Is Minimalism Moribund?

Sarah Williams Goldhagan, in her review for The New Republic of Sejima and Nishizawa's new New Museum, evidently thinks so. While she finds the project's exterior 'pleasing,' Goldhagan basically determines it to be an unnecessary retread. More significantly, she seems to suggest that the architectural progeny of Judd are spent:

'SANAA's New Museum is a freeze-dried packet of desiccated minimalism. It is in no way miraculous. We are in more trouble than I thought if this is the project that is supposed to restore faith in New York City or point the way toward the future of architecture. The most that can be said in its favor is that in the New Museum, as in the firm's other projects, SANAA raises provocative questions about the value of minimalism in architecture.'

Perhaps programs of radical simplicity, with surprise no longer at hand and maybe impossible altogether, must at this juncture carry rather minimal expectations. Besides, simply because statements literally built have foregone subtlety—the play on transparency and light is quite appropriately apparent, even if one does not read the architects' written statement—that fact does not render them less sophisticated, or, more significantly, less important. Isn't the museum's ebullient appearance on the Bowery's east side enough?

Out With The Bourg.

Ah, the marital dyad remains a curiously durable structure. I would also say that part of the durability here is that the production of what is designated dominant and submissive—for the boys as well—is formed in anticipation of the structure (regardless of the permissibility of legal initiation into marriage). That is, the dyadic division of sexual labor is an effect of the marital structure both before and independent of the union itself. Hypothetically, were we to desist from recognizing marriage as a legal matter—and, were social convention (i.e., religious organizations) to simultaneously desist—we would still be forced to face this division for a substantial period.

The Clash is Back: Part II

So it is that the magazine which rarely fails to deliver the latest from the cast of the administration has released upon us all a piece by Jerry Z. Muller, a historian at Catholic University, arguing that 'ethnonationalism' emanates—yes—'from the human spirit' and is therefore ineradicable. In 'The Clash of Peoples' or 'Us and Them' (have your iteration: cover or 'in-book'), the conclusion that Muller conjures from this notion of the 'nature' of the human is that international policymakers should basically accommodate 'ethnonational' claims, because to deny them is to risk exciting a bloodbath between nationalists and the minorities or polities which they hope to do without. 'Partition,' Muller assures us, 'is often the least bad answer.' He later asserts that with it comes finality and a lower price tag in terms of international peacekeeping.

The allusion to Huntington's 1993 'Clash' is more than titular: The magazine is hoping to make a similarly spectacular provocation by employing a seemingly different thesis that, on consideration, seems (if we can steal Muller's unfortunate appropriation of terms with Hegelian baggage) to emanate from the precise spirit that animated 'Clash' fifteen years ago. While Huntington, by his own avowals, was setting forth a bold and provocative description of affairs as they were and would be, it became gradually apparent that he was more deeply implicated and invested in the conclusions than he may have wanted critics to believe.

So forgive me for experiencing a tad of déjà vu with 'Us and Them' and the case at hand:

'But if ethnonationalism has frequently led to tension and conflict, it has also proved to be a source of cohesion and stability. When French textbooks began with "Our ancestors the Gauls" or when Churchill spoke to wartime audiences of "this island race," they appealed to ethnonationalist sensibilities as a source of mutual trust and sacrifice. Liberal democracy and ethnic homogeneity are not only compatible; they can be complementary.

One could argue that Europe has been so harmonious since World War II not because of the failure of ethnic nationalism but because of its success, which removed some of the greatest sources of conflict both within and between countries. The fact that ethnic and state boundaries now largely coincide has meant that there are fewer disputes over borders or expatriate communities, leading to the most stable territorial configuration in European history.'

The retroactive fallacy upon which nationalism is necessarily built—we must, for virtually the entirety of Western Europe, speak of the precession of the state—is at the same time concealed (he presents the European 'nation state' synchronically, as it were) and summoned forth by Muller: The ethnic project arouses, as the above passage makes clear, the author's sympathy, by virtue of its continuing powers of cohesion. And here we see that Muller's piece is also a lesson in understanding Theory's burden in the social sciences. The most basic insights into the dissemination of culture will receive acknowledgment only, by way of that precise acknowledgment, to then receive summary dismissal. 'Contemporary social scientists who write about nationalism tend to stress the contingent elements of group identity,' Muller offers near the end of the essay. 'It is true, of course, that ethnonational identity is never as natural or ineluctable as nationalists claim.' And yet: 'They regularly invoke Benedict Anderson's concept of "imagined communities," as if demonstrating that nationalism is constructed will rob the concept of its power.'

