Samir Chopra's Blog, page 75

Sponsoring ‘Steven Salaita At Brooklyn College’

Last Tuesday, the philosophy department of Brooklyn College voted to co-sponsor ‘Silencing Dissent: A Conversation with Steven Salaita, Katherine Franke and Corey Robin‘, an event organized by the Students for Justice in Palestine and scheduled for Thursday, November 20th. (In so doing, we joined the ranks of the departments of political science and sociology, as well as the Shirley Chisholm Project, Brooklyn for Peace, Jewish Voice for Peace – New York Chapter, and the International Socialist Organization.)

Because I had suggested–during the ‘new business’ section of our department meeting–that the department sponsor the event, and because the BDS controversy at Brooklyn College focused so much attention on the business of academic departments ‘sponsoring’ supposedly ‘political’ and ‘one-sided’ events, I offered some arguments about the desirability of the philosophy department signing on as a co-sponsor, even if our vote to do so would attract some of the same hostility the political science department at Brooklyn College had during the BDS event.

Those arguments can be summed up quite easily. Steven Salaita will soon be claiming, in a court of law, that: he lost his job because his constitutional right to free speech was infringed by a state actor; his speech was found offensive on political grounds; his academic freedom was violated; he lost his livelihood because he espoused his political opinions in a manner offensive to some. A debate about these issues, conducted with a law professor and moderated by a political theorist (who also teaches Constitutional Law), would offer to our students–even if they disagreed vehemently with Salaita’s political viewpoints–a chance to engage with many philosophical, political and legal problems, all of which they are exposed to, in theoretical form, in their many readings across our curriculum.

Most broadly, philosophy students would see philosophy in action: they would see arguments presented and analyzed and applied to an issue of contemporary political and moral significance. (One of my colleagues pointed out that our department offers a popular Philosophy and Law major, which ostensibly prepares them for law school admission and careers in the law; this demographic would be an ideal audience for the discussion.)

As might be imagined, given the furore generated by the BDS event last year, there was some trepidation over whether such a departmental vote, or the use of the language of ‘sponsorship’ was a good idea. In response, I analogized our sponsorship decision as akin to the inclusion  of a reading on a class syllabus (During the BDS controversy, I had made a similar argument in response to the claim that sponsoring an event entailed ‘endorsement’ of the speakers’ opinions.) When a philosophy professor does so, she says no more than that she thinks her students should read the reading and engage with it critically; it is worth reading, even if only to criticize it. (This semester, I had included Gobineau in my Social Philosophy reading list; I certainly did not intend to promulgate a theory of the Aryan master race by doing so.)

Lastly, I suggested issues of academic freedom are of utmost relevance and importance for all academic disciplines today. Every department on campus should be interested in a discussion centering on them.

We voted; the motion carried.

CP Snow On ‘The Rich And The Poor’

In 1959, while delivering his soon-to-be-infamous Rede Lectures on ‘The Two Cultures‘ at Cambridge University, C. P. Snow–in the third section, titled ‘The Rich and the Poor’–said,

[T]he people in the industrialised countries are getting richer, and those in the non-industrialised countries are at best standing still: so that the gap between the industrialised countries and the rest is widening every day. On the world scale this is the gap between the rich and the poor….Life for the overwhelming majority of mankind has always been nasty, brutish and short. It is so in the poor countries still.

This disparity between the rich and the poor has been noticed. It has been noticed, most acutely and not unnaturally, by the poor. Just because they have noticed it, it won’t last for long. Whatever else in the world we know survives to the year 2000, that won’t. Once the trick of getting rich is known, as it now is, the world can’t survive half rich and half poor. It’s just not on. [C. P. Snow, The Two Cultures, Cambridge University Press, Canto Classics, pp. 42]

Well, well, what extraordinary, almost touching, optimism.

