Long Sunday

Who Killed Cultural Studies?

  I had a number of complicated reactions to the recent article in the London Review of Books by Jeremy Harding describing the final day of Walter Benjamin’s life.  Benjamin’s death, perhaps more than any other of those theorists whose lives ended in suicide or insanity (Nietzsche, Deleuze), holds me in a sort of mournful thrall.  I find myself obsessing over the moment when Benjamin finally decided that there was no way out, that he would be deported, loaded into a train, sent to a concentration camp, and gassed—his body disappearing underneath hundreds of now nameless Jews in a mass grave. 

Harding’s article (a review of a recent memoir by Carina Birman, one of the individuals who attempted to take Benjamin across the Franco-Spanish border) meditates on what he calls the “Walter Benjamin cult.” Benjamin’s death, according to Harding, is

symbolic to the point of unreality, an enactment more than an event, like the death of the Christain messiah and the disappearance of the ‘risen’ body, for so long a matter of ardent conjecture.  In a ritual sense, Benjamin’s death is closer to Judaic purification than a redemptive sacrifice.  Yet in the likeness of the scapegoat, he confounds even that tradition, evicted not by his own tribe but by their enemies, wandering a mountainous wilderness not with the misdemeanours of his people on his head-‘all their iniquities in all their sins’—but their innocence. 

Benjamin is the Christ-figure of cultural studies, his unique writing style and eccentric concerns only heighten the sense of his otherworldliness: a materialist who nevertheless uses kabbalism and Jewish messianic thought to break open the homogeneous temporality embedded in much of historical-materialism.  But it is in his death that Harding sees the birth of an academic messianic figure. Benjamin sacrifices himself attempting to deliver his final work (presumably a final version of The Arcades Project, but even this is heavily disputed by Benjamin critics) to the public.  He, then, dies and his death magnifies the resonance of his work a thousand-fold.  In Benjamin 's work popular culture meets the literary, the religious and the political, and it is in the wake of his death that all of these elements merge together in the ubitquitous and nebulous form of contemporary American cultural studies.  American cultural studies is founded, in a large sense, in the haunting shadow of Benjamin's death. I can't help but wonder if my own work is not a mourning ritual for figures like Benjamin.   

Culture and politics, as Nietzsche said...

Or at least parrhesia, that is. A fourth unavowable film joins The Power of Nightmares, Inconvenient Truth and Sicko, then (via here).

No End in Sight is apparently the first film by millionaire Charles Ferguson, and an essential one. (As the saying goes, aristocracy often do some interesting things because they have the time. The rest of us just watch. I recently watched the Guerilla News Network's docudrama, Battleground, a bit more in your face than My Country, My Country, though both significant collections of testimony on their own.)

If one thing seems abundantly clear, it is that a politically splintered, sectarian Iraq looms on the horizon, and for a while now has been actively anticipated and even "planned for" by a host of powers. For what the blogosphere has had to say on this disastrous "development," still as yet barely noted in the MSM (barring some miracle, as an all-but-inevitable, long-planned-for military consequence), I refer you to Juan Cole (any others?).

A Coup for the Blogosphere

The biggest scoop ever in the blogosphere relative to the MSM: Perez Hilton is reporting that Castro died last week. Unfortunately, Perez Hilton is roughly the blogosphere equivalent of Howard Stern. But all the same.

Notes on Coffee

Carl Schmitt and Jurgen Habermas are, without a doubt, the most (in)famous political theorists to come from Germany since Marx. (One might want to include Leo Strauss, but I don't think he wrote anything of substance on coffee.) As is well-known - many of us get our introductions to Habermas via his Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere - Habermas associated the development of the salons and coffee-houses with the development of the public sphere, located between the spheres of 'family' and 'state.' Coffee, for Habermas, was essential to the development of liberal, bourgeois and democratic politics.  Much less well known is that Schmitt also wrote on coffee, the bourgeoisie and liberal democratic. His assessement of coffee and liberalism is nearly the opposite of Habermas'. Their respective assessments of coffee present interesting grounds upon which to judge and compare the anti-liberalism of Schmitt with the pro-liberalism of Habermas. Interestingly, it is worth noting that Schmitt's notes on coffee (1947-51) predate Habermas' book on the coffee-house (orig. 1962) by over a decade and coincide with the end of Schmitt's internment and interrogations at Nuremberg. While Habermas engages in a lengthy -  if albeit surprisingly ambivalent - confrontation with Schmitt in the Structural Transformation, he does not cite Schmitt's notes on coffee (most likely because they were not widely available, even in Germany, until 1991).

