It may seem odd to some people for me to respond to this tragedy intellectually, and it may seem odd to think of a person’s death in terms of the intellectual labor it spurs us to undertake, but I believe that this is how Paterno would want it, given that his own generosity sponsored the Paterno Family Chair in the English department held by professor of contemporary literature and cultural theory Michael Bérubé (who was a professor of mine when I was a graduate student.) As the philosopher Jacques Derrida reflected on the deaths of his colleagues in one of his last books, The Work of Mourning, the death of a friend, parent, coach, or writer one has read asks us to come to terms with our debt to them, the debt of our own existence that we owe to those who preceded us. These are the people through whom we think about our ethical relationship to the world, and in a sense our mourning is how we keep ourselves alive as we attempt to continue speaking to the dead and to our loss and to the possibility that their work will eventually be realized — a work that is always incomplete and unfinished just like any life, a work for which they have struggled, a work that they hoped, and we continue to hope, might possibly and actually come to be. Almost a year ago, I wrote blog posts about the novelist and philosopher Edourd Glissant’s death and about my own professor Marshall Grossman’s death as an occassion for reflecting on our complex relations with the world – ”the totality of Relation” is Glissant’s philosophical concept for this reflection – as our own lives are constituted by these relations, not all of them positive yet nevertheless still part of who we are and who we are becoming.

Joe Paterno inspires such work, because of our debt to him and because of the work he called upon us to do. As another of my Facebook friends honored Paterno’s memory by quoting him: ”Believe deep down in your heart that you are destined to do great things.” For me, this was not about football or about Penn State pride. For me, this was about Paterno’s committment to his players and to the principles of the modern university. When I was teaching at Penn State, it was well-known that the football players were always good students, and that was certainly my own experience when they were in my classes. Much of the intellectual life at Penn State was encouraged by Paterno’s financial support of the library and professors and by his moral support of its teachers. And he did this at a time when faculty felt attacked by politicians who accused us of corrupting the youth and cut the university’s budget and by the media pundits who questioned the relevance of the humanities in the twenty-first century. Paterno’s ethics and his work demonstrated to coaches across the country that it was possible to succeed both on the field and in the classroom — that a coach did not have to sacrifice one for the other. These are some examples of the complex and multifaceted ”totality of Relation“ (as Glissant put it) that call us to a work of mourning and to an ethical responsibility not just to act but also to think.

The scandal and Paterno’s other ethical failures over the course of his long career do not undermine this work but actually heightens its meaning and focuses attention on the question of thoughtful action. As Michael Berube suggested in his op-ed on that scandal for the New York Times, the complexities of the event demand that the public, the faculty, and the administration dialogue together openly to build upon Paterno’s legacy, take it in new directions, and address systemic problems. Likewise, the event galvanized a political response to child abuse as Penn State students thoughtfully put their ideals into action through a “Blue Out” that reminded the public to support the victims of child abuse. These are examples of the always unfinished “work of mourning” and the open-ended possibility that inheres in the “totality of Relation.”

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* Addendum: I wrote the above post late last night, and this morning, around 10 a.m., it was announced that Joe Paterno passed. His family released this statement to the press. Also, Penn State graduate Tori Bosch published these thoughts on Slate.com.

Step One: Hegemony

In my view, the social pressure to get married actually prevents human beings from imagining a more ethical relationship with each other. Even more seriously, it prevents people from acting on their own imagination. Personally, I have for years felt pressured to get married, have children, and buy a house — a pressure that theorists call “hegemonic.” In this case, hegemonic means not merely that there are deep cultural pressures to do these things, but also the force of law, taxes, insurance, and various other privileges and rights, so that, in effect, when a colleague, family member, or friend teased me for not getting married, it was a teasing accompanied by some very sharp and very powerful teeth. In other words, it is not even possible to do a lot of things that, in my view, should be possible. The obvious example that the media talks about a lot is gay marriage, and in most of the world, a significant percentage of the population is barred from legal matrimony.  Actors Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie have famously said they would not get married until everyone acquired that right, a right that some might consider to be a basic human right, and I have a lot of respect for their taking such a strong and clear ethical position. But, as the gay-activist, literary theorist, and scholar Michael Warner has argued in The Trouble with Normal, we should be looking beyond that rigidly simple binary of married/not married towards other alternative relationships. For instance, Jane Juffer’s book Single Mother points out that single mothers might want to form cooperative living arrangements with other women in order to manage the challenges of raising children without a husband.

