Wednesday, August 3, 2016
Monday, June 1, 2009
Tourism and the Capitalist Religion
I would like to situate capitalism as a theological regulatory apparatus that, through its very structuring of all relations, embodies a tendency to nullify the subject while simultaneously leading it to believe in its fulfillment through its own means (i.e., agency). In its spectacular global stage, capitalism frames “the world” within certain practical and representational parameters that prohibit its conception (and conceptual deployment) as anything other than complicit with the development of capitalism. Tourism—as a kind of bourgeois ritual, a vital aspect of lifestyle indoctrination that all post-grads are encouraged to perform— is a useful phenomenon in understanding the metabolism of “the world” that is strategic to the reproduction of life here, in the center.
“Capitalism is nothing but a gigantic apparatus for capturing pure means.” This statement by Giorgio Agamben reveals, once its terminology is defined, the crux of the question of agency in late capitalism and how agency is continually sanitized in the very instance that the subjective or liberatory gesture is made. First, the definition of apparatus:
All apparatuses of power are always double: they arise, on the one hand, from an individualizing subjective behavior and, on the other, from its capture in a separate sphere. There is often nothing reprehensible about the individual behavior in itself, and it can, indeed, express a liberatory intent; it is reprehensible only if the behavior—when it has not been constrained by circumstances or by force—lets itself be captured in the apparatus.
Agamben’s notion of the apparatus is a synthesis of the Foucauldian dispositif with (less explicitly) Situationist/Debordian theories of détournement and its reenactment by capital. (For Agamben, the Situationists articulate capitalism’s theological kernel—itself a kind of universal apparatus—which is separation.) The dispositif is the positive historical instantiation of a set of strategies governing social relations and the economies of power contained therein. Capital, again, is the mammoth apparatus that has sheathed the world like duckweed across the pond’s surface; beneath its slimy opacity exist entire ecologies of apparatuses that (disjunctively and paradoxically) are continually functioning to reinscribe us within capital and transform whatever it can into capital. Apparatuses are, therefore, “heterogeneous set[s] that include virtually anything, linguistic and nonlinguistic, under the same heading.”
Capture: This is the transition undergone by objects (and activity) in the operation of sacrifice. When something is sacrificed it is rendered cursed by and removed from the profane world of human activity and enclosed within the inaccessible realm of the divine. Once given over to the sacred sphere the human hand can only contaminate the object, or make it profane. The religious apparatus functions to maintain the sacred, to maintain the separation between what is sacrificed and, in a sense, those who sacrifice it. Agency comes into play only insofar as it nullifies itself in authorizing the capture of what was once proper to it by an alien force (the religious). Ritual can be defined as the activity that completes and reenacts this alienation—thus the laboring and consumptive rituals of our stage of capitalism. The sacrificial ritual (generally and ahistorically) is the consumptive act par excellence; it is the total destruction of utility (for the human) in the object. Participation in ritual results in the paradoxical production of a subject at the moment at which it is nullified or desubjectivized by the prescriptive logic of the ritual. Agency—if it can exist—is realized in use, which is the direct, legitimate expression of the user in material form; sacrifice is the careful method of negating the possibility of use in the object.
In “Sacrifices” Bataille poetically articulates this paradox, which is at the core of late capitalist vertigo, which forces us to scramble for a concrete understanding of ourselves and our participation in capitalism. Patrick Swayze (as Bodhi) thematizes the interiority of “the tube” in Point Break as “The place where you lose yourself and find yourself.” This is the sacrificial operation endured under late capitalism, where the condition is, universally, self-sacrifice, or the division and capture of a portion of the individual and her experience.
In an ideally brilliant and empty infinity, chaos to the point of revealing the absence of chaos, the anxious loss of life opens, but life only loses itself—at the limit of the last breath—for this empty infinity. The me raises itself to the pure imperative, living-dying for an abyss without walls or floor…
The brilliance of consumption casts the human, now (self-)sacrificed, in an indeterminate zone, “living-dying.” Living-dying is the mode of being within the theological apparatus of capitalism. There is no end to the consumptive feast, for capitalism induces an extravagant celebration of itself on a daily basis. Obviously, work is no longer the sole celebratory act, for capitalism realizes its most intense phase as an apparatus governing/distributing the means by which one consumes, i.e., how one separates oneself from oneself. This is the schizophrenia of a perfected and generalized form of separation that, according to Agamben, was first instated by Christianity and secularized by capital in the form of alienation (alienated labor and alienated consumption). The etymology of the word oikonomia is bound up with maintaining the separateness of the divine through an earthly administration: Christ.
The Trinity signifies the portioning out of Providence by the Fathers of the Church in the 4th Century. Theology rooted itself in the oikos, God’s home, through the figure of Christ, the material and historical incarnation of the divine. Christ became the medium by which the theological translates the idea into material. He frames human history within an economy of redemption in the form action (politics, economics and institutions and general) but only insofar as activity separates itself from God’s ontological plane. Action is therefore reconciled with scripture and theological doctrine while, simultaneously, praxis ceases to be the foundation of being. Christ embodies this fracture, which capital adopts in the form of ideology. Ideology mediates activity, it assures historical persons that they will be redeemed for their actions, or even that they have already been! The eternal quality of ideology is found in the assurance it provides its subjects, which states, “there is no need for revising or intervening in the administration of reality, for YOU are already in the process of doing so.” However, as representation, ideology discloses the potential for human intervention in the administration of reality; like God, it is sovereign and autonomous. It is through the apparatus—ensuring the administration of the terrestrial, historical oikos—that ideology materializes.
Capitalism inherits the Church’s role of maintaining humanity’s respect for this division between material practice and the contemplative, ideational divine. Religion implicates its subjects in their own fragmentation, praxis—ritualistic scruple before the ideational. It is the expression of a deeply schizophrenic condition in which having is mistaken for being. In the consumer society praxis is valued relative only to the accumulation that follows from it; property thus becomes the illusion whereby consumers secure the unity of their being in a deontologized (and desubjectivized) social structure.
Tourism as praxis and industry is the sacrificial operation that the individual carries out upon his own body, which he forfeits to the apparatus: to transport him, feed him, provide him with a vista and a marketplace for purchasing. Souvenirs are emblematic of the deontologization of this consumer practice; tourism is a celebration of the pure mediation that stands in for the experience of the proper, of that which is immanent (and not alien). The globe will not undergo a cosmopolitical transformation so long as travel is the expression of a solipsistic desire to be thrown into the alien. In America, we tend to express this desire through varying degrees of hostility toward immigrants on the one hand and a ritual devotion to consuming museified world culture on the other. Resorts, cruises, the tour bus and adventure/ecotourism are outstanding expressions of how the tourism apparatus functions. It exhibits, through its exhibitionism, how humans desiringly sacrifice experience for total desubjectification. Tourism is the consumption of prefab experiences, events that unfold predictably, regardless of the participants. This is one legacy of colonial that continues to have a deep impact on the consumer societies.
Capital may geographically liberate its subjects, but only in order to capture this freedom in new forms of voluntary subordination.
Tourism supplies the traveler with a sacred image of the world. The figure of the traveler is defined by the mere accumulation of these images.
“Capitalism is nothing but a gigantic apparatus for capturing pure means.” This statement by Giorgio Agamben reveals, once its terminology is defined, the crux of the question of agency in late capitalism and how agency is continually sanitized in the very instance that the subjective or liberatory gesture is made. First, the definition of apparatus:
All apparatuses of power are always double: they arise, on the one hand, from an individualizing subjective behavior and, on the other, from its capture in a separate sphere. There is often nothing reprehensible about the individual behavior in itself, and it can, indeed, express a liberatory intent; it is reprehensible only if the behavior—when it has not been constrained by circumstances or by force—lets itself be captured in the apparatus.
Agamben’s notion of the apparatus is a synthesis of the Foucauldian dispositif with (less explicitly) Situationist/Debordian theories of détournement and its reenactment by capital. (For Agamben, the Situationists articulate capitalism’s theological kernel—itself a kind of universal apparatus—which is separation.) The dispositif is the positive historical instantiation of a set of strategies governing social relations and the economies of power contained therein. Capital, again, is the mammoth apparatus that has sheathed the world like duckweed across the pond’s surface; beneath its slimy opacity exist entire ecologies of apparatuses that (disjunctively and paradoxically) are continually functioning to reinscribe us within capital and transform whatever it can into capital. Apparatuses are, therefore, “heterogeneous set[s] that include virtually anything, linguistic and nonlinguistic, under the same heading.”
