But it hasn’t. The New York Times has left out quite a bit of information and common sense. Whether this is because a culture of lazy ignorance and stupidity saturates the profession of journalism or because the Times tends to favor the interests of Wall Street, I don’t know. Maybe both. Maybe neither. In any case, what the Times leaves out is precisely the information that we need if we are to assess whether the new safety plan and national reforms will work.  There is no excuse for neglecting this  information since global activists such as the Institute for Global Labor and Human Rights  and the United Students Against Sweatshops have been making a case for global legal reform not just for Bangladesh, but worldwide, since the mid-1990s. In response to activists, the multinational corporations such as Nike, Disney, Wal-Mart, and others have fought tooth and nail against labor and safety standards, though you wouldn’t know that from reading the Times. Here is the first part of a documentary entitled The Hidden Face of Globalization about the garment industry in Bangladesh produced by those activists:

The early years of this conflict was reported by Naomi Klein in her influential book, No Logo, published way back in 2000, which quickly became standard reading for global labor activism around the world. Back in 2000, there seemed to be a ray of hope for college students who were promoting something called “designated suppliers” which would enable colleges and other organizations to select only factories that abide by labor, environmental, safety, and human rights standards to produce the clothing and other items with their college logo on them. In addition to many universities, many Catholic churches also took a leading role in this movement for social justic.

However, the designated supplier programs are difficult because of something called “outsourcing” whereby the retailer outsources the management of production to another company who in turn outsources the actual production to yet another local company. Major retailers claim such designater supplier programs violate anti-trust law on the grounds that it controls supply chains, and hence the big corporate lawyers began to sue the nonprofit educational and religious organizations that attempted them, which of course is ironic considering that Wal-Mart’s entire model of success is based on its very aggressive control of supply chains.  The hypocrisy of the corporate world’s position apparently went unnoticed by the American judiciary. At the same time, when local governments in countries such as Bangladesh, Indonesia, and Guatemala, among others, try to support their labor force through the regulation of businesses, tax revenue for social programs and education programs, and labor rights standards, they are threatened with a loss of capitalization and financing by the International Monetary Fund and Wall Street brokers.

Much of the debate over globalization has been about how regulation happens — including the question of what laws are made and how they are enforced. So, what is sinister about the new “safety plan” proposed by multinational corporations is that they locate the problem in Bangladesh and pretend that they will now take responsibility for the problem. Related to this political issue, scholars of literature and media such as myself have long noticed how expressions of sympathy over the poor in the so-called “third world” countries actually exacerbates the problem, because these shallow tears assume a paternalistic pity for others rather than an honest assessment of our own complicity. In other words, the cultural representation of sympathy supports the political plan of condescending paternalism that was naively reported by the Times today. We can imagine the Hollywood version of this movie – all tears and pity for the poor foreign country, but no substance and no awareness of the complex economic reality. After all, if we instead take a more global and politically responsible view, then the corporations would have to admit that it was their own practices and belligerent political pressure that created the problem, not just in Bangladesh, but worldwide.

And more to the point, who really believes that corporations will honestly regulate themselves?

Instead, what might be prefered is that the Bangladeshi government be in charge of such regulation, rather than the corporations, even if we worry over government corruption.  This preference for the role of national government is part of the tradition of the United States and its Constitution. Such a preference should remind us of the success the labor movement in the United States had after a very similar event on the Lower East Side of New York City a century ago. The infamous Triangle Shirtwaist Fire in 1911 led to the tragic death of 146 workers, mostly young immigrant women. It galvanized labor organizers and caused a shift in public thinking that eventually led to many of the labor standards Americans enjoy today: the right to unionize, minimum wage, overtime pay, and many other laws protecting the rights and safety of the worker. It is the responsibility of state and national government to ensure that the law is followed, that buildings are built to code, and that workers are not exploited. It might seem that Bangladesh is poised to follow this model, and indeed, the event has led to its government revising labor law so as to be less hostile to workers.

However, two things are significantly different. First, in this case, it is not the national government that is enforcing the new so-called safety plan, but rather a loose agreement among multinational corporations to do better in Bangladesh. Is that a viable model? And why not do better everywhere? Second, the question of why not do better everywhere, rather than in just the one country, leads to the troubling economic reality of globalization and the question of global governance. As the sociologist Saskia Sassen in her book Globalization and Its Discontents (1999) and the Nobel-prize winning economist Joseph Stiglitz in his book also titled Globalization and Its Discontents (2002) have both observed, whenever one country starts to improve its labor and environmental standards, then the system of outsourcing and supply chaining simply moves its factories somewhere else. Hence, there is a legitimate fear within Bangladesh that implementing the rule of law in their country could result in multinational corporations moving their business elsewhere and financial institutions punishing the Bangladeshi government by pulling out their investment. The old nation-based model of progress that was so successful in the United States in the 1930s after the Traingle Shirtwaist Fire is a model that struggles today in the face of globalization.

The image is reminiscent of the famous Zen rock gardens of Japan, the most famous of which is at the Ryoan-ji Temple in Kyoto. The joke observes the resemblence between these philosophical gardens and kitty litter boxes, and then speculates philosophically about the poop as a metaphor for the impermanence of our own existence, a well-known idea in Zen Buddhism. However, it also seems to enact the basic drama of poop — that we wish it (and all the uncomfortable detritus of our lives) would simply disappear, but actually it doesn’t. The false consciousness of this ideology is discussed by the world’s favorite Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Zizek in several of his books. In the movie Examined Life, which features nine influential contemporary philosophers speaking about the world while paripatetically walking around somewhere in that world, Zizek begins his presentation, significantly, at a dump. By doing so, he is suggesting that philosophy, if it is to be honest and ethical, should begin with our excrement and our trash.

Precisely the things we least want to talk about in polite society is what we must talk about if we are to address the most important problems of our time and if we are to understand ourselves. It is telling that we have constructed such elaborate architecture and political infrastructure for quickly removing our poop as far away from ourselves as possible so that we are able to go about our daily lives ignoring it as best we can. The Zen Kitties speculating on the total erasure of their poop actually mirrors, in an odd way, the way we humans behave towards our poop.

In no way do I want to make the argument that these Zen Kitties have anything to do with actual Zen philosophy and practice, which is very rigorous and tough. But it does have something to do with the popularized, somewhat self-indulgent version of Zen in America that can be found in books such as Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance by Robert Pirsig. (And obviously, the title of my blog post is a play on Pirsig’s book.)

The popularized mystified version of Western Buddhism and new-age spirituality is also something Zizek has critiqued in various places in his writings, including his article on the new Star Wars movies and his essay “The Prospect of Radical Politics Today.” He jokes that the Western Zen ethos is the perfect articulation for the neoliberal ideology of ”late capitalism” and that if Max Weber were alive today, he would have written a sequel to The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (written in 1904-1905) that might better address our twenty-first century world, and this sequel would be thusly titled “The Zen Ethic and the Spirit of Global Capitalism.” Zizek attacks this ideology which he sees as unethical false consciousness: ”Western Buddhism is such a fetish: it enables you fully to participate in the frantic pace of the capitalist game, while sustaining the perception that you are not really in it, that you are well aware how worthless this spectacle really is–what really matters to you is the peace of the inner self to which you know you can always withdraw.” This Zen Ethic (by which Zizek means the popularized Zen in Western culture, not actual Zen) pretends to be beyond politics precisely at moments when its practictioner is most enmeshed in a political world. Ironically, the typical mode of withdrawal today is not Zen’s spiritual withdrawal into an ethical selflessness, but hipster irony and an endless play of cultural referentiality.

What I love about the Zen Kitties is their meditation on one of the most profoundly difficult subjects of existence. The philosophical conclusion they draw from the cleaned kitty litter box is the impermanence of life. The more obvious question that they don’t ask, and that Zizek thinks we need to ask, is where did the poop go. However, even though the comic doesn’t ask Zizek’s question, the huge eyes of one of the kitties registers a surprise and an anxiety about the disappeared poop that is the comic counterpoint to the closed, meditative eyes of the other kitty. Both of these responses are two sides of the same condition — not our human condition, but a condition that is both animal and technological at the same time. The Zen Kitties’ imagination of the philosophical meaning of a pristine and stainless litter box, in a bizarre way it seems to me, mirrors our own twenty-first century global culture’s desire for a smooth and seemless world of production and consumption without consequences and without pollution, and it provokes laughter at the strangeness of our own impossible desire. The counterpoint to this desire can be found in one of my favorite children’s books, Everyone Poops by the Japanese author Taro Gomi, that beautifully explores both the naturalness as well as the humorous variety of pooping. It can also be found in one of my favorite essays on Japanese culture, Junichiro Tanizaki’s In Praise of Shadows, which impishly delights in contrasting the poetic, meditative shadowy qualities of Japanese wooden toilets to the obsessively clean and white, antiseptic European toilets.

