At the end of a week that saw Maggie “There Is No Alternative” Thatcher’s funeral, it just might be worth stopping to remember the human disaster that is global capitalism. (video courtesy of The Rules)
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Swami Vivekananda: An Outsider’s Ramblings
24 Mar
Earlier this month I visited New Delhi’s Ramakrishna Ashram for the first time. What drew me there was the exhibition on the life of Swami Vivekananda (a.k.a., Narendra Dutta, 1863-1902). The exhibition, inaugurated a few months ago by the Dalai Lama, celebrates the 150th birth anniversary of the saffron-clad monk who is India’s Great Man -“second only to Ghandi,” as I was told more than once. Compared to most other historical exhibitions I have seen in this country, “Vivekananda: A Prophet of Harmony” is tip-top, as measured by functioning A/C and lighting fixtures, savvy graphics panels, contemporary wallpaper posters, new dioramas, and an interactive exit quiz intended for schoolchildren. Plus it’s relatively crowded. Over the course of an hour or two I spent there on a Saturday morning I counted a couple of university students (probably taking a short study break from the nearby library), a few senior citizens, half-dozen sadhus (among them, two Europeans and an Indonesian), and one large middle class family visiting the capital city from Tamil Nadu. “You must see the film,” said the moustached paterfamilias to me.
His reference was to “9/11: The Awakening,” a 15-minute computer-animated piece on a speech Vivekananda gave on 11 September 1893 at the World Parliament of Religion in Chicago, which was held in conjunction with the World’s Columbian Exposition. Starting with a scene straight out of The Titanic, the film depicts the monk’s transoceanic crossing, and how he bowed to Saraswati, the goddess of learning, before taking the podium. “Sisters and brothers of America,” Vivekanada’s opening line, is known to every educated Indian person, but “the speech” in the short film appears to take from multiple speeches the monk gave in Chicago, including the second (“Why We Disagree,” September 15) and the third (“Paper on Hinduism,” September 19) are the richest. By all accounts, Vivekananda’s discourses on religious tolerance and unity, mutual recognition, India, and Hinduism were a big hit (it suffices to consider the tumultuous applause he received multiple times from the audience of 4,000 – or 7,000 if you include the overflow halls of the Art Institute). Chicago treasures these memories today. A stretch of the Michigan Ave (at Adams St) is now the honorary Swami Vivekananda Way and a statue of the saint, taller than the one at Delhi’s RK Ashram metro station, adorns Chicagoland’s premier Hindu temple in Lemont.
According to the standard historical narrative, Vivekananda was the first Indian/Hindu thinker to introduce Hinduism and the Indian/Hindu understandings of tolerance, peace, and justice to Anglo-America and the European continent – ideas that would “conquer the world,” as he would put it (“It is my ambition to conquer the world by Hindu thought – to see Hindus from the North Pole to the South Pole”, 1897). The Chicago speeches and other overseas interventions carried by the swamiji established a number of inter-civilization bridges, both big (the global spread of Vedanta philosophy and yoga) and small (Nikola Tesla’s vegetarianism, celibacy, and a possible re-consideration of the mind-body problem). Vivekananda’s speeches and writings, the narrative goes, “awoke” India from its slumber (“For the next fifty years let Mother India be your God. Serve your country as you would serve God, and India will awaken”, 1897). His “modernized” version of the Indian/Hindu thought inspired “social reform” at home, while helping raise awareness about India’s anti-colonial struggle abroad. No less important, he founded the Ramakrishna Mission (now the main publisher of his writings) and the Vedanta Societies [1], which continue to spread his teachings to this day.
“Across Oceans To Hear”
20 Mar
The eighth post in our Methodology and Narrative mini-forum, this time from Naeem Inayatullah. Naeem teaches at Ithaca College. His research locates the Third World in international relations. He shows how the history and theory of international relations are formed against ideas about “Indians”. He demonstrates how classical theorists such as Smith, Hegel, and Marx construct their arguments via comparisons to non-European peoples. His conceptualization of political economy as a capitalist global division of labor aims to reveal how contemporary conditions of wealth and poverty emerge from historical capitalism. In addition, he works on the relationship between autobiography and theory construction as well as on how popular culture – especially music and television – expresses theoretical tensions. With David Blaney, he is the co-author of International Relations and the Problem of Difference (Routledge 2004), and Savage Economics: Wealth, Poverty, and the Temporal Walls of Capitalism (Routledge 2010). He is the editor of Autobiographical International Relations: I, IR (Routledge 2011). He is currently working on materials that consider the overlap between pedagogy, psychoanalysis, and writing.
Pablo adds: He is also an incisive and funny responder to student criticism.
