Tuesday, August 24, 2004
New Arab cinema tells intimate stories - on the festival of contemporary Arab films in London
| Published: 2004/08/23 17:06:55 GMT New Arab cinema tells intimate stories | |||||||
 Filmgoers in London are getting the chance to see what a new generation of Arab film-makers have to say. The UK's national film theatre is hosting a festival of contemporary Arab films.
You see her smoking, you see her drinking; you see her naked; then you see her having sex - fully clothed - in a doorway. Then you see her naked again. Now, be honest, is this really what you expected from an Arab film festival? According to Mona Tayara-Deeley, the film festival's curator, the main change in Arab cinema is that directors have decided to tell small, intimate stories instead of flag-waving or political issues. "They're really focusing on the point that people in the Middle East are living lives like everyone else - love, friendship, boredom, entertainment - it's just that the context they live in is different." Arab films lagging behind Many of the films in this festival are being seen in the UK for the first time. And while the names of Iranian film-makers like Kiarostami or Makhmalbalf are now familiar to western film-lovers, the new generation of Arab directors don't seem to have made quite such an impact.
Omar al-Qattan is a Palestinian film director based in London. His film, Canticle of the Stones, is showing in the festival. He says Iran has been able to survive so well because it is a unified country, with a unified language - and a well-funded network of cinemas and distribution outlets. By contrast, he says, the Arab world is anything but unified, and its cinemas have largely closed down - because of the video revolution, because of lack of investment and censorship. This makes it very difficult for film-makers like him. "When you don't have a domestic market - a market that speaks the language of the film, that's naturally interested in the subject matter of the film - when that market is weak, and the Arab market is weak, it's a massive handicap for any filmmaker, because you're pleading your case for funding with international backers not the natural domestic market." 'Money in TV' Egypt has the only real film industry in the Arab world. In its heyday during the 1960s and 70s, it was state subsidised and producing influential films about politics and the grittier side of Egyptian life.
Emad Abdulrazik, a film critic based in Washington, says all the money these days is going to television. "The TV industry is enjoying a lot of subsidy from the state, and from the private sector as well. A lot of movie-makers cannot make movies any more. You know what they do? They do video clips. Or if they're lucky, they do soap operas for TV." Without a strong domestic industry to fall back on, Arab film-makers - from Tunisia, Lebanon, the Palestinian Territories - often rely on western co-productions to get their films made. But for those like Omar al-Qattan, who have stuck to debating the big political issues of the region, the problems don't always end there. "My films have been banned or censored in various Arab countries," he says. "But there are different kinds of censorship here. In a way, they're harder to resist because the person imposing them, usually a commissioning editor, has much more power over you than a remote government. "It may not be a case of someone saying, 'you can't say this', but - which in a way is more pernicious - you may be told that you may say this but you may not say it in this way, or at that particular time of the night, or in this particular form." Aside from the politics, and the economics, there are cultural reasons why many Arab film-makers find it hard to distribute their films - even across the Middle East. Because the Arabic spoken in Tunisian films for example is different to that spoken by Egyptians or Syrians, or because the lifestyles presented in one Arab country mean nothing to film-goers in another. | |||||||
When you don't have a domestic market - a market that speaks the language of the film, that's naturally interested in the subject matter of the film - it's a massive handicap for any filmmaker, because you're pleading your case for funding with international backers 
Hazem Azmy
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Monday, August 23, 2004
Humbled by a hero - on immigrants in today's Europe
Humbled by a hero
John Hooper explains how the death of a young immigrant as he rescued a swimmer has left Italians to face some awkward truths
The Guardian - Monday August 23, 2004
Cheikh Sarr's wife told the Corriere della Sera newspaper that, when she first met him seven years ago, she thought: "This is a man with a big heart. He will make me happy. He will be the father of my children. And he will see me grow old."
Speaking to the newspaper from the only public telephone in her village, 120 miles from Dakar, in Senegal, she added: "Unfortunately, only the last of my premonitions was wrong."
Her husband died on Saturday August 21, in circumstances that have deeply moved Italians, making some pause for thought at a time when the latest summer upsurge in illegal immigration is being depicted by many politicians and commentators as a threat to the Italy's future.
Like millions of Italians, Sarr, a 27 year-old building worker, went to the seaside with a friend that day. They opted for the beach at Marina di Castagneto, near Livorno.
It was a blustery day and the sea was rough. Suddenly, they saw someone in difficulties in deep water. They plunged in. Sarr succeeded in reaching the man and pulling him towards the shore. But, in the last stages of his rescue effort, he was hit by a freak wave.
"I can still hear Cheikh as he held my hand crying out for help at the moment the wave carried him off," his Italian friend and workmate, Francesco Candeliere, said.
It was not until 8pm that Sarr's lifeless body was washed back onto the darkened shore. By then, the way in which he was perceived had undergone a remarkable transformation.
When he went into the water, he would have been looked on as a suspect "extracomunitario" (the Italians' odd term for foreigners - usually non-white - from outside the EU). He emerged from it as a hero.
The president of the province of Florence, Matteo Renzi, wrote to the mayors of its 44 boroughs, proposing that each name a street in their town after the young African.
Now, it is true that Italians - like everyone else - love a hero. A cynic might add that left-leaning Italians such as the provincial president of Florence are particularly fond of immigrant heroes, and never more so than when their political opponents are calling for tougher measures to stem the tide of illegal entries.
However, there is another reason for the deep emotions rescue incident has stirred: a common sense of having been humbled.
Italians pride themselves on being exceptionally civilised - and with reason. The very word civilisation was given to the world by their forebears. They have an unique history of cultural achievement.
Italians are elegant, refined and sensitive. But, as this incident showed, some of them can be capable of breathtakingly self-centred don't give a damn attitude that Italians themselves call menefreghismo (from "me ne frego", or "I couldn't care less").
It emerged that the man rescued by Sarr, an Italian, had simply left the beach after being saved without offering a word of thanks or consolation. Nor, despite the extensive publicity given to the incident, has he come forward to express gratitude to the stricken relatives of the man who saved his life.
