Reviews tag:www.socialtextjournal.org,2009-11-10:/reviews/11 2011-11-28T04:25:40Z Books, Film, Event Reviews Movable Type Pro 4.31-en A History of Debt tag:www.socialtextjournal.org,2011:/reviews//11.1723 2011-10-31T22:42:18Z 2011-11-28T04:25:40Z David Graeber's Debt: The First 5,000 Years is an outsize exposition of social, historical, and institutional constructions of value and the high political stakes they have for human societies. It spans an impressive gamut of practices ranging from religious beliefs about primordial obligation, 19th-century Positivist notions of "social debt," and the bond between states and the markets that parasitically rely on each other to survive. In his Philosophy of Money, Georg Simmel wrote, "just as a poem is not simply a fact of literary history, but also an aesthetic, a philological and a biographical fact - so the fact that two people exchange their products is by no means simply an economic fact" (52-53). People invest economic objects with a calculable value as if it were an inherent quality, though Simmel left the question of what value is or means as ultimately "unanswerable." Marx took a similar approach, notwithstanding his remarks on the element of unaccountability in money as an expression of frayed social relations. Graeber's Debt offers a synthesis of transnational social practices concerned with value, exchange, and money but moves in an exciting novel and opposite direction. He situates debt as the quantification of promise and obligation and the threat of violence behind that calculation (in contrast to the complexities of obligation in self-cooperating civilizations, in what is usually referred to as mutual aid). Read more Maryam Monalisa Gharavi http://www.socialtextjournal.org/cgi-bin/mt/mt-cp.cgi?__mode=view&blog_id=11&id=658

Under Review:
David Graeber, Debt: The First 5,000 Years. Melville House Publishing: NY, 2011

'Tis to be a slave in soul,
And to hold no strong control
Over your own wills, but be
All that others make of ye.

--The Mask of Anarchy
Percy Bysshe Shelley (Canto XLIV)

Formal slavery has been eliminated, but (as anyone who works from nine to five can testify) the idea that you can alienate your liberty, at least temporarily, endures.

--David Graeber, Debt (210)


David Graeber's Debt: The First 5,000 Years is an outsize exposition of social, historical, and institutional constructions of value and the high political stakes they have for human societies. It spans an impressive gamut of practices ranging from religious beliefs about primordial obligation, nineteenth-century positivist notions of "social debt," and the bond between states and the markets that parasitically rely on each other to survive.

In his Philosophy of Money, Georg Simmel wrote, "just as a poem is not simply a fact of literary history, but also an aesthetic, a philological and a biographical fact so the fact that two people exchange their products is by no means simply an economic fact" (52-53). People invest economic objects with a calculable value as if it were an inherent quality, though Simmel left the question of what value is or means as ultimately "unanswerable." Marx took a similar approach, notwithstanding his remarks on the element of unaccountability in money as an expression of frayed social relations.

Graeber's Debt offers a synthesis of transnational social practices concerned with value, exchange, and money but moves in an exciting novel and opposite direction. He situates debt as the quantification of promise and obligation and the threat of violence behind that calculation (in contrast to the complexities of obligation in self-cooperating civilizations, in what is usually referred to as mutual aid). He starts with the position of absolute debt to the cosmos (or humanity), however alien it might seem in the individualistic societies familiar to his readers. However, by beginning a history of debt from the vantage point of "many different fraudulent ways to presume to calculate what cannot be calculated," Graeber challenges linchpin theories of debt that "always end up becoming ways of justifying structures of authority," such as the police, markets, and states (69). In doing so, he rejects a teleological approach and ventures to salvage the notion of society from the modern nation-state -- "a secular god" -- as we have conceived of it since at least the French revolution.

In interrogating the moral grounds of economic relations, Graeber also reevaluates communism (with a lower-case "c") as the basic foundation of human society, down to the exquisite etymological details of sociolinguistics. In English, for example, "thank you" derives from a phrasal verb meaning "I will remember what you did for me." He distinguishes between commercial economies and "human economies," exchanges in which money acts more as a social lubricant than facilitates the purchase of things, with domestic arrangements such as marriage, concubines, and other conjugal arrangements used to assert male control over women. The concluding chapter surveys the most pressing forms of debt in the global North, which has essentially been aggregated war debt since 1790. As we pass the 50th anniversary of Eisenhower's remarks about the United States as a "military-industrial complex," Graeber's book also serves as a reminder of the behemoth of sea, land, and air power, a "doctrine of global power projection," that conjoins the social malaise of debt and death and the glorification of economic and political violence necessary to sustain them.

Importantly (and consciously) Debt overturns historical misconstructions such as the myth of barter (what Graeber calls a pernicious and long-lasting fallacy perpetuated by Adam Smith); the "free market" (a concept which has never sustained a universal meaning); and the ubiquitous but false notion that money is an invented thing ("'money' isn't a 'thing' at all, it's a way of comparing things mathematically, as proportions: of saying one of X is equivalent to six of Y. As such it is probably as old as human thought.") (52). Graeber even performs a corrective on "knight-errants," who in actuality were thuggish Christian fighters whose bullish debt extractions were washed over in literary accounts.

Among the book's greatest strengths is a two-fold achievement in breadth and depth. It meets at the cross-section of great swaths of human history and is broad-reaching in its scrutiny of economic theories of debt. Yet it is explicitly conscious of its anthropological horizons. It signals a return to "big idea" anthropology that was perceived to have lost steam in recent decades. In a challenge to anthropologists published this month, John Hawks blogged: "Anthropology, supposedly engaged deeply in diverse communities around the world, is almost totally disengaged with the American public. Long ago, anthropologists spoke out on our origins, history, and diversity. Now, the public is much more likely to hear about human relationships and diversity from popular books and television programs hosted by amateurs. The most celebrated (and most watched) television program today touching on anthropology is Ancient Aliens." Graeber's book is acutely tuned to this concern, and is far-seeing and accessible in its disciplinary imperative on both accounts. The culminating effect of Graeber's stirring transhistorical, multi-narrative accounts beyond simply a uni-cultural or national assessment of what meaning a social group has made of value is that it offers a solemn chronicle of how quantified and codified debt has led to the disintegration of largely self-cooperative civilizations. Thus, the volume could do very well on its own without genuflecting to a single discipline.

Without question, Debt's publication in a year as dynamic, historical, and value-driven as this one will greatly benefit its public reception. The book will resonate with global observers of the market-caused global debt crisis; the Arab/North Africa uprisings; the Chilean student debt movement; the "austerity" scarecrow and persistent protests in Spain and Greece; and the Occupy Wall Street mobilizations that have so far sustained an important alter-structure to the bulwark of capitalism. Many have asked whether the desperate act of a young indebted Tunisian man, Mohamed Bouazizi, triggered the remarkable social change witnessed this year, and in a reflexive moment Graeber himself shares that he "struggled for years to pay back his student loans" (389). Perhaps the most concise and accurate synopsis of the book I have found traces back to the author, who in engaging with one of his dozens of reviewers writes: You're living in a dozen [systems] at once right now. Capital dominates. It does not pervade. Possibilities are endless."

(Top image: "A new way to pay the national-debt" by James Gillray (detail) 1786).

Maryam Monalisa Gharavi is a doctoral candidate in Comparative Literature and Film and Visual Studies at Harvard University.


]]> A Trespasser's Legacy tag:www.socialtextjournal.org,2011:/reviews//11.1181 2011-05-17T16:50:22Z 2011-10-03T19:22:13Z No obituaries appeared in the major American newspapers when Masao Miyoshi, the author of Accomplices of Silence (1974), As We Saw Them (1979), and Off Center: Powt and Cultural Relations between Japan and the United States (1991), passed away on October 1st, 2009. Solely his academic department and his publisher informed briefly about the passing of a scholar who still seems to be fairly unknown outside the field of Asian Pacific cultural studies. Yet Miyoshi, a Japanese-born, naturalized American émigré intellectual, whose long career saw him teach at UC Berkeley, University of Chicago, and UC San Diego and whose work shares much common ground with the oeuvres of his friends Noam Chomsky, Frederic Jameson, and Edward Said, deserves more wide-spread consideration. Bastian Balthazar Becker http://www.socialtextjournal.org/cgi-bin/mt/mt-cp.cgi?__mode=view&blog_id=11&id=428

Work Reviewed:
Miyoshi, Masao.
Trespasses: Selected Writings. Ed. Eric Cazdyn.
Durham: Duke UP, 2010. xxxiii + 344 pp.


No obituaries appeared in the major American newspapers when Masao Miyoshi, the author of Accomplices of Silence (1974), As We Saw Them (1979), and Off Center: Powt and Cultural Relations between Japan and the United States (1991), passed away on October 1st, 2009. Solely his academic department and his publisher informed briefly about the passing of a scholar who still seems to be fairly unknown outside the field of Asian Pacific cultural studies. Yet Miyoshi, a Japanese-born, naturalized American émigré intellectual, whose long career saw him teach at UC Berkeley, University of Chicago, and UC San Diego and whose work shares much common ground with the oeuvres of his friends Noam Chomsky, Frederic Jameson, and Edward Said, deserves more wide-spread consideration. The lack of immediate posthumous public appreciation is now compensated by the recent publication of Trespasses: Selected Writings. The great range and scope of the texts complied in this anthology and the clarity and urgency of voice and vision which characterizes Miyoshi's critique will indubitably bring his ideas and concerns to a wider audience.

The eleven pieces put together by Eric Cazdyn represent Miyoshi's oeuvre over thirty years, from 1979 to 2009 (though publications from the 1980s are conspicuously absent). The first part of the anthology is primarily dedicated to Miyoshi's contributions to Asian Pacific cultural studies. An excerpt from Miyoshi's ground-breaking As We Saw Them (1979), which illustrates how he extends Edward Said's concept of Orientalism to the Far East; a review which highlights how cultural exchange occurs when translation becomes interpretation; a critique of the ways in which English literature in Japan serves exclusively as a means to a specific career strategy; and a caustic reprisal, in which he highlights the self-serving motives behind one of his critic's attacks, reveal the sweeping scope of Miyoshi's cultural criticism. The two most provocative pieces of this section, "Who Decides, and Who Speaks?" (1991) and "Japan Is Not Interesting" (2000), critique the manner in which Japanese forms to theorize subjectivity have served to promote depoliticized intellectuals, which are blind to ongoing abuses of power, and how the unquestioning obsession with and lacking critical discourse of the idea of Japan by its people has suppressed recognition of homogeneity.

But Miyoshi is much more than an expert on Asian Pacific cultures. "What is important," he argues in the interview which concludes Trespasses, "is the willingness to go outside one's national, cultural and disciplinary borders" (284). Following this dedication to cross-cultural and interdisciplinary approaches, Miyoshi throughout his career constantly explored new areas. As such other essays in Trespasses explore the ways in which postmodern architecture and city planning are co-opted by global capital to produce maximum exclusion and how capitalist commodity culture has curtailed the possibilities of counter-hegemonic art.

