Bookforum links to my piece from the "Utne Reader," which was reprinted, last month, from the spring issue of "Bidoun."
http://www.bookforum.com/blog/#entry6401
Tuesday, September 14, 2010
Friday, September 10, 2010
Addendum
A while ago, I started writing an essay about the film Field of Dreams, predicated upon the notion that one of its signature lines—“If you build it, he will come”—was an almost perfect distillation of the fetishism at the heart of contemporary American capitalism. In Field of Dreams, the main character is a farmer named Ray Kinsella, an ex-hippie who spent much of his youth trying to get away from the farm, and from his father. As the film opens, Ray is working in the fields when he hears a voice whisper the words quoted above. Rather than questioning his mental competency, Ray concludes that he must build a baseball field in the middle of his corn, and that, if he does, Shoeless Joe Jackson will “get to come back and play ball again.” Which is more or less what happens. Ray builds his baseball field, Shoeless Joe shows up, and the farm becomes a hot ticket for all the Major Leaguers in the afterlife. This sort of cornball fantasy is really only the set up for a more earthbound story about Ray, his family, and their farm, which they are in danger of losing, particularly after Ray sacrifices much of his acreage—and their savings—to build the field. At the film’s denouement, the town banker, Ray’s brother-in-law, tells Ray that if he sells his land, the bank will let him keep his house. Ray is about to sign off on the deal when his daughter suggests that they can make the field over as a tourist attraction, where people can come, watch a game, “and it will be just like when they were little kids.”
There is, of course, more to the story, but you get the point. Field of Dreams is, in part, an allegory for the farm crisis of the 1980s, perhaps the first generalized economic crisis of the post-Keynesian era. That crisis was brought on by the credit-fueled expansion of US farming operations during the late 1970s, itself predicated upon the opening of the Chinese market to American produce following Nixon’s normalization of US-Chinese trade relations in 1972. The opening of that market made for relatively high commodities prices throughout the 1970s, yet when it closed, following the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in 1979, commodities bottomed out, and many farmers were unable to maintain their debts. For all practical purposes, the farm crisis of the 1980s all but killed the family farm in the United States. While benevolent patriarch family farmers often continue to work the land, agribusiness corporations now control the majority of their produce, leaving those families who managed to hold onto their farms in a state of perpetual economic peril.
Of course, Field of Dreams is also an allegory for how rural America “got out” of that particular economic crisis. Although not everyone can build a baseball field in the middle of their corn, a generation of rural policy makers and business interests has taken Field of Dreams’ utopic sense of wish fulfillment as a viable model for social and economic development. “If you build it, they will come,” has translated into, “Use state revenues to build and promote privately-owned tourist destinations, on the off chance that people will show up, pay big, and continue coming back.” This is the same reasoning that sees second- and- third-tier cities in the American rust belt building extensive downtown conference centers—again at taxpayers’ expense—or that underwrites the ubiquity of gaming and casino culture throughout the United States. It is a narcotic train of thought, one that imagines an exchange of money for the promise of experience, sensation, affect. In Field of Dreams, the promise is of a simpler time, a gentler America, thoroughly in possession of its rural roots. That this gentler America corresponds to the rural community of a pre-farm crisis, pre-Watergate US is born out in a sequence where Ray quixotically time-trips to 1972, and by and large, it is this simpler America that the entrepreneurs of rural tourism have sought to evoke. Family farms, for instance, may no longer exist on paper, but if you want to revel in the myth of rural American plenitude and rootedness—what Sarah Palin likes to call “the real America”—they are there to find. In most cases, however, what you’re looking at is a museum piece along the lines of Plimoth Plantation or Colonial Williamsburg. Although Midwestern farms still perform an important social function, in terms of their resonance within the within the wider field of American culture, they are less substance than simulation.
The essay in which I expected to explore these themes never quite came together, in large part because other projects got in the way. It is, however, something that I thought to return to, as I try to clarify some of the commitments and questions that I began to allude to in the final passages of my previous post. When I started writing about Field of Dreams, a largely unexplored element of the story, something I hadn’t thought about before, began to occupy my attention. Whatever its larger allegorical valences, Field of Dreams is, more or less explicitly, the story of Ray, his father, and the conflicts that defined their relationship. In Field of Dreams, that conflict is mediated through baseball, and by Ray’s rejection of his father’s passion for the game. Hoping to realize his dreams through his son, Ray’s father makes baseball practice into a chore, eventually leading Ray to abandon the game and, in due course, his father. Now that he is a father, and now that his father is dead, Ray regrets this childish disavowal, so much so that he will follow the mad pronouncements of “the Voice” in the hope of redeeming his father’s childhood hero, Shoeless Joe Jackson. This quest ends, of course, not with Shoeless Joe’s return, but with the mysterious appearance of Ray’s father—young and hopeful, unaware of his son, his life, or the conflict that eventually consumed their relationship. The film closes with Ray and his father playing catch, symbolically healing the rift between them.
Father-son conflict is certainly nothing new in literature, and it’s perhaps the general ubiquity of the theme that kept me from thinking about it in the terms offered by the film. In Field of Dreams, however, the conflict between Ray and his father stands in for a more generalized, intergenerational tension between the children of the baby boom and their parents; this conflict, in turn, becomes the vehicle by which economic upheaval is read, culturally. The swift, deliberate, at times cataclysmic, unmaking of the Keynesian state is here presented as an opportunity to resolve the conflict between these generations, a conflict that had once been posed, in far more radical terms, as a critique of the culture of unexamined privilege, abundance, and conspicuous consumption enabled by American military, political, and economic hegemony of the post-war era. Like Reaganite and post-Reaganite political discourse, in general, Field of Dreams rewrites the oppositional culture of the New Left and the greater Sixties as a moment of unaccountable, irrational, ultimately regrettable excess, and the film does its best to discipline that regrettable exuberance by framing it within a teleological narrative of American progress. This is captured, at the end of the film, when James Earl Jones—playing a character based not even loosely on J.D. Salinger—delivers a stirring aria on the dialectics of American history. Baseball, he avows, is America’s only constant; all else is flux. Where the New Left understood the material abundance of the United States in the post-war era as an unprecedented opportunity to critique the uneven distribution of poverty and wealth around the world, in Field of Dreams, this critique is rendered banal—childish, even. The oppositional culture of the 1960s becomes nothing more than a temper tantrum, a concentrated burst of adolescent outrage over uptight parents and suburban conformity.
What’s interesting about this is just how painfully uninteresting it is. The question is no longer how many roads a man must walk down; it is, rather, how many times we have to retrace our steps. American culture since the 1960s has been obsessed with the 1960s, and we have replayed this decade over and again, ad infinitum, ad nauseam. At this point, the 60s are less a time, a place, a sociocultural location, or even a commodity fetish: they are a kind of infinitely flexible parable of cultural flux, one that can be bent to any number of purposes, any number of ends. Politically, the fetishization of the 1960s began with Nixon and was formalized by Reagan, neither of whom could have attacked the regulatory and state apparatuses that supported Eisenhower era American prosperity head on, but were more than capable of doing so once “regulation” and “big government” were made over as inheritances from the New Left. Nixon and Reagan inaugurated the notion of “necessary adjustment” versus “predatory reformism” that is now so successfully mined by shills like Glenn Beck. As many have noted, these latter-day attempts, by the Right, at capturing the moral authority of history of the civil rights movement play upon already existing divisions within the coalition that constituted that movement. This is one of the reasons why Martin Luther King (that is, King prior to 1966) has been so roundly celebrated by the state, to the exclusion of more troublesome—though arguably more important—figures like A. Philip Randolph, Bayard Rustin, or Ella Baker. The problem, of course, is that it is actually impossible to understand King’s spiritual and political project outside the terms of social and cultural dynamics within that movement; just as it would be impossible to understand Malcolm X outside the context of global movements against colonialism, movements that, in the greater Muslim world, often took the form of ecstatic, Islamic revivals. Within the statist history of the period, however, King and X get to play Good Negro/Bad Negro, as barely realized metonyms for “good reform” and “bad radical.”
During the 2008 election, there were hopeful signs that this delusional retelling of the 1960s was coming to a close: signs made all the more hopeful after the historical abuses of the 2004 election, when John Kerry’s exemplary Vietnam war record was held up as evidence of his unfitness to be Commander in Chief, while Bush’s draft-dodging frat house bawdies were made over as proof that he was true red, white, and blue. When John McCain and Sarah Palin tried to smear Obama by linking him with William Ayers, a founding member of the Weather Underground who had, up until 2008, been a fairly obscure figure in the history of the New Left, Obama very calmly countered that he was barely in his teens when the Weather carried out their violent campaign of property destruction. McCain could, of course, claim the moral authority of having served in the Air Force during the Vietnam War, and having been tortured as a prison of the Viet Cong, but given the unavoidable fact of Obama’s age, he could not make the election into a referendum on the 1960s, as Bush had with Kerry. Although many attempts were made to pin Obama to radical New Left proxies like Bill Ayers and Reverend Jeremiah Wright, Obama’s very literary sensitivity to historical narrative allowed him to reframe these points of contention on terms more congenial to himself. Indeed, had anyone in the McCain camp bothered to read Dreams of My Father, they might have realized that Obama was operating in a different register, one that—it now seems—is perhaps more Reaganite than was first apparent.
Since the election, of course, the 60s have come back; although at times, to be honest, it seems as if the Right won’t be content until they have helped themselves to the entirety of the Left revolutionary tradition. (When, for instance, did the American Right become “red,” as in, “red states”? And remember during the health care debate when they were trying to claim that Hitler was an arch-Leftist? Apparently Adorno need not have exiled himself to LA after all.) Whether it’s Sarah Palin claiming the mantle of feminist, or Glenn Beck positioning himself as a dream Martin Luther King had been dreaming, there has been a somewhat concerted attempt, on the erratic populist front of the American Right, to mobilize the legacy of the 1960s. In this case, however, what we have is an attempt to purge that legacy of its excesses, as well as its latter-day manipulation by those perpetual bogeymen of Right-wing politics, the revisionists. In some part, this is probably because Comrade Obama is so freakishly adept at working these angles himself; at the same time, I think it speaks to the aging of the electorate, and the queer sense of political marginalization that now occupies much of the boomer generation. For a very long time, the boomers and their concerns have been at the center of the national narrative, and even though they continue to exercise hegemony over the very institutions that shape our culture and our politics, on at least one level, the 2008 election was a strange wake-up call, a presentiment of political impotence, if not physical mortality. This was perhaps more apparent during the primaries, when, after Obama began to pull away from the pack, the Clinton campaign started making noises about “the youth” upsetting their plans, violating the carefully negotiated succession of power within the Democratic Party. (I’ve since talked to many Clinton staffers, still bitter, who continue to spin this line.) What was odd about the variable of “youth” in this equation, however, was that it seemed to be defined as almost anyone under the age of sixty. I was an Obama supporter, 2008 was my fourth presidential election, and I am by no means a rash or unsubtle political thinker. Indeed, I turned thirty the month that Comrade Obama won the nomination; although I am by no means old, in the idiom of the 1960s, this makes me too old to trust.
We’re stuck on this track because of the fundamental melancholia of boomer culture, forever locked in self-referential contemplation of the lost object of its youth. It has become something of a commonplace that there are two 1960s. There are the 1960s before the Kennedy assassination in November 1963, an optimistic time that belonged, really, to the 1950s. The other 1960s, the one that we are better acquainted with, began after January 1964, with the British Invasion, escalation in Vietnam, the murder of civil rights activists in Mississippi, and the church bombings in Montgomery. Boomer culture is trapped in solipsistic contemplation of the trauma of 1963-64, as evidenced by any number of pop cultural touchstones treading lightly over the pleasures of the Eisenhower era. As early as 1973, George Lucas tapped into boomer nostalgia and cemented the notion of 63-64 as watershed by setting his second feature, American Graffiti, in the lost idyll of 1962. American Graffiti helped create a vogue for period films as nostalgia pieces, and perhaps its most important contribution to this now extensive genre was the soundtrack. Composed entirely of pop songs from the late 1950s and early 1960s, Lucas’s film was not the first to eschew the traditional film scores—this is another innovation that he picked up from Kubrick—but it was the first to use a soundtrack of recycled pop to evoke a period. The pop soundtrack is now an almost unavoidable component of commercial film and movie marketing, a slyly calculated means of establishing a affective resonance between media outlets and amplifying the emotional appeal of a given product. The soundtrack marketing phenomenon allows even films that are not plugged into nostalgia culture to establish themselves as nostalgia pieces, commercially ordained signposts announcing themselves as the cultural sensibility of a particular moment in time.
All of which is to say that the vogue for nostalgia that has distinguished American popular culture since 1973 is symptomatic of what Eric Lott has called, in his blistering critique of post-68 liberal political thought, boomeritis. For Lott, boomeritis describes the revulsion for radical commitment evinced by many members of the generation of ’68, those who, for whatever reason, reject aggressive modes of radical critique and direct action as inherently damaging to the goals of “legitimate” protest movements. (The widespread excoriation of the Weather Underground is a good example of this; while there are obvious limits to the course of violent property destruction pursued by the Weather, and the organization might be faulted for not being strategic enough in the ways in which it utilized violence, most critiques of the group are wholesale, and often blame the organization for discrediting the anti-war movement, as a whole.) Lott finds this mode of self-legitimizing political thought in a variety of thinkers who were formed by the protest movements of the 1960s, including, but not limited to, the self-appointed eminence grise of the 1960s, Todd Gitlin. What is particularly important about Lott’s critique of boomeritis is that it begins to suggest all the ways in which the revolution of the 1960s, incomplete though it may be, has been made over as the cultural logic by which the state effects its reproduction—the logic, in other words, by which the self-anointed political class reproduces is hegemony over a state project that has come to see democracy and citizenship as liabilities. This state project treats democracy and citizenship in much the way that it treats the history of the 1960s: instead of principles or ideals to which we strive, they are made over as nostalgic reveries to be consumed, along with the rest of the consumer goods that now occupy and organize social life.
What happens to revolution when it becomes the narrative by which the capitalism consolidates its hold over the state? And what happens to the history of revolution when it becomes the object of melancholy self-immolation, the thing that prevents the realization of revolutionary potential? We are fast approaching the limits of this self-referential cultural formation, the point at which it will no longer be possible to sustain the delusional fantasy that finds us living in a past that never was. The holodeck culture of wish-fulfillment imagined by Field of Dreams, in which one can imagine the resolution of the social and cultural contradictions of capital in and through the delirious immateriality of money, has reached its limit. The question now is what can be salvaged, given the ways in which the nostalgic contemplation of the past has poisoned our culture, our history. Where do we start? How do we begin again?
There is, of course, more to the story, but you get the point. Field of Dreams is, in part, an allegory for the farm crisis of the 1980s, perhaps the first generalized economic crisis of the post-Keynesian era. That crisis was brought on by the credit-fueled expansion of US farming operations during the late 1970s, itself predicated upon the opening of the Chinese market to American produce following Nixon’s normalization of US-Chinese trade relations in 1972. The opening of that market made for relatively high commodities prices throughout the 1970s, yet when it closed, following the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in 1979, commodities bottomed out, and many farmers were unable to maintain their debts. For all practical purposes, the farm crisis of the 1980s all but killed the family farm in the United States. While benevolent patriarch family farmers often continue to work the land, agribusiness corporations now control the majority of their produce, leaving those families who managed to hold onto their farms in a state of perpetual economic peril.
Of course, Field of Dreams is also an allegory for how rural America “got out” of that particular economic crisis. Although not everyone can build a baseball field in the middle of their corn, a generation of rural policy makers and business interests has taken Field of Dreams’ utopic sense of wish fulfillment as a viable model for social and economic development. “If you build it, they will come,” has translated into, “Use state revenues to build and promote privately-owned tourist destinations, on the off chance that people will show up, pay big, and continue coming back.” This is the same reasoning that sees second- and- third-tier cities in the American rust belt building extensive downtown conference centers—again at taxpayers’ expense—or that underwrites the ubiquity of gaming and casino culture throughout the United States. It is a narcotic train of thought, one that imagines an exchange of money for the promise of experience, sensation, affect. In Field of Dreams, the promise is of a simpler time, a gentler America, thoroughly in possession of its rural roots. That this gentler America corresponds to the rural community of a pre-farm crisis, pre-Watergate US is born out in a sequence where Ray quixotically time-trips to 1972, and by and large, it is this simpler America that the entrepreneurs of rural tourism have sought to evoke. Family farms, for instance, may no longer exist on paper, but if you want to revel in the myth of rural American plenitude and rootedness—what Sarah Palin likes to call “the real America”—they are there to find. In most cases, however, what you’re looking at is a museum piece along the lines of Plimoth Plantation or Colonial Williamsburg. Although Midwestern farms still perform an important social function, in terms of their resonance within the within the wider field of American culture, they are less substance than simulation.
The essay in which I expected to explore these themes never quite came together, in large part because other projects got in the way. It is, however, something that I thought to return to, as I try to clarify some of the commitments and questions that I began to allude to in the final passages of my previous post. When I started writing about Field of Dreams, a largely unexplored element of the story, something I hadn’t thought about before, began to occupy my attention. Whatever its larger allegorical valences, Field of Dreams is, more or less explicitly, the story of Ray, his father, and the conflicts that defined their relationship. In Field of Dreams, that conflict is mediated through baseball, and by Ray’s rejection of his father’s passion for the game. Hoping to realize his dreams through his son, Ray’s father makes baseball practice into a chore, eventually leading Ray to abandon the game and, in due course, his father. Now that he is a father, and now that his father is dead, Ray regrets this childish disavowal, so much so that he will follow the mad pronouncements of “the Voice” in the hope of redeeming his father’s childhood hero, Shoeless Joe Jackson. This quest ends, of course, not with Shoeless Joe’s return, but with the mysterious appearance of Ray’s father—young and hopeful, unaware of his son, his life, or the conflict that eventually consumed their relationship. The film closes with Ray and his father playing catch, symbolically healing the rift between them.