Lately, numerous novels, movies, and television shows have begun to imagine such alternative, cooperative living arrangements, but such arrangements are discouraged by laws about taxes, benefits, and even home ownership. For instance, there is a long contentious legal history about the definition of “family” for neighborhoods zoned for “single family homes” as you can read about [here] and [here]. Cities, suburbs, and towns have passed zoning laws deliberately to promote traditional nuclear families, but complicating the implementation of those laws, the national Fair Housing Act prevents discrimination against non-traditional families. For instance, the courts have ruled that a state’s law can’t define ”family” so narrowly that it excludes uncles, grandparents, and various sorts of dependents. Nevertheless, questions remain about whether the definition of family means biological, legal, or functional relationships. For instance, clearly two people who live together and raise children can be considered a “family” even if they aren’t legally married and even if the children aren’t their biological offspring. But what about five elderly women who want to live together and support each other? (This was a real case, Baer v. Town of Brookhaven, by the way.) Despite the obvious benefits, as we can see in the popular TV show The Golden Girls, this sort of living arrangement has been legally discouraged. In my view, it should be encouraged. (Notably, The Golden Girls show had four women living together, which is legal, and not five, which would put them over the legal limit asserted in the Baer v. Brookhaven case.) Moreover, home ownership is always tied to the market, and cultural assumptions about family affect the value of homes as does direct government policy that artificially manipulates the market. For instance, according to this article, so-called “multi-family homes” (e.g., a duplex) may be a more efficient and less expensive alternative to single-family homes, but they are also harder to sell. In addition, the recent ”Hope for Homeowners” government program created to boost the housing market targets traditional single family homes.

And all this is what I mean when I say that the traditional nuclear family is a “hegemonic” institution, supported by all sorts of laws, including laws that manipulate market conditions. And given the power behind this hegemony, it sometimes felt to me a little bit cruel when people would make remarks implying that I had problems with committment, that I hated children, or that I secretly wished my life were like theirs.

Step Two: Living in a Post-Fordist World

Now that I’ve discussed the hegemony of the nuclear family — a “tradition” arguably created in the early twentieth century alongside the modern industrial ”Fordist” economy, as historians have argued. See, for instance, [here]. The ideal for this economy was life-long employment at a single company such as Ford. I now turn to the twenty-first century socioeconomic conditions, which have been called “post-Fordist” because of the market demand that labor and capital be more flexible and mobile. An effect of this new economic world order was the demise of automobile manufacturing cities Detroit and Flint, Michigan, as documentary film maker Michael Moore famously narrated in his classic Roger and Me. Considering the destructive impact on families caused by such capital flight as well as the increased cost of living and the environmentally destructive effects of suburban sprawl, the old white-picket-fence image of the 1950s model for the nuclear family would seem at the very least out-of-step with the world we live in today, if not downright immoral. Such social conditions of our so-called post-Fordist world include heightened geographic mobility, civil rights for women and people of color, shocks to the labor market due to rapid capital flight, an increase in the cost of living, and the environmental effects of over-population and industrial capitalism.

A great essay about what all this post-Fordist stuff means for college educated women that wonderfully rips apart the hegemony I discuss above is The Atlantic.com piece “All the Single Ladies,” but let me try to illustrate what it means for working class people through the following example. It  has become increasingly easy for large corporations and investment banks to move large amounts of capital very quickly. For instance, as in the case of Ford and GM, a company might move an entire factory or simply outsource production to another country. Such “shocks” to the local economy would seem to demand a more mobile and flexible labor force. However, at the same time that the government permits such capital flight and encourages easy financial speculation, it also encourages individuals to buy homes even if they can’t really afford them. The recent housing bubble and subsequent recession has alerted everyone to this problem. As one economist has recently explained [here], the artificially propped up housing market has a negative impact on the labor market because it discourages individuals from moving to where there is a better job. Another example is the environment, as land once populated with wild animals is now “exurbs” of McMansions, and people drive great distances from their single-family homes to their place of work. Thus, in response to the vicissitudes of the new economy and to the foreseen dangers of global warming that contradict the ideal of the nuclear family, more and more people are forced to look for practical solutions to life’s problems, and these include more flexible, cooperative living arrangements. And for me, these arrangements are already being practiced by many different kinds of people, despite the ways in which they are discouraged by the hegemonic system I described above.

In my view, it seems more praiseworthy to aspire to something greater than mere marriage. And this is why, before she became my wife, she was my grrrl-comrade, not my girl friend — the name alluding to the feminist “riot grrrl” punk movement during the mid-1990s. Its “Riot Grrrl Manifesto“ aimed to foster a revolution of everyday life. This is what I believed in and tried to practice with my own grrrl-comrade, who was my political partner as well as my romantic partner. I have also discussed what this means with two of my colleagues who have made an even greater effort than I have to foster a broader sense of community and an expanded sense of what it meant to be responsible for the raising of children.

But now I’ve gotten married, so have I sold out? Have I succumbed to the incentives offered by insurance companies and the Internal Revenue Service? Have I given up the dream and settled for settling down? Are my friends and former students justified in making fun of me? What does it mean when my friends and family say things like “Finally!!!” as if I were merely a deluded fool for not getting married before. What does it mean when people now jokingly welcome me “to the club”?