Capture: This is the transition undergone by objects (and activity) in the operation of sacrifice. When something is sacrificed it is rendered cursed by and removed from the profane world of human activity and enclosed within the inaccessible realm of the divine. Once given over to the sacred sphere the human hand can only contaminate the object, or make it profane. The religious apparatus functions to maintain the sacred, to maintain the separation between what is sacrificed and, in a sense, those who sacrifice it. Agency comes into play only insofar as it nullifies itself in authorizing the capture of what was once proper to it by an alien force (the religious). Ritual can be defined as the activity that completes and reenacts this alienation—thus the laboring and consumptive rituals of our stage of capitalism. The sacrificial ritual (generally and ahistorically) is the consumptive act par excellence; it is the total destruction of utility (for the human) in the object. Participation in ritual results in the paradoxical production of a subject at the moment at which it is nullified or desubjectivized by the prescriptive logic of the ritual. Agency—if it can exist—is realized in use, which is the direct, legitimate expression of the user in material form; sacrifice is the careful method of negating the possibility of use in the object.
In “Sacrifices” Bataille poetically articulates this paradox, which is at the core of late capitalist vertigo, which forces us to scramble for a concrete understanding of ourselves and our participation in capitalism. Patrick Swayze (as Bodhi) thematizes the interiority of “the tube” in Point Break as “The place where you lose yourself and find yourself.” This is the sacrificial operation endured under late capitalism, where the condition is, universally, self-sacrifice, or the division and capture of a portion of the individual and her experience.
In an ideally brilliant and empty infinity, chaos to the point of revealing the absence of chaos, the anxious loss of life opens, but life only loses itself—at the limit of the last breath—for this empty infinity. The me raises itself to the pure imperative, living-dying for an abyss without walls or floor…
The brilliance of consumption casts the human, now (self-)sacrificed, in an indeterminate zone, “living-dying.” Living-dying is the mode of being within the theological apparatus of capitalism. There is no end to the consumptive feast, for capitalism induces an extravagant celebration of itself on a daily basis. Obviously, work is no longer the sole celebratory act, for capitalism realizes its most intense phase as an apparatus governing/distributing the means by which one consumes, i.e., how one separates oneself from oneself. This is the schizophrenia of a perfected and generalized form of separation that, according to Agamben, was first instated by Christianity and secularized by capital in the form of alienation (alienated labor and alienated consumption). The etymology of the word oikonomia is bound up with maintaining the separateness of the divine through an earthly administration: Christ.
The Trinity signifies the portioning out of Providence by the Fathers of the Church in the 4th Century. Theology rooted itself in the oikos, God’s home, through the figure of Christ, the material and historical incarnation of the divine. Christ became the medium by which the theological translates the idea into material. He frames human history within an economy of redemption in the form action (politics, economics and institutions and general) but only insofar as activity separates itself from God’s ontological plane. Action is therefore reconciled with scripture and theological doctrine while, simultaneously, praxis ceases to be the foundation of being. Christ embodies this fracture, which capital adopts in the form of ideology. Ideology mediates activity, it assures historical persons that they will be redeemed for their actions, or even that they have already been! The eternal quality of ideology is found in the assurance it provides its subjects, which states, “there is no need for revising or intervening in the administration of reality, for YOU are already in the process of doing so.” However, as representation, ideology discloses the potential for human intervention in the administration of reality; like God, it is sovereign and autonomous. It is through the apparatus—ensuring the administration of the terrestrial, historical oikos—that ideology materializes.
Capitalism inherits the Church’s role of maintaining humanity’s respect for this division between material practice and the contemplative, ideational divine. Religion implicates its subjects in their own fragmentation, praxis—ritualistic scruple before the ideational. It is the expression of a deeply schizophrenic condition in which having is mistaken for being. In the consumer society praxis is valued relative only to the accumulation that follows from it; property thus becomes the illusion whereby consumers secure the unity of their being in a deontologized (and desubjectivized) social structure.
Tourism as praxis and industry is the sacrificial operation that the individual carries out upon his own body, which he forfeits to the apparatus: to transport him, feed him, provide him with a vista and a marketplace for purchasing. Souvenirs are emblematic of the deontologization of this consumer practice; tourism is a celebration of the pure mediation that stands in for the experience of the proper, of that which is immanent (and not alien). The globe will not undergo a cosmopolitical transformation so long as travel is the expression of a solipsistic desire to be thrown into the alien. In America, we tend to express this desire through varying degrees of hostility toward immigrants on the one hand and a ritual devotion to consuming museified world culture on the other. Resorts, cruises, the tour bus and adventure/ecotourism are outstanding expressions of how the tourism apparatus functions. It exhibits, through its exhibitionism, how humans desiringly sacrifice experience for total desubjectification. Tourism is the consumption of prefab experiences, events that unfold predictably, regardless of the participants. This is one legacy of colonial that continues to have a deep impact on the consumer societies.
Capital may geographically liberate its subjects, but only in order to capture this freedom in new forms of voluntary subordination.
Tourism supplies the traveler with a sacred image of the world. The figure of the traveler is defined by the mere accumulation of these images.
Shifting the Center
Sobe sand advertisement
We would be hard pressed to look into the human past and find a social group, town, nation or civilization that did not identify with a particular physical place as a spiritual or at least communal center, and yet our post-modern globalized landscapes (metaphorically and physically) seem to have made no room for these spaces. The concept of the cosmic axis is found across many cultures, a spot at which the four directions intersect, the sky and earth meet and the gods descend as prayers ascend. The marker for these spots is called the omphalos, greek for navel. Often times mountains such as the Kun Lun in China or Mt. Fuji in Japan acted as omphaloses, but any place could be marked as one.
The Omphalos stone of Delphi
Omphaloses place the believer in a world with an affirmed center; once this center is established the believer imagines his physical and spiritual world around that point. As sites of spiritual epiphany as well as social exchange, the omphalos is the focal point of reference from which to judge one's closeness to god and humans, a place to either move away from or come towards. Communal purpose can often supersede spiritual, as is the case with village greens and common spaces in England, Scotland and Wales, which for hundred of years have served as spots for resource harvesting, outdoor meetings and sport events as well as holiday and religious celebrations. As locuses for collective and sacred communication, omphalic centers define the self in relation to larger human and spiritual systems.
With the advent of global trade and finance, immigration, communication, came a vision of humanity encompassing the globe, containing it. The omphalos shifted from the local and became the world itself. The globe became the center, the commons, in the eyes of some eliminating the significance of local centers altogether while to others increasing the need to keep omphalic spaces. The debate of the significance of these spaces has become increasingly relevant in the past century as all natural and cultural resources rapidly become translated into and exchanged as capital. Land, water, air space and the human genome itself are all part of a rapid bidding system for ownership while biomass appropriation begins to reach its limits and species diversity plummets in numerous regions of the world. When Teilhard spoke of the coming psychic compression, reorganization and re-emergence of man, he was also referring to the literal compression of land and space, but it is hard to see at what point humans, let alone earth itself, will be elevated by what Teilhard concisely calls our "internal tensions."
The sense of displacement and pushing outward into non-identifiable space is not only felt of course, by the increasing millions of immigrants who simultaneously move in search of capital while fleeing its effects, but by the way landscapes are modeled for the middle to upperclass. Here I will take the United States as an example. With the advent of car culture, suburbs were sculpted to accomodate these new vehicles: Streets were widened, sidewalks eliminated and central-green space ignored. Neighborhoods were designed on the presupposition that cars were the main purveyors of transportation and access to communication with others, and thus they became one of the major resources for these needs. The alternatives, of course, were technoscapes or mediascapes that the middle class urban inhabitant could access from home via internet or television. The significance of land as an anchoring site for identity was literally blacktopped.