Does this disclaimer near the conclusion of the essay acquit Muller of the work's persistent treatment of ethnonationalism as entirely superstructural? And what of the fact that, with few exceptions, the majority of any given populace remains ambivalent to indigenous nationalisms? Would not partitioning merely defer to those with the biggest guns and largest printing presses? Does Muller's determination that 'partition is the least bad answer' simply happen to coincide with his recognition of ethnonationalism's social benefits? And, if, as is more likely, nationalism 'emanates' not from the 'human spirit' but from configurations among economic strata, would partition solve a problem likely to reiterate itself despite new lines on a map? Nationalism's empire—an absurdity that manages to approach the object—knows no limits so long as the basic fissures of which it is an effect (and thus also an affect) are extant. Its work will complete itself neither of its own accord nor by a simple rearrangement of decidedly novel linguistic categories. Sort of like Theory's.

The Clash is Back: Part I

Theoretical moribundity makes me think of International Relations—the academic field, that is—with awkward pretensions that find its practitioners caught between the 'hard science' pressure to identify independent variables (that language!) sufficiently robust to survive localized controls (i.e., that are sensible across circumstances unfortunate enough to be deemed [ahem, and produced] 'case studies'), on the one hand, and to grandly pronounce sonorous and significant theoretic narratives on the other. The IR impulse is what brought us some of those eccentric and entertaining 200-level course debates over such creations as 'rational actors' and other bewildering anthropomorphizations of the state, generally pilfered from economists and adorned with some strung out Enlightenment gestures toward 'human nature.'

These debates are so broad and therefore vulgar that one can but sympathize with the recent clamoring among IR faculty over 'game theory,' which, one supposes, is sonorous and clever enough, but which, at the same time, might remind one of set theory's deployment in early Kristeva. These fads—which may, in another context, bear a vague semblance to some Malcolm Gladwell piece in The New York Times Magazine—tend to take hold of a discipline desiring more precise-sounding adornments to explanatory powers whose capacity does not much change. Perhaps I am, after all, also writing of Political Science on the whole. Who cares? Slaking the desire for a topping of the gram with the matheme has generally produced unattractive results. The question must become: Just how many metaphoric layers must one be forced to lick to reach the center after all?

Meanwhile, I have no trouble heaping the blame for Foreign Affairs, the Washington Consensus magazine with, I suppose, a rather severe case of journal anxiety, at the door of the IR department. I will refrain from hammering home the point that virtually the entirety of Foreign Affairs looks to be ghostwritten, an observation charitable neither to the magazine nor to the would be foreign-service members sidelining for celebrity authors. The entire thing could be produced by the human relations department in the basement of State. In any event, Foreign Affairs is always given top-shelf treatment—yes, that's it, just to the right of US Weekly, the not-necessarily-less-worthwhile magazine celebrating celebrities of another variety—and it seems to give its readers the feeling of reading some thorough academic research of some sort. One can rarely be fully certain of a publication's constituency, but I would venture that the chap most likely to be impressed by Foreign Affairs would be what Christopher Guest might call 'of the catalogue generation,' replete with latte and chinos and Borders on a Sunday afternoon. Oh, the image is too much already.

Brown Bunnies

Jeff Koons is online.

CNN Gets Foucauldian [Limit Experiences]

From a disreputable news source:

'CNN personality Richard Quest was busted in Central Park early yesterday with some drugs in his pocket, a rope around his neck that was tied to his genitals, and a sex toy in his boot, law-enforcement sources said.'

Cheers.

Positively Gaudily

Amid fanfare and deferential treatment that have performed the seemingly impossible feat of transforming Manhattan into some thirteenth century eastern French village, it is worth remembering that beyond the gold jewelry and God-awful sixteenth century art lie a man and an institution that continue to hold sway over a not-insubstantial share of a billion people. And I do not mean to detract from the brilliant and agreeable rhetorical turns offered by the pontiff—the Church badly needed some good stateside spin.

Todorov Finds Politics

Tzvetan Todorov—perhaps best known stateside as an interlocutor for Russian Formalism—gives a fascinating and pugnacious interview in Critical Inquiry's winter issue. The interview, conducted by Danny Postel, finds Todorov asked the manner of question that one wishes Derrida were given more often and more pressingly and giving the sort of responses that nearly vindicate Derrida's political reticence. While Todorov punts the opening question on his general reluctance to "get political," as it were, he more than makes up for it in his responses to subsequent questions on the Danish cartoons and the November 2005 banlieues riots—yeah, it's that kind of interview.

Here's a good bit on the Paris riots:

The particular forms of violence displayed are also worthy of note. At no point were political, ethnic, or religious demands expressed. The gangs of youngsters did not come to Paris where the rich live, and they didn’t attack city halls or other institutional buildings. They hardly stepped out of the housing projects where they live. Instead of taking their anger out on symbols of the French Republic, they did so on their neighbors who resemble them in every respect but age and on structures of social order that are there for their benefit. They burned cars on their streets and their parking lots, cars that belonged to their uncles or neighbors. They tried to destroy sports facilities and other meeting places intended for their use. They set fire to day-care centers and schools where their younger siblings went and to state employment services that were meant to help them. All these acts have an evident self-destructive character (even if their agents do not always realize it). When they burn buses that connect (however poorly) their housing projects to the outside world, they and their families are the ones to suffer, not the people residing in the upscale districts.