Step Three: A Theology of Potential

Before I answer those questions, I want to step back a bit and address the Christian view of marriage. One of my students, a double theology and English major, recently pointed out to me that the Catholic church’s position on marriage has changed a lot over the course of history. I don’t know much about that, but since my wife and her family is Lutheran, I went to my bookshelf and took down a book I hadn’t read since I was a college student majoring in religious studies, around the same time the punk band Bikini Kill published its Riot Grrrl Manifesto. And that book is Martin Luther:  Selections from His Writings, edited by John Dillenberger. To my surprise, I discovered that Luther was quite the radical for his day and in many ways agreed with me. He argues that marriage and the need for humans to combine in various practical ways is a human mystery that historically predates church authority or any cultural instantiation of it, and thus, when the Catholic church (or any church)  claims that marriage is a sacrament and that therefore it has the authority to decide who can and can’t marry, it is in effect acting like a pimp selling the “male and female pudenda” and therefore is the Antichrist (p. 331). Yes, he really does say that. In other words, to put Luther’s argument in the terms of literary theory, the so-called traditional nuclear family is an ideological social construct, and the human energy and potential for social combination can express itself in a multitude of forms. In less hyperbolic language, John Calvin makes a similar argument in his Institutes of the Christian Religion, the first book to systematically outline the entire protestant Christian faith. Luther goes further than Calvin, even arguing that bigamy/adultery are preferable to divorce, so if the husband turns out to be sexually impotent, it’s preferable that the wife have sex with someone else than they divorce, because marriage is a spiritual bond and practical work, not a sexual definition. And the real point of course is that marriage is not about sex (contrary to the constant harping on that subject by people who claim to be Christians), but about building community.

The particular passage of the Bible that Luther and Calvin focus on is when St. Paul talks about marriage in his letter to the Ephesians. Luther and Calvin argue for a reading of Ephesians that today most Catholic theologians also agree with — that Christ is speaking metaphorically, not literally, about husband and wife becoming one flesh. In Paul’s letter, marriage is a metaphor for the open potential of human beings to end warfare and suffering and become Christ-like (i.e., becoming one flesh metaphorically means the political body of Christ, not holy matrimony.) Understood metaphorically in this way, marriage is an opening to grow beyond the limits of one’s individual self. Ironically, this Christ-like understanding of marriage as an opening up of human potential is the opposite of the narrow definition of marriage usually endorsed by people claiming to be Christians, whose literal and stupid understanding of the Bible actually enforces limits on our Being.

Conclusion

My detour through some old theological statements was meant to reconcile my earlier critique of marriage with my decision to get married. It might seem that Luther’s theology of marriage has a little bit more in common with the Riot Grrrl Manifesto than most Lutherans and Bikini Kill fans would admit. So, in conclusion, what I believe in is the opening or unfolding of human potential in the context of complex conditions. Those complex conditions place very material demands on us that we can’t simply ignore or dismiss. We make our way in the world as best we can and ethically aim for something better than what is. My wife is my partner in this endeavor, and our marriage is, I hope, an opening up of both our individual potentials as well as our potential relationship with others and with the world we aim to change.

My blog’s vacation will end in January 2012 when I begin teaching the “Introduction to Literary Theory” class again. I am grateful to all of my friends, family, colleagues, students, former students, and interested strangers who have read my blog from time to time over the years. I am grateful to your generosity and curiosity, and I appreciate you perhaps more than you realize. And I sincerely hope you will come back to check out my new posts next year when I return to the blog-0-sphere and start blogging again.

So, for this blog post, I’d like to imagine a few research questions — things that I could imagine my students writing a research paper about someday, maybe for another class, or maybe just on their own.

(1) Do documentary films and dramatic films about war influence each other? I’m thinking not just about the content and social context of the films but also the formal, stylistic elements. I can imagine an interesting senior thesis that compares and contrasts one of the most famous war-propaganda documentaries Why We Fight, made by Frank Capra between 1942 and 1945, and one of the most famous Hollywood movies of all time, Casablanca, made in 1942. Not only the moral message of both films, but also the way they are shot, seem somewaht similar to me. I would think that someone might enjoy researching documentary films and dramatic films made during the war about the war. I’m not exactly sure what the exact research question would be. Maybe the question of influence is not the right question. Curiously, it seems like another World War II-era classic, Citizen Kane (1941), edits together documentary and innovative camera shots in a way that seems to sarcastically comment on the relationship between documentary and drama.

(2) How do national or local histories get told in film? I have blogged about this with regards to Chinese cinema and history before [here]. In my opinion, Chinese cinema is the best in the world, and a lot of it very consciously engages with controversial and complicated feelings about its long history. I think it would be a fun project for a student to pick a country he or she is interested in and try to learn about its real history and the way film aestheticizes that history. I’ve heard fascinating things about Iranian cinema, for instance, and I myself have raised a few questions about the cinema history of Nigeria, Ethiopia, and Senegal before in this blog [here]. Such a project might relate to the issues discussed in a post-colonial literature class.

(3) Are remakes and sequels always more ideologically conservative and thematically simplistic than the originals? In my class, we have noticed this trend in the re-makes of Shaft and Hairspray, but perhaps not in the new James Bond films. So, the commercial conditions and contexts of such remakes and sequels may be more complicated than one might assume.

 (4) There is a new genre out there now that critics are calling the “bromance” which is getting a lot of critical attention for what it suggests about gender relations and gender norms today. Has anyone done a thorough study of the new ”bromance” genre in film?

(5) There are of course lots of contemporary issues that have been the subjects of dozens upon dozens of films just in the past few years — topics as different from each other as post-traumatic stress disorder among soldiers returning home from the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, immigration policy and the U.S.-Mexico border, and sexual relations between friends. What do these movies say about the anxieties Americans have and/or the confused and conflicted feelings that exist out there.