Ironically, the most commercially controlled spaced found today are the ones that create the illusion of social space the most effectively. Recognizing our yearnings for omphalic space, malls provide central space as a celebration of the shared community built on consumption.
One company has managed to fully exploit the yearning for center, sublimating its logo into an entire town. Celebration, FL was created by the Disney Company in the late 1990's as a real estate venture. Using visual and literary propaganda which provoked images of small town America, it drew in hundreds of families by emphasizing the communal atmosphere of the town center and encouraging community organizations which "each play a role in the governance of Celebration."
Downtown Celebration
Twelve years after its launching, Celebration is the model of commercialized community. Since Celebration is wholly owned by Disney, the need for the Disney logo disappears, the illusion of communal autonomy through central shared space is complete.
Our displacement from physical landscape drives us more consistently into the imagined worlds that Appadurai divides into spheres of technoscape, mediascape, financescape etc. As we make basic exchanges- from purchasing foods at a supermarket to sending e-mail we "see" our actions extending outward into a global sphere. Through a fusion of self-made and media-constructed imagery the mind's eye imagines a globe connected by light: a manifestation of the world growing ever claustrophobic and imprisoned by the enlightening beams of global transference. Our imaginations manifest and re-inforce this reality and vice versa.
If the globe is the omphalos, and the omphalos is choking on itself, how then to re-claim room? The imagination as social practice is the place to begin. The scapes we live in and make exchange through are reinforced by our very acknowledgement of them. The projected worlds produced at every level of society are what move nations to war, reinforce hierarchy, topple regimes etc. The landscapes of exchange (communal, ideological etc.) that operate within us are what maintain or disintegrate organized society. Appadurai asserts:
"An important fact about the world we live in today is that many persons on the globe live in such imagined worlds...and thus are able to contest and sometimes even subvert the imagined worlds of the official mind and of the entrepreneurial mentality that surround them."
Appadurai proposes that a sort of democratization of the imagination has occured in the post-modern era, that imagination as a social practice is a new phenomenon. This assertion is altogether false. Certainly our imagined worlds are more complex and in some ways more ()pervasive than ever before, but are these worlds not monopolized, as they always have been, by certain elite groups? The access to a greater number of visions of the worlds operations are certainly available, but one must account for the cornucopia of visions that are forcibly excluded from the list of acceptable world views. When Appadurai reduces imagination's past usages to "mere fantasy," "simple escape," elite pastime," and "mere contemplation" he does not account for imagination's fundamental usage as a propagandist tool that manifests dominant landscapes first in the mind and then in reality. In doing so he is also denying the importance and vital usage of radical or alternative scapes envisioned by those who do not have a general monopoly on reality. In every era alternative landscapes have been manifested and traversed via imagination. In the 17th century the Diggers, who founded small agrarian egalitarian communities on common land (which in reality was always owned by a lord), relied upon specific visions to manifest their goals. They believed in a Golden Age of England, before the Norman invasion, at which time land was shared equally and hierarchy was non-existent. By envisioning this fantastical time period, the Diggers had a model by which to first practice in their minds and then physically produce.
Today, the imagination as a radical tool is being utilized as a way to reclaim public space and create new omphalic centers. Seeing the globe as a whole has reinvigorated the idea of the earth as a shared space, or rather has re-erected the urgent need to understand it as a limited system with a specific reproductive carrying capacity. Activist Vandana Shiva has been a vocal part of the "earth democracy" movement, which, amongst its tenets recognizes the land as commons: "All members of the earth community including all humans have the right to sustenance - to food and water, to a safe and clean habitat, to security of ecological space...These rights are natural rights...and are best protected through community rights and commons." The earth is envisioned as one active community, but one that is naturally and necessarily traversed and influenced at regional levels, thus the need for local economy, local knowledge, local understandings of self. This concept has become increasingly pervasive in any number of movements against Western economo-ideological influence. Whether in reaction to the privatization of centuries-old rice varieties in India, or to the neglect of land in England or the destruction of it on the Northwest coast of the U.S., organized groups are establishing autonomous zones for egalitarian and agrarian practice. In an era in which no call for "traditional" activity or ideology is untouched by modern influence, the degree to which these new spaces actually signify independence and resistance from oppressive spheres is questionable. The Burning Man Festival is an apt example. On its website, Burning Man's intention is stated as "to create radically-inclusive, self-supporting society that connects individuals to each other, civic life and the natural world." At the end of the week, participants ritually burn The Man, a wood model symbolizing society's oppressive ills.
The Man that resided over the 2008 event (pre-burn)
An altar at a Rainbow Gathering
While Burning Man hosts lectures on any number of social and environmental justice topics as well as practicing a "leave no trace" policy, a radically-inclusive society can only be so inclusive when it charges entrance fees upwards of hundreds of dollars. (phtotos from burning man) But what Burning Man and similar, if less capitalized festivals such as Rainbow Gathering are trying to feed are the desire for focused omphalic spiritual sites that produce fantastical landscapes to use as models for other parts of the world. The vision feeds the practice (for those who can afford it at least).
Recently the practice of autonomous space has been manifested in phenomena such as guerilla gardening. Identified by many as a revitalization of the Diggers movement, guerilla gardening is a new name for the centuries old yet increasingly important practice of populist land seizure. Individuals as well as organized teams of people choose derelict land, private and publicly owned and covertly and openly plant and tend decorative, herbal and food plants.
Guerilla gardening at night
Wider scale examples have been increasing in recent years due to the exacerbation of untenable living conditions and higher food prices. In 1995 Tacamiche banana plantation workers in Honduras illegally grew vegetables on abandoned plantation land rather than leave with the plantation's closure. In May 1996 activists affiliated with "The Land is Ours" occupied 13 acres of derelict land belonging to the Guinness Co. in the banks of River Thames in Wandsworth, South London. The action claimed to highlight what the occupiers described as "the appalling misuse of urban land, the lack of provisions for affordable housing and the deterioration of the urban environment." The community built there lasted for 5.5 months before being evicted. These acts are prompted out of desperation for survival, but on both a physical and psychic level, and imaginative practice is essential to the construction of these new environments. Through a gaze that subverts and disrupts our dominant financescapes, technoscapes and mediascapes the masked qualities of our land and our relationship to it are revealed. As post-modern subjects, we recognize everywhere as a potential site for central communal and spiritual exchange.
Cosmopolitan Tribalism
the so-called democratic definition of global (pop) culture by urban youth
"Cosmopolitan Tribalism arises from the democratization of creative, experimental youth culture: a multitasking generation, attuned to the world, armed with freedom and the tools to create and mix references in its own way..."
I stumbled across the video 'Cosmopolitan Tribalism' on the blog of design agency Bola Sociology Design. From their website: "Bola is a design institute which uses behavioral research as a premise to its projects. We believe that in investigating and understanding what happens in society in order to develop ideas which are in tune with its aspirations. This is the foundation for what we call meaningful design. We work with the same research methodologies used by our sister-company, Box 1824, and with a multidisciplinary structure that includes anthropologists, semioticians, photographers and, naturally, designers."
The video begins with an Animal Collective-esque soundtrack - echoey samples in a chorus that sounds both old and new - and a man's voice transposed over a futuristic background of shifting stars.
"Looking forward to a futuristic world rooted in a primitive unity. Blurring the boundaries between irony and truth, ancient and new, the collective and the individual. This is a cultural impulse to create a new, united, global culture. We can define it as cosmopolitan tribalism," he says.
The premise behind this project - commissioned by "a group of technology and style companies"- is that the Internet and a new modern connectively has shifted modes of consumption and self-identification. "The urban world, connected and cosmopolitan, opens door for a return to the primitive, where nature worship, spiritual quests and new states of being are again in the discussion. This is how we define a new way of thinking... driving the cultural and consumer goods industry towards updating and rejuvenating its direction."
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XVnRzEjpUmE
The video introduces "concepts" such as celebration, dance, hedonism, tribal patterns, and sacred geometry, alongside videos and still images culled from the fashion, music, and art worlds [like clips from the "tribal" or "primitively" inspired MGMT video above.]