Thanks to DP.

Birthdays Were the Worst Days

Just not for E. Nellie Bowles. Happy Birthday, little sister.

Faust To Attend ROTC Ceremony

Given the many ironies of 'Don't Ask, Don't Tell'—not least among them the central position telling has played in military life 'from time, from time,' if we translate literally a wonderful Levantine expression—one can only hope that the next administration will quickly do away with the oft-mocked policy. Meanwhile, Harvard's president, Drew G. Faust, will attend what is called a 'commissioning ceremony,' following—and perhaps in light of?—the right's flamboyant outrage at Harvard's various slights of the military. From the Crimson:

University President Drew G. Faust will attend this year’s Reserve Officers Training Corps (ROTC) commissioning ceremony during Commencement, continuing a new precedent set by her predecessor Lawrence H. Summers.

According to Harvard spokesman John D. Longbrake, Faust will be “part of the program,” although he did not say what her precise role would be. Summers spoke at the commissioning ceremony each year as Harvard president in an effort to show support for students participating in ROTC.

Harvard has had a fractious relationship with ROTC since its removal from campus in 1969 in the wake of strident anti-war protests. ROTC remains banished due to the military’s “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” policy, which Harvard considers discriminatory, and is not deemed an official Harvard organization.

Harvard students involved with ROTC conduct their exercises with a battalion at MIT.

Moot in two years? Let's hope so.

Badiou: Unreformed, Unbowed

Critical Inquiry is preparing to publish an interview with Badiou on the rather grand topic of philosophy's relevance to politics. The interview is noteworthy, although perhaps mostly for an accessible take on what is presently on the mind of the former philosophy chair at the ENS. While refusing any sort of renunciation of old-guard communism, Badiou appears to have largely redefined the term in his usage to refer to more 'cultural struggles'—à la Laclau. The interview also gives treatment to Real Existing Socialism—Badiou is critical of Leninist praxis—and to the thinker's hopes and fears for the communist project at present. Here's part of what he has to say about events and the socialist possibility in the Middle East:

The attacks of September 11, for example, were not accompanied by any political discourse addressed to the entire world, nor with any declaration of war—such declarations are the condition for politics. What we have instead is a violent destabilization whose concept is ungraspable. The only declarations that followed the event were completely rooted in a religious particularism that I read as exclusively negative. I won’t have anything to do with this type of practice.

I don’t confuse this phenomenon with the theological character of certain mass organizations in the Middle East. But I do think that the fact that the organizations that are the most active and most rooted in the “people” are of this type is part of what I have been calling the contemporary crisis of negation. In this case, religion presents itself as the surrogate for something else that has not been found, something that should be universalizable, should be able to uproot itself from the particularity of religious limits. It is for this reason, I think, that Marx still seems so current. Communism, according to Marx, is essentially internationalist in character. With religious dogmatism, in this case with Shia Islam, we are confronted with a collective messianism that I know and recognize is quite powerful but which is, finally, intrinsically limited. We need to consider these phenomena on their own terms, but also understand their limitations. I think these movements represent a passage that bears witness, in a very vivid way, to the limits of our thought on the problems of the negative, critique and political organization.

Traffic Control in Baghdad

A moving passage from Thursday's NYT:

General Mraweh is passionate about traffic control. He is particularly irked by the driving behavior by the employees of security companies like Blackwater, who sometimes throw water bottles at people walking down the street or shoot their guns in the air to clear the road, he said.

But primarily, General Mraweh sees his job as a way to piece together his shattered country.

'If everyone says there are killings, there are massacres, then I will stay powerless at home and this will disable the country,” he said. “But if the grocer goes to work, the merchant goes to work, I go to work, even you go to work, there will be no more killing, and the criminal will be afraid and he will go back to his den like a mouse.'

As for Blackwater, one is likely in Kuwait to hear 'absolute cowboys' at the mention of their name.

Freud on Drugs

Remember that marvelous passage in Civilization and Its Discontents where Freud—anticipating what research into cognition has already confirmed—suggests that the psychic effects of drugs are identical with those that can be induced by other stimuli?

'[I]t is a fact that there are foreign substances which, when present in the blood or tissues, directly cause us pleasurable sensations; and they also so alter the conditions governing our sensibility that we become incapable of recovering unpleasurable impulses.... But there must be substances in the chemistry of our own bodies which have similar effects.'

Singular.

'Tribalism' Back From The Dead

As far as unfortunate book reviews go, Stanley Kurtz's Weekly Standard treatment of Culture and Conflict in the Middle East, Philip Carl Salzman's rather oddly abbreviated 224-page manifesto, is 'up there.' That said, when we search for faults in a book review bearing a subheading that reads, 'Tribalism may offer a clearer view of our enemies' motivations,' perhaps we have found too easy a target. In Salzman's words, the book asks 'Why, in the Middle East, [do] we so reliably find relentless partisanship, unending conflict, and conscienceless repression of those not holding power'? Let us ignore for a moment the question's rather grand predications.

