Issue 99

Neocitizenship and Critique

2009-12-17T22:29:04Z

Identity now functions not so much to retain a representational space or
define a trajectory toward cultural autonomy as it operates as a holograph
of what the appropriate subject of a new form of governance might look
like. The referents of identities are now less important than the capacity
to look like an identity at all.
-- Cindy Patton, "Tremble, Hetero Swine!"

It may be that the true predicaments of our time will assume their
authentic form . . . only when totalitarianism has become a thing of
the past.
-- Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism

And what if Rome once more conquered the revolution?
-- Michel Foucault, Society Must Be Defended

This essay asks how the political identity and the domain of civic practice we refer to by the term citizenship is transformed, eroded, or, perhaps, disappeared in the contexts of neoliberal governance. To put the question more pointedly: what happens -- what is presently happening -- to the meaning and practice of citizenship with the eclipse of popular sovereignty? By way of caveat lector, I confess at the outset that this essay has served as the occasion to pursue a rather particular, eclectic trajectory through a limited body of historical and critical work that compels my own thinking on this question. It is, unabashedly, both a prolonged and a preliminary meditation -- a chance to follow through on a line of thought that has emerged for me piecemeal, in graduate classrooms and conference halls, even as I know that I will not arrive. If nothing else, I hope to pressure the relation between subjects and citizens in the context of neo-liberal governance. My concern is not so much that in our rush to think the emergent modalities of state and corporate power routinely glossed as "neoliberal" we neglect the topic of political subject-constitution (though sometimes, of course, we do that, as well), but rather that when we do attend to latter-day "citizen-subjects," we proceed as though we know what we mean: as though the term citizen, divested of the modifier bourgeois, perhaps with an alternate descriptor attached (e.g., flexible), can

name the relation of subjects to the institutions of neoliberal governance as well as it did, not so very long ago, to the legal and civic institutions of the bourgeois nation-state. In this regard, it's only too apparent that the we of the preceding sentence is no ingenuous rhetorical choice, as my own title brashly enacts the very same critical maneuver. At the same time, my aspiration in this essay is to hold open the question of whether "citizens" and "citizenship" outlives its modern conditions of possibility and, especially, the related question of what claims we can make for (and about) it -- whether our intellectual reflexes, honed on the critique of the "old" citizenship and its contexts (abstract equality, racial nationalism, bourgeois civil society, and so forth), are adequate to the critical engagement with whatever it is we now name citizenship, what Michael Hardt expressly calls "the citizen as a whatever identity."

TV Urgente: Urban Exclusion, Civil Society, and the Politics of Television in Venezuela

2009-12-17T22:22:14Z

"Aqui no hay barrios" (There are no barrios here) was what real estate agents told me when they showed me apartments in one of the middle-class zones of eastern Caracas, to assure me that the slum districts that house roughly half of the city's population, called barrios in Venezuela, were safely distant. Shortly after I arrived in the country, a security official at the U.S. Embassy warned me never to travel into the slums. "The people there are so desperately poor," he insisted earnestly, "that they'll rob your shoes, your shirt, your eyeglasses, your belt -- and that's if you get out alive." The

barrios are often identified in everyday conversations like these as a kind of cancer on the city, pouring bodies into and draining resources out of the valley of Caracas. Caracas's slums have been steadily growing since the 1950s, but in the 1990s, their population surged alongside the marginal quarters of BogotÃ¡, Lima, and the other outsized metropolises of Latin America. But in Venezuela this constituency has succeeded in leveraging its local energies into a national political movement. In a country where over 85 percent of the population lives in cities, the radical social-democratic government of Hugo ChÃ¡vez has counted largely on barrio residents for its

base of support. The politics of media and journalism, moreover, have played a uniquely prominent role in the class conflict that has occupied Venezuelan society for the last six years. On both the right and left, the airwaves have become a critical theater in the political and social conflict of a divided nation.

The Labor Factor in the Creative Economy: A Marxist Reading

2009-12-17T22:16:09Z

In the advent of the creative economy,1 creativity is turned into a tool for economic development. Through the reification of creativity, freedom is celebrated, and a new type of democracy is conjured up, which is not based on political participation but on free access to creativity -- everybody can produce creatively, and everybody can consume creative products according to individual tastes. Within such a discourse of celebration, what must be strategically ignored is the labor dimension essential to

creative production. The creative economy relies on but also dismisses the materiality of creative labor. My focus in this essay is precisely to explicate the labor factor that makes up this creative economy.