Sir Charles did not understand, or care to, perhaps, the extraordinary pertinacity of the rich, those in power, their capacity to manipulate political and economic systems, their almost total control of consciousness and imagination, their ability to promulgate the central principles of the ideology that drives the economic inequality of this world to ever higher levels. (Snow was certainly correct that the world would not remain ‘half rich and half poor’ – that fraction, an always inaccurate one, tilts more now in the direction of the one percent–ninety-nine percent formulation made famous by Occupy Wall Street.)

Snow was also, as many commentators pointed out at the time in critical responses to his lectures, in the grip of an untenable optimism about the ameliorating effects of the scientific and industrial revolutions on both the world of nature and man: as their effects would spread, bringing in their wake material prosperity and intellectual enlightenment, old social and political structures would give way. But science and technology can comfortably co-exist with reactionary politics; they can be easily deployed to prop up repressive regimes; they can be just as easily used to prop up economic and political injustice as not. There is ample evidence for these propositions in the behavior of modern governments, who for instance, deploy the most sophisticated tools of electronic surveillance to keep their citizens under watch, acquiescent and obedient. And automation, that great savior of human labor, which was supposed to make our lives less ‘nasty and brutish’ might instead, when it takes root in such unequal societies, put all workers out to pasture.

But let us allow ourselves to be captured by the hope shown in Snow’s lectures that such radical inequality as was on display in 1959 and thereafter, cannot be a stable state of affairs. Then we might still anticipate that at some point in the future, armed with–among other tools–the right scientific and technical spanners to throw into the wheels of the political and economic juggernaut that runs over them, the poor will finally rise up.

Snowpiercer: The Train As Capitalist Society And The Universe

Post-apocalyptic art–whether literature or movies–is provided, sometimes all too easily, ample opportunity for flirting with the grand, for making sweeping statements about human nature and the meaning and purpose of life. After all, it’s the (often violent) end of the world. Time to speculate about the new, phoenix-like world that may rise from the ashes of the old, or to mourn the loss of not-easily replaced intangible moral goods of a world gone missing.  So it is unsurprising that Snowpiercer, Bong Joon-ho‘s English-language debut, swings for the fences.  It is initially grounded in a facile morality play about global warming, man’s persistently failed and hubristic attempts to play God, and the evils of science. There is more to it though. The ark-like train which is the movie’s stage and centerpiece, which circles the world carrying the survivors of a world frozen over, functions as an extended allegory for capitalist society, its economic inequality, class structures and exploitation of the weak, its decadence and immorality, and its inevitable revolt of the oppressed, and their rise to the top (or the front).

But Snowpiercer is more intellectually ambitious than that. It also to aims to be an allegory that flirts with God, the Universe, Free Will, Evil, Freedom and Existential Choice. It offers us commentary on ideology and false consciousness and propaganda; it shows us how man may be tempted by evil and can choose moral redemption instead. The structure of the train and the progressively enlightening journey of the rear passengers through its various compartments suggest too that Dante’s Inferno and the Pilgrim’s Progress could be invoked here with some ease. (Ironically, for an allegory, Snowpiercer is sometimes a little too literal and heavy-handed. Yes, man, with all his cunning and scheming, can play the part of a devious God, and God may just be our notion of human powers and goodness and judgment extrapolated to a unimaginable extreme, but these theses can be advanced with a little more subtlety than Snowpiercer allows.)

Snowpiercer‘s grand ambitions are sometimes realized and sometimes not.  Mostly they are not realized because Snowpiercer spends a little too much time trying to be an action movie. Its showings off of technical virtuosity, its nods to the video game and martial arts genres with their extended bloodiness, their glorying in gore, their stylized slow-motion combat, are distractions and deceits. (This action initially provides a possibly invigorating jolt to the movie’s plot, but all too soon it becomes tedious, deadening, and in the movie’s closing stages it is a distraction.) There is much in the movie that is visually interesting and provocative, much that should have been allowed to come to rest in the viewer for to facilitate reflection and introspection.  But this does not happen, largely because the movie believes that some rather archaic cinematic tropes–physical conflict rages elsewhere while two protagonists engage in philosophical debate!–must be relied on to in order to build and generate tension.

