The Suits and Trappings of Shanti; or, The Pain of Disco

If you like Bollywood movies — with all the singing, dancing, costumes, and scenary — you’ll love Om Shanti Om, produced in 2006. I just watched it yesterday. One of my colleagues screens a Bollywood film every semester for her friends, followed by a lot of delicious food and things that go with food… such as conversation. Usually, these films are like 3 hour music videos with predictable romantic plots, but Om Shanti Om is somewhat different than the usual Bollywood fare, because it is a parody of itself… and of the whole Bollywood film industry.

I’m blogging on this in part because my theory class just began reading The Holder of the World by Bharati Mukherjee, which is an amusing novel that takes place in seventeenth-century New England, alludes multiple times to Hawthorne’s Scarlet Letter, and then travels to the cost of India via the ships of the East India Companyat the very beginning of England’s mercantile and colonial project there.

What do these two texts have in common? Honestly, not much, except that I happen to be teaching one at roughly the same time as I watched the other, and both have something to do with India. Mostly, I just want an excuse to post up this YouTube video of a song from Om Shanti Om — “Dard-e-disco” — because I think it’s hilarious.  The chorus translates as “In my heart is the pain of disco, pain of disco, pain of disco.”

For a translation of the lyrics to the song, go this website here, and scroll down to “The Pain of Disco.”

But perhaps I can think of a more significant relation between the two texts. The ”Pain of Disco” scene in the movie reminded me of a passage in Holder of the World, which is just as much a “romance novel” as it is a “postcolonial” one. In this one passage, a fisherman on the Coromandel Coast of India witnesses an English man and woman riding horseback on the beach  and kissing in public. He is very excited and decides to move to Europe to experience what he imagines must be an exotic and liberating world “without rules.” Of course, at the time, Puritan New England, where the two characters came from, had just witnessed repressive witch trials, so it was hardly a liberated world without rules. But in seventeenth-century India, the sort of European one was likely to encounter would have been an outlaw. (Is it any different today? I don’t know.)  What I like about this passage is the way it flips the gaze — an Indian fantasizing wrongly about Europe in the same manner that the Europeans were at that time fantasizing about India (and the novel proceeds to allude to one of those fantasies: John Dryden’s 1675 play, Aureng-Zebe.)

And I guess I like how the movie Om Shanti Om also comments (very indirectly) on India’s relationship to America through this video and through the plot. In a sense, the movie is reversing the scopophilic gaze we got in Slumdog Millionaire, that I blogged on a few months ago [here]. So, basically, that’s the topic of my blog post today – how the novel Holder of the World and the movie Om Shanti Om both deconstruct the long,  historically convoluted, transnational relationship between East and West.

SPOILER ALERT: Seriouisly skip this paragraph if you haven’t seen the movie and want to. The plot has two parts. Part one takes place inside the Bollywood of the 1970s, as a young man named Om struggling to become a famous actor falls in love with a rising young starlet named Shanti — the star of a movie fittingly titled Dreamy Girl. Om eventually discovers that Shanti is not only secretly married to the producer but also pregnant with his child. The producer fears this might interfere with the success of his Bollywood film company, so he decides to kill her and hence becomes the arch-villain of the story. When our hero Om finds out, he tries to save Shanti and also dies. So ends part one. Part two is thirty years later. Our hero has been reincarnated as the son of the most successful Bollywood actor — something like the Bollywood version of Charlie Sheen, son of Martin Sheen, or Michael Douglass, son of Kirk Douglass. Anyway, his name is still Om, but at first our reincarnated hero is a spoiled, self-centered brat (like Charlie Sheen). This all changes when he accidentally visits the scene of his and Shanti’s death. There, he is psychically merged with his previous self. His two identities become united, and he remembers the crime that he witnessed. For the rest of the movie, he attempts to catch the villain the same way Hamlet tried to catch his uncle in Shakespeare’s play — by reproducing the crime in art form. Coincidentally, the villain has just recently returned from America, where he has been making millions of dollars as a film producer for the past thirty years — ever since that fated day of his criminal act. As in Hamlet, Om’s efforts fail because the woman he hires to be Shanti can not convincingly play the role, but fortunately for our sense of poetic justice, the real ghost of Shanti (not just her “suits and trappings”) appears and gets her revenge.