Father-son conflict is certainly nothing new in literature, and it’s perhaps the general ubiquity of the theme that kept me from thinking about it in the terms offered by the film. In Field of Dreams, however, the conflict between Ray and his father stands in for a more generalized, intergenerational tension between the children of the baby boom and their parents; this conflict, in turn, becomes the vehicle by which economic upheaval is read, culturally. The swift, deliberate, at times cataclysmic, unmaking of the Keynesian state is here presented as an opportunity to resolve the conflict between these generations, a conflict that had once been posed, in far more radical terms, as a critique of the culture of unexamined privilege, abundance, and conspicuous consumption enabled by American military, political, and economic hegemony of the post-war era. Like Reaganite and post-Reaganite political discourse, in general, Field of Dreams rewrites the oppositional culture of the New Left and the greater Sixties as a moment of unaccountable, irrational, ultimately regrettable excess, and the film does its best to discipline that regrettable exuberance by framing it within a teleological narrative of American progress. This is captured, at the end of the film, when James Earl Jones—playing a character based not even loosely on J.D. Salinger—delivers a stirring aria on the dialectics of American history. Baseball, he avows, is America’s only constant; all else is flux. Where the New Left understood the material abundance of the United States in the post-war era as an unprecedented opportunity to critique the uneven distribution of poverty and wealth around the world, in Field of Dreams, this critique is rendered banal—childish, even. The oppositional culture of the 1960s becomes nothing more than a temper tantrum, a concentrated burst of adolescent outrage over uptight parents and suburban conformity.
What’s interesting about this is just how painfully uninteresting it is. The question is no longer how many roads a man must walk down; it is, rather, how many times we have to retrace our steps. American culture since the 1960s has been obsessed with the 1960s, and we have replayed this decade over and again, ad infinitum, ad nauseam. At this point, the 60s are less a time, a place, a sociocultural location, or even a commodity fetish: they are a kind of infinitely flexible parable of cultural flux, one that can be bent to any number of purposes, any number of ends. Politically, the fetishization of the 1960s began with Nixon and was formalized by Reagan, neither of whom could have attacked the regulatory and state apparatuses that supported Eisenhower era American prosperity head on, but were more than capable of doing so once “regulation” and “big government” were made over as inheritances from the New Left. Nixon and Reagan inaugurated the notion of “necessary adjustment” versus “predatory reformism” that is now so successfully mined by shills like Glenn Beck. As many have noted, these latter-day attempts, by the Right, at capturing the moral authority of history of the civil rights movement play upon already existing divisions within the coalition that constituted that movement. This is one of the reasons why Martin Luther King (that is, King prior to 1966) has been so roundly celebrated by the state, to the exclusion of more troublesome—though arguably more important—figures like A. Philip Randolph, Bayard Rustin, or Ella Baker. The problem, of course, is that it is actually impossible to understand King’s spiritual and political project outside the terms of social and cultural dynamics within that movement; just as it would be impossible to understand Malcolm X outside the context of global movements against colonialism, movements that, in the greater Muslim world, often took the form of ecstatic, Islamic revivals. Within the statist history of the period, however, King and X get to play Good Negro/Bad Negro, as barely realized metonyms for “good reform” and “bad radical.”
During the 2008 election, there were hopeful signs that this delusional retelling of the 1960s was coming to a close: signs made all the more hopeful after the historical abuses of the 2004 election, when John Kerry’s exemplary Vietnam war record was held up as evidence of his unfitness to be Commander in Chief, while Bush’s draft-dodging frat house bawdies were made over as proof that he was true red, white, and blue. When John McCain and Sarah Palin tried to smear Obama by linking him with William Ayers, a founding member of the Weather Underground who had, up until 2008, been a fairly obscure figure in the history of the New Left, Obama very calmly countered that he was barely in his teens when the Weather carried out their violent campaign of property destruction. McCain could, of course, claim the moral authority of having served in the Air Force during the Vietnam War, and having been tortured as a prison of the Viet Cong, but given the unavoidable fact of Obama’s age, he could not make the election into a referendum on the 1960s, as Bush had with Kerry. Although many attempts were made to pin Obama to radical New Left proxies like Bill Ayers and Reverend Jeremiah Wright, Obama’s very literary sensitivity to historical narrative allowed him to reframe these points of contention on terms more congenial to himself. Indeed, had anyone in the McCain camp bothered to read Dreams of My Father, they might have realized that Obama was operating in a different register, one that—it now seems—is perhaps more Reaganite than was first apparent.
Since the election, of course, the 60s have come back; although at times, to be honest, it seems as if the Right won’t be content until they have helped themselves to the entirety of the Left revolutionary tradition. (When, for instance, did the American Right become “red,” as in, “red states”? And remember during the health care debate when they were trying to claim that Hitler was an arch-Leftist? Apparently Adorno need not have exiled himself to LA after all.) Whether it’s Sarah Palin claiming the mantle of feminist, or Glenn Beck positioning himself as a dream Martin Luther King had been dreaming, there has been a somewhat concerted attempt, on the erratic populist front of the American Right, to mobilize the legacy of the 1960s. In this case, however, what we have is an attempt to purge that legacy of its excesses, as well as its latter-day manipulation by those perpetual bogeymen of Right-wing politics, the revisionists. In some part, this is probably because Comrade Obama is so freakishly adept at working these angles himself; at the same time, I think it speaks to the aging of the electorate, and the queer sense of political marginalization that now occupies much of the boomer generation. For a very long time, the boomers and their concerns have been at the center of the national narrative, and even though they continue to exercise hegemony over the very institutions that shape our culture and our politics, on at least one level, the 2008 election was a strange wake-up call, a presentiment of political impotence, if not physical mortality. This was perhaps more apparent during the primaries, when, after Obama began to pull away from the pack, the Clinton campaign started making noises about “the youth” upsetting their plans, violating the carefully negotiated succession of power within the Democratic Party. (I’ve since talked to many Clinton staffers, still bitter, who continue to spin this line.) What was odd about the variable of “youth” in this equation, however, was that it seemed to be defined as almost anyone under the age of sixty. I was an Obama supporter, 2008 was my fourth presidential election, and I am by no means a rash or unsubtle political thinker. Indeed, I turned thirty the month that Comrade Obama won the nomination; although I am by no means old, in the idiom of the 1960s, this makes me too old to trust.
We’re stuck on this track because of the fundamental melancholia of boomer culture, forever locked in self-referential contemplation of the lost object of its youth. It has become something of a commonplace that there are two 1960s. There are the 1960s before the Kennedy assassination in November 1963, an optimistic time that belonged, really, to the 1950s. The other 1960s, the one that we are better acquainted with, began after January 1964, with the British Invasion, escalation in Vietnam, the murder of civil rights activists in Mississippi, and the church bombings in Montgomery. Boomer culture is trapped in solipsistic contemplation of the trauma of 1963-64, as evidenced by any number of pop cultural touchstones treading lightly over the pleasures of the Eisenhower era. As early as 1973, George Lucas tapped into boomer nostalgia and cemented the notion of 63-64 as watershed by setting his second feature, American Graffiti, in the lost idyll of 1962. American Graffiti helped create a vogue for period films as nostalgia pieces, and perhaps its most important contribution to this now extensive genre was the soundtrack. Composed entirely of pop songs from the late 1950s and early 1960s, Lucas’s film was not the first to eschew the traditional film scores—this is another innovation that he picked up from Kubrick—but it was the first to use a soundtrack of recycled pop to evoke a period. The pop soundtrack is now an almost unavoidable component of commercial film and movie marketing, a slyly calculated means of establishing a affective resonance between media outlets and amplifying the emotional appeal of a given product. The soundtrack marketing phenomenon allows even films that are not plugged into nostalgia culture to establish themselves as nostalgia pieces, commercially ordained signposts announcing themselves as the cultural sensibility of a particular moment in time.
All of which is to say that the vogue for nostalgia that has distinguished American popular culture since 1973 is symptomatic of what Eric Lott has called, in his blistering critique of post-68 liberal political thought, boomeritis. For Lott, boomeritis describes the revulsion for radical commitment evinced by many members of the generation of ’68, those who, for whatever reason, reject aggressive modes of radical critique and direct action as inherently damaging to the goals of “legitimate” protest movements. (The widespread excoriation of the Weather Underground is a good example of this; while there are obvious limits to the course of violent property destruction pursued by the Weather, and the organization might be faulted for not being strategic enough in the ways in which it utilized violence, most critiques of the group are wholesale, and often blame the organization for discrediting the anti-war movement, as a whole.) Lott finds this mode of self-legitimizing political thought in a variety of thinkers who were formed by the protest movements of the 1960s, including, but not limited to, the self-appointed eminence grise of the 1960s, Todd Gitlin. What is particularly important about Lott’s critique of boomeritis is that it begins to suggest all the ways in which the revolution of the 1960s, incomplete though it may be, has been made over as the cultural logic by which the state effects its reproduction—the logic, in other words, by which the self-anointed political class reproduces is hegemony over a state project that has come to see democracy and citizenship as liabilities. This state project treats democracy and citizenship in much the way that it treats the history of the 1960s: instead of principles or ideals to which we strive, they are made over as nostalgic reveries to be consumed, along with the rest of the consumer goods that now occupy and organize social life.
What happens to revolution when it becomes the narrative by which the capitalism consolidates its hold over the state? And what happens to the history of revolution when it becomes the object of melancholy self-immolation, the thing that prevents the realization of revolutionary potential? We are fast approaching the limits of this self-referential cultural formation, the point at which it will no longer be possible to sustain the delusional fantasy that finds us living in a past that never was. The holodeck culture of wish-fulfillment imagined by Field of Dreams, in which one can imagine the resolution of the social and cultural contradictions of capital in and through the delirious immateriality of money, has reached its limit. The question now is what can be salvaged, given the ways in which the nostalgic contemplation of the past has poisoned our culture, our history. Where do we start? How do we begin again?
Thursday, August 19, 2010
Algeria, Indians, the New Left, and Boomer-itis: How does this story end?
At the end of my second year of college, I participated in a student-led takeover of our college administration building, in protest of the college’s decision to offer an honorary degree to media mogul Ted Turner. The protest against Turner had been building for months, beginning with meetings held by Proud Indigenous Peoples for Education, one of the many “cultural” organizations funded by the student government, and the most visible indigenous peoples’ organization on our campus. For many years, indigenous rights organizations had been building strong bases of support, organizing around issues related to the use of “Indian” mascots in professional sports. The concerns that PIPE raised had grown out of this movement. How, they asked, could our college, located in the middle of the Twin Cities—home to one of the largest, most vibrant, and politically active American Indian communities in the country—invite the owner of the Atlanta Braves to be part of our annual commencement ceremonies?
Although PIPE had probably less than ten members, the concerns they raised resonated with other students and cultural organizations. Our college prided itself on its commitment to internationalism and cultural diversity; as students, we were highly attuned to the ways in which its rhetoric did not match our reality. Cultural organizations were typically expected to perform difference in order to substantiate the college’s diversity, yet there was little in the way of institutional support for our organizations outside the funds they received through the student government. Students wanted to see that the energy that they had devoted to creating the aura of diversity—something the college was quick to exploit in student recruitment and development campaigns—was being reciprocated at the institutional level, whether in terms of an expanded office of multicultural affairs, a campus-wide commitment to anti-racism workshops, or greater community outreach. At the very least, we wanted some assurance that our efforts were recognized as both significant contributions to the college, and as a form of work. Students sacrificed a great deal to keep those organizations up and running and reaching out to the community at large, and by offering Ted Turner an honorary degree, we felt that the college had insulted us, and denigrated the ways in which we expressed our commitment to it.
The Turner campaign built for many months. At first, it seemed as if there was not enough energy to galvanize students outside the cultural organizations. As we neared commencement, however, the campaign began to pick up speed. Our closed-door meetings, polite sit-downs with administrators, and consciousness-raising exercises gave way to more vocal protests, with student and community leaders taking their message to the quad. In one very memorable instance, members of the American Indian Movement came to campus, and Clyde Bellecourt spoke, at length, about the history of indigenous peoples’ activism in Minnesota, and the place of Native peoples in the greater struggle for social and economic justice. There was drumming, and we danced, and immediately afterward, a small group of us—led by the intrepid Janel Stead—crossed to the administration building, determined to make an appointment with the college president. Janel may have been the only person who understood this (I certainly didn’t, then) but the time had come to force the issue. With barely a week to go before commencement, and support for the campaign growing by the day, there was no question that the college would be willing to take our demands seriously. While our administrators were always willing to talk, now they would have to negotiate. We scheduled a meeting for the next morning and went off to figure out our strategy.
The date, incidentally, was May 5, 1998, and that evening, my friends Brett and Bill and I inaugurated a tradition that we would continue to observe for many years: the celebration of Karl Marx’s birthday. The three of us were to live together that summer, and we had decided that we would read Capital, for the first time, together. The logic of this decision escapes me, although I suspect that our interest in Marx had something to do with the loose, largely uninformed way in which many of our professors dismissed him and his work. As anti-authoritarian as post-structuralism may be, on our campus, in the late 1990s, it was orthodoxy, and the stridently authoritarian manner in which it was presented was bound to inspire a backlash. So, with little direction or plan, and some dismissive criticism from even the most sympathetic professors, we set out to read the big book. On Marx’s birthday, we celebrated that commitment, as we celebrated him, with vodka and Kool-Aid, not entirely attentive to the irony. That night, well after dark, we ran around campus, copying out quotes from Marx’s more famous writings in sidewalk chalk. On the path leading to the administration building, Brett transcribed a passage from the Brumaire: “Men make their own history, but they do not make it just as they please….The tradition of all the dead generations lies like a nightmare on the brains of the living.”
Those were the words that greeted us the next morning when we arrived for our meeting with the president. I don’t remember much of the meeting, except that Vernon Bellecourt was with us, and after it became clear the administration did not want to negotiate, he pulled out his cell phone. We found this horribly amusing. Within minutes, however, AIM security had shown up, and the rest of us had gone into action mode. I went back to my room to collect some supplies while others took up positions around the building. By ten, we were entrenched, and while we allowed work to go on as usual, our energy, our enthusiasm, and our presence transformed the space. Protest should not be thought of as an end in itself, but protests have a sort of performative power that is, for lack of a better word, intoxicating, transformative. From his reading of St. Paul, Agamben tells us that, in the post-Messianic future, everything will be as it is now, but different. While this may seem like an unbearable bit of sophistry, it offers a relatively economical description of what a protest is like. Protests take place in space, they occupy space, and they transform it; they release the inherent, suppressed possibilities of a space, giving play to unthought of relations between people, places, and things. Everything is as it was before, but everything is different; some new, intangible, unquantifiable magic has been introduced into the world, and once you’ve felt it, it’s difficult to let that go.
The news spread quickly. While I was in my room, a friend who was involved in desegregation work in Minneapolis called me to ask if I could be at a meeting that night. Very abruptly, I told him that I couldn’t talk, and explained the situation. He got very excited. “Adam, why didn’t you tell me?!” he demanded, clearly elated. Fifteen minutes later, he was on site, as were twenty or thirty others from his cohort. Others came and went, including students from nearby colleges and universities, and some of the local news media. Sympathetic professors came and sat with us in support; a few offered to meet with the administration on our behalf. In addition to those of us who stayed in the building, a group of students gathered below, holding signs and placards, and chanting slogans. One student, alone against the world, held a counter-protest; we realized later that it was staged for the benefit of an independent film. At some point, those of us in the building ordered pizza. All the while, members of the AIM council of elders sat on the lawn below. Janel and others would go down to confer with them throughout the day. With the bustle of activity, as the evening drew near, Marx’s words were completely obscured, only a dull, dusty shadow beneath our feet.
The occupation ended around five, when word came down that Turner had decided to decline the college’s offer of an honorary degree. None of us had expected such a decisive victory, and while we were elated at the outcome, it left us wondering about our larger purpose. The Turner campaign had helped bring into focus many otherwise vague concerns, and we had expected that the protest would mark the beginning of a longer period of negotiation over questions of curriculum development, social programming, student recruitment, and ethnic studies. Within the intellectual and social space created by the campaign, students had begun to articulate new visions of how they hoped to interface with the administration, as well as a different sense of the obligations that bound students, faculty, and staff. The Turner campaign, in other words, had become, over the course of several months, one of the most dynamic political spaces within an already-dynamic campus political environment. As students attempted to position themselves as collaborators to the institutional processes that framed, and enabled, their education, Turner was valuable as an antagonist, yet he was never much more than a symbol. Once Turner had removed himself from the conflict, much of the urgency was lost, and—despite many of our best intentions and efforts—the larger agenda was abandoned.
None of this was on our radar the night after the occupation, when we gathered to reflect on the events of the day and plan our next moves with regard to the administration. For at least the next week, we knew, there would be meetings with different administrators, including a sit-down with members of the Board of Trustees, and we had to map out strategy. At the same time, we wanted to discuss how we might move forward with our larger agenda after the loss of our star antagonist, and as we were faced with the end of the academic year. Our energy would peak, we knew, unless we were able to find new outlets, and new purposes, that would sustain us over the summer months. That evening, we asked Clyde about AIM’s plans for the summer, and whether or not there was some role that we might play in the organization during the coming months. Part of our vision was of a more active relationship between the college and local communities—something more dynamic and ongoing than the missionary outreach that went on in the name of the college’s commitment to “service”—and I think we hoped that we might use the summer to build bridges with the American Indian community of the Twin Cities. Clyde, for his part, had different ideas. The American Indian Movement was grateful for our commitment, he told us, and to honor the success of our campaign, the elders of the organization were inviting us to the annual AIM Sundance, to be held that summer, at the sacred pipestone quarries outside Pipestone, Minnesota. He gave us literature and asked for our contact information. We pressed him for advice on activism. “Just come to the Sundance,” he replied. We made our promises, and went off to study for finals.
That August, I was one of two students who took the elders up on their invitation. For ten days, my friend Emily and I camped out, with several hundred others, in empty fields near the pipestone quarries in western Minnesota. The Sundance itself took place over about six or seven days. Like the Turner protest, the ritual brought into the open a sideways reality, a world that sat alongside the material plane, but that remained, for the most part, beyond the realm of sight. The Sundance remade the world, filling it with portent, elevating our most mundane actions from the banal to the sublime. The morning after we arrived, I woke early to take part in a sun ceremony in which we greeted the dawn with drums, song, and dance. On a small hill overlooking the camp, we sang for the sun, and when the first sliver of light appeared just over the rise, it felt as if we had brought it up. We knew that the sun came because we asked it to, and from then on, everything that we did seemed desperately important, utterly ripe with purpose.