All too often, I find myself describing science-fiction movies as missed opportunities. This is one such.

Cultural Associations Do Not Add Up

In reviewing Jonathan Lethem‘s Dissident Gardens (“Leftists in Jeopardy“, New York Review of Books, April 2014), Michael Greenberg writes:

Lethem’s impulse to display his knowingness, his “vernacular” expertise, as he calls it, his belief that “were’ surrounded by signs [and] our imperative is to ignore none of them engenders a narrative noise that drowns out the novel’s subtler chords. His characters become the sum total  of their cultural associations,  creatures of the zeitgeist, a form of determinism, that as determinism does, leaves little or no room for spontaneity and nuance. We know them by their era, their affiliations, the music they listen to, and the products they boycott, or acquire.

Greenberg may be right that such ‘narrative noise…drowns out the novel’s subtler chords.’ But I do not know if the fundamental anxiety he expresses, that the characters subjected to such treatment become entirely relational–the “sum total of their cultural associations…with no room for spontaneity or nuance”–is all that worrisome or even perspicuous.

These associations and affiliations are expressions of taste, evidence of choices. These choices may display the very ‘spontaneity’ and ‘nuance’ whose absence Greenberg is bemoaning. We might know these characters by ‘their era, their affiliations, the music they listen to, and the products they boycott, or acquire’ but that does not mean the particular and peculiar way these are assembled by each individual may not be a ‘style’, a distinct signature, all its own.Greenberg seems to imagine such characters are entirely passive, merely bearing the impress of their cultures. But that would only be so if there is an assumption of, ironically enough, a certain ‘determinism’ on his part. These collections of ‘cultural associations,’ often very distinct from each other, present a different breeding ground for the various influences they subsequently encounter. Those interactions will often result in a quite unique character.

As but a trivial example, the temporal sequencing of these cultural adoptions may significantly affect the particular ‘sum total'; cultural choices and tastes do not follow some commutative law of addition. The teenager who discovers Slayer first, and then Black Sabbath later is very different from the one who listens to Black Sabbath first and finds Slayer later. The former finds his beloved thrashers have their provenance in classic heavy metal; the latter finds his beloved masters continue to live on in the homage paid them by contemporaries. The former may be tempted into an exploration of an older school of music; the latter may seek to find other bands’ expressions of a signature style. Their resultant journeys are likely to be very different. Or, if you prefer a more exalted example, those who read military histories of the Second World War first, and then later read those written by Herodotus, are likely to have a quite different reading experience from those who bring Herodotus to their reading of the Second World War histories.

Conformity is a genuine worry, but not quite in the way that Greenberg worries about it. The notion of a ‘sum total…of cultural associations’, in particular, strikes me as incoherent.

The Indian Non-Fan of Cricket

My latest post at The Cordon at ESPNcricinfo, about that supposedly mystical creature, the Indian non-fan of cricket, is up and running. Here is how the post concludes:

There is nothing essential about cricket’s place in the Indian imagination or sensibility; its position is not protected by any mystical guarantees of durability. It is a cultural activity, one with a history of contingencies propping it up; it must compete for time and attention and emotional investment with all the other offerings of this variegated world. Perhaps, almost unimaginably, it will recede from Indian shores, leaving behind some archaeological traces of its once iron-clad hold on that land.

Re-Reading Cormac McCarthy’s ‘The Road’

I’m re-reading Cormac McCarthy‘s The Road in preparation for discussing it with my students next week. It has been an interesting experience.

First, I am struck by how new the book seems on this second reading. I read it first a year ago, and yet, its prose seems just as pristine. There is some familiarity in the narrative, in the landscape the Man and the Boy traverse, and the central tragedy of their impoverished and stark existence, but the words are read anew all over again. They have not lost–in the slightest–their power to evoke wonder, pity, fear, and sorrow. Indeed, I’m struck by how much more I notice on my second journey through this bitter, desolate land (beginning with the dream on page one of “the great stone room where lay a black and ancient lake” on whose “far shore” is a “creature that raised its dripping mouth from the rimstone pool and stared into the light with eyes dead white and sightless as the eggs of spiders.”)