Anyways, so begins my critical inquiry into the literary history of poop.

In some ways yes, in some ways, no.

For sure, the actor Daniel Craig continues to play the constantly brooding, angry version of Bond, instead of the pithy, urbane version of Bond performed by Sean Connery, Roger Moore, Pierce Brosnan, and others. But my point is that the new Bond style is not just Craig’s acting — it’s the whole thing, and it’s a “whole thing” that relates to the history of globalization.

The question that the characters of Skyfall ask over and over again is whether the fictional Bond character, as well as the real British intelligence service MI6, is irrelevant in our globalized, postmodern world. The movie brilliantly layers this idea, as Bond appears to die, but returns, and at various moments in the movie, Britain’s Parliament debates the relevance of MI6 and the double-O agents. In one scene, Bond and Q sit in front of a painting of a “grand old war ship inevitably being hauled off to scrap,” and Eve Moneypenny jokes about Bond being an old dog with new tricks. As the gorgeous theme song by Adele begins, “This is the end,” and later Bond jokes that he specializes in resurrection. (By the way, Bond’s resurrection is not a new theme; consider You Only Live Twice, Never Say Never Again, and GoldenEye.) Amusingly, and not so coincidentally, critics have been asking the same question that the movie itself asks. Is the Bond film a dead genre, or does it have to reinvent itself or resurrect itself to stay current and hip… and… uh… not suck. And there appears to be a general consensus that Skyfall represents something new, some critics celebrating the movie for its innovative new take, and others trashing the film for failing in the attempt. However, I have a slightly different view than the critics. For all the obsessive worry about relevance and newness, the film actually asserts a troubling and ridiculously nostalgic return to the old Bond.

But before I explain what I mean about this nostalgic return to the old Bond, rather than a further elaboration of the new Bond, let’s review how Skyfall repeats some of the stuff I mentioned in my article about Quantum of Solace. Most of the “globalist” ideas appear in a speech that the villain Silva gives when he and Bond first meet. Silva pontificates about all of Bond’s outdated attachments to the nation-state and the old order: ”England… empire… MI6… you’re living in a ruin and just don’t know it yet.” (Ironically, they are having this conversation literally within a ruin that Silva himself created.) He goes on to explain how easy it is to destabilize nation states by rigging the stock market and elections. In a sense, Silva’s speech is somewhat similar to the argument I made about globalization and the withering of the nation-state in my article, but with one key and unsurprising difference. What was good about the previous Bond movie Quantum of Solace is its recognition that in the real globalized world of today, it is the U.S. and British governments who are doing all that “rigging” and often collaborating with clandestine and criminal organizations in order to do so. This was the first time in Bond history that the British government was not unequivocally on the side of good. The plot was complicated enough to map out a somewhat complex network of relations, which moved beyond the simplistic good-guys versus bad-guys story that was so typical of the older Bond movies. What’s stupid about Skyfall is the world’s geopolitical complexity is reduced to the character of Silva, whose insanity represents pure evil, and who would be a totally absurd character if it weren’t for the brilliant acting of Javier Barden. What is even more troubling is Bond’s response to Silva, that Bond represents a “resurrection.” But a resurrection of what? Silva has just trashed the British empire, and who would want to resurrect that?

In a sense, the new Bond film reduces the complexity of history to an Oedipal drama. (I’m not the only person to notice the excessively Freudian structure of the plot; for instance, see David Denby’s review in The New Yorker and another in the Atlantic.) Whereas Quantum of Solace traces the return of history in terms of American geopolitical strategies coming back to bite America in the ass, Skyfall is strictly a Freudian fantasy where the injured MI6 agent with mommy issues and a bruised adolescent ego returns to attack his former boss, who is represented as a mother figure. The film is brilliant on this point, especially when Silva shows what the cyanide capsule did to his face when he tried to kill himself in order to protect Great Britain; in that scene, he is both figuratively and literally the monster that MI6 unintentionally created. We might pose an analogy between this monstrosity and the monstrosity of so many militant groups created by the United States and Europe in other countries that backfired — Ronald Reagan’s al Qaeda being the worst. But the movie doesn’t do that. Instead we have two ghosts (or, “the last two rats,” as the movie repeatedly jokes) – the ghost of Bond returning from the dead in order to fight the ghost of Bond’s evil twin. Both of them feel wronged by MI6, and for Silva, M clearly represents the “phallic mother” figure whose love he seeks but whom he also wants to master or destroy. However, unlike Silva who returns from the dead to wage a personal war against M and MI6, Bond returns from “enjoying death” to protect M and MI6 because, he says, ”we are under attack.” In this way, the movie projects international politics onto the personalities of individuals, and any geopolitical context that could have been explored or even just alluded to in the background has almost entirely disappeared from view. The movie even attempts to justify its own narrative blindness by means of an odd version of globalization theory’s thesis about the reduced role of the modern nation-state when M tells Parliament that “our enemies are  no longer known to us, they are no longer nation states; they are now individuals…. and the shadows is where we do battle.” (Ironically, of course, their enemies are very much “known” to MI6, because apparently the “individuals” are former MI6 agents.)

Three quarters of the way through a very long movie, it appears that Silva’s postmodern, globalized insanity has got Bond and MI6 beat, so how is Bond to fight back? The answer is by going back in time, where, as Bond says, “we have the advantage.” And so we travel to Bond’s childhood home, Skyfall, a mansion in Scotland. To complete this nostalgic image, the old home appears to come with its own endearing old caretaker, Mr. Kincaid, who appears with a shotgun on his arm as if just back from a pheasant hunt. Here, a number of things are completely unique and new about this Bond film. First, this is the only time in Bond history that Bond’s childhood is a major part of the plot. In all other Bond movies, Bond’s life before he became an agent is totally absent, and it’s hard to imagine him anything but, as if he sprang like Minerva, a fully formed agent with tuxedo, martini, and Walther PPK pistol from the brain of Zeus (or, in this case, from the motherly brain of M.) Second, this is the first time that most of the explosions happen inside of Britain. Usually, Bond goes to other countries where he and the villain callously destroy much of that nation’s cultural heritage, but in Skyfall, both MI6 headquarters and Bond’s childhood home are destroyed (and please note the Freudian connection between his childhood home where his parents died and his adult home at MI6 where the life of his new “mum” — his boss M — is threatened.) Lastly, and most importantly, this is the first Bond movie where Bond cries, and over what does he weep so many tears? Yes, the death of his surrogate Oedipal mommy, M.

Since the death of M (mum) is the climax of the movie, we might think back to when Judi Dench was first introduced as the new M — not surprisingly in the last movie to also question Bond’s relevance in a post-soviet era, Golden Eye, when Judi Dench calls Bond a “sexist, misogynist dinosaur.” In the history of Bond films, GoldenEye represented a major turning point for three reasons. First, because it was produced after the longest gap in time between Bond films, as studios really did believe the genre had died with Timothy Dalton. Second, it was the first Bond movie to be produced after the fall of the Soviet Union and the Berlin Wall, so it very directly raised the question of whether MI6 and Bond were still relevant.  Third, GoldenEye replaced the sexist, old-boys-club feel of the earlier Bond movies with more progressive roles for women, including Judi Dench as M, a more outspoken and capable ”Bond-Girl“ (e.g., Natalya Simonova, played by Izabella Scorupco in GoldenEye). By the time we get the new Casino Royale and Quantum of Solace, the pathetic, Bond-worshipping Moneypenny character has also been dropped from the story. Curiously, while in her first movie, Dench as M criticizes the old agents like Bond, in her last movie she defends them, and she defends them just in time to signal a return to the arrangement of the older Cold-War-era Bond movies with a new male M and a doting Moneypenny. What excessively Freudian Skyfall stages is the death of the ”phallic mother” (M).

I’d like to pause for a moment to emphasize the paradox and the curious contradiction. On the one hand, critics are saying this is a “new” Bond movie (which of course annoys me, because I argued that it was Quantum of Solace that was the “new Bond.”) But on the other hand, it is a movie that nostalgically gestures back to the older films and performs a wish-fullfillment fantasy of a return to an older world order.