This sense was only heightened when, later that day, we marched into the woods in search of the sacred Sundance tree. The tree had to be of a certain age and height; it had to be living; and, perhaps most importantly, it had to be cut and carried to the Sundance site without ever touching the ground. When we located the appropriate specimen, its trunk was smudged with sage, and the elders prayed, while the rest of the community prepared for its removal. Over several hours, the men hacked away at it with an axe. When one tired, another would step in, and the children would take advantage of the break to rush in and scoop up the wood chips left in their wake. As the operation neared its end, and it became apparent how the tree was going to fall, those of us who held back began to arrange large timbers on the ground. They would catch the weight of the trunk and prevent it from touching the earth. After it was on the ground, we gathered around it, and with a truly spectacular measure of martial discipline, we hoisted it—all one hundred feet of living wood—above our heads, and began marching back to the camp. We carried the tree over a mile back to the Sundance grounds. After adorning the tree for the ritual, tying its branches with bundles of tobacco, we set it upright, fitting its base into a large hole that had been carved into the earth. Using ropes tied to its upper branches, we held the tree upright while others filled in the soil at its base. This final operation took about thirty minutes, during which we exhausted ourselves keeping the tree in position. When it was over, however, the tree was secure in the earth, and we had become, in the course of the afternoon, somehow sanctified. Although we were tired and sore, we had accomplished something that seemed utterly improbable, and in the act of creating the sacred space, we had become something greater than ourselves.
This is, of course, the purpose of a Sundance, which is something that Clyde knew when he invited us. Although generations of anthropologists have been thrown by the name, the Sundance is, in essence, an allegory for birth: the Sundancers spend several days making circuits around the tree, pausing to dance at each of the cardinal points. The tree is in the umbilical cord, the link to the mother, here figured as the body of the earth, and by dancing to the north, south, east, and west, the dancers salute the different spirits and spirit realms that cohabitate with our material world. On the final day of the ritual, after several days without food, the Sundancers pierce their chests with large chunks of wood or bone, before tying themselves to the sacred tree. With what remains of their strength, they fling themselves to the ground in an attempt at breaking free. They continue in this manner until their flesh tears and they are released, or they are exhausted and unable to go on. This final drama, generally referred to as “piercing,” represents the birth that is a rebirth, the transformation of the dancer, and the renewal of the community that is his support.
I have never liked to talk about the Sundance. For a long time I thought this was because of principle, because the experience of the dance was not really mine to share. While this is, in many respects, an entirely reasonable objection, in my case, it masks something far less noble. My difficulty in talking about the Sundance suggests resistance, in a purely psychoanalytic sense; resistance, here, designating something of such deeply felt personal importance that it can be approached, through language, only obliquely. The Sundance was, for me, something traumatic and formative. I can talk about it, but I cannot understand; it can be told, but not narrated. This characterization might not make sense unless I tell you that I have been tripping over these last five lines for several hours now, and that I have written and deleted several pages trying to find a way to weave together all that has come before. I can think about the Sundance, I can describe the Sundance, I can even suggest some of what the Sundance means to me; yet somehow something always goes missing, something always gets left out, something always gets in the way. What this something is, on my own, I cannot even begin to conceive.
The Turner protest, by contrast, feels as familiar as a pop hit from my youth. And like a long forgotten pop song, I can go for years without hearing it, yet when it comes on the radio, I can remember every word, hit every note. The Turner protest marked the end of a certain romance of the political, and the beginning of a more studious engagement with the question of history, politics, and social change. Perhaps the most crucial moment of the protest, with regard to these questions, came late in the day, shortly before it was announced that Turner would not be coming to campus. As he was showing a sympathetic professor around the occupied administration building, I heard one of the students who had been long active in the campaign casually remark that the protest outside looked “just like the 1960s.” The professor responded, without missing a beat, “It looks like the twenty-first century.” Reflecting on this now, twelve years later, it seems all too cute, the sort of thing that, were I making a movie, I would immediately cut from the script. Yet, when it happened, it happened to a much different person, and I took this bit of portentous tedium as fabulously revelatory. In that moment, it was as if we had passed over some previously unseen threshold, and into a world that was more fully our own. Although I did not grow up in a household that was suffused by memories of the 1960s, many of my classmates and colleagues did; and while I had only the slightest inclination of what this meant, in that moment, in that protest, it felt as if we were announcing ourselves as arbiters of a new tradition, the vessels through which something new might be realized, and something lost might be redeemed.
Except it didn’t quite happen like that. Although we began to embroider the mythology of that day even before it was over, as the protest was unfolding, these intimations were vague, at best. Over subsequent revisions, however, the story has grown, to the extent that, for myself, the events themselves have taken on a host of new meanings. In the coming months, I had a falling out with the student who made the off-hand remark I found so significant, a falling out that, on its face, had everything to do with tactics and strategy but that, I now recognize, had much more to do with the ways in which we related to the histories in which we were embedded, and the use of history as a resource in social struggle. I spent the last two years of college engaged in an almost agonizingly self-conscious study of the New Left and its history, one that was animated by a desire to figure out what went wrong, what went right, and what lessons we might apply as we moved forward. For the student with whom I quarreled, the way forward was to reject the past and move on, secure in the righteousness of the course. This is, no doubt, a caricature of something far more complex, but it feels right, if only because it continues to seem a fair characterization of contemporary youth activism. The imperative to do something—anything—often continues to hold more weight than the need to understand why one is doing something, or the need to conceive of action in terms of some larger strategy. Although I have enormous respect for the accomplishments of this sort of anarcho-libertarianism, I remain now, as then, unconvinced of its capacity to seal the deal, to mount anything more than a brazen frontal assault that will—because it is under-theorized, under-organized, and under-prepared—inevitably falter.
The flip side of this, of course, is that my protracted engagement with the past has taken me further and further from question of actual politics, so much so that my not infrequent ruminations on strategy and tactics now feel like covert explanations as to why I have so long abandoned the political. While I reject the opposition of theory to practice, in terms of emotional satisfaction, the small, often intellectual struggles in which I am typically engaged seem a poor substitute for the actual business of getting things done, of pulling the levers, of making history move.
I realize that this makes me sound unbearably self-important, the sort of intellectual bore one studiously avoids at cocktail parties. And, in some part, that is who I am, and I have almost made my peace with that fact. I am not, however, trying to impress anyone with my desperate leaps of intellectual daring; I am trying, as best I can, to explain—to myself as much as anyone—how I came to Algeria because of a set of political and intellectual commitments that were formed when I was not yet twenty. Algeria is, I have come to believe, the end of this particular story, the denouement of something I more or less stumbled into nearly fifteen years ago, the final stage of a project that is now almost complete. Algeria loomed large in the imagination of the New Left, and the New Left has long loomed large in the consciousness of my generation, particularly for those of us who found some sense of meaning, some purpose, in politics and activism. The reasons for this have to do as much with a settling of generational accounts, of trying to sort through the tortured bonds that bind us to the Boomers, the links that continually frustrate my generation in its attempts at coming into itself. In going to Algeria, then, I am hoping to accomplish something eminently practical, which may be nothing more than finding an ending to a story that I am sick of reading. But like the Sundance, however, there is something more, something unaccountable, something that I cannot quite articulate; I know I want the story to end, but I’m not yet sure how.
Although PIPE had probably less than ten members, the concerns they raised resonated with other students and cultural organizations. Our college prided itself on its commitment to internationalism and cultural diversity; as students, we were highly attuned to the ways in which its rhetoric did not match our reality. Cultural organizations were typically expected to perform difference in order to substantiate the college’s diversity, yet there was little in the way of institutional support for our organizations outside the funds they received through the student government. Students wanted to see that the energy that they had devoted to creating the aura of diversity—something the college was quick to exploit in student recruitment and development campaigns—was being reciprocated at the institutional level, whether in terms of an expanded office of multicultural affairs, a campus-wide commitment to anti-racism workshops, or greater community outreach. At the very least, we wanted some assurance that our efforts were recognized as both significant contributions to the college, and as a form of work. Students sacrificed a great deal to keep those organizations up and running and reaching out to the community at large, and by offering Ted Turner an honorary degree, we felt that the college had insulted us, and denigrated the ways in which we expressed our commitment to it.
The Turner campaign built for many months. At first, it seemed as if there was not enough energy to galvanize students outside the cultural organizations. As we neared commencement, however, the campaign began to pick up speed. Our closed-door meetings, polite sit-downs with administrators, and consciousness-raising exercises gave way to more vocal protests, with student and community leaders taking their message to the quad. In one very memorable instance, members of the American Indian Movement came to campus, and Clyde Bellecourt spoke, at length, about the history of indigenous peoples’ activism in Minnesota, and the place of Native peoples in the greater struggle for social and economic justice. There was drumming, and we danced, and immediately afterward, a small group of us—led by the intrepid Janel Stead—crossed to the administration building, determined to make an appointment with the college president. Janel may have been the only person who understood this (I certainly didn’t, then) but the time had come to force the issue. With barely a week to go before commencement, and support for the campaign growing by the day, there was no question that the college would be willing to take our demands seriously. While our administrators were always willing to talk, now they would have to negotiate. We scheduled a meeting for the next morning and went off to figure out our strategy.
The date, incidentally, was May 5, 1998, and that evening, my friends Brett and Bill and I inaugurated a tradition that we would continue to observe for many years: the celebration of Karl Marx’s birthday. The three of us were to live together that summer, and we had decided that we would read Capital, for the first time, together. The logic of this decision escapes me, although I suspect that our interest in Marx had something to do with the loose, largely uninformed way in which many of our professors dismissed him and his work. As anti-authoritarian as post-structuralism may be, on our campus, in the late 1990s, it was orthodoxy, and the stridently authoritarian manner in which it was presented was bound to inspire a backlash. So, with little direction or plan, and some dismissive criticism from even the most sympathetic professors, we set out to read the big book. On Marx’s birthday, we celebrated that commitment, as we celebrated him, with vodka and Kool-Aid, not entirely attentive to the irony. That night, well after dark, we ran around campus, copying out quotes from Marx’s more famous writings in sidewalk chalk. On the path leading to the administration building, Brett transcribed a passage from the Brumaire: “Men make their own history, but they do not make it just as they please….The tradition of all the dead generations lies like a nightmare on the brains of the living.”
Those were the words that greeted us the next morning when we arrived for our meeting with the president. I don’t remember much of the meeting, except that Vernon Bellecourt was with us, and after it became clear the administration did not want to negotiate, he pulled out his cell phone. We found this horribly amusing. Within minutes, however, AIM security had shown up, and the rest of us had gone into action mode. I went back to my room to collect some supplies while others took up positions around the building. By ten, we were entrenched, and while we allowed work to go on as usual, our energy, our enthusiasm, and our presence transformed the space. Protest should not be thought of as an end in itself, but protests have a sort of performative power that is, for lack of a better word, intoxicating, transformative. From his reading of St. Paul, Agamben tells us that, in the post-Messianic future, everything will be as it is now, but different. While this may seem like an unbearable bit of sophistry, it offers a relatively economical description of what a protest is like. Protests take place in space, they occupy space, and they transform it; they release the inherent, suppressed possibilities of a space, giving play to unthought of relations between people, places, and things. Everything is as it was before, but everything is different; some new, intangible, unquantifiable magic has been introduced into the world, and once you’ve felt it, it’s difficult to let that go.
The news spread quickly. While I was in my room, a friend who was involved in desegregation work in Minneapolis called me to ask if I could be at a meeting that night. Very abruptly, I told him that I couldn’t talk, and explained the situation. He got very excited. “Adam, why didn’t you tell me?!” he demanded, clearly elated. Fifteen minutes later, he was on site, as were twenty or thirty others from his cohort. Others came and went, including students from nearby colleges and universities, and some of the local news media. Sympathetic professors came and sat with us in support; a few offered to meet with the administration on our behalf. In addition to those of us who stayed in the building, a group of students gathered below, holding signs and placards, and chanting slogans. One student, alone against the world, held a counter-protest; we realized later that it was staged for the benefit of an independent film. At some point, those of us in the building ordered pizza. All the while, members of the AIM council of elders sat on the lawn below. Janel and others would go down to confer with them throughout the day. With the bustle of activity, as the evening drew near, Marx’s words were completely obscured, only a dull, dusty shadow beneath our feet.
The occupation ended around five, when word came down that Turner had decided to decline the college’s offer of an honorary degree. None of us had expected such a decisive victory, and while we were elated at the outcome, it left us wondering about our larger purpose. The Turner campaign had helped bring into focus many otherwise vague concerns, and we had expected that the protest would mark the beginning of a longer period of negotiation over questions of curriculum development, social programming, student recruitment, and ethnic studies. Within the intellectual and social space created by the campaign, students had begun to articulate new visions of how they hoped to interface with the administration, as well as a different sense of the obligations that bound students, faculty, and staff. The Turner campaign, in other words, had become, over the course of several months, one of the most dynamic political spaces within an already-dynamic campus political environment. As students attempted to position themselves as collaborators to the institutional processes that framed, and enabled, their education, Turner was valuable as an antagonist, yet he was never much more than a symbol. Once Turner had removed himself from the conflict, much of the urgency was lost, and—despite many of our best intentions and efforts—the larger agenda was abandoned.
None of this was on our radar the night after the occupation, when we gathered to reflect on the events of the day and plan our next moves with regard to the administration. For at least the next week, we knew, there would be meetings with different administrators, including a sit-down with members of the Board of Trustees, and we had to map out strategy. At the same time, we wanted to discuss how we might move forward with our larger agenda after the loss of our star antagonist, and as we were faced with the end of the academic year. Our energy would peak, we knew, unless we were able to find new outlets, and new purposes, that would sustain us over the summer months. That evening, we asked Clyde about AIM’s plans for the summer, and whether or not there was some role that we might play in the organization during the coming months. Part of our vision was of a more active relationship between the college and local communities—something more dynamic and ongoing than the missionary outreach that went on in the name of the college’s commitment to “service”—and I think we hoped that we might use the summer to build bridges with the American Indian community of the Twin Cities. Clyde, for his part, had different ideas. The American Indian Movement was grateful for our commitment, he told us, and to honor the success of our campaign, the elders of the organization were inviting us to the annual AIM Sundance, to be held that summer, at the sacred pipestone quarries outside Pipestone, Minnesota. He gave us literature and asked for our contact information. We pressed him for advice on activism. “Just come to the Sundance,” he replied. We made our promises, and went off to study for finals.
That August, I was one of two students who took the elders up on their invitation. For ten days, my friend Emily and I camped out, with several hundred others, in empty fields near the pipestone quarries in western Minnesota. The Sundance itself took place over about six or seven days. Like the Turner protest, the ritual brought into the open a sideways reality, a world that sat alongside the material plane, but that remained, for the most part, beyond the realm of sight. The Sundance remade the world, filling it with portent, elevating our most mundane actions from the banal to the sublime. The morning after we arrived, I woke early to take part in a sun ceremony in which we greeted the dawn with drums, song, and dance. On a small hill overlooking the camp, we sang for the sun, and when the first sliver of light appeared just over the rise, it felt as if we had brought it up. We knew that the sun came because we asked it to, and from then on, everything that we did seemed desperately important, utterly ripe with purpose.
This sense was only heightened when, later that day, we marched into the woods in search of the sacred Sundance tree. The tree had to be of a certain age and height; it had to be living; and, perhaps most importantly, it had to be cut and carried to the Sundance site without ever touching the ground. When we located the appropriate specimen, its trunk was smudged with sage, and the elders prayed, while the rest of the community prepared for its removal. Over several hours, the men hacked away at it with an axe. When one tired, another would step in, and the children would take advantage of the break to rush in and scoop up the wood chips left in their wake. As the operation neared its end, and it became apparent how the tree was going to fall, those of us who held back began to arrange large timbers on the ground. They would catch the weight of the trunk and prevent it from touching the earth. After it was on the ground, we gathered around it, and with a truly spectacular measure of martial discipline, we hoisted it—all one hundred feet of living wood—above our heads, and began marching back to the camp. We carried the tree over a mile back to the Sundance grounds. After adorning the tree for the ritual, tying its branches with bundles of tobacco, we set it upright, fitting its base into a large hole that had been carved into the earth. Using ropes tied to its upper branches, we held the tree upright while others filled in the soil at its base. This final operation took about thirty minutes, during which we exhausted ourselves keeping the tree in position. When it was over, however, the tree was secure in the earth, and we had become, in the course of the afternoon, somehow sanctified. Although we were tired and sore, we had accomplished something that seemed utterly improbable, and in the act of creating the sacred space, we had become something greater than ourselves.
This is, of course, the purpose of a Sundance, which is something that Clyde knew when he invited us. Although generations of anthropologists have been thrown by the name, the Sundance is, in essence, an allegory for birth: the Sundancers spend several days making circuits around the tree, pausing to dance at each of the cardinal points. The tree is in the umbilical cord, the link to the mother, here figured as the body of the earth, and by dancing to the north, south, east, and west, the dancers salute the different spirits and spirit realms that cohabitate with our material world. On the final day of the ritual, after several days without food, the Sundancers pierce their chests with large chunks of wood or bone, before tying themselves to the sacred tree. With what remains of their strength, they fling themselves to the ground in an attempt at breaking free. They continue in this manner until their flesh tears and they are released, or they are exhausted and unable to go on. This final drama, generally referred to as “piercing,” represents the birth that is a rebirth, the transformation of the dancer, and the renewal of the community that is his support.
I have never liked to talk about the Sundance. For a long time I thought this was because of principle, because the experience of the dance was not really mine to share. While this is, in many respects, an entirely reasonable objection, in my case, it masks something far less noble. My difficulty in talking about the Sundance suggests resistance, in a purely psychoanalytic sense; resistance, here, designating something of such deeply felt personal importance that it can be approached, through language, only obliquely. The Sundance was, for me, something traumatic and formative. I can talk about it, but I cannot understand; it can be told, but not narrated. This characterization might not make sense unless I tell you that I have been tripping over these last five lines for several hours now, and that I have written and deleted several pages trying to find a way to weave together all that has come before. I can think about the Sundance, I can describe the Sundance, I can even suggest some of what the Sundance means to me; yet somehow something always goes missing, something always gets left out, something always gets in the way. What this something is, on my own, I cannot even begin to conceive.
