I cite

A horrible list

1.   Climate change. I read the NYT magazine today. One of its reminders--that US gas mileage is pathetically worse than that in Japan and the EU. That the structure of our communities around driving is killing the environment. It may be that little nudge that pushes me to start a vegetable garden although I hate gardening. There are good reasons for this: I will be changing my practices, decreasing my carbon footprint, all that stuff. But I'm really doing it because I think that the society is so close to the abyss that I need some skills and some kind of provisions for the calamity to come.

2.    Economic collapse. With no Soviet Union to keep it in line, capitalism has accelerated and intensified unbearably. I can't get over the fact that 50 hedge fund managers (combined) made over 20 billion dollars this year. And that the numbers of workers making 20 dollars or more an hour has declined to levels below where they were in the seventies. The greed is mind-boggling. The 'oh well, there's nothing we can do' attitude is unbearable. There has been a massive counter-revolution in the US since the 70s, brought on by finance capital, its corporate allies, and conservatives in the wake of the unrest of the 60s (this was what makes Reagan so popular, the not quite human face of counter-revolution in the guise of greed is good and sex is bad). And the thing is, people have gone for it, swallowed what was screwing them whole. Cheap credit, tons of consumer goods, constant entertainment and socially acceptable prescription drugs. Who needs economic equality when we've got You Tube? We are all creative. We entertain each other and let the rich take more and the environment collapse.

3.   That the Bush administration will get away with torture (waging aggressive war, undertaking illegal surveillance). How could the NYT have ignored the White House torture story for more than a week and then only produce one editorial on it? The editorial was pathetic, saying things like we need more information and we won't get the information and using the Orwellian euphemisms for torture promulgated by the White House. Isn't it their job to dig up this information? Pelosi and the rest of the Democrats are pathetic, too weak and spineless (and I include both presidential candidates here) to call for resignations, press for indictments, and all the rest (maybe if folks had been giving each other blowjobs in the Oval we'd have a case...). The sickness will fester, continuing to kill the Constitution until it rots away completely (or is just the building blocks of children's toys Agamben evokes). Do we have anything to offer in its place?

Addition: Global food riots, shortages, and massive price increases, the flipside of American obesity (think corn syrup).

Recommending Hitler

What are the obligations a professor owes her students and how far do they extend?

It is clear that grades should not be based on political persuasion, profession of faith, or, why not, conception of the good. I am enormously uneasy with advocacy in the classroom, thinking that more often than not it starts to tie grades to one of these. This can be a problem in courses in feminist theory or women's studies. In my course in feminist legal theory, I deal with the problem by testing the students' knowledge of and facility with majority and dissenting opinions in legal cases, as well as critiques of the way the cases are framed.

But that's easy. Here is the harder problem: what if a student with a political or world view that one finds completely repellent wants a recommendation, for law school or for a job? And what if he or she has performed well in the classes, so that one would write him or her a glowing recommendation but for the repellent world view? Do I commend the academic skills of an advocate for torture, an immigration wall, 100 years in Iraq? What about for a future lawyer dedicated to altering the Constitution by insuring that America returns to God? What about a future lawyer dedicated to a constitutional amendment in defense of marriage and the sanctity of the lives of the unborn?

I can imagine that it must have been the case that students in the late sixties feared that their life chances would be altered by their opposition to the war in Viet Nam. But perhaps what makes their opposition brave is precisely the fact that it was opposition; it was against the views of their professors and they did take a risk.

Can students justifiably expect to have it both ways? To have a right to express their convictions and a right not to be accountable to or responsible for them?

Nice? No, thanks!

The interesting comments on the hugs and kisses thread have stimulated my thinking about niceness. They explore the ways niceness functions as a mode of control (with gendered dimensions) in the current political conjuncture, disabling dissent, channeling conflict onto the subject as the fragile individual with precarious self-esteem, and operating as an illusory locus of agency--we might not be able to change the world, but we can still be nice!

Given the politics of nice in its oppressive and gendered dimensions, is there nonetheless a terrain where we should be nice and if so how far does it extend? Like, maybe we should be really nice to young children and the very old? But, if that's the case, wouldn't it be because we don't think they can handle the truth? That they aren't quite tough enough? And, how would toughening kids up occur anyway?