Eyewitnesses described the man, who left without giving his name, as being around 40 years old, strongly built, with greying hair and a tattoo on his left arm. It is safe to say he is today the most unpopular man in Italy, a living, walking, yet anonymous embodiment of all that is least attractive in the national character.
What makes his stubborn refusal to thank all the more painful to his compatriots is the dignified and moving reaction of Sarr's elder brother, Khadim.
He denied that he felt any resentment towards the rescued man, but added: "I just want him to give me the opportunity to take him silently in my arms, because I am sure that, in him, I would recover a part of the life of my brother."
john.hooper@guardian.co.uk
Hazem Azmy
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Wednesday, August 18, 2004
Ageism in UK Academe
| 'Daft ducks' and 'smelly old cows' probably not welcome Chris Bunting Published: 22 November 2002 | |
| Ageism in universities is not limited to academic staff, writes Chris Bunting. Many mature students find that they are isolated and suffer abuse in a system that favours the young. Julie" doesn't look like a victim of ageism. She arrived at one of the Britain's elite universities last year aged only 22, with a clutch of three A-level grade As. "I thought age wouldn't be an issue. I thought nobody would think about that. But it was an issue," says the law student, who does not wish to be named. "They were all 18 or 19. Most hadn't even been on a gap year and the discussion was dominated by the outcome of A levels, getting drunk and getting laid. I felt the fact that I had had a gap at all marked me out from them." Julie, who had arrived late at university because of a medical problem, found herself lying about her age. She started telling people she was 20 "just to narrow the divide". The relentless partying of her fellow first-years further alienated her from the group and, as the year wore on, endless talk about her coming "21st birthday" celebrations started to build up mental pressure that culminated in a nervous breakdown. Without any effective pastoral support from her university, she finished the year and started the new term this October unable to attend lectures. Her degree has become a correspondence course. Irene Ison is 72. It was when her fellow students started calling her a "smelly old cow" and "the old bitch" that she realised she was in for a rough ride. That was when she was taking a City and Guilds course with a group of 16-year-olds at Tile Hill College in Coventry. Ison, who won the national adult learner's award in 1992, subsequently graduated to an MA course in photography at De Montfort University, where the discrimination was "more mature". For her entire second year, her fellow students refused to tell her where they held the fortnightly cooperative study groups that were integral to the course. She turned up to a Christmas party to find nobody there and a message to the venue saying the rest of the year group would arrive when she had gone. Ison, who has now finished the MA, is looking for a PhD place to research creativity and eccentricity in old age.She turned up to one interview to be told that applicants for the cleaner's job should go down the corridor. "One academic asked me why he should give me a place if I was likely to die during the course," Ison says. "They don't want a daft old duck in their class. You are intruding on a kind of cult of youth." Such tales of a youth-oriented monoculture in some British universities are common among mature students. They would be a sad but perhaps peripheral issue if there was not evidence that age discrimination in higher education extended far beyond the attitudes of a few ignorant teenagers. Tom Schuller, professor of continuing education at Birkbeck College, London, believes that assumptions about the age of students are endemic among academics. "You will find many academics organising their seminars with no thought as to whether they can fit into mature students' lives. There is a focus on full-time not part-time students, which again has an age aspect." A mature student attempting to continue his or her education beyond undergraduate level will quickly discover that it is common among academics to discriminate on age in a way that would be unacceptable in other walks of life. High-profile postgraduate grant schemes such as the Gates Cambridge scholarships and the Royal Society's Dorothy Hodgkin grants have removed age limitations in the past two years because of concerns about discrimination, but it is still common for postgraduate funding to be limited explicitly to students in their 20s or 30s. Carolyn Carr, a chemist working in industry and a former Daphne Jackson fellow at Lady Margaret Hall, Oxford, says: "The model is you come out of your degree straight to postgraduate work and on to your PhD. Any delay and you are going to find it very difficult to build an academic career. "The logic for these age restrictions is they are getting new blood into their fields, but you might ask whether they are just perpetuating the old blood," she says. "What kind of people are you going to get? Not women who have been delayed because of having families, not people who have started late into the system because of their backgrounds. You are more likely to get middle-class men." Joe Baden, manager of a project at Goldsmiths College, London, to recruit and retain non-traditional students in education, says that age discrimination can be a very good proxy for other less acceptable forms of discrimination such as class, race and gender discrimination. "I don't think that is the intention in most cases, but that is the effect that people have got to understand," he says. Julie already has limited prospects. If she chooses postgraduate study after she graduates, the Evan Lewis-Thomas Law Studentships at Sidney Sussex College, Cambridge, for instance, state that "preference will be given to candidates who will be under 26I though special circumstances (for instance military service) will be taken into account". Julie, who has not done military service, would be unlikely to be able to use a studentship to fund a PhD, although a shorter masters course taken immediately after her degree might be possible. Challenged about Julie's case, Mark Hemmings, senior tutor at Sidney Sussex, said: "The main thing is that we are looking for someone at the beginning of their career rather than any particular age." Barry Farleigh, who handles mature-student issues for the National Union of Students, believes part of the reason for what he calls "the massive ignorance" about age issues in higher education is a lack of effective representation. "Mature students see themselves as the forgotten students. Even in the NUS, there is very little focus on these kind of issues. Not so long ago, for instance, we negotiated a 30 per cent discount on London Transport for 18 to 24-year-olds. We just completely ignored the over-30s," Farleigh says. A conference of mature student NUS members last year discussed a motion to make ageism a "liberation campaign", NUS-speak for a top-priority campaign aimed at combating discrimination. "I had to advise them that there would be too much opposition from within the leadership of the NUS. There are people in the other campaigns, such as the gay and lesbian campaign, the women and the black students, who would feel the inclusion of age would trivialise theirs. It is not seen as a serious issue," Farleigh says. Because large parts of the student and academic population are apparently ignorant of ageism, many hope that a government loudly committed to "lifelong learning" will address what Schuller describes as education's "massive systemic bias in favour of youth". Schuller believes that the government has already done some practical work. Significantly increased funding for community and work-based learning has helped sustain vital re-entry points into education for adults, he says. Money has also been pumped into researching age-related issues in education. Nevertheless, "the focus of policy in relation to post-compulsory education has undoubtedly narrowed" since Labour came to power, Schuller says. The government plans to introduce legislation on age discrimination in the workplace by 2006, but it has produced no similar plans for education. More immediately damaging has been a "crippling" preoccupation with a target of increasing the proportion of 18 to 30-year-olds to 50 per cent. This, Schuller believes, has led to a "front-loading" of universities with millions of "middle-class underachievers at the expense of other groups who may not be able to take up the opportunity straight after school". The move towards funding higher education through loans, which are not available to over-55s and are often highly unattractive to adults who already have debts and extensive commitments, combined with the large expansion in the availability of education for school-leavers has meant that the sector has got younger, not older, in recent years. Between 1996 and 2001, the number of under 25-year-olds accepted by the Universities and Colleges Admissions Service rose by 24 per cent, from 258,913 to 321,093. The number of students aged over 25 went up by 0.14 per cent. Ison, who missed three years of her schooling in the war, left school aged 14 unable to read. She then raised three highly successful children as a single mother. "I did my O levels in my 40s, my A levels in my 50s, my BA in my 60s and my MA in my 70s. I'll keep knocking on the door for them to let me in," she says. | |
Hazem Azmy
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Sunday, August 15, 2004
Said who?