(6) Last year, I imagined teaching an entire class entitled “Literature, Philosophy, and Film after 9/11″. I was hoping to do it this coming fall, on the tenth anniversary of the destruction of the World Trade Center in New York, but unfortunately I won’t have the chance to. There are so many “post-9/11″ movies that reflect upon the past ten years that it would take up an entire blog post to list them here, and likewise there have been so many poems and short stories that the editors of the Norton Anthology of American Literature created a new section at the end of its anthology on this very topic. Many of the world’s most influential philosophers have also weighed in, including Slavoj Zizek’s Welcome to the Desert of the Real (2002), Judith Butler’s Precarious Life (2004), and Giorgio Agamben’s State of Exception (2005),  just to name three books that I’ve read and considered teaching. But what would be the research question guiding this inquiry? I’m not sure yet.

(7) Finally, how do contemporary films re-write old literary classics? For instance, recent film versions of Gulliver’s Travels (starring Jack Black) and Robinson Crusoe (starring Pierce Brosnan) completely change the story. I am not so interested in the commercial motivations that the studio might have for making these movies. Rather, what are the political and ideological implications behind such changes?

(8) On a different note, other films borrow from an old story in order to tell an entirely new story. It might be interesting to investigate how different cultures have borrowed from Shakespeare, for instance. In my view, the best film version of Shakespeare’s Hamlet is neither an American nor a British film but a recent Chinese film — The Banquet (2006). I loved this movie so much that I requested it for my school’s library. And likewise it is Japan’s most famous director, Akira Kurosawa, who adapted Shakespeare’s plays King Lear and Macbeth to Japanese culture in his movies Ran and Throne of Blood. What happens to a story when it crosses cultures? How might we theorize such instances of cultural translation (or what theorist Fernando Ortiz called “transculturation“)?

So, those are just some random thoughts on possible research papers I could imagine someone doing. I wish I had the time to do them myself. Possibly they’ve been done already. I don’t know, since I haven’t had time to check the library’s databases JSTOR, Project Muse, Academic Search Premier and MLA Bibliography. If I wanted to seriously take up one of these questions, I would have to spend a few days in the library searching through these databases.  The rather obvious point I’m trying to make here is that coming up with a good research question is not so easy, but without a good question, it’s hard to have a good thesis.

To put it another way, I want to perform the ethical work of mourning that I described earlier this year on the occasion of Edouard Glissant’s death [here]. Back then I wrote that the death of a friend, parent, or writer we have read asks us to come to terms with our debt to them — the debt of our existence, and of our own thinking, and of our open-ended becoming that we owe to them. It is through them and their work on us that we imagine the possibility of our ethical relationship to the world. This, I think, is the project that John Donne’s many poems about death and mourning (about which I wrote for Marshall’s class) encourage us to undertake.

One of the things I liked about Marshall is actually summed up nicely at the conclusion of this YouTube video of him, made a few years ago by one of his undergraduate students, which splices together some bits of one of his lectures on Shakespeare’s Hamlet with an interview.

At the end, in answer to the question about what he wants from his students, he says he can’t ever know what that is in advance, and it would be even unethical for him to pretend to know that, because ultimately he doesn’t want the students to discover something about him, or even about the Shakespeare plays he teaches. Rather he wants them to discover something about themselves and their world. This, I think, epitomizes his scholarly and pedagogical style that resisted merely situating literary texts anecdotally within their historical context but instead encouraged readers to think about what kind of work these texts do. I remember him criticizing the kind of New Historicism (which I’ve also criticized at length [here]) that was in vogue at the time by noting that this method couldn’t explain why the literature was any good or even worthwhile. For Marshall, the wonderful literary qualities of the text mattered — mattered politically, even – for it was those literary qualities that prompted us to think about the contingencies of history and our ethical and figurative relationship to it.

And Marshall was also one of the most clearsited cultural theorists. What I remember so often admiring about Marshall is how he could mention a recent pop song or simply look out the window, describe what he was seeing in great detail (as he does in the epilogue to Story of All Things), then use that detail to explain a complex theoretical question (Lacanian psychoanalysis, for instance), and then start talking about a poem by Shakespeare or Milton, and somehow all of these three topoi (the mundane object of our present-day reality, the theoretical discourse, and the poetry) would illuminate each other and each shine all the brighter at the end of Marshall’s witty and lucid commentary. For those who have taken my classes in literary theory or who just read this blog once in a while, this might sound familiar, or at least I hope it sounds familiar, as one of my aspirations has been that you are always getting a little bit of Marshall Grossman whenever you read or listen to me.

Lastly, what I loved about Marshall was his acerbic and challenging wit. He was somewhat well known for his tough and sometimes sarcastic engagement with both his students and his colleagues. I remember some of my fellow graduate students being a bit afraid of him, but this too I loved even when I was the object of his criticism.  Criticism is an ethical project, and we can see this project in all of his scholarly work, and also in the political blog that he wrote for the Huffington Post [here]. As one of his colleagues said about him, “To know him well enough was to see an underlying sweetness to his disposition that expressed itself mostly by indirection. Beneath his sometimes sardonic persona, he was an incredibly kind man.” Marshall’s tough engagement inspired me to think harder and do better, but even more important than that, I think most who knew him would agree that any discussion, no matter what the subject, was never more alive than when he was participating in it.