Seventeen Years, Seventeen Murders: Biospectacularity and the Production of Post-Cold War Knowledge in El Salvador

2009-12-17T22:08:17Z

Skulls rise. Then shins. Then kneecaps. Then fingers. Toes. Teeth. Jumbled fragments soon to be assembled by forensic anthropologists into a stiff mimesis of body space once inhabited so carelessly.

In late January 1999, dozens of journalists descended on a graffiti-covered neighborhood at the edge of the sweaty departmental capital of San Miguel, in eastern El Salvador, in search of bones. They came back wielding the corpse reportage long familiar to Salvadorans after a dozen years of war. All the evening news shows seemed to cut the same segments: first a vertical pan of squinty-eyed firefighters emerging from the depths of abandoned wells -- gripping those skulls and shins and kneecaps. Next a long zoom shot onto the skulls -- as if they were seeking scraps of flesh or shreds of hair. Yearning for a face in mute bone. The visions roused tabloid

editors to conjure lurid captions in the morning papers: "Pozos macabros" ("Macabre wells") and "Pozos de la muerte" ("Wells of death").

Not Yet Beyond the Veil: Muslim Women in American Popular Literature

2009-12-17T21:55:38Z

In his 1977 essay "An Image of Africa: Racism in Conrad's HEART OF DARKNESS," Chinua Achebe tells of receiving a letter from a high school student

in Yonkers who upon reading Achebe's novel THINGS FALL APART "was particularly happy to learn about the customs and superstitions of an African tribe." Among other problems of preconception and ethnocentrism, Achebe here points to the damaging habit of approaching fiction as a transparent, practically invisible conveyance for ethnography. Beyond the student's failure to consider the engrained behaviors of "his own tribesmen in Yonkers, New York," as Achebe puts it, there lies an even more basic fallacy: the idea that a novel can serve as a reliable container

for "customs and superstitions." Since 1977, if anything, this reductive ethnographic reading practice has become more prevalent, to the point where college syllabi, Amazon bulletin boards, and professional book reviews alike exhibit a hermeneutic division of labor that allows Western representations to be ironic and complex and reads "third-world" and "minority" writing as exclusively mimetic.

Editorial Note

2009-12-17T21:46:47Z

From its inception, SOCIAL TEXT has regularly published work in translation. Although translations have perhaps been less prominent than in some other journals (the early New Left Review, New German Critique, and Telos, for example), the commitment to making significant texts in foreign languages available to English-language readers has been central to our editorial collective's understanding of the journal's mission. Over the past thirty years, SOCIAL TEXT has published the first translations into English of major works by theorists including Michel de Certeau, Jacques Attali, and Roberto FernÃ¡ndez Retamar, as well as a wide range of literature, scholarship, and interviews with academics, visual artists, performers, and political activists.

A Short Introduction to Adorno's Mediation between "Kultur" and Culture

2009-12-17T21:36:55Z

This introduction to the translation of Theodor W. Adorno's "Kultur and Culture," originally a lecture not intended for transcription and publication, situates the talk amongst Adorno's analyses of U.S. society and traces his distinctions between European and American understandings of culture. The talk is a rare example where Adorno discusses culture per se, as opposed to his work on "culture industry" and "cultural criticism." The object of the critical and dialectical critique--a prime example of "immanent critique" as understood by the Frankfurt school--is the Enlightenment, both as a historical epoch and as human beings' increasing technical mastery over nature. In its historical sense, the Enlightenment has been victorious in the United States, where free and equal citizens engage in market exchanges as free agents, without feudal and precapitalist residues. Examining the concept of culture in American and European context suggests that in the United States, culture is seen as an exertion of control over human nature and one's natural surroundings. On the other hand, the Old World is "cultured" because it preserved, cared for nature: the Enlightenment as humans' increasing technical mastery over nature has not been completely victorious. In its critique of the Enlightenment both in the historical and philosophical sense, "Kultur and Culture" seeks to transcend the dichotomy of uncritically identifying oneself with or hypercritically isolating oneself from the United States. It rejects the opposition between the allegedly profound German Kultur and the "mere civilization" of the United States. The introduction concludes by highlighting the main challenges of translating "Kultur and Culture": the author's complex sentences and the characteristics of a spontaneous, freely held speech, which are mirrored in the syntax of the translation.