These seem to me to be vexed questions because of the ways that niceness, politeness, and consensus blend together. Some forces in contemporary US society seem to want to make every forum child and family friendly (well, nearly everywhere: there positions involve necessarily excluded spaces of violence, otherness, and difference, spaces for the uncivilized, spaces that need to be contained or controlled). Others point out (correctly in many cases) the ways that hostile and demeaning speech has exclusionary effects. I have been uncertain on this point, myself. For example, in Precarious Life, Judith Butler describes how accusations of anti-semitism silence criticisms of Israel (or at least make the costs of that criticism very, very high). In the past, I haven't been very sympathetic to this view, in part because I think that one should be able to counter those positions pretty easily and in part because I think politics requires a kind of will and toughness.

But, I wonder now if I have been wrong. Perhaps the risk or the costs are more internal, happening in advance of the speech that one wants to make. That is, charges of anti-semitism, or fear of those charges, occurs in advance of one's speaking. They inflect our thoughts and our willingness to think and speak so that our thinking and speaking is shaped in advance. Fear, then, has a configuring force and once fear has been installed it runs on its own, under the surface, like an excess program Microsoft stuck into our operating system while we weren't paying attention.

But, if this is the case, then all thinking and speaking is already shaped by forces outside and beyond us. And, if that's true, then how can we tell the difference between a meanness, hostility, or diminution that is somehow wrong, beyond the acceptable, and that which is already part of the conditions within which we speak? Additionally, it could be that politics is in part about changing those conditions. This would apply to both right and left proponents of nice--they want a different terrain. They want a specific set of rules, rules that limit opposition.

So, back to my initial question: are there some terrains where niceness is a good idea and is education one of those? Or, does failure to challenge the politics of education concede a crucial terrain in advance?

Silence

A few of the threads around here lately have carried some remarkable reflections on voice, opinion, reason, argument, and complicity (to mention but a few of the themes). The comments have given me a lot to think about and I am grateful. As I reflect on them in this post, I am not thinking about dynamics in a classroom, although this could apply. I have in mind conflicts within parties, organizations, and loosely organized bureaucracies (like a college or university campus, but I think it can be broader).

What happens when there is a standoff between opinions, between those who remain committed to their positions and refuse to argue, compromise, or continue discussion?  Some comments suggested a variety of alternatives including changing the subject and doing something else, engaging in a practice. I think this is possible, but if the situation is one where there has to be a decision, then in this specific instance (although there is the metagame) changing the subject and doing something else, waiting it out, are not options. Part of framing a situation (and I unfortunately mean this in Lakoff's sense which I don't tend to like but I am an ideological subject easily imprinted by dominant memes) involves creating this sense of immediacy--something must be done right now. Cell phones and email intensify this speedy sense of right now, amplifying its effects, and inducing a kind of immediacy that makes authority or violence the most likely outcome.

I think there are differences between situations where there is a standoff and the giving of reasons (defense of one's position and critique of the other's) and situations where there is not. It seems to me most likely that the in the latter case, resentment and sense of not being heard, not being respected, can fester. The process of exchanging reasons, of critique and engagement, has effects of its own, effects that are not subsumed under the decision in the situation even though they are outcomes.

But I could be wrong on this. I could be grossly underestimating the liberating potential of silence, of refusal, of preferring not to, and the way that being brought under the constraints of argument, the specificities of give and take, the patterns of argumentation (not to mention the myriad psychic and intra-group pressures and dynamics). The one who remains silent may not be denied voice at all. Silence may be the way to speak. It's like a kind of present absence, a rock of dissensus that forgoes exit to make a point. Part of the point is refusing to put it into the other's words or frame.

And this is maddening. Disruptive. It generates all sorts of desires to inquire, to find out the truth, to survey and examine.

Many of the politically correct presume that silence is an indication of a being silenced, that it is inflicted and enforced. Under conditions of communicative capitalism, with its compulsions to speak and express (and here again I am deeply within this ideology), its constant and unceasing injunctions to communicate, to tell us all what one is feeling and thinking, to let nothing remain interior (or lead us to expect that anyone has an interior beyond our knowledge and control left), silence may well be golden.

And this is unfortunate if all around us there are only tin ears.

Distance and Defense

I was thinking about forms of defense, particularly self defense. Irony, sarcasm, and citationality first came to mind.These seem to be mechanisms to establish distance. Zizek mentions something like this, "I love you," as they say in the movies, or something like that. I defend myself by diffusing my feeling, making it less mine than ours. Everyone feels this way or, it's hardly surprising that one would feel this way. I can always add--oh, I was joking or that was meant sarcastically.

