One-Way Street

Shame, Lies, and WikiLeaks

Slavoj Žižek weighs in on the WikiLeaks controversy with characteristic dialectical zig-zags ending in an apocalyptic vision.

He starts in one of his favorite places: American popular cinema. Julian Assange, WikiLeaks’s director, corresponds to the Joker in Christopher Nolan’s The Dark Knight. In Nolan's film district attorney Harvey Dent and police commissioner Gordon collude to cover up the truth about Dent's vigilantism in order to preserve the social order of Gotham City. The Joker threatens to reveal the truth behind the lie that holds society together. Julian Assange, in the same manner, wants to reveal the truth behind the "necessary lie" conservative philosopher Leo Strauss identified as the glue that holds democracy together. In Strauss's view, or rather in Žižek's view of Strauss's view, elites obscure the material relations of economic and political power from the gullible masses through soothing fables of social harmony.

Yet Assange only appears to have pulled back the curtains of the necessary lie. Žižek pins the "liberal ideology" of All the President’s Men and The Pelican Brief on WikiLeaks. The free flow of information, this line of thinking goes, is sufficient to speak truth to (and about) power.

For all its reformist zeal, however, WikiLeaks didn't tell us anything we didn't already know about the working of the American State Department. For Žižek,

The only surprising thing about the WikiLeaks revelations is that they contain no surprises. Didn’t we learn exactly what we expected to learn? The real disturbance was at the level of appearances: we can no longer pretend we don’t know what everyone knows we know. This is the paradox of public space: even if everyone knows an unpleasant fact, saying it in public changes everything.

We could see for ourselves that Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi is a buffoon. It's oddly comforting to find out that American diplomats think he is, too. But for Žižek, this is precisely the problem. We can no longer pretend that Berlusconi isn't running a clown democracy, that we needn't worry about a bullying moron taking over an industrialized nation through media manipulation.

Finally, we have the truth about the workings of American diplomats--or more accurately, one percent of the truth, if WikiLeaks' extortionist threats are to be believed. Now what do we do? One thing we're not doing, Žižek claims, is feeling ashamed about how we're complicit with the corrupt power relations in the United States.

This is precisely our situation today: we face the shameless cynicism of a global order whose agents only imagine that they believe in their ideas of democracy, human rights and so on. Through actions like the WikiLeaks disclosures, the shame – our shame for tolerating such power over us – is made more shameful by being publicised. When the US intervenes in Iraq to bring secular democracy, and the result is the strengthening of religious fundamentalism and a much stronger Iran, this is not the tragic mistake of a sincere agent, but the case of a cynical trickster being beaten at his own game.

There must be a Hegelian term for when things get dodgy in the dialectic. First of all, in the U.S. we've already had our moment of shame and moved on to a particular form of apocalyptic anger in the form of the Tea Party and other loudly disgruntled groups. Žižek is no Tea Partier, but he shares their nihilism in his demands that the only honest way out of our shame is total revolution, the contours of which he neglects to provide.

Žižek is reading a lot of Hegel these days. Too bad he's left behind his original intellectual mentor, Jacques Lacan, who would have dismissed the Tea Partiers as a bunch of hysterics and reminded Žižek the truth remains forever veiled, that whatever shame we may feel is actually a méconnaissance, a false recognition. Even the Joker has to subscribe to the necessary lie that his criminal schemes seek something real.

Phati'tude: Multiculturalism in the 21st Century

Multiculturalism generated a great deal of interest in American college campuses in the 1980s and '90s--as well as a great deal of controversy. Since then multiculturalism has gone mainstream. Yesterday, the President of the United States visited his boyhood home in Indonesia, where he closed his remarks at a press conference with the Muslim greeting “salaam aleikum.” But this is also a time when an NPR correspondent was fired for remarking, "if I see people who are in Muslim garb and I think, you know, they are identifying themselves first and foremost as Muslims, I get worried. I get nervous." Recently a candidate for the US Senate falsely asserted that Dearborn, MI and Frankford, TX, which doesn't exist, are governed by Sharia law.