Extracts from Habermas' Structural Transformation and a discussion of Schmitt's Glossarium notes on coffee by Jakob Norberg 'below the fold.'

al qaeda in the subdivisions; or, AP american history

(x-posted from adswithoutproducts)

It is worth remembering that, however things look on the surface, we Americans will always be the insurgents, never the occupiers. The IEDs will always be ours, the sniping - we invented that.

Whatever it looks like on the screen, we will always be irregulars, we will always land on the asymmetrical side of things. Our torture rooms are never those of the prison-bricked Central Intelligence office or the PVC camp - they are always in the back room, upstairs and to the back, with the rough hewn chair and the single lightbulb hanging from the ceiling.

We will always be "just kids," and the wars will always be fought between one backyard and the drainage pond at the corner. Someone's golden retriever will always run across the field of battle at the critical moment. We will lock and load and empty our magazines before our mothers call us in for microwaved dinners.

In Totem and Taboo, Freud fabulates the origination of the incest taboo in a story that is also (of course) a story of the origins of civilization and the social contract that initiates it. There is a big bad father, and then there are sons. The sons - they can't get what they want sexually or in any other way - dad has a monopoly over the women. So the sons kill dad (Freud wonders if it was "some advance in culture, like the use of a new weapon," that allowed the sons to win - I think we can all agree that it wasn't so much a "weapon" as a set of tactics, namely guerrilla warfare, the sort of thing that would later manifest itself, as we all learn in school, at Lexington and Concord against the Redcoats...) But once dad is dead, there is a problem - a problem whose solution takes the shape of the incest prohibition and, well, civilization itself:

[T]he incest prohibition had [...] a strong practical foundation. Sexual need does not unite men; it separates them. Though the brothers had joined forces in order to overcome the father, each was the other’s rival among the women. Each one wanted to have them all to himself like the father, and in the fight of each against the other the new organization would have perished. For there was no longer any one stronger than all the rest who could have successfully assumed the role of the father. Thus there was nothing left for the brothers, if they wanted to live together, but to erect the incest prohibition – perhaps after many difficult experiences – through which they all equally renounced the women whom they desired, and on account of whom they had removed the father in the first place. Thus they saved the organization which had made them strong and which could be based upon the homo-sexual feelings and activities which probably manifested themselves among them during the time of their banishment.

What can we say? If only this were true when it comes to us. The happy - if only ever moderately happy - structuralization of dad's brutality, the construction upon the solid foundation of a repressed but ever present fraterphilia as well as the (sure!) very dark joke that deaddad gets to play on them in the end as far as access to women goes ("You thought you'd have all, but instead you'll have none, because you are too many...") The revolution ends in a socialism of castration - the only consolation arrives via the fact that it you (pl.) that deny yourself the women, rather than that fat bastard of a father, in our case, King George III, later aka LeninoStalin, et al.

No. What happened here is something entirely other. We killed dad, yes, but rather than simply constructing a totem and going on our self-chastening way, we decided (is that the word?) to reenact differently, more viscerally - for real. With our own sons, or especially the sons of others - even as we strike them down, we imagine, time and again, that it is the hand of filial revolt that we raise when we raise to strike. We will always be the bad son, the prodigal returned to fuck dad up right good when we asks what we've done with the money, even if there is no beard on those we strike, even if they still are on mom's tit as we decapitate and worse, in our eyes, fucked up with the drug of repetition without difference, they are bearded and old, they have stolen our mom-sisters from the tent bed, they are sandy with their mature denial of our rights even as infants. We are Issac as Abraham striking down Issac - the call to hold off never comes, because you need a father's ear to hear it, and we are only sons...

The Child is the father of the Man. Yes, but the natural piety in question, the binding of now to back then, incessantly takes the shape of sprinting in surplus stuff across the backyard, carrying the guns borrowed from our fathers' (father's) collection, a children's crusade, an insurgency of kids, shooting blanks, catching ourselves on film, all in the end for AP credit.