But of course we can’t go back, and what really makes this movie “new” and interesting is the troubling Freudian discovery that it can’t go back. Bond blows up his childhood home, which he says he has always hated, and its image burns like the ghost of history, an uncanny and very un-Bond-like image that haunts the movie’s end. This is wonderful cinema. For a full minute of screen time, everything is dark except for this burning house. In addition, even more important than the destruction of Bond’s two homes (his childhood home and MI6 headquarters), I’d like to suggest that one other aspect of this movie also undermines the desire to return to a simpler time. As some critics have noticed, the “Bond girl” Severine was the victim of sexual abuse and human trafficking when she was just a child. Bond’s discovery of this, and Severine’s self-betrayal, is perhaps, the most interesting moment in the film — the only moment of a troubling Real of globalization in the entire movie which is otherwise little more than a Freudian fantasy. Actress Berenice Marlohe is brilliant here, her whole body trembling with fear, rage, and hate towards the world order that the movie represents. And for both Lacanian and Foucaultian theorists of the Real and of the body, it is important that it is the actress’s body that communicates this. I assume that the horror of this scene is meant to dramatise what a horrible villain Silva is, but the horror is so great it almost overwhelms the whole movie. As dozens of scholarly articles on James Bond have noticed, Bond’s relationship to women is, of course, symptomatic of the fallen British empire’s relationship to the world. We may recall that what was totally unique and unprecedented in Quantum of Solace was the chaste relationship between Bond and the Bond-girl, Camille Montes, with whom he does not even try to have sex, but instead gives a brotherly peck on the cheek. Instead, in Skyfall, what is unprecedented is that the history of Severine’s exploitation is admitted, and the tragedy of her situation more painfully understood. In a way, both the excessively chaste Bond and politically radical Bond-girl in Quantum of Solace and the realization of Severine’s history in Skyfall are two sides of the same coin — the horrible Real of globalization that can no longer be properly sexualized and neutralized by a debonair hero. In truth, it is Severine who is the tragic heroine of globalization in this movie. Bond is not.

Let me explain why not. Traditionally, most Bond films end with both Bond and the Bond-girl together in each other’s arms, but at the end of the new Bond, Severine has died, Moneypenny has been transformed from a badass agent to a cheerful secretary, and the woman in Bond’s arms is his mommy, M. If I may make a joke on Newsweek‘s infamous cover story in 2009 after the government bailed out the auto industry, “We’re all Socialist Now,” we might speculate that if the popularity of the latest Bond movie says anything about our culture today, as it anxiously looks ahead to a troubled brave new world, it says that “We’re all Children Now.” At the beginning of this essay, I promised that I’d say something about why Craig’s brooding style is more appropriate for the new Bond than the adolescent humor of the old Bond — Craig is a lovable, angry child.

The songs by Fun and Minaj are both about partying and having fun; as is typical of pop songs, the chorus and the verses seem to contain opposite messages. For instance, listening casually to the song “We Are Young,” the chorus that goes “Tonight, we are young, so let’s set the night on fire, we can burn brighter, than the sun” would seem to be a celebration of youthful desire. The driving, anthemic music contributes to this feeling.

However, reading the lyrics of Fun’s “We Are Young” verses tells the opposite story. The song is told from the point of view of a young man who has, apparently, physically abused his girlfriend in the past, probably while intoxicated, and now they are both again so drunk at the bar that they need someone to take them home. Not only does the story the lyrics tell haunt the chorus, but also the anthemic style of the music is beautifully haunting as the music’s notes drop at key moments to create a depressing, dark counterpoint to the hopeful message of youthful desire.

Nicki Minaj’s song is similar in the way its form contains contradictory ideas. The music is club music, with a strong beat for aggressive dancing, and the chorus seems to promote the party at which, we might imagine, the song would be played: “I’m on the floor, I love to dance, so give me more… Starships were meant to fly, Hands up and touch the sky, Can’t stop ’cause we’re so high, Let’s do this one more time.” Brilliantly, these lines seem to tell the music, and therefore also the bodies of the listeners, what to do; put your hands up and dance (and also drink) one more time.

However, like in the song by Fun, a closer reading of Minaj’s lyrics reveals its dark, cynical irony. The character that the song is about is someone who will “blow all my money and don’t give two shits” and “ain’t paying my month’s rent.” Not only does the song make fun of itself, but it is also a perfect synthesis of form and content in which the lyrics and the music seem to be having a conversation. The music, lyrics, and video all express longing for escape, as they fuse drinking, sex, vacations at primitive beaches, and starships. The idea of the starship as a utopian escape from a frustrating reality has a long history, from Parliament’s “Mothership Connection” to Kanye West’s “Spaceship.”  My favorite moment is when Nicki Minaj sarcastically quotes the famous children’s song “Twinkle twinkle little star” after the character says you can “fuck who you want” – a juxtaposition of vulgarity and innocence that indicates just how much the song’s character is lost in space, pursuing her childish dreams of fun.

So, what are the politics of their songs? An ideological reading would have a hard time locating any political view, since both songs express the desires, frustrations, and contradictory feelings that people have. Nicki Minaj presents us with a Barbie-doll image but seems to mock it at the same time. How do we begin to analyze the politics of having fun, poking fun, and dropping puns?

In contrast to an ideological reading, a symptomatic reading will put the song in its socio-economic context, observe how the symbolic content of the song expresses the psychologically repressed problems, and observe what about those problems are absent from the song. In other words, both Fun and Minaj’s songs seem wonderful expressions of the frustrations and desires of young people in the midst of an economic recession. Fun’s song focuses on an abusive drunk, but neglects to explain what provokes a man to be abusive and to assert his identity in such a way. Moreover, why do we feel we can relate to this troubled character? Minaj’s song focuses on a party girl who is – as so many Americans discovered in 2008 when the economy crashed – in chronic debt. One effect of this recession is that the “youth unemployment rate” (ages 16 to 24) is very high, and it seems to me that the sort of schizophrenic nature of Fun and Minaj’s songs is an indirect response to these troubled times. In my view, Minaj’s lively wordplay is somewhat more attuned to the broader economic problems than Fun’s more anthemic style, even though it lacks the emotional content that Fun’s song has. Both songs, I believe, are wonderfully symptomatic of the contradictory feelings we have about the current economic recession much in the way that a runny nose and sore throat are symptomatic of the virus that causes them. However, in saying that, I don’t want to suggest that the songs are merely symptoms and therefore naive and stupid, because I actually think the lyrics are quite sophisticated and self-aware enough to draw attention to the problematic of the contradictory feelings we have in our twenty-first century consumer-driven society that demands of us that we all believe we are special despite our lacking the means to be truly special. However, their “diagnosis” of these symptoms (if I may continue the medical metaphor of my mode of reading these songs) merely notes the contradictions at play in the way we live our lives, but not the deeper viral problems that are the root of them. In the end, there is no escape from our pathetic lives except for the fantasy of the escape narrated in the song that is already structurally a part of our lives.

So, what are Nicki Minaj and Fun’s politics? Heck if I know, but this question is an entirely different question than the question of the political problematic of their songs.

There are numerous lines of inquiry that one can take, but the questions that I would like to focus on are these: (1) What constitutional ambiguities does the Meles’s death expose, if any? (2) What does the American response to Meles’s death tell us not only about U.S.-Ethiopian relations but also about American culture? Indeed, many Oromos in the United States have been wondering why American newspapers and the American government have been so silent on Meles’s disappearance from the political scene for over a month, seemingly waiting for some official announcement (like the one today, [here]). Before I continue discussing this issue, I have to admit that I am no political scientist, and I usually find contemporary Ethiopian politics to be a confusing maze of acronyms. I am writing this blog largely because my past involvement in Ethiopian and Oromo issues has led several of my friends to ask me what I think about this. In answer to that question, probably the best thing I could do is simply refer them to this excellent analysis published by Jawar Mohammad the day before Meles’s death was officially announced. So, read Jawar’s piece for a political analysis. As for myself, what I have to offer as a scholar of literature and language concerns the narratives that people make in order to make sense of what’s going on and the blind spots that those narratives create. The only blind spot in Jawar’s piece is the role of foreign governments in the politics of his homeland, but that is an issue that, lacking concrete evidence, Jawar was perhaps wise to avoid, since one can only theorize about it — and theorize I will do.