Of course, this representation of the "new global culture" is troubled by the homogeneity of its authors. Bolo Sociology Design say in their introduction to the project: "We see here a little of the “globalist spirit” made tangible. It does not represent most of mankind and global youth, but rather a niche of globalized young men and women living an interconnected culture in the most economically active capitals of the world. This is an inspiration video, aesthetically organizing how a culture expresses itself."
According to this interpretation, being globalized is to be in a position of luxury. This version of cosmopolitanism is not a modern trend sparked by the internet; rather it has a long history. Waldron in a response to Benhabib's essay illuminates different uses of the term: "'Cosmopolitanism,' Professor Benhabib rightly observes, 'has become one of the keywords of our times'(17). But "cosmopolitan" has a number of different meanings. For some, it is about the love of mankind, or about duties owed to every person in the world, without national or ethnic differentiation. For others, the word "cosmopolitan" connotes the fluidity and the evanescence of culture; it celebrates the compromising or evaporation of the boundaries between cultures conceived as distinct entities; and it anticipates a world of fractured and mingled identities. For still others--and this is the theme that Benhabib explores--cosmopolitanism is about order and norms, not just culture and moral sentiment. It envisages a world order..." 83, Waldron.
The cosmopolitanism we see depicted in this inspirational advertising video falls closest to Waldron's second definition. It is interesting that the agency sees the future, driven by globalization, as a single culture based on a Western interpretation of the other - other in both place and time - that they are able to come into contact with and define by virtue of their globalized privilege. It is not even a world of "fractured and mingled identities" - the modern cultural trend sees globalization as a return to a "primitive unity."
This depiction is complicated when voices selected to define these primitive, ancient, yet ultra-modern trends themselves from the location of the periphery.
http://www.miauk.com/
M.I.A. is a musical artist of Sri Lankan Tamil descent. She is quoted on the Tamil Nation website as saying, "Nobody wants to be dancing to political songs. Every bit of music out there that’s making it into the mainstream is really about nothing. I wanted to see if I could write songs about something important and make it sound like nothing. And it kind of worked." By joining the dominant Western trend (or even by being selected or favored by the niche group of privileged, globalized, urban youth) M.I.A. gained global influence (she was recently voted by Time Magazine as one of the world's top 100 most influential people.) Her success in the Western world does not mean that diverse global culture is being built from the bottom.
Walter Mignolo's concludes his essay on border thinking and critical cosmopolitanism with a visual metaphor for a new, just, working world order: "If you can imagine Western civilization as a large circle with a series of satellite circles intersecting the larger one but disconnected from each ohter, diversality will be the project that connects the diverse subaltern satellites appropriating and transforming Western global designs. Diversality can be imagined as a new medievalism, a pluricentric world built on the ruins of ancient, non-Western cultures and civilizations with the debris of Western civilization. A cosmopolitanism that only connects from the center of the larger circle outward, and leaves the outer places disconnected from each other, would be a cosmopolitanism from above..." (Mignolo 183-184).
It is also worth commenting on the fact that this video, made for the purposes of directing and inspiring successful advertising campaigns, both justifies the cultural agenda-setting of a small privileged group of globalized urban youth and forwards the aims of capitalism.
Watch the full video for many more examples, including depictions in youth culture of "totems, idols, primitivism, neo-psychedelia, shamanism, rituals and carnival."
"Cosmopolitan Tribalism arises from the democratization of creative, experimental youth culture: a multitasking generation, attuned to the world, armed with freedom and the tools to create and mix references in its own way..."
I stumbled across the video 'Cosmopolitan Tribalism' on the blog of design agency Bola Sociology Design. From their website: "Bola is a design institute which uses behavioral research as a premise to its projects. We believe that in investigating and understanding what happens in society in order to develop ideas which are in tune with its aspirations. This is the foundation for what we call meaningful design. We work with the same research methodologies used by our sister-company, Box 1824, and with a multidisciplinary structure that includes anthropologists, semioticians, photographers and, naturally, designers."
The video begins with an Animal Collective-esque soundtrack - echoey samples in a chorus that sounds both old and new - and a man's voice transposed over a futuristic background of shifting stars.
"Looking forward to a futuristic world rooted in a primitive unity. Blurring the boundaries between irony and truth, ancient and new, the collective and the individual. This is a cultural impulse to create a new, united, global culture. We can define it as cosmopolitan tribalism," he says.
The premise behind this project - commissioned by "a group of technology and style companies"- is that the Internet and a new modern connectively has shifted modes of consumption and self-identification. "The urban world, connected and cosmopolitan, opens door for a return to the primitive, where nature worship, spiritual quests and new states of being are again in the discussion. This is how we define a new way of thinking... driving the cultural and consumer goods industry towards updating and rejuvenating its direction."
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XVnRzEjpUmE
The video introduces "concepts" such as celebration, dance, hedonism, tribal patterns, and sacred geometry, alongside videos and still images culled from the fashion, music, and art worlds [like clips from the "tribal" or "primitively" inspired MGMT video above.]
Of course, this representation of the "new global culture" is troubled by the homogeneity of its authors. Bolo Sociology Design say in their introduction to the project: "We see here a little of the “globalist spirit” made tangible. It does not represent most of mankind and global youth, but rather a niche of globalized young men and women living an interconnected culture in the most economically active capitals of the world. This is an inspiration video, aesthetically organizing how a culture expresses itself."
According to this interpretation, being globalized is to be in a position of luxury. This version of cosmopolitanism is not a modern trend sparked by the internet; rather it has a long history. Waldron in a response to Benhabib's essay illuminates different uses of the term: "'Cosmopolitanism,' Professor Benhabib rightly observes, 'has become one of the keywords of our times'(17). But "cosmopolitan" has a number of different meanings. For some, it is about the love of mankind, or about duties owed to every person in the world, without national or ethnic differentiation. For others, the word "cosmopolitan" connotes the fluidity and the evanescence of culture; it celebrates the compromising or evaporation of the boundaries between cultures conceived as distinct entities; and it anticipates a world of fractured and mingled identities. For still others--and this is the theme that Benhabib explores--cosmopolitanism is about order and norms, not just culture and moral sentiment. It envisages a world order..." 83, Waldron.
The cosmopolitanism we see depicted in this inspirational advertising video falls closest to Waldron's second definition. It is interesting that the agency sees the future, driven by globalization, as a single culture based on a Western interpretation of the other - other in both place and time - that they are able to come into contact with and define by virtue of their globalized privilege. It is not even a world of "fractured and mingled identities" - the modern cultural trend sees globalization as a return to a "primitive unity."
This depiction is complicated when voices selected to define these primitive, ancient, yet ultra-modern trends themselves from the location of the periphery.
http://www.miauk.com/
M.I.A. is a musical artist of Sri Lankan Tamil descent. She is quoted on the Tamil Nation website as saying, "Nobody wants to be dancing to political songs. Every bit of music out there that’s making it into the mainstream is really about nothing. I wanted to see if I could write songs about something important and make it sound like nothing. And it kind of worked." By joining the dominant Western trend (or even by being selected or favored by the niche group of privileged, globalized, urban youth) M.I.A. gained global influence (she was recently voted by Time Magazine as one of the world's top 100 most influential people.) Her success in the Western world does not mean that diverse global culture is being built from the bottom.
Walter Mignolo's concludes his essay on border thinking and critical cosmopolitanism with a visual metaphor for a new, just, working world order: "If you can imagine Western civilization as a large circle with a series of satellite circles intersecting the larger one but disconnected from each ohter, diversality will be the project that connects the diverse subaltern satellites appropriating and transforming Western global designs. Diversality can be imagined as a new medievalism, a pluricentric world built on the ruins of ancient, non-Western cultures and civilizations with the debris of Western civilization. A cosmopolitanism that only connects from the center of the larger circle outward, and leaves the outer places disconnected from each other, would be a cosmopolitanism from above..." (Mignolo 183-184).
It is also worth commenting on the fact that this video, made for the purposes of directing and inspiring successful advertising campaigns, both justifies the cultural agenda-setting of a small privileged group of globalized urban youth and forwards the aims of capitalism.
Watch the full video for many more examples, including depictions in youth culture of "totems, idols, primitivism, neo-psychedelia, shamanism, rituals and carnival."