This is the climate into which Phati'tude, a literary magazine, debuts--or, rather, relaunches. The journal was last published in 2001, when the terms of cultural debate abruptly shifted to a realm beyond language, beyond the orthodoxies of liberalism and multiculturalism.

The Spring 2010 issue of Phati'tude is a retrospective of multiculturalism as it has developed over the past 30 years. There are interviews with veterans of the curriculum wars of the '80s and '90s. Lawson Fusao Inada, a Japanese-American writer and educator, has been involved with the West Coast poetry scene since the 1960s. A. Robert Lee is a British Professor of American Literature, has been writing about multiculturalism since the 1980s. For Inada and Lee, multiculturalism is a community with a common set of reference points: Ishmael Reed and Maxine Hong Kingston, to name only two. A lively and interesting literary community has always been one of the prime attractions of multiculturalism.

The essays from younger contributors, somewhat surprisingly, cover much of the same ground. David Zinser argues that American universities commodify diversity, which is true in the sense that, in the age of declining public support for upper education, pretty much everything is commodified on college campuses these days. Mark Crane's scattershot attack on all forms of hegemony hits all the wrong targets. He rails against an unnamed "rich white guy who writes for The New York Times Book Review" about Gabriel Garcia Marquez. Here's a secret from the patriarchy: rich white guys don't read Gabriel Garcia Marquez, let alone write about him in The New York Times. That's how they become rich. Crane also informs us it's a "taboo to imagine any notion of identity that undermines what has been assigned by one’s parents and cultural group." Speaking for the millions of parents across the land, all I can say is, "if only." David M. Wulf contributes an essay that's well meaning but strays into territory that was marked off limits in the 1990s. "Authors of diverse cultural background, due to their own unique heritage, present an alternative to the hegemonic Anglo-American Dream that is foisted on them as a requisite to their integration," he writes. "This essay attempts to make a clear distinction between authentic identity and what is merely socially prescribed." Back in my school days the notion of authentic identity was demolished by every post-structuralist thinker from Jacques Derrida to Homi Bhabha. If it has made a comeback, I don't want to know about it.

Zinser, Crane and Wulf are carrying out ideology critiques, which I'm all for. And multiculturalism is a proper medium for examining ideology. After all, what is multiculturalism but ideology critique under another name? However, ideology critique is an advanced critical skill. It easily falls into the trap of a false binary between self and other. Your thought is rigid and dogmatic, hegemonic in intent and delusional in content, while my thought is wonderfully nuanced and flexible, intuited from lived experience and broadly sympathetic. This mode of thinking is itself deeply ideological.

While the Phati'tude editors are open to contributions in all literary forms, poetry dominates the Spring issue. There's a fine poem from Heid Erdrich, the sister of poet and novelist Louise Erdrich, and a pair of contributions from Lawson Fusao Inada. Jaime "Shaggy" Flores' "Letter of the Day" is impassioned, like a lot of the work in the issue, and also inventive. Also not to be missed is Gabrielle David's sensitive and learned reviews of poetry collections.

As I was reading Phati'tude I kept returning to my days as a graduate student and faculty in English and Film Studies. But the multicultural debate of the 1990s suddenly seemed distant and quaint last Sunday, when I saw my little nephew for the first time since he started kindergarten. He was enrolled in a magnet school focusing on language and arts. Children are assigned one of four languages for an immersion program: Spanish, Chinese, Arabic, and Urdu. When his class was assigned Urdu, the parents contemplated protesting, but in the end they didn't. This is America today: a boy of almost entirely English extraction dutifully working on his Urdu letters, which he shows to his proud and baffled parents. So much for Mark Crane's claim that parents can't think outside their cultural identity.