Although the villain’s detour in America is a minor part of the plot, it is significant. It  reminds me of Salman Rushdie’s novel Fury (published 2001, just a month or so before 9/11)  in which America is a place of refuge for a character who has committed crimes in his home country, and hence “America” psychically and symbolically takes on all sorts of strange, convoluted, and contradictory connotations that you might imagine it would take for a character who is running from his past and toward an indeterminate future. In the case of Om Shanti Om, consider that this movie is a parody of Bollywood, and the fact that the evil film producer would flee Bollywood because of his crime and go to Hollywood (which doesn’t just rhyme with Bollywood, right?) seems more than a little bit suggestive. And what it seems to me to be suggesting is something about the transnational nature of the culture industry itself.

But what?

As I mentioned in my blog about Slumdog Millionaire, the real question one should be asking about it is not “what does this say about India” (which is what the mainstream media was asking), but rather “what does this movie say about Europeans and Americans?” Similarly, Om Shanti Om and its self-consciously silly video on “The Pain of Disco” suggests not something about American disco or Hollwyood, but about how India feels about its relationship to the American culture industry — perhaps at the heart of this relationship is both a dream and a crime.

Found in Tranference

There are two inspirations for this post. First, an acquaintance of mine circulated on one of those “online social networks“ a YouTube clip of this music video “Lloyd, I’m Ready to Be Heartbroken,” by the band Camera Obscura, in which the boy and the girl dance through the shopping district of Shibuya in Tokyo for no sensible reason at all. Second, I’m going to be leading a three-week study-abroad trip in Japan this May, and since I don’t really have anything to blog about this week, I thought I’d blog about something that relates to my upcoming trip… even if the music video doesn’t really relate to my trip… or relate to anything at all.

Except maybe it does…. I’m going to try to say something immensely clever by the end of this post. What that will be, I don’t know yet. I hope you’re as excited and shaking with anticipation as I am about it. Anyway, here’s the music video, which my aforementioned acquaintance from the unnamed online social network claimed would be an “optical seducation.”

Oh, oh, so fun, so fun, indeed — a seductive frolic through color and 60’s kitsch. I’d never heard of the band Camera Obscura before, but because of the location in Shibuya, I was reminded of the movie, Lost in Translation. And if you haven’t seen this movie yet, you should. And if you don’t think you should, then it’s quite possible that you’ve got, um, you know… “issues.”

That movie came out in 2003, and the song about Lloyd came out in 2006, and so maybe the people in Camera Obscura saw the movie… but so what? Who cares that the synapses of my distrubed brain connected one thing with the other?

But here’s the thing — the thing of the two things. The two things are opposites. The music video is the reverse of the movie.

What? Is this the clever thing I promised?… Hold on.

The movie of course is about two characters — Bill Murray and Scarlet Johanson — who are “lost” even before they get to Japan, but who are even more lost in Japan where they don’t know the language or the culture. Obviously the whole “being lost” thing is a metaphor for how meaningless their lives had become before they even arrived on the scene. But they don’t realize their existential lostness until they encounter a literal lostness – similar to the TV show Lost.  (Except the literal lostness is actually the metaphorical vehical to explore their existential lostness.) Although the movie seems at first to be about their confrontation with the “other” foreign culture, we eventually realize that the real other is their own self.  I’ve written about the American fascination with Japanese otherness before [here]. Eventually Murray and Johanson become friends, come to like being in Japan… and find that their lives have meaning. In other words, they translate themselves. That is to say, it is their confrontation with otherness, with strangers, that allows them to reconcile themselves to their own internal otherness — to the fact that they had long before become strangers to themselves.