Kultur and Culture - Theodor W. Adorno

2009-11-13T17:57:47Z

However gratefully the author appreciates the initiative of the directors of the Hochschulwochen to make its talks available to its participants in a privately published edition, he nonetheless hesitates to consent to the publication of his own contribution. He is aware of the fact that in his mode of action the spoken and the written word are even farther apart than is generally the case today. If he spoke in such a way as he would have to write for the sake of the binding force of factual representation, he would remain incomprehensible. Nothing, however, that he says can do justice to what he must expect of a text. The more general the topics -- and the

subject of this published talk was worded in a fatally general way -- the greater the difficulties become for someone whom a critic recently and in a friendly manner certified that his production conformed to the dictum "God is in the details." Where a text would have to provide exact documentary proof, such talks inevitably do not go beyond the dogmatic claim of results. He is thus unable to accept the responsibility for the printed text that follows and merely regards it as aiding the memory of those who were present during his improvisation and who -- as a result of the modest stimulations that he provided -- want to continue thinking about the discussed questions on their own. The author regards the ubiquitous tendency to record free speech [die freie Rede], as it is called, on tape, and then to disseminate it itself as a symptom of the administered world that even ties down the ephemeral word, whose truth lies in its own transience, and then makes the speaker swear to it. The tape recording is something like the fingerprint of the living mind [lebendigen Geistes]. By making use of the kind readiness of the course's director to say all of these things openly, the author hopes to prevent at least some of the misinterpretations to which he would otherwise inevitably subject himself. [Trans. by Mark Kalbus]

Questions on Intellectual Emigration - Theodor W. Adorno

2009-11-13T17:49:04Z

This article explores the notion of contribution and the role of emigrant intellectuals in relation to their new cultural context. Using the example of German exiles in the United States, Adorno suggests that if emigrants find the demands for intellectual independence in discord with the dominant habits of American intellectual life, they should not conform to the American Geist. In academic fields, the notion of contribution is visible in the positive sciences but becomes more problematic in the humanities, where contribution appears not as a palpable result but as a reflection about the results and the nature of the contribution itself. The idea of contribution presupposes the merit of the order to which the contribution is being made: it is precisely this merit of the order that needs to be scrutinized. Emigrant intellectuals--by making contributions without critically reflecting upon them--and the organization of American intellectual life itself--by insisting that the intellectual either integrate him- or herself or remain an outsider--are to blame for furthering standardized contribution. The emigrant intellectual should not accept the idea of "this is the way it is done here" but needs to develop critical thought in relation to the new context. The article proposes four demands to intellectual emigration: (1) one should not cancel out previous life experience and consider emigration as beginning life anew; (2) one must resist the pressure of the industrial apparatus; (3) one must express one's thoughts without regards for ends and the sake of communication; and (4) one must not curtail insight, imagination, and speculation. The article thus propounds the idea that we can only contribute to the building of a better society by not "blindly devot[ing] ourselves to the existing" one.

Depression Today, or New Maladies of the Economy

2009-11-13T17:40:59Z

Depression seems now to represent the mental problem par excellence in the United States, disturbing an increasing number of people and encompassing a wide range of psychic and bodily symptoms. According to the National Institute of Mental Health, over 10 percent of the population currently suffers from some sort of depression, including major depressive disorder, chronic mild depression, psychotic depression, postpartum depression, seasonal affective disorder (SAD), and bipolar disorder. At some point in their lives, the NIMH predicts, most people have suffered or will suffer from depression. Reigning neurochemical, cognitive, and psychiatric understandings of depression emphasize function and dysfunction, but I would like to mobilize the idea that depression represents an affect that connects, mediates, and blurs the individual and the social. Indeed, the explosion of academic interest in affect, emotion, and bodily capacities -- what Patricia Clough coined "the affective turn" -- has not only supplied us with multiple and varied concepts of affect and affectivity, but perhaps more important signals its theoretical and political significance in thinking the history of the present. The numerous configurations under a broadly conceived heading of "the affective turn" have several antecedents (most notably in psychoanalysis and philosophy) and have been developed and debated over the last ten years in fields as diverse as literary studies, gender and sexuality studies, ethnic studies, queer theory, science studies, sociology, anthropology, and cultural studies more generally. Some commonalities among the divergent theorists of affect will facilitate my thought here.