Too often my eyes glaze over when I am reading the theory section of our professional papers. At conferences and workshops, my ears search for other frequencies when I hear theory speak. But not always. When “my theorists” are engaged, I can filter out and hone in. Otherwise, though, I glide away. When I do so, I discipline myself into attention by mocking my hubris. I don’t wish to take that posture here. Instead, I want to use this space to defend and substantiate my drift. I am not sure I will do so, however, with an explicit argument.
Our discipline is faddish, no? Product differentiation requires graduate students and established scholars to move from theorist to theorist – searching for profit from all the pores of the earth.[1] And yet, new debates seem like old debates. Things, times, and theorists change but our foundational questions probably remain less than a dozen. My favorite theorists – dead and alive – negotiate these questions. As do yours. I no longer have it in me to sift through the jargon and make the translations.
And yet, there is always something to be had in these workshops and conference papers. Something buried in the theory speak but which the author/speaker hides in plain view. She/he is speaking now. A mind/body configured uniquely by the particular path of this particular life. But structured by forces mundane, ubiquitous, and universal. Such bodies speak and write. They hide what they try to learn. But they also reveal bits of the real. I am trying to pay attention.
—–
Claire Turenne-Sjolander relates her husband’s sudden death. She conveys what forced her to write her grief and to rage against the medical profession. She describes her negotiation with the editor of a journal over what needs to be added. She marvels at the outpouring of responses she receives from readers. Her story contains a universal equivalent. It presses others to reveal their own particular grief and anger. She sketches the stakes in all this. Writing is grief work, a kind of mourning — I take her to imply.
Jennifer Riggan says, “I fell in love with a man from Eritrea.” My mind races. Continue reading
Allow his prophetic voice to be heard…
23 JanI was thinking of writing on Dr King’s legacy (again) to mark MLK Day this past Monday, but it turns out that Dr Cornel West has already said what needs to be said.
Cultural Cues and Clues for the American in India
17 DecNewcomers to India, however extensive their previous study about the country, are likely at times to find themselves in baffling or embarrassing situations as a result of their ignorance of local attitudes and customs.
Thus begins Gordon C. Roadarmel’s Cultural Cues and Clues for the American in India, which you can now download here. My friend and mentor Arthur Rubinoff recommended it for various reasons, including the fact that this booklet went to every India-bound Fulbright scholar between 1970s to early 1990s (the first publisher, in 1971, was the Center for South and Southeast Asia Studies at UC Berkley, the last, in 1995, the U.S. Educational Foundation in India). Born in India to missionary parents and a frequent traveler to New Delhi and Allahabad, Roadarmel was regarded as one of the foremost specialists in modern Hindi literature in his time, at least in the United States (in a book review of published in 1970 in the journal Mahfil, Gayatri Spivak is critical of Roadarmel’s translation skills, describing him as a “native American with some Indian schooling”; Vol. 6, No. 2-3, p. 35). In addition to a number of interesting revelations about Indian and American elites in the middle years of the twentieth century, Cultural Cues and Clues invites reflection on standard ethnographic items such how (not) to experience Otherness (“except in parts of South India, people try to keep food above the middle joints of the fingers”), the use and abuse of analogical reasoning (“Chapaties, however, which resemble tortillas, are always eaten by the fingers) or language politics (“Since most Indians have not learned their English from Americans, they may have difficulty in understanding your accent and some of your vocabulary”). Well worth a read – even if you’re not an American academic planning to do fieldwork in India several decades ago.
Fratriarchy, Homoeroticism and Military Culture
1 Nov
The ever-excellent Sociological Images offers up this 1940s advert, and others like it, as an example of how images previously taken to be innocent consumer bait for stereotypical homemakers now appear to us as dripping with homoeroticism. They may have added too that this half-ironic, half-nostalgic distance is what endears us to such images, which we then enjoy as vintage objects, for all that we know about the true historical context in which they were produced.
One common idea, which relates nicely to military bathing aesthetics (cannon towels? really?) is that many bonding behaviours in nominally heterosexual, male-dominated groups are in fact homosexual, but in a disavowed or repressed way. The scrum, the shared shower, the bunk-beds, the exclusion of women not only from the fields of play and war, but also from the various celebrations and carnivals that follow, all seem to indicate a desire for intimacy that cannot be named as such.
In the excellent Bring Me Men (which deserves its own dedicated review), Aaron Belkin identifies a more complex relation. In becoming military men, there is a need not only to disavow femininity, but also to become intimate with the ‘unmasculine’ and the ‘queer’. Rather than identifying a direct alignment of the masculine with the military, or seeing gender norms as accidental in their intersection with the military, there is instead a constitutive tension between the masculine and the unmasculine (or, we might say, between the strongly heteronormative and the homosexual). Basic training relies on a traumatic ambiguity, continually casting initiates as by turns masculine and unmasculine, so that no soldier can ever be sure that they were sufficiently on the ‘right side’ of the line. As one Marine put it: “The opposite of feminine? No. To me, what is masculine? I don’t know. [pause] And I’ve worked so hard at being it”. The continual ambiguity – what Belkin calls discipline as collapse – interacts with surveillance and punishment to produce the soldier-subject.