Drawing on his ethnographic work on the Yarahmadzai of Iranian Baluchistan in the 1970s, Salzman finds his answer in 'Arab culture, grounded in Bedouin culture.' While serving its subjects well in 'segmentary tribal settings,' this culture is, in Salzman's estimation, 'uncongenial to inclusive polities and universalistic legal regimes.' Here we find once again the proverbial 'tribal mentality' about which we have all heard a great deal; and yet its continued espousal never fails to surprise those of us actually, as it were, 'on the ground.' Salzman's work is structured around the argument that 'Arab tribalism' is a long-suffering and presently unfashionable category that just happens to hold greater explanatory power for the region's current travails than any other consideration.

Judging by Salzman's synthesis, this already-reaching notion holds up about as well as one could expect for a thesis developed out of and plucked from the author's personal work with a discrete and insular grouping in the southeast of Iran and then spread—without much regard for, say, linguistic, sectarian, geographic, and ethnic categories (the less said about temporal considerations the better)—to present-day Arab politics. The author attempts to do away with concerns over this disjuncture by pointing out that social science is a collaborative affair and that the secondary literature just happens to corroborate his empirical work. Let us be assured that this is an admission that under more rigorous circumstances, Salzman's empirical work would bear the most tendentious relationship with the book's scope. And then there's that title.

In any event, this all proves too much for Kurtz, who writes throughout the laudatory review as though—and, no, I do not exaggerate and, yes, it pains me to write this—there were no differences (not even cleavages!) among the categories 'Arab,' 'Iranian,' and 'Muslim.' Kurtz is thrilled with the fashionably unfashionable appearance of the book and immediately takes its conclusions out for a stroll:

Arab tribesmen are preoccupied with maintaining deterrence and prepared to use force preemptively, if necessary--rather like über neocons. The ironic but very real parallel is a function of the de facto stateless anarchy in which Arab Bedouin live--and the de facto global anarchy that hawkish conservatives rightly believe to be the underlying reality of the international system. Saddam Hus-sein's interest in being taken to possess WMDs, whether or not he actually had them, makes sense in light of the link between deterrence and reputation. The emboldening effects of America's pre-9/11 retreats in Somalia, Lebanon, and elsewhere show the reverse of the medal. Although this is a familiar litany, I'd argue that the fatwa against Salman Rushdie, the rage against the Muhammad cartoons, the killing of Theo van Gogh, and a host of related acts of intimidation ought to be placed under the heading of pro-active deterrence as well.

And there you have it. Moroccan-born militants in northern Europe (van Gogh's killer was, after all, Moroccan), Iranian clerics, secular-left Arab dictators—the appearance and behavior of these personages and phenomena can be explained by a simple referral back to 'Arabs' segmentary tribalism.' Finally, that meddlesome region has found the explanatory variable that has long eluded us. In the end, one can hardly be certain of how to respond appropriately to Salzman's posture and the inevitable hand-maiden's role it will play among certain crowds. Certainly, one could be bewildered, and certainly one could be perturbed. At least concerning the hawkish cheerleaders already cheering the book's release—as though Salzman's work constituted some sort academic validation—I am perfectly satisfied to simply consider the source. (Also, check out that advanced praise.)

Internet Filtering...in Dubai?

Just as US corporations pander to America's indigenous 'family-values' crowd, so do firms in Muslim states often compete for those fathers who justifiably believe that their children's sex education will be largely Internet-based. Meanwhile, the conservative and trigger-happy bureaucrat, generally eliciting the shaking of heads from much of political society, also seems to be a recurring motif. From the UAE:

Du [a UAE telecom company] will start to block internet websites with undesirable content from Monday in a move to comply with the new internet management policy issued by the UAE Telephone Regulatory Authority (TRA). A statement issued by du said it will block all content that is not in line with moral, social and cultural values of the UAE.

Then again, in light of Damascus's recent Facebook manoeuvre, perhaps the addition of ten minutes to the journey to the more ribald corners of the Web isn't quite so bad.

Muslims and the 'Radical Generation'

A prominent feature of opposition to the US occupation of Iraq supposes that the invasion and its aftermath, quite to the contrary of chief among the adventure's stated aims, have indeed bred anti-US sentiment and even created a fresh complaint that will, in turn, spur recruitment efforts by groups like al-Qa'ida. This concern tends to be stated like so (taking the following, for an instance, from Paglia's latest Salon column):

'We have not defeated the "Islamo-fascists" in Iraq; we have simply created more of them around the world by radicalizing an entire generation of young Muslims.'