In a globalized world-system, flows of migrant workers are essential for economic development. The constant need for affordable labor has forced countries to seek out workers beyond its own borders. Immigrants have tended to travel from poor under-developed nations to rich first-world capitalist countries in Western Europe and North America. In recent years, however, Russia has emerged as a country with one of the largest immigrant populations in the world. The dissolution of the Soviet Union was followed by the erection of new international boundaries between former Soviet republics. Over fifteen years after the collapse, the Russian Federation has emerged as the economic and financial power-house of the post-Soviet region. With its enormous revenue from gas and oil exports, Russia has undergone a rapid economic transition. By the late 90s, there was a growing economic disparity between Russia and the surrounding republics, most notably in the Caucuses and Central Asia. In the span of a decade, Russia transitioned from a migrant-exporting to an overwhelmingly migrant-importing nation. As a relatively recent phenomenon, Russia has not been able to respond to the reality of being a major destination for immigrants. Increased immigration to Russia has been the direct result of capitalist development and is therefore similar to other waves of migration experienced in the capitalist West. Nonetheless, the case of Russia is exceptional in more ways than one due in part to its historical legacy.
Throughout modern history, Central Asia and the Caucuses had been part of Russian territory, first as regions of the Russian Empire and later as socialist republics in the Soviet Union. Russian domination over neighboring ethnic and religious groups could be interpreted as being both imperialist and colonial. Yet unlike European colonialism, Russia did not annex territory for economic benefit in the forms of human labor and raw materials. The Russian Empire was, above all, a military and symbolic entity that used territory to exert geo-political pressure on its neighboring countries. Despite that fact that ethnic minorities were granted formal autonomy, the Soviet Union inherited a highly centralized state from the Russian Empire. The communist party, for example, promoted a policy of Russification throughout the Soviet republics. How is it then possible that former Soviet citizens with a common identity now regard each other as foreigners?
While the world expanded freedom of movement in order to enhance the flow of capital, the Soviet Union remained strictly speaking a police state. Mobility within the Soviet Union was extremely limited as a result of a complicated system of residency controls. Every Soviet citizen was issued an “internal” passport that had the individual’s name, address, ethnicity, marital status, and other information. In addition to this, each Soviet citizen has to possess a valid “propiska” (registration) from the local police. Any person caught by the police in the city without a valid registration was liable to imprisonment, banishment, and/or fines. Given this strict system of oversight, citizens could not simply relocate to different parts of the Soviet Union without obtaining a permit from the authorities. As a result, there was limited movement of people between the regions and republics of the country. Surprisingly, this archaic passport system is still in force in modern-day Russia, albeit in a less rigid form.
Since the fall of the Soviet Union, human mobility has been greatly facilitated. Travel between Russia and other CIS republics is visa-free, open, and poorly regulated. As part of the Commonwealth of Independent States, the former Soviet republics have agreed to allow freedom of movement between member states. Unlike the European Union, however, the economic disparity between the respective countries is much greater. As is highlighted in “International Flows of Humanity”, migration is defined by the capitalist principles of supply and demand. In the case of immigration to Russia, it is important to look at the situation in terms of Bhagwati’s “push” and “pull” factors. Like with most forms of migration, economic inequality between the Central Asian republics and Russia is the main reason behind this flow of migration today. More importantly, however, than economic inequality are the cultural and historical bonds between Russia and its neighbors. As the former epicenter of the Soviet Union, Russia has retained its superiority in terms of industry, science, culture, military, and education. The geopolitical domination of Russia over this vast region has to a large extent predetermined the trajectory of migration movement because “inequality needs to be activated as a migration push factor – through organized recruitment, neocolonial bonds, etc.” (Sassen 136). This explains why Kyrghyz and Tadjik migrant workers are more likely to immigrate to Russia rather than to China or Iran. In this particular case, Russia’s relationship to its neighboring republic would be more aptly described as “neo-imperial” rather than “neo-colonial”. As far as the pull factors are concerned, the demographic crisis within Russia has left it in dire need of both skilled and unskilled workers in most sectors of the labor market. Construction firms and other private companies have been active in recruiting wage laborers from poor underdeveloped Central Asian countries. Unlike in Germany,however, the importation of migrants has developed outside of any national government programs and has remained largely unregulated.
On the surface, the immigration to Russia from Central Asia and the Caucuses seems to mirror the experience of post-World War II Western Europe. There is the post-imperial legacy, the need for cheap labor, and the concentration of capital in a single region. Generally speaking, this is a typical Center-Periphery dichotomy as is presented in word-systems analysis. Nonetheless, migrants arriving in Russia today experience an environment very different from that of Western Europe. Despite the recent economic success, Russia remains an extremely poor country, especially in its more distant regions. This situation creates conflict between the poor local ethnically Russian population and the migrant guest-workers from abroad. Whereas in Western Europe there was a “hunger for immigrants…to supplement the domestic labor force and also to ensure that the social security systems do not wind up bankrupt”, in Russia there is no functioning social system at the moment (Bhagwati 212). Guest-workers do not pay taxes in Russia, but neither do the majority of Russian citizens.
Bhagwati is naive in believing that “it is impossible to incarcerate migrants caught crossing borders illegally without raising an outcry over humane treatment” (216). Given Russia’s corrupt and undemocratic regime, the mistreatment of migrant workers hardly raises any eyebrows.
While European and North American nations are closing their borders to flows of migrant workers, Russia has left its borders open while providing a hostile environment for those workers that do migrate. Upon arrival, migrant workers encounter a complicated web of Soviet-style bureaucracy that is both confusing and frustrating. According to Russian law, migrant workers need to register at an immigration office within 3 days of their arrival in the country. According to Human Rights Watch this system is inefficient and complex:
Many migrant workers entering Russia under the non-visa regime do not have a job or a place to live when they arrive in Russia, and for most of them three days is a very short period in which to identify one or the other, unless they already have established contacts prior to their arrival (HRW 2009)
http://www.hrw.org/en/reports/2009/02/09/are-you-happy-cheat-us
Therefore being unable to follow the official law on immigration, these migrant workers immediately become “illegal”. Here is a short advertisement produced by the Federal Migration Service warning potential immigrants of the dangers of failing to register with the authorities:
In the video a guest-worker named “Ahmet” goes to Russia and is too lazy to register legally, gets into trouble with the authorities, and is sent back to his village. The content of this video exposes the racist and discriminatory attitude of the Russian government officials towards migrant-workers. Abuse of migrant workers by police is rampant and gruesome. Anti-immigrant sentiment among the Russian population is extremely high. In the short span of time since the break-up of the Soviet Union, the “other” in the form of a guest-worker is “represented, stereotyped as from a different race and culture” (Sassin 135). In the photo below, Russian police is raiding a construction site with migrant workers. Usually, the police abuses, robs, and beats the workers before releasing them for a bribe.
Generally, most of the literature on flows of migration has focused on the immigration to capitalist democratic nations. Although Russia is indeed a capitalist nation thirsty for cheap labor, the concept of human rights is virtually non-existent within its borders. While large Western corporation have exploited cheap labor via outsourcing in Asia, immigrants within these countries borders have, to a large extent, enjoyed the same social, political, and economic rights as the local population. The European notion that “the individual is now an object of law and a site for rights regardless of whether a citizen or an alien” does not hold true in Russia (Sassen 23). Under a corrupt, semi-authoritarian regime, both the local population and guest-workers are to a certain extent limited in their political and social rights. Nonetheless the local Russian population feels threatened by its former neighbors turned foreigners. In essence, Russia is stuck in the nineteenth century with open borders, a lack of human rights, rapid capitalist development, and a need for cheap under-paid labor. At the same time, it is still attempting to maintain its influential historical and cultural role over the entire region. In the meantime, the suffering of migrant workers in Russia seems to have no end in sight.
Sunday, May 31, 2009
Global Study
(work in progress)
On the “Studying Globally at Bard” website, the first image the visitor is encountered with is a bird’s-eye view of the City Abroad. The densely-packed urban space is nestled around and between mountains, lit by the sun (of the southern hemisphere), extending toward the shore of a teal-blue and wavy ocean (ah, the unspoiled paradise of the 3rd world). The shot makes the earth seem round and small, though despite its familiarity to the student deeply entrenched in the global-village discourse of American liberal arts education, the view depicts something foreign, new, unfamiliar, worth zooming into. We are invited to learn more:
Why Study Abroad?