My nephew is on the front line of a problem that multiculturalism and liberalism are ill-equipped to handle. A good liberal leaves behind religious commitments behind and makes political decisions not as a Jew or a Christian or a Muslim but as a self unencumbered by ethnic, racial, gender, class or religious identities. Since 9/11 the idea of a multicultural nation has had to contend with the reality that some versions of Christian fundamentalism, some versions of Orthodox Judaism, some versions of Islam refuse to separate the public from the private self. In a troubling twist on the old saw "the personal is the political," there are people who want to see their religion's strictures and regulations enacted in every corner of daily life, including the public sphere. Sharia law, whether enacted in Afghanistan or an imaginary town in Texas, is deeply illiberal. Strong religious conviction completely frustrates liberalism's conviction that one of the mighty achievements of the radical Enlightenment to reject the idea that virtue or vice depend on your ethnic or religious background. Multiculturalism wasn't built to understand suicide bombers.

The gamble my nephew's school is taking is that we will be able to somehow decipher the cultural code of people who sympathize with the Taliban and thereby neutralize the effects of religious fundamentalism. My nephew isn't learning Urdu to converse with a Pakistani classmate; he's learning it with an eye on the minarets of Karachi. Chicago means that multiculturalism has gone global, but not in a good way. Hopefully, future issues of Phati'tude will address the next challenges of the great American experiment in a pluralistic society. Multiculturalism is an endless conversation, and that conversation is as important now as it has ever been.

The Gaza Flotilla Crisis in the Haaretz Authors' Edition

This week in Israel started innocently enough. Haaretz had invited a number of prominent authors to help celebrate Israel's national book week. Then the IDF swooped down on a boat in international waters and killed nine people. All of the sudden, no one wanted to talk about books. So with nothing else to do, the authors switched topics to Israel's worst week in years.

Israeli filmmaker and short story writer Etgar Keret turned in a meta-journalistic piece about his difficulties getting officials to talk on record about the crisis. His first plan was to interview Benjamin Netanyahu. The Israel prime minister was too flustered to meet with Barack Obama, so he wasn't going to talk to Keret, either. In fact, the PM canceled a press conference because of the high probability he'd say something stupid. Keret doesn't have much better luck talking to other government officials because no one knows what's going on. He ends up spending a lot of time on the phone with his editor.

Margaret Atwood is a beloved figure everywhere else but in the Middle East, where she's regarded as a meddling harridan. She writes on what she calls the "Shadow" accompanying Israeli-Palestinian relations.

The Shadow is not the Palestinians. The Shadow is Israel’s treatment of the Palestinians, linked with Israeli’s own fears. The worse the Palestinians are treated in the name of those fears, the bigger the Shadow grows, and then the fears grow with them; and the justifications for the treatment multiply.

Bernard-Henri Lévy offers us a glimpse into his "diary." He circles around the topic of the flotilla incident for a while, throwing out perplexing observations such as Barack Obama "is the most Chinese president in American history." He eventually gets around to addressing the crisis by admitting that, like pretty much everyone else, he doesn't know much about what happened during the raid. But if he did know what happened, this is what he would think about it.

I am convinced that it will soon be learned that this so-called humanitarian flotilla was humanitarian in name only, and that its organizers and implementers were exploiting the signs and symbols of humanitarian aid and essentially exploiting the media, rather than expressing any real concern for the suffering of the people of Gaza. And I am also convinced that the initiators of this provocation − the Turkish branch of the Muslim Brotherhood, which is indeed a part of the government in Turkey − had very good reasons for refusing the suggestion that the boats enter the Israeli port of Ashdod so that the real nature of their cargo could be verified.

Jamaica Kincaid writes about watching the crisis unfold on TV, working up some sympathy for Israel, "a tiny, tiny, so tiny country." Jonathan Safran Foer drifts off topic in his piece, "Chicken soup or the Jewish soul?" Milan Kundera decided the Gaza flotilla crisis was the perfect occasion to argue to the release of Roman Polanski.

Fun Friday: The End of the World as We Know It Edition

It's now been scientifically proven that the Internet totally destroys your attention span, so I will keep this Fun Friday post as brief as possible because I may have already lost your attention. 