Miyoshi's arguably most important critical contribution, however, is to be found in a train of thought which begins with his essay "A Borderless World" (1993). Written right after the end of the Cold War, Miyoshi draws an astute, and horrific, portrayal of the world at the turn of the twenty-first century, a portrayal which has only gained in validity since its first publication. Observing that an increasingly tight network of global investments has turned multinational corporations in transnational corporations, Miyoshi warns that ours "is not an age of postcolonialism, but of intensified colonialism, even though it is under an unfamiliar guise" (148). Nation-states have, in fact, become more and more inoperable, impotent, and are prone to be manipulated by transnational capital (a fact which in the US has recently been further enhanced by the ruling of Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission).

Transnational corporations operate over distance, regardless of national boundaries to "rationalize and execute the objectives of colonialism with greater efficiency and rationalism" (148). When the need arises, however, corporations will still demand the support of their host nation's military forces. "The military, in the meantime," Miyoshi writes in regard to the Gulf War, "is increasingly assuming the form of a [transnational corporation] itself--being nearly nation-free" (148). Written almost two decades ago, his words could not be more current and his voice more urgent than today in the age of Blackwater Worldwide. While Miyoshi's model at times exudes a neigh paralyzing irredeemability, it is not without hope, though it seeks that hope in an unlikely place. As such, Miyoshi argues that "[f]ar more truly transnational and universal than even the [transnational corporations], the effects of environmental violence inescapably visit everyone, everywhere" (147).

Three related and more recent essays, "Ivory Tower in Escrow" (2000), "Literature and Diversity, Ecology and Totality" (2001), and "Literary Elaborations" (2009) take these explorations further and focus on the emergence of a global academic industry. Therein, Miyoshi suggests that today "[t]ransnational scholars, now career professionals, organize themselves into an exclusionary body that has little to do with their fellow citizens, in their places of origin or arrival, but has everything to do with the transnational corporate structure" (228). Learning has been converted into intellectual property, teaching into an openly and increasingly competitive occupation, scholarly expertise has been standardized and commercialized to the utmost, the university has been shaped after the global corporation, and "culture as a historical force is inexorably absorbed by consumerism" (13).

Education's dilemma, Miyoshi points out, is further amplified by the increasing factionalism, territorialism, and tautology brought forth by identity exceptionalism. "It is common today," Miyoshi notes, that the university and society on a whole alike are characterized by "a mutually icy-distant silence, which allows everyone to escape into her/his womblike cocoon, talking minimally to the fewest contacts possible" (238). Multiculturalism, in this sense, is seen as a contradictory and troubled project in which "each group, minority or majority, demanding its own autonomous and independent, that is, incommensurable space" (258). While the firm establishment of group identities was necessary for self-protection during the struggle for greater recognition, identity politics through its policy of self-promotion has produced a climate within which groups privatize and monopolize exclusionary self-identities.

Playing into the hands of transnational corporatism, this alienation of fragmented groups which treat their identities as a commodity, "as a private investment, as capital" (237) calls for interdisciplinary work. "[T]he universities, torn asunder by the professionalism and territorialism of their departments," Miyoshi calls out with unusual cynicism, "want some appearance of reintegration" (8). He identifies the future of the global environment as such a core site for unlimited inclusiveness. Because nobody will be able to escape the environmental deterioration of the planet, Miyoshi argues, environmental studies is uniquely transdisciplinary and inclusive. Calling for a saturation of all courses in every discipline with environmental and social consciousness, Miyoshi prophesies that environmental justice is the only field which could resuscitate the waning humanities.

In a recently published obituary entitled "A Trespasser" Kojin Karatani mourns the death of Masao Miyoshi yet he also declares that his colleague had "been ready to go for some time."[1] While Miyoshi might have considered his own boundary-defying intellectual journey to be complete, Trespasses, his selected writings clearly call out for a continuation of his project by other scholars. Promoting his dedication to "[i]ntercultural, international, interethnic, interracial, and other intercategorical thought," Miyoshi's oeuvre constitutes a brutally honest portrayal of the corporate forces which shape our world and a vitriolic critique of the moribund humanities. But his work does not promote surrender to these forces, but an urgent and indicting call to arms. "As the transnationals try to "globalize" their operation," Miyoshi warns his readers emphatically, "we have serious work to do--to resist and survive, and to help our neighbors also resist and survive. For the only alliance that is needed now is the alliance of all the exploited regardless of the categories of difference" (204).

]]> Insecure Times tag:www.socialtextjournal.org,2011:/reviews//11.1123 2011-04-12T09:21:15Z 2011-04-25T20:29:16Z Under Review:Marc Abélès, The Politics of Survival (Duke University Press, 2010)Kolya Abramsky, Sparking a Worldwide Energy Revolution: Social Struggles in the Transition to a Post-Petrol World (AK Press, 2010)Slavoj Zizek, Living in the End Times (Verso, 2010)Writing about Hollywood disaster movies, Fredric Jameson once quipped that our culture finds it easier to imagine the end of life on Earth than to conceive of a transformation of the capitalist social relations that are pushing us inexorably towards catastrophe. Jameson's quip unfortunately grows more prescient by the day. Liberal democratic political systems the world over seem utterly incapable of coping with the critical economic, political, and ecological challenges that face contemporary civilization. Indeed, the sole significant change evident in the political sphere these days is the dismantling of the very forms of regulation and infrastructure that made decades of post-1945 stability and prosperity possible. The only exit from the current organic crisis of capital, politics, and ecology seems, in other words, to be an intensification of precisely the destabilizing conditions that provoked that crisis in the first place. As a result, we are living through a radical foreclosure of the future. Little wonder, then, that we're being subjected to a bumper crop of disaster movies. Ashley Dawson http://www.socialtextjournal.org/cgi-bin/mt/mt-cp.cgi?__mode=view&blog_id=11&id=8

Under Review:

Marc Abélès, The Politics of Survival (Duke University Press, 2010)

Kolya Abramsky, Sparking a Worldwide Energy Revolution: Social Struggles in the Transition to a Post-Petrol World (AK Press, 2010)

Slavoj Zizek, Living in the End Times (Verso, 2010)


Writing about Hollywood disaster movies, Fredric Jameson once quipped that our culture finds it easier to imagine the end of life on Earth than to conceive of a transformation of the capitalist social relations that are pushing us inexorably towards catastrophe. Jameson's quip unfortunately grows more prescient by the day. Liberal democratic political systems the world over seem utterly incapable of coping with the critical economic, political, and ecological challenges that face contemporary civilization. Indeed, the sole significant change evident in the political sphere these days is the dismantling of the very forms of regulation and infrastructure that made decades of post-1945 stability and prosperity possible. The only exit from the current organic crisis of capital, politics, and ecology seems, in other words, to be an intensification of precisely the destabilizing conditions that provoked that crisis in the first place. As a result, we are living through a radical foreclosure of the future. Little wonder, then, that we're being subjected to a bumper crop of disaster movies.


French anthropologist Marc Abélès's book The Politics of Survival (Duke University Press, 2010) begins from precisely this pessimistic premise.  The neoliberal era has, Abélès argues, displaced power increasingly from the political to the economic sphere, fostering forms of risk and instability that manifest themselves most sharply today in fears over urban insecurity and ecological deterioration.  As uncertainty has become our common fate, we have entered a radically different epoch from the modern, when politics - despite evidence to the contrary such as the Holocaust and the atom bomb - concerned itself enduringly with the question of utopian futures and progress.  Today, Abélès concludes, we are stuck in a world without hope and futurity.  As a consequence, the question of survival has become paramount.  As Abélès puts it, "my ambition in this book is to define the political space of survival and analyze the specific modes of governmentality that are invented to put these politics into practice."


Abélès's book contains some fascinating discussions to support these arguments, including an intriguing consideration of the temporality of the present based on Reinhardt Koselleck's foundational work on the temporal orientation of modernity.  Abélès also draws on anthropology of the state to argue for the historical specificity of the absorption of politics by the modern nation-state.  This in turn leads him to a critique of Foucault's notion of biopower.  Abélès's critique is grounded in the argument that Foucault's influential analysis focused on the "policing" power of the modern nation-state, a power that is now being superannuated as significant sections of populations are cut adrift, to become what Zygmunt Bauman terms "human waste" or surplus humanity.


The limits of Abélès's book lie less, then, in his anatomy of how things have changed than in his discussion of the politics of survival today.  In these sections of his book, Abélès focuses in particular on the contemporary role of non-governmental organizations (NGOs) in keeping issues of environmental sustainability and global social equity in the public eye despite the diminution of state power.  Abélès seems to be familiar with the critique of NGOs articulated by writers such as James Petras, who see the organizations as acting to dampen collective militancy by creaming off the most articulate leaders and offering them lucrative jobs in groups that never challenge the status quo that creates the need for NGOs in the first place.  NGOs, in other words, like most other organisms, have an interest in perpetuating themselves.  While this critique is a little overstated, nonetheless the realm of NGOs seems a rather pallid contender given the magnitude of the crises we currently confront.


Another weakness of Abélès's book is its Eurocentrism.  His discussions of modernity, temporality, and politics are all articulated from a perspective that is not only apparently unfamiliar with the hybrid modernities of many postcolonial societies, but which fails to question the uneven development of modernity within the "advanced" capitalist nations themselves.  For the vast majority of people alive today, in fact, the shift towards instability and the politics of survival that Abélès traces is nothing new.  What is new today is that this instability is being ramped up as a result of the forms of predatory economic rent seeking and the unsustainable industrially generated carbon emissions engaged in by the developed world (as well as, it has to be said, an increasingly large segment of the developing world).  The point here is that the politics of survival, like those of development, are likely to be highly uneven. Abélès makes no effort to examine the impact of ecological crises in places such as Bolivia and Pakistan, not to mention New Orleans, where historical inequality and imperialism are intensifying the "natural" disasters produced by anthropogenic climate change.


The title of Slavoj Zizek's latest book, Living in the End Times (Verso Press, 2010), implies a focus on precisely such severe conditions.  As he has done in previous works, Zizek weaves together psychoanalytic and historical materialist theories with great panache, turning, in this work, to Elizabeth Kubler-Ross's theory of the five stages of grief through which terminally ill people progress (denial; anger; bargaining; depression; acceptance) in order to understand how humanity is dealing with the terminal crisis of the liberal capitalist political-economic order.  Zizek is extremely clear about what ails us today: the progress of capitalism, he argues, which requires a consumerist ethos, is undermining the very conditions that make capitalism possible.  This contradiction is particularly clear in the recent subprime mortgage-fueled economic crisis, in which arcane financial instruments designed to minimize risk became central ingredients in a Ponzi scheme whose collapse endangered the now-globalized financial nervous system of capitalism.


At the outset of the book, Zizek explains that the book will be organized around Kubler-Ross's five stages: 1) an analysis of the predominant modes of contemporary obfuscation which keep us in denial of present conditions, from Hollywood blockbusters to false (displaced) apocalypticism; 2) discussion of violent protests against the global system, the rise of religious fundamentalism, and other symptoms of anger; 3) a critique of political economy, with a plea for renewal of this central ingredient of Marxist theory; 4) a consideration of the impact of the forthcoming collapse as evidenced in the rise of new forms of subjective pathology; 5) an exploration of signs of an emerging emancipatory subjectivity, which focuses on the seeds of a future communist culture in diverse forms, including in literary and other utopias.  This all sounds very logical, but, as one reads Living in the End Times, one sometimes feels as if one is in the presence of a wild-eyed, ranting prophet rather than the cool-headed analyst that the foregoing organizational schema promises.  In the book's first chapter, for example, Zizek engages in a freewheeling discussion of the ancient Hindu text The Laws of Manu, the Book of Job, as well as contemporary corporate mega-philanthropists like Bill Gates.  The point here is to explain how denial and disavowal work, but the examples discussed are, if impressively erudite, nonetheless so breathtakingly transhistorical that one is left wondering what makes this particular moment any different from any other one since the beginning of the Neolithic age.