The trouble with this statement is not that it fails to present an important phenomenon. Certainly, the Iraq adventure has bred ill-will toward the US. And yet, underlying this statement is the same predicated homogeneity that instantiates utterances such as 'the Middle East.' We need hardly mention that the categorical treatment out of which the signifier 'Muslim' is deployed in Anglophone discourse is less than fully coherent, refusing as it does the most basic contemplation of geographic, sectarian, or socioeconomic categories. Significantly, there is no analogue signified in Arabic: One simply does not hear 'the Christians,' 'the Christians.' Nationality tends to be the salient category in the Arabic media. Moreover, the notion of an entire and entirely 'radicalized' generation—a concept that never makes itself entirely known, as 'radical' is a radically emptied signifier—supposes profound credulity on the part of 'young Muslims.'

As I've learned during my time in Muslim-majority states, particularly in Syria, to suppose such credulity on the part of 'young Muslims' is to commit a serious error. While certainly—in Damascus, Beirut, Kuwait, and elsewhere—I have met Muslim students antipathetic to the US—an antipathy surely aggravated or ratified by the Iraq War—I have also met students sympathetic to the effort. I've had taxi drivers in Damascus hold forth on Israel's 'right' to use aggressive tactics against less conciliatory Palestinian factions and have heard students express Rumsfeldian confidence in the certainty that Syrians would take to the streets in celebration of a reenactment in Damascus of the Iraq adventure.

Broad antipathy toward and approval of the US is, in my experience, rare. Most often, much like students in the US, the youths whom I've met or befriended (or who are in the classes for which I'm a TA), express a wariness toward 'American power' and its more unfortunate manifestations. Where aspects of American domination often considered 'purely cultural'—films and music, for instance—are rejected, this rejection can stem from social conservatism—in other words it emanates from a permutation of the same drive motivating Christianist concern over 'family values.'

Finally, let us do away with the notion that an 'entire generation' can be so easily 'radicalized.' It is highly unlikely that the Iraq War has substantially changed the structure of high-risk group recruitment and initiation. The pool of potential recruits for groups like al-Qa'ida—with which the relatively mainstream and hence low-risk Hamas and Hizb Allah cannot be compared—will generally consist of youths with weak social ties, a factor that can indeed be simultaneously effected and affected by economic crises (which wars can certainly precipitate). The substance of the group's configuration of ideals, it should be added, is not a primary concern and will, in any event, be made by recruiters to align with already existing woes. These groups at the margin come into existence through their supposed opposition to the center/'mainstream' and are always and already part of the structure of society. They (in addition to those who seek their eradication) are mutually contingent and can never be universalized completely. The appeal tends to lie in the social, financial (and, then, of course, psychic) security justifiably promised by high-risk, high-reward groups. The point is that there's barely a text in that class.

Obama's Honest Slip

Obama is receiving the 'elite liberal' treatment by Clinton and McCain after audio of the would-be nominee's remarks, recorded last week at a San Francisco fundraiser, surfaced Friday. The contested comments—which you can listen to here—were as follows:

You go into these small towns in Pennsylvania and, like a lot of small towns in the Midwest, the jobs have been gone now for 25 years. ... And it’s not surprising then they get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren’t like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations.

Two-part question: Why should Obama apologize for off-the-cuff remarks that happen to (1) lay out incisively the rather obvious relationship between perceived economic disadvantage and bigotry (can a stratified system function apart from the satiation of each stratum's desire for relative significance over the 'next one down'? The discourse simply gets less attractive the 'further' vertically one goes.), and (2) reflect his actual beliefs on the matter? We should further note the significance of these remarks' extempore nature—they were made in San Francisco at a press-free event—and the extent to which they are at odds with the more 'populist' message he is trotting out at official campaign stops. The comments may also be understood in the context of serious doubts over the sincerity of the candidate's anti-NAFTA posture. Let us hope that Obama follows the Henry Ford school of apology, while, meanwhile, we seek consolation in the success of a gentleman who, at least by Scheiber's account in The New Republic, is the least principle-bound candidate of our time. And I mean that in the best sense.

UPDATE: The inevitable.

Forget Tibet?

Absent from most considerations of Beijing's rule over the Tibet Autonomous Region and other territories claimed by Tibetan nationalists is the question of what precisely the restoration of a pre-1951 Tibet would entail. Those who call for a 'Free Tibet' and a state able to reassert 'cultural independence'—the seemingly more moderate claim made by the Dalai Lama—presumably do not also hope for a restoration of the rigidly stratified socioeconomy extant until Beijing forced land redistribution in Amdo and Eastern Kham in 1951 and throughout the territories in 1959.