Let’s look at the constitutional question first. The official narrative of Ethiopia that the constitution tells is the narrative of a democratic federal state that shares power among various constituencies in various ways. In some ways, the Constitution’s language seems excessive, giving far too much detail about the procedures and duties of each office, as if it has to illustrate its democratic qualities by spelling out each thing governments might do, and yet, at the same time begging the question of why some things are not included on the list. In the midst of this excess, there is at the same time a lot missing. Importantly, there is not much in Ethiopia’s constitution about an official line of succession, except to note that the Deputy Prime Minister represents the Prime Minister in his absence (article 75). Significantly, the Constitution neglects to say how the Deputy Prime Minister is appointed in the first place. The fact of this seemingly absent process may explain why so many of my Oromo friends on Facebook have been speculating for the past month about secret negotiations and politicking behind closed doors. The problem of a line of succession is certainly not unique to Ethiopia. The language in the U.S. Constitution was originally vague about the position of the Vice President and also unclear about who would fill the position if both the president and vice president died or were removed from office. However, in the case of Ethiopia’s constitution, we find a very slippery language throughout. On the one hand, the Constitution emphatically asserts a transparent (article 12) and accountable (article 72) government by elected representatives (called “councils”) of the people. And to be sure, the Prime Minister and his various officials are beholden to the Council of People’s Representatives (article 72 and 77). What is slippery is how much power the Prime Minister is granted by the Constitution, including the power to “supervise” and organize the activity of the councils and the many important positions that are appointed rather than elected (article 74). For instance, it has long been noted that the office of the President is purely ornamental, being merely appointed by the Council of People’s Representatives and having no formal power whatsoever (article 71). Notice that nobody is even considering the President as candidate for any future office; why would they? The office is little more than an empty symbolic gesture. But considering the politically weak position of Deputy Prime Minister Hailemariam, and considering the ambiguity and lack of transparency in how such political appointments are ratified, it seems to me that the issue of the line of succession needs to be revised and amended.

The second question is America’s response and the narrative Americans tell themselves. It would seem that America is just finding out about Meles’s situation today in the New York Times even though people who are invested in Ethiopia’s politics have been wondering about Meles’s health for a long time. Even the British newspaper, The Guardian, wondered about Meles’s apparent disappearance two weeks ago. It would seem that American newspapers held off reporting about Meles until after they received official word from the Ethiopian government. What do we think about American newspapers’ apparent lack of journalistic tenacity? I want to suggest three possible viewpoints. We could simply chalk this up to the general lack of concern Americans have for other countries. We might call this viewpoint the “innocent ignorance” viewpoint. The opposite viewpoint is that the American government was so heavily invested in what was taking place behind the scenes that it actively suppressed all discussion in the mainstream press. We might call this the “paranoid conspiracy” viewpoint. Neither of these viewpoints seem reasonable to me. The first avoids the obvious fact that lots of people were talking about it and the other obvious fact that American newspapers often speculate wildly about the regimes of other countries before receiving official word from the governments of those countries. The second assumes all sorts of unprovable things and forgets the more mundane workings of state institutions (e.g., the constitutional procedures for temporarily transferring power and the state bureaucracy that actually does most of the work, whether or not anyone is actually “leading” it.)

I think the best way to go about thinking of this issue is to compare the Ethiopian situation to similar situations in other countries. Without belaboring the point, we can easily recall the constant speculation (much of it irresponsible) about the health and stability of the leaders of other nations, such as Cuba, North Korea, Iran, Syria, Libya, etc. What do all these nations have in common? Obviously, there is conflict between them and the United States. So, what’s the simple moral of the story here? This is not so clear. One might speculate that the press follows the political interest of the U.S. government, so if the U.S. government is interested in undermining another government, then the press will jump right in and say as many nasty things as it can in order to justify American hostility, meddling, invasion, etc., but if the U.S. government is interested in supporting another government, then the press will hold its tongue and be polite. After all, President Obama today praised Meles and has never acknowledged the many human rights abuses perpetrated by his government, e.g., see [here]. But it’s hard for me to buy into the theory that the press is simply the yapping dog serving American political interests, even if we might clarify that we mean that it serves American corporate interests (i.e., the corporations who pay for the advertising), not that it serves the elected government (i.e., Congress). What seems somewhat more likely to me is that the press makes a careful calculus about what sort of journalism is both profitable and safe. Hence, when we look at the narrative the press tells about Ethiopia, we see that it is significantly different from what President Obama officially says. The press is emphatic about two things: first that Meles was a successful leader who reformed Ethiopia in positive ways and helped transform Ethiopia into a democratic, prosperous nation, and second that he was a ruthless, oppressive autocrat under whose rule democracy floundered and human rights were constantly violated. How Meles could be both those people at the same time is hard to figure out, and so the press has to be very careful about where these two images of Meles come from. It has to appear “fair and balanced” after all, yet all the while revealing very little.

And what I mean by revealing very little is that the press so often seems to avoid actually investigating some of the roots of the issue — not only the constitutional question that I raised, but also the very troubling relationship between American foreign policy and Ethiopian domestic policy that has been going on since the Clinton administration and only seems to get worse. I often find myself wondering if journalists ever go to the library and look stuff up before they start reporting on it. And in this case, what has long troubled me is something the press never talks about, and that is the degree to which the United States supports Ethiopia with money and weapons in exchange for political favors, such as the attack on Somalia in 2006.

However, I want to be clear here. I don’t think either the press or the American government has a clear agenda with regards to Ethiopia. So, when I say that the U.S. is supporting Ethiopia, I’m not saying that this line of support is consistent or unilateral. It is, in fact, symptomatic of many of the classic ideological contradictions that Karl Marx long ago observed in capitalist, colonialist countries who propagate a set of conflicting values. Americans want democracy in Ethiopia, but they also want a secure state friendly to American business interests. Americans want pluralism and tolerance worldwide, but they also ally themselves with some groups against others, in particular against those others who desire a government according to either Islamic or Socialist principles. Americans want economic development in Africa, but not competition from Africa. The point being, what will never be fully addressed in the American media is the full relationship between Ethiopia’s line of succession and America’s very confused sense of itself and its own interests. As James Ferguson’s book Global Shadows: Africa in the Neoliberal World Order demonstrates, it is hard for both Americans and Ethiopians to think beyond the category of the nation-state when we are assigning responsibility for political and economic problems and speculating about possible solutions.

In sorting through the various perspectives and statements on the state of higher education, and in coming to terms with my surprise and anger at some of John’s comments, I am reminded of the theoretical notion about ideology made by the influential cultural theorist Stuart Hall. In one essay [here], he argues that ideology is not such a simple correlation between a social class position and a way of thinking — e.g., the ideology of the proletariat vs. the bourgeois, Democrat vs. Republican, or college student vs. banker. Instead, he urges a theorization of difference in which we recognize “that there are different social contradictions with different social origins; that the contradictions that drive the historical process forward do not always appear in the same place, and will not always have the same historical effects.” In other words, even though John and I may basically agree on most things, we may come to our beliefs in different ways and occupy different social positions in relation to our ideology as well as in relation to the various contradictions in our ideology.

Let me try to explain what I mean about Hall’s complication of the concept of ideology by first acknowledging how John and I agree. His main idea and advice for college graduates is for them to go to a foreign country, get some experience, learn a foreign language, and come to a different understanding of the world. In light of the changing socio-economic conditions that many journalists and scholars (including myself) call “globalization” and in light of the recession that began in 2008, I have often given this same advice to my own students and have used almost the same language as John. “Get out of the country,” we both say. “Make some money to pay off your college loans and get some experience to help you figure out what you can do.” This doesn’t just mean teach English, as I did. It could mean some sort of service, as John did. This goes along with some advice I wrote to graduating students in this blog way back in 2009 [here], specifically for my English majors who were confused about their career options and graduate school. Of course, our viewpoint here is not so original. Colleges and universities themselves are increasingly promoting “global citizenship” and study-abroad programs, as such experiences and skills are increasingly seen as necessary in today’s competitive environment. So, there is really nothing especially controversial about this view, whether you are a Republican, Democrat, Libertarian, Marxist, or Green. There is, however, something troubling about this view if you are poor — since the version of “global citizenship” and the way such cultural experiences are credentialed is somewhat exclusive.

And here is where I get critical of how John arrives at his position, and my point here, relating to the theory of Stuart Hall, is that we may all agree about the value of international experience and skills, but we may arrive at this viewpoint differently and articulate the contradictions of our ideology differently. John makes some rather cynical statements about the value of college education which he compares to a social club for rich people. Curiously, this comparison is part of his argument that contrasts the uselessness of college education with the usefulness of international experience. Hence, John’s argument relies upon a somewhat common (and, in my view, false and misleading) binary opposition between an exclusive ivory tower of spoiled brats and the “real world.” Ironically, of course (and here is an instance of the ideological contradiction I mentioned earlier), international experience is perhaps even more an exclusive opportunity for the rich than a college degree is. Many of my own students who come from poor families have remarked that a lot of the international and service opportunities (e.g., Peace Corps, AmeriCorps, various non-governmental organizations, etc.) with which their wealthier classmates pad their résumé’s are unavailable to them. They need to make money right away, and often do so with the less glamorous sorts of jobs.