This, of course, is Zizek's style.  It's often entertaining, always dazzling, and, at times, insightful about the crisis of the present.  All too often, however, I found myself bridling at the level of generality at which the argument unfolds.  Is it really true, for instance, that human beings in general (Eurocentrism rears its head again) are engaged in disavowal of climate change, just to take one of the serried crises we confront?  The problem with this argument is that it ignores the various specific ways in which our environmental and political situation has been obscured.  In order to understand this situation adequately, we'd need an analysis of the various corporate-funded fake science front organizations and the entire ecology of Right-wing mass media.  The danger is that, in treating the issue of denial both ahistorically and in a predominantly psychoanalytic vein, Zizek makes people into shills who are seamlessly interpolated by hegemonic ideology.  This of course ignores several decades of cultural studies work that documents the great variety of ways that people decode dominant media messages, not to mention the specificity of the current media landscape.


Even if it were true, however, that people in general are going through the different stages of grief identified by Zizek, this does not necessarily mean that much will change once this grief is identified.  Green consumerism is now a huge and growing segment of the market in overdeveloped nations, where recycling and other palliative measures are nearly universal.  But at long as our electricity is generated from coal-fired power plants and the structure of our cities forces us to make long commutes, it is unlikely that catastrophe will be averted.  The problem lies in the infrastructure of modern civilization.  The question that consequently arises is how radical democratic social movements can foster change in these infrastructures of contemporary capitalist civilization.  Neither Abélès nor Zizek attempts to answer this question in any detail.  Perhaps they wish to avoid the search for some privileged agent of historical change.  Of course there are awful hierarchical traditions in Marxism that we would do well to shy away from today. But this should not prevent us from looking for strategic sites, sectors, and struggles where we can apply our energies in order to provoke meaningful change.


This is where Kolya Abramsky's Sparking a World-Wide Energy Revolution (AK Press, 2010) is so inspiring.  Unlike Abélès and Zizek, Abramsky and his colleagues set out to identify the fulcrum points at which revolutionary transformation might be possible today.  Key in this regard, as the title of the collection suggests, is the energy sector.  Beginning with the assumption that energy will be an increasing flashpoint for social struggle as reserves of fossil fuels peak and competition for renewable energy heats up, Abramsky explores incipient political alliances around struggles over power generation. Unlike many analysts who assume that renewable energy will be a utopian mode of small-scale, decentralized, egalitarian power generation, Abramsky argues that renewable power resources tend to be located in geographical sites to which indigenous and other oppressed peoples have been relocated across the centuries.  The growth of renewable power is therefore likely to lead to a fresh round of accumulation by dispossession.  Nonetheless, Abramsky discerns possibilities for alliances between rural peoples, urban dwellers, and those working within the traditional fossil fuel sectors (the plurality of whom are located in the global South, in all three cases).  Alliances between these groups, leading in the best possible scenario to popular control of the means of power generation, could produce dramatic political gains and a reversal of neoliberal hegemony.  It's to this battle for the emerging global energy commons - as well as cognate struggles in areas such as the agricultural commons - that we should look for a viable and meaningful politics of survival, rather than to the NGOs or X-Men comic books discussed by Abélès and Zizek.  I do not mean to suggest that liberal institutions and mass culture are entirely irrelevant to the struggle at hand, but simply that, given the planet-killing crises we confront, we need to think far more strategically about where our political energies should be applied.  It is from such sites, moreover, that particularly fertile combinations of political struggle and popular culture are likely to emerge.

]]> Painfully Beautiful tag:www.socialtextjournal.org,2011:/reviews//11.1100 2011-03-29T15:35:18Z 2011-03-30T15:13:29Z I saw Miral, the new film by Julian Schnabel last week. It was opening in New York and Los Angeles, to great controversy, as it was advertised as giving us a Palestinian point of view. My ears perked up when I heard that, with visions of big screen political dissidence dancing through my head. While I wasn't angrily disappointed by the film, it left me underwhelmed, as it was little more than a pretty primer, cautiously extending a critique of Israeli violence, but leaving us with little more than a few resisters and calling for little more than the so called 22% of the land promised by the Oslo Accords. The film is a version of the autobiographical novel of the same name by journalist Rula Jebreal, who also wrote the screenplay, about growing up in Palestine in the 1980's. Schnabel and Jebreal are now in love, (did I mention she looks like, and is groomed as, a supermodel?) and from my perhaps ungenerous perspective, the film is shaped by Schnabel's obvious romance with the brown world, albeit a feminized one, which he claims he only recently discovered (although his prior films Basquiat and Before Night Falls are precedents). A cynical mind might call this "trauma tourism," the appeal of stories from the underdeveloped world being their cathartic effects. We are left by his film with a light sprinkle of therapeutic tears, not the kind of itchy political ire I was hoping for. Where's Brecht when you need him the most? Read more Jayna Brown http://www.socialtextjournal.org/cgi-bin/mt/mt-cp.cgi?__mode=view&blog_id=11&id=165 I saw Miral, the new film by Julian Schnabel last week. It was opening in New York and Los Angeles, to great controversy, as it was advertised as giving us a Palestinian point of view. My ears perked up when I heard that, with visions of big screen political dissidence dancing through my head. While I wasn't angrily disappointed by the film, it left me underwhelmed, as it was little more than a pretty primer, cautiously extending a critique of Israeli violence, but leaving us with little more than a few resisters and calling for little more than the so called 22% of the land promised by the Oslo Accords.

The film is a version of the autobiographical novel of the same name by journalist Rula Jebreal, who also wrote the screenplay, about growing up in Palestine in the 1980's. Schnabel and Jebreal are now in love, (did I mention she looks like, and is groomed as, a supermodel?) and from my perhaps ungenerous perspective, the film is shaped by Schnabel's obvious romance with the brown world, albeit a feminized one, which he claims he only recently discovered (although his prior films Basquiat and Before Night Falls are precedents). A cynical mind might call this "trauma tourism," the appeal of stories from the underdeveloped world being their cathartic effects. We are left by his film with a light sprinkle of therapeutic tears, not the kind of itchy political ire I was hoping for. Where's Brecht when you need him the most?

Schnabel begins the story before the establishment of Israel, and follows the lives of three generations of women. The first section belongs to the historical figure Hind Husseini, (Hiam Abbass). After the first invasion setting up Israel, Hind finds a group of orphaned Palestinian children and opens a school for them on her father's estate (whose wealth goes unexplained). She refuses any state aid, and runs it privately, to avoid political involvement. The orphanage is our home site throughout the film. What better way to win the hearts and minds of Americans than the raw innocence of children and women? And a privately run institution? The second section belongs to Miral's mother, Nadia (Yasmine Al Massri). Surviving a childhood of sexual abuse, she turns to drinking and self-destruction but not before marrying a wonderfully supportive man (Alexander Siddig). After all, personal tragedy sells better than mundane, collective suffering. The last chapter is Miral's, played by the Indian actress and ex model (see Slumdog Millionaire) Freida Pinto, who is unconvincing and miscast.

This film was hard for me to watch, but not for the reasons I was hoping it would be. I wanted it to be hard to watch because it was unforgiving, like a Waltz with Bashir from the point of view of the Lebanese the night of the Sabra and Shatilla massacres; I wanted it to capture the existential stench of war. But no. Miral was just too achingly beautiful to carry the politics I wanted it to manage.

At first I thought it was because Freida Pinto is so painfully gorgeous. I found her blinding beauty very distracting, partly as she seems so self-conscious of it, and a bit simpery. All I could think of as I watched was how thoroughly this ex-model worked that red carpet after Slumdog Millionaire. As Miral, her giggles and tears throughout the film drew me more to Elle than AlJazeera. At one point a17- year-old Miral aids the PLO, and is caught by Israeli police. Brought to the station she is hung by her wrists and whipped by a stern matron (anyone remember Lina Wertmüller's Seven Beauties?) But even the torture scene became sexy, kind of kinky and voyeuristic, in that 'innocent girl caught in a big bad world' kind of way.

Then I realized, it was not Freida that distracted me but the overall aesthetic sensibility of the film, its painterly virtuosity. With the lighting, camera work and color scheme, the film strikes a rich, major key that obscures the harshness of the lives it is trying to honor. In one scene Miral and her hot PLO member boyfriend Hani (Omar Metwally) enjoy a cuddle as they talk politics. Which would be okay, (though I don't really like my politics mixed with romance, but that's just old curmudgeonly me) except that their sun kissed good looks--his rugged bone structure and piercing eyes, Miral's perfectly white teeth and glossed lips--transport us to a Calvin Klein commercial. The drab, dull, dirty, aging nature of living under oppression is scrubbed as clean as Miral's perfectly smooth skin. At some points the film does try to identify the urgent, with an occasionally shaky camera, and a mournful, melancholy but lush musical score gives a lyrical refrain for the film's chapters. But even the music is too beautiful.

Now there is nothing wrong with beauty, which can exist in stark contrast to its surroundings. Rula Jebreal is herself unbelievably photogenic. And the film is careful not to aestheticize violence. But the beauty of it avoids the starkness of the dystopian war-torn terrain. It obscures the ugliness of poverty, the grotesque banality of endless war, the broken teeth and pocked skin caused by living under the constant stress of apartheid.

The film gives us what we expect from a well funded and distributed film--a comforting symmetrical narrative with a predictable arc, a coming of age story inviting our emotional identification, an overemphasis on personal relationships and romantic involvements, oversimplified politics rather than the often dry, complicated and morally ambiguous. I yearned for at least a touch of Brechtian distance.