Second, my first reading occurred after I had already seen John Hillcoat‘s cinematic adaptation. Then, my appreciation of the novel’s imagery had been significantly impacted by that of the movie; I could not but help invoke the movie in my mind’s eye as I read the book. It made for an often jarring experience. Now, a year or so has passed since I last saw the movie, and the novel stands on its own. And I dare say its brilliance is even more acutely on display. I’m more aware of the poetic sparseness and harshness of its language, its deployment of wondrous words and sentences (“lozenges of stone veined and striped”), and the interiority of the Man, his bitter railings and his love and anger. Then, I had read the novel to see what the movie was based on; now, as I read the novel there is nothing else in mind. My attention is commanded entirely by the novel; its spells are ever more efficacious.

Third,  I am not reading alone. My students are reading it with me, even if they are not physically present at the moment. Because I’m reading the book in preparation for a classroom discussion, I’m actively and aggressively marking up passages to bring up in class.  I am looking, keenly, for its suggestions and symbolisms and allegories;  I am thinking anew about the meanings of even the briefest dialogues. I’m anticipating my students’ reactions to each passage, wondering whether one of them will comment on the same line I have marked up in the margins, whether they will be horrified, saddened, and enthralled as I was a year ago, and as I am now. Because I will be bringing my reading of the book to them, and hope they will do the same, my reading is tinged with a sense of foreboding: yet another encounter with it awaits me. Who knows what my students’ backgrounds and lives will produce in their meetings with the text? And perhaps our joint discussion will throw up ever newer meanings and interpretations.

Truly, the classics pay rich dividends for our persistent devotions.

Parable of the Sower: Octavia Butler’s Parable

Octavia Butler‘s Parable of the Sower, the richly symbolic and subversive.story of Lauren Olamina, a prophet in the making, one finding her voice and her people in the midst of an America whose social order is collapsing around her, grows on you.  The story line is sparse: the US’ accumulated social, political and environmental dysfunctions have grown out of control thanks to a myopic complacent populace; some fortunate families shelter in gated communities while urban war rages outside; rape, murder, and mayhem rule rampant; a young girl, convinced she has devised a new religion, Earthseed–whose central principles are that ‘God is Change’ and can be ‘shaped’–finds her sheltering life within these walls untenable, and leaves after yet another attack on them convinces her it is more dangerous inside than outside. From that point on, she accumulates a small band of fellow travelers and heads north to possible safety. On the way she finds further gruesome evidence of the end of the new world and dreams about a new one. The haven promised them turns out to be a burnt-out shelter, the larger world on a smaller scale–but she chooses to drop anchor and get to work on it. (I’ve not read the sequel Parable of the Talents yet, but I intend to. Parable of the Sower was written in 1993, and it sets its action in the years 2025-2027. Though perhaps inevitable, I suspect it is besides the point to wonder if its speculations about a collapsing US are on the mark. The real story lies elsewhere. )

Parable of the Sower is subversive because the prophet is a young black girl, not an old white man. She is wise beyond her years. She is sexually active with young and old men alike; she can be harsh and soft.  She is scientifically literate. She is hyperempathic–she can literally feel the pain of others. (This is a dangerous ‘blessing’ in a world with so much pain but Lauren comes to learn its limits and to live with it.)  She is tough and resourceful and clever; we come to admire her as her dangerous journey progresses. We do not normally associate these qualities with people meeting Lauren’s description–not in this society anyway, with its dominant stereotypes and ideological frames of understanding.  Just for this character, Parable of the Sower would have been an interesting and enlightening read.