This is not just a minor point, since the entire thrust of John’s argument relies on the contrast between a somewhat useless and exclusive nature of college education (useless in terms of any real skills or knowledge, according to him) and the usefulness, openness, and inclusiveness of “real” international experience. He claims, “college is more about socialization than about education.” Here his argument relies upon a binary opposition between socialization and knowledge, as if the two aren’t intimately related (as I demonstrated in my last blog post about intercultural competency). In fact, the way one goes about gathering data and interpreting it is an ethical act that requires the student to be able to question their own assumptions. Later, making the assertion that the infamously exclusive Skull and Bones club is a microcosm of the whole college experience, John claims that “college is a lot like the club of advanced industrialized nations” where the elite cater to the elite and exclude others, and he makes this claim without any acknowledgement that international travel may be an even more elite activity than college.

Repeatedly in question in John’s blog is what college faculty and administrators do. For those of us who teach, interact with students each day, work hard to design curriculum, and work with administrators to address the problem of social inequalities among our students, we tend to think that we are making a genuine effort to accomplish exactly the opposite of what John claims the institution of higher education does. Most colleges aim for their campuses being a “microcosm” of the whole society, not a microcosm of an exclusive club, and colleges support this as best they can with need-based financial assistance and programs to recruit first-generation students, immigrants, etc. However, what is disturbing here is that John’s stereotype of college culture is not supported by any evidence but is instead cloaked in the authority of a rather simplistic Marxism (exactly the sort that Stuart Hall is critiquing.) His stereotypes sound plausible, as strereotypes so often do. However, they are not true. Students actually learn quite a lot. Speaking as someone who actually labors in the trenches of higher education, the examples are numerous. In their first semester, students learn how to do research, evaluate sources, and compose a long research paper. This is very difficult for most of them when they arrive, but by the end of their first year, they can do it, and this is a very valuable skill, as I’ve argued elsewhere [here]. It is one of the joys all teaching when we see students accomplish something that they weren’t able to do before.

In addition to such skills (and there are many such skills), there is also a lot of knowledge and ways of processing knowledge. One of the things education abroad offices and college professors have discussed at length is how students learn (or sometimes don’t learn) from their experiences in other countries. Contrary to John’s assumption, most of the real learning happens not when the students are in the foreign country, but after they return to college, when they read, write, discuss, and process their experience. And this is especially important because what a middle-class white person (such as John and myself) usually experiences in a foreign country is a rather small piece of it. These travelers may not be aware of the socio-economic forces that produced their experience, and they may not ever see other aspects of the society, as I have argued in my blog about my trip to Japan with students [here]. Even someone whose job is to understand the whole society in which they work might be exposed to only a part of that society and come away from their “experience” with a rather ideologically warped understanding of where they were, as I have argued in my blog about my trip to Kenya with several of my colleagues [here]. There are things that a cultural historian, sociologist, and economist may reveal about a country that no personal experience will ever get, and although John seems to think that the various courses that students take during their four years of college have no connection to each other, actually the point of the liberal arts education is that they learn different ways of understanding the realities of the world that are usually invisible to us. College professors labor very hard revising and revising and revising college curriculum so that it is more inclusive and more effective at leading to exactly the sort of global understanding that John’s blog promotes. It is one of the joys of teaching when we see a student’s face light up with a transformative new understanding of the world they live in and when they make connections between what they learn in one class and another.

So, coming back to Stuart Hall’s point about ideology, we can see that while John and I might both agree that an international understanding of the world is important (a view with which almost all college administrations today also agree — so much so that it would seem both John and I reflect the very hegemonic ideology that we think we are critiquing), we arrive at that view very differently. Moreover, I would argue that the way he makes his politically leftist argument ironically has a lot in common with the arguments that the politically far-right make about higher education. Many of their arguments assert that public universities are sites of liberal brainwashing and socialization, and not about real content. (I have written about this at length [here]). Their goal is clearly to discredit the scholarly work that professors do, and their goal is a financial one — to shift funding away from publicly funded, publicly managed education to privately funded, privately managed education. My own problem with this is that privately funded education is, of course, like privately-funded think tanks, subject to the whims and biases of private money (often the interests of corporations and bankers.) What worries me about John’s disparaging comments about higher education is how similar they are in effect to the beliefs of the very people John is most ideologically opposed to.

And of course, when it comes right down to it, the real issue is the money question. All of the hysterical assertions in the mainstream media about the quality of education, how little students are learning, the content of their curriculum, the usefulness of a college degree, and the effectiveness of the delivery mechanism (i.e., on-line education, lecture hall, group learning, etc.) is largely smoke and mirrors. The real issue is an economic one, and has to do with inflation, cost of education, competition, etc. The often-cited graph is this one in which the cost of education has gone up so much faster than the rate of inflation.

Although Romney and other Republicans argue that the cause of this rising tuition is the federal government giving loans to students (huh?) and that fostering competition between colleges will drive prices down, it is more likely that the heightened competition is exactly what has driven prices up, as colleges pour money into new facilities, special programs, etc. I can tell you that the increase in tuition dollars does not go into professor’s salaries or the classroom experience. Rather, it goes into all the special things that make a school attractive and competitive. We might laughingly speculate that one of the things that has driven up college tuition is their effort to become more “global” in exactly the way John prescribes. The real concern here is how we finance a broad-based, accessible liberal arts education in which students from all backgrounds are exposed to a lot of different ways of looking at the world and learn a lot of valuable skills. In my view, it is dangerous to fancifully imagine replacing the liberal arts college and public university with something else, as John seems to do, because what is most likely to replace it is a corporate-driven agenda that merely trains young people to do the things the stockholders and CEOs need them to do. This is not the road to real prosperity, and it is not the road to a just and equitable society. Given the obvious gaps and holes in our culture that will likely widen with such a corporate-driven agenda, we can anticipate what will fill those gaps — not the objective, hard scholarly work that happens at the research university but the biased and narrow agenda of sectarian groups that fight each other.

As the episode of The Office and Freud’s essay suggest, what might make a class on intercultural competency hard to teach – and even harder to institutionalize – is that it is not simply a set of information that the student must learn. Rather, it asks that the students come to terms with their selves – their biases, desires, privileges — some of which may be conscious, some of which may be unconscious. And as all my students in my introduction to theory are well aware, once the notion of the “self” is posited as an important dimension of the curriculum, then things get tricky. Often the course may enter uncomfortable territory not because the student is encountering a new, foreign culture (as many administrators wrongly believe), but actually because they are encountering uncomfortable things about themselves that they already know but don’t want to think about. For instance, ideally, we have all been taught that an equitable society for men and women of all colors and creeds is desirable, but at the same time we also recognize that this is not in fact the case and that there is a huge gap between the ideals of our society and its realities. Some of us may have privileges, opportunities, and good fortune that others don’t have. Everyone is aware of this gap, but few want to confront it. Notice that this discomfort has to do with a political and sociological difference, not a cultural one. Hence, the very conceptualization of “intercultural competency” is already a problematic displacement of a thorny political question onto a cultural schematic. In my view, the fact that many people naturally gravitate towards the familiar and avoid the unfamiliar isn’t enough to cause discomfort in intercultural competency classes; rather, what’s uncomfortable is the things about ourselves and our world that we are all too familiar with but would prefer not to take responsibility for.

Now, I don’t want to claim that intercultural competency is all about the psychology of the student, or that it’s all about the equally problematic psychology of the institution. Most of it is about the appreciation of different cultures along with the history of race relations and/or international relations, including histories of colonization and imperialism. Such is the manifest content of class work — the stuff one studies. However, the latent content of the class is its meaning for the self. And because I just taught my intro-to-theory class the essays of Freud, Lacan, and Derrida, I am deliberately using terminology from Freud’s Interpretation of Dreams that distinguishes between the “manifest content” (or the stuff in the dream) and the “latent content” (or, what the stuff means.) In other words, the stuff on the syllabus for any class is naturally going to be primarily content about different cultures, ethnicities, races, etc., and there are hundreds of ways to approach this content that reflect political and methodological differences among faculty. However, regardless of the content, the impetus behind the syllabus, or the drive that motivates requiring it, is of course the actual relationship of the student not only to people of other cultures or races, but also the student’s understanding of his or her ethical understanding of self and other. In some ways, then, the latent content of the class is ethics and psychology, even though most of the manifest content may not be either ethics or psychology. There would seem to be a slippage between the manifest content (the study of culture, history, literature, etc.) and the latent content (ethics, psychology, etc.). When the slippage between multiple subjects is considered, it is easy to see why this is a hard curricular requirement to wrap one’s head around. The course slides between the academic subjects of history, literature, culture, psychology, ethics, etc.  Moreover, always grounding this linked chain of subjects is another subject — the self or “I” (note the double meaning of “subject” here), what Freud calls the “ego.”