Instead, this film retracts whatever political promise it may have extended. Our passionately righteous insurgent Hani changes. Without giving too much away, the film's resolution takes the easy way out of showing the militants to be their own worst enemy, and ends, conveniently, with the Oslo accords; the film stops dead in its tracks in 1994. There is no reference to Israeli destruction since then, or the recent events in Gaza. It ends simply with a euphemistic "the Oslo agreement has not been honoured yet." Miral, with her perky nose, slumbering eyes and moist lips, sums up the film for us; "Why can't we have one country for everyone? Like New York City?" Maybe we are supposed to laugh at her rather unbelievable naivete, but that seems about the depth of the film's political message.]]> The Promise of Happiness tag:www.socialtextjournal.org,2011:/reviews//11.1051 2011-02-09T02:45:39Z 2011-02-10T22:06:51Z In her sweeping new work The Promise of Happiness, Sara Ahmed provocatively challenges the idea of happiness as a necessary social good. Ahmed delivers a compelling and engrossing argument about the normative functions of the teleological desire called happiness. The social injunction to be happy is constantly around us, and Ahmed engages in a startling polemic against the inherent goodness of happiness. In "The Theses on the Philosophy of History" Walter Benjamin has written, "reflection shows us that our image of happiness is thoroughly colored by the time to which the course of our own existence has assigned us" (253-254).[1] Not only is happiness culturally conditioned, so is how we think about happiness. Ahmed's basic question is: what forms of subjectivity are foreclosed by the seemingly universal drive towards happiness? How do the narratives of the happy family, happy worker, happy native, or happy citizen work to dismiss people? Against a socioeconomic backdrop predicated on desire, consumption, disaster, and greed Ahmed strives to open a space to resist the compulsory smile or nod. Sean Grattan http://www.socialtextjournal.org/cgi-bin/mt/mt-cp.cgi?__mode=view&blog_id=11&id=363 Reviewed: Ahmed, Sara. The Promise of Happiness. Durham: Duke University Press, 2010

In her sweeping new work The Promise of Happiness, Sara Ahmed provocatively challenges the idea of happiness as a necessary social good. Ahmed delivers a compelling and engrossing argument about the normative functions of the teleological desire called happiness. The social injunction to be happy is constantly around us, and Ahmed engages in a startling polemic against the inherent goodness of happiness.  In "The Theses on the Philosophy of History" Walter Benjamin has written, "reflection shows us that our image of happiness is thoroughly colored by the time to which the course of our own existence has assigned us" (253-254).[1]  Not only is happiness culturally conditioned, so is how we think about happiness. Ahmed's basic question is: what forms of subjectivity are foreclosed by the seemingly universal drive towards happiness? How do the narratives of the happy family, happy worker, happy native, or happy citizen work to dismiss people? Against a socioeconomic backdrop predicated on desire, consumption, disaster, and greed Ahmed strives to open a space to resist the compulsory smile or nod.

The central concept of The Promise of Happiness is the "affect alien." According to Ahmed we feel affect as alienation when we experience a "gap between the promise of happiness and how [we] are affected by objects that promise happiness"(42).[2]  The affect alien feels the wrong thing at the right time, or the right thing at the wrong time--as she puts it near the end of the text in both cases "feeling at odds with the world or feeling that the world is odd"(168). Ahmed's text is rich with readings of these gaps, and the navigation of the spaces between the promise of happiness and the feeling of happiness productively grounds her text. When Ahmed introduces the affect alien she does it deftly and quickly through juxtaposing receiving a "save the date" card to someone's wedding and slinking further into her seat at a movie while everyone around her laughs at a joke she does not find funny. These two examples do a lot of work for Ahmed. In the last twenty years the first example has become instantly and recognizably political and though the second is less immediately so, it confers a feeling of shame to the reader because of a recognition of the deep stigma of being out of step with the "normal" reaction to something. The combination of examples captures much of what is wonderful about Ahmed's approach; the pairing of a more overt or obvious political moment with what seems, at first, a fairly personal reaction to the world. Yet they work together to isolate a similar, recognizable and familiar response that coalesces into the figure of the affect alien.

Ahmed organizes each chapter around a different version of the affect alien: Feminist Killjoys, Unhappy Queers, Melancholic Migrants, and the less descriptively titled "Happy Futures" (Raging Revolutionaries!). If anyone doubts the critical need for meticulously thinking through the ubiquitous compulsion for happiness, Ahmed forcefully answers why the study of affect is important by thoughtfully engaging with the "unhappiness archives" produced around these figures. The injunction to be happy manifests itself as a normalizing stricture that when questioned, according to Ahmed, allows us to ask "other questions about life, about what we want from life, or what we want life to become" (218). Evocative readings of texts by Rita Mae Brown, James Gunn, Radclyffe Hall, Toni Morrison, and Virginia Woolf and films like Bend it Like Beckham, Children of Men, and If These Walls Could Talk 2 propel her argument about ways happiness obscures the possibility of different ways of being in the world. Ahmed juxtaposes these readings with a refreshingly inclusive discussion of affect. Though she firmly places The Promise of Happiness within the tradition of queer and feminist affect theorists like Eve Sedgwick, Lauren Berlant, Ann Cvetkovich, Teresa Brennan, Sianne Ngai, and Heather Love, Ahmed also engages with the line of affect studies influenced by Benedict Spinoza, Friedrich Nietzsche, Gilles Deleuze, Rosi Braidotti, and Brian Massumi. Her conclusion "Happiness, Ethics, Possibility" productively embarks on a reading of both lines to open an arena for embracing affirmative and negative affective possibilities.   

Beneath happiness the undercurrent connecting each chapter is Ahmed's focus on the troublemaker as the discursive site for disciplining (why do you refuse to be happy?) and resistance (I refuse to be happy!). Ahmed most clearly deals with the "intimacy of trouble and happiness" in her readings of nineteenth century Bildungsroman novels by women writers that offered "rebellion against Emile in the narrativization of the limitations of moral education for girls and its narrow precepts of happiness" (60). The dissonance between the troublemaker and the well-behaved person makes explicit the ways happiness is about "the narrowing of horizons" and the tightly bound relationship between happiness and normalcy (61). In this chapter Ahmed is specifically engaged with "feminist killjoys," but the narrowing of imaginative horizons because of the narrative of happiness is one of Ahmed's more powerful insights. Ahmed argues for an ethics of possibility not curtailed by the drive for happiness. "Affect aliens can be creative: not only do we want the wrong things, not only do we embrace possibilities that we have been asked to give up, but we create life worlds around these wants" (218). For Ahmed, "the struggle against happiness as a necessity is also a struggle for happiness as a possibility" (222). The emergence of the possibility for unhappiness, happiness, and the wide range of other potential affects is the key political and ethical challenge of The Promise of Happiness.

Often Ahmed's language is a joy, and her work on each case study is filled with insight and rigor as she doggedly traces the social networks of dominance concealed and congealed around happiness. Yet reading The Promise of Happiness is a little akin to being an affect alien. In part because by the time the text closes Ahmed has made it increasingly apparent that everyone might stand in as exemplary of the kind of separation between promise and happiness she explores here. Though Ahmed balks at calling the final chapter "the raging revolutionary" because "that figure seems to gather too much, thus saying too little," what begins as the investigation of a concept through a series of challenging case studies finally becomes diffuse enough to wonder why she didn't just stick with the original title (18). This criticism aside, The Promise of Happiness is an important intervention in affect studies that crucially approaches one of the major assumptions guiding social life: the assumption that we need to be happy.

[1] Benjamin, Walter. "Theses on the Philosophy of History". Illuminations: Essays and Reflections. Trans. Harry Zohn. New York: Schocken Books. 1968.

[2] Ahmed, Sara. The Promise of Happiness. Durham: Duke UP. 2010. 

]]> X-Ray of Civilization tag:www.socialtextjournal.org,2010:/reviews//11.984 2010-12-13T15:46:10Z 2010-12-13T21:55:43Z David Wojnarowicz often said that he wanted his art to be an "X-Ray of civilization." Eighteen years after his death, at the age of 37, from AIDS-related complications, his work has apparently lost none of its radioactive power. When Martin E. Sullivan, the director of the National Portrait Gallery, caved to demands from the Catholic League and several prominent Republican congressmen--including soon-to-be House Speaker John Boehner--to remove a video piece by Wojnarowicz from public exhibition, it was as if he had inadvertently exploded a time-bomb loaded with the shocking affective charge of a bygone era of queer expression. An event that, for many, felt like an acid flashback to the bad old days of the 1990s Culture Wars has actually revealed a much more far-reaching--and disturbing--discursive constellation of political agendas. What might have been dismissed as a wearingly familiar debate about censorship and government funding of the arts has turned out to reveal a lot about the still-uneasy status of queer representation in the national political imaginary. Leon Hilton http://www.socialtextjournal.org/cgi-bin/mt/mt-cp.cgi?__mode=view&blog_id=11&id=340

David Wojnarowicz and the Politics of Representation

Discussed: "Hide/Seek: Difference and Desire in American Portraiture," National Portrait Gallery, Washington DC. October 30, 2000 through February 13, 2011. 

David Wojnarowicz often said that he wanted his art to be an "X-Ray of civilization." Eighteen years after his death, at the age of 37, from AIDS-related complications, his work has apparently lost none of its radioactive power. When Martin E. Sullivan, the director of the National Portrait Gallery, caved to demands from the Catholic League and several prominent Republican congressmen--including soon-to-be House Speaker John Boehner--to remove a video piece by Wojnarowicz from public exhibition, it was as if he had inadvertently exploded a time-bomb loaded with the shocking affective charge of a bygone era of queer expression. An event that, for many, felt like an acid flashback to the bad old days of the 1990s Culture Wars has actually revealed a much more far-reaching--and disturbing--discursive constellation of political agendas. What might have been dismissed as a wearingly familiar debate about censorship and government funding of the arts has turned out to reveal a lot about the still-uneasy status of queer representation in the national political imaginary.

The offending video, a four-minute excerpt of a thirty-minute work called "A Fire in My Belly," was displayed as a part of a temporary exhibition on the theme of American portraiture and sexual difference called "Hide/Seek," organized by the National Portrait Gallery. Wojnarowicz completed work on the video in 1987 after spending several years gathering research material and images in Mexico and Latin America. Dedicated to the memory of photographer Peter Hujar, Wojnarowicz's close friend and former lover whose death from AIDS marked a decisive turning point in his artistic and personal life, the video is assembled out of a rapidly inter-spliced collection of footage, some intentionally staged, some found and repurposed. Crafted in Wojnarowicz's signature raw, quasi-punk aesthetic, the video is a discomfiting mélange of quickly shifting images: a white porcelain bowl fills with blood; two hands attempt to sew a bisected loaf of bread back together; the lips of a face are pierced by a needle and thread, sealing up the mouth; a young man removes his shirt, then his pants and underwear. The full-length video also includes harrowing footage of Mexican street life, a bloody cockfight, and a brutal wrestling match: the violence of the filmic cut resonates and amplifies the violent thrust of a proliferation of bodies smashing into each other on screen. (Art critic Holland Cotter has written an interesting take on the piece for the New York Times's Arts Blog). In the version of the video displayed at the National Portrait Gallery, Wojnarowicz's video is accompanied by excerpts from experimental musician Diamanda Galás's Plague Mass, in which the singer shrieks verses from the Book of Leviticus enumerating Biblical laws regulating the treatment of the "unclean."
 
The Catholic League's Bill Donohue honed in on one image in particular--a shot of a crucifix and wood-carved Christ figure, blood dripping from its wounds, a black smear of swarming ants covering over its prone body.  "It would jump out at people if they had ants crawling all over the body of Muhammad," Donohue protested in an interview with the New York Times, "except that they wouldn't do it, of course, for obvious reasons." Shamelessly insisting that the display of this image constituted "hate speech" against Catholics and Christians more broadly, Donohue's bizarre logic was reiterated by Rep. Eric Cantor, who told Fox News that the display of the video was "an obvious attempt to offend Christians during this Christmas season." The video was taken down on November 30, the evening before World AIDS Day.