But there is more. Earthseed seems a little new-ageish, but teasing out some of Lauren’s pronouncements enable an understanding of it as a kind of existentialist creed, one grounded in a richly interactionist. embedded, dynamic view of man and nature and cosmos. Heaven and hell are found here, around us, made by us, shaped by our actions; the old religions shrouded them in mystery but we live in them everyday. (The shrewd prophet uses that old word ‘God’ to make her religion easier to follow by those accustomed to old anthropomorphic deities.) In a world headed for hell in a handbasket this religion offers no solace, facilitates no finger-pointing; the blame is ours, but so may be the rewards for reconstructing it.  No creed can, or should, offer more.

 

Matthew Arnold On Inequality

In his 1879 essay ‘Equality,’ Matthew Arnold wrote about inequality too:

What the middle class sees is that splendid piece of materialism, the aristocratic class, with a wealth and luxury utterly out of their reach, with a standard of social life and manners, the offspring of that wealth and luxury , seeming out utterly out of their reach also. And thus they are thrown back upon themselves–upon a defective type of religion, a narrow range of intellect and knowledge, a stunted sense of beauty, a low standard of manners. And the lower class see before them the aristocratic class, and its civilization, such as it is, even infinitely more of out of their reach than out of that of the middle class; while the life of the middle class, with its unlovely types of religion, thought, beauty, and manners, has naturally in general, no great attractions for them either. And so they too are thrown back upon themselves; upon their beer, their gin, and their fun. Now then, you will understand what I meant by saying that our inequality materialises our upper class, vulgarises our middle class, brutalises our lower.

And the greater the inequality the more marked is its bad action upon the middle and lower classes….

[O]ur aristocracy…is for the imagination a singularly modern and uninteresting one. Its splendor of station, its wealth, show, and luxury, is then what the other classes really admire in it; and this is not an elevating admiration. Such an admiration will never lift us out of our vulgarity and brutality, if we chance to be vulgar and brutal to start with; it will rather feed them and be fed by them….our love of inequality is really the vulgarity in us, and the brutality, admiring and worshipping the splendid materiality.

[Matthew Arnold: Selected Essays, edited with an introduction by Noel Annan, Oxford University Press, 1964]

Arnold does not speak here of rage, outward or inward directed, but he might as well have. For there is a black envy here, in his mention of an ‘admiration’ that is not ‘elevating’ but that instead ‘feeds’ and is ‘fed’ by ‘vulgarity’ and ‘brutality.’ This corrosion of sensibilities that inequality produces–all the more acute as the inequality grows more pronounced–cannot be anything but a destabilizing force, one that may not restrained too long.

In some cultures it is said staring at someone eating brings bad luck to the person eating. The watcher is urged to show some manners; the eater turns away to consume in peace. A pair of hungry eyes looking at sustenance denied them cannot but ruin the appetite of those conscious of their gaze. Matters, no doubt, are infinitely worse when the food on the plate has been stolen from those watching, when they have been forced to serve it up with their own hands.

The converse, of course, of such a superstition, is that the ostentatious consumer of food denied others reminds others of their misfortune, rubs their faces in it. He runs the risk too, of having his plate snatched out of his hands.

Not Working While Working

Roland Paulsen has an interesting essay over at The Atlantic on not working while working. Shirking, slacking, ‘pretending to add value,’ not having enough to do, boring work, ‘meaningless’ work – whatever it is, whatever the reason – there’s a whole lot of not working while working going on. And yet, we continue to ‘work’ more and more, with increasingly reduced time for families and leisure. The cruelest of all ironies: we have to remove ourselves from  scenes of leisure and familial ties, take ourselves elsewhere, and then, not work.

I often don’t work while working, mainly because I’m distracted by social media and email and just plain old Internet-centered procastination–as I have complained here. But there was a time once, when I wanted to work while working and couldn’t, because someone else wanted to do my work.

In 1998, in an effort to earn a little money that would allow me to work on my dissertation without having to spend a lot of time teaching for peanuts in CUNY’s adjunct-exploiting system, I decided to take six months off and work in New York City’s financial sector–doing UNIX system administration. Jobs were a dime-a-dozen, the Internet gold rush was on, and I found a gig at an online brokerage within three days of applying. (I stupidly asked for too little, of course.)