The Turner protest, by contrast, feels as familiar as a pop hit from my youth. And like a long forgotten pop song, I can go for years without hearing it, yet when it comes on the radio, I can remember every word, hit every note. The Turner protest marked the end of a certain romance of the political, and the beginning of a more studious engagement with the question of history, politics, and social change. Perhaps the most crucial moment of the protest, with regard to these questions, came late in the day, shortly before it was announced that Turner would not be coming to campus. As he was showing a sympathetic professor around the occupied administration building, I heard one of the students who had been long active in the campaign casually remark that the protest outside looked “just like the 1960s.” The professor responded, without missing a beat, “It looks like the twenty-first century.” Reflecting on this now, twelve years later, it seems all too cute, the sort of thing that, were I making a movie, I would immediately cut from the script. Yet, when it happened, it happened to a much different person, and I took this bit of portentous tedium as fabulously revelatory. In that moment, it was as if we had passed over some previously unseen threshold, and into a world that was more fully our own. Although I did not grow up in a household that was suffused by memories of the 1960s, many of my classmates and colleagues did; and while I had only the slightest inclination of what this meant, in that moment, in that protest, it felt as if we were announcing ourselves as arbiters of a new tradition, the vessels through which something new might be realized, and something lost might be redeemed.
Except it didn’t quite happen like that. Although we began to embroider the mythology of that day even before it was over, as the protest was unfolding, these intimations were vague, at best. Over subsequent revisions, however, the story has grown, to the extent that, for myself, the events themselves have taken on a host of new meanings. In the coming months, I had a falling out with the student who made the off-hand remark I found so significant, a falling out that, on its face, had everything to do with tactics and strategy but that, I now recognize, had much more to do with the ways in which we related to the histories in which we were embedded, and the use of history as a resource in social struggle. I spent the last two years of college engaged in an almost agonizingly self-conscious study of the New Left and its history, one that was animated by a desire to figure out what went wrong, what went right, and what lessons we might apply as we moved forward. For the student with whom I quarreled, the way forward was to reject the past and move on, secure in the righteousness of the course. This is, no doubt, a caricature of something far more complex, but it feels right, if only because it continues to seem a fair characterization of contemporary youth activism. The imperative to do something—anything—often continues to hold more weight than the need to understand why one is doing something, or the need to conceive of action in terms of some larger strategy. Although I have enormous respect for the accomplishments of this sort of anarcho-libertarianism, I remain now, as then, unconvinced of its capacity to seal the deal, to mount anything more than a brazen frontal assault that will—because it is under-theorized, under-organized, and under-prepared—inevitably falter.
The flip side of this, of course, is that my protracted engagement with the past has taken me further and further from question of actual politics, so much so that my not infrequent ruminations on strategy and tactics now feel like covert explanations as to why I have so long abandoned the political. While I reject the opposition of theory to practice, in terms of emotional satisfaction, the small, often intellectual struggles in which I am typically engaged seem a poor substitute for the actual business of getting things done, of pulling the levers, of making history move.
I realize that this makes me sound unbearably self-important, the sort of intellectual bore one studiously avoids at cocktail parties. And, in some part, that is who I am, and I have almost made my peace with that fact. I am not, however, trying to impress anyone with my desperate leaps of intellectual daring; I am trying, as best I can, to explain—to myself as much as anyone—how I came to Algeria because of a set of political and intellectual commitments that were formed when I was not yet twenty. Algeria is, I have come to believe, the end of this particular story, the denouement of something I more or less stumbled into nearly fifteen years ago, the final stage of a project that is now almost complete. Algeria loomed large in the imagination of the New Left, and the New Left has long loomed large in the consciousness of my generation, particularly for those of us who found some sense of meaning, some purpose, in politics and activism. The reasons for this have to do as much with a settling of generational accounts, of trying to sort through the tortured bonds that bind us to the Boomers, the links that continually frustrate my generation in its attempts at coming into itself. In going to Algeria, then, I am hoping to accomplish something eminently practical, which may be nothing more than finding an ending to a story that I am sick of reading. But like the Sundance, however, there is something more, something unaccountable, something that I cannot quite articulate; I know I want the story to end, but I’m not yet sure how.
Friday, August 06, 2010
The Turner Thesis
This is the second piece of a larger essay. Part one can be found below.
* * *
The occupation ended around five, when word came down that Turner had decided to decline the college’s offer of an honorary degree. None of us had expected such a decisive victory, and while we were elated at the outcome, it left us wondering about our larger purpose. The Turner campaign had helped bring into focus many otherwise vague concerns, and we had expected that the protest would mark the beginning of a longer period of negotiation over questions of curriculum development, social programming, student recruitment, and ethnic studies. Within the intellectual and social space created by the campaign, students had begun to articulate new visions of how they hoped to interface with the administration, as well as a different sense of the obligations that bound students, faculty, and staff. The Turner campaign, in other words, had become, over the course of several months, one of the most dynamic political spaces within an already-dynamic campus political environment. As students attempted to position themselves as collaborators to the institutional processes that framed, and enabled, their education, Turner was valuable as an antagonist, yet he was never much more than a symbol. Once Turner had removed himself from the conflict, much of the urgency was lost, and—despite many of our best intentions and efforts—the larger agenda was abandoned.
None of this was on our radar the night after the occupation, when we gathered to reflect on the events of the day and plan our next moves with regard to the administration. For at least the next week, we knew, there would be meetings with different administrators, including a sit-down with members of the Board of Trustees, and we had to map out strategy. At the same time, we wanted to discuss how we might move forward with our larger agenda after the loss of our star antagonist, and as we were faced with the end of the academic year. Our energy would peak, we knew, unless we were able to find new outlets, and new purposes, that would sustain us over the summer months. That evening, we asked Clyde about AIM’s plans for the summer, and whether or not there was some role that we might play in the organization during the coming months. Part of our vision was of a more active relationship between the college and local communities—something more dynamic and ongoing than the missionary outreach that went on in the name of the college’s commitment to “service”—and I think we hoped that we might use the summer to build bridges with the American Indian community of the Twin Cities. Clyde, for his part, had different ideas. The American Indian Movement was grateful for our commitment, he told us, and to honor the success of our campaign, the elders of the organization were inviting us to the annual AIM Sundance, to be held that summer, at the sacred pipestone quarries outside Pipestone, Minnesota. He gave us literature and asked for our contact information. We pressed him for advice on activism. “Just come to the Sundance,” he replied. We made our promises, and went off to study for finals.
That August, I was one of two students who took the elders up on their invitation. For ten days, my friend Emily and I camped out, with several hundred others, in empty fields near the pipestone quarries in western Minnesota. The Sundance itself took place over about six or seven days. Like the Turner protest, the ritual brought into the open a sideways reality, a world that sat alongside the material plane, but that remained, for the most part, beyond the realm of sight. The Sundance remade the world, filling it with portent, elevating our most mundane actions from the banal to the sublime. The morning after we arrived, I woke early to take part in a sun ceremony in which we greeted the dawn with drums, song, and dance. On a small hill overlooking the camp, we sang for the sun, and when the first sliver of light appeared just over the rise, it felt as if we had brought it up. We knew that the sun came because we asked it to, and from then on, everything that we did seemed desperately important, utterly ripe with purpose.
This sense was only heightened when, later that day, we marched into the woods in search of the sacred Sundance tree. The tree had to be of a certain age and height; it had to be living; and, perhaps most importantly, it had to be cut and carried to the Sundance site without ever touching the ground. When we located the appropriate specimen, its trunk was smudged with sage, and the elders prayed, while the rest of the community prepared for its removal. Over several hours, the men hacked away at it with an axe. When one tired, another would step in, and the children would take advantage of the break to rush in and scoop up the wood chips left in their wake. As the operation neared its end, and it became apparent how the tree was going to fall, those of us who held back began to arrange large timbers on the ground. They would catch the weight of the trunk and prevent it from touching the earth. After it was on the ground, we gathered around it, and with a truly spectacular measure of martial discipline, we hoisted it—all one hundred feet of living wood—above our heads, and began marching back to the camp. We carried the tree over a mile back to the Sundance grounds. After adorning the tree for the ritual, tying its branches with bundles of tobacco, we set it upright, fitting its base into a large hole that had been carved into the earth. Using ropes tied to its upper branches, we held the tree upright while others filled in the soil at its base. This final operation took about thirty minutes, during which we exhausted ourselves keeping the tree in position. When it was over, however, the tree was secure in the earth, and we had become, in the course of the afternoon, somehow sanctified. Although we were tired and sore, we had accomplished something that seemed utterly improbable, and in the act of creating the sacred space, we had become something greater than ourselves.
This is, of course, the purpose of a Sundance, which is something that Clyde knew when he invited us. Although generations of anthropologists have been thrown by the name, the Sundance is, in essence, an allegory for birth: the Sundancers spend several days making circuits around the tree, pausing to dance at each of the cardinal points. The tree is in the umbilical cord, the link to the mother, here figured as the body of the earth, and by dancing to the north, south, east, and west, the dancers salute the different spirits and spirit realms that cohabitate with our material world. On the final day of the ritual, after several days without food, the Sundancers pierce their chests with large chunks of wood or bone, before tying themselves to the sacred tree. With what remains of their strength, they fling themselves to the ground in an attempt at breaking free. They continue in this manner until their flesh tears and they are released, or they are exhausted and unable to go on. This final drama, generally referred to as “piercing,” represents the birth that is a rebirth, the transformation of the dancer, and the renewal of the community that is his support.
* * *
The occupation ended around five, when word came down that Turner had decided to decline the college’s offer of an honorary degree. None of us had expected such a decisive victory, and while we were elated at the outcome, it left us wondering about our larger purpose. The Turner campaign had helped bring into focus many otherwise vague concerns, and we had expected that the protest would mark the beginning of a longer period of negotiation over questions of curriculum development, social programming, student recruitment, and ethnic studies. Within the intellectual and social space created by the campaign, students had begun to articulate new visions of how they hoped to interface with the administration, as well as a different sense of the obligations that bound students, faculty, and staff. The Turner campaign, in other words, had become, over the course of several months, one of the most dynamic political spaces within an already-dynamic campus political environment. As students attempted to position themselves as collaborators to the institutional processes that framed, and enabled, their education, Turner was valuable as an antagonist, yet he was never much more than a symbol. Once Turner had removed himself from the conflict, much of the urgency was lost, and—despite many of our best intentions and efforts—the larger agenda was abandoned.
None of this was on our radar the night after the occupation, when we gathered to reflect on the events of the day and plan our next moves with regard to the administration. For at least the next week, we knew, there would be meetings with different administrators, including a sit-down with members of the Board of Trustees, and we had to map out strategy. At the same time, we wanted to discuss how we might move forward with our larger agenda after the loss of our star antagonist, and as we were faced with the end of the academic year. Our energy would peak, we knew, unless we were able to find new outlets, and new purposes, that would sustain us over the summer months. That evening, we asked Clyde about AIM’s plans for the summer, and whether or not there was some role that we might play in the organization during the coming months. Part of our vision was of a more active relationship between the college and local communities—something more dynamic and ongoing than the missionary outreach that went on in the name of the college’s commitment to “service”—and I think we hoped that we might use the summer to build bridges with the American Indian community of the Twin Cities. Clyde, for his part, had different ideas. The American Indian Movement was grateful for our commitment, he told us, and to honor the success of our campaign, the elders of the organization were inviting us to the annual AIM Sundance, to be held that summer, at the sacred pipestone quarries outside Pipestone, Minnesota. He gave us literature and asked for our contact information. We pressed him for advice on activism. “Just come to the Sundance,” he replied. We made our promises, and went off to study for finals.
That August, I was one of two students who took the elders up on their invitation. For ten days, my friend Emily and I camped out, with several hundred others, in empty fields near the pipestone quarries in western Minnesota. The Sundance itself took place over about six or seven days. Like the Turner protest, the ritual brought into the open a sideways reality, a world that sat alongside the material plane, but that remained, for the most part, beyond the realm of sight. The Sundance remade the world, filling it with portent, elevating our most mundane actions from the banal to the sublime. The morning after we arrived, I woke early to take part in a sun ceremony in which we greeted the dawn with drums, song, and dance. On a small hill overlooking the camp, we sang for the sun, and when the first sliver of light appeared just over the rise, it felt as if we had brought it up. We knew that the sun came because we asked it to, and from then on, everything that we did seemed desperately important, utterly ripe with purpose.
This sense was only heightened when, later that day, we marched into the woods in search of the sacred Sundance tree. The tree had to be of a certain age and height; it had to be living; and, perhaps most importantly, it had to be cut and carried to the Sundance site without ever touching the ground. When we located the appropriate specimen, its trunk was smudged with sage, and the elders prayed, while the rest of the community prepared for its removal. Over several hours, the men hacked away at it with an axe. When one tired, another would step in, and the children would take advantage of the break to rush in and scoop up the wood chips left in their wake. As the operation neared its end, and it became apparent how the tree was going to fall, those of us who held back began to arrange large timbers on the ground. They would catch the weight of the trunk and prevent it from touching the earth. After it was on the ground, we gathered around it, and with a truly spectacular measure of martial discipline, we hoisted it—all one hundred feet of living wood—above our heads, and began marching back to the camp. We carried the tree over a mile back to the Sundance grounds. After adorning the tree for the ritual, tying its branches with bundles of tobacco, we set it upright, fitting its base into a large hole that had been carved into the earth. Using ropes tied to its upper branches, we held the tree upright while others filled in the soil at its base. This final operation took about thirty minutes, during which we exhausted ourselves keeping the tree in position. When it was over, however, the tree was secure in the earth, and we had become, in the course of the afternoon, somehow sanctified. Although we were tired and sore, we had accomplished something that seemed utterly improbable, and in the act of creating the sacred space, we had become something greater than ourselves.
This is, of course, the purpose of a Sundance, which is something that Clyde knew when he invited us. Although generations of anthropologists have been thrown by the name, the Sundance is, in essence, an allegory for birth: the Sundancers spend several days making circuits around the tree, pausing to dance at each of the cardinal points. The tree is in the umbilical cord, the link to the mother, here figured as the body of the earth, and by dancing to the north, south, east, and west, the dancers salute the different spirits and spirit realms that cohabitate with our material world. On the final day of the ritual, after several days without food, the Sundancers pierce their chests with large chunks of wood or bone, before tying themselves to the sacred tree. With what remains of their strength, they fling themselves to the ground in an attempt at breaking free. They continue in this manner until their flesh tears and they are released, or they are exhausted and unable to go on. This final drama, generally referred to as “piercing,” represents the birth that is a rebirth, the transformation of the dancer, and the renewal of the community that is his support.
Monday, August 02, 2010
How do we start? How do we begin again?
This is the first segment of a much longer piece. Please stay tuned.
* * *
At the end of my second year of college, I participated in a student-led takeover of our college administration building in protest of the administration's decision to offer an honorary degree to media mogul Ted Turner. The protest against Turner had been building for months, beginning with meetings held by Proud Indigenous Peoples for Education, one of the many “cultural” organizations funded by the student government, and the most visible indigenous peoples’ organization on our campus. For many years, indigenous rights organizations had been building strong bases of support, organizing around issues related to the use of “Indian” mascots in professional sports. The concerns that PIPE raised had grown out of this movement. How, they asked, could our college, located in the middle of the Twin Cities—home to one of the largest, most vibrant, and politically active American Indian communities in the country—invite the owner of the Atlanta Braves to be part of our annual commencement ceremonies?
Although PIPE had probably less than ten members, these questions resonated with the members of other cultural organizations. Our college prided itself on its commitment to internationalism and cultural diversity, yet, as students, we were highly attuned to the ways in which its rhetoric did not match our reality. Cultural organizations were typically expected to perform difference in order to substantiate the college’s diversity; nonetheless, there was little in the way of institutional support for our organizations outside the funds they received through the student government. Students wanted to see that the energy that they had devoted to creating the aura of diversity—something the college was quick to exploit in student recruitment and development campaigns—was being reciprocated at the institutional level, whether in terms of an expanded office of multicultural affairs, a campus-wide commitment to anti-racism workshops, or greater community outreach. At the very least, we wanted some assurance that our efforts were recognized as both significant contributions to the college, and as a form of work. Students sacrificed a great deal to keep those organizations up and running and reaching out to the community at large, and by offering Ted Turner an honorary degree, we felt that the college had insulted us, and denigrated the ways in which we expressed our commitment to it.
The Turner campaign built for many months. At first, it seemed as if there was not enough energy to galvanize students outside the cultural organizations. As we neared commencement, however, the campaign began to pick up speed. Our closed-door meetings, polite sit-downs with administrators, and consciousness-raising exercises gave way to more vocal protests, with student and community leaders taking their message to the quad. In one very memorable instance, members of the American Indian Movement came to campus, and Clyde Bellecourt spoke, at length, about the history of indigenous peoples’ activism in Minnesota, and the place of Native peoples in the greater struggle for social and economic justice. There was drumming, and we danced, and immediately afterward, a small group of us—led by the intrepid Janel Stead—crossed to the administration building, determined to make an appointment with the college president. Janel may have been the only person who understood this (I certainly didn’t, then) but the time had come to force the issue. With barely a week to go before commencement, and support for the campaign growing by the day, there was no question that the college would be willing to take our demands seriously. While our administrators were always willing to talk, now they would have to negotiate. We scheduled a meeting for the next morning and went off to figure out our strategy.
The date, incidentally, was May 5, 1998, and that evening, my friends Brett and Bill and I inaugurated a tradition that we would continue to observe for many years: the celebration of Karl Marx’s birthday. The three of us were to live together that summer, and we had decided that we would read Capital, for the first time, together. The logic of this decision escapes me, although I suspect that our interest in Marx had something to do with the loose, largely uninformed way in which many of our professors dismissed him and his work. As anti-authoritarian as post-structuralism may be, on our campus, in the late 1990s, it was orthodoxy. The stridently authoritarian manner in which it was often presented to us was bound to inspire a backlash. So, with little direction or plan, and dismissive criticism from even the most sympathetic professors, we set out to read the big book. On Marx’s birthday, we celebrated that commitment, as we celebrated him, with vodka and Kool-Aid, not entirely attentive to the irony. That night, well after dark, we ran around campus, copying out quotes from Marx’s more famous writings in sidewalk chalk. On the path leading to the administration building, Brett transcribed the words from the Brumaire that have haunted me ever since: “Men make their own history, but they do not make it just as they please….The tradition of all the dead generations lies like a nightmare on the brains of the living.”