(A brief theoretical joke for those who have read Jacques Lacan’s ”Agency of the Letter in the Unconscious.” Please skip this parenthesis if you haven’t. Following the example of Lacan’s joke about the mathematical algorithm for Freudian psychology, we might give the variable subjects in the class a capital letter “S” for “Subject” and the variable stuff in the intercultural class a lower case “s” for stuff. Lacan’s algorithm for the relationship between language and the unconscious is that the function of the Signifier (S) is the relationship between the ego (I) and the signified (s), and we might jokingly say that the function of the Subject (S) is the relationship between the student’s’ ego and the stuff in the class. Consequently, whatever the variable Subjects (S) of the class are, their relationship to its various stuff (s) and therefore its very meaning in society is a function of ego, hahahaha, and this is why the Subject of a class on intercultural competency inevitably slides along a chain of Subjects, from culture to history to literature to political science to ethics to psychology, etc. In other words, in Derrida’s terms, the central point of intercultural competency is by definition absent and decentered along a signifying chain.)

Hence, if there is always a psychological component, whether or not this component is actually on the syllabus, I propose a psychoanalysis via Jacques Lacan. In his seminal essay, “The Agency of the Letter in the Unconscious,” Lacan argues that many pop psychologists mistakenly understand the unconscious id of Freud’s theory as instinctual drive. However, the unconscious is not instincts at all, but is in fact the aspects of our relationship to our own culture that we suppress and displace through complex symbols. His argument is long and difficult, but for the sake of this blog, I want to boil it down to three versions of the Cartesian cogito that Lacan explores. Following Lacan’s exploration of these three formulations, I will explore three versions of intercultural competency, each based on one of these formulas for the self’s relationship to critical thinking.

• I think therefore I am.
• I think where I am.
• I think where I am not; therefore I am where I do not think.

The first is the famous line “I think therefore I am.” Here the philosopher René Descartes explores our ability to doubt received wisdom and to question our very existence, but ultimately resolves this doubt by positing a thinking subject that exists. There is something wonderfully appealing and universal to this idea, and somewhat radical for his own time since it places the burden of rational and ethical thought on the individual subject rather than on God. The upshot for an intercultural competency class is that the students are given the tools to think critically about their own culture. Hence, the goal is to transcend the arbitrariness and randomness of culture instead of wrongly believing that your own culture is in some way normal or universal. What many philosophers have criticized, however, is the idea of a self-contained individual subject that is doing all this thinking. Most of us are aware that our thoughts respond to external stimuli, are derived from language that we have no control over, etc. Hence, in order to situate the subject in his or her environment or cultural context, Lacan humorously suggests a revision of the statement to “I think where I am.”

What are the implications of this second formulation for intercultural competency? Well, the first version implies that all human beings are rational thinking beings. There is something wonderfully universal about this, and much of the ideology of modern Europe was the believe in the universality of modern science and human rights. However, there are many challenges to this ideology. Most of the “rights” encoded in our Constitution and the United Nations Charter are individual rights. However, people don’t live alone; they live in communities, which has caused the United Nations to add “cultural” and “community” rights to its manifest. We are not just individual thinking subjects; we are also members of specific cultural locations. Hence, Lacan’s second versions of the cogito draws attention to the goals of intercultural competency typically set forth by college administrations: (1) to appreciate other cultures, and (2)  to appreciate that one comes from a culture oneself. In other words, one may think that there is a “normal” way of doing things and a “normal” or “universal” way of understanding rights and responsibilities, or one may also think that it’s possible for a rational individual to transcend the arbitrariness of culture, but in fact our very way of thinking is conditioned by the circumstances in which we happen to live. To put it another way, when we think, we think with the various tools for thinking that our culture gives to us. And this is what Lacan means when he suggests that we think where we are. We think through our culture.

However, Lacan is unsatisfied with this for all sorts of reasons. First and foremost, it’s not true. We don’t think where we are. Culture is not so deterministic, and ethical values are not so relativistic. In fact, when we think of ourselves, we always do so in relation to other people and other spaces. For instance, men both desire and fear women. Our imagination of ourselves is always in relation to desires and fears, and an important contribution of psychoanalytic theory is that we don’t simply fear difference; we also desire it. If we think of the earliest examples of classic literature, they are always imagining the self in far-away locations: e.g., Thomas More’s Utopia, John Milton’s Paradise Lost, Daniel Defoe’s Robison Crusoe. The more popular example of James Bond movies take this utopian imagination even further as the secret agent Bond always expresses himself by seducing exotic, foreign women. Even the Bible begins by defining humanity in terms of a lost paradise. So, the notion of intercultural competency that suggests we simply appreciate where we come from and where others come from is somewhat impotent and wrongheaded. More dangerously, it is also deterministic as it assumes that a culture determines the way we think. Against such a deterministic understanding of culture, we can appreciate that even though two people may come from the same culture, they may also differ from each other in all sorts of ways. The human imagination is broader and more  interesting than simply one’s cultural location. It is not simply a reflection of where one comes from. Those who posit a version of intercultural competency along the lines of “they have a culture and I have a culture and I must appreciate both” are not just factually wrong in really obvious ways; they are wrong in a way that is horribly unethical.

Hence, we have two paradigms: one is Descartes’s individual rational subject who doubts everything but seems unaware of the role cultural difference plays in his or her own thinking, and the other is overly deterministic in its premise that we simply think the way our culture teaches us to. Neither of these are satisfactory, and neither gets us very far. How do we reconcile these two very different iterations of the cogito – of how we think and how we recognize ourselves thinking?

To answer this question, Lacan concludes with this version of the cogito: I think where I am not; therefore, I am where I do not think.

This formula, I believe, provides a more useful and factually accurate understanding of cultural difference. On a very simple level, it helps students discover that stereotypes are not just incorrect understandings of others. Rather, it helps students understand how stereotypes are expressions of the cultural generating the stereotype — its desires, its fears, etc. In other words, we understand ourselves through metaphorical figurations of others. To give you a recent illustration of this, one author has angrily argued against something he calls White Savior Industrial Complex. This is a perfect example of the how Americans feel good about themselves by saving Africans, which is a feel-good situation that first requires that the Americans understand themselves in relation to a stereotype of Africans. For another example, I have written about Oromo ethnic culture in America and in Ethiopia with Lacan’s theory in mind [here]. Another example might be the popularity of “gangsta rap” in mostly white, middle-class suburbs. In addition, on a more fundamental, epistemological level, Lacan anticipates the work of recent philosophers of science and philosophers of mind that question the mind-body dualism of Descartes and assert that our mind thinks not only with our body but also with our body’s physical relationship to the world.

Therefore, if thinking always happens in relation to a world, then in order to understand ourselves, and in order to become ethical individuals, we need to understand the world, and here we come full circle back to the very impetus behind intercultural competency in the first place — the world we live in. In other words, the stuff (lower case “s”). However, it’s not enough simply to study the stuff, because how we imagine the stuff is crucial. In other words, the Subject (upper case “S”) directs our understanding of the stuff (s). If Lacan is right, that we understand ourselves through our rather metaphorical imagination of others, then the question of how to teach the psychological component of intercultural competency is key.

What I think is cool about Lacan’s formula for the relationship between thinking and selfhood is that it opens up the slipperiness of identity, the possibility of change, the role of the imagination, the necessity of self-criticism, and the recognition that we are in essence incomplete beings. Think about it. Why do we both fear and desire others? Because we are at root dissatisfied with ourselves. We are incomplete. Hence the metaphor for marriage “better half” and “she completes me.” Intercultural competency is, in part, a quest for completeness and a meaningful life.

In conclusion, and to return to the episode of The Office about the bumbling attempt to overcome stereotypes, we can see the boss articulating his own identity through various personas — Chris Rock, Martin Luther King, Jr., etc. In other words, he believes he is leading his office to become interculturally competent because he is endorsing black celebrities, but his imagination of himself through them is precisely what is offensive because his starting place is the assumption of difference and the fetishization of specific tropes (metonymies) of that difference. The show clearly indicates that this is foolish, but unfortunately, the show does not give us any positive indication of what might be better. The show does not provide any space for individuals to actually have a real conversation about difference. In order for a class about difference to be meaningful, the starting point needs to be the extent to which we are interdependent, incomplete individuals. On a very basic level, I rely on others for food, clothing, shelter, knowledge,  culture, etc. Where does it all come from and how does it move? Why don’t I want to think about the conditions in which my T-shirts were made and the extent to which my identity depends on the teenage girl in Mexico who made it. That’s the starting point.