What is supposed to be funny is how obtuse her advisor is about the financial reality of her situation. This basically reverses the roles of the original video in which the student was insistently obtuse and the professor frustrated. Of course, in reality, most advisors are quite aware of the problem facing academia today. The exigency (or timeliness and urgency) and what Aristotle called the kairos of this video is the recent budget cuts to higher education by state legislatures across the country. University presidents have actively protested these budget cuts. For example, the president of the University of Minnesota [see here] and the president of Penn State University [see here]. Students have also protested in Albany, New York [see here], and you may remember that it was the State University of New York in Albany’s elimination of several departments that prompted the first “So You Want To Get a PhD…” video. The upshot of all this is that higher education in the United States appears to be downsizing, and this is scary.

Questions I could explore in this blog post include (1) Why isn’t the new video as funny as the first one? (2) What the heck is causing all this mess in the first place? (3) What intended and unintended effects might we expect to see in the future? And (4) does this video spur us to actually do something about it, and what might that something be?

But for the first time in the history of this blog, I’m not going to explore them. I’m too pissed off.

So, before I get to talking about the movie and the theory, here’s my somewhat idiosyncratic regimen. First thing is a small cardiovascular workout. Now, the word “small” is a relative term, and I exercise pretty regularly, so for me “small” means half of what I’d do if I were feeling healthy. I think this is the opposite of what most people do when they’re sick. Most people rest, but the first thing that I want to do is clear out all the stuffed up yuckiness that I feel has been collecting in my body while I slept. It feels gross, and I want to get rid of it. A short run gets the lungs and arteries moving so that they can clean up the yuckiness. After the workout, I have a big breakfast with lots of fruit and some hot green tea with some lemon, honey, and fresh grated ginger. Ginger is good for the throat and for the soul, according to many cultural traditions around the world, and green tea has antioxidants. After spending the morning reading enjoyable stuff (and it’s got be enjoyable, or it’s not going to work), for lunch I have a spicy-garlic-vegetable soup. Garlic is also a famous anti-cold remedy and generally good for your health, and I suspect that’s where the tradition of using garlic to ward of vampires and evil spirits came from. The spiciness just helps clear my head and my nose. I don’t know why it does this, but it does. I’ve heard that red pepper releases endorphins in your brain, which makes you feel better, so maybe that’s it. Then I go see an action movie in the movie theater. Something about being in the theater, with the loud sound and intense visual, allows me to stop thinking about being sick and gets my pulse going. And when I stop thinking about it, then my body seems to relax and begin to cure itself. In a sense, I suspect that worrying about being sick gets in the way of getting better. Then I come home, have some roiboos (a.k.a. African red bush) tea.

My practice goes against what’s usually done in Western medicine, which emphasizes rest, seclusion, repeated diagnosis, and drugs. Typically what this means today is sitting around the house, watching TV, taking cold medicine, and feeling like crap. All of these things combined basically make you feel even more lousy, and because you haven’t done anything all day, it’s hard to sleep, even though you’re tired, and so your sleep cycle gets messed up, and then you get more tired the next day. Cold medicines aren’t actually designed to do anything about the virus that causes the cold. They are designed to simply numb your body so it doesn’t feel the symptoms. I can’t see how this is at all helpful, unless the pain is so great that it prevents you from doing things. (I readily concede that there are cases — rare cases — when Western medicine is useful.) In my admittedly paranoid opinion, the primary goal of Western medicine is not to make you get better and live a happier and more productive life; rather, the goal is to make money for the pharmaceutical industry and doctors. There is a whole industry at stake here, and that industry funds a system of knowledge, a whole way of thinking about health — something the theorist Michel Foucault calls a regime of truth – a way of thinking that I wouldn’t say is false, but perhaps blinds us to more simpler, healthier alternatives.

For me, the way to get better is self-discipline and a flight into wellness. To put it simply, I want to be well, so I do well things. And also for me, the mind is connected to the body; it’s all one. There is no dualism between them, no distinction. The only way to make yourself well is self-discipline, a regimen of the body rather than a regime of truth about biochemistry. To put it another way, for me, the location of my soul is my lungs and my arteries. And I think the ancients understood this which is why the word spirit is etymologically related to the word respiration. To put it still another way, if you think of your head being connected to your feet, and you want your head to get better, then move your feet. This reminds me of the African proverb, “When you pray, move your feet.”