The music video “Lloyd, I’m Ready to Be Heartbroken,” [lyrics]  would seem to be the total opposite. Instead of a confrontation with the other, the music video is fantasy escape into total otherness — the Shibuya skyline, the retro-60s clothing and furniture, the ecstacy, etc.  This is what Freud calls “transference” when you redirect your libidinal desires or feelings onto an idealized object. In this case, the idealized object is the metonymic symbolization of perfect happiness, and I’m using the word somewhat differently than Freud. For him, the object of transference was the doctor himself — the One who knows all,  the one who knows the secret cure. But the culture industry is in many ways a substitute doctor. And in the case of the music video, the singer longs to be the happy, skipping blond couple who seem to have some secret knowledge of the way to happiness. This is the solution to her identity, which is why she sings, ”I know you can stay a girl by holding a boy’s hand.” The knowledge of this secret happiness is key, especially since the singer clearly knows that she does not know it. And in a sense, she doesn’t want to BE them at all (because who would want to, really?); she just wants to know what they know. She is “ready to be heartbroken.”

This is the secret to happiness, she believes… a secret she wants but doesn’t really want… but of course the writers of the song don’t really believe that. They are playing the standard love narrative, which soons becomes uncanny and strange, when the couple skips past the allusion to Andy Warhol’s famously postmodern Brillo boxes and we discover how completely reproducable Lloyd is. Immediately after the Brillo/Lloyd boxes we enter a Hollywood cinemascape from a 50s musical. The “boy” is, like the Hollywood romantic musical, a fabrication — a substitute for another, a constructed thing that confers identity on the girl. There is no unique “him” that is needed. Any “him” will do.

So, on the one hand we have Lost in Translation, with its fearful confrontation with otherness that leads the characters out of their psychological feeling of void. And on the other hand, we have the music video, with its desire for otherness that reminds the singer (if not also us) that her life is not the idealized one — an other that seems to be not just difference, but the big Other. The big Other with a capital O (according to Lacan) is the symbolic order that demands the subject not necessarily conform to it, but — at least — relate to IT somehow, whatever IT is, which of course we don’t really know because we only know that by holding the boy’s hand,  the girl gets some kind of status conferred upon her.

So, I’m almost done, amost done trying to sound clever. So, here’s the thing: in a sense, the music video is the flip side of the movie. What does this dialectic between two opposites teach us? Search me, I’ve lost myself.

teabagged on tax day

I got teabagged on tax day. It’s true. But it’s not what you think. Or maybe it is. As my blog-comrade Dr. J pointed out in her post a week ago, the teabagger tactics are a hilarious semiotic blunder by the conservative movement — unaware as they seem to be of the word’s sexual double entendre.

More about “teabagged on tax day“, posted with vodpod.

Anyway, as my other blog-comrade Dr. DRL noted yesterday, apparently some believe that “taxation with representation” is analogous enough to “taxation without representation” that they ought to channel the spirit of the Boston Tea Party. It’s funny and sad on too many levels…… and so, like many at my university, I came to work today and encountered a couple of teabags…  So as not to offend anyone, I will refrain from mentioning where I and many other of my colleagues encountered them…  

… and there’s an amusing coincidence here, because today in my class we were planning to discuss political tactics and how they connect with literary production and cultural identities. For instance, consider the strangeness of the Boston Teaparty itself — a bunch of white people dressing up like the native Americans. Why appropriate a Native American identity? And why do this when the white colonists had been killing Native Americans for centuries? Few are taught all of the “causes” of the Revolutionary war in their high school ideology classes (oops, I mean, high school history classes), but one of the reasons for the Revolutionary War was the desire of the very wealthy to speculate on land west of the Appalachians. Yes, indeed, this was the original subprime housing market fiasco. The British Empire was at that moment actually honoring its treaties with the Native Americans who lived there (not typical of the Empire, but sometimes they did honor their treaties)… So the irony of dressing up as Native Americans in order to symbolize liberty is a historically painful irony. And it’s no far stretch of the imagination to guess that the Boston Teaparty inspired one of the most terribly written novels to still be considered an American classic — James Fenimore Cooper’s The Last of the Mohicans, a novel in which a white guy becomes an American hero by somehow becoming a better Indian than the Indians themselves.