The next morning, when we arrived for our meeting with the president, those were the words that greeted us. I don’t remember much of what happened, except that Vernon Bellecourt did a lot of talking, and after it became clear the administration did not want to negotiate, he pulled out his cell phone. We, the students, found this horribly amusing. Within minutes, however, AIM security had shown up, and everyone had gone into action mode. I went back to my room to collect some supplies while others took up positions around the building. By ten, we were entrenched, and while we allowed work to go on as usual, our energy, our enthusiasm, and our presence transformed the space. Protest should not be thought of as an end in itself, but protests have a sort of performative power that is, for lack of a better word, intoxicating, transformative. From his reading of St. Paul, Agamben tells us that, in the post-Messianic future, everything will be as it is now, but different. While this may seem like an unbearable bit of sophistry, it offers a relatively economical description of what a protest is like. Protests take place in space, they occupy space, and they transform it; they release the inherent, suppressed possibilities of a space, giving play to unthought of relations between people, places, and things. Everything is as it was before, but everything is different; some new, intangible, unquantifiable magic has been introduced into the world, and once you’ve felt it, it’s difficult to let that go.
The news spread quickly. While I was in my room, a friend who was involved in desegregation work in Minneapolis called me to ask if I could be at a meeting that night. Very abruptly, I told him that I couldn’t talk, and explained the situation. He got very excited. “Adam, why didn’t you tell me?!” he demanded, clearly elated. Fifteen minutes later, he was on site, as were twenty or thirty others from his cohort. Others came and went, including students from nearby colleges and universities, and some of the local news media. Sympathetic professors came and sat with us in support; a few offered to meet with the administration on our behalf. In addition to those of us who stayed in the building, a group of students gathered below, holding signs and placards, and chanting slogans. One student, alone against the world, held a counter-protest; we realized later that it was staged for the benefit of an independent film. At some point, those of us in the building ordered pizza. All the while, members of the AIM council of elders sat on the lawn below. Janel and others would go down to confer with them throughout the day. With the bustle of activity, as the evening drew near, Marx’s words were completely obscured, only a dull, dusty shadow beneath our feet.
* * *
* * *
At the end of my second year of college, I participated in a student-led takeover of our college administration building in protest of the administration's decision to offer an honorary degree to media mogul Ted Turner. The protest against Turner had been building for months, beginning with meetings held by Proud Indigenous Peoples for Education, one of the many “cultural” organizations funded by the student government, and the most visible indigenous peoples’ organization on our campus. For many years, indigenous rights organizations had been building strong bases of support, organizing around issues related to the use of “Indian” mascots in professional sports. The concerns that PIPE raised had grown out of this movement. How, they asked, could our college, located in the middle of the Twin Cities—home to one of the largest, most vibrant, and politically active American Indian communities in the country—invite the owner of the Atlanta Braves to be part of our annual commencement ceremonies?
Although PIPE had probably less than ten members, these questions resonated with the members of other cultural organizations. Our college prided itself on its commitment to internationalism and cultural diversity, yet, as students, we were highly attuned to the ways in which its rhetoric did not match our reality. Cultural organizations were typically expected to perform difference in order to substantiate the college’s diversity; nonetheless, there was little in the way of institutional support for our organizations outside the funds they received through the student government. Students wanted to see that the energy that they had devoted to creating the aura of diversity—something the college was quick to exploit in student recruitment and development campaigns—was being reciprocated at the institutional level, whether in terms of an expanded office of multicultural affairs, a campus-wide commitment to anti-racism workshops, or greater community outreach. At the very least, we wanted some assurance that our efforts were recognized as both significant contributions to the college, and as a form of work. Students sacrificed a great deal to keep those organizations up and running and reaching out to the community at large, and by offering Ted Turner an honorary degree, we felt that the college had insulted us, and denigrated the ways in which we expressed our commitment to it.
The Turner campaign built for many months. At first, it seemed as if there was not enough energy to galvanize students outside the cultural organizations. As we neared commencement, however, the campaign began to pick up speed. Our closed-door meetings, polite sit-downs with administrators, and consciousness-raising exercises gave way to more vocal protests, with student and community leaders taking their message to the quad. In one very memorable instance, members of the American Indian Movement came to campus, and Clyde Bellecourt spoke, at length, about the history of indigenous peoples’ activism in Minnesota, and the place of Native peoples in the greater struggle for social and economic justice. There was drumming, and we danced, and immediately afterward, a small group of us—led by the intrepid Janel Stead—crossed to the administration building, determined to make an appointment with the college president. Janel may have been the only person who understood this (I certainly didn’t, then) but the time had come to force the issue. With barely a week to go before commencement, and support for the campaign growing by the day, there was no question that the college would be willing to take our demands seriously. While our administrators were always willing to talk, now they would have to negotiate. We scheduled a meeting for the next morning and went off to figure out our strategy.
The date, incidentally, was May 5, 1998, and that evening, my friends Brett and Bill and I inaugurated a tradition that we would continue to observe for many years: the celebration of Karl Marx’s birthday. The three of us were to live together that summer, and we had decided that we would read Capital, for the first time, together. The logic of this decision escapes me, although I suspect that our interest in Marx had something to do with the loose, largely uninformed way in which many of our professors dismissed him and his work. As anti-authoritarian as post-structuralism may be, on our campus, in the late 1990s, it was orthodoxy. The stridently authoritarian manner in which it was often presented to us was bound to inspire a backlash. So, with little direction or plan, and dismissive criticism from even the most sympathetic professors, we set out to read the big book. On Marx’s birthday, we celebrated that commitment, as we celebrated him, with vodka and Kool-Aid, not entirely attentive to the irony. That night, well after dark, we ran around campus, copying out quotes from Marx’s more famous writings in sidewalk chalk. On the path leading to the administration building, Brett transcribed the words from the Brumaire that have haunted me ever since: “Men make their own history, but they do not make it just as they please….The tradition of all the dead generations lies like a nightmare on the brains of the living.”
The next morning, when we arrived for our meeting with the president, those were the words that greeted us. I don’t remember much of what happened, except that Vernon Bellecourt did a lot of talking, and after it became clear the administration did not want to negotiate, he pulled out his cell phone. We, the students, found this horribly amusing. Within minutes, however, AIM security had shown up, and everyone had gone into action mode. I went back to my room to collect some supplies while others took up positions around the building. By ten, we were entrenched, and while we allowed work to go on as usual, our energy, our enthusiasm, and our presence transformed the space. Protest should not be thought of as an end in itself, but protests have a sort of performative power that is, for lack of a better word, intoxicating, transformative. From his reading of St. Paul, Agamben tells us that, in the post-Messianic future, everything will be as it is now, but different. While this may seem like an unbearable bit of sophistry, it offers a relatively economical description of what a protest is like. Protests take place in space, they occupy space, and they transform it; they release the inherent, suppressed possibilities of a space, giving play to unthought of relations between people, places, and things. Everything is as it was before, but everything is different; some new, intangible, unquantifiable magic has been introduced into the world, and once you’ve felt it, it’s difficult to let that go.
The news spread quickly. While I was in my room, a friend who was involved in desegregation work in Minneapolis called me to ask if I could be at a meeting that night. Very abruptly, I told him that I couldn’t talk, and explained the situation. He got very excited. “Adam, why didn’t you tell me?!” he demanded, clearly elated. Fifteen minutes later, he was on site, as were twenty or thirty others from his cohort. Others came and went, including students from nearby colleges and universities, and some of the local news media. Sympathetic professors came and sat with us in support; a few offered to meet with the administration on our behalf. In addition to those of us who stayed in the building, a group of students gathered below, holding signs and placards, and chanting slogans. One student, alone against the world, held a counter-protest; we realized later that it was staged for the benefit of an independent film. At some point, those of us in the building ordered pizza. All the while, members of the AIM council of elders sat on the lawn below. Janel and others would go down to confer with them throughout the day. With the bustle of activity, as the evening drew near, Marx’s words were completely obscured, only a dull, dusty shadow beneath our feet.
* * *
Tuesday, July 27, 2010
Pretentious literary criticism: First thoughts on Infinite Jest
David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest is set, almost entirely, in Boston and, despite the pretense of overt farce, I could not help but read it as a chillingly accurate depiction of that forsaken city and its spiritual malaise. Wallace made no secret of his debt to David Lynch, and while I would not presume to rule on whether or not Infinite Jest should be categorized as Lynchian, the book shares Lynch’s almost preternatural affection for the mundane. Far more so than any of the explicitly creepy stuff that actually happens, it is Lynch’s attention to the mundane, and his mercilessly faithful representations of the mundane, that account for the quality of weirdness in his films. Lynch’s films strike us as alien, in other words, because they are composed of almost painfully realistic renderings of the everyday relations between people, places, and things. For all its jokey-ness, Infinite Jest has the same quality. There is deliberately weird stuff going on all the time, but the characters, their motivations, and their environment are so frankly observed that they begin to take on the hyperreal quality that emerges from such brutally faithful renderings. In Lost Highway, Mulholland Drive, and Inland Empire, Lynch has given us some of the most beautifully honest portraits of the density of affects that is Los Angeles, and in Infinite Jest, Wallace presents Boston in much the same way, as a structure of sensations barely guarding against the dark chasm of meaninglessness forever threatening to swallow us up.
It is something of a minor miracle that anyone reads Infinite Jest because the book was obviously crafted to frustrate its readers. The novel is a sprawling epic of minutiae, and like many of most seminal works of literary modernism and postmodernism, it fusses over its language, grafting portentous academic jargon onto a myriad of regional vernaculars, while—here and there—dropping in more artfully fashioned literary prose. Over the course of the novel, Wallace switches, seemingly without provocation, between the first and third person, and the story unfolds in a temporality that both entirely speculative, yet not wholly unlikely. One of the conceits of the book is that, in the “not distant future,” time itself is subsidized, with corporations bidding on the naming rights to different years. Besides commenting on the colonization of everyday life by corporate culture, setting the story in the Year of the Depend Adult Undergarment effectively dislodges the reader. We live our lives in and through a variety of narratives, and of these narratives, the calendar is perhaps the most compelling. By taking that away, Wallace makes us work that much harder to locate ourselves in his work. Things get more convoluted still when we make trips to the Before Subsidization (B.S.) past, or to the future Year of Glad, or to the Year of the Perdue Wonderchicken in the recent subsidized past.
This quality of disjointedness, of the narrative that never quite delivers, is another of the ways in which Wallace stays faithful to the affective topography of metro Boston. As a politically orchestrated physical landscape, Boston, quite simply, does not make any kind of sense, and this has a range of curious psychic consequences. After two days in Paris I was able to navigate without a map; I lived in Boston for a year and only in the last month was I able to tell east from west. The streets run together in an impossible tangle, the neighborhoods are indistinct, the suburbs seem exist in different time zones, and less said about the subway system the better. While Boston invites you to think of it as a walkable city, it is openly hostile to all but the most seasoned pedestrians and, as an effect, most of its residents simmer at a low rage. The city therefore lacks the vitality born of vernacular use. In both their geography and their character, urban spaces are shaped by acts of appropriation and resistance that constitute a sort of inchoate, everyday class struggle, and they become livable to the extent that they have been humanized by that struggle. In Boston, somehow, all the insurgencies have been contained, and all the flows are staunched. The city and its residents exist in vexed relation to a set of reified narratives—of Puritan heritage, revolutionary exuberance, or immigrant alienation—that stubbornly resist declension into the colloquial.
In Infinite Jest, the textual space of metro Boston is a metonym for the whole of America, and the narrative tropes through which that entity has organized itself. Perhaps the most important of these, for the purposes of the novel, is the cherished description of the United States as a “city on a hill.” As at least one reviewer has pointed out, Enfield Tennis Academy—the setting for much of the book—exists in rarefied isolation on a hill in metro Boston, one that has been shaved flat to accommodate the tennis courts, disturbing its neighbors in all directions, and prompting a series of unsettled lawsuits. Rendering the metaphor literal, Enfield Tennis Academy allows Wallace to evoke the distance between “the city on a hill” as it was first described by Puritan governor John Winthrop, and its obsequious remaking by that latter-day avatar of an exhausted world spirit, Ronald Reagan. Where Winthrop saw the city on a hill as one possible future for the Puritan colony—a future that was attainable only through mutual support and sacrifice—for Reagan, that city was a certainty, an assured part of the American landscape. Unlike Winthrop, Reagan did not use the trope to call Americans to a higher purpose, but to revel in their inherent greatness. While both shared a vision of the city on a hill as something that existed to be seen, a beacon to the world, for Winthrop, that city would be a model of the ideal Christian community, where all members sacrificed together and rejoiced together, in celebration of their higher ideals. For Reagan, however, it was a consumer spectacle, something to be watched, envied, and enjoyed. In the Enfield Tennis Academy, Wallace combines some measure of both. Its students sacrifice their youth, their energy, their time, and their individuality, but their higher impulses are bent toward baser purposes. Everything they do is in preparation for something they call the Show, in pursuit of careers as professional athlete entertainers. They live their lives in hopeful expectation of the Show, in some cases paralyzed by the fear that they may not realize their ambitions.
Wallace’s America is one that has been given over—entirely—to the pursuit of pleasure. The maximization of pleasure is, accordingly, the only purpose to which his characters are willing to devote themselves, the only pursuit for which they are willing to sacrifice. There are many unsubtle jabs in the book, and perhaps the most glaring is the hypothetical political formation Wallace calls the Organization of North American Nations, or O.N.A.N. This masturbatory future America is ruled over by a former lounge singer named Johnny Gentle, an entertainer turned politician pressed from the Reaganite mold. Like Reagan, Gentle is little more than a conduit for the expression of more insidious commercial interests, and when he appears in the story, his dialogue is rendered in the form of stage directions. At one point he is portrayed, in an experimental docudrama, as a google-y eyed sock puppet. The story, insofar as there is one, plays out against the backdrop of Gentle’s Office of Unspecified Services (an eerie premonition of the Department of Homeland Security) and their search for something they call “The Entertainment,” a film cartridge so addictive that, once seen, its viewers only desire is to watch it, again and again. Faced with a group of radical Quebec separatists who plan to distribute the film as part of a vague plot to realize their independence, Gentle’s government attempts to track down all copies of the film, including its elusive master copy and a rumored “antidote.” This brings them into contact with the members of the Incandenza family, whose patriarch, James, committed suicide—by sticking his head in a microwave oven—shortly after the film was completed.
For the most part, these plot points are all development, no delivery. They allow Wallace to explore his characters, and their concerns, but he offers little in the way of resolution. The book is bracketed by the withdrawal of James Incandenza’s youngest son, Hal, into an existential void so empty, so bleak, that he becomes locked within himself. In the first chapter, narrated from Hal’s perspective, we learn that Hal is both a tennis prodigy and something of a savant, his interests encompassing subjects as varied as etymology and the history of Byzantine erotica. Very quickly, however, we realize that something is wrong, that although Hal is capable of thinking incredibly complex thoughts, he is completely unable to interact or communicate. Indeed, members of the university admissions committee attempting to interview him describe his sounds and gestures by which he tries make himself known as inhuman. Within the temporality of the book, this scene is set in the future, and we spend much of the rest of the story waiting to find out just how Hal—precocious, neurotic, pampered Hal—becomes this fragile shell of himself. Wallace delivers an answer, but not in the form of an external, organic cause. (There is, of course, a large online community devoted to the search for one.) Instead, Hal withdraws into himself as the obsessive rituals that have lent his life a semblance of meaning are stripped away. The most glaringly obvious of these are the trips Hal makes to his school’s subterranean A/C system, where he gets “secretly high,” before applying Visine and popping a Clorets. Hal is self-aware enough to understand that it is not the high that he is addicted to, but the byzantine conventions surrounding his drug use, including its highly prized secrecy.
The question of addiction runs through the novel, and through it, Wallace comments on a range of compulsive behaviors. Drugs, however, are never very important in themselves. For the characters in Infinite Jest, drugs are little more than MacGuffins, allowing them to get on with a whole lot of business that, while not necessarily important, gives structure and meaning to their lives. This is true, as well, of the various recovery programs in which different characters eventually end up, with the daily AA meeting replacing the ritual score down on the corner, or nightly trip out to the bar. In his real life, Wallace was in some sort of recovery, although he never revealed—publicly, at least—just why or for what, and in the AA scenes, his writerly ambivalence at the course of treatment is palpable. His terror at being made to recite, much less embrace, the most hoary clichés is reflected in many of the characters, and in long passages where he reflects on the seeming improbability of AA. As a system of meaning, AA fares far better, however, than either drug use or consumer culture and its entertainments, although Wallace does seem to worry over its absent center—the higher power that isn’t there, the absolute concern to which it tends, but does not name.
It is tempting to think of Infinite Jest as a critique of the post-industrial culture of credit-fueled consumption inaugurated by the Reagan presidency, but this reading comes just short of the mark. Wallace’s real target is the long, slow erosion of American public life, occasioned by the consecration of personal pleasure as our highest ideal. No doubt Wallace had Reagan and his acolytes in mind when writing the book—the most chilling moment in the book is a throwaway reference to the Limbaugh-Gingrich administration—but the culture of consumption is no recent innovation, nor is the use of consumerism as a mode of social control. Over the past century, Americans have come to understand the ephemeral pleasure that one derives from consumption as the most perfect manifestation of human happiness. The “pursuit of happiness” that now orients our republic is, as a consequence, the pursuit of ever more stuff. The upshot of this consumer culture is the creation of an enormous amount of waste—both literally and figuratively—and in Infinite Jest, Johnny Gentle is a raging obsessive compulsive clean-freak who wins the presidency on an ultra-green platform of “city streets so clean you can eat off them.” In the political history of the novel, this campaign promise blossoms into the creation of the Great Concavity, a radioactive no-man’s land to which all communities in the US export their garbage via enormous catapults.