In any case, once I signed up, I found myself assigned as backup to an older system administrator. He would show me the ropes and I would assist him on all tasks. I quickly realized my colleague had been made extremely nervous by my hiring. He was convinced–thanks to his years in the aerospace industry–that his head was on the proverbial chopping block and that once he had finished ‘training’ me, he would be fired. (Asking around behind the scenes, I was told that no such plan was in the works, but all reassurance to this effect failed to comfort my co-worker.)

So, all too quickly, I realized that any work assigned us as a pair would be done by him alone. All too often, my co-worker would tell me to ‘relax’, saying he could take care of it himself. Once done with it, he would report to our supervisor, informing him in great detail just how efficiently he had accomplished his objectives. (He also insisted on keeping the emergency beeper with him at all times; I was only too happy to let him hold on to it.) I would sometimes accompany him as he went about these chores but soon enough I gave up even that pretense and retired to my desk to browse, drink coffee, and chat with my neighbors. I knew there was little danger of my being fired; my employers wanted a pair of system administrators on duty at all times, and there was little chance they would let me go in the job market that existed then, which featured a shortage of folks with my ‘skills.’ As before, this fact did not make a dent in my co-worker’s anxieties. Truth be told, there was something pitiful about it all.

And so it went. I would show up on time at work, convey a reasonable impression of being occupied, take long lunch and coffee breaks, attend meetings, and all of the rest. A few months later, when according to my calculations I had earned enough to take care of my living expenses for a few months of teaching-free dissertation writing, I handed in my resignation.

In six months, I had barely worked the equivalent of two weeks.

Chronicle Of A Cryptic Reminder

Sometimes I scribble little notes to myself–mostly on pieces of paper, but increasingly, on a little electronic notepad on my smartphone. Sometimes they are prompted by observations while walking, sometimes by a passage read in a book, sometimes by a scene in a movie. Sometimes they make sense when I return to them a little later, and an expanded thought based on them finds its way into my writing–perhaps here on this blog, or elsewhere. But sometimes, when I look at them, they make little or no sense. I have no idea what prompted them, and they find their way into a physical or virtual wastebasket. This forgetfulness stems, in part, from their provenance. When I write them down, I am possessed by a panic that the momentary thought will disappear, leaving no trace behind. So, cutting corners, I rush to commit to permanence. Haste makes waste indeed. Or rather, anxiety does.

Here is one such cryptic missive: “A few years after I became older than my father, I met him again.” I do not know what this means, I do not know what inspired this line. But let me see if I can make some sense of it.

I am now older than my father. I became older than him in September 2010. Indeed, if I could be bothered to do so again, I could calculate the exact date on which I did so. It had been a little obsession of mine–this going past my father in the chronological stakes–in the days and months leading up to it. It marked a strange supersession–I had racked up more days on this planet than he ever managed.  Once I passed that magic marker, every day beyond it bore a curious stamp: it was associated with an age my father had never experienced. (It is for this reason, of course, that I cannot imagine my father as an old man; he always appears as a young man in the images I associate with him, even as he became prematurely balding in his late thirties.) So, now, even as I experience some of the same bodily and mental changes he underwent in the forties, I can also surmise, optimistically, that I will have some experiences he never underwent.

But I have no idea what “I met him again” means. Perhaps he had starred in one of my dreams, appearing as he normally does, a shadowy figure, not quite distinct, all too easily morphing into the background, becoming hidden again, a quick vision, a quick obscurity. Or perhaps I meant it more figuratively, as an encounter with something I associate indelibly with him: Russian literature, military aviation, or his gloomy prognostication, made back in the seventies, that the coming century would see increasingly bloody and intractable conflict between the haves and the have-nots.  Or perhaps, it might just be that one day I looked at my daughter and saw some distinctive feature which announced her genetic inheritance. At that moment, perhaps, I saw, just for an instant, my father all over again.