URL: http://www.salon.com/books/it/1999/10/04/said
Said who?
In his new memoir, "Out of Place," Edward Said brings his exile into focus and finds a home between his past and his future.
- - - - - - - - - - - -
By Chris Colin
When a philosopher publishes a memoir, he or she threatens to make the inaccessible accessible. A career's worth of abstrusity promises to be illuminated by that ultimate searchlight, the personal narrative. So when America's foremost Palestinian intellectual, Edward Said -- admittedly not so abstruse in the murky theory department -- released his long-awaited "Out of Place" this month, it seemed that he, too, just might snap open the shades and show us night in broad daylight for a moment.
"Out of Place" is a guilty pleasure for the recovering theory nut. With Barthes and then Foucault, we renounced our fascination with the author of a text, recognized that his or her religion, family life -- even his or her other texts -- have no bearing on the work in question. The domain of the enlightened critic, it was decided, is textual interplay and nothing more; to let the author's biography color our reading in any way is to grant him or her an undemocratic tyranny over a text that should belong exclusively to the reader.
But then Said's work has always collapsed text and "text producer," as theory's unbearable prose would put it; we read about Palestine, visions of the East, even Joseph Conrad, and Said is always present as a persona, weaving in his own experience and biases. The Columbia English professor's scholarship comes with a self-consciousness that constantly directs our attention to the scholar responsible. What facilitates this criticism? he asks. How does my background inform my perspective?
This time, though, the background is the foreground. From birth in Jerusalem in 1935 to his childhood years divided between Cairo and Palestine, then on to boarding school and university in the United States, the book traces a life characterized predominantly by exile and displacement. As a Christian Palestinian, and a Palestinian outside Palestine, Said suffered -- and occasionally nurtured -- a perpetual sense of marginalization. Out of place became something of a hometown.
If Said's story unfurls in a jumble of alien places, these places assume an impressive vividness. He describes his life as a series of incongruities and amalgams, each sending him further from what he deems center. First his name: the English Edward, the Arabic Said. Throughout the book, as the apparent contradictions in his life grow more pronounced -- his mother's love was "both beautiful and withheld"; he's neither 100 percent Palestinian nor 100 percent Egyptian; he supports Palestinian self-determination but criticizes the PLO -- he returns to the dissonance in his name as a sort of de-centering mantra.
As Said grows from nervously resourceful child to thoughtful/rebellious teen to dedicated scholar, we see his sense of perpetual displacement evolve into a comfort zone. Being out of place, he recognizes, affords him not only an ideal vantage point from which to consider the world, but also a rich vocabulary of images, metaphors and narratives with which to evaluate criticism itself.
But for all the relevance of marginalization in Said's life, the book sometimes stalls in its exhaustive exploration of periphery. While he clearly gets de-centered more than the average world citizen, his memoir neglects to recognize displacement as a fairly universal psychological condition. Who, as a child, doesn't feel out of place? The disservice lies not in some insensitivity toward Everyman's childhood, but rather in Said's own failure to distinguish between two distinct forms of displacement. He treats familiar experiences of personal estrangement with the same attention and intensity as his family's forced expatriation. Yet for American-born readers -- with emigration in our history -- tales of displacement and cultural hybrids rarely elicit shock.
Though "Out of Place" illuminates the liminal space Said inhabits throughout his personal and political life (liminality, with its suggestion of in between, is a central theme in his criticism), it neglects to consider the most interesting space of all: the intricate path his theoretical work snakes amid theoretic schools -- post-structuralism, post-colonialism, liberal enlightenment and deconstruction.
It's in his intellectual work that we see Said live up to the rebel reputation so often ascribed to him on his book jackets. Unlike postmodernists such as Derrida and Baudrillard, who dispensed with the very notion of authority altogether, he still believes in truth and the possibility of speaking it. Where Derrida might explore his own subjectivity ad nauseam, Said never renounces the authority to fight concrete battles (Palestinian self-determination, for example) and use theory as one of his weapons.
Though he doesn't discuss it in terms of his intellectual work, his ambivalent relationship to authority plays out emotionally in "Out of Place." Cold, reserved and critical, Wadie Said raised his son with dramatic scoldings and mysterious silences. Said writes:
"The most terrible thing he ever said to me -- I was twelve then -- was, 'You will never inherit anything from me; you are not the son of a rich man,' though literally of course I was."
In response, Said spent years attempting to secure the affections of this distant man. Said loves his father with a mix of rebellion and reverence. The hot and cold of this relationship is echoed and elaborated in his dealings with all sorts of authority structures. He describes himself, early on, as "the boy who went to school and unsuccessfully tried to follow (or ignore and circumvent) all the rules."