What does this have to do with the movie Sucker Punch? Well, check out its trailer:

The movie is about a girl nicknamed Babydoll, whose abusive stepfather puts her in an institution for the mentally insane after she tries to defend herself and her sister against him. She is traumatized by the fact that when she tried to shoot him, she accidentally shot her sister. Her stepfather is afraid her confession to the police might implicate him, so he makes a deal with the corrupt and criminal manager of the institution to have her lobotomized. The manager, we soon find out, uses the institution as a front for his criminal activity, and he prostitutes all the young girls. The girls are trained by a dance instructor to perform sexy dances for an audience. All of this we learn in the first few minutes of the film. The rest of the film is Babydoll’s plan to escape with her fellow inmates Rocket, Blondie, Amber, and Sweet Pea and her flights of imagination into these elaborate, action-packed, video-game-like battle scenes. So, the movie is pretty absurd, mostly just some cute girls kicking ass, but the absurdity isn’t there for nothing. The metaphor between the fantasy battles and the girl gang’s real strategy for libration is obvious, and it is a metaphor that (like all metaphors) moves us somewhere. The movie explicitly articulates its moral, “your mind can set you free.”

But what does that mean? Certainly, it does not simply mean to deny reality and fantasize. The movie deliberately blurs the lines between “reality” and “fantasy,” and what is more, Babydoll’s fantasies about doing battle only occur when she is dancing. The relationship between her body dancing and her mind imagining is the key here. The dance instructor tells the girls that the dance is a little world that they control in the midst of a larger world which imprisons and abuses them. She tells them that she is teaching them how to survive evil. Significantly, surviving evil is not the same thing as escaping it, and what Babydoll does is use the survival practice of dancing as a tool for imagining and putting into practice a means of escape — what the theorists Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari call a line of flight. And it is Babydoll’s transfiguration of survival tactics into a revolutionary liberation strategy that is the basis of the plot.

Like me, Deleuze and Guattari also deny the mind-body dualism, and instead advocate a very empiricist and critical practice of freedom. Their philosophy also calls into question Western psychology, as the title of their first book, Anti-Oedipus, indicates. However, I think it is a mistake to think (as many scholars today do) that they were simply opposed to psychoanalytic teachings of Freud and Lacan. In fact, Guattari considered himself a Lacanian. What they did was move psychology away from reductive mind categories (e.g., id, ego, superego, Oedipal relationship, etc., which I’ve discussed in detail elsewhere in my blog [here]) and towards a philosophy and practice of the body. Their philosophy is somewhat based on the real-world practices of institutional psychotherapy that Guattari actually ran at La Borde. I have been reading about this recently in a new biography of Deleuze and Guattari by François Dosse, entitled Intersecting Lives. (I’m not finished with the book yet.) Guattari’s practices were reputed to be quite successful but were also radically different from standard medical practices. La Borde was something of a utopian commune in which the doctors, nurses, and patients all shared responsibilities (including the menial labor of cleaning and cooking) and regularly met to discuss the daily schedule and duties. The point was to move patients out of the subject position of “patient” and get them to actually act like a person. The line of flight out of mental illness was not drugs and diagnosis; rather it was activity, conversation, planning, the body’s relationship to other bodies, and an affirmation of differences. In other words, discipline and flight.

But lately, I find myself avoiding the news. It makes me sad, angry, and frustrated. Though I know the TV and radio news is usually a bit incorrect (and sometimes even really wrong), I can’t bring myself to do the hard work to respond to it. And please believe me, I’ve started numerous blog posts about all of the above topics, but I quickly become afraid of my own ignorance, and my writing never gets very far. The responsibility to be correct, in the context of so many incorrect statements, has felt too heavy. And I don’t want to watch and read the horrible stuff I’d have to watch and read in order to write something good. Anyway, I want to return to the subject of my writer’s block in a moment, but before I do, I want to overcome it for a brief moment and say something about how to help Japan.

I guess the reason why I’m overcoming my writer’s block on this subject is simple. I lived in Tokyo for two years (1997-1999), and am still in touch with a few of the friends I made during that time. I took a group of students there a couple years ago (2009) and blogged a lot about it [here]; I have a Japanese exchange student in my class right now; my school has a program there every fall; and a former student whose honors thesis I advised is working there now. I’ve thankfully heard from all of my friends and my former student since the earthquake, and they are all fine. And probably because of my history there and my connections, a few people in the United States have asked me what they should do. More specifically, they have asked what organization might be the best to donate to? And I forwarded their question on to my Japanese friends and got some answers. It is more difficult question than it might seem, and I’ve blogged before on the difficulty of the question of aid with regards to Haiti’s earthquake last year [here] and [here], aid to Kenya [here], and aid to Ethiopia [here]. So, for the past week, I’ve tried to think of a good answer, but my writer’s block and other things keep getting in the way — my own ego too, perhaps… my hesitation is maybe just silly.

To get right to the point, there is a simple answer and a complex answer. The simple answer is this. I was advised by my Japanese friends to donate to Japan’s Red Cross [here] or a special fund set up by Japanese banks [here]. This is what the Japanese television is saying, apparently. One of my friends in Japan alerted me to the fact that there are some bogus websites out there, so be careful — for example, see [here] about a bogus website pretending to be Japan’s Red Cross. However, the Japanese Red Cross’s English website also suggests that foreigners check to see if their own national Red Cross is supporting Japan’s endeavors. And the American Red Cross announced that it is [here]. (Note, the different Red Crosses are independent of each other, not just one big organization.)