More brutally: Continue reading
A Magical Anti-Rape Secretion
20 Aug
Todd Akin (R-MO) says that doctors told him that women can’t get pregnant from rape. The doctor in question was presumably Onesipherous W. Bartley, whose 1815 A Treaties on Forensic Medicine or Medical Jurisprudence explained that conception:
must depend on the exciting passion that predominates; to this effect the oestrum/veneris must be excited to such a degree as to produce that mutual orgasm which is essentially necessary to impregnation; if any desponding or depressing passion presides, this will not be accomplished. (via)
At least we know how up to date a certain kind of Republican is on the medical literature. Aaron ‘zunguzungu’ Bady offers a less generous, but surely more astute, diagnosis:
The thing about a chucklehead like Rep. Akins is that he doesn’t actually care whether or not women have a magical anti-rape secretion in their body that makes conception less likely. That’s the whole point: his right not to have to worry about it. If you look at his entire statement, for example, you’ll notice that his foray into weird science was tangential to his main point, which was, simply, punish the criminal not the child. And this is more or less orthodox GOP doctrine, which has the hammer of law enforcement and looks for nails: solve the problem of rape by hammering the criminal, and make abortion into a crime, so you can hammer that too. But this simple-minded approach stumbles when it runs into the problem of the rape-victim: how to have empathy for the victim (because “victim’s rights” is a central pillar of the law and order approach) while also criminalizing her if she gets an abortion? How to insulate her choice to get an abortion from the contingency she did not control, and could not have chosen?
As many have pointed out, then, the first imperative is to make it her choice, and therefore her fault. But there’s still he cognitive dissonance of a rape victim forced to have the child of a rapist, something that doesn’t sit at all easily in the mind of a right wing family-and-police; she’s still a problem, and a thorny one. And so, a simple answer, for a simple mind: she does not exist. He argues that the rape victim who is impregnated is a fantasy of people who want to make the whole thing complicated and difficult, with their “ethics” and “problems,” and so he invents a “doctors told me” story to make it make sense, to explain how what seems complicated is actually simple. But the fact that he’s just making shit up, that women’s body’s aren’t Nature’s Own Anti-Rape Kit, is irrelevant; when you believe in the super-sufficiency of simple laws (and in The Law), problem-cases just become nails to be hammered down or ignored, while “facts” are nothing more that the warrant for doing so.
The Olympic Semiosphere
10 Aug
The chafing constraints of a thesis prevent any original reflection on our hallowed Olympic moment (not least because Rahul has already said so much, and so well). There was little to better Iain Sinclair’s apt diagnosis of “a wonderful national hallucination: a beautiful conjuring between William Borroughs and Charles Satchi…the combination of paranoia and advertising run wild” (a clip worth watching for Jon Snow’s outraged ignorance at the origins of the Olympic Flame [clue: Nazis]). Reports had filtered through that the economic miracle was not as originally billed, with talk of Central London’s ‘ghost town’, stimulating a description elsewhere of the Olympics as an “economic bomb deployed against world cities”. And now there is the most welcome return of K-Punk. At length:
Welcome to the Hunger Games. The function of the Hunger Games is to suppress antagonism, via spectacle and terror. In the same way, London – 2012 preceded and accompanied by the authoritarian lockdown and militarisation of the city – are being held up as the antidote to all discontent. The feelgood Olympics, we are being assured, will do everything from making good the damage done by last year’s riots to seeing off the “threat” of Scottish independence. Any disquiet about London 2012 is being repositioned as “griping” or “cynicism”. Such “whinging”, it is claimed, assumed its proper place of marginality as the vast majority enjoy the Games, and LOCOG is vindicated…
…But once the Olympic floodlights are turned off, most will switch back from an attitude of mild interest to indifference towards even the most dramatic Olympic sports, never mind those many Olympic sports which plainly have limited specator appeal. This isn’t the point though: disquiet about London 2012 was never necessarily based in any hostility towards the sports. Enjoyment of the sport and loathing for LOCOG and the IOC are perfectly compatible.
Cynicism is just about the only rational response to the doublethink of the McDonalds and Coca Cola sponsorship (one of the most prominent things you see as you pass the Olympic site on the train line up from Liverpool Street is the McDonalds logo). As Paolo Virno argues, cynicism is now an attitude that is simply a requirement for late capitalist subjectivity, a way of navigating a world governed by rules that are groundless and arbitrary. But as Virno also argues, “It is no accident … that the most brazen cynicism is accompanied by unrestrained sentimentalism.” Once the Games started, cynicism could be replaced by a managed sentimentality.