Suspension of Disbelief

(The following contains spoilers for the latest Bourne film – though its nothing you couldn’t reasonably guess if you’ve seen such a movie in the last 20 years.)

Towards the end of the latest Bourne movie, moralistic CIA cog Joan Allen - having acquired a black bag full of dirty agency secrets - hides herself in a basement, dutifully faxing off the incriminating pages.  She is blowing the whistle on the Blackbriar program, an almost comically small-time (by present standards) assassin-training program, responsible, in addition to waxing several internationals, for killing a couple of U.S. citizens.  The aggregate response to this information is consistent with the genre – outrage towards the Program, accolades for Allen, a fictional President commissions a special investigation, and our bad guy CIA cogs are shown being taken away in cuffs.  Movie over - world safe.

It happens that in this week’s New Yorker there is a lengthy article detailing the set-up and operation of the CIA black-sites in the years following 9/11.  Explained at length is the resurrection and perfection of Cold War torture techniques by head CIA policy makers, the process by which thousands were kidnapped and deported, regardless of nationality, and the generally illegal and reprehensible conduct of the agency over the past six years.  The fact that none of this is really news mitigates only slightly the effect of reading this information in the New Yorker, and even less the resounding silence to which this article will, undoubtedly, be met.

"but you're still fuckin' peasants as far as I can see..."

(x-posted from adswithoutproducts)

Just came across another candidate for my collection of incredibly strange American politico-cultural amalgamations, hybrids, and halfrights: Green Day's recent cover of John Lennon's "Working Class Hero."

Did they actually listen to the song before they decided on this Darfur x-over thing? High-Period Lennon Political Ambivalence (see also: "When you talk about destruction, doncha know that you can count me out... in...) meets Teary Liberal Piety about those Poor, Poor People Elsewhere at the crossroads of unmetabolized reflexivity.

How about this part, as the noble faces of the Darfurians bubble across the screen, and Billie Joe Armstrong sings:

Keep you doped with religion and sex and TV,
And you think you're so clever and classless and free,
But you're still fucking peasants as far as I can see,
A working class hero is something to be,
A working class hero is something to be.

Yeouch. Just to make it worse, here's a bit from wikipedia that quotes the band's press release about the song:

When asked why they chose the song, frontman Billie Joe Armstrong said, "We wanted to do 'Working Class Hero' because its themes of alienation, class, and social status really resonated with us. It's such a raw, aggressive song -- just that line: 'you're still fucking peasants as far as I can see' -- we felt we could really sink our teeth into it. I hope we've done him justice."

You could write a dissertation, not an acceptable one, but whatever, on the topic: "Who does Billie Joe think the 'you' of that toothsome line refers to?"

Secondary mystification, or simply vapid distraction, "what the fuck, yeah, the Africans, cool..."? Benettonism gone libidinal? Inadvertent self-disclosure, a profoundly unconscious honesty that leaves Lennon's navel-gazing in the dust? 

The new liberal eugenics?

Recently the blogosphere has bee alight over the issue of eugenics, and whether liberals are bringing it back in. Various strands of evidence are offered, including the fact that historically it was "progressives" who previously supported eugenics when it was hot in the early twentieth century. Another strand is simply that "eugenics" and "pro-choice" are the same thing. Another strand follows the debate about stem cell research and equates those in favor of it with eugenics. (Summary article here.)

Then you have CNN host Glen Beck:

Beck added: "Then you get the scientists -- eugenics. You get the scientists -- global warming. Then you have to discredit the scientists who say, 'That's not right.' And you must silence all dissenting voices. That's what Hitler did."

Beck aside, let's take this concern seriously for a moment, especially the idea that genetic testing will lead to preferential births. Are liberals in favor of this and do they have a history of supporting such positions? The first thing to do would be to know something about the nature and origins of eugenics, and who supported it in the early twentieth century.

The idea that this was a progressive project isn't true. Eugenics is the practice of improving the breeding stock by eliminating the weak and increasing the strong. The term was invented by Francis Galton in 1883, and was pursued vigorously in the UK and America in the early twentieth century. It was not at all a disreputable idea at that time, and when applied to physical traits such as size or color (selective breeding) it does work. In fact eugenics was mainstream science in the USA at that time, with anthropologists, biologists and geographers all endorsing its claims. It is not unrelated to developments in public health either.