Despite Donohue's and Cantor's almost willfully asinine contention that "A Fire in My Belly" is anti-Christian, Wojnarowicz's video--and indeed his artistic project as a whole--both draws from and radically reconfigures the centuries-old representational tradition of Christian martyrdom in Western art. Wojnarowicz's imagery takes clear inspiration from both high Renaissance tableaux of Christ's suffering on the cross and the colorfully gory vernacular depictions of religious figures he encountered while traveling and working in Mexico. The beautifully composed Christ image in "A Fire in My Belly" combines the artist's longstanding appropriation of religious iconography with another of his frequently evoked subjects: ants and insects constitute one of the most striking formal motifs in Wojnarowicz's artwork, crawling over the surface of paintings, looming ominously in enlarged close-up photo-collages, and traversing video frames. But ants here also play an important aesthetico-political role: they manifest the artist's sustained and rigorously developed interest in finding beauty in the abject, the marginal, and the subterranean. Minuscule organisms teeming beneath the surface of the visual world, ants in Wojnarowicz fervent imagination signal a kind of return of the repressed: a simultaneously mesmerizing and repellent reminder of the primordial origins of the social itself. Viewed in this context, the ant-covered Christ is less a desecration than a political intervention, a reorientation of the visual field that lends the iconicity of the crucifixion a newly recharged corporeality.

But what seems to be truly unconscionable for critics of Wojnarowicz's art is its forceful imputation of the analogy between the Biblical torment of Christ and the contemporary suffering of queer bodies and subjects. Far from a reductive or simplistic attempt at shock value, as Donohue and Cantor would have it, Wojnarowicz's ant-covered Christ fires on a number of representational and figurative levels at once and becomes the locus for a range of intersecting cultural imperatives. In its abject prostration, the figure calls discomfiting attention to the parallels between Christ's tribulations and the stigma and paranoia surrounding the queer body during the initial flare-up of the AIDS crisis. Wojnarowicz's Christ image also functions as a visual reprimand to the viciously disingenuous response of the Catholic Church to the epidemic, and its refusal to countenance the use of condoms to prevent the spread of the disease. Christ, here standing in for the penetrated and vulnerable queer body, bears witness to the damage inflicted by the paranoid fantasies propagated by church, state, and the mass media. Wojnarowicz's ant-covered Christ is thus simultaneously an icon of queer identification, and a castigation of the institutions and individuals who so uncannily reiterated the humiliations visited upon Christ in response to the threat he posed to the stability of the social order.

Responding to the recent controversy in a letter published in the Washington City Paper, Diamanda Galás herself underlined this point in her inimitable fashion: "What the Catholic League and certain members of the House presumably wish to remove from their consciousness," she writes, "is thirty years years of death sentences handed down to their parishioners and citizenry, who were told not to wear condoms, and the mistreatment of those stigmatized as miscreants and sinners by their viral status and/or homosexuality and/or status as drug addicts. They wish to remove the UNSEPARATE CHURCH AND STATE conduct throughout the epidemic, which this film articulately reflects." 


* * *

Inevitably, far from eradicating "A Fire in My Belly" from the visual field or the national consciousness, the Portrait Gallery's action has instead produced what Michel Foucault would call an "incitement to discourse": suddenly Wojnarowicz's haunting, beautiful, and wholly unique vision is everywhere, his name making headlines and snapshots from his work traveling widely across newspapers and the web. The Washington Post, the New York Times, and New York Magazine posted links to the banned video on their websites. Expressions of outrage quickly circulated across the Internet--through Twitter, Facebook, and other social media platforms--often accompanied by links to the video's YouTube page. Transformer, a Washington DC gallery located not far from the National Mall, announced that it would screen "A Fire in My Belly" on a 24-hour loop in its front window until the piece is reinstated at the NPG.  In an action reminiscent of a similar response to the controversy surrounding a planned exhibition of Robert Mapplethorpe photographs at the Corocoran Gallery in 1989, a group of activists projected Wojnarowicz's work on the NPG's walls. And on December 4, two agitators were detained by police and then expelled for life from the Smithsonian after showing the video on their iPads inside the "Hide/Seek" exhibition itself. 
 
Considering the outpouring of support for the banned video, it would be tempting to conclude that the usual suspects on the Right had fallen for Wojnarowicz's bait. In seeking to censor his images, it might be argued, Donohue, Boehner, Cantor and company actually wildly increased the visual purview of the work and redoubled its political potency.  Wojnarowicz, of course, was no stranger to run-ins with state authority, and cannily used his work's provocative formal qualities and subject matter in order to promote both his career and the his political agenda. In 1990, he successfully sued the American Family Association's Frank Wildmon for copyright violation when the AFA used out of context snippets from his work in a pamphlet they circulated to lobby against funding the National Endowment for the Arts. (Interestingly, that case also revolved around Wojnarowicz's queer redeployment of religious imagery). In one sense, the latest imbroglio around Wojnarowicz's incendiary images simply confirms the hypnotic power they seem to hold over the would-be moral custodians of the visual field. Certainly as a student of Wojnarowicz's work and the period in which he lived, it has been perversely gratifying to witness his singular vision return with such urgency to the front lines of the contestation over the questions of sexuality, art, and state power. 
But both the censorship of Wojnaworicz's work and the response it has engendered also indicates--and, perhaps, diagnoses--the pernicious conditions under which representations of non- or anti-normative sexual identities and politics are produced, circulated, and regulated.  And the furor provoked by the incident suggests the extent to which ongoing tensions surrounding the inclusion of certain queer people and bodies within the national imaginary are largely played out within the order of "representation" as such. The piece was, after all, displayed in the National Portrait Gallery, a part of the Smithsonian and hence, in a very official sense, an institution whose federally mandated mission is to preserve and visually represent the nation to and for itself. The familiar mantra heard from conservative complainers--that the video was "in-your-face perversion paid for by tax dollars" (as Georgia's Rep. Jack Kingston would have it)--has simply cemented and reiterated the association between the politics of (visual) representation and the entrenchment of neoliberal economic imperatives at every level of the political system. While the wholesale decimation of public support for the arts and humanities in any form has been a bedrock of the conservative agenda since the Reagan ascendancy, the invocation of queer, "anti-Christian" artwork as a justification for slashing public funding as such has attained scary new mouthpieces in the era of the Tea Party and Sarah Palin. As NPG director Sullivan put it in his interview with the Times, "Obviously the Portrait Gallery is a part of the Smithsonian. It's just one of many, many players in this new discussion or debate that's going on in Congress about federal spending, the proper federal role in culture and the arts, and so forth. We don't think it's in the interest, not only of the Smithsonian but of other federally supported cultural organizations, to pick fights."

Beyond the economic register, we might also be prompted to consider the ways in which the contested image of the suffering queer Christ covered with ants--created at the height of one moment of particular "gay panic"--now resonates within the broader context of the ongoing debate surrounding the legalization same-sex marriage and the open acceptance of gays in the military? And what of the heightened national attention now being paid to the vulnerabilities of queer youth to bullying and suicide? The reappearance of Wojnarowicz's work within the political present serves as a depressing reminder of just how impoverished the vision of queer politics has become since the height of the AIDS epidemic in the US. Wojnarowicz's (and Galás's) deeply unsettling, politically uncompromising words and images render even more stark the emaciated political imagination of the mainstream LGBT rights movement. The focus for the past decade on marriage and military rights once again exposes the degree to which the fantasy of the healthy body (most often white, most often male) serves as a regulatory norm for the kinds of citizens deemed worthy of representation and rights (a notion that Jasbir Puar has so forcefully developed in her work on the biopolitics of what she has termed "homonationalism"). Indeed, we should wonder if it was purely coincidence that this controversy erupted the very same week that the Pentagon released a study concluding that the repeal of the Don't Ask Don't Tell Policy would not have any significant negative effect upon military readiness. 

More distressingly still, certain voices from within the gay community itself have voiced their disapproval of both the display of the video and Galás's response, contending that both "make us look bad" or "prove [Donohue's] point." This anxiety, of course, only confirms the power that privileged modes of visual representation have to determine who and what is deemed worthy of national inclusion. And ultimately it reveals the way certain queer subjects and representations--healthy, aspirationally middle-class, white, and married--are easily assimilable into the discourse of the nation, while the freaks so beautifully invoked in the work of Wojnarowicz and Galás become figured as threats to the coherence and impermeability of the national body itself. 

For my part, I wonder if what we can learn from this incident is that the unstinting work of artists like Wojnarowicz and Galás should be viewed not as moribund artifacts from a more radical queer past, but, as José Esteban Muñoz helps us to imagine, visionary invocations of a future whose time has yet to come. In this sense, perhaps we can read "A Fire in My Belly" as a wake up call addressed, precisely, to us--illuminating an alternative route through the treacherous present, and providing an X-ray of a civilization that was, and still is, yet to be.

Leon Hilton is a PhD student in the Department of Performance Studies at New York University.

Image: detail: David Wojnarowicz, Untitled (ant and eye), 1988-89, black-and-white photograph, 20" x 15.7"
]]> Comrades in the Barrio tag:www.socialtextjournal.org,2010:/reviews//11.952 2010-11-05T00:16:51Z 2010-11-05T00:41:53Z In her shrewd but at times vexing new book Who Can Stop the Drums?: Urban Social Movements in Chávez's Venezuela, sociologist Sujatha Fernandes reveals a world of activism deeply influenced by the history of Left movements in Latin America, but vulnerable to the kind of technocratic, bottom-line reasoning regrettably necessary for the state's economic success. Even those activists who benefit from state funding and share its interests are wary of its presence. They know that the edicts of global capitalism are never far from the minds and machinations of Chávez, even if his ultimate goals are the elimination of urban poverty and a greater place for the dispossessed on the world stage. Nicholas Gamso http://www.socialtextjournal.org/cgi-bin/mt/mt-cp.cgi?__mode=view&blog_id=11&id=302
Reviewed: Fernandes, Sujatha. Who Can Stop the Drums?: Urban Social Movements in Chávez's Venezuela (Durham: Duke Univeristy Press, 2010)

Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez is known for his popularity among the urban poor: they've provided a major voting bloc in three victorious national elections and rallied behind him as he's pushed through an ambitious domestic agenda. Activists watch his weekly talk show, "Aló Presidente," and cheer on his performances, his songs, his heady pronouncements and colloquial humor. But such popularity is not tantamount to absolute devotion. Rather, his support is mediated through elaborate activist networks, and is more tenuous than many outside Venezuela would believe. 
 
In her shrewd but at times vexing new book Who Can Stop the Drums?: Urban Social Movements in Chávez's Venezuela, sociologist Sujatha Fernandes reveals a world of activism deeply influenced by the history of Left movements in Latin America, but vulnerable to the kind of technocratic, bottom-line reasoning regrettably necessary for the state's economic success. Even those activists who benefit from state funding and share its interests are wary of its presence. They know that the edicts of global capitalism are never far from the minds and machinations of Chávez, even if his ultimate goals are the elimination of urban poverty and a greater place for the dispossessed on the world stage.
 