You see, Web surfing actually rewires your brain so that we can't help but focus on crap instead of, say, on an entire Dickens novel or any of the biographies of his overstuffed, antic, distracted life. Some people say having the attention span of a firefly allows us to use up all the time people used to devote to watching television, which, as we all know, broadcasts nothing but crap. Even when they show something worthwhile, television networks manage to reduce it to crap, such as when Fox News edited out the applause during Obama's speech at West Point. Our attention spans will be further reduced once we all start wearing computer screens sown into our clothes in a few years. Then we can use the time we used to spend watching Lost to Google ourselves obsessively. Freed from the constraints imposed by desktops, laptops, even iPads, you can roam around like a flâneur as your location is geo-tagged and mapped so that the surface chaos of the wireless crowds reveals deeper structures. 

As advanced reproductive technologies become more pervasive, inducing new levels of distraction, buildings will accommodate our eccentric gazes. We may overlook little gems of world literature and lose interest in questions of how we see other cultures through the cinema. We won't notice that the end of the world as we know it may already be here.

Twitter Reports from Tehran

The Twitter feed persiankiwi has dramatic, and virtually minute by minute updates from Tehran. Posted a few moments ago: we are all tired - no sleep for 3 days - one of us is injured from baton - waiting for doctor.

From the Rooftops of Tehran

This just in from the Tehran Times:

TEHRAN - Supreme Leader of the Islamic Revolution Ayatollah Seyyed Ali Khamenei has said the unprecedented turnout for Friday’s presidential election was a miracle.

The other top story in the Iranian capital:

TEHRAN -- The University of Tehran held the fifth literary session on Saturday reviewing works by filmmaker, actor and writer Woody Allen.

Evidently the Tehran Times reporters on their way to investigate the reports that Basij militia forces opened fire on a rally for Iranian opposition leader Mir Hossein Mousavi were held up in traffic. And the culture desk reporters decided an academic panel on a Jewish American writer and filmmaker was more significant than the Mousavi supporters shouting "God is great! Death to the dictator!" from the rooftops of Tehran, just as protesters did at the beginning of the 1979 revolution. 

Recycling in the Contact Zone

Borders have long been a privileged postmodern space. Borders are where differing cultures come into contact with each other. Most theorists have stressed the ways in which one culture tends to prevail over another; others see a more level playing field on which hybrid cultures emerge—cultures that are neither one nationality nor another. Architect and Cal-San Diego professor Teddy Cruz writes in The Nation about the mother of all borders, the US-Mexico border, that “zone of occult instability where the people dwell,” to use Frantz Fanon’s words. (Article link, with accompanying video, can be found here.)

Cruz reports on a vast improvisational recycling project in which salvage materials from demolished suburban houses in San Diego are recycled as building elements for housing in Tijuana. San Diego’s collar suburbs, with their modest bungalows, are morphing into McMansion zones. The postwar California dream spaces are being dismantled and trucked across the border. Garage doors are being repurposed into walls for housing on Tijuana’s hilly fringes. And entire California bungalows are lifted intact from their sites and dropped into parts of the Mexican city with astonishingly permissive building codes, for the houses are often mounted on steel girders so that the space beneath them can be used for taco stands and other purposes.

One would think that the San Diego-Tijuana recycling building materials industry is a pregnant enough metaphor for sustainability at the margins of a vast consumer culture. However, Cruz and some undefined “we” are staging an “intervention,” which, in postmodern parlance means self-aggrandizing meddling by well-meaning but often ineffective academics. “We are currently negotiating a maquiladora-made prefabricated frame that can act as a hinge mechanism to coordinate the multiplicity of recycled materials and systems brought from San Diego and reassembled in Tijuana,” Cruz writes. In other words, somebody is trying to convince a Mexican factory to recycle salvaged building materials in a more efficient way.

The nameless small operators with trucks and blow torches seem to be doing a pretty good job all by themselves, but some professional manufacturing techniques would probably do some good, provided the factory-made materials aren’t priced out of reach of Tijuana’s poorer homeowners. One place the maquiladoras could help is manufacturing sturdier platforms for all those bungalows in the air.