Just how radical was the communist readjustment? Before the 1950s the vast majority of Tibet's population lived in hereditary serfdom, belonging by birth to landed estates run by lords (sger pa). 'With the exception of approximately 250-300 aristocratic families,' Melvyn Goldstein explains, the populace was made up of serfs (mi ser), who 'did not have freedom of movement' and were subject to forcible recapture if they attempted escape.*

Religion's epiphenomenality strikes again. Guess which stratum was not born into serfdom? Why, the monastic estate, of course. If one were born a mi ser, becoming a monk was the sole viable means of escape—though it could be done only with the sger pa's permission. One need not venture far here to understand the doctrinal and ideological implications of Tibetan Buddhist thought: While the epistemologic gestures of most Buddhist schools are those with which I happen to most closely sympathize, we can hardly ignore the relationship between the Tibetan social structure and a system of thought which, despite its internal heterogeneity, tends to emphasize quietism, acceptance of discomfort (meditation's object, if we are permitted to say that), and, of course, Samsara.

The notion of 'deserving' that inheres in any conception of karma or rebirth can hardly be characterized as an aleatory ideological development in a structurated socioeconomy. Can calming practices be viewed as independent of monastic efforts to supply a subjected populace with the cognitive tools with which to live and survive in such a system? (We know, for instance, that meditation's effects rival or exceed psychotropic interventions in terms of effectiveness.) The very notion of 'deserving,' which necessarily functions as a figment of legitimation, is coherent only in relation to a bourgeois subject. One can hardly conceal amusement at the doctrine's present resurgence (and remarkable financial success) in the U.S. in the form of such works as The Secret and its predecessor, You Can Heal Your Life.

Despite—or perhaps because of—the suppression of pre-occupation Tibetan 'cultural' practices, one can safely say that the life of the average citizen of the region is substantially improved. The region has experienced 12 percent GDP growth for most of this decade, and per capita income has increased at around ten percent for the same period, if we are to accept the official reports.

This is not to say that Beijing's occupation of and claim to the territories can be characterized as anything other than domination that is imperialist in practice and nationalist in ideology. Before the 18th century, the notion of Tibet as part of 'China' was hardly yet a Manchu fantasy. And yet nationalism's structure remains unaltered and unalterable. Domination is the precondition of territory in any place and at any time. To speak of 'legitimate' or 'illegitimate' borders and to speak of cultural 'rights' to self-determination is to make claims predicated on an originary and always elusive point of descent. Claims to nationhood enact an endless diachronic operation backwards. If we reject the foundationalist architecture surrounding claims to 'race,' 'ethnicity,' and 'culture'—each of which seeks to suppress heterogeneity while simultaneously reproducing marginal difference—the moral legitimacy of calls for national self-determination becomes less certain. As with any movement of signification, territory and borders are produced by words masquerading as descriptive utterances. They are the effect of what J.L. Austin would have called an illocutionary movement.

Much like sadism and masochism in Deleuze, no dialogue can be had between legitimacy and territory. Which 'Tibet' is to be 'freed' exactly? Are we to reject Chinese nationalism in favor of its Tibetan counterpart? It is useful to remember that the 'Tibet' envisaged by Tibetan exiles was nonexistent before the seventh century. Moreover, that imagined territory coincides with land claimed by India and, of course, by China (Arunachal Pradesh, for instance, while partly claimed by both, is administered by the former). The Tibet Autonomous Region, meanwhile, excludes Amdo and other territory claimed by Tibetan nationalists, which has been incorporated by several adjacent Chinese provinces.

In the end, nationalism lives and breathes through diffusive romance. Its power lies in its ability to seduce, particularly the subjects who are the object of its claims (in this case, the 'Tibetan people') and those who can legitimate those claims (the international audience). We finally might do well to view nationalism as a lover whose charms are best resisted.

*Melvyn C. Goldstein, 'Serfdom and Mobility: An Examination of the Institution of "Human Lease" in Traditional Tibetan Society,' The Journal of Asian Studies, Vol. 30, No. 3 (May, 1971), pp. 521-534.

Paglia, Bloody Paglia

Despite her probable hostility to what we might call Parole's 'originary drive,' Camille Paglia made a serious contribution to the American scene in the nineties. I write of her more in form than substance. I liked her brashness and energy. Her critiques of Theory, simultaneously prolix and hyperbolic, were ill-considered -- but they were amusing. Her critiques of academic decadence and the faculty-conference complex even showed a bit of sagacity. Her treatment of camp - her writing revels in allusions to 'The Women' and Joan Crawford and 'Valley of the Dolls' - was exhilarating. She was a flashy presence and very much a guilty pleasure. Besides, does New Criticism not also deserve its flamboyant champions?

So where is she now? Well, she's teaching at Philadelphia's University of the Arts. She's still around, to be sure. Break, Blow, Burn, her close readings of a creatively chosen forty three poems was wonderful. (Less so was the Theory-bashing introduction.) She also writes a monthly column for Salon every second Wednesday. She and Drudge are mutual admirers, and the latter usually posts a link to her columns and occasional newspaper op-eds.