Study abroad can be a transformative experience in a student’s undergraduate education. Students return from abroad with fresh perspective on the Bard education, and other with ideas that serve as the foundation for their senior projects. Bard’s high expectations of student achievement extend to study abroad. Bard has developed a number of programs specifically designed to integrate students into foreign cultures and academic environments.
Especially when combined with related academic study and foreign language fluency, study abroad enables students to gain essential perspectives on the history, culture, and concerns of people around the globe. This includes such vital issues as globalization, democratization, human rights, development, culture, identity and the environment.
Marketed as an integral part of a Bard education, studying abroad promises a number of valuable assets to the motivated, high-achieving students and just as importantly, their primary sponsors (parents). Some obligatory/promising keywords include: perspective, integrate, culture, human rights, and globalization. Global Study is framed within the discourse of academia and educational enrichment, be it through its application in language acquisition, comparative economic and/or political systemology, or cultural fluency. These are the products being marketed, and sometimes they are also acquired. However, in mobilizing the imagination of the student of liberal arts, the experience is implicitly constructed as one that further equips him with the tools necessary to hold high-brow dinner conversation at the table with his elite cosmopolitan contemporaries.
Gayatri Spivak has enlightened students of globalization and cosmopolitanism in her articulation of the process of globality. Globality is the strategic rhetorical employment of globalization discourse that works to reaffirm and reproduce power hierarchies, be they neo-colonial, gendered, or otherwise. Spivak would urge us to re-read texts that employ the rhetorical devices of globality in order to make transparent these power structures and thus to see clearly the violent dynamics taking shape through talk of globalization. Thus, Global Study becomes less about the practical educational acquisitions it promises us and more about cultivating and enriching an elite class of globalists. Moreover, the marketing of the product only indulges in its superficiality until the moment of departure.
On the “Studying Globally at Bard” website, the first image the visitor is encountered with is a bird’s-eye view of the City Abroad. The densely-packed urban space is nestled around and between mountains, lit by the sun (of the southern hemisphere), extending toward the shore of a teal-blue and wavy ocean (ah, the unspoiled paradise of the 3rd world). The shot makes the earth seem round and small, though despite its familiarity to the student deeply entrenched in the global-village discourse of American liberal arts education, the view depicts something foreign, new, unfamiliar, worth zooming into. We are invited to learn more:
Why Study Abroad?
Study abroad can be a transformative experience in a student’s undergraduate education. Students return from abroad with fresh perspective on the Bard education, and other with ideas that serve as the foundation for their senior projects. Bard’s high expectations of student achievement extend to study abroad. Bard has developed a number of programs specifically designed to integrate students into foreign cultures and academic environments.
Especially when combined with related academic study and foreign language fluency, study abroad enables students to gain essential perspectives on the history, culture, and concerns of people around the globe. This includes such vital issues as globalization, democratization, human rights, development, culture, identity and the environment.
Marketed as an integral part of a Bard education, studying abroad promises a number of valuable assets to the motivated, high-achieving students and just as importantly, their primary sponsors (parents). Some obligatory/promising keywords include: perspective, integrate, culture, human rights, and globalization. Global Study is framed within the discourse of academia and educational enrichment, be it through its application in language acquisition, comparative economic and/or political systemology, or cultural fluency. These are the products being marketed, and sometimes they are also acquired. However, in mobilizing the imagination of the student of liberal arts, the experience is implicitly constructed as one that further equips him with the tools necessary to hold high-brow dinner conversation at the table with his elite cosmopolitan contemporaries.
Gayatri Spivak has enlightened students of globalization and cosmopolitanism in her articulation of the process of globality. Globality is the strategic rhetorical employment of globalization discourse that works to reaffirm and reproduce power hierarchies, be they neo-colonial, gendered, or otherwise. Spivak would urge us to re-read texts that employ the rhetorical devices of globality in order to make transparent these power structures and thus to see clearly the violent dynamics taking shape through talk of globalization. Thus, Global Study becomes less about the practical educational acquisitions it promises us and more about cultivating and enriching an elite class of globalists. Moreover, the marketing of the product only indulges in its superficiality until the moment of departure.
Saturday, May 30, 2009
Cosmo-Patriotism: A Necessarily Limited Response to Immanuel Wallerstein (2.0)
by Frank Brancely
May 2009
Towards the end of the twentieth century a sickness struck the world. Not everyone died, but all suffered from it. The virus which caused the epidemic was called the “liberal virus.” This virus made its appearance around the sixteenth century within the triangle described by Paris-London-Amsterdam. The symptoms that the disease then manifested appeared harmless…But the virus traveled across the Atlantic and found a favorable place among those who, deprived of antibodies, spread it. As a result, the malady took on extreme forms.
The virus reappeared in Europe towards the end of the twentieth century, returning from America where it had mutated. Now strengthened, it came to destroy a great number of the antibodies that the Europeans had developed over the course of the three preceding centuries…
The virus caused among its victims a curious schizophrenia. Humans no longer lived as whole beings, organizing themselves to produce what is necessary to satisfy their needs (what the learned have called “economic life”) and simultaneously developing the institutions, rules, and customs that enable them to develop (what the same learned people have called “political life”), conscious that the two aspects of social life are inseparable. Henceforth, they lived sometimes as homo oeconomicus, abandoning to “the market” the responsibility to regulate their “economic life” automatically, and sometimes as “citizens,” depositing in ballot boxes their choices for those who would have responsibility to establish the rules of the game for their “political life.”
-Samir Amin. P.8 “The Liberal Virus: Permanent War and the Americanization of the World.”
What is clearer but that those living in the center, especially Americans, have difficulty imagining others as human? What then does it mean to be an American? Elaine Scarry states in her essay, “The Difficulty of Imagining Other People,” that the way we act toward “others” is shaped by the way we imagine them. If the states that belong to the center, following a world-systems analysis, enjoy a status that is only possible by the subordination of the periphery, which is in part an inability to see the humanity of other peoples, then what other solution is there but a global re-distribution of wealth, a global triumph of really-existing socialism? In order to resist, we must understand the system that subordinates us. How do we educate ourselves out of our condition? Wallerstein writes that from education we must not only learn that we are citizens of the world, but that we are locatable in specific “niches” in an unequal world.
"Being disinterested and global on one hand and defending one’s narrow interests on the other are not opposites but positions combined in complicated ways. Some combinations are desirable, others are not. Some are desirable, but not there, now but not then. Once we have learned this, we can begin to cope intellectually with our social reality." Wallerstein 124 (1)
What should be obvious is that education cannot be divorced from the economic or social question. In a global community, the pedagogy of education is an especially contested terrain. Educational spaces and practices in the core, in the public and private spheres, are more than ever dominated by the forces neo-liberalism. The capitalist system is blind at its center, and the methodologies and content of the classroom remain at the core of an oppressive, systemic reality. This is the problem that American youth are faced with today but are unable to see. This situation is not inevitable.
The White liberal student, such as the typical Bard student, is aloof as to precisely how and why he occupies his “niche.” The forces of capital have arranged it this way. This student enjoys an especially dominant position, politically, economically, and has the option of aggression toward the weak. He will enjoy the profit of capital made by his network, whether he realizes it or not. He might graduate with a major in “human rights” and have the capacity, according to the philosophy behind his education, to think critically about the forces that shape his present circumstances. What does this mean? If the promise is fulfilled, he can only gain a stained conscience. How could an awakening of consciousness be followed by anything but guilt for his privilege? His education, he finds, is only an additional layer of security to this promise. The exertion required to ensure his place near or among the bourgeoisie is minimal. Post an entry to the blog. One may feel sorry for his situation, but do not feel sorry for him. His ignorance, like his guilt, is built on the suffering of others. He perceives the suffering of others and assigns them either to forces beyond his agency, or he feels sorry for them and engages in “humanitarian” projects that are not only unwilling to seriously undermine the status quo, but perpetuate it by “managing the crisis.” The supremacy of the capitalist over the proletariat today is only noticed by those paying attention; built into this system are increasingly sublime and sophisticated disguises, justifications, and methods of dehumanization.