Affective exploitation is crucial to late capitalism. The BBC’s own Caesar Flickerman (the interviewer who extracts maximum sentimental affect from the Hunger Games contestants before they face their deaths in the arena) is the creepily tactile trackside interviewer Phil Jones. Jones’s “interviews” with exhausted athletes, are surely as ritualised as any Chinese state broadcast. Emote. Emote again. Emote differently. Praise the crowd.
And, just in case you somehow missed it, the irrepressible CassetteBoy:
Feminist Notes, part I
12 JulBy including what violates women under civil and human rights law, the meaning of “citizen” and “human” begins to have a woman’s face. As women’s actual conditions are recognized as inhuman, those conditions are being changed by requiring that they meet a standard of citizenship and humanity that previously did not apply because they were women. In other words, women both change the standard as we come under it and change the reality it governs by having it applied to us. This democratic process describes not only the common law when it works but also a cardinal tenet of feminist analysis: women are entitled to access to things as they are and also to change them into something worth our having.
Thus women are transforming the definition of equality not by making ourselves the same as men, entitled to violate and silence, or by reifying women’s so-called differences, but by insisting that equal citizenship must encompass what women need to be human, including a right not be sexually violated and silenced. This was done in the Bosnian case by recognizing ethnic particularity, not by denying it. Adapting the words of the philosopher Richard Rorty, we are making the word “woman” a “name of a way of being human.” We are challenging and changing the process of knowing and the practice of power at the same time.
-Catharine MacKinnon, “Postmodernism and Human Rights,” Are Women Human?
Recent Comments
Recent Selections from Our Complete & Utter Works
Pablo, 'Refusing to be a Man?: Men’s Responsibility for War Rape and the Problem of Social Structures in Feminist and Gender Theory', Men and Masculinities, OnlineFirst, 2013
Pablo, 'How Is Rape A Weapon Of War?: Feminist International Relations, Modes of Critical Explanation and the Study of Wartime Sexual Violence', European Journal of International Relations, OnlineFirst, 2012
Joe, 'Rereading the Universal Declaration of Human Rights: Plurality and Contestation, not Consensus', Journal of Human Rights, forthcoming, 2013
Joe, 'Towards a Politics for Human Rights: Ambiguous Humanity and Democratizing Rights', Philosophy and Social Criticism, forthcoming, 2013
Meera, 'Avatars of Eurocentrism in the Critique of the Liberal Peace', Security Dialogue, 44(3), 2013
Meera, 'IR In Dialogue ... But Can We Change the Subjects? A Typology of Decolonising Strategies for the Study of World Politics', Millennium, 39(3), 2011
Nick, The Speculative Turn: Continental Materialism and Realism (edited with Levi Bryant and Graham Harman), re.press, 2011
Nick, 'Conflict Networks: Collapsing the Global into the Local', Journal of Critical Globalisation Studies, 2, 2010
Srdjan, The Anglosphere: A Genealogy of a Racialized Identity in International Relations, Stanford University Press, 2011
Srdjan, 'A Racialized Peace? How Britain and the US Made Their Relationship Special', Foreign Policy Analysis, 7(3), 2011
Antoine, The Scientific Way Of Warfare: Order & Chaos on the Battlefields of Modernity, Hurst & Co., 2009
Antoine, 'Beyond Models and Metaphors: Complexity Theory, Systems Thinking and International Relations' (with Simon Curtis), Cambridge Review of International Affairs, 24(1), 2011
Robbie, German Thought & International Relations: The Rise & Fall of a Liberal Project, Palgrave Macmillan, 2009
Robbie, 'Decolonising the Grounds of Ethical Inquiry: A Dialogue Between Kant, Foucault and Glissant', Millennium, 39(3), 2011
Rahul, Third World Protest: Between Home and the World, Oxford University Press, 2010
Rahul, 'Disciplining Cosmopolitanism', Transnational Legal Theory, 1(3), 2010
Wanda, Volunteer Tourism in the Global South: Giving Back in Neoliberal TImes, Routledge, 2012
Wanda, '"Caring" Capitalism and the Duplicity of Critique', Theory and Event, 14(4), 2011
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Header art adapted from Diego Rivera, Gerard ter Borch, Jean-Michel Basquiat, Kent Monkman, Pieter Bruegel, Emmanuel Leutze, Ron English, MacDonald 'Max' Gill, and Jack Kirby.
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Pre-Election Facebook Rants, #652
5 NovPosted without comment; thanks James Sadri.
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