No, the problem is not that Paglia is 'off' the scene, but rather that she has been 'on' it for some time now and has evidently run out of things to say. What she does say, meanwhile, she has said before. Again and again: 'Post-structuralism is a plague.' 'The Ivy league is too cushy.' 'Students need technical training.' 'Madonna is a robot.' Paglia may as well have borrowed Danielle Steel's automatic writing machine. Her Salon columns simply repeat these same points - which were not even particularly numerous to begin with - over and over, as if on cue. Meanwhile, with repetition comes responsibility: You run the risk of running your arguments into the ground. She has done this and then some.

Even taken on their own terms, Paglia's major points of contention are surprisingly anachronistic: No college is, at this point, a stranger to demands for a more 'technical' or 'practical' curriculum (opposition to which accounted for part of the Summers controversy). Her analyses - which almost without exception rely upon (and usually also explicitly call for) - a foundationalist theoretical architecture are not so foreign any longer either. With the rise and increasing ambition of evolutionary biology (and the media's eagerness to publish the news of each 'genetic discovery'), we now have similar ideas bandied about in the garb of 'scientific' authority.

The other Paglia problem is productivity. She is simply not sufficiently prolific. 'But writing requires time, and I do give it time,' Paglia once remarked, in a rare understatement. This is especially damning given her critiques of moribundity in academia. Her only regular output is twelve 2,500-word Salon columns a year. Considering that in at least three of these she is simply responding to readers' letters, these could not possibly amount to a large drain on her energy and 'resources.' Her last significant publication before Break, Blow, Burn in 2005? A slim entry on The Birds for the British Film Institute in 1998.

The long-promised (or, dare I say, threatened) sequel to Sexual Personae has taken on the near-mythic status of Foucault's final volume on 'the history of sexuality.' Whether it was ever really fleshed-out is beside the question: It looks as though it will never see the light of day. The probable reason for this is significant. After an initial Yale Press roll-out with little fanfare in 1990, Sexual Personae became a sort of cult hit, mostly for its thumb-to-the-teeth attitude toward 'political correctness' (my, how banal that kampf seems at present). When journals and the (comp) literati actually got around to publishing reviews of the book, the verdicts were not charitable. Recalls Paglia on that period: 'But when Sexual Personae started to get publicity, which was almost a year later after it was published, it started to get viciously attacked. And I counterattacked!' What happened next is well-known enough at this point.

Paglia is clever enough, then, to realize - particularly in light of the special place she seems to occupy in the hearts of many reporters and editors - that the publishing of the follow-up volume to the book that made her reputation would be accompanied by a good deal of chatter. If the second tome were to follow the foundationalist structure of the first - and we have no reason to doubt that it would - the academic reviews would be scathing. They would, moreover, probably have the unhappy effect of encouraging an unflattering reconsideration of the volume's predecessor. The procateuse, then, has much to lose.

In urging a more engaged and, lacking a better word, fruitful Paglia, one might refer to her 1991 speech at MIT, where Paglia excoriated Susan Sontag for wallowing in 'the novel,' all the while allowing her potential as a nouveau champion of camp to wither away. While Paglia is no doubt a stimulating pedagogue, we might do well to wonder whether her daily energies might be better employed outside of the classroom proper. She is a public intellectual more than she is a serious intellectual - and there's nothing wrong with that. So can't we call for a bit more agitation in the public square?

Fish is Dead On

The season's most apposite critique of the bizarre game of feigned offense and denunciation demands that dominates much of US political discourse comes from none other than Stanley Fish. Commenting on the dead (for now) kerfuffle over Obama's Wright connection, the former don of English at Duke concludes:

The odd thing is that the press that produces these distractions and the populace that consumes them really believe they are discussing issues and participating in genuine political dialogue. But in fact they have abandoned genuine political dialogue and have committed themselves to a conversation that differs only in subject matter from conversations about Eliot Spitzer’s and David Paterson’s sex lives. It’s not politics; it’s titillation clothed in political garb.

We should collectively denounce and renounce denouncing and renouncing.

I would add that those who most obviosly benefit from this silliness are the Fourth Estate's more unfortunate members.

Dubai's Condo Art Underbelly

Monde Arte in Dubai's Mall of the Emirates

These sorts of things do, one supposes, almost universally accompany real estate booms.

Tehran's Basquiat, Martin Parr in Dubai

Haerizadeh's 'Under the Sour Cherry Tree'. On display in Dubai's B21 Gallery until April 10.

Dubai's gallery scene already looks the part, located as it is in an area nearly resembling a hybrid of SOMA in San Francisco and LA's Fairfax (just off Sheikh Zayed Road in the Al Quoz area, to be less than exact). I spent the afternoon largely at B21 and The Third Line - probably the city's two most influential galleries - and was struck by Rokni Haerizadeh's 'The Donkey, the Pagan, the Bride, and Others' at B21. The Tehran-born Haerizadeh's points of reference would appear to be Basquiat and Motley (and, technically though not thematically, we can safely add a dash of Matisse in there too). Needless to say, he moves genre easily. His concerns also coincide with those of Basquiat and Motley: While playing with Persian mythologic tropes and drawing freely from Rumi, Haerizadeh gravitates toward urban settings (yes, he makes Pahlavi Street look like Harlem or U Street) and seems drawn to (although not fixated on) deviance and its uneasy existence in Tehran. 'Tuesday Afternoon on Pahlavi Street' goes so far as to actually depict a group of gays bickering with a conservative.