And now, the conservative moment has accidentally appropriated the sexual act of teabagging… Hmmmmm… More could be said, such as what has been said at The Huffington Post, but I think I’ll leave it at that.

Theory and Neologisms: the “Prosumer” or the Journalist

The other day, some veteran journalists came to my campus to participate in a panel discussion about the future of the news media. As everyone knows, newspapers these days are struggling to maintain themselves, and one of the panelists cited the statistic that approximately 12,000 journalists had lost their jobs in recent years (out of a total of 50,000 or so… sorry about the inexactness of the numbers, but I didn’t take notes, so I’m writing from memory.) What, unfortunately, none of the panelists adequately addressed was probably what was most on the minds of those in the audience — jobs. If newspapers are firing not hiring, then what kind of career in journalism can an English major look forward to? One of the panelists briefly suggested that graduating seniors should look to gain life experiences after college (teaching English abroad, for instance) that could lead to a writerly life, but sadly none of his options included a paid position in traditional newsmedia. His comment was meant to be consoling, but it was actually the opposite — quite scary to all those students in the room who were hoping to earn some money after college and could ill afford to spend it on more life experiences. Also sadly, all of the special projects to revive quality journalism that these panelists were discussing were exactly that – special. And by special, I mean receiving some special public grant or some special support from a university committed to promoting quality journalism for the sake of its undergraduates . . . um . . . so that they can be trained for jobs that don’t exist.  (Don’t get me wrong; I was very impressed by all of the panelists and wish the kind of work they do was supported even more than it is, but still, I am concerned about my students earning a living after they graduate.)

The day before this panel discussion, my blog-comrade Topspun over at SevenRed recently posted a lengthy discussion of the word “prosumer” [here], a neologism that combines producer and consumer. Now, to be honest, I’d really never read anything about this neologism before, so I have to admit my ignorance, but it seems that we can relate the term to some of the economic and professional transformations of journalism.  According to Topspun’s post as well as to wikipedia (sorry, I’m being lazy today), the neologism “prosumer” was first coined in 1980 by Alvin Toffler in his book The Third Wave, a book which I’ve never heard of until now. The idea of the prosumer, basically, is that the traditional division between the act of production and the act of consumption does not hold today. Not only does the internet and other communications technologies enable production to be more responsive to the desires of consumers, but even a lot of innovative work (i.e., intellectual labor) is done by the consumers themselves rather than by men in suits sitting in office buildings or industrial park complexes. One example of the prosumer is bloggers — consumers of internet knowledge who also produce internet knowledge. Similarly, YouTubers. In a sense, bloggers and YouTubers are like unpaid journalists (through sometimes bloggers actually are paid journalists).

So, what’s my point? Admittedly, I’m struggling to get to it — and my struggle is reminding me of how my “intro-to-theory” students probably feel when they have to blog for my class about concepts that are as new and foreign to them as “prosumer” is to me. And as I am writing now, I expect that probably some of my students will have smarter things to say than I do about prosumption or whatever, but to finally get to the point of this blog, I think my main question is this: do we understand the word “prosumer” to indicate something that actually exists or do we understand it as a conceputalization of a problematic relation?

And here’s why I ask that. It seems to me that there are those who gleefully see the “prosumer” as the economic hope of the future and the spitting image of the postmodern, entrepreneurial, do-it-yourself, get-rich-quick individual. For an example, see this rather obnoxious book Pro-Sumer Power! that I just found on-line. (I didn’t finish reading its introduction, because it kind of made me nauseous.) For these people, the idea that the consumer can also be a producer is both liberatory and powerful, because production is no longer controlled by the capitalist owner of the factory, newspaper, etc.