The big picture here, and an urgent dilemma for these activists, is just how Chavez's frequent acquiescence to the demands of international capital has left his supporters to contend with many of the same old problems as in earlier political eras. Though Fernandes looks hard at some of the bureaucratic roadblocks her subjects face, she somehow skirts two issues central to revolutionary movements in many parts of the developing world: 

First, the economies of resource-rich countries like Venezuela, whose revenue surplus relies heavily on oil extraction and circulation, are unstable by any reasonable measure, leading to inconsistent state services. Second, although things have gotten better for many, the capital city of Caracas remains highly stratified. The successes of the radical Left have failed to resolve longstanding social problems and to break up established political bodies. And although Chavez's economic reforms have worked in places, they haven't overcome the deeply entrenched interests of the middle class and private media, which aren't about to be ignored.

As a result, more and more activists seek to assert an independent voice in Venezuelan politics, abandoning the channels advocated by the current government and looking to models of protest that both predate the Chávez era and circumvent the state's many bureaucratic obstacles. Here, as an observer and ethnographer, Fernandes is expert.  Using historic Barrio San Agusín as a case study, she argues that the location of the everyday is what distinguishes true social movements from other, sanctioned, forms of activism such as trade unions and political parties. Her subjects employ highly-localized rhetoric and build awareness through personal relationships and organic community networks.
 
She considers public spaces - "the barrio, the plaza, the calle" - to be key to social movements, especially in Caracas where activists are at odds with most private interests. Streets and public squares are accessible to the disenfranchised and large enough for meetings and spontaneous demonstrations. But they're also laden with memories of past movements and conflicts. Particularly in San Agustín, which has been a center of Left activism for decades, no intersection, no street, no storefront or facade is without its own set of resonant signifiers.
 
Fernandes is savvy to the politics of nostalgia and sees how shared spaces and esoteric genealogies can cultivate revolutionary agency, but again and again her examples are marred by disheartening moments of defeat. She documents the peaceful takeover of an abandoned movie theater to screen a film about Grupo Madera, an ensemble of Black musicians from the 1970s who advocated radical racial integration and economic justice. The group bears an almost mythic status for many in the barrio and proved the perfect symbol for the new theater, which remained open and became a popular space for community meetings and events. But before long, the project fell apart and the theater closed. Members of the collective that ran the space were exhausted by other obligations and had no time to mediate the usual array of internal politics that can crop up in collective work. 

The theater's closure was devastating for San Agusín and underscores, for me, an issue that looms large over Fernandes's text but remains unresolved: the most insidious effects of inequality can be far more resonant than the activistic spirit of the commons. 

One of Fernandes's subjects remains politically involved while keeping a job and managing her home. But she's never had time to finish her degree, and in her attempts to question official state politics she can often do no more than yell at the television or commiserate with friends. While the many festivals and community events depicted in this text have proven to cultivate political participation, they often turn into scenes of violence, ultimately exacerbating feelings of frustration and immobility among barrio residents. If a group's greatest asset is the everyday, if its revolutionary potential lives in shared experience and collective memory, how can it go on when the everyday is marred by misery or insecurity? These activists may thrive in the quotidian, but they're also bound by it.

Further, though Chávez and his government do fund many projects associated with social movements, their own bureaucratic mechanisms often enact the very economic prejudices that characterize life for so many in Caracas. Fernandes details the closure of a local radio station after its transmitter was removed by a state agency. The station's offices had been occupied in protest after its frequency was usurped by a larger, commercial station owned by a vocal supporter of Chávez. Ultimately, a committee ruled in favor of the commercial station. In moments like these, the government asserts a kind of coercive authority over a substantial political voice, using regulatory steps designed, as Fernandes rightly observes, to stall and disable unsanctioned forms of resistance. Unconditional support for Chávez may not be a prerequisite for state funding, but in moments of bureaucratic gridlock, the state will surely (and expectedly) side with its advocates. 

Compromises like these emerge on the international level as well.  Despite his notorious criticisms of the West, Chavez relies on its wealth and its desire for resources to fund his domestic reforms. So, too, do the beneficiaries of such reforms. Fernandes weaves this irony through her ethnographic descriptions with great insight and wit but what ceaselessly emerge are the compromises and failures of her subjects, and not their victories. Real as some successes have been, and spirited as these social movements may be, the structure of inequality -- both in the small motions of the quotidian and the heavy-handed theater of the state - remains.

Nicholas Gamso is a doctoral student in English at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York and an instructor of writing and literature at Queens College
]]> Liberal Arts: Lurching towards Obsolescence? tag:www.socialtextjournal.org,2010:/reviews//11.638 2010-05-01T23:33:08Z 2010-11-05T00:36:34Z Louis Menand's The Marketplace of Ideas offers suggestions for revamping liberal education at a time when the liberal arts seem increasingly irrelevant to incoming freshmen. Andrew Scull's notorious hatchet job "UCSD letter" and other imbroglios are signs of the hazardous times. Trained as a historian and working as an English professor, Menand digs up fascinating history and proffers bits of insider gossip. Nonetheless, he falls short with an "if you can't beat them, join them" attitude,arguing that market forces (one can infer, a hybrid corporate-university model) stimulates competition and innovation in an academic culture which he views as mostly stagnant and out of touch with "real" societal concerns. Indeed the first line of his book is: "Knowledge is our most important business," he writes, noting that the "value-added" component of a college education is lost when "most of th[e] esoterica [of a professor's knowledge] is available instantly on Wikipedia" (19). He also seems to imply that women, minorities, and the 1980s "culture wars" instituted the decline in Academic culture away from its mission of disinterested research and non-ideological, or apolitical, vetting and debate. Read More. Crystal Son Brownell http://www.socialtextjournal.org/cgi-bin/mt/mt-cp.cgi?__mode=view&blog_id=11&id=175 Reviewed: Menand, Louis. The Marketplace of Ideas. New York: W.W. Norton & Co Ltd, 2010.

Louis Menand's The Marketplace of Ideas offers suggestions for revamping liberal education at a time when the liberal arts seem increasingly irrelevant to incoming freshmen. 1 Andrew Scull's notorious hatchet job "UCSD letter" and other imbroglios are signs of the hazardous times. 2  Trained as a historian and working as an English professor, Menand digs up fascinating history and proffers bits of insider gossip. Nonetheless, he falls short with an "if you can't beat them, join them" attitude, arguing that market forces (one can infer, a hybrid corporate-university model) stimulate competition and innovation in an academic culture which he views as mostly stagnant and out of touch with "real" societal concerns. Indeed the first line of his book is: "Knowledge is our most important business." He notes that the "value-added" component of a college education is lost when "most of th[e] esoterica [of a professor's knowledge] is available instantly on Wikipedia" (19). He also seems to imply that women, minorities, and the 1980s "culture wars" instituted the decline in academic culture away from its mission of disinterested research and non-ideological, or apolitical, vetting and debate. 3  
 
Menand spends the early part of his book historicizing the general education paradigm, and ultimately argues that "the problem with general education is that it is perceived as an attempt to impose on liberal education a mission--call it 'preparation for life'--whose rationale liberal education has traditionally defined itself in opposition to" (25).  While differentiating between distributed and core models of general education, he posits that in the end a general education should be a "binding experience," for "in a meritocratic society, citizens need a common fund of knowledge, a kind of cultural lingua franca, to prevent politically dangerous divisions from developing" (41). One might pause to wonder what these dangerous divisions are, and it is here that Menand's own "apolitical" politics become apparent. He argues that the Harvard report on "General Education in a Free Society," a 1945 Cold War document, resolved problems such as socioeconomic resentment and intellectual relativism by familiarizing students with American "touchstones for contemporary culture and debate. . .[representing] a common heritage that bonds each citizen, whether a lawyer or cabdriver, to each" (42). What remains unexcavated in Menand's high appraisal of such a Cold War document is its easy and unselfconscious universality, ignoring the contradictory position of persons excluded from full and robust citizenship and representation in such courses and texts, or those persons marked as "other" and burdened with particularity. A series of such uncritical moves on Menand's part make portions of the book read as apologias for the current hegemonic ideology and neoliberal status quo.

He spends the middle portion of the book, "The Humanities Revolution," lauding the humanities for forever altering the way knowledge was produced and what it looked like. He then uses "Interdisciplinarity and Anxiety" to throw into doubt the "buzziness" of the term interdisciplinarity. In his view, "interdisciplinarity is simply disciplinarity raised to a higher power" (96-7). He believes it is the term's vagueness and evangelical overtones that create anxiety as to what it is that academics are really doing in the modern university.

In spite of some of the more uncritical portions of the book, Menand does offer some thoughtful, albeit counterintuitive, solutions to academic problems. Controversially, rather than lament the "cheapening" of Ph.D. candidates through their proliferation, he argues that there should be greater numbers of Ph.D.s awarded and that they should moreover be easier to obtain. This would make a Doctor of Philosophy an added texture for non-academic employees and workplaces. Imagine a society where many people were trained in ways to think about thinking. Additionally, he proposes limiting exploitative cheap ABD (All But Dissertation) labor by seriously reducing the time to degree, replacing the doctoral thesis with the publication of a peer-reviewed article (152). "If it were easier and cheaper to get in and out of the doctoral motel, the disciplines would have a chance to get oxygenated by people. . .much less invested in [its] paradigms," he quips (153). By advocating oxygenation, he is referring to his other main intervention regarding what he calls "cloning" and the phenomenon of an academic "guild" system.

Menand emphatically believes that professors must be trained differently from their predecessors. In the section "Why Do Professors All Think Alike?" he notes that universities are surprisingly resistant to change. Quoting former UC Chancellor Clark Kerr, Menand relates, "few institutions are so conservative as the universities about their own affairs while their members are so liberal about the affairs of others . . . The faculty member who gets arrested as a 'freedom rider' in the South is a flaming supporter of unanimous prior faculty consent." 4  His biggest criticism is that "the professoriate is homogeneous," meaning predominantly center-left Democratic (140). This is problematic for Menand's dialectical approach to intellectual inquiry as "liberalism needs conservatism, and orthodoxy needs heterodoxy, if only in order to keep it on its toes" (153). While this seems like an opportunity for Menand to appear as a reactionary wolf in sheep's (read liberal academic) clothing, his ideas and way of writing both irritate and inspire. I believe Menand is sincere when he attempts to deflect critiques that he is presentist or utilitarian, but I am not at all convinced that he is without an agenda. 

This book is worth reading for its snappy prose and occasional gossipy bits, if not for Menand's overall plan of action. It is more interesting to ponder and debate the proposals of The Marketplace of Ideas than to ignore them, especially when liberal arts education seems to be lurching towards obsolescence.
]]> Out of Now: The Lifeworks of Tehching Hsieh tag:www.socialtextjournal.org,2010:/reviews//11.639 2010-04-01T00:44:18Z 2010-05-06T00:34:25Z While the artist Tehching Hsieh has enjoyed some resurgent interest in his work through the Museum of Modern Art's "Performance" series and the Guggenheim's "Third Mind" exhibition, it is with the publication of Out of Now: The Lifeworks of Tehching Hsieh that a truly satisfactory and in-depth resource for engaging his art has emerged. Hsieh is a Taiwanese-American artist who carried out six major durational performances after immigrating to the United States in 1974, five of which lasted for one year and the final of which lasted thirteen. For each performance, Hsieh would develop a highly restrictive set of rules and a means of documenting his adherence to them, then release these as a statement of intent and invite audiences to view his work on select dates throughout the year. These performances were endurance acts of spatial and temporal constraint, all characterized by an astounding formal minimalism: the first confined him to his imagination as he sat inside a cell in his studio space; another bound him and the artist, Linda Montano, with an eight foot rope that remained their only source of contact. For an artist whose work has remained a touchstone for many students of performance and body art, it's surprising that Out of Now is the first sustained examination of Hsieh's durational works. Alex Pittman http://www.socialtextjournal.org/cgi-bin/mt/mt-cp.cgi?__mode=view&blog_id=11&id=174 Reviewed:

Adrian Heathfield and Tehching Hsieh, Out of Now: The Lifeworks of Tehching Hsieh (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2009)

Tehching Hsieh, One Year Performance: Art Documents, 1978-1999 (DVD-ROM); available for purchase at www.one-year-performance.com.