What about humor, parody, cynicism? Do these require a lack of commitment, a distance and amorphousness, a denial, refusal, or foreclosure of ownership? I'm thinking of the Daily Show, a blog, and Peruvian presidents. Are the utterances, performances, predicated on a refusal of an underlying belief or conviction? Or, are they premised on its constitutive absence? On a smooth ability to drift and flow, catching on nothing and open to anything? Are these about distance or perhaps more properly about defense? If the latter, perhaps it is defense of nothing or of nothingness, defense against an underlying lack or foreclosure?

It could be, though, that humor and parody work best when there is some kind of core, or at least underlying ethical sense, even one stated negatively? Perhaps humor works best when it highlights something shared, a common frustration, or when it allows for a sharing or linking together by calling upon us to see things in a new way together?

And cynicism? Without looking back at Zizek (or Sloterdjik, for that matter) cynicism seems to indicate not simply a false promise (we are fighting for freedom) but the open sense that we all know that the promise is false (why are you saying we aren't really fighting for freedom when we aren't really fighting for freedom)? And there is a difference between the cynicism and fetishism (I know, but nevertheless I believe) insofar as the level of belief is missing: our practices do not affirm a belief contrary to the cynical claim (our actions are not those of freedom fighters). Instead, they conform to the open sense of falseness persisting underneath the false promise; we go through the motions, aware that we don't believe them, aware of the lie.

So, this going through the motions is not the same as the practice of belief persisting in fetishism. It's different, it is cynical, persistence without belief, a persistence in the face of claims to the contrary (again, we are not fighting for freedom). What accounts for the persistence? It isn't belief (at the level of the enunciation or at the level of practice). Is it fear? Apathy? A lack of anything else? A general sense of, that's just the way it is, change is impossible? Is it an acceptance of our own castration? Is it the manipulation, capitalization, and commodification of this sense of castration?

And, if it is something like this, then can people persist in such a state, a state of shallow cynicism, of flow  underpinned by statis, or does something give or give way? Do we rot from within and go crazy?

Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe

I hadn't read much of the commentary about the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe (Peter Eisenman). I recalled vaguely that it was controversial, that there had been a lot of debate about it, and that it featured lots of gray slabs or stelae in a large grid. I had also read that it was designed to be encountered alone: that the paths through the stelae were big enough for wheelchairs (although I would think that some of the slopes would make that challenging) but not for two people to walk abreast). So, when we got there, we scattered.

We first found ourselves treating the grid like a maze. It wasn't just the kids. And it wasn't just us. A number of visitors were kind of running through it, playing hide and seek. You would look down one aisle and see no one, hear some running, perhaps glimpse someone passing through another aisle. I found the deeper I went into the stelae, the less like a game or a maze they seemed. They got taller, the ground more sloping and uneven. The shift from something kind of amusing or fun, though, was gradual, unexpected, not unlike the gradual growth of the stelae from short slabs (maybe 8 inches high) to tall ones (more than 7 feet high).

I noticed that people treated the initial short slabs as sun-bathing benches, tables, or platforms from which to jump to other benches. They were like a playground of sorts. It made me think of the way something might start out innocuous, no big deal, virtually inseparable from our experience of the everyday and then become, before we've quite grasped it, something quite horrifying and disruptive, a new structuring of life, a different partition of the perceptible in which we find ourselves implicated and trapped. We also find ourselves responsible: we didn't have to step into it, after all.

Deep in the memorial, I found that I didn't see or hear Paul or the kids. I started to get a little panicky, pacing more rapidly through the aisles, encountering strangers who may have been enjoying the maze, confronting alienation, or planning crimes.

I admire the way Eisenman has designed a site that induces a kind of performativity, that is, an affect that arises gradually in the course of one's envelopment in the memorial.

Everything and nothing

The mantra of post-politics, of depoliticization and the collapse of the political, needs to be understood as accompanying the nineties lament that everything is political. These are two sides of the same coin--if everything is political, then nothing is political. If everything is already political, then there is no work of politicization to be done.