One might argue that Infinite Jest is about the myriad ways in which we have come to compensate for the death of God; that is to say, all the ways in which we have allowed ourselves to not confront the death of God, just as Hal never really confronts the death of his father. With the death of God we lose the Messianic promise of return and redemption. We find ourselves alone in a world that will not end, with nothing but time, and ourselves. How do we fill the days? How do we behave toward one another? And what does it matter, anyway? Wallace does not answer these questions, but he suggests that some options might be better than others. In Infinite Jest, the romance of novelty and the pursuit of sensation—the Janus faces of ideology in our very late capitalism—are presented as traps. If we follow our bliss we risk chasing Narcissus, ever deeper into the sea. The passive consumption of entertainment allows us to live unconsciously. It does not maximize pleasure so much as diminish work; the work of thinking, evaluating, choosing and, in general, deciding how to make a life, and how to make it meaningful.
This is not easy, and Wallace never claimed that it was. In an interview given shortly before he killed himself, he pointed out that there are many important, simple things that we must do that are nonetheless hard, that make tedious claims upon our time; despite this, Wallace argued, we must do them, we cannot forsake our obligations to ourselves, and each other. Reading Infinite Jest may be one of these obligations. “Is it our duty to read Infinite Jest?” a student once asked Dave Eggers. When I first heard that question, I thought it pretentious and eggheaded, the sort of portentous nonsense a first-year graduate student might spin—or that much of my thinking on the book might suggest. After reading the book, though, I think I understand what he meant, and I am glad that I was able to fulfill my responsibility. It took me nearly fifteen years, and innumerable false starts, but I am very much richer for having done it.
It is something of a minor miracle that anyone reads Infinite Jest because the book was obviously crafted to frustrate its readers. The novel is a sprawling epic of minutiae, and like many of most seminal works of literary modernism and postmodernism, it fusses over its language, grafting portentous academic jargon onto a myriad of regional vernaculars, while—here and there—dropping in more artfully fashioned literary prose. Over the course of the novel, Wallace switches, seemingly without provocation, between the first and third person, and the story unfolds in a temporality that both entirely speculative, yet not wholly unlikely. One of the conceits of the book is that, in the “not distant future,” time itself is subsidized, with corporations bidding on the naming rights to different years. Besides commenting on the colonization of everyday life by corporate culture, setting the story in the Year of the Depend Adult Undergarment effectively dislodges the reader. We live our lives in and through a variety of narratives, and of these narratives, the calendar is perhaps the most compelling. By taking that away, Wallace makes us work that much harder to locate ourselves in his work. Things get more convoluted still when we make trips to the Before Subsidization (B.S.) past, or to the future Year of Glad, or to the Year of the Perdue Wonderchicken in the recent subsidized past.
This quality of disjointedness, of the narrative that never quite delivers, is another of the ways in which Wallace stays faithful to the affective topography of metro Boston. As a politically orchestrated physical landscape, Boston, quite simply, does not make any kind of sense, and this has a range of curious psychic consequences. After two days in Paris I was able to navigate without a map; I lived in Boston for a year and only in the last month was I able to tell east from west. The streets run together in an impossible tangle, the neighborhoods are indistinct, the suburbs seem exist in different time zones, and less said about the subway system the better. While Boston invites you to think of it as a walkable city, it is openly hostile to all but the most seasoned pedestrians and, as an effect, most of its residents simmer at a low rage. The city therefore lacks the vitality born of vernacular use. In both their geography and their character, urban spaces are shaped by acts of appropriation and resistance that constitute a sort of inchoate, everyday class struggle, and they become livable to the extent that they have been humanized by that struggle. In Boston, somehow, all the insurgencies have been contained, and all the flows are staunched. The city and its residents exist in vexed relation to a set of reified narratives—of Puritan heritage, revolutionary exuberance, or immigrant alienation—that stubbornly resist declension into the colloquial.
In Infinite Jest, the textual space of metro Boston is a metonym for the whole of America, and the narrative tropes through which that entity has organized itself. Perhaps the most important of these, for the purposes of the novel, is the cherished description of the United States as a “city on a hill.” As at least one reviewer has pointed out, Enfield Tennis Academy—the setting for much of the book—exists in rarefied isolation on a hill in metro Boston, one that has been shaved flat to accommodate the tennis courts, disturbing its neighbors in all directions, and prompting a series of unsettled lawsuits. Rendering the metaphor literal, Enfield Tennis Academy allows Wallace to evoke the distance between “the city on a hill” as it was first described by Puritan governor John Winthrop, and its obsequious remaking by that latter-day avatar of an exhausted world spirit, Ronald Reagan. Where Winthrop saw the city on a hill as one possible future for the Puritan colony—a future that was attainable only through mutual support and sacrifice—for Reagan, that city was a certainty, an assured part of the American landscape. Unlike Winthrop, Reagan did not use the trope to call Americans to a higher purpose, but to revel in their inherent greatness. While both shared a vision of the city on a hill as something that existed to be seen, a beacon to the world, for Winthrop, that city would be a model of the ideal Christian community, where all members sacrificed together and rejoiced together, in celebration of their higher ideals. For Reagan, however, it was a consumer spectacle, something to be watched, envied, and enjoyed. In the Enfield Tennis Academy, Wallace combines some measure of both. Its students sacrifice their youth, their energy, their time, and their individuality, but their higher impulses are bent toward baser purposes. Everything they do is in preparation for something they call the Show, in pursuit of careers as professional athlete entertainers. They live their lives in hopeful expectation of the Show, in some cases paralyzed by the fear that they may not realize their ambitions.
Wallace’s America is one that has been given over—entirely—to the pursuit of pleasure. The maximization of pleasure is, accordingly, the only purpose to which his characters are willing to devote themselves, the only pursuit for which they are willing to sacrifice. There are many unsubtle jabs in the book, and perhaps the most glaring is the hypothetical political formation Wallace calls the Organization of North American Nations, or O.N.A.N. This masturbatory future America is ruled over by a former lounge singer named Johnny Gentle, an entertainer turned politician pressed from the Reaganite mold. Like Reagan, Gentle is little more than a conduit for the expression of more insidious commercial interests, and when he appears in the story, his dialogue is rendered in the form of stage directions. At one point he is portrayed, in an experimental docudrama, as a google-y eyed sock puppet. The story, insofar as there is one, plays out against the backdrop of Gentle’s Office of Unspecified Services (an eerie premonition of the Department of Homeland Security) and their search for something they call “The Entertainment,” a film cartridge so addictive that, once seen, its viewers only desire is to watch it, again and again. Faced with a group of radical Quebec separatists who plan to distribute the film as part of a vague plot to realize their independence, Gentle’s government attempts to track down all copies of the film, including its elusive master copy and a rumored “antidote.” This brings them into contact with the members of the Incandenza family, whose patriarch, James, committed suicide—by sticking his head in a microwave oven—shortly after the film was completed.
For the most part, these plot points are all development, no delivery. They allow Wallace to explore his characters, and their concerns, but he offers little in the way of resolution. The book is bracketed by the withdrawal of James Incandenza’s youngest son, Hal, into an existential void so empty, so bleak, that he becomes locked within himself. In the first chapter, narrated from Hal’s perspective, we learn that Hal is both a tennis prodigy and something of a savant, his interests encompassing subjects as varied as etymology and the history of Byzantine erotica. Very quickly, however, we realize that something is wrong, that although Hal is capable of thinking incredibly complex thoughts, he is completely unable to interact or communicate. Indeed, members of the university admissions committee attempting to interview him describe his sounds and gestures by which he tries make himself known as inhuman. Within the temporality of the book, this scene is set in the future, and we spend much of the rest of the story waiting to find out just how Hal—precocious, neurotic, pampered Hal—becomes this fragile shell of himself. Wallace delivers an answer, but not in the form of an external, organic cause. (There is, of course, a large online community devoted to the search for one.) Instead, Hal withdraws into himself as the obsessive rituals that have lent his life a semblance of meaning are stripped away. The most glaringly obvious of these are the trips Hal makes to his school’s subterranean A/C system, where he gets “secretly high,” before applying Visine and popping a Clorets. Hal is self-aware enough to understand that it is not the high that he is addicted to, but the byzantine conventions surrounding his drug use, including its highly prized secrecy.
The question of addiction runs through the novel, and through it, Wallace comments on a range of compulsive behaviors. Drugs, however, are never very important in themselves. For the characters in Infinite Jest, drugs are little more than MacGuffins, allowing them to get on with a whole lot of business that, while not necessarily important, gives structure and meaning to their lives. This is true, as well, of the various recovery programs in which different characters eventually end up, with the daily AA meeting replacing the ritual score down on the corner, or nightly trip out to the bar. In his real life, Wallace was in some sort of recovery, although he never revealed—publicly, at least—just why or for what, and in the AA scenes, his writerly ambivalence at the course of treatment is palpable. His terror at being made to recite, much less embrace, the most hoary clichés is reflected in many of the characters, and in long passages where he reflects on the seeming improbability of AA. As a system of meaning, AA fares far better, however, than either drug use or consumer culture and its entertainments, although Wallace does seem to worry over its absent center—the higher power that isn’t there, the absolute concern to which it tends, but does not name.
It is tempting to think of Infinite Jest as a critique of the post-industrial culture of credit-fueled consumption inaugurated by the Reagan presidency, but this reading comes just short of the mark. Wallace’s real target is the long, slow erosion of American public life, occasioned by the consecration of personal pleasure as our highest ideal. No doubt Wallace had Reagan and his acolytes in mind when writing the book—the most chilling moment in the book is a throwaway reference to the Limbaugh-Gingrich administration—but the culture of consumption is no recent innovation, nor is the use of consumerism as a mode of social control. Over the past century, Americans have come to understand the ephemeral pleasure that one derives from consumption as the most perfect manifestation of human happiness. The “pursuit of happiness” that now orients our republic is, as a consequence, the pursuit of ever more stuff. The upshot of this consumer culture is the creation of an enormous amount of waste—both literally and figuratively—and in Infinite Jest, Johnny Gentle is a raging obsessive compulsive clean-freak who wins the presidency on an ultra-green platform of “city streets so clean you can eat off them.” In the political history of the novel, this campaign promise blossoms into the creation of the Great Concavity, a radioactive no-man’s land to which all communities in the US export their garbage via enormous catapults.
One might argue that Infinite Jest is about the myriad ways in which we have come to compensate for the death of God; that is to say, all the ways in which we have allowed ourselves to not confront the death of God, just as Hal never really confronts the death of his father. With the death of God we lose the Messianic promise of return and redemption. We find ourselves alone in a world that will not end, with nothing but time, and ourselves. How do we fill the days? How do we behave toward one another? And what does it matter, anyway? Wallace does not answer these questions, but he suggests that some options might be better than others. In Infinite Jest, the romance of novelty and the pursuit of sensation—the Janus faces of ideology in our very late capitalism—are presented as traps. If we follow our bliss we risk chasing Narcissus, ever deeper into the sea. The passive consumption of entertainment allows us to live unconsciously. It does not maximize pleasure so much as diminish work; the work of thinking, evaluating, choosing and, in general, deciding how to make a life, and how to make it meaningful.
This is not easy, and Wallace never claimed that it was. In an interview given shortly before he killed himself, he pointed out that there are many important, simple things that we must do that are nonetheless hard, that make tedious claims upon our time; despite this, Wallace argued, we must do them, we cannot forsake our obligations to ourselves, and each other. Reading Infinite Jest may be one of these obligations. “Is it our duty to read Infinite Jest?” a student once asked Dave Eggers. When I first heard that question, I thought it pretentious and eggheaded, the sort of portentous nonsense a first-year graduate student might spin—or that much of my thinking on the book might suggest. After reading the book, though, I think I understand what he meant, and I am glad that I was able to fulfill my responsibility. It took me nearly fifteen years, and innumerable false starts, but I am very much richer for having done it.
Wednesday, July 21, 2010
A short note on the Didionesque
Didionesque, The: n. Deliberate use of seemingly inconsequential detail to portend great insight into a person, place, or situation. E.g. The prominence of iPads in Ras Beirut. The absence of a Rick's Cafe in the Casablanca airport. Such details have no inherent significance and must be derived from context. The Didionesque is a promise that does not always deliver. See Dada, Dadaist movement.
Tuesday, July 20, 2010
The natural history of destruction, Beirut, July 2010
When the second plane hit, I called Hannah. It was not so much the fact of the second plane that frightened me; it was that I had seen it and the news anchors hadn’t. They had not seen it plow into the building, which meant that I was, for the moment, ahead of the story they were telling. I called Hannah because I had no context for what was happening. She, on the other hand, had been in New York for the 1993 World Trade Center bombing, and would probably be able to gauge the severity of what was happening. This was probably the most logical thought I had all morning, because after I got Hannah out of bed to reassure me that everything was going to be fine, my next impulse was to rush downtown. I jumped in the shower, rushed to dress, and packed my bag. I checked the news one last time before heading out, just in time to see the first tower collapse. And then the phone began to ring.
Last night, I stood on the balcony looking south into the city, wondering somewhat absently what it would be like if the fireworks that appear regularly over the suburbs were not childish amusements but Israeli bombs. This is, to be sure, a morbid curiosity, but one that is, in some part, justified, if only for all the practical questions an air raid would inevitably raise. I may be emotionally and intellectually equipped to decipher airline schedules in five languages, but nothing in my life has prepared me for the not entirely remote possibility of life under a hail of artillery. I have read the accounts, I have heard the stories, and I have lived a significant portion of my life in proximity to the history of such violence, but narrative can take you only so far. Some things you must learn by doing, and, so far, I have been spared such grim lessons. In terms of experience, 9/11 is about as close as I can get and, terrible as that day might have been, somehow the carpet-bombing of an entire city seems far more horrifying.
This vision of indiscriminate destruction came after considering all the mundane ways in which Beirut has changed over the last year. The list grows longer every day: There are no longer swarms of mosquitoes at night. I’ve witnessed bartenders mix an indecent martini. Caribou Coffee has come to Hamra Street, as has H&M. People now address me in Arabic, and they switch only after it becomes apparent that my Arabic vocabulary is wretchedly thin. Walimat has moved around the corner. The brothel on Makdissi Street is remodeling. My manoushe place has closed. These small things are juxtaposed against the more spectacular developments: The forest of cranes that has sprung up downtown. The myriad high-rises that seek to command the sky. When I was here in January I learned that there are some six hundred new apartment buildings under construction in Beirut, none of which are advertising anything other than luxury suites. Affordable housing, whatever that means, is coming at more and more of a premium. At the moment, these developments seem to present a more immediate threat to the city than an Israeli attack.
Beirut is flux: the city has been destroyed and rebuilt many times. There is something in its present renaissance, however, that is foreboding, an intimation of some less remarkable misfortune.
Last night, I stood on the balcony looking south into the city, wondering somewhat absently what it would be like if the fireworks that appear regularly over the suburbs were not childish amusements but Israeli bombs. This is, to be sure, a morbid curiosity, but one that is, in some part, justified, if only for all the practical questions an air raid would inevitably raise. I may be emotionally and intellectually equipped to decipher airline schedules in five languages, but nothing in my life has prepared me for the not entirely remote possibility of life under a hail of artillery. I have read the accounts, I have heard the stories, and I have lived a significant portion of my life in proximity to the history of such violence, but narrative can take you only so far. Some things you must learn by doing, and, so far, I have been spared such grim lessons. In terms of experience, 9/11 is about as close as I can get and, terrible as that day might have been, somehow the carpet-bombing of an entire city seems far more horrifying.
This vision of indiscriminate destruction came after considering all the mundane ways in which Beirut has changed over the last year. The list grows longer every day: There are no longer swarms of mosquitoes at night. I’ve witnessed bartenders mix an indecent martini. Caribou Coffee has come to Hamra Street, as has H&M. People now address me in Arabic, and they switch only after it becomes apparent that my Arabic vocabulary is wretchedly thin. Walimat has moved around the corner. The brothel on Makdissi Street is remodeling. My manoushe place has closed. These small things are juxtaposed against the more spectacular developments: The forest of cranes that has sprung up downtown. The myriad high-rises that seek to command the sky. When I was here in January I learned that there are some six hundred new apartment buildings under construction in Beirut, none of which are advertising anything other than luxury suites. Affordable housing, whatever that means, is coming at more and more of a premium. At the moment, these developments seem to present a more immediate threat to the city than an Israeli attack.
Beirut is flux: the city has been destroyed and rebuilt many times. There is something in its present renaissance, however, that is foreboding, an intimation of some less remarkable misfortune.
Monday, July 19, 2010
And then, West Beirut.
It wasn’t this way in Casablanca. From New York to Morocco, every thirty minutes, a woman shrieked, convinced that the plane was about to fall from the sky. When we touched down, there was scattered applause, but the polite ovation spoke more to our sense of relief than any deeply felt joy. Now, in Beirut, the plane lands, and the ululations begin. Cities thrive on hyperbole, but at this moment, Beirut begins to convince me that to arrive in this place is to arrive in a city unlike any other.
Every time I have flown to Beirut, it has been this way. The passenger cabin is alive with barely suppressed song and dance. There is an electric expectation, an almost overwhelming euphoria. When I lived here, these feelings got to be so familiar that I stopped feeling them, overwhelmed by the frustration of being locked into such a small place, everyone restricted in their movements. Flying from Cairo or Istanbul, it was easy to imagine myself as banished to a life of toil in the provinces of the empire; yet, even then, the excitement would creep back in. I’m going home, I would think. I’m going home, and home is Beirut.
This proprietary impulse used to upset me. When I lived here, I had an expat friend that would refer to himself and his relationship to Lebanon in the collective, and the possessive. Explaining the rolling blackouts that plague the country, he said, “We used to have five power plants, but the Israelis destroyed one during the July War.” Commenting on spent shell casings littering the mountains north of the city, he said, “We have a lot of people who like to hunt.” Describing the fractious political dynamics of the Lebanese confessional system, he said, “We have a real problem forming a government.” For the first months I lived in Beirut, these statements seemed almost ridiculously affected, but by month three, I found myself claiming similar allegiances. As American tourism began to pick up after the New York Times travel section declared Beirut the destination for 2009, I once told a friend, “We really need to do something about all these foreigners.” As a joke, we would hold out hope for a car bomb or an assassination, something that would scare away all but the true believers.