While the artist Tehching Hsieh has enjoyed some resurgent interest in his work through the Museum of Modern Art's "Performance" series and the Guggenheim's "Third Mind" exhibition, it is with the publication of Out of Now: The Lifeworks of Tehching Hsieh that a truly satisfactory and in-depth resource for engaging his art has emerged. Hsieh is a Taiwanese-American artist who carried out six major durational performances after immigrating to the United States in 1974, five of which lasted for one year and the final of which lasted thirteen.  For each performance, Hsieh would develop a highly restrictive set of rules and a means of documenting his adherence to them, then release these as a statement of intent and invite audiences to view his work on select dates throughout the year.  These performances were endurance acts of spatial and temporal constraint, all characterized by an astounding formal minimalism: the first confined him to his imagination as he sat inside a cell in his studio space; another bound him and the artist, Linda Montano, with an eight foot rope that remained their only source of contact.  For an artist whose work has remained a touchstone for many students of performance and body art, it's surprising that Out of Now is the first sustained examination of Hsieh's durational works.  The monograph itself is a formidable object that contains six essays by the art scholar (and book editor) Adrian Heathfield; an extensive and illuminating interview between Hsieh and Heathfield; several short letters addressed to Hsieh by fellow artists Marina Abramović, Santiago Sierra, and Tim Etchells, as well as the performance theorist Peggy Phelan; and, what is most exciting, extensive reproductions of the many ephemera that remain from each of the performances.  Alongside his self-released DVD-ROM, which contains videos and timelines of his works, the two releases are by far the most comprehensive collection of the many legal, photographic, promotional, and evidentiary traces of the One Year Performances.

Adrian Heathfield's six essays are divided according to the different variations on the theme of time that Hsieh's works engage.  Instead of ceding to the tendency - reflexive in performance criticism, he argues - to attribute the rupturing temporality of the "event" to time-based art, Heathfield instead focuses on the phenomena of duration in Hsieh's performances (13).  Further, his exploration of duration as the slower temporality through which Hsieh's art unfolds provides the clue into what that hybridized term in the subtitle, "lifework," means.  Though early in the monograph Heathfield claims that lifework indicates "that these artworks are made from the very material and experience of a life" (which artworks aren't? we might respond), by the end of his very nuanced set of essays I for one am more convinced by his argument that Hsieh's protracted durations re-work the conditions that produce and support the subject across time (12, 56-58).  This fidelity to Hsieh's works accords well with his stated intention to challenge the traditional monograph form of writing about a subject by instead writing with one.

Continuing with the theme of duration, I find that while going through the documentation of Hsieh's performances in the monograph (62-317), as well as the videos on the DVD, I'm drawn by what the literary theorist Sianne Ngai calls "stuplimity" - a mix of astonishment and boredom that she detects in the massive taxonomic works of figures like Gertrude Stein, Ann Hamilton, and Samuel Beckett.  As Ngai explains, stuplimity is "marked by extended cycles of exhaustion and recovery [...] rather than by an abrupt, instantaneous defeat of comprehension" (Ngai 277).  In short, it is a feeling that manifests through the experience of a series more than through any individual moment contained within it.  Further, I believe this feeling testifies, not only to how Hsieh's works affect a gravitational pull into the density of time's passing, but to how they transmit difference through repetition, as the strictures that are the works' conditions of production and reproduction prove unable to contain the amount of variation they would seem to delimit.  Perhaps the best example of this is the film of One Year Performance 1980-81 (a.k.a. Time Clock Piece).  For this work, Hsieh claimed that he would punch a time clock, every hour on the hour, for one year and document each punch with one still, taken with a 16mm film camera.  The result is a 13-minute time-lapse film that features Hsieh, as a jittery figure with sprouting hair, alongside clock hands that spin wildly and a punch card that mechanically fills and depletes with the hours that pass.  The stills, reproduced in the monograph (128-158), allow the reader to consider these internal variations at a reduced pace, but not with any more taxonomic ease.  The same can be said for the reproduction of the maps that document Hsieh's travels around New York City in One Year Performance 1981-82 (a.k.a. Outdoor Piece): it can prove as mentally exhausting as shocking and exhilarating to trace the borders of Hsieh's daily travels around lower Manhattan, which he marked with a red pen on otherwise largely identical maps.

Finally, it bears mentioning that Heathfield is first and foremost an art historian, and that while I welcome the careful focus he gives to the place of Hsieh's work within art history, I do find that the word "life" does a lot of work in his analysis without much examination.  If Hsieh's work complicates the identity of "art" as it drives toward life, couldn't we likewise say that his work complicates what we mean when we say "life?"  These works after all are embedded within biopolitical durations: within technologies of surveillance and imprisonment; within the temporal rhythms and spatial constrictions that constitute the labor process; and within the discursive emergence of "quality of life" as a regulatory model for the aesthetic order of urban space, especially in New York City in the 1980s.  In part, Heathfield refrains from this line of argument because, I believe, he wants to insist on the singularity of Hsieh's life (he refers throughout not to life in general but to art made from a life); it also helps that Hsieh himself refuses both contextual limits to his work and the designation of "political artist" (324 & 330).  But these qualifications defer rather than resolve the question of how Hsieh's lifeworks agitate across the history and politics of life as well as art.  All that said, though, this remains a minor quibble with Heathfield's otherwise excellent essays, and one that, if anything, indicates how far the conversation on and with Hsieh's works has yet to go.


Works Cited:
Ngai, Sianne.  Ugly Feelings. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2005.

Photo:
From One Year Performance 1980-81 (Time Clock Piece).  Available on

]]> Listening at the end of the Twentieth Century tag:www.socialtextjournal.org,2009:/reviews//11.433 2009-12-15T23:19:51Z 2010-04-13T00:14:58Z Under Review:Tim Lawrence, Hold On to Your Dreams: Arthur Russell and the Downtown Music Scene, 1973-1992 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2009). David Suisman, Selling Sounds: The Commercial Revolution in American Music (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009). I began reading these two elegantly composed, deftly researched studies around the same time, with absolutely no sense that they might speak to one another. But despite the vast difference of their subjects, they form fascinating bookends to the history of American music in the 20th century. David Suisman's Selling Sounds shows how the music industry taught Americans to understand recorded music as a commodity. On the other side of the century, we have Arthur Russell, the composer and musician whose work and life are given deservedly serious, thoughtful treatment Tim Lawrence's excellent biography. Gustavus Stadler http://www.socialtextjournal.org/cgi-bin/mt/mt-cp.cgi?__mode=view&blog_id=11&id=72

Reviewed:

Tim Lawrence, Hold On to Your Dreams: Arthur Russell and the Downtown Music Scene, 1973-1992 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2009). 

David Suisman, Selling Sounds: The Commercial Revolution in American Music (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009). 

I began reading these two elegantly composed, deftly researched studies around the same time, with absolutely no sense that they might speak to one another. But despite the vast difference of their subjects, they form fascinating bookends to the history of American music in the 20th century. While most histories of sound recording have centered on technological "evolution," David Suisman's Selling Sounds shows how the music industry taught Americans to understand recorded music as a commodity. Concerned largely with the first three decades of the 20th century, he traces the emergence of standardized marketing and distribution strategies -- from the star system to the décor of record stores -- that lasted long into the century, as well as the struggle of copyright law to keep up with new versions of the commodity form. Indeed, despite its focus on the early 20th century, the story Suisman is telling is that of the formation of the musical landscape in which most of today's adults grew up, a realm which has only recently been upended by the digitalization of music's consumption. His writing is theoretically astute, but it's the deep texture with which he presents formative chapters in this story that makes this book so enjoyable to read, whether the episode is the story of the "pluggers" who promoted records in live performances before the emergence of celebrity branding, or the transformation engineered around the figure of Enrico Caruso, the first major recording star.

Recognizing that the consolidation of the music business "was never static or homogenous, and [that] the growing concentration of power in the culture industry did not mean that it was experienced by everyone in the same way," Suisman also offers a fascinating chapter on the short-lived African-American label, Black Swan, founded by a Harry H. Pace, a protégé of W. E. B. Du Bois. Black Swan struggled to establish itself in the early 1920s against the deep-seated racism in the industry and the popular music it was producing, and went under after just four years of existence. But it launched the careers of several major black recording artists (Alberta Hunter, Ethel Waters, Fletcher Henderson) and demonstrated the profits to be made from a largely black listening audience to the white-owned major labels. Thus Black Swan, too, played a formative role in a period that "ensured that the way that most people thought about music and integrated it into their lives would be forever changed."

On the other side of the century, we have Arthur Russell, the composer and musician whose work and life are given deservedly serious, thoughtful treatment Tim Lawrence's excellent biography. Russell's career was remarkable for its indifference to the regimented qualities of the market Suisman's book historicizes. Originally a shy kid from Iowa, Russell lived and worked on the borderlines of numerous categories, musical and otherwise: he straddled musical genres such as "serious" experimental music, disco, pop, and country, and he lived a personal life in which the categories straight and gay applied obliquely at best. Russell grew up playing cello, and he remained closest to that instrument throughout his journies across genre. Initially he planned on becoming a composer of "serious" new music. After a brief stay among Buddhists in San Francisco, he moved to New York, where, buoyed by early supporters like Allen Ginsberg, he began looking for ways to channel his dissatisfaction with the sterility of post-Cagean minimalism. But rather than trying simply to turn new music in another direction, Russell turned to the most vibrant aspects of other, popular genres. Russell was 23 when composer Rhys Chatham offered to let him program a season of events at the now-legendary downtown performance space, the Kitchen; by inviting Jonathan Richman and the Modern Lovers to play alongside experimentalists like Alvin Curran and Phill Niblock, Russell opened up a form of "sonic democracy" that would become a hugely generative relationship between rock and the avant-garde in the 1970s.

Of all his generic experimentation, Russell probably brought the most passion to his work in disco, that long-degraded motive force in 1970s gay and black nightlife culture. His breakout song in that style, un-coyly titled "Is It All Over My Face?", filters a bass track reminiscent of the Rolling Stones' "Miss You" into the essence of funkiness. True to Russell's weirdness, it is also rife with unpredictable shifts in meter, and at least in its original version, sounds like it's being sung by three drunk dudes doing karaoke (it was later re-recorded with a female vocalist and re-mixed several times). Lawrence's book does a wonderful job of portraying this highly playful, queer sort of weirdness with which Russell infused his work, a quality very different from modernist machismo. I think these qualities are best embodied on his album World of Echo (1986), made up of songs that are mostly Russell accompanied by his cello, cast through a healthy portion of analog delay. The songs jumble beautifully composed melodies into weirdly repetitive structures, given an added layer of pathos by Russell's plain-spoken lyrics and his understated singing. His vocal style on this album is made up of elongated vowel sounds that often obscure the sense of the lyrics, in a manner somewhat reminiscent of early Michael Stipe. The pervasive echo makes it sound as though Russell is playing music with the accompaniment of his own ghost.