Beijing Coma

Exactly 30 years ago last month, Deng Xiaoping addressed the Third Plenary session of the Communist Party and declared the start of gaige kaifang, market-oriented reforms and more trade with the outside world. These policies would later come to be called “socialism with Chinese characteristics.”  China has since become an economic juggernaut, producing oceans of cheap goods and unsettling Olympic spectacles. China’s inefficient export-oriented economic model has run into trouble during the global economic downturn, but that hasn’t prevented China’s leaders from standing on their pile of US Treasury bonds and lecturing the US on our sloppy risk management.

But as far as their own risk management is concerned, the Chinese themselves have been more lucky than good. Thirty years down the road it looks as if the Chinese shed their Mao suits and opened textile factories under the benevolent guidance of the central government. In fact, Deng’s economic reforms have succeeded only by virtue of a great deal of subterfuge. Deng strictly prohibited private industry, but entrepreneurs proceeded by operating their businesses as "red hat" collectives and enterprises--private companies operating under the flag of state ownership. Deng's reforms succeeded because the Chinese people disobeyed Deng's rules.

The essential unruliness of the Chinese capitalists—or “socialist entrepreneurs” as they’re officially known as—can be seen in Ma Jian’s novel Beijing Coma, translated into English by Flora Drew and published in the US last spring. The central tension in this strife-filled book is between the docile generation of Mao’s revolution and the Tiananmen Square generation. The tension is dramatized in a small Beijing apartment. Ma Jian’s protagonist and narrator, Dai Wei, lies in a waking coma, conscious but paralyzed, since he was shot fleeing Tiananmen Square on June 4, 1989. For the past 10 years he has been tended to by his aging mother. She complains incessantly, asking him to hurry up and die. When he lingers too long, she sells one of his kidneys.

That Dai’s mother should prey upon his body is emblematic of the mythic violence to which her generation was subjected. During Mao’s land-redistribution movement of the 1950s, Dai’s landowner grandfather—just “two fields and three cows”—was sentenced to be buried alive by one of his sons, who would have been executed had he refused. Dai’s early girlfriend’s mother had her pubic hair shaved and, humiliated, committed suicide; another friend’s father was tortured and wound up in an asylum. Dai own father, a violinist who toured America, was branded a rightist and worked for 20 years in a forced labor camp where he had to resort to cannibalism.

The younger generation feeds more metaphorically on its own discontent. “’You’re all starving to death,’” one of Dai’s friends says during the buildup to the Tiananmen Square protests. “‘Where do you find the energy to engage in these power struggles?’” Dai and his college revolutionaries, like their American counterparts during the 1960s, have a lot of moxie, but they’re also petty, disorganized and indecisive. Some want to overthrow the government; others just want to have sex without state interference. They abscond with the funds donated their cause when the tanks start to roll. Meanwhile, thousands go on a hunger strike.

During the Tiananmen Square protests of June 4, 1989, Dai Wei takes a bullet to the head and spends 10 years listening to his mother complain. Most of Dai Wei’s friends who survive the aftermath of Tiananmen Square slink off and get rich. One of Dai’s former girlfriends, for instance, becomes a real estate magnet buys his mother’s building, intending to raze it as part of Beijing’s redevelopment in preparation for the Olympics. Other friends move to America, join the Communist Party, operate a tour company, and become an interior designer. Dai’s compatriots achieved social consciousness as squabbling rebels trying to seize their historical moment, only to end up “advanced wealth makers” for the new China.

Four hundred million Chinese were raised from poverty as Dai sleeps in an iron bed. In the China of 2009 social unrest is increasing again as the export economy sputters and the environment deteriorates. The question raised by Ma Jian’s novel, however, is whether or not China has truly awakened from its coma. Dai himself seems to suggest that China will continue to simply grind down its problems through inertia. “The Chinese are very adept at ‘reducing big problems to small problems, then reducing small problems to nothing at all,’ as the saying goes,” he tells us. “It’s a survival skill they’ve developed over millennia.”