It has been almost two years since the last significant violence, and that sense of fatalism has largely faded. Even the rumors about a possible Israeli invasion do not seem to have had much of an effect. I walked the Corniche yesterday, and the boys were out in force, diving from the sea wall, smoking argileh on the rocks in the shallows. One of the larger beach clubs, just west of AUB Beach, was positively bumping, blasting an infective mélange of Arab synth-pop and Chicago-style house that turned the street into a runway, compelling us to a faster step, a more pronounced strut. Outside the makeshift walls of the club, women in hijab stood ankle-deep in the sea, tending to small children, while, nearby, barrel-chested men smoked state-subsidized cigarettes.
It’s now nine in the morning and the power has just gone out. It will come back at noon. I wouldn’t have noticed, except that I heard the neighbors’ generator start up, its bass drone complementing the rhythmic beat of the construction workers’ hammers as they remodel the store below.
Every time I have flown to Beirut, it has been this way. The passenger cabin is alive with barely suppressed song and dance. There is an electric expectation, an almost overwhelming euphoria. When I lived here, these feelings got to be so familiar that I stopped feeling them, overwhelmed by the frustration of being locked into such a small place, everyone restricted in their movements. Flying from Cairo or Istanbul, it was easy to imagine myself as banished to a life of toil in the provinces of the empire; yet, even then, the excitement would creep back in. I’m going home, I would think. I’m going home, and home is Beirut.
This proprietary impulse used to upset me. When I lived here, I had an expat friend that would refer to himself and his relationship to Lebanon in the collective, and the possessive. Explaining the rolling blackouts that plague the country, he said, “We used to have five power plants, but the Israelis destroyed one during the July War.” Commenting on spent shell casings littering the mountains north of the city, he said, “We have a lot of people who like to hunt.” Describing the fractious political dynamics of the Lebanese confessional system, he said, “We have a real problem forming a government.” For the first months I lived in Beirut, these statements seemed almost ridiculously affected, but by month three, I found myself claiming similar allegiances. As American tourism began to pick up after the New York Times travel section declared Beirut the destination for 2009, I once told a friend, “We really need to do something about all these foreigners.” As a joke, we would hold out hope for a car bomb or an assassination, something that would scare away all but the true believers.
It has been almost two years since the last significant violence, and that sense of fatalism has largely faded. Even the rumors about a possible Israeli invasion do not seem to have had much of an effect. I walked the Corniche yesterday, and the boys were out in force, diving from the sea wall, smoking argileh on the rocks in the shallows. One of the larger beach clubs, just west of AUB Beach, was positively bumping, blasting an infective mélange of Arab synth-pop and Chicago-style house that turned the street into a runway, compelling us to a faster step, a more pronounced strut. Outside the makeshift walls of the club, women in hijab stood ankle-deep in the sea, tending to small children, while, nearby, barrel-chested men smoked state-subsidized cigarettes.
It’s now nine in the morning and the power has just gone out. It will come back at noon. I wouldn’t have noticed, except that I heard the neighbors’ generator start up, its bass drone complementing the rhythmic beat of the construction workers’ hammers as they remodel the store below.
Thursday, July 08, 2010
The Mayflower Compact
When I lived in Beirut, for some reason, I never questioned the presence of a hotel called the Mayflower. I was more enamored of the fact that the Mayflower was directly across the street from the Napoleon Hotel, and that the bar at the Mayflower was this sad, wood-paneled imitation of an English hunting lodge called the Duke of Wellington. (And, in case you don't remember your European history, it was the Duke of Wellington who defeated Napoleon at Waterloo. For his trouble, the British bestowed upon him their highest honor: they named a really ill-conceived concoction of beef, foie gras, and pastry.) At the moment, however, the Mayflower Hotel gives me pause. Not that American institutions and cultural references aren't all over Beirut, but this one is just too freakishly random and, well, Protestant. Some Lebanese Christians will occasionally embrace American evangelical propaganda (my students in Beirut were all convinced that Comrade Obama was a secret Muslim) but, in general, Protestantism really hasn't had a good run in the Leb. The American University of Beirut started its life as the Syrian Protestant College, and while the college had a missionary mandate, and everyone was required to go to daily services, the only thing they ever converted anyone to was Darwinism. One way or another, the name Mayflower just seems like a weird, free-associative reference to the American cultural tradition. Which I guess is cool and all, but I don't really want to believe that the name is that meaninglessly Dada. I guess it works the other way, as well. Why, after all, do we call the poultry that we eat on Thanksgiving a turkey? Were the Pilgrims secret Muslims sent to infiltrate our country? Emissaries of Ottoman power? Are we all just serving the interests of the Shadow Caliphate?
Something to ponder while I begin the countdown to Beirut. Seven days.
Something to ponder while I begin the countdown to Beirut. Seven days.
Thursday, June 24, 2010
Soccer, Football, and the New Post-Colonialism
Although I put my future happiness at risk by admitting it, I confess that I missed all of Algeria’s games in the World Cup. Yes, even the spectacular, save-the-day, Landon Donovan goal in the ninety-first minute of the match with the US. Although I am keeping one eye on the proceedings, that’s about all I can afford at the moment; and when I do commit to watching a match, it’s inevitably a daylong affair, as viewing space in Brooklyn is now coming at something of a premium, and once you stake out a space, you don’t want to let it go. I watched Brazil/Cote d’Ivoire at Madiba, the South African joint on Dekalb in Fort Greene, and was overwhelmed by the throng. Friends that work at restaurants throughout our fine borough report a dramatic tide of customers, the ebb and flow coinciding with FIFA’s schedule.
I don’t remember it being like this, last time around. Granted, I was leaving New York in July 2006, and I don’t remember much of the period immediately before. What I do remember, however, is that World Cup spectatorship was a relatively isolated phenomenon, with fans gathering in a few scattered bars on the Lower East Side, where the expatriates of the professional class would gather to watch the action and commiserate over being lost in a sea of red, white, and blue ignorance. I was still working in a restaurant at the time, one on the Upper West Side. For the duration of El Mundial, I witnessed an all out war for control of the television over the bar, with the largely Mexican and Central American kitchen and floor staff battling the bourgeois, largely white, American bar crowd. For some reason I still can’t entirely fathom, in this particular establishment, the bar patrons loved to watch golf, a sport that proceeds with all the kinetic energy of a caterpillar in its pupa stage. Yet, when the kitchen staff managed to commandeer the television for the hour or so between the lunch and dinner shifts—the point when the restaurant was at its most informal—the bar patrons would complain, at great length, about the tedium of soccer, about how they just didn’t understand the game, and about the enthusiasm of its fans. How, they wondered, could something so boring mean so much, to so many people? Soccer fanaticism confirmed my bar patrons in their jingoism because, once you assume that soccer is inherently boring, the only possible answer to their question is that people in the rest of the world are crazy—which is something that Americans are generally inclined to believe.
Or at least they were. It’s obviously still too early to tell, but I’m beginning to wonder if something has changed. And, keep in mind that I am, at best, a gloomy, cynical, disheartened wretch. I don’t trade in gooey sentiment or hopeful sloganeering. I believe in misery, and I believe that there is more than enough reason to be miserable, at the moment. That said, it seems like something is shaking loose. Americans have a very conflicted relationship to the game they call soccer (a word that somehow derives, I’ve learned from Brett Baldwin, from the game’s official moniker “association football”) and, even when American interest in the game has been low, American attitudes toward football/soccer have generally been as political as those of more rabid fans around the world. As my restaurant example suggests, a myriad of social, cultural, political, and economic conflicts are manifest in and through soccer in the United States, even if the lines of class affiliation and national identity characteristic of European football are not as clear, and even if some people claim not to care. At present, this dynamic shows up in the right-wing’s attempt to link the World Cup to President Obama’s “secular-socialist-Islamist” conspiracy. By forcing us to watch soccer, Glenn Beck argues, Comrade Obama is trying to turn America into Europe. Next thing you know, we’ll have Parisian-style public toilets lining Fifth Avenue! Good thing we’ve got the Second Amendment so we can defend ourselves against such government overreach.
Yet, for all that bluster, the ratings for the World Cup are up. The US/England game was watched by more people than the opening game of the NBA finals. The same applies, however, even to matches in which pretty boy douchebag Landon Donovan is not playing. The Brazil/Cote d’Ivoire game, for instance, was broadcast not on ESPN or ESPN2 but on ABC, in the middle of the afternoon, on a Sunday, the zero hour of American sports spectatorship. Perhaps more significantly (although it is a big country, so maybe this is no trick) Americans make up the largest portion of spectators in South Africa. None of this is conclusive, of course, yet it is suggestive, and the media who cover these things have wasted no time suggesting that maybe, just maybe, Americans are finally getting into it, that the beautiful game might finally be resonating on these shores, that—like it or not, Glenn Beck—football’s coming home.
Over at The Nation, Dave Zirin has been very attuned to the cultural politics of this moment, and I think he got it right when he argued that the rise of soccer fandom corresponds, in part, the subtle demographic shifts that have taken place, in the United States, since the passage of the 1965 Immigration Act. Right-wing opposition, Zirin posits, stems from the same phenomenon, as white Americans seek to fortify their already slim majority against Lothrop Stoddard’s “rising tide of color.”
While this explains a great deal, I’m not sure it’s the whole story. And what I’m wondering about now—and what gives me pause and opportunity for hope—is whether or not the generational and demographic shifts that are very clearly at work, in this moment, can be thought in terms of the waning of American empire. That’s a big, broad, not entirely coherent thought, so let me try to parse it out.
About two years ago, I had my introduction to American studies seminar read a short article, by Immanuel Wallerstein, called “The Curve of American Power.” First published in the New Left Review in 2006, “Curve” is a condensed version of the argument that Wallerstein has been making for years; namely, that alternations in the nature of global political economy threaten the bases of American political and economic power. Without getting into the K-waves of it, the argument is fairly straightforward: since 1945, America’s global political and economic power has rested upon its ability to dictate the terms of the world system. With European and East Asian industrial plants destroyed during World War II, the US became the producer, financier, and political broker of the so-called First World. Because of the presumed stability of the US government and economy, the dollar became the global reserve currency. Profits from US global supremacy were redistributed, domestically, into the development of the infrastructure and consumer culture we have come to associate with the suburban American middle-class. Such downward redistribution of wealth, coupled with the cultural politics of the Red Scare, stemmed dissent, thus keeping production humming.
Since the early 1970s, however, when European and Asian industrial capacity began to exceed that of the US, American hegemony over the international system has been threatened. American consumer culture and political power rested upon the ability to control the international market and, once forced to compete with other industrial powers, that power began to fade. In order to preserve profits, corporations began looking for ways to circumvent the power of labor, while the government began searching for new strategies through which to preserve America’s political might. This is, in David Harvey’s rendering, also the moment in which the financialization of the economy began to take shape. As competition rendered assets in the “real economy” less and less profitable, investors begin inventing derivatives based upon credit and currency markets, leading to ever more risky investment schemes that are less and less connected to the materiality of production. The edges of these pieces are somewhat jagged, yet they add up to a fairly clear picture. American power has been on the wane since the mid-1970s, Wallerstein argues, and every national security strategy, from then until now, has been predicated upon slowing its decline.
My rendering of the argument is piecemeal, at best, but then, so is Wallerstein’s. The point that I wanted to get to, though, is that, in sharing this line of argument with my undergraduates, I set off a firestorm. My students—my highly intellectual, politically savvy, bright and committed students—had a reaction to Wallerstein that was as visceral as it was bizarre (at least, to me). “You mean we’re not the best anymore?” Although we analyzed the article on its merits and its flaws, the general tone of our conversation followed this line. “How is it possible?” “I’ve never thought of that.” “How can we not be the best?”
Americans do not think of themselves as an imperial people, yet they have the imperial habit of thinking the best of themselves at all times, in all situations and—fair or not—the domestic arrangements of the last seventy-odd years have helped support this illusion. And in those moments when it was becoming painfully clear that America was not “the best,” that it had some painful, profound challenges to face, we Americans ducked those through fits of magical thinking. We ask for more government services even as we argue against government; we ask for high levels of super efficient government service, yet we refuse to accept the necessity of paying taxes, even when it means that our market-based expenses might be decreased. We elect Reagan to protect us from the downer Carter. We respond to President Obama most when he is telling us things we want to hear—about our goodness, our greatness, and our willingness to sacrifice. But, of course, we don’t want to sacrifice. The last great gasp of collective belief in this America might have come after 9/11, when it was—at least for a moment—possible to believe that our hurt was greater than the whole world, that no one had never been hurt like us before, that the worst thing ever had happened, and it had happened to us. Because we were great and good.
There is a generational fault line running through American culture, and the crack begins at the point where American power made its hairpin curve. On one side are those Americans who grew up in a world in which they could believe that they were at the top of the pyramid; on the other are those of us who have been told, our entire lives, that America is the greatest, even after that statement stopped matching our material reality. Those of us on the other side of that line, those of us born after such certainties were possible, have been slowly waking to the realization of our national decline. Some may celebrate it, others may not; everyone might have different ideas about what it means, but one way or another, we are losing our illusions, and that loss opens up new vistas, new possibilities.
At the US Social Forum, this week, the cry has gone out: “Another world is possible; another US is necessary.” I want to believe that, if some Americans are watching soccer, their interest indexes a new consciousness in formation, and of a chance of a truly post-colonial America.
I don’t remember it being like this, last time around. Granted, I was leaving New York in July 2006, and I don’t remember much of the period immediately before. What I do remember, however, is that World Cup spectatorship was a relatively isolated phenomenon, with fans gathering in a few scattered bars on the Lower East Side, where the expatriates of the professional class would gather to watch the action and commiserate over being lost in a sea of red, white, and blue ignorance. I was still working in a restaurant at the time, one on the Upper West Side. For the duration of El Mundial, I witnessed an all out war for control of the television over the bar, with the largely Mexican and Central American kitchen and floor staff battling the bourgeois, largely white, American bar crowd. For some reason I still can’t entirely fathom, in this particular establishment, the bar patrons loved to watch golf, a sport that proceeds with all the kinetic energy of a caterpillar in its pupa stage. Yet, when the kitchen staff managed to commandeer the television for the hour or so between the lunch and dinner shifts—the point when the restaurant was at its most informal—the bar patrons would complain, at great length, about the tedium of soccer, about how they just didn’t understand the game, and about the enthusiasm of its fans. How, they wondered, could something so boring mean so much, to so many people? Soccer fanaticism confirmed my bar patrons in their jingoism because, once you assume that soccer is inherently boring, the only possible answer to their question is that people in the rest of the world are crazy—which is something that Americans are generally inclined to believe.
Or at least they were. It’s obviously still too early to tell, but I’m beginning to wonder if something has changed. And, keep in mind that I am, at best, a gloomy, cynical, disheartened wretch. I don’t trade in gooey sentiment or hopeful sloganeering. I believe in misery, and I believe that there is more than enough reason to be miserable, at the moment. That said, it seems like something is shaking loose. Americans have a very conflicted relationship to the game they call soccer (a word that somehow derives, I’ve learned from Brett Baldwin, from the game’s official moniker “association football”) and, even when American interest in the game has been low, American attitudes toward football/soccer have generally been as political as those of more rabid fans around the world. As my restaurant example suggests, a myriad of social, cultural, political, and economic conflicts are manifest in and through soccer in the United States, even if the lines of class affiliation and national identity characteristic of European football are not as clear, and even if some people claim not to care. At present, this dynamic shows up in the right-wing’s attempt to link the World Cup to President Obama’s “secular-socialist-Islamist” conspiracy. By forcing us to watch soccer, Glenn Beck argues, Comrade Obama is trying to turn America into Europe. Next thing you know, we’ll have Parisian-style public toilets lining Fifth Avenue! Good thing we’ve got the Second Amendment so we can defend ourselves against such government overreach.
Yet, for all that bluster, the ratings for the World Cup are up. The US/England game was watched by more people than the opening game of the NBA finals. The same applies, however, even to matches in which pretty boy douchebag Landon Donovan is not playing. The Brazil/Cote d’Ivoire game, for instance, was broadcast not on ESPN or ESPN2 but on ABC, in the middle of the afternoon, on a Sunday, the zero hour of American sports spectatorship. Perhaps more significantly (although it is a big country, so maybe this is no trick) Americans make up the largest portion of spectators in South Africa. None of this is conclusive, of course, yet it is suggestive, and the media who cover these things have wasted no time suggesting that maybe, just maybe, Americans are finally getting into it, that the beautiful game might finally be resonating on these shores, that—like it or not, Glenn Beck—football’s coming home.
Over at The Nation, Dave Zirin has been very attuned to the cultural politics of this moment, and I think he got it right when he argued that the rise of soccer fandom corresponds, in part, the subtle demographic shifts that have taken place, in the United States, since the passage of the 1965 Immigration Act. Right-wing opposition, Zirin posits, stems from the same phenomenon, as white Americans seek to fortify their already slim majority against Lothrop Stoddard’s “rising tide of color.”
While this explains a great deal, I’m not sure it’s the whole story. And what I’m wondering about now—and what gives me pause and opportunity for hope—is whether or not the generational and demographic shifts that are very clearly at work, in this moment, can be thought in terms of the waning of American empire. That’s a big, broad, not entirely coherent thought, so let me try to parse it out.
About two years ago, I had my introduction to American studies seminar read a short article, by Immanuel Wallerstein, called “The Curve of American Power.” First published in the New Left Review in 2006, “Curve” is a condensed version of the argument that Wallerstein has been making for years; namely, that alternations in the nature of global political economy threaten the bases of American political and economic power. Without getting into the K-waves of it, the argument is fairly straightforward: since 1945, America’s global political and economic power has rested upon its ability to dictate the terms of the world system. With European and East Asian industrial plants destroyed during World War II, the US became the producer, financier, and political broker of the so-called First World. Because of the presumed stability of the US government and economy, the dollar became the global reserve currency. Profits from US global supremacy were redistributed, domestically, into the development of the infrastructure and consumer culture we have come to associate with the suburban American middle-class. Such downward redistribution of wealth, coupled with the cultural politics of the Red Scare, stemmed dissent, thus keeping production humming.