Said's memoir, of course, comes with baggage: Reading "Out of Place" means reading it against allegations of dishonesty recently leveled against him. In the September Commentary -- published before Said's memoir hit bookshelves -- Justus Reid Weiner accused him of fudging his Palestinian heritage. Said, he claimed, was not expelled from Palestine and did not attend school there as he has suggested. The Said camp fought back. Supporters cast Weiner as a Zionist Kenneth Starr: You're wrong, and even if you are right, get a life.
Wait until the book comes out, said Said's defenders, then we'll be vindicated. Indeed, "Out of Place" offers sufficient evidence to exonerate Said of any blatant obfuscation. (Christopher Hitchens and others have offered thorough, point-
But the most remarkable thing to see in the debate was the reduction of two decades of scholarship to a week of tit-
"Out of Place" lets us see him better than any of his previous writing has, and this seemed to be what he was after. Diagnosed with leukemia in 1991, he decided it was time to look back on a life largely obscured by the movement of exile. And as in the best of his criticism, he is able to make beautiful sense of the abstract and complex:
I occasionally experience myself as a cluster of flowing currents. I prefer this to the idea of a solid self ... These currents ... at their best, they require no reconciling, no harmonizing. They are "off" and may be out of place, but at least they are always in motion ...
salon.com | Oct. 4, 1999
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Saturday, August 14, 2004
Patriarchy Gets Funky: The Triumph of Identity Marketing
from Chapter Five of Naomi Klein's NO LOGO
Patriarchy Gets Funky
The Triumph of Identity Marketing
Source: NO LOGO
Published: Flamingo, 2001
Scanned: Andy Blunden, 2001
LetÂs face it, when you're a story line on Friends, itÂs hard to keep thinking you're radical.
- Jay Blotcher, AIDS activist, New York magazine, 1996
As an undergraduate in the late eighties and early nineties, I was one of those students who took a while to wake up to the slow branding of university life. And I can say from personal experience that itÂs not that we didnÂt notice the growing corporate presence on campus  we even complained about it sometimes. ItÂs just that we couldnÂt get particularly worked up about it. We knew the fast food chains were setting up their stalls in the library and that profs in the applied sciences were getting awfully cozy with pharmaceutical companies, but finding out exactly what was going on in the boardrooms and labs would have required a lot of legwork, and, frankly, we were busy. We were fighting about whether Jews would be allowed in the racial equality caucus at the campus womenÂs center, and why the meeting to discuss it was scheduled at the same time as the lesbian and gay caucus  were the organizers implying that there were no Jewish lesbians? No black bisexuals?
In the outside world. the politics of race, gender and sexuality remained tied to more concrete, pressing issues, like pay equity, same-sex spousal rights and police violence, and these serious movements were  and continue to be  a genuine threat to the economic and social order. But somehow, they didnÂt seem terribly glamorous to students on many university campuses, for whom identity politics had evolved by the late eighties into something quite different. Many of the battles we fought were over issues of Ârepresentation  a loosely defined set of grievances mostly lodged against the media, the curriculum and the English language. From campus feminists arguing over Ârepresentation of women on the reading lists to gays wanting better Ârepresentation on television, to rap stars bragging about Ârepresenting the ghettos, to the question that ends in a riot in Spike LeeÂs 1989 film Do the Right Thing  ÂWhy are there no brothers on the wall?  ours was a politics of mirrors and metaphors.
These issues have always been on the political agendas of both the civil-rights and the womenÂs movements and later, of the fight against AIDS. It was accepted from the start that part of what held back women and ethnic minorities was the absence of visible role models occupying powerful social positions, and that media-perpetuated stereotypes  embedded in the very fabric of the language  served to not so subtly reinforce the supremacy of white men. For real progress to take place, imaginations on both sides had to be decolonized.
But by the time my generation inherited these ideas, often two or three times removed, representation was no longer one tool among many, it was the key. In the absence of a clear legal or political strategy, we traced back almost all of societyÂs problems to the media and the curriculum, either through their perpetuation of negative stereotypes or simply by omission. Asians and lesbians were made to feel Âinvisible, gays were stereotyped as deviants, blacks as criminals and women as weak and inferior: a self-fulfilling prophecy responsible for almost all real-world inequalities. And so our battlefields were sitcoms with gay neighbors who never got laid, newspapers filled with pictures of old white men, magazines that advanced what author Naomi Wolf termed Âthe beauty myth, reading lists that we expected to look like Benetton ads, Benetton ads that trivialized our reading-list demands. So outraged were we media children by the narrow and oppressive portrayals in magazines, in books and on television that we convinced ourselves that if, the typecast images and loaded language changed, so too would the reality. We thought we would find salvation in the reformation of MTV, CNN and Calvin Klein. And why not? Since media seemed to be the source of so many of our problems, surely if we could only subvert them to better represent us, they could save us instead. With better collective mirrors, self-esteem would rise and prejudices would magically fall away, as society became suddenly inspired to live up to the beautiful and Worthy reflection we had retouched in its image.
For a generation that grew up mediated, transforming the world through pop culture was second nature. The problem was that these fixations began to transform us in the process. Over time, campus identity politics became so consumed by personal politics that they all but eclipsed the rest of the world. The slogan Âthe personal is political came to replace the economic as political and, in the end, the political as political as well. The more importance we placed on representation issues, the more central a role they seemed to elbow for themselves in our lives  perhaps because, in the absence of more tangible political goals, any movement that is about fighting for better social mirrors is going to eventually fall victim to its own narcissism.