Elegant Graffiti

Boyd Tonkin of The Independent finds a terrific metaphor for Arab writing: the Moorish citadel in Granada, its interior covered with ornamental poetry in Arabic. Tonkin calls it "Europe's most elegant graffiti," and like graffiti, its florid craftsmanship is illegible to the public at large. It is a crime of writing. Arab writing has long flouted the law; now it is being asked to exculpate real and imagined crimes.

Despite Arab governments' support for literature across the region, writers are still jailed. Western news feeds are full of tales of repression, like the arrest and conviction of an Egyptian blogger who writes under the name Kareem Amer (presumably, he was imprisoned under his real name). He was convicted of insulting President Hosni Mubarak and an Egyptian university in his blog. Interestingly, insulting the university carried the stiffer penalty. Religious militants lurk everywhere, ready to harass anyone who writes a single heterodox line.

When despotic Arab governments aren't throwing writers into jail, they're handing out lavish awards. Two major literary prizes have recently been established: the International Prize for Arabic Fiction, commonly known as the "Arab Booker," and the Sheikh Zayed Awards, which are part of the emirate of Abu Dhabi's determined attempt to create a new Granada on the Persian Gulf.  All cultural awards are promotional to one degree or another, and these awards are no exceptions. These awards have raised the profile of Arab writing internationally, but equally important, they provide official endorsement of the novel as a genre, something the novel hasn't always enjoyed in a culture that has long considered the novel an irredeemably Western form of writing. Unlike lyric poetry, which is closer to the Muslim tradition of oracular verse, the novel is prosaic and secular, two qualities still regarded with suspicion in a region plagued by bureaucratic disinformation and a religious fundamentalism that has replaced secular dissent as the most popular form of resistance against tyranny.

After describing the daunting obstacles Arab writers continue to face, Tonkin argues we need to pay attention to the new Arab writing. By beginning his discussion of Arabic writing in Granada, the site of a European victory in the clash of civilizations, Tonkin suggests that translated Arabic literature is important because of "the perpetually rocky relationship between the Arab and European worlds" in which "[i]mperial bureaucrats, soldiers and scholars on one side; radical nationalists, pious militants and oil-rich oligarchs on the other – all have had their various axes to grind, and to wield." These crimes will be exculpated by a writing that is itself outside the law. Arab literature is the new "elegant graffiti," both illegal and admired, cryptic yet expressive, collective but inscribed where it isn't welcome.

Fitna

Get ready for more mob violence in the Middle East.  Geert Wilders, a right-wing member of the Dutch Parliament, will soon have the world premier of his film Fitna, and tempers are rising in anticipation. Wilders' film is short but incendiary, a paranoid broadside again Islam and everything associated with it. After filmmaker Theo van Gogh was stabbed to death by a militant Islamist and mobs across Islamic world went berserk over some Danish cartoons, the Dutch government is frantically trying to contain the potential damage. The government persuaded Dutch television not to broadcast the film, but some Internet site will post it. From there, no doubt, it will go viral in the right wing-nut margins of the Internet. Otherwise, the domestic front looks ready; Dutch Muslim groups have been cooperating by urging Muslims not to let Wilders get under their skin. A loner jihadist may do something rash, but that's a more or less constant risk anyway.

Beyond the Netherlands the situation isn't so secure. Last month the Cairo International Film Festival for Children held the Dutch animated short Where Is Winky's Horse? hostage until the Dutch government apologized and did some symbolic slapping around of a certain right-wing parliamentarian. But l'affair de Winky may not be the last word from the Islamic World. Protests have already started in Pakistan and Afghanistan, where, you would think, they would have more important things to worry about. Judging from the Danish cartoon episode, the current penalty for graven images of the Prophet created in a small European country seems to be 50 deaths, and that has a lot of people concerned.

Fitna may be a waste of bandwidth, but you can insert your standard defense of freedom of speech here. The film's release is yet another example of the mutual misunderstanding between Islam and the West. No one believes Wilders' film will be the last provocative episode, but one can hope that the reaction will be relatively subdued, and Wilders' hateful bluster will end up little more than a 20-second segment on the BBC World News.  After all, the long tail of sectarian hysteria has to start diminishing some time, right?