Since the early 1970s, however, when European and Asian industrial capacity began to exceed that of the US, American hegemony over the international system has been threatened. American consumer culture and political power rested upon the ability to control the international market and, once forced to compete with other industrial powers, that power began to fade. In order to preserve profits, corporations began looking for ways to circumvent the power of labor, while the government began searching for new strategies through which to preserve America’s political might. This is, in David Harvey’s rendering, also the moment in which the financialization of the economy began to take shape. As competition rendered assets in the “real economy” less and less profitable, investors begin inventing derivatives based upon credit and currency markets, leading to ever more risky investment schemes that are less and less connected to the materiality of production. The edges of these pieces are somewhat jagged, yet they add up to a fairly clear picture. American power has been on the wane since the mid-1970s, Wallerstein argues, and every national security strategy, from then until now, has been predicated upon slowing its decline.
My rendering of the argument is piecemeal, at best, but then, so is Wallerstein’s. The point that I wanted to get to, though, is that, in sharing this line of argument with my undergraduates, I set off a firestorm. My students—my highly intellectual, politically savvy, bright and committed students—had a reaction to Wallerstein that was as visceral as it was bizarre (at least, to me). “You mean we’re not the best anymore?” Although we analyzed the article on its merits and its flaws, the general tone of our conversation followed this line. “How is it possible?” “I’ve never thought of that.” “How can we not be the best?”
Americans do not think of themselves as an imperial people, yet they have the imperial habit of thinking the best of themselves at all times, in all situations and—fair or not—the domestic arrangements of the last seventy-odd years have helped support this illusion. And in those moments when it was becoming painfully clear that America was not “the best,” that it had some painful, profound challenges to face, we Americans ducked those through fits of magical thinking. We ask for more government services even as we argue against government; we ask for high levels of super efficient government service, yet we refuse to accept the necessity of paying taxes, even when it means that our market-based expenses might be decreased. We elect Reagan to protect us from the downer Carter. We respond to President Obama most when he is telling us things we want to hear—about our goodness, our greatness, and our willingness to sacrifice. But, of course, we don’t want to sacrifice. The last great gasp of collective belief in this America might have come after 9/11, when it was—at least for a moment—possible to believe that our hurt was greater than the whole world, that no one had never been hurt like us before, that the worst thing ever had happened, and it had happened to us. Because we were great and good.
There is a generational fault line running through American culture, and the crack begins at the point where American power made its hairpin curve. On one side are those Americans who grew up in a world in which they could believe that they were at the top of the pyramid; on the other are those of us who have been told, our entire lives, that America is the greatest, even after that statement stopped matching our material reality. Those of us on the other side of that line, those of us born after such certainties were possible, have been slowly waking to the realization of our national decline. Some may celebrate it, others may not; everyone might have different ideas about what it means, but one way or another, we are losing our illusions, and that loss opens up new vistas, new possibilities.
At the US Social Forum, this week, the cry has gone out: “Another world is possible; another US is necessary.” I want to believe that, if some Americans are watching soccer, their interest indexes a new consciousness in formation, and of a chance of a truly post-colonial America.
Muslims on Main Street
The Utne Reader has printed an abridged version of my Spring 2010 Bidoun essay. I haven't seen the physical issue, yet, but you can find it online at the link below.
And I promise a real blog entry by the end of the day. Seriously. I will not be deterred by the World Cup. I will not be deterred by writer's block.
http://www.utne.com/Politics/Elkader-Iowa-Abd-al-Qadir-al-Jazairi.aspx
And I promise a real blog entry by the end of the day. Seriously. I will not be deterred by the World Cup. I will not be deterred by writer's block.
http://www.utne.com/Politics/Elkader-Iowa-Abd-al-Qadir-al-Jazairi.aspx
Friday, June 11, 2010
Algeria v. Slovenia
Sunday, 7:30am. Who's there? And which brand of Marxist-inflected psychoanalysis will triumph?
Saturday, June 05, 2010
Solidarity, democracy, and the future
In the June 2 issue of the New York Times, Thomas Friedman criticized the Palestinian solidarity movement for emphasizing the Israeli blockade of Gaza over other human rights crises in the Middle East. He writes: “I have no problem with Turkey or other humanitarian groups criticizing Israel. But I have a big problem when people get so agitated by Israel’s actions in Gaza but are unmoved by Syria’s involvement in the murder of the prime minister of Lebanon, by the Iranian regime’s killing of its own citizens demonstrating for the right to have their votes counted, by Muslim suicide bombers murdering nearly 100 Ahmadi Muslims in mosques in Pakistan on Friday and by pro-Hamas gunmen destroying a UN-sponsored summer camp in Gaza because it wouldn’t force Islamic fundamentalism down the throats of children.” Though he offers no evidence to support his point, Friedman uses this supposed lack of passion to suggest that the solidarity movement is, at base, motivated by hate. The argument that critics of Israel are closet anti-Semites is, of course, all too familiar, but in Friedman’s case, it comes with a prescriptive edge. If you want to talk about Israel and Palestine, he seems to say, address yourselves to all the other problems in the Middle East. Work those out, and then we’ll get back to you.
Friedman is an intellectual featherweight, yet his incoherent screed offers an opportunity for those of us in the Palestinian solidarity movement to clarify our position with regard to the struggle. When the Ahmadis are being slaughtered in Lahore, when the streets of Kingston are running with blood, and when the Gulf of Mexico is drowning in oil, what is it about Palestine that commands our attention?
The most reasonable answer to this question may be the overwhelming human misery caused by Israeli policies toward Palestine. Despite having the right of return under international law, Palestinians remain the largest and oldest refugee population in the world, with over 4.6 million in exile, 2.2. million of whom live in some fifty-nine refugee camps throughout the Arab world. Since 1967, the Palestinians who remained in Gaza, the West Bank, and East Jerusalem have lived under Israeli military occupation; at present, the occupied territories are home to 3.2 million. Together, the landmass of the territories is less than one thousand square kilometers, making for a population density of 3,200 per square kilometer. By contrast, the most densely populated state in the US, New Jersey, has only 452 people per square mile. Since 2007, the 1.2 million Palestinians in Gaza have suffered under an Israeli blockade prompted by the election of Hamas in 2006. According to UNRWA, the Strip receives, at present, less than a quarter of the provisions it did before the blockade began, and no provisions are allowed into Gaza without Israel’s approval. Travel between the West Bank and Gaza is all but impossible, and commerce is almost unheard of, even as Israel builds new roads to facilitate Israeli settlers’ movements through the occupied West Bank.
Prior to December 2008, the situation in Palestine was merely intolerable. Since then, following over three weeks of airstrikes by the Israeli military, life in Gaza has been made almost impossible. Using the heinously retrograde logic that civilians were harboring terrorists—“terrorists” in this case referring to the democratically-elected Hamas government—the IDF bombed civilian targets throughout the strip, even, at one point, targeting UNRWA relief workers and civilian press. Israeli spokespeople argued that the bombardment was prompted by security concerns stemming from rockets fired from Gaza into Israel. If Hamas could not ensure Israeli security, they argued, the IDF would. In point of fact, rocket fire from Gaza into Israel had decreased more than 98% following the ceasefire of 21 June 2008; it only picked up after Israel violated the ceasefire agreement with an attack on cross-border tunnels in Gaza on 4 November. This date is very significant, and it speaks to the perfidy of the Israeli government when it comes to the question of Palestine or the so-called “peace process.” November 4, 2008 was, of course, the day before the US Presidential election; the attacks were called off within about twenty-four hours of Barack Obama’s inauguration. The Israeli siege of Gaza, in other words, was the consequence of a political calculation, because it was generally assumed that the interregnum between Bush and Obama would be the last time Israel had carte blanche when it came to enforcing its will over the occupied territories. This reading of the situation is more or less confirmed by the report issued by the UN Fact Finding Mission on the Gaza Conflict, which states that “the attack on the only remaining flour producing factory, the destruction of a large part of the Gaza egg production, the bulldozing of huge tracts of agricultural land, and the bombing of some two hundred industrial facilities, could not on any basis be justified on military grounds. Those attacks,” the report concluded, “had nothing whatsoever to do with the firing of rockets and mortars at Israel.” Operation Cast Lead reduced much of the strip to rubble, and left more than 1300 Palestinians, and 13 Israelis, dead.
The physical toll of the occupation is more than enough reason to support Palestine, but it is—I want to suggest—only one of the conditions that compels our solidarity. Perhaps more important is the relationship between what Jean Genet used to call the Palestinian revolution and the future of the Arab world. Friedman claims that those of us in the Palestinian solidarity movement have not taken into account the myriad crimes committed throughout the greater Middle East by the various sects and regimes that control the region, suggesting that our support for Palestine is evidence of either hatred or a blind fanatical conviction. It is difficult to see how Friedman maintains any credibility on this point when he mentions Syrian involvement in the murder of Rafiq Hariri—a charge often advanced but never proven—and fails to mention the very real, systematic, and brutal abuses committed, as a matter of course, by the government of Saudi Arabia, or the suppression of Muslim communities in his darling of the developing world, India. Of course, the only constant in Friedman’s work is a general hostility to reason, so I won’t dwell overlong on the speciousness of his argument. Although the equivalence he poses between the scope of Israel’s crime in Palestine and the violence and human rights abuses meted out elsewhere in the Arab world is false, I would argue that our support for Palestine emerges, in part, from a consideration of these very crimes.
To support the Palestinian cause, in my estimation, is to support the cause of justice throughout the greater Middle East—or, what Friedman sometimes calls, for no particular reason, the Arab-Muslim world. Of the many facts about Palestine and the Palestinian revolution that have been suppressed in the United States, one of the most significant is that the Palestinian revolution has, at various points in its history, understood itself in opposition to the many autocratic and undemocratic regimes that control the Arab Middle East. This is one of the reasons why Palestinian rights are suppressed in places like Jordan, Kuwait, and Lebanon. Historically, most Arab regimes have been interested in the Palestinian cause to the extent that Palestine presents either a point of popular democratic mobilization against their rule, or a safety valve through which to redirect the legitimate political grievances that emerge under autocracies. For most Arab leaders who wield the power of the state, Palestine is important as a matter of state, and a matter between states, because of its potential to inspire a democratic popular front throughout the greater Arab world. One gleans hints of this potentiality in the aid flotillas that have attempted to break the Israeli blockade of Gaza; one sees it, as well, in the street protests that erupted in the capitals of the Arab world during the Gaza War in 2008-09. On the other hand, one sees the ineptitude of Arab statecraft in the 2009 summit at Sharm-el-Sheikh called in response to the bombing of Gaza. Lacking any signals out of Washington as to how the wind would blow under Obama, various statesmen from throughout the Arab world could not come to any meaningful conclusion about the crisis.
It would be easy to take this point as one more strike against the Arab world, or a backhanded case for the Zionist claim that Israel is the only democracy in the region. To do so would be to grossly misconstrue the point. Solidarity with Palestine, at its best, and at its broadest, has meant—historically—solidarity with democracy itself; not the democracy that George W. Bush or other missionary statesmen have sought to impose upon the Arab Middle East like so many other political “solutions” imposed upon the Middle East since the end of the first World War, but the real deal democracy that inheres in the collective and that is the only guarantee of the individual and her liberties. Democracy, as Fred Moten has argued, is to identify with the common, and the commons; it is the condition of all state structures in that it is the very thing that might undermine those structures. This is democracy at its most dangerous, its most powerful, and sometimes its most problematic. It is the reason why Fanon insisted—against the entirety of the Marxist tradition—that we attend to the lumpen, and that we learn from the lumpen even as they learn from an “us” that I’m not quite sure can be said to exist. This is the democracy that allows “us” to find ourselves as such. It is this democracy that has the only chance of saving this doomed world. I am in solidarity with Palestine because I am in solidarity with democracy and because I believe that, by being in solidarity with Palestine, we might yet save ourselves.
Friedman is an intellectual featherweight, yet his incoherent screed offers an opportunity for those of us in the Palestinian solidarity movement to clarify our position with regard to the struggle. When the Ahmadis are being slaughtered in Lahore, when the streets of Kingston are running with blood, and when the Gulf of Mexico is drowning in oil, what is it about Palestine that commands our attention?
The most reasonable answer to this question may be the overwhelming human misery caused by Israeli policies toward Palestine. Despite having the right of return under international law, Palestinians remain the largest and oldest refugee population in the world, with over 4.6 million in exile, 2.2. million of whom live in some fifty-nine refugee camps throughout the Arab world. Since 1967, the Palestinians who remained in Gaza, the West Bank, and East Jerusalem have lived under Israeli military occupation; at present, the occupied territories are home to 3.2 million. Together, the landmass of the territories is less than one thousand square kilometers, making for a population density of 3,200 per square kilometer. By contrast, the most densely populated state in the US, New Jersey, has only 452 people per square mile. Since 2007, the 1.2 million Palestinians in Gaza have suffered under an Israeli blockade prompted by the election of Hamas in 2006. According to UNRWA, the Strip receives, at present, less than a quarter of the provisions it did before the blockade began, and no provisions are allowed into Gaza without Israel’s approval. Travel between the West Bank and Gaza is all but impossible, and commerce is almost unheard of, even as Israel builds new roads to facilitate Israeli settlers’ movements through the occupied West Bank.
Prior to December 2008, the situation in Palestine was merely intolerable. Since then, following over three weeks of airstrikes by the Israeli military, life in Gaza has been made almost impossible. Using the heinously retrograde logic that civilians were harboring terrorists—“terrorists” in this case referring to the democratically-elected Hamas government—the IDF bombed civilian targets throughout the strip, even, at one point, targeting UNRWA relief workers and civilian press. Israeli spokespeople argued that the bombardment was prompted by security concerns stemming from rockets fired from Gaza into Israel. If Hamas could not ensure Israeli security, they argued, the IDF would. In point of fact, rocket fire from Gaza into Israel had decreased more than 98% following the ceasefire of 21 June 2008; it only picked up after Israel violated the ceasefire agreement with an attack on cross-border tunnels in Gaza on 4 November. This date is very significant, and it speaks to the perfidy of the Israeli government when it comes to the question of Palestine or the so-called “peace process.” November 4, 2008 was, of course, the day before the US Presidential election; the attacks were called off within about twenty-four hours of Barack Obama’s inauguration. The Israeli siege of Gaza, in other words, was the consequence of a political calculation, because it was generally assumed that the interregnum between Bush and Obama would be the last time Israel had carte blanche when it came to enforcing its will over the occupied territories. This reading of the situation is more or less confirmed by the report issued by the UN Fact Finding Mission on the Gaza Conflict, which states that “the attack on the only remaining flour producing factory, the destruction of a large part of the Gaza egg production, the bulldozing of huge tracts of agricultural land, and the bombing of some two hundred industrial facilities, could not on any basis be justified on military grounds. Those attacks,” the report concluded, “had nothing whatsoever to do with the firing of rockets and mortars at Israel.” Operation Cast Lead reduced much of the strip to rubble, and left more than 1300 Palestinians, and 13 Israelis, dead.
The physical toll of the occupation is more than enough reason to support Palestine, but it is—I want to suggest—only one of the conditions that compels our solidarity. Perhaps more important is the relationship between what Jean Genet used to call the Palestinian revolution and the future of the Arab world. Friedman claims that those of us in the Palestinian solidarity movement have not taken into account the myriad crimes committed throughout the greater Middle East by the various sects and regimes that control the region, suggesting that our support for Palestine is evidence of either hatred or a blind fanatical conviction. It is difficult to see how Friedman maintains any credibility on this point when he mentions Syrian involvement in the murder of Rafiq Hariri—a charge often advanced but never proven—and fails to mention the very real, systematic, and brutal abuses committed, as a matter of course, by the government of Saudi Arabia, or the suppression of Muslim communities in his darling of the developing world, India. Of course, the only constant in Friedman’s work is a general hostility to reason, so I won’t dwell overlong on the speciousness of his argument. Although the equivalence he poses between the scope of Israel’s crime in Palestine and the violence and human rights abuses meted out elsewhere in the Arab world is false, I would argue that our support for Palestine emerges, in part, from a consideration of these very crimes.
To support the Palestinian cause, in my estimation, is to support the cause of justice throughout the greater Middle East—or, what Friedman sometimes calls, for no particular reason, the Arab-Muslim world. Of the many facts about Palestine and the Palestinian revolution that have been suppressed in the United States, one of the most significant is that the Palestinian revolution has, at various points in its history, understood itself in opposition to the many autocratic and undemocratic regimes that control the Arab Middle East. This is one of the reasons why Palestinian rights are suppressed in places like Jordan, Kuwait, and Lebanon. Historically, most Arab regimes have been interested in the Palestinian cause to the extent that Palestine presents either a point of popular democratic mobilization against their rule, or a safety valve through which to redirect the legitimate political grievances that emerge under autocracies. For most Arab leaders who wield the power of the state, Palestine is important as a matter of state, and a matter between states, because of its potential to inspire a democratic popular front throughout the greater Arab world. One gleans hints of this potentiality in the aid flotillas that have attempted to break the Israeli blockade of Gaza; one sees it, as well, in the street protests that erupted in the capitals of the Arab world during the Gaza War in 2008-09. On the other hand, one sees the ineptitude of Arab statecraft in the 2009 summit at Sharm-el-Sheikh called in response to the bombing of Gaza. Lacking any signals out of Washington as to how the wind would blow under Obama, various statesmen from throughout the Arab world could not come to any meaningful conclusion about the crisis.
It would be easy to take this point as one more strike against the Arab world, or a backhanded case for the Zionist claim that Israel is the only democracy in the region. To do so would be to grossly misconstrue the point. Solidarity with Palestine, at its best, and at its broadest, has meant—historically—solidarity with democracy itself; not the democracy that George W. Bush or other missionary statesmen have sought to impose upon the Arab Middle East like so many other political “solutions” imposed upon the Middle East since the end of the first World War, but the real deal democracy that inheres in the collective and that is the only guarantee of the individual and her liberties. Democracy, as Fred Moten has argued, is to identify with the common, and the commons; it is the condition of all state structures in that it is the very thing that might undermine those structures. This is democracy at its most dangerous, its most powerful, and sometimes its most problematic. It is the reason why Fanon insisted—against the entirety of the Marxist tradition—that we attend to the lumpen, and that we learn from the lumpen even as they learn from an “us” that I’m not quite sure can be said to exist. This is the democracy that allows “us” to find ourselves as such. It is this democracy that has the only chance of saving this doomed world. I am in solidarity with Palestine because I am in solidarity with democracy and because I believe that, by being in solidarity with Palestine, we might yet save ourselves.
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