Coincidentally, just a few days after writing that post, I happened to read some of Lady Mary Wortley Montagu’s letters that she wrote three centuries ago in 1717 when her husband was an ambassador to Turkey. This is my first time ever reading her work, and I regret not having read it before. She is very witty and clever, and her published letters about her experiences in Turkey were quite popular at the time and are now usually included in anthologies of English literature. Montagu’s lengthy descriptions of the Turkish baths reveal a fascination with the idea of Muslim women in one of the most powerful empires in the eighteenth century lounging around naked in each other’s company. The image is one of freedom and comfort, and she contrasts this image to the complex stays and corsets of English clothing, which she compares to a “machine” that has her “locked up.” In another letter on “Turkish Dress,” she again contrasts her own uncomfortable clothing to the more comfortable dress. Now, here is what I find fascinating, and I’m going to quote it in full.

‘Tis very easy to see they have more liberty than we have, no woman of what rank soever being permitted to go in the streets without two muslins, one that covers her face all but her eyes and another that hides the whole dress of her head and hangs half way down her back…. You may guess how effectually this disguises them, that there is no distinguishing the great lady from her slave, and ’tis impossible for the most jealous husband to know his wife when he meets her, and no man dare either touch of follow a woman in the street. This perpetual masquerade gives them entire liberty of following their inclinations without danger of discovery…. The great ladies seldom let their gallants know who they are, and ‘its so difficult to find it out that they can very seldom guess at her name they have corresponded with above half a year together…. Neither have they much to apprehend from the resentment of their husbands, those ladies that are rich having all their money in their own hands, which they take with ‘em upon a divorce with an addition which he is obliged to give ‘em. Upon the whole, I look upon the Turkish women as the only free people in the Empire. The very Divan pays a respect to ‘em, and the Grand Signore himself, whenever a Bassa is executed, never violates the privileges of the harem, which remains unsearched entire to the widow.

You can also find the whole passage on [this website]. What is interesting to me is how her eighteenth-century imagination of the hijab is exactly the opposite of the American and European imagination in the twenty-first century. She sees it as liberating, whereas the American media today sees it as oppressive. What do we make of this total reversal of meaning?

Montagu is, I suspect, using the idea of Turkish difference to launch a feminist critique of English society. One may doubt her assessment of how free Turkish women actually were, and she seems to enjoy the scandalousness of the point that she is making. Few Muslims would agree with her sense of freedom in terms of the ability to commit acts of infidelity undetected. But the reality of the daily lives of English or Turkish people is not the purpose of my analysis, nor even, perhaps, of Montagu’s own intention in writing those letters, an intention we can only guess at anyway. (In my view, and in my experience in Japan, the Czech Republic, Kenya, and Ethiopia, people are usually just people, and the hype about cultural difference is generally overblown and potentially dangerous. Freedom and unfreedom, wealth and poverty — these are things that exist in every society I’ve ever encountered, especially my own.) Rather, I am interested in the fantasy and in the use of a rather utopian representation of freedom to critique the oppression of one’s homeland. My own interpretation of Montagu’s letters is that her idea exposes the ways in which English women are not free, considering that they are subject to so much abuse and disrespect. The style of clothing, for Montagu, is a signifier of the abuse and disrespect in English society versus the freedom and respect in Turkish society.

The thing about her eighteenth-century letters that made me think of the twenty-first century video about ninjas in Iran is the notion that the headscarf and veil are instruments of stealth and invisibility, and that this is powerful. After all, ninjitsu is the art of invisibility. What does it mean for both the 18th-century letters and the 21st-century video to understand a woman’s liberty in terms of her ability to be invisible? This is a curious notion indeed. If we think of Freud’s work on dreams and Jacques Lacan’s work on the very language we use to describe our social relations, then we begin to detect the ways in which gender is a product of signifiers — in this case, clothing, but as Saussure and Lacan also argue, signifiers organized by a logic of difference. Hence, the meaning of the signifiers ”men” and “women” is the logic of their difference, and this committment to such a difference means that we never actually “see” just the person. We always see the person in terms of these culturally loaded signifiers. A woman is already “invisible” in the sense that her real objective self exists behind a cloud of language and culture. Montagu’s desire is for her own invisibility, but this desire paradoxically is symptomatic of the fact that she actually already feels invisible. It is a curious thing to desire that which you already are, or have, and this is the curious nature of the human psyche. She already feels invisible because English men neither understand nor want to understand her as a person with a brain. This is what Lacan means when he suggests “there is no such thing as woman.” He doesn’t mean that individual women don’t exist. He means that the notion of “woman” is a culturally loaded idea. Ralph Ellison made a similar point about African-Americans in his famous novel Invisible Man, published in 1952, where white people do not really “see” black people. Instead, they only see projected images of their own fears and desires. Likewise, the symbolism of the Turksish baths, harem, and hijab all metaphorically mean a condition of invisibility. Montagu’s celebration of that invisibility displaces her anxiety about feeling invisible and disempowered all the time already onto a more empowering form of invisibility. For her in the eighteenth century, this was the hijab. For us today, it is the ninja, whose clothing style is curiously similar to the hijab in many ways, as I argued in my previous blog post.

hijab or shinobi shozoku?

This past week, the internet was buzzing with news of Iran’s secret army of “deadly ninja women.” It sounds like something straight out of the plot of a James Bond movie, in which the world’s favorite “global hero” would have to seduce the deadly but also sexy ninja Muslim girl and save the planet from nuclear holocaust. The Washington Post imagined director Quentin Tarantino taking on this seemingly made-for-cinema topos. Of course, Iran has no such “army” of secret sexy soldiers who are experts in the art of invisibility. Rather, this is merely a club sport, like so many club sports for men and women around the world. In the United States today, thousands of women take kickboxing classes, and thousands more take pole dancing. If we can imagine Hollywood making a movie in which James Bond or some other international man of mystery falls in love with an Iranian ninja woman, can we also imagine Iran’s well-regarded movie industry making an action thriller with an Iranian secret agent seducing an American ex-cheerleader in order to prevent the world from another American-instigated war in the Middle East? The producers of the film would be sitting around a table in Tehran debating whether to make that character a kickboxer or a pole dancer.

What I want to argue here, since my theory class is just now beginning its unit on theories about language and signs, is that this video perfectly illustrates Ferdinand de Saussure’s famous point about the relationship between the signifier and the signified being constituted by a logic of difference. In this case, the signifier is the veil that has become such a politically loaded symbol of Islam, but is, of course, also an essential feature of the Japanese art of ninjitsu. Before I go on, please check out the video of Iran’s ninja women that has gone viral on YouTube.

Now that’s badaaassss!!!

There is a lot one can say about this video, but the point I want to make is about the nature of signs. One of the arguments of the structuralist linguistics presented be Ferdinand de Saussure is that language does not merely refer to things. Rather, language is a system constituted by difference. As human subjects, we enter a system of language that we come to understand even if we have never seen the things that the words refer to. Consequently, if the system of language pre-exists our experience of things, and if meaning is derived not from the thing itself but from the principle of difference, then we might begin to suspect that language affects how we see the world.

The particular sign that I want to focus on is the veil and headscarf (hijab) that is a standard feature for Muslim women and for ninjas. In European and American culture, the sign of the veil is typically understood as a symbol of Islam’s oppression of women. In this sense, the veil and headscarf  is understood by the West as a sign of difference –how they are different from us. Many connotations are attached to this one symbol, and it is somewhat famously controversial, but the strongest connotation for Europeans and Americans is oppression. What is curious about this symbol is how divorced from any sense of the ordinary, everyday life in the countries where hijab is commonly worn. So, the assumption in the western media is that all Iranian women are oppressed, and the meaning of this article of clothing is oppression. The piece of clothing functions as a sign — a sign overloaded with meaning, kind of like the way the Scarlet Letter A functions as sign for the Puritans in Hawthorne’s famous novel. An example of the western assumption is the rather chauvinistic Atlantic.com article about the women ninjas. This article wrongly assumes that the women ninjas are resisting state sponsored oppression. But this is no underground movement. In fact, the ninja clubs are part of a general state sponsored fitness program, the exact opposite of the Atlantic.com‘s idiotic assumption. What the Atlantic.com also neglects to mention is that 60% of all college graduates in Iran are women, and it has one of the most progressive family medical leave programs in the world. (The United States, in contrast, has one of the least progressive.) Considering that feminists have long been arguing for a more progressive family medical act, why is it so hard for American feminists to appreciate Iran? Why is hijab understood as oppressive and bikinis and pole dancing liberating? Despite the fact that Iranian women play sports, western governments won’t allow them to play in competitions for one reason only — the hijab clothing, simply because of its symbolic meaning.