There are a number of reasons why the relationship between organizations matters. First, sometimes large multinational organizations act as if they know everything, try to take over when they arrive in a foreign country, and just get in the way or are insensitive to local issues. It’s actually more efficient to make use of already existing institutions that have been there, so it’s better if the American Red Cross simply gives some money to the Japanese Red Cross than if it descends upon the country en masse. Second, multinational organizations and the American Red Cross have been criticized in the past for making use of a natural disaster to re-engineer a smaller country’s economy and political structure, which is why I am sometimes suspicious of them (as I wrote about at length in my blogs about Haiti’s earthquake), but in this case, Japan is obviously not a small country, and it has one of the best national infrastructures on the planet, so it seems the relationship between Japan’s Red Cross and America’s is reasonable. Third, the most challenging aspect of disaster relief is supply chains – how to get stuff like water, food, and blankets from one place to another. And this is always a problem, but especially a problem in the case of a tsunami like this one which has destroyed many of the means of transportation. Hence, too many organizations on the ground will get in each other’s way unless there is some coordination. The national government is almost always able to respond more quickly and more effectively than private charities for this reason. And considering the challenge of supply chains, it should be obviously stupid for us to send truckloads of stuff or even truckloads of people to Japan at this time. How would it get there? Doesn’t it make more sense to trust the Japanese organizations to handle this?

So, the best way to help Japan is by donating to organizations that will support Japan’s own organizations with money, not with stuff. That’s the simple answer. But there is a more complex answer too, and this more complex answer has something to do with why I was afraid to write about this, why I avoided watching the media’s representations, and the very strange psychology of international aid. The American media’s response has been frustratingly stupid and even offensive to some Japanese people. The news stories are often unclear about the specifics of location and time (looping the same image over and over without identifying which city it’s from). Annoyingly, it emphasizes how America is helping rather than how Japan is helping itself. It will even make racist generalizations about the Japanese character; words I’ve heard a lot are stoic and traditional; I’ve even heard the word tribal; none of these adjectives make the least bit of sense to me. At the same time, the danger at the nuclear power plant has prompted endless debate about the safety of nuclear power and what America needs to do to help Japan, as if TEPCO (Japan’s energy company) and the Japanese government haven’t already been planning for this kind of thing for years. There is almost no discussion of the important role of Japan’s Self Defense Force, which has one of the largest budgets of any military in the world. Since Japan’s Constitution, written after World War II with significant input from the United States, prohibited Japan from having a traditional military that could invade other countries, its SDF was often used as a disaster-response force. (This of course changed somewhat recently after George W. Bush and Junichiro Koizumi found a legal loophole so as to let Japan participate in the “war on terror”, especially in Afghanistan.) In sum, the history of Japan’s political relationship to the rest of the world is often absent from the characterizations (including the fact that Japan has been for years one of the largest givers of aid to other countries, as I had to chance to witness first hand when I was there in 2009 — see my blog post about that [here].)

My point here is not that the mainstream American media is doing a poor job innocently. Rather my point is that it is not innocent at all — that there is a strange self-serving psychology motivating the way it represents Japan and all other countries. There is a wonderful analysis of the contradictory and protean history of American representations of Japan by the cultural theorist Masao Miyoshi in his introduction to the book Japan in the World. My personal experience in Japan agrees with Miyoshi, and I first became aware of this kind of thing back in 1997 when my American friends would send me stories from the New York Times and Newsweek that were presumably about Japanese society, but were bizarrely untrue. In 1997 and 1998, it was obvious what motivated the American media’s symbolic denigration of Japanese society — the United States’s president Bill Clinton was in the middle of renegotiating a trade relationship and was hoping to open up Japan’s financial sector to American banks. That was over a decade ago; what motivates the American media now is something I don’t understand. Maybe it’s just habit.

A second issue is something that we are almost not supposed to talk about out loud. One of my students wrote a great paper about this for my class a couple years ago, so I’m relying on her research. All aid organizations such as the Red Cross, Oxfam, etc., know that they function best when they are proactive and prepared and when they perform preventative measures. Waiting for an emotionally distraught public to send money after disaster has struck will do no good at all. But it never occurs to the public to support institutions (both governmental and non-governmental) and to engage in preventative measures that are efficient and that work. The public’s emotions are only mobilized reactively not proactively, and this is a huge problem that everyone in the “relief” business is well aware of. Hence, usually, a relief organization will save the money they raise during any given disaster for the next disaster that hasn’t happened yet. In other words, the money you gave to non-governmental organizations during Hait’s earthquake or Pakistan’s flood might now be used for Japan’s tsunami, and the money you give now for Japan’s tsunami might be used for some future disaster somewhere else in the world. This makes good sense, and non-governmental organizations have long figured out how to use the irrational and generally ignorant emotionalism of the general public to good effect. To raise money, organizations hype the personal connection between the giver and the receiver, no matter how inefficient or ineffective that personal connection might actually be in practice.

But — and this is a big but – the risk is that such hype and sentiments might symbolically and psychologically undermine the institutions that are actually more effective (e.g., the national governments), since when people expect such a personal connection, they come to expect the wrong things from their investment and distrust the organizations that actually are most effective. It puts the government and the non-governmental organization in the habit of managing public emotions, and television becomes a necessary tool for this management, and sometimes it becomes difficult to find the right set of symbols to appeal to the public’s emotions (as was the case during Pakistan’s flood, which received relatively less support, as many aid workers lamented)… and thus… all the misrepresentations of other cultures proliferate.