Soon Âouting wasnÂt about AIDS, but became a blanket demand for gay and lesbian Âvisibility  all gays should be out, not just right-wing politicians but celebrities as well. By 1991, the radical group Queer Nation had broadened its media critique: it didnÂt just object to portrayals of homicidal madmen with AIDS, but any non-straight killer at all. The groupÂs San Francisco and L.A. chapters held protests against The Silence of the Lambs, objecting to its transvestite serial-killer villain, and they disrupted filming on Basic Instinct because it featured ice-pick-wielding killer lesbians. GLAAD (Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation) had moved from lobbying the news media about its use of terms like Âgay plague to describe AIDS, and had begun actively pushing the networks for more gay and lesbian characters in TV shows. In 1993, Torie Osborn, a prominent U.S. lesbian rights activist, said that the single biggest political issue facing her constituency was not same-sex spousal benefits, the right to join the military or even the right of two women to marry and adopt children. It was, she told a reporter, ÂInvisibility. Period. End of sentence.Â
Much like a previous generation of anti-porn feminists who held their rallies outside peep shows, many of the political demonstrations of the early nineties had shifted from the steps of government buildings and courthouses to the steps of museums with African art exhibits that were deemed to celebrate the colonial mindset. They massed at the theater entrances showing mega-musicals like Showboat and Miss Saigon, and they even crept right up to the edge of the red carpet at the 1992 Academy Awards.
These struggles may seem slight in retrospect, but you can hardly blame us media narcissists for believing that we were engaged in a crucial battle on behalf of oppressed people everywhere: every step we took sparked a new wave of apocalyptic panic from our conservative foes. If we were not revolutionaries, why, then, were our opponents saying that a revolution was under way, that we were in the midst of a Âculture warÂ? ÂThe transformation of American campuses is so sweeping that it is no exaggeration to call it a revolution, Dinesh DÂsouza, author of Illiberal Education informed his readers. ÂIts distinctive insignia can be witnessed on any major campus in America today, and in all aspects of university life.Â
Despite their claims of living under Stalinist regimes where dissent was not tolerated, our professors and administrators put up an impressively vociferous counteroffensive: they fought tooth and nail for the right to offend us thin-skinned radicals; they lay down on the tracks in front of every new harassment policy, and generally acted as if they were fighting for the very future of Western civilization. An avalanche of look-alike magazine features bolstered the claim that ID politics constituted an international emergency: ÂIlliberal Education (Atlantic Monthly), ÂVisigoths in Tweed (Fortune), ÂThe Silences (MacitanÂs), ÂThe AcademyÂs New Ayatollahs (Outlook), ÂTaking Offense (Newsweek). in New York magazine, writer John Taylor compared my generation of campus activists with cult members, Hitler Youth and Christian fundamentalists. So great was the threat we allegedly posed that George Bush even took time out to warn the world that political correctness Âreplaces old prejudices with new ones.Â
The Marketing of ID
The backlash that identity politics inspired did a pretty good job of masking for us the fact that many of our demands for better representation were quickly accommodated by marketers, media makers and pop-culture producers alike  though perhaps not for the reasons we had hoped. If I had to name a precise moment for this shift in attitude, I would say August of 1992: the thick of the Âbrand crisis that peaked with Marlboro Friday. ThatÂs when we found out that our sworn enemies in the Âmainstream  to us a giant monolithic blob outside of our known university-affiliated enclaves  didnÂt fear and loathe us but actually thought we were sort of interesting. Once we'd embarked on a search for new wells of cutting-edge imagery, our insistence on extreme sexual and racial identities made for great brand-content and niche-marketing strategies. If diversity was what we wanted, the brands seemed to be saying, then diversity was exactly what we would get. And with that, the marketers and media makers swooped down, air-brushes in hand, to touch up the colors and images in our culture.
The five years that followed were an orgy of red ribbons, Malcolm X baseball hats and Silence = Death T-Shirts. By 1993, the stories of academic Armageddon were replaced with new ones about the sexy wave of ÂDo-Me Feminism in Esquire and ÂLesbian Chic in New York and Newsweek. The shift in attitude was not the result of a mass political conversion but of some hard economic calculations. According to Rocking the Ages, a book produced in 1997 by leading U.S. consumer researchers Yankelovich Partners, ÂDiversity was the Âdefining idea for Gen-Xers, as opposed to ÂIndividuality for boomers and ÂDuty for their parents.
Xers are starting out today with pluralistic attitudes that are the strongest we have ever measured. As we look towards the next twenty five years, it is clear that acceptance of alternative lifestyles will become even stronger and more widespread as Xers grow up and take over the reins of power, and become the dominant buying group in the consumer marketplace. ... Diversity is the key fact of life for Xers, the core of the perspective they bring to the marketplace. Diversity in all of its forms  cultural, political, sexual, racial, social  is a hallmark of this generation [italics theirs] ...
The Sputnik cool-hunting agency, meanwhile, explained that .youth today are one big sample of diversity and encouraged its clients to dive into the psychedelic ÂUnited Streets of Diversity and not be afraid to taste the local fare. Dee Dee Gordon, author of The L. Report, urged her clients to get into Girl Power with a vengeance:, ÂTeenage girls want to see someone who kicks butt backÂ; and, sounding suspiciously like me and my university friends, brand man Tom Peters took to berating his corporate audiences for being ÂOWMs  Old White Males.Â
As we have seen, this information was coming hot on the heels of two other related revelations. The first was that consumer companies would only survive if they built corporate empires around Âbrand identities. The second. was that the ballooning youth demographic held the key to market success. So, of course, if the market researchers and cool hunters all reported that diversity was the key character trait of this lucrative demographic, there was only one thing to be done: every forward-thinking corporation would have to adopt variations on the theme of diversity as their brand identities.
Which is exactly what most brand-driven corporations have attempted to do. In an effort to understand how Starbucks became an overnight household name in 1996 without a single national ad campaign, Advertising Age speculated that it had something to do with its tie-dyed, Third World aura. ÂFor devotees, Starbucks experience is about more than a daily espresso infusion; it is about immersion in a politically correct, cultured refuge. ... Starbucks, however, was only a minor player in the P.C. marketing craze. Abercrombie & Fitch ads featured guys in their underwear making goo-goo eyes at each other; Diesel went further, showing two sailors kissing; and a U.S. television spot for Virgin Cola depicted Âthe first-ever gay wedding featured in a commercial, as the press release proudly announced. There were also gay-targeted brands like Pride Beer and Wave Water, whose slogan is ÂWe label bottles not people, and the gay community got its very own cool hunters market researchers who scoured gay bars with hidden cameras.