Where it differs sharply from natural processes of course is that people intervene to try and reduce traits that are only vaguely defined such as "feeblemindedness" which had no stable definition, and to make causal hereditary linkages for observed behaviors. In the early 20th century many proponents of eugenics, such as leading scientist and anthropologist Charles Davenport, who headed the Eugenics Records Office at Cold Spring Harbor, also pursued a racist agenda (as was common at the time) in the face of immigration fears (particularly immigrants from SE Europe). Davenport, his colleagues, and allies in Congress also passed forcible sterilization laws that targeted minorities, the poor and poorly educated.

Was Davenport a liberal? I don't know how he voted, but consider that he endorsed differences in racial intelligence and once received an admiring letter from Adolf Hitler (documented in Black's book). (He also imported and the ERO distributed many German propaganda films during the 1930s, and was given an award by the German government.) On the eve of WW2 his office was disbanded after receiving years of criticism for being unscientific (and his pro-German views increasingly an embarrassment). He did not endorse human equality (that all humans display the same potential) but the exact opposite: that being related to a drunkard uncle made you less viable. As one commentator to this discussion already pointed out, Hitler and the Germans got many of their ideas from the Americans, not the other way round.

All this has reached a head recently, with developmental geneticists such as Armand Leroi arguing that there is a neo-eugenics on the horizon due to the increased possibility of genetic screening of the fetus. Leroi may be familiar to you as the scientist who had argued in an op-ed in the NYT that race is genetically and biologically identifiable (in direct opposition to the prevailing scientific view of the post-war era. In fact, the SSRC set up a website to discuss this idea and why it is mistaken.) Geneticists are not scholars of race, but Leroi's latest discussion piece seems more viable. As Troy Duster has long argued, there is a real possibility of a rebiologization of life (including race, but also pre-natal screening, race-based medicines such as BiDil) in ways which echo some of the later work of Michel Foucault on biopolitics.

Neo-eugenics, liberal eugenics, race and biopolitics. Obviously this is going to be one of the key issues of our time.

PS: Salon recently reviewed a new history of eugenics, which I have not read, but there are already several great histories available (see below).

Black, E. (2003) War against the Weak. Eugenics and America's Campaign to Create a Master Race. New York and London, Four Walls Eight Windows.

Kevles, D.J. (1985) In the Name of Eugenics. Genetics and the Uses of Human Heredity. Berkeley and Los Angeles, University of California Press.

I wrote about some of this elsewhere:

Crampton, J.W. (2007). Maps, Race and Foucault: Eugenics and Territorialization Following World War One. In Crampton, J.W. & Elden, S. (Eds.) Space, Knowledge and Power: Foucault and Geography. Aldershot, Hants, Ashgate. 223-44.

So What About Schmitt

I've a handful of favorite plaints against procedural-parliamentary-liberal-juridical- constitutional-democracy.  Democracy is by definition anti-minority.  Liberalisms greatest strength, its apotheosis of the individual, is likewise its greatest failing.  Then there's the devastation of Society Must Be Defended.  So it was that I was perfectly well prepared to add another from Schmitt when a book discussion group I've recently joined here in Toronto took up Schmitt's Political Theology.  I was bowled over by my reading of "The Theory of the Partisan."  Not so with Political Theology.  Sure it displays a certain brilliance and contains a few rather memorable lines.  However, the oft bandied about truism that Schmitt's critique of liberalism has never found its answer before or since strikes me as extraordinarily short-sighted. 

While Kelsen, as the major target of Schmitt's venom, appears to me to get what's coming his way, the answer to Krabbe (Ch. 2 - pp. 21ff in my edition), at least Krabbe as presented by Schmitt, seems to me rather unimpressive.  As Schmitt describes it Krabbe posits "[t]he modern idea of the state" as replacing

the personal force (of the king, of the authorities) with spiritual power. "We no longer live uner the authority of persons, be they natural or artificial (legal) persons, but under the rules of laws, (spiritual) forces ... These forces rule in the the strictest sense of the word.  Precisely because these forces emanate from the spiritual nature of man, they can be obeyed voluntarily."

Closely related, according to Schmitt, are the associative theories Gierke and Preuss.  Such a coummunity is understood to be "based on associations and constitued from below, as an organization that d[oes] not need a monopoly on power and could thus also manage without sovereignty."