Both claims are false, caught up in the hegemonic matrix of neoliberalism and neoconservatism. Neoliberalism is a political strategy of capital to extend its reach, expropriate labor and productivity, and defend its financial position. Claims for the logic of the market, for market efficiencies, are political claims. They involve a theory of the state--that which governs less, governs best, except when it comes to war and police, and creating tax policies that benefit the rich. Neoconservativism is a position in the culture wars--and a smart one, too, insofar as it takes over the identity claims raised by left multiculturalists, deploying them for its own purposes of moralization, control, and order. The combination of neoliberalism and neoconservatism involves a complete politicization: everything is political.

With Agamben and the virtuality of homines sacri, the political everything is extended into the virtual as well. His ontologized approach to politics accepts the view that everything is political--and radicalizes it to a being as such (within Western metaphysics). On a more mundane level, that we are all virtually homo sacer satisfies a certain left multiculturalism that revels in victimization. A student organization at my college announced that all those who are oppressed should come to a meeting to discuss their experiences. The college is a private, 4 year school, that costs over 40K a year to attend. It's hard for me to see that very many of our students are oppressed.

But, speaking as oppressed seems, at least for many in the current political formation, the only way to speak at all. The feelings of being oppressed or silenced are likely real. The question, then, is analyzing what is behind the feeling, the sense of inability and futility. And the sense isn't one of the depoliticization but of the efficacy of a specific combination of right-wing politics.

Consumerism adds to the problem: people want quick results. That politics, changing hearts and minds, getting the million people I need for JRP (Jodi's revolutionary party) takes time and energy; it's easy to give up.

That's what hegemony looks like.

Why am I here?

On one hand, the question is circumstantial--why am I in a hotel in DC less than a week after returning from Peru? Why am I traveling so much that I can't read or think?

But that's the boring part. The other part is what am I doing as a teacher or, more precisely,how is that I have these students (who end up becoming rabbis) focused on the question 'why am I here?"

More specifically, a student thinks the question is "why am I here?" I say that philosophy can't answer this question. Perhaps this is the post-Kantian tragedy, this inability to answer this question. Perhaps it is more contemporary, this inability to pose the question sensically. Whichever it is, it seems to me that this question can't be asked: there is no I that can ask it, no here that can situated it, and nothing that can answer it. Differently put, the very question posits a source and site of meaning that make no sense under contemporary terms of thought as I understand them.

And, the student is left with religion--religion willing and able to answer the question.

Addendum: the question came right after I digressed in class with a story of my son's unwillingness to go to confirmation. I'm not making him go and I feel weird about it. He said that he isn't religious and doesn't believe in God. I told him that, well, it's a good idea to go because religion provides ways of thinking about God. He said that he doesn't think about God. I hope I am now hurting him by not making him go. He says that you can't make someone believe. I think, but don't say, well, we have our ways...

Accounting or the Argument from Monty-Python

I'm getting read to go visit Paul. I leave Wednesday for Ecuador. Saturday we will go to Peru. I'll be gone not quite 2 weeks. To prepare, I got vaccinated for hepatitis and typhoid. My tetanus shot was up to date. I declined the malarial pills because of side effects and the fact that I won't be in a jungle. I purchased bug spray with deet, anti-bacterial towelettes, and immodium, pepto-bismal. I've read that I should not drink the water, avoid ice, refrain from eating uncooked vegetables, avoid milk and dairy products, avoid fresh fish, not swim in fresh water (except, perhaps, for a heavily chlorinated pool), and not eat anything from an open air market. I need to be careful with my wallet, purse, backpack, and all personal items because of theft.

Thinking about all these warnings, I started to wonder about my naivete with regard to notions of revolution or emphases on trying to find alternatives to capitalism and democracy. Maybe it's a kind of Monty-Python reasoning along the lines of "what have the Romans done for us"--so, what has capitalism and the liberal-democratic state done for us: "well, we don't really have a problem with malaria and the water is potable."

But, then I realized some flaws in the argument from Monty-Python. First, it relies on an implicit 'best of all possible worlds' vision of the US and Europe. Second, in its reliance on a simple and pathetic us/them, primitive/developed, third/first world binary, it disavows the splits within each 'world'--you'd think that Katrina would have eliminated that sort of elementary blunder. Third, and I think most important, the argument from Monty-Python erases 'our' (the US, neoliberal capital and its corporate agents) role in the picture. It absolves the US and Capital from any responsibility for producing inequalities.