Parr shoots the Harpers Party at Grosvenor House. On display at Third Line until April 14.

Whereas Haerizadeh approaches the proverbial difference-homogeneity dialectic with seriousness and restraint (never diluting sensual pleasure, I will add), Martin Parr, who is currently featured at The Third Line, takes a somewhat different tack. Parr's work at Third Line is from a series he shot at The Dubai World Cup Horse Race and the DIFC Art Fair last year. Parr does not bother to hide his disdain for his subjects, as his self-penned introduction (titled 'Bling Bling' no less) to the catalogue drives home. The little essay carries a disturbing 'Tom Wolfe does Dubai' sensibility, and is, I will not hesitate to add, replete with an unfortunate misuse of 'compliment' in the first paragraph.

Parr's strategy seems to consist of finding vaguely unattractive members of the nouveau riche and honing in on signs of bad taste (Eurotrash brands in particular) and, even better, plastic surgery. The trouble is that when one goes to the race track or a flashy art gala in search of these 'motifs,' the targets are just too easy. And then, as an artist, you come across as a little bit lazy and a little bit mean. Besides, most of Parr's audience already knows and has seen enough bad taste. And Lord knows we have all seen enough plastic surgery to know it when we see it and, frankly, to remain unmoved at this point.

Fitzgerald is Preserved [Canon Troubles]

This picture, which I took at the Carrefoure in Dubai's Emirates Mall, presents yet another reason to shudder at that book's central position in the 'American literary canon.' For students outside of the US (and not majoring in American lit), of course, Gatsby is almost universally served up as the instance par excellence of the country's literature.

A Feminist South Park: Spears and Subjection

One could not help but be struck by the fashion in which Trey Park and Matt Stone gave Britney Spears the '"South Park" treatment' in the series's March 19 episode, 'Britney's New Look.' Beyond the episode's allusive sophistication - the episode aped The Lottery's structure and dashed in pop-horror motifs ('Children of the Corn,' for instance) - the writers' take on Spears turned out to be profoundly, even earnestly, feminist. The episode was the most affecting take on young women and pop culture that I have seen.

The writers knowingly and indignantly lay out the tropes that have structured Spears's treatment: the public's Colosseum-style (blood)lust for the young woman's failure; Spears's obvious inability, from the outset, to define her interests, career, or identity; and, of course, the cruel obsession with her weight and appearance. When Stan screams, 'But she has no head,' one of the producers in the recording studio (to where Spears was rushed after her suicide attempt) responds: 'I know. She really chubbed up.'

Some further observations:

(1) When Spears blows off the top two-thirds of her head with a 12-gauge shotgun, she loses the top of her mouth and hence the ability to enunciate. She thus speaks in glottal starts and stops. It is unclear if those around her can understand what she 'says.' The idea is that it never mattered anyway. There is more significance here if we consider Derrida's general understanding of the voice as that which presences the subject (or, perhaps, if we want to speak of origins, the antesubject) to itself (for Lacan, meanwhile, the voice constituted objet a). It would seem that the narrative's end was to cripple - though not fully deprive - Spears of the primary means for becoming present to herself and to use this as a metaphor for her status as a placeholder of sorts.

(2) This 'placeholder' is thus, for the narrative, a receptacle for social neuroses: Hence, at the end of the episode - when it is revealed that Spears's ritual killing is just that and will be repeated on a replacement or successor (Hannah Montana, as it happens) - the holder of the place is structurally irrelevant and will inevitably be succeeded. Spears is irrelevant and the original desire is insatiable.

(3) Butler's excellent discussion of 'passionate attachment' and subjection in general in The Psychic Life of Power - where, she suggests, 'the subject is formed by a will that turns back upon itself, assuming a reflexive form' - seems relevant: If subjection is enacted when a desire or will is met with language and is instantiated by this meeting, becoming attached and committed to its recognition (the combination of the will to suppress this attachment and, later, other linguistic effects, forming the unconscious), can we speak of subjective attachment in degrees? While subjection is surely a universal movement, are some more subjected than others? Or is the attachment more 'passionate' in some than others?

Certainly, part of the now-proverbial Spears 'tragedy' - a trope unto itself at this point - is Spears's attachment to the paparazzi. 'South Park' largely ignored this, forcing us to accept the conceit that Spears genuinely tries to escape their gaze. The actual narrative is more complex: Spears's obvious desperation for their attention suggests an attachment far more passionate than 'South Park' would admit or than people seem comfortable contemplating: That level of passion, for which no one can coherently 'blame' the young woman, saturates - and largely constitutes - the 'tragedy.'