The Gap, meanwhile, filled its ads with racially mixed rainbows of skinny, childlike models. Diesel harnessed frustration at that unattainable beauty ideal with ironic ads that showed women being served up for dinner to a table of pigs. The Body Shop harnessed the backlash against both of them by refusing to advertise and instead filled its windows with red ribbons and posters condemning violence against women. The rush to diversity fitted in neatly with the embrace of African-American style and heroes that companies like Nike and Tommy Hilfiger had already pinpointed as a powerful marketing source. But Nike also realized that people who saw themselves as belonging to oppressed groups were ready-made market niches: throw a few liberal platitudes their way and, presto, you're not just a product but an ally in the struggle. So the walls of Nike Town were adorned with quotes from Tiger Woods declaring that Âthere are still Courses in the U.S. where I am not allowed to play, because of the color of my skin. Women in Nike ads told us that ÂI believe Âbabe is a four-letter word and ÂI believe high heels are a conspiracy against women.Â
And everyone, it seemed, was toying with the fluidity of gender, from the old-hat story of MAC make-up using drag queen RuPaul as its spokesmodel to tequila ads that inform viewers that the she in the bikini is really a he; from Calvin KleinÂs colognes that tell us that gender itself is a construct of Sure Ultra Dry deodorant that in turn urges all the gender benders to chill out: ÂMan? Woman? Does it matter?'
Oppression Nostalgia
Fierce debates still rage about these campaigns. Are they entirely cynical or do they indicate that advertisers want to evolve and play more positive social roles? BenettonÂs mid-nineties ads careered wildly between witty and beautiful challenges to racial stereotypes on the one hand, and grotesque commercial exploitation of human suffering on the other. They were, however, indisputably part of a genuine attempt to use the companyÂs vast cultural real estate to send a message that went beyond ÂBuy more sweatersÂ, and they played a central role in the fashion worldÂs embrace of the struggle against AIDS. Similarly, there is no denying that the Body Shop broke ground by proving to the corporate sector that a multinational chain can be an outspoken and controversial political player, even while making millions on bubble bath and body lotion. The complicated motivations and stark inconsistencies inside many of these Âethical businesses will be explored in greater depth in a later chapter. But for many of the activists who had, at one point not so long ago, believed that better media representation would make for a more just world, one thing had become abundantly clear: identity politics werenÂt fighting the system, or even subverting it. When it came to the vast new industry of corporate branding, they were feeding it.
The crowning of sexual and racial diversity as the new superstars of advertising and pop culture has understandably created a sort of Identity Identity Crisis. Some ex-ID warriors are even getting nostalgic about the good old days, when they were oppressed, yes, but the symbols of their radicalism werenÂt for sale at Wal-Mart. As music writer Arm Powers observed of the much-vaunted ascendancy of ÂGirl PowerÂ, Âat this intersection between the conventional feminine and the evolving Girl, whatÂs springing up is not a revolution but a mall ... Thus, a genuine movement devolves into a giant shopping spree, where girls are encouraged to purchase whatever identity fits them best off the rack. Similarly, Daniel Mendelsohn has written that gay identity has dwindled into Âbasically, a set of product choices. ... At least Culturally speaking, oppression may have been the best thing that could have happened to gay culture. Without it, we're nothing.Â
The nostalgia, of course, is absurd. Even the most cynical ID warrior will admit, when pressed, that having Ellen Degeneres and other gay characters out on TV has some concrete advantages. Probably it is good for the kids, particularly those who live outside of laser urban settings  in rural or small-town environments, where being gay is more likely to confine them to a life of self-loathing. (The attempted suicide rate in 1998 among gay and bisexual male teens in America was 28.1 percent, compared with 4.2 percent among straight males of the same age group.) Similarly, most feminists would concede that although the Spice Girls crooning, ÂIf you wanna be my lover, you have to get with my friends isnÂt likely to shatter the beauty myth, itÂs still a step up from Snoop DoggÂs 1993 ode to gang rape, ÂIt ainÂt no fun if my homies canÂt have none.Â
And yet, while raising teenagers self-esteem and making sure they have positive role models is valuable, itÂs a fairly narrow achievement, and from an activist perspective, one canÂt help asking, Is this it? Did all our protests and supposedly subversive theory only serve to provide great content for the culture industries, fresh new lifestyle imagery for LeviÂs new ÂWhatÂs True ad campaign and girl-power-charged record sales for the music business? Why, in other words, were our ideas about political rebellion so deeply non-threatening to the smooth flow of business as usual?
The question, of course, is not Why, but Why on earth not? Just m they had embraced the Âbrands, not products equation, the smart businesses quickly realized that short-term discomfort whether  it came from a requirement to hire more women or to more carefully vet the language in an ad campaign  was a small price to pay for the tremendous market share that diversity promised. So while it may be true that real gains have emerged from this process, it is also true that Dennis Rodman wears dresses and Disney World celebrates Gay Day less because of political progress than financial expediency. The market has seized upon multi-culturalism and gender-bending in the same ways that it has seized upon youth culture in general  not just as a market niche but as a source of new carnival-esque imagery. As Robert Goldman and Stephen Papson note, ÂWhite-bread culture will simply no longer do. The $200 billion culture industry  now AmericaÂs biggest export  needs an ever-changing, uninterrupted supply of street styles, edgy music videos and rainbows of colors. And the radical critics of the media clamoring to be Ârepresented in the early nineties virtually handed over their colorful identities to the brandmasters to be shrink-wrapped.
The need for greater diversity  the rallying cry of my university years  is now not only accepted by the culture industries, it is the mantra of global capital. And identity politics, as they were practiced in the nineties, werenÂt a threat, they were a gold mine. ÂThis revolution, writes cultural critic Richard Goldstein in The Village Voice, Âturned out to be the savior of late capitalism. And just in time, too.