So, now I think that all the precautions I'm advised to take point in the opposite direction--which, incidently, seems to be the view of Ecuador's new government, already allied with Hugo Chavez.

Long Sunday: Strong Beliefs, Weakly Held

In the comment thread here, Kenneth Rufo raises the following with respect to my evocation of conditions of validity:

In the context of this conversation we have the idea of "conditions of validity," which provides a solid catchphrase for exactly the sort of maneuver that must happen for incommensurability to be known as an ontological or existential fact, but of course the exact delineation of those conditions will always be rhetorical. SO questions of disciplinarity, hegemony, boundary-work - in short, all the questions of sociological distinction - serve as the technical operations that divide two (sets of) discourses.

But therein seems to be a tension, because for the incommensurability to be known, either a consensus on that incommensurability is necessary (which does seem to involve a certain paradox), or an act of force or coercion must be undertaken that successfully draws the line that separates the condition of validity from that of invalidity. This latter option makes practical sense, but it seems reliant on extant modalities of power and identification that simultaneously appear (though perhaps "masquerade" is a better word choice) to be the subject of incommensurability rather than the more fundamental condition from which incommensurability is made possible.

Incommensurability need not be accepted or known by all involved (which would of course make it parasitic on a prior commensurability). In fact, the opposite is the case--inscribed into the situation is its own description, about which there is disagreement. So, there isn't an external point of truth or agreement that then allows for incommensurability to appear.

I prefer to talk about the situation with respect to antagonism--or even with respect to the division of the one, as Zizek describes it in Parallax. Put in political terms, society is fundamentally split, and this split appears in its own description--competing or disagreeing elements describe the split differently. They have different ways of accounting for it, situating it, defining it. Some may not even recognize or acknowledge a split at all--and then they might dismiss those who do acknowledge it as recalcitrant troublemakers.

The antagonism of sexual difference also well illustrates the point: there is not one human that is divided into 2 sexes. Nor is there a fundamental way to account for or explain sexual difference (gender, desire, chromosones, genitalia, etc). Instead, we have a difference and then multiple ways of accounting for it, explaining it, dealing with, ways that ultimately want to erase or eliminate the split altogether, perhaps by demonstrating that what we really have is balance, duality.

Swifty (in the same thread) is also skeptical about the term incommensurability, suggesting perhaps the term political incommensurability, in part, I think, because he wonders about incommensurability among those who share a language. I don't think that differences between languages is central here, first, because I don't think the matter is one of understanding and, second, because of the gaps and excesses rupturing language.

With regard to the first point, as I mentioned several times in various comments, understanding doesn't tell us very much. That I understand the words coming out of a person's mouth, that I even understand why he says the words he does in the sense that I can reconstruct the conditions that make these words valid, does not mean that I accept these conditions or that I hold them to be operative. So, I may understand why an economist wants to decrease the money supply or increase demand without accepting the larger set of neoliberal economic assumptions informing his advice or recommendations. Similarly, I can know why a theorist argues for cultural rights (to protect the heritage and traditions of a minority group, say) while nonetheless rejecting its premises (that cultures are the sorts of entities that can have rights, that rights are sensical political tools). Or, closer to the worlds I travel in, I can understand when people deny things like the constitutive lack, the imaginary, the symbolic, and the Real, but I think they are mistaken to do so. I may hope that they will see the error of the ways, but more fundamentally, I don't expect them to.

Resolving these issues, moreover, is not a matter of finding the proper facts. It's not that a piece of information is missing that will decide the case. It's more fundamental than that--it's a matter of ways of looking at the world and expressing both the looking and the world--and here I think Kenneth is right to emphasize the importance of rhetoric as it helps formulate these problems as well as ways of grappling with them. I don't think, though, that rhetoric solves them--although it can solve some and create others.

And, this leads to my second point: as we try to express ways of looking at the world, we will never get it completely right. My words will say more and less than what I mean--this is an aspect of language as a set of shifting signifiers and significations, a set that is unfixed, changing, permeated with enjoyment, and embedded in a set of material conditions (not the least of which is the voice). Others' words will also say more or less than what the other means. In arguments, we often pick up on these elements of more and less--much to the outrage of our opponents, who insist that we are misreading or misinterpreting them, that we are refusing to acknowledge what they know to be true. Such arguments then become momentary enactments of the failures of language and irreducibility of incommensurability, we might even say, of the stubborn rock of the Real.