What I think is so fascinating about the above video is that, when I am watching it, I can’t quite tell which part of the outfit is hijab and which part is the ninja’s outfit, called in Japanese shinobi shozoku. And this is key, because when we think about ninjas in the Japanese context, rather than the Iranian context, we think of that sort of clothing not as a symbol of oppression, but as a symbol of power. Hence, in the imagination of the other culture (always exaggerated according to a logic of difference — of us versus them), this same item of clothing in one context means weakness and in another context means strength. And this is why I think Saussure is correct when he says that the meaning of signs is not so much based on the referent (the thing that you can point to with your index finger — in this case, the clothing), but to the whole system of signs that the one sign is a part of.

And of course, the reason for all this odd fascination in American pop culture with the ninja women in Iran at this particular moment is that the United States happens to be leading an international embargo of Iran’s economy and threatening Iran with the possibility of an attack. Iran, meanwhile, continues to develop its nuclear program. It is not the point of this blog to make a political argument for or against the embargo or to speculate on the likelihood of the United States or Israel attacking Iran. Rather, I just want to point out how strange it is for Americans to be so fascinated by ninja women in Iran at this time. Or maybe it’s not strange at all. Maybe it’s all too predictable. If we read the signs, the contradictory double meaning of the veil says a lot about America’s confused and troubled relationship with this other country. For the western fantasy – the kind of fantasy we see in James Bond movies — the hijab is both a symbol of power and of weakness. It is the image of the woman he desires and the image of the woman he is supposed to scorn or pity, the woman he is both scared of and wants to save. And if you think I’m exaggerating, see this really gross website forum where American men have already posted lewd comments about either submitting to sexy Iranian women or dominating them. In conclusion, the American interpretation of the ninja woman in Iran and the sign of the veil is rife with all sorts of ideological contradictions. One can understand why American pop culture would have so much fun entertaining this contradictory fantasy, but let us hope that our political leaders don’t think and act like adolescent James Bonds.

So, in my blog today (since only people registered for the class can see the wiki textbook), I wanted to put something I wrote for the textbook out there in the public to see what kind of feedback I might get. Also, it kind of relates to the concept of the “subject” that we just covered in my other class, the intro to theory for which I created this blog in the first place. Below is a section from the wiki textbook. To give you some background, the five units for the book are 1) Getting a Job, 2) Internal Communication, 3) Networking and Collaboration, 4) External Communication, and 5) Presentations and Visuals. Currently, we are in the middle of the second unit on internal communication, which includes memos, e-mails, reports, and proposals. For each unit, the textbook has three sections. The first section is simply practical how-to stuff, like what does a memo or a progress report typically look like. The second section is a more theoretically reflective section, which we believe is necessary so that students can actually think about what they’re doing and respond intelligently to changing circumstances; in other words, this is where the humanistic, critical inquiry valued by liberal arts colleges comes into play. And the third section is a bunch of activities and assignments. So, below is what I just wrote today for the “theory” section of unit two.

Diversity, Power, and Democratic Communication

Whether you’re working for a large company, a small business, a government office, or a non-governmental organization, internal communication is what makes the place run. We can use the metaphor of a human body to describe the workplace. Without good communication, the right hand doesn’t know what the left hand is doing, and the right leg might be walking in a different direction than the left. You can imagine a humorous cartoon version of this. Worst case scenario is the workplace stumbles and falls or gives itself a bloody nose.

Unlike the sort of writing that takes place in the university or the public sphere, writing in the private sphere is subject to a range of demands, expectations, and sources of information. We might think of the scholarly writing or the kind of writing that appears in magazines such as Harper’s and The Atlantic as “transcendental” writing. Such writing assumes an ethically pure position of privilege above the nitty-gritty of the work-a-day world. This is the philosopher Immanuel Kant’s notion of “enlightenment” where the writer or critic positions himself or herself outside the system that he or she critiques. Such a critique is fundamental for society, which is why the institutions that support that position, such as newspapers and the “public sphere” (theorized by Jurgen Habermas), play such an important role in our society. However, writing in the workplace is different in that it puts the individual within a web of demands and expectations that he or she must negotiate.

Furthermore, just as we learned in the ”Getting a Job” unit for this course, each and every place has its own unique culture, norms, values, procedures, and organizational structure. Some places may be rigidly formal, others casual. Some may emphasize a hierarchical chain of command and clear lines of authority, and others may value a more open-ended, democratic environment. For some jobs, you may work autonomously much of the time, but in others you may be mostly working as a team or under the direction of someone else. And some organizations may seem like they value diversity and democratic decision-making when in fact they are really top-down, autocratic, and resistant to genuine, positive change.

It is now a commonplace idea held by many theorists and business leaders that companies increasingly value diversity and horizontal communication. Why is this so? What was wrong with the old model, where the boss told the employees what to do, and they did it. After all, the military has a clear hierarchical, vertical, and centralized chain of command, and what’s wrong with that? Actually, today’s military has also been affected by the “postmodern condition” and have become more horizontal and decentered. The reason why companies discovered the benefits of democratic decision-making and the important role of diversity is the same reason why nation states did. What is sarcastically called the “old boys network” at the top (or, we might say, the “rich white men”) didn’t always make the right decisions. They were less innovative and responsive to changing conditions on the ground, and were subject to something called “group think.” Group think is when everyone gradually thinks the same way even if that way turns out to be really, really wrong. One Nobel-prize winning economist (Paul Krugman) famously compared stock brokers to lemmings who just followed the leader off a cliff and didn’t think for themselves. Catastrophic events like the Thai-bhat crash in 1997 and the bursting of the housing bubble in 2008 were the result of “group think”, when thousands of individuals engaged in unwise and unethical behavior. Hence, diversity and democratic decision-making are not just noble principles for a just and equitable society. They are also perceived to be the foundation of good business and a necessary antidote to the evils of the old boys network. Free and open communication are essential for a competitive, innovative organization. Moreover, our postmodern appreciation for horizontal communication not so coincidentally happens alongside many new communications technologies such as the internet and e-mail that allow information to flow in all sorts of directions with the touch of a button. New communications technologies create new organizational structures and forms of internal communication, even though traces of the old forms remain. (For instance, e-mail basically follows the conventions of the old-fashioned memo, except in a quicker, more casual form and more easily sent to a diverse array of people.) Likewise, college professors began to celebrate the internet and such on-line communication technologies as course-management software (e.g., Moodle), chat rooms, and social networking sites as ways to “decenter” and “democratize” the classroom, appreciate the knowledge students bring to the class, include a wider diversity of student voices, etc., etc., etc.

However, as theorists as different from each other as Stanley Deetz, Slavoj Zizek, and Gilles Deleuze have argued, much of this “new-age” business model that seems to liberate workers from the old power structure actually just creates a new and even more complex demand. Workers must be more adaptive, more agile, and more responsive to changing conditions. This new demand instills within the postmodern labor force an ever-present anxiety, requiring constant personal development. Moreover, diversity and democratic decision-making are valued only up to a point — so far as they continue to serve the basic power structure. As the philosopher Deleuze argued in a brief and somewhat famous essay “Society of Control” (in which he responds to Michel Foucault’s book Discipline and Punish), what makes the new form of control so challenging is precisely the ways in which the chain of command is no longer simple, linear, and top-down. Rather, it is more like a web of relations in which the protocols for communication are situational and ad hoc. As a result, the roles we play and faces we wear (like professional masks) are also more complicated. Organizations focus on team building and blur the boundaries between “work” and “leisure” in order to boost morale and improve the lines of communication among all the different members of the organization. This is believed to improve productivity and efficiency. However, the “casualization” of the workplace doesn’t result in more liberated labor. Just because we now wear jeans on “casual Fridays” and go river-rafting with the boss does not mean that we are getting a better paycheck or that we are really our boss’s equal or buddy. Corporations increasingly give all of their employees the formal title of “assistant manager” or even “manager” when in fact they are not really managers at all — just paper pushing, number crunching assistants, as the TV show The Office famously mocks. Both the British and American versions of this show are symptomatic of the anxieties employees feel in the workplace where the chain of command is ambiguous and the democratization of communication lacks clarity.

In fact, the casualization of the workplace and the multi-directionality and diversification of communications technologies means that the demand for effective workplace communication is all the more intense. In essence, the workplace remains rife with ideological contradictions and dilemmas, in which workers are subject to conflicting expectations and demands. How to negotiate those conflicting expectations and demands and become a more ethical person is the reason why a course such as English 315 “Business Writing, Civil Society, and Professional Careers” exists. At the end of the day, however, this sort of writing is an experimental writing, not a following of strict formulas. The more you do it, the more you practice this sort of communication, and the more you think about the choices you make and how you perform different roles at different times, the more this complex web of relations will make sense.