Market Masala: Diversity and the Global Sales Pitch
About the same time that Try friends and I were battling for better cultural representation, the advertising agencies, broadcasters and global brands were preoccupied with some significant problems of their own. Thanks to freer trade and other forms of accelerated deregulation, the global marketplace was finally becoming a reality, but new, urgent questions were being asked: What is the best way to sell identical products across multiple borders? What voice should advertisers use to address the whole world at once? How can one company accommodate cultural differences while still remaining internally coherent?
For certain corporations, until recently, the answer was simple: force the world to speak your language and absorb your culture. In 1983, when global reach was still a fantasy for all but a handful of corporations, Harvard business professor Theodore Levitt published the essay ÂThe Globalization of Markets, in which he argued that any corporation that was willing to bow to some local habit or taste was an unmitigated failure. ÂThe worldÂs needs and desires have been irrevocably homogenized, he wrote in what instantly became the manifesto of global marketing. Levitt made a stark distinction between weak multinational corporations, which change depending on which country they are operating in, and swaggering global corporations, which are, by their very definition, always the same, Wherever they roam. ÂThe multinational corporation operates in a number of countries, and adjusts its products and practices to each  at high relative costs. The global corporation. operates with resolute constancy  at low relative cost  as if the entire world (or major regions of it) were a single entity; it sells the same things in the same way everywhere. ... Ancient differences in national tastes or modes of doing business disappear.Â
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Friday, August 06, 2004
Zionism thesis stirs up a storm
Zionism thesis stirs up a storm
Phil Baty
The Times Higher Education Supplement
06 August 2004
Geoffrey Alderman, Middlesex University's former pro vice-chancellor for quality assurance, this week accused the university of handing a doctorate to the Anglican vicar for "little more than his own religious prejudices dressed up in academic guise".
Dr Sizer, vicar of Christ Church in Virginia Water, Surrey, and the university hit back this week. They accused Professor Alderman, an Orthodox Jew and leading historian of Judaism, of trying to undermine the credibility of the thesis because he opposes its arguments.
Dr Sizer's thesis attacks Christian fundamentalists in the US who unequivocally support the state of Israel and its policies, arguing that they are one of the "most powerful and destructive forces in America".
Professor Alderman told The Times Higher: "Middlesex has permitted its highest research degree to be awarded in respect of a work of propaganda.
If I had been examining it - and I've examined many PhDs - I would have required extensive revision, including deletion of all passages giving the author's superfluous personal views and prejudices."
Professor Alderman, a former member of the Board of Deputies of British Jews, first raised his concerns last month in the Jewish Chronicle. He cited the wider issue of the Church of England's growing backlash against the rise of "Christian Zionism", a belief by some Christians that the restoration of the Jews to Palestine constitutes a divine mandate.
But the row escalated when Dr Sizer and Middlesex suggested Professor Alderman was influenced more by his personal political and religious position than concern for academic standards.
Dr Sizer is one of Britain's leading critics of Christian Zionism. His website quotes from his PhD thesis, Christian Zionism: Road Map to Armageddon: "Christian Zionism has become the most powerful and destructive force at work in America today. Influential in shaping Western foreign policy on the Middle East, they are not only inciting hatred between Jews and Muslims but are also the greatest roadblock to lasting peace in the Middle East."
This week Dr Sizer told The Times Higher that he had not seen the article in the Jewish Chronicle, but said that Professor Alderman was "an angry man who has upset a lot of people in various academic institutions".
"I'm not surprised he has gone for this approach because the simplest way of undermining criticism of Israel is to undermine the credibility of those who criticise it," he said. "If you can't disagree intellectually with someone's arguments, you try to undermine them in other ways. Those who have taken a stand against the policies of (Israeli Prime Minister) Sharon have had their credibility questioned."
The thesis was carried out at Oak Hill College, a "biblical training" college for Church of England vicars, accredited by Middlesex. Dr Sizer said he did not see himself as an academic, but had a masters with distinction from Oxford University. "I've got a PhD Middlesex was happy with - it's not Oxford or Cambridge - but Middlesex was happy and my examiners gave me a hard time at the viva."
The PhD was examined by Andrew Walker, professor of theology at King's College London, and Donald Wagner, professor of religion and Middle Eastern Studies at North Park University in Chicago and executive director of the Centre for Middle Eastern Studies.
Professor Walker said: "It is strange an academic with strong Zionist commitments should attack the thesis for its political bias. The question is not, is it pro-Palestinian, or even a brilliant thesis, but does it pass muster?
"We are in a bad way if academics attack the academic standard of a thesis they did not examine and give the impression this is an issue about standards as if addressed by a neutral observer."
A spokeswoman for Middlesex said: "The role of Middlesex, which Professor Alderman himself refers to as 'a reputable English university' was to judge the academic quality of Dr Sizer's doctoral thesis. The Quality Assurance Agency, in its 2003 institutional audit of Middlesex University, confirmed its confidence in all the university's degree-awarding processes."
Professor Alderman said: "Dr Sizer's response is pathetic. He should stop trying to personalise the issue and address the substance of my argument."
AN IRRECONCILABLE DIVIDE?
GEOFFREY ALDERMAN
Geoffrey Alderman is academic dean of the American Intercontinental University, London. He was pro vice-chancellor for quality assurance of Middlesex University between 1994 and 1999, and is emeritus professor at Middlesex.In more than a decade at Royal Holloway, University of London, he held positions as professor of politics and contemporary history, chairman of the academic council and pro vice-chancellor for academic standards.
He has been an auditor for the Higher Education Quality Council and a review chairman for the earliest Teaching Quality Assessments.
Professor Alderman is a former member of the Board of Deputies of British Jews, and is an Orthodox Jew and leading expert on Jewish history.
He is a former student of Cecil Roth, the "founding father" of Anglo-Jewish historiography, at Lincoln College, Oxford, and the author of Modern British Jewry and The Jewish Community in British Politics.
