West/Bank
I am a New York City-based social researcher. I write about social theory, religion, politics, culture, books, Europe, facial hair, and other things that catch my interest.
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Fukuyama, Gladwell and the Egyptian revolution
Current revolutionary events in Egypt are often discussed with reference to two theses put forward by American writers. The first is Malcolm Gladwell’s recent thesis that protest requires hierarchical organization rather than networks, and the second is Francis Fukuyama’s thesis from the late 1980s that history has exhausted its possibilities and we are left with liberal democracy as the sole credible form of socio-political organization. I think, and will argue below, that the appeal of both theses in Western publics stems from a common source.
“As the Egyptian state murdered hundreds of Islamist activists through extra-judicial killings, the Supreme Council published agit-prop tracts praising secular rationality. As the Egyptian state imprisoned and tortured thousands of political prisoners, the Supreme Council held conferences on poetry. As Mubarak’s clique privatized and stole the nation’s wealth, the Supreme Council held invitation-only colloquia about translation. Sadly, by conscripting “culture” and “secularism” and “enlightenment” for use by a violent and corrupt regime, Asfour insured that these terms would be indelibly linked to one another in people’s minds.”
— Elliott Colla, “State Culture, State Anarchy”
The dream of the nineties
Two or three years ago I went to my first nineties party. The nineties, a decade I could have sworn ended just a few weeks ago, but which is now being represented nostalgically and inventoried to be taken into a Museum of the Nineties. The movers have been busy recently boxing up the exhibits.
Something I used to hear about all the time and don’t miss: how the concept of “being” is irremediably “Greek” and therefore oppressive, etc
What once appeared to be a liberating application of high theory to essential aspects of political and cultural experience now seems silly. Tenured radicals have awakened out of their comfortable nineties slumber to reckon with full-scale catastrophe.
But I guess they’re still talking about phallogocentrism in Portland:
Renegades in resistance
The taz, Germany’s left-wing daily newspaper, reports from a high-profile conference in honor of those who either refused to follow orders to murder Jews or otherwise supported them when they went into hiding in the Third Reich. These people constituted a tiny minority:
Eighteen million Germans faught for the Wehrmacht during the Second World War, but only about one hundred of them are known to have actively helped the persecuted Jews… Among the civilian population things did not look much better. It is estimated that twenty to thirty thousand people stood up for the persecuted by providing them with food, shelter or false identification. More than sixty million did not.
The activities of this small minority were long ignored, in part because they inconveniently troubled the foundational myth of the German successor states that nothing much could be done against the nazis, so don’t you go blaming us. Now researchers are taking a look at these personal stories of resistance—and are troubled once more! This time, in seeking out models of Zivilcourage—a somewhat annoying concept that roughly translates as “civic virtue”—the researchers are finding that the resisters rarely embodied the kinds of virtues they seek. “Many of the helpers came from socially marginalized groups, for instance prostitutes or petty criminals,” and their motives were often “immoral.” Often they were not selfless but rather derived questionable pleasures from the help they provided. The conference participants concluded that today’s youth should not be taught to emulate these “bad” people; rather, they should learn “fundamental values” so they could “find themselves” (seriously!).
The article made me think of Thad Russell’s wonderful book A Renegade History of the United States, in which he argues that the people that did the most to advance what freedoms contemporary Americans enjoy were “bad” people—”drunkards, prostitutes, ‘shiftless’ slaves and white slackers, criminals, juvenile delinquents, brazen homosexuals, and others who operated beneath American society.” These people did not embody the esteemed virtues of good democratic citizens or what Russell calls an “ethic of sacrifice,” and as a consequence, they did more than anybody to enlarge the realm of freedom. Russell gives a quick overview of his revisionist argument in this video.
Clearly, more if this kind of revisionism is needed. It’s time for a renegade history of the resistance movement.
Inadvertent haiku in the English translation of Freud’s The Interpretation of Dreams:
It is easier
to illustrate this process
than to describe it.
Waking up to fatigue society
For those not capable of reading German, a summary of Byung-Chul Han’s worthwhile essay on “fatigue society” (Müdigkeitsgesellschaft, Berlin: Matthes & Seitz, 2010):
![An English, a French and a German philosopher are asked to write a treatise on camels.
The English philosopher moves to Egypt and observes camels for two years, recording every single detail. He returns home and condenses his extensive notes into two volumes totaling 1,300 pages. The book is boring and tedious, but earns him praise for being exemplary scholarship.
The French philosopher goes to the Jardin des Plantes for an afternoon, chats with the zookeeper, pokes his umbrella at a camel a few times, goes home and writes a monograph over the course of a weekend. The study, Of Camel and Man: Reflections on Mammal Being, is called either brilliant or frivolous by reviewers.
Meanwhile, the German philosopher locks himself up in his office and isn’t seen for many months. When he emerges, he presents a 600-page book called The Ontology of the Camel as Derived from the Category of the Ego.
[I wrote this up for the benefit of my undergrads a while ago. I don’t remember exactly where I read the joke—it may have been in something by Horkheimer]](http://29.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_lcx3nk3mqr1qaetvio1_500.jpg)
An English, a French and a German philosopher are asked to write a treatise on camels.
The English philosopher moves to Egypt and observes camels for two years, recording every single detail. He returns home and condenses his extensive notes into two volumes totaling 1,300 pages. The book is boring and tedious, but earns him praise for being exemplary scholarship.
The French philosopher goes to the Jardin des Plantes for an afternoon, chats with the zookeeper, pokes his umbrella at a camel a few times, goes home and writes a monograph over the course of a weekend. The study, Of Camel and Man: Reflections on Mammal Being, is called either brilliant or frivolous by reviewers.
Meanwhile, the German philosopher locks himself up in his office and isn’t seen for many months. When he emerges, he presents a 600-page book called The Ontology of the Camel as Derived from the Category of the Ego.
[I wrote this up for the benefit of my undergrads a while ago. I don’t remember exactly where I read the joke—it may have been in something by Horkheimer]