Possibly I’m wrong about all this. I have been avoiding most media about this topic, precisely because it makes me so upset, and so my sense of the media and the reality on the ground is by no means thorough…. And so… thus… hence… therefore… my writer’s block about so many issues.

So now back to my writer’s block. A friend recently reminded me of something the philosopher Jacques Derrida said in an interview done for a documentary about him (entitled Derrida.) Here’s what he said:

Derrida says that when he is half asleep he will have a moment of panic and second-guess himself. Thus, in a classic deconstructive move, Derrida reverses how we usually think of things. We usually think of the panic about writing happening when we are very conscious — perhaps even overly conscious – not when we are unconscious. But Derrida suggests it is our unconscious that is the more vigilant.

But I’m not so sure Derrida is right. Most people (since most people don’t have Derrida’s ability to write book after book after book) feel that anxiety before they write, not after they write. Most people feel overwhelmed by the amount of information and the challenge of making sense, which is why they feel unable to say things unless they are empowered by some larger movement. (Whether that movement is sensible or not is another story.) When Derrida says he is compelled to write by some feeling of necessity or some force outside himself, this is an unusual mystification on his part of the complex social relations that empower him — specifically the relation he and everone else have to certain kinds of information and the affective conditions that give us a feeling we have a right to speak even when we are largely ignorant of the facts.

In a funny way, democracy as a form of government depends upon an incredibly ignorant public believing they have a right to speak about everything. And this is important. What frightens me most about the overload of information and recent crises around the world is that it might cause us (or maybe just me) to want to hide. The question of what to do is too big a question.

Thomas Jefferson once suggested that democracy required an informed public, and it is common to think of fascist dictatorial regimes, in contrast, as controlling and limiting access to information (Orwell’s famous book 1984, for instance, but also the actions of Libya and Egypt’s governments.) But there is also the possibility that too much information might stymie the public. In other words, perhaps too much information and a constant feeling that we are in the middle of a crisis is the new postmodern form of fascism that causes people either to stammer and yell or to hide and retreat rather than come together and reasonably discuss. (And this is, by the way, one of the insights of the philosopher Agamben’s recent books, State of Exception.) Maybe writing is a form of exceptionalism — we must temporarily become the exception when we write. What a strange idea!!!

The characters Mel and Fred are old, out-of-work Western-movie actors who decide to search out and take their revenge upon a screenwriter who physically abused them when they were child actors. Since neither of them has a working car, they convince Mel’s daughter Delilah to drive them to the famous location of so many Westerns, Monument Valley, where they believe the evil screenwriter, Fritz Frobisher, will be. During their road trip through the west, Mel and Fred constantly talk about movies, especially some of the classic westerns, and some of the scenes clearly allude to famous moments in that genre. Because it’s essentially a meta-film (a film about films), and because it was made on a tiny budget, just $180, 000, it is perhaps the kind of movie that only a movie nerd like me would find hilariously clever. And I did find it hilariously clever.

The movie satirizes American culture by having the Quentin-Tarantino-style dialogue meander back and forth from discussions of revenge tragedies, war films, and Westerns to discussions of the war in Iraq, gas-guzzling cars, the corporate film industry, Naomi Klein’s book No Logo, and Chicano politics. The slogan the characters come up with for their quest is “justice, gas, revenge” — an obvious commentary on American foreign policy, except the characters don’t themselves see that connection. (And this is an example of dramatic irony.) The humor is based on the unlikely connections between movie worlds and the real world.

For some reason, the movie reminded me of Karl Marx’s sarcastic joke about Napoleon III in The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte when he says, “Hegel remarks somewhere that all facts and personages of great importance in world history occur, as it were, twice. He forgot to add: the first time as tragedy, the second as farce.” As the characters in Searchers 2.0 say, the first Searchers movie is almost a classic revenge tragedy (like Shakespeare’s Hamlet) of American racism against Native Americans, but the tragedy that happened in the real historical world is famously averted in the film world in the final climactic moment. The first Searchers was made right when the civil rights movement was beginning, and the second Searchers 2.0 was made during the post-civil rights era. So, the comic irony is that its characters are trying to emulate the pre-civil rights era hero. But of course the world has changed, and their attempt to reference an earlier movie world is clearly farcical. It is especially farcical since the character Mel is Chicano, so he both idolizes and hates the racist white hero of the classic Hollywood Western. (For example, he mentions that his father would not let his family watch any John Wayne movies.) All they can do is talk endlessly about the many manifestations of heroism that clearly they are not.

In the next paragraph of his book, Marx wrote, “Men make their own history, but they do not make it as they please; they do not make it under self-selected circumstances, but under circumstances existing already, given and transmitted from the past.” So, the characters talk and talk and talk, but can do nothing, so trapped are they by their cloudy memory, the role they want to play but ironically can not play. To conclude, the movie is a classic example of how dramatic irony reveals the disconnect between metaphorical identity and real identity (condensation) and exposes the narrative trick of displacing real political problems onto simpler moral stories.