Those who do not have the forces of capital at their side may be no more or less submerged in the ideologies that envelop them but find themselves at the mercy of a corporate elite ever ready to attack and subjugate. Their education does not fail to be critical; it does not purport to be critical. “Instead of offering poor and disenfranchised youth decent schools and potential employment, the militarized state offers them the promise of incarceration” (Giroux 159). (2)
What becomes overwhelmingly necessary is a pedagogy that is impenetrable, that has yet to be penetrated by the virus of liberalism. Such a space for this certainly does not yet exist. And if it did, who could be trusted to ensure its success? Where would these new schools be located, who would be among their ranks, and what would they teach? These questions are central to the task of regaining humanity from a system that has stolen mortal life energy and with it human dignity.
"The struggle for humanization… is possible only because dehumanization, although a concrete historical fact, is not a given destiny, but the result of an unjust order that engenders violence in the oppressors, which in turn dehumanizes the oppressed… Only power that springs from the weakness of the oppressed will be sufficiently strong to free both." Freire 21. (3)
The charity of a liberal institution like Bard College, in its multi-various humanitarian schemes or in the cloning and implantation of itself in spaces that are not yet thoroughly intellectually colonized, constitute the “false charity” through which “the strong” or “the oppressors” seek to perpetuate an unjust social order nourished by death, despair and poverty. Freire advises us that self-reliance, on the part of the oppressed, is needed for the oppressed themselves to realize the shackles that bind them to their oppressors, that this is an ongoing process.
The teachers, we now know, must be the oppressed themselves, or at least leaders among them who have perceived and articulated their subjective reality and are courageous enough to be self-critical in terms of their own social identity. Every oppressed man must be willing to confront the fact that, in this status quo, his sex is dominant. “Men (whom the virus struck in preference to women) not only became accustomed to it and developed the necessary antibodies, but were able to benefit from the increased energy that it elicited” (Amin 7). (4). The dominance of the White race over others, of men over women, of straightness over queerness, of the wealthy over the poor, manifests itself in explicit and not-so-explicit ways, and must be dissected and destroyed by those who seek to claim a new social order.
In his short essay “Neither Patriotism Nor Cosmopolitanism,” Wallerstein refers to the oppressed as “the weak.” (5). He insists that they will only overcome “disadvantage” if they insist on the principles of group equality. (6). To do this effectively, they may have to “stimulate group consciousness – nationalism, ethnic assertiveness, etc” (Wallerstein 122). Oppressed individuals must understand their commonality and seek to rupture the power that divides them from one another and from themselves (in a Foucauldian analysis). (7) But where to begin?
Wallerstein gives us “the concrete situation in the United States today.” The discourse turns to hegemony, which was the status it achieved by 1945 when its ideological line became supremely nationalist: America is the world’s greatest country and leader of the free world and defender of values of individual liberty (which are in fact the world’s values, i.e. Kantian categorical imperatives). The anti-systemic movements that shook the world began in the 1960/70s, and were undertaken by the oppressed. Did they succeed?
"Those who were excluded sought to be included, and those who were already included were most often inclined to keep eligibility for citizens’ rights defined narrowly, maintaining the exclusions. This meant that those who were seeking inclusion had to organize outside the parliamentary channels in order for their cause to be heard. That is, quite simply, they had to engage in demonstrative, rebellious, sometimes revolutionary activity." Wallerstein 52. (8).
(wallerstein)
Wallerstein stops short of elaborating what an “integrating patriotism” even means. We can only infer that it seeks the same ends as the anti-systemic failures, that is, integration of the oppressed and oppressor alike, their submergence in false consciousness. The difference is that this “integration patriotism” is, according to Wallerstein, a gesture that emanates from the camp of the oppressor. We might expect that the oppressed, given that the system is presenting a somewhat more visible fracture, will gradually begin to grasp the reality of their predicament.
May 2009
Towards the end of the twentieth century a sickness struck the world. Not everyone died, but all suffered from it. The virus which caused the epidemic was called the “liberal virus.” This virus made its appearance around the sixteenth century within the triangle described by Paris-London-Amsterdam. The symptoms that the disease then manifested appeared harmless…But the virus traveled across the Atlantic and found a favorable place among those who, deprived of antibodies, spread it. As a result, the malady took on extreme forms.
The virus reappeared in Europe towards the end of the twentieth century, returning from America where it had mutated. Now strengthened, it came to destroy a great number of the antibodies that the Europeans had developed over the course of the three preceding centuries…
The virus caused among its victims a curious schizophrenia. Humans no longer lived as whole beings, organizing themselves to produce what is necessary to satisfy their needs (what the learned have called “economic life”) and simultaneously developing the institutions, rules, and customs that enable them to develop (what the same learned people have called “political life”), conscious that the two aspects of social life are inseparable. Henceforth, they lived sometimes as homo oeconomicus, abandoning to “the market” the responsibility to regulate their “economic life” automatically, and sometimes as “citizens,” depositing in ballot boxes their choices for those who would have responsibility to establish the rules of the game for their “political life.”
-Samir Amin. P.8 “The Liberal Virus: Permanent War and the Americanization of the World.”
What is clearer but that those living in the center, especially Americans, have difficulty imagining others as human? What then does it mean to be an American? Elaine Scarry states in her essay, “The Difficulty of Imagining Other People,” that the way we act toward “others” is shaped by the way we imagine them. If the states that belong to the center, following a world-systems analysis, enjoy a status that is only possible by the subordination of the periphery, which is in part an inability to see the humanity of other peoples, then what other solution is there but a global re-distribution of wealth, a global triumph of really-existing socialism? In order to resist, we must understand the system that subordinates us. How do we educate ourselves out of our condition? Wallerstein writes that from education we must not only learn that we are citizens of the world, but that we are locatable in specific “niches” in an unequal world.
"Being disinterested and global on one hand and defending one’s narrow interests on the other are not opposites but positions combined in complicated ways. Some combinations are desirable, others are not. Some are desirable, but not there, now but not then. Once we have learned this, we can begin to cope intellectually with our social reality." Wallerstein 124 (1)
What should be obvious is that education cannot be divorced from the economic or social question. In a global community, the pedagogy of education is an especially contested terrain. Educational spaces and practices in the core, in the public and private spheres, are more than ever dominated by the forces neo-liberalism. The capitalist system is blind at its center, and the methodologies and content of the classroom remain at the core of an oppressive, systemic reality. This is the problem that American youth are faced with today but are unable to see. This situation is not inevitable.
The White liberal student, such as the typical Bard student, is aloof as to precisely how and why he occupies his “niche.” The forces of capital have arranged it this way. This student enjoys an especially dominant position, politically, economically, and has the option of aggression toward the weak. He will enjoy the profit of capital made by his network, whether he realizes it or not. He might graduate with a major in “human rights” and have the capacity, according to the philosophy behind his education, to think critically about the forces that shape his present circumstances. What does this mean? If the promise is fulfilled, he can only gain a stained conscience. How could an awakening of consciousness be followed by anything but guilt for his privilege? His education, he finds, is only an additional layer of security to this promise. The exertion required to ensure his place near or among the bourgeoisie is minimal. Post an entry to the blog. One may feel sorry for his situation, but do not feel sorry for him. His ignorance, like his guilt, is built on the suffering of others. He perceives the suffering of others and assigns them either to forces beyond his agency, or he feels sorry for them and engages in “humanitarian” projects that are not only unwilling to seriously undermine the status quo, but perpetuate it by “managing the crisis.” The supremacy of the capitalist over the proletariat today is only noticed by those paying attention; built into this system are increasingly sublime and sophisticated disguises, justifications, and methods of dehumanization.
Those who do not have the forces of capital at their side may be no more or less submerged in the ideologies that envelop them but find themselves at the mercy of a corporate elite ever ready to attack and subjugate. Their education does not fail to be critical; it does not purport to be critical. “Instead of offering poor and disenfranchised youth decent schools and potential employment, the militarized state offers them the promise of incarceration” (Giroux 159). (2)
What becomes overwhelmingly necessary is a pedagogy that is impenetrable, that has yet to be penetrated by the virus of liberalism. Such a space for this certainly does not yet exist. And if it did, who could be trusted to ensure its success? Where would these new schools be located, who would be among their ranks, and what would they teach? These questions are central to the task of regaining humanity from a system that has stolen mortal life energy and with it human dignity.
