responsibility of schools like NYU, private nonprofit institutions; it is and has been the responsibility of the state legislatures and the people who elect them. But the academic freedom that exists at NYU to discuss the politics of the crisis is, as much as it stands to be at Abu Dhabi, a way of keeping up the conversation while pocketing the change.



image: Louvre Abu Dhabi, Atelier Jean Nouvel