But this seems to me to be an insidiouis ruse for two reasons. First, unlike laborers and employees, prosumers don’t get paid. Now, it’s possible that they might end up making millions of dollars if their blog or YouTube production hits the big time (such as the blogger Diablo Cody who later was hired to write the screenplay for the hit film Juno.) But of course, most don’t (and Diablo Cody was actually making money by stripping until she was “discovered” by the mainstream media), and so I’m sceptical of people who see prosumption as somehow “liberatory” or “powerful” or “resistant” to capitalism. If anything, it seems to fit perfectly with the interests of capitalists who ultimately want to increase productivity and decrease wages. And with prosumption, they get their labor for free.

This is insidious in the same way that the culture of Starbucks and Barnes &Noble are insidious according to Naomi Klein in No Logo. What is curious about that culture is that these companies enlist college graduates to work there because college graduates like coffee-house culture and books. In a sense, everyone in the place (whether one works there or not) is participating in the production of the socially meaningful experience of being there. And that is why Starbucks and Barnes & Nobel can pay its workers so little… because the workers are supposedly supposed to enjoy it. (And this reminds me of Slavoj Zizek’s jokes when he appeared on NiteBeat about the postmodern injunction to enjoy what one in reality has to to do anyway…. And it also reminds me of the condition of teachers who get paid so little and get so little respect because supposedly their jobs are so emotionally meaningful to them that the work is its own reward.) Likewise, to return to my original observation about the panel of esteemed journalists, today’s college graduates are supposed to do prosumptive labor not for a salary but for their own enjoyment and to gain life experiences.

However, to return to my question about how we understand the word “prosumer,” my main point is that we should think of it as a conceptual tool for thinking about a problematic relation instead of thinking about it as a thing. In other words, not only should we be skeptical of those who think prosumption is liberatory, powerful, and resistant, but we should be skeptical of those who think prosumers exist. Certainly bloggers and YouTubers exist, but what does it mean to call them prosumers? What such pundits of prosumption are doing is taking a neologism and reifying it. Reification is when a concept is removed from its context and placed in another context in order to assert some kind of independent, a priori existence. Or, as Karl Marx says in his notes on alienated labor in the Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844 , the field of economics proceeds from identifiable facts (private property in the case of Marx’s chapter, prosumption in the case of this blog post), but does not explain those facts or how they came to be. In other words, it mistakes the effect (e.g., private property, prosumption) for the cause (e.g., a complex history of changing — and changeable — social relations.)

Instead of reifying concepts to assert their existance, I think the point of neologisms such as “prosumer” should be to conceptualize a problematic relation. (And the same is true for such neologisms as ”postnational” and “glocal” which I blogged about last December [here].) In the case of prosumption, the problematic relation is among capital, labor, technology, and social value. For the prosumer pundits, technology is what drives the new form of economic being, but of course they have taken prosumption out of the context of capital and labor and placed it in the context of technology.

And of course, getting back to Marx’s point, we all know that technology is as much an effect of changing relations of capital and labor as it is a cause. And this is why Marx goes on to say that the economist “conceals the estrangement inherent in the nature of labor by not considering the direct relationship between the worker and production.” Marx is asserting the estrangement (or alienation) of labor here, because the worker is in effect producing the very conditions that oppress him. The more productive the workers are, the more the capitalist can reinvest the fruits of their labor to expand, intensify, and control the economic relations of production. To apply Marx’s idea to the idea of prosumption, by doing labor for nothing, we are ultimately enabling the economic system to continue giving us nothing… and in the case of journalism, to continue cutting salaried jobs.

To explain what I mean about the difference between reification and problematization, consider this analogy. In formal poetics, the synecdoche is a figure of speech in which the part stands in for the whole. In good poetry, the synecdoche always alerts (or should always alert) the reader not only to what it stands-in-for or represents, but also to its failure to represent. In other words, in standing in for the “whole,” the part always excludes some information and always marginalizes other parts of the whole. Therefore, good poetry (in contrast to bad propaganda) will reveal the failure of its own figures of speech, because a synecdoche simultaneously indicates an identity and a non-identity.