"The struggle for humanization… is possible only because dehumanization, although a concrete historical fact, is not a given destiny, but the result of an unjust order that engenders violence in the oppressors, which in turn dehumanizes the oppressed… Only power that springs from the weakness of the oppressed will be sufficiently strong to free both." Freire 21. (3)
The charity of a liberal institution like Bard College, in its multi-various humanitarian schemes or in the cloning and implantation of itself in spaces that are not yet thoroughly intellectually colonized, constitute the “false charity” through which “the strong” or “the oppressors” seek to perpetuate an unjust social order nourished by death, despair and poverty. Freire advises us that self-reliance, on the part of the oppressed, is needed for the oppressed themselves to realize the shackles that bind them to their oppressors, that this is an ongoing process.
The teachers, we now know, must be the oppressed themselves, or at least leaders among them who have perceived and articulated their subjective reality and are courageous enough to be self-critical in terms of their own social identity. Every oppressed man must be willing to confront the fact that, in this status quo, his sex is dominant. “Men (whom the virus struck in preference to women) not only became accustomed to it and developed the necessary antibodies, but were able to benefit from the increased energy that it elicited” (Amin 7). (4). The dominance of the White race over others, of men over women, of straightness over queerness, of the wealthy over the poor, manifests itself in explicit and not-so-explicit ways, and must be dissected and destroyed by those who seek to claim a new social order.
In his short essay “Neither Patriotism Nor Cosmopolitanism,” Wallerstein refers to the oppressed as “the weak.” (5). He insists that they will only overcome “disadvantage” if they insist on the principles of group equality. (6). To do this effectively, they may have to “stimulate group consciousness – nationalism, ethnic assertiveness, etc” (Wallerstein 122). Oppressed individuals must understand their commonality and seek to rupture the power that divides them from one another and from themselves (in a Foucauldian analysis). (7) But where to begin?
Wallerstein gives us “the concrete situation in the United States today.” The discourse turns to hegemony, which was the status it achieved by 1945 when its ideological line became supremely nationalist: America is the world’s greatest country and leader of the free world and defender of values of individual liberty (which are in fact the world’s values, i.e. Kantian categorical imperatives). The anti-systemic movements that shook the world began in the 1960/70s, and were undertaken by the oppressed. Did they succeed?
"Those who were excluded sought to be included, and those who were already included were most often inclined to keep eligibility for citizens’ rights defined narrowly, maintaining the exclusions. This meant that those who were seeking inclusion had to organize outside the parliamentary channels in order for their cause to be heard. That is, quite simply, they had to engage in demonstrative, rebellious, sometimes revolutionary activity." Wallerstein 52. (8).
(wallerstein)Wallerstein stops short of elaborating what an “integrating patriotism” even means. We can only infer that it seeks the same ends as the anti-systemic failures, that is, integration of the oppressed and oppressor alike, their submergence in false consciousness. The difference is that this “integration patriotism” is, according to Wallerstein, a gesture that emanates from the camp of the oppressor. We might expect that the oppressed, given that the system is presenting a somewhat more visible fracture, will gradually begin to grasp the reality of their predicament.
"To attract the attention on the financial collapse is not enough. Behind it, a crisis of real economy is standing out, since the financial drift was continuously asphyxiating the growth of the production basis. Solutions brought to the financial crisis can just lead to a crisis of the real economy, i.e. a relative stagnation of the production with its side effects: regression of wages, growth of unemployment, growing precariousness and aggravation of poverty in the Southern countries. We must speak now about depression and no more about recession" (Amin). (9)
How long must the unemployed wait until they realize that the system does not need to be restored but disposed of? Wallerstein’s observation of a “more ethnocentric style of oppressed groups” may already be indicative of some opening of consciousness, but it is far from evident whether the decline of American empire is the root cause.
The question is whether cosmopolitanism or patriotism may serve to bring the human population to harmony, to a socio-economic equilibrium that engenders a high-intensity global democracy. He outright rejects both. “The stance of ‘world citizen’ is deeply ambiguous. It can be used just as easily to sustain privilege as to undermine it” (124). This is a lame reduction of the possibilities of cosmopolitanism. Wallerstein speaks of the need for “a far more complex stance, constantly moving toward and away from defensive assertion of the group rights of the weak as the political arena changes the parameters of the battle” (124). The fact that capitalism cannot be sustained, that its management is temporary, means that the political will be free from the clutches of the economic at some point, the effective undoing of the always-already fragile anti-systemic movements. But how are we to suppose patriotism or cosmopolitanism as separate from this unfolding phenomenon, or that they will only be able to play simple roles in the process? Surely they are integral, the complexity of their operations manifold.
The question is whether cosmopolitanism or patriotism may serve to bring the human population to harmony, to a socio-economic equilibrium that engenders a high-intensity global democracy. He outright rejects both. “The stance of ‘world citizen’ is deeply ambiguous. It can be used just as easily to sustain privilege as to undermine it” (124). This is a lame reduction of the possibilities of cosmopolitanism. Wallerstein speaks of the need for “a far more complex stance, constantly moving toward and away from defensive assertion of the group rights of the weak as the political arena changes the parameters of the battle” (124). The fact that capitalism cannot be sustained, that its management is temporary, means that the political will be free from the clutches of the economic at some point, the effective undoing of the always-already fragile anti-systemic movements. But how are we to suppose patriotism or cosmopolitanism as separate from this unfolding phenomenon, or that they will only be able to play simple roles in the process? Surely they are integral, the complexity of their operations manifold.
"Right now, for example, the United States has a nuclear policy that permits a president, acting almost alone, to authorize the firing of nuclear weapons. How should people in the United States protect other populations from the sudden use of this monarchic weapons system? Should we hope that at the moment of firing, the president will suddenly have the imaginative powers to picture other people in their full density of concerns, picture not one caricatured leader but the men of women and young people of that country?" (Scarry 108). (10).
An epihenomenon: sacred life and the imagination of man were nearly extinguished by the machismo of a new hegemony.
America needs a new imagination. The only alternative is TINA, which translates to self-destruction. The theorists at least can discern this. But neither Americans nor the theorists have an imagination that will restore humanity to either the nation or the globe.
Bibliography
[1] Nussbaum, Martha C. “For Love Of Country?” Beacon Press. Boston, MA. 2002.
[2] Giroux, Henry A. “Against the Terror of Neo-liberalism.” Paradigm, Inc. Boulder, CO. 2008
[3] Freire, Paulo. “Pedagogy of the Oppressed.” Penguin Books. London, England. 1972.
[4] Amin, Samir. “The Liberal Virus.” Monthly Review Press. New York, NY. 2004.
[5] I doubt that Wallerstein means that the oppressed are totally incapacitated to bring about social change; therefore, I would suggest “weak” is a misleading description of a potentially powerful force.[6] Likewise, the term “disadvantage” is equally misleading because surely the periphery is not “disadvantaged” but “dominated” by the most violent means.
[7] Foucault discusses this ‘new economy’ in regards to ‘the state’ as an individualizing, totalizing power-relation that divides men from men and man from himself, a power that constitutes subjects through ‘governmentality.’ See his essay “The Subject and Power.” Critical Inquiry 8 (Summer 1982). The University of Chicago.
[8] Wallerstein, Immanuel. “World-Systems Analysis.” Duke University Press. Durham, NC. 2004.
[9]. Amin, Samir. "Financial Collapse, Systemic Crisis? Illusory Answers and Necessary Answers." Political Affairs.net<http://www.politicalaffairs.net/article/articleview/7768/>
Accessed: June 01, 2009. (This paper introduced the World Forum of Alternatives, in Caracas, October 2008. Translated from French by Daniel Paquet for Investig'Action. Revised by Samir Amin).
[10]. Scarry, Elaine. "The Difficulty of Imagining Other people" in Nussbaum's "For Love of Country." Beacon Press. Boston, MA. 2002.
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