STEPHEN SIZER
Stephen Sizer has been vicar of Christ's Church, Virginia Water, Surrey, for eight years. His website says his personal mission is to "assist people to become fully devoted followers of Jesus Christ".He has served with Campus Crusade for Christ as an evangelist, and with other mission agencies on projects in Europe and the Middle East.
He is chairman of the International Bible Society UK and vice-chairman of Highway Projects, a Christian charity that sends people to "serve the indigenous Church in the Holy Land".
He has contributed to several books, including Speaking the Truth about Zionism and Israel.
Don Wagner, one of the PhD examiners, described Dr Sizer's PhD as "the most important on the subject to date and should be read by all Christians concerned about a just resolution to the Palestinian-Israeli conflict".
Thursday, August 05, 2004
How an inattentive hero slipped into imperial decline - review of Colossus
| How an inattentive hero slipped into imperial decline
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| The torch of empire has been passed, but the Americans need to learn some lessons from the most skilled imperialists of the past two centuries: their British brethren. Niall Ferguson, one of the brightest, most opinionated and prolific younger historians from the UK, has emigrated to the US to help educate us in every way. He will teach our classes, fill our television screens, provide popular history for the masses and teach us how to run a liberal empire the old-fashioned way. In the opening pages of his earlier Empire, a skewed and sloppy work on the history of the British Empire produced to accompany a television series, Ferguson told of the successes his Scottish family had as it spread throughout the empire. He argued, inter alia, that the Scots and the Irish were particularly helpful in building this empire, upon which the sun was never to set, so the yen for imperial pedagogy was instilled within him. But the sun did set. The Americans came to the fore with the Second World War, though they had been edging towards empire throughout their history. In Colossus, the rise of the American empire into the 1980s is scanned in the first two chapters, and then two more chapters deal with the difficult days for this empire in the 1980s and 1990s even as the Soviet star of empire was descending. However, much to Ferguson's chagrin, the rise that he would like to see continue and help straighten out some of the world's difficulties was followed by a fall. Instead of up and up, we are witnessing, at the moment, a descent due to America's economic deficit, its manpower deficit and - the most serious of the three - its attention deficit. His skilful focus on decline in the second half of Colossus makes this a much more interesting and useful book than all the nostalgia for liberal empire. Ferguson has a way of using parts of previous books, or restating these parts in a new work, and here he treats us to lengthy accounts of the British in Iraq and in Egypt, and even some pages on the British Raj in India. He believes that comparisons of past situations and present ones are exceptionally informative for present readers and policy-makers. This belief, though certainly arguable, is not borne out in the text at hand. The British Empire flourished in a different historical era when, as Ferguson notes, technology was much less developed. Today's anti-imperialists have automatic weapons, hand-held rockets, possibly weapons of mass destruction in the making, and the internet. So even without many of the means of mass destruction that the American Empire has, they can and are making the world hell for Americans and their friends. Mere fire power will not quell them and make the world safe for liberal empire. This relates to one of the major drawbacks of this work (and of Empire): Ferguson (like Karl Marx) discounts and dismisses the power of nationalism. And further, to a great extent, he ignores the worlds of the Others, those on whom empire has been imposed, first by Europeans and then by Americans. Consider his brief and lopsided view of the Vietnam War. First, he has not a clue about the importance of this conflict over a quarter century of American history, its impact on millions of Americans way beyond the 57,000 who died, and its impact on the Vietnamese. Second, he seems to think from his selective reading of a few - and not the best - military historians that if only a little more fire power had been used, or a somewhat different strategy employed, America would have won instead of lost. He hardly considers that the Vietnamese nationalists led by Ho Chi Minh and General Giap were a formidable foe for both the French and the Americans and that they had legitimacy for many Vietnamese, whereas the puppet governments constructed by the French and Americans never did have and never could have had legitimacy. Although the Second World War certainly weakened the French, they lost on the battlefield in the decades after the war despite using their best resources. The Americans were not weakened by the Second World War or the Cold War and used extensive resources. Short of obliterating Vietnam with atomic bombs, they could not have defeated the Vietnamese nationalists. Lyndon Johnson, like George W. Bush with Iraq, insisted that Americans were in Vietnam for the long haul and would win in the end. What the Americans got was an embarrassing defeat, hundreds of thousands of American casualties, millions of Vietnamese casualties and hardly a good idea of what went wrong. Ferguson should have consulted Phillip Davidson's Vietnam at War (1988), a better military history than the ones he has used. Now Bush and his ideologues have mistakenly picked another target, not out of necessity, but by wilful choice. They distorted the evidence, abandoned the United Nations when it did not bend to their will, and soon had their comeuppance as they faced the difficulties of nation-building, the anger of the Iraqis and continued resistance of Saddam Hussein backers. I believe that even their quick military victory will look different once we have some historical perspective. Withdrawal is on the cards, though American and British forces will stay for some time and absorb casualties. Here is where Ferguson's three deficits come into play, and where his book is so useful in understanding the Iraq situation. But what must be added is that no American-created government can have any legitimacy in Iraqi eyes. Many may have loathed Saddam, but they do not want Americans in his place. Iraqi nationalism dictates that they find their own way to their own political system and leadership, which, one hopes, would be more just and democratic than what went before. Colossus is not a book to read for its account of the rise of American imperialism. There are much more serious and interesting works including Andrew Bacevich's American Empire (2002) and Mahmood Mamdani's Good Muslim, Bad Muslim (2004). The first half of Ferguson's book is a fairly pedestrian retelling of the American imperial adventure, but he is sharp enough and skilled enough in economics to have written a second half that makes one better understand the failure of this American international enterprise. Having dismissed the efficacy in world politics of the UN and of the European Union, and then finding the Americans failing, Ferguson has no hero to turn to. But we will surely hear from him once he has found one. Leonard A. Gordon is emeritus professor of history, Brooklyn College, City University, New York, US. | |||||||||||||
Hazem Azmy
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Monday, August 02, 2004
subjectivity, multiculturalism, sex and