I think we should think about all theoretical neologisms the same way we think about synecdoche — not as nouns indicating new phenonema, but as concepts alerting us to changing social relations and as concepts that always suggest an absence of identity at the same time that they indicate a new presence that can be identified.  So, in my opinion, neologisms such as “prosumer” should be taken to suggest not only new identities but also non-identities (or even the “lack” of a fully present identity.) The non-identity in this mix, of course, is how hungry and cold we might be if prosumption became the dominant form of labor in our society (instead of wage labor.) In other words, getting back to the comment made by the panelist about the future of jobs in journalism, the non-identity here is that most college graduates who decide to become prosumer-journalists will probably be living with their parents after they graduate. (And by my own reasoning, probably I shouldn’t waste so much time blogging like I’m doing now, because even though I use it as both a teaching tool and as an experimental space to test out scholarly work I might do in the future, it isn’t what butters my bread either.)

What I think is genuinely liberatory and resistant is not prosumption, but the social production of alternatives. In other words, working for nothing is not exploitative if one is participating in the social creation of the conditions that sustain life. I would admit that there is some potential in prosumption for alterity, but it seems to me that the prosumption pundits risk subsuming the alterity of prosumption to the interests of capital when they forget the basis for resistance and alterity in the first place.

Theorizing Spaces and the ICC

My father just told me about this new blog he heard about, called Critical Investigations into Humanitarianism in Africa, and I am interested in this blog for two reasons: one, I work with Oromo-Americans, and two, I happen to be going on a faculty development trip to Kenya in June, and the organizer/leader of this trip happens to study humanitarianism in Africa (though I have no idea whether he’s heard of this blog or would agree or disagree with the arguments put forth in it.) Its latest post is about the International Criminal Court’s issuance of an arrest warrent four days ago for Omar Al Bashir, the president of Sudan, for war crimes and crimes against humanity.

The blogger begins by observing that the 7-year-old ICC has so far only been willing to override the soverignty of a nation in Africa (and never anywhere else.) There is a troubling irony here. The United States hypocritically refuses to be held accountable to the ICC at the same time that it argues that all other nations should be held accountable. In contrast, the African nations all signed on to the ICC in hopes that the rule of law would protect them, but their voices are rarely heeded compared to the strong voice of the U.S. Hence, the ICC has become yet another instrument of U.S. and European neo-colonial control. What’s interesting about this mechanism of control, besides America’s all-too-painfully-obvious hypocrisy, is that the African nations willingly subjected themselves to it. Moreover, the ICC would seem to repeat some of the early 18th and 19th century examples of colonial morality when the Europeans imagined themselves as being obligated in some sort of Christian way to help the poor Africans even though it was the Europeans themselves who caused the problems for Africa in the first place (i.e., conquest, slavery, etc.).  The blogger concludes that African nations should reject the ICC, and he does so even though he fully recognizes Sudananese government’s terrible deeds.

I’d like to add a literary poststructuralist side to that blogger’s postcolonial argument. There is something curious with the European sense of space. On the one hand, geopolitical spaces are rigidly defined. Africa is Africa, and Europe is Europe — culturally and politically distinct. What happens in Africa is (according to this spatial logic) a problem with the African culture or with the African leaders, who should be held responsible for the tragedies there (even though their leaders are almost always partially subject to a confusing mixture of organizations with divergent agendas such as the International Monetary Fund, the United States, mineral and agricultural corportations (i.e., oil, coffee, cotton), various non-governmental organizations, etc.)