As Lawrence shows in great and sometimes heartrending detail, Russell's unwillingness to work within categories made available by the music industry came with many costs, including relative obscurity and its attendant financial woes. The book's interviews with former friends, lovers, and associates paint a picture of a genuine and generous soul who desperately wanted a significant following, but struggled with a crippling perfectionism that limited his output as a recording artist. Accordingly, he was unable to capitalize on a couple of opportunities (an audition with John Hammond, a failed collaboration with Robert Wilson) that might have landed him a major record deal. The story only gets worse, and more representative of this period in the New York arts scene, as Russell learns he is infected with HIV and after a couple of years of struggling to get another album out, dies of an AIDS related illness. But Lawrence's writing is up to the task of telling this narrative in a way that makes the pathos of Russell's life a deeply compelling window onto the "Downtown" music scene of the 1980s and 90s. Indeed, part of what makes the book so successful is Lawrence's insight into Russell's ongoing ambivalence toward this scene, especially its fascination with the machismo of grand modernist gestures.

Appeals to Americanness as a reference point are cheap, and Lawrence mercifully avoids them, but all things said and done it's hard not to think about Russell in relation to a line of queer American artists, from Walt Whitman to Gertrude Stein to Andy Warhol, whose journey to the avant-garde has involved a sustained, ineluctable engagement with the popular.

A Russell renaissance of sorts began in 2004, with the release of two CDs of previously unreleased work; more of these, along with some reissues, have followed. Matt Wolf's 2008 documentary film, Wild Combination is a great counterpart to this biography. In one of his many insightful observations in his epilogue, Lawrence points out that Russell's diversity is better suited to the contemporary moment -- the one following the decline of the institutional structures whose emergence David Suisman traces -- with the easy availability of so many genres 24/7 over one's home internet connection. One can't help but wonder about the ways Russell would have found to be queer in this world as well.

]]> The Forensics of Capital tag:69.60.11.20,2009:/reviews//11.390 2009-11-11T15:50:54Z 2009-11-10T17:26:08Z A Review of "Capitalism: A Love Story," directed by Michael Moore Crimes have been committed in this building. I am here to make a citizen's arrest. In the final scene of "Capitalism: A Love Story," Michael Moore drags police tape around city blocks that house the corporate offices of Goldman Sachs, AIG, Merrill Lynch, Citibank, Wachovia, and J.P. Morgan Chase--all recipients of taxpayer money used by the federal government as part of a "bailout" package. Moore's stated purpose is to make a "citizen's arrest" of the criminals who, when faced with the ramifications of their own financial faux-pas, "backed an armored car up to the US treasury" only to leave with 700 billion dollars of "our money." Moore figures each corporate building as the scene of a crime, leaving us to ponder the implications of what William Pietz once called the "forensics of capital..." Michael Ralph http://www.socialtextjournal.org/cgi-bin/mt/mt-cp.cgi?__mode=view&blog_id=11&id=10 A Review of "Capitalism: A Love Story," directed by Michael Moore

Crimes have been committed in this building. I am here to make a citizen's arrest.

In the final scene of "Capitalism: A Love Story," Michael Moore drags police tape around city blocks that house the corporate offices of Goldman Sachs, AIG, Merrill Lynch, Citibank, Wachovia, and J.P. Morgan Chase--all recipients of taxpayer money used by the federal government as part of a "bailout" package. Moore's stated purpose is to make a "citizen's arrest" of the criminals who, when faced with the ramifications of their own financial faux-pas, "backed an armored car up to the US treasury" only to leave with 700 billion dollars of "our money." Moore figures each corporate building as the scene of a crime, leaving us to ponder the implications of what William Pietz once called the "forensics of capital," where "forensics" does not simply refer to police procedures and physical specimens, nor exclusively to legal judgments (like the fine or prison sentence dealt to a convicted criminal) but to a broader range of strategies for translating "physical causality into [the] social causation that establishes legal liability,"1 a set of techniques for charting the relationship between the social act that leads to injury, death, or wrongful termination and the forms of redress that ensue.

Moore's criminal inquiry explores the link between value and vitality across a series of related domains as a way to signal the duplicity that has eroded cherished features of US citizenship--home ownership, personal security, the right to a fair wage, and the opportunity to store savings for one's family in the case of death or injury. Moore indicts the US government with criminal negligence for relinquishing control of these pressing social issues to corporations who profit from popular demise. An early segment features an appearance by Peter Zalewski of Condo Vultures whose company, he confesses, helps clients with "no compassion, no sensitivity"--people who "are looking to slit any single seller's throat"--buy foreclosed homes they can later re-sell at a profit. "A vulture basically represents a bottom feeder that goes in there and cleans off a carcass," says Zalewski. "The vultures aren't actually killing, they are the ones doing the clean up," he elaborates, but acknowledges that "because they are dealing with so many germs and so many situations" vultures "will often vomit on themselves." "Chk-chk.  Boom!" Zalewski cocks an imaginary shotgun to figure the fatal blow to the deceased he mines for sustenance, as he stares directly into the camera suggesting that the "difference" between his work and that of a "real vulture" is "simple": "I don't vomit on myself."

From the foreclosure "epidemic"--in which Zalewski had likened himself to "a drone that flies over the battlefield in Afghanistan"--Moore shifts his focus to Wilkes-Barr, Pennsylvania, a town that closed its juvenile detention facility in 2002 before ceding land to a private corporation who promised to perform the same tasks, though not before billing an $8 million dollar construction project to the state, and acquiring a $58 million lease from it. But it gets even more sinister, because although PA Child Care incarcerated thousands of offenders between 2003 and 2006, the two judges responsible for the convictions were later indicted themselves for taking millions of dollars in bribes to pack the facility. Moore closes this segment by interviewing a former "delinquent" who explores his new-found freedom by training as a pilot, before telling us that most US commercial airline pilots earn less income than a manager at Taco Bell.

Moore then explores the contradictions of corporate greed by showing that, even after it had received bailout money from the US government, Bank of America refused to pay factory workers at Republic Windows and Doors the salaries that were interrupted when their employer closed abruptly after defaulting on a loan it had acquired through the bank. Thanks to the sit-down strike that ensued--and no doubt due, in part, to support from President Barack Obama--the workers were ultimately paid what they were owed.


But, as in previous efforts, Moore maintains a vexed relationship to capitalism.  In this film, he interviews several Catholic priests who equate capitalism with sin. He even visits a museum to read an original copy of the US Constitution, noting that although the words "we," "union," and "welfare" appear in the document, the term "capitalism" does not. Yet, when Moore chronicles corporations who enable their employees to be owners, offering them an opportunity to shape policy, one wonders whether he thinks "capitalism" is the culprit or whether he simply believes the true culprit is corporate greed, in the same way that it remains unclear whether his primary target in Fahrenheit 9/11 is US democracy or the Bush administration. In this regard, his expressed effort to promote a keener sense of democracy as a substitute for capitalism remains unclear in its implications because social critics typically consider these phenomena to be intricately intertwined.

Is Moore troubled by individual acts of corruption, the abuse of public office for personal gain, and fraud, the act of deceiving others to enrich oneself? Or does he believe that the problems he identifies are systemic to US democracy and capitalism? It often appears that he believes the latter but wants us to believe he believes the former.

After all, the most impressive--though most undeveloped segment--in Capitalism is Moore's discussion of "Dead Peasant" insurance, the phrase used to mark policies that corporations from Bank of America, Citibank, McDonnell Douglas, Hershey, Nestle, Wal-Mart, Proctor & Gamble, Ameritech, American Express, and others have taken out in the name of employees who had no knowledge of the coverage. When Daniel L. Johnson died of cancer, Amegy Bank made more than $5 million on policies it had take out in his name that were never shared with his dependents.

"There is a reason that it is illegal for me to take out a fire insurance policy on your house," Moore insists, incredulous that any life insurance agency could provide corporations with incentives to have employees "die in accordance with their policy projections."3 But his characteristic indignation works against him in this segment,for the logic of capital finds it clearest expression not in the pages of Superfreakonomics4 (a book expressly concerned with the way that "people respond to incentives" if "not necessarily in ways that are predictable or manifest") but in places like the insurance premium or settlement where the violence endemic to capitalism appears self-evident.

As it turns out, there is a precedent for wealthy people to benefit from the death of others. Well into the nineteenth century, life insurance was contested, in part, because it was reminiscent of "graveyard insurance," a form of gambling in which wealthy men would bet on the mortality of low-income populations, the aged and the infirm--demographics expected to die an early death.5 While fire insurance (especially for homes) and marine insurance (especially for shipped goods) were well enshrined in mundane forms of commerce by the eighteenth century, the human body was considered too sacred to be priced in legitimate market transactions until nearly the middle of the nineteenth century. But if historians have puzzled over the reasons that the US life insurance industry did not take root until the 1840s, they have generally overlooked the fact that the business of insuring slaves was a robust domain of commercial traffic from the 1830s onward. As early as 1804, several life insurance companies had debated and dismissed the idea of insuring blacks: they believed that free blacks would put undue stress on premiums for their white clients and decided that, while enslaved Africans were sufficiently regulated by insurance on property (chattel), this particular class of commodity was not worth the risk.

But while some insurance companies decided not to bother with the messy business of insuring slaves, others decided to specialize in it. Already by the 1850s, there were as many enslaved Africans in the Upper South covered by life insurance policies as white men in the northeast. By the time the Civil War arrived, the Baltimore Life Insurance Company could boast that slaves accounted for 2/3 of its business.6 With the legal abolition of slavery in 1865, African Americans could finally qualify for life insurance. By 1870, the life insurance industry was enshrined as a central feature of capital exchange in the US. But the historical relationship between the business of insuring slaves and the history of insuring people in the US suggests that, far from being an anomaly, the notion that some people can take out insurance policies on others is a longstanding American tradition (meanwhile, nineteenth century mortality rates were so high for British planters traveling to Jamaica, that they found it easier to insure their slaves than to get policies for themselves).

This all begs a series of questions that Moore deserves credit for raising, even if he doesn't explore them: how do corporations decide who to cover with a Dead Peasant insurance policy? Do they have access to employee medical records? Is it based on physical exams they require employees to complete? If not, do they have their own forms of corporate espionage and reconnaissance, replete with methods for hacking into employee health records? What about forms of surveillance (apparatuses for recording and cataloging employee gossip about health care concerns)? Needless to say, this is a topic worthy of sustained attention in its own right. Because while the idea that some employees are worth more to their employers dead than alive is deeply troubling, it is even more disturbing that these policies remain pervasive and profitable regardless of the strong emotional reactions they provoke. It all makes me wonder whether some form of Dead Peasant insurance has been around since slavery was legal, or whether it is a recent innovation designed to build on a technology of capital from a bygone era.

And, I can't decide which is worse.

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