On the other hand, and at the same time, both the ICC and many of the humanitarian organizations imagine themselves as space-less… as utopically transcending all geopolitical and cultural locations. This is the same kind of utopian logic put forward by cosmopolitans, citizens of the world, and global citizens (who advocate for such lovely things as peace and democracy but oddly seem to forget that one’s legal rights as a citizen are guaranteed by a concrete, constituted government not by an abstract ideal.)  By inhabiting such a non-place, the ICC and other such global citizen organizations purify themselves from complicity with evil. But as Zizek has pointed out in his recent book Violence, many of the global institutions manage a systemic violence that produces mass famine, drought, and disease, but this systemic violence is rarely discussed or brought before the courts because there is no single event to report on and no single action to bring to trial. While the ICC is nowhere (nowhere specifically), systemic violence is (by definition) everywhere, and it’s that kind of violence that is often the underlying cause of local “crimes against humanity” (a phrase which seems to be deployed as a legal euphemism for almost-but-not-quite genocide.)

In other words, the question we should be asking as theorists is not simply whether or not the ICC should have issued the warrant on Omar Al Bashir, but why it hasn’t issued warrants for the president of every member state. And since many of these member states are democratic, perhaps the ICC should really be issuing warrants to arrest the people who voted for those presidents (i.e., you and me.)

I admit that I’m getting a bit wingnutty, and I also admit that the Darfur crisis is not something I know much about, except what I hear from time to time in the news. And before anyone starts throwing bloggy-cyber-stones at me, I must add that I really, really don’t mean to suggest that Omar Al Bashir is innocent or that all African leaders should be let off the hook just because we know the extent to which Africa’s problems are in part caused by colonial and neo-colonial mechanisms of control. To the contrary.

And I definitely don’t mean to suggest at all that we should not taking the Darfur crisis seriously. I do take it seriously, as do I take the famine in Guatemala (which was sparked by a coup d’etat organized by the United States), as do I take the millions who have died in the Congo (a situation sparked by the assassination of Congo’s president… also by the United States) . . . . as do I take the millions who have died or suffered all around but never make the headline news.

Such concern motivates the many hours I spend working with (not for – notice the difference in preposition) the Oromo, whom I’ve blogged about before here and here  — a people who suffer because Ethiopia’s political alliance with the United States actually fosters crimes against humanity. Ironically, the United States has repeatedly taken the moral high ground when it asks the Ethiopian government to cease such actions just as the UN and ICC asks Sudan to cease such actions, but then at the same time the United States pressures Ethiopia to invade Somalia and to protect its capital investments, etc.

One could also argue against me and say, well, geez, what use it is to deconstruct the spatial order of the ICC? We must do something! After all, people are dying there! And without such a spatial order (or “world order” or “geopolitical order”), we have no grounds for ethical action or political agency! Against that statement, I would say this: in addition to thinking we must do something to help them over there about localized episodic violence, we might also think about what we are doing all the time over here that is complicit with globalized systemic violence. As we begin to learn about so-called “others” and other cultures, we should also start with a questioning of ourselves, of our own place in this spatial order, and of the degree to which the spatial order as it has been legally constituted protects our privileged position within it and inoculates us from culpability. If we think about this more globally, in other words, we as individuals might be able to work with the African governments and other African organizations more constructively.

So far, what I’m saying may sound all too “poly-sci” and not “lit” (and I’m a literature professor by training), but imagine writing a novel or memoir or journalistic piece about this situation. What are you going to include? How are you going to connect the dots? Here, I find that the form of the novel has incredible value because of its unique ability to connect personal lived experience with geopolitical concerns and its ability to highly the nuances of contradictory and paradoxical situations.

The Magentic Fields Teach/Kill Saussure

One of my colleagues today told me about this song, ”The Death of Ferdinand de Saussure,” by The Magnetic Fields, one of the greats to come out of the college-indie-pop scene of the 1990s, and a perfect example of postmodern aesthetics. Next time I teach structuralism and Saussure, I’ll have to remember to play this song.

 

 

Meanwhile, I just discovered that my old professor, Michael Berube, whose essays I sometimes teach in my intro-theory course, returned to the blog-o-sphere after a year vacation from it. His blog is one of the inspirations for my own, and apparently he’s been back on for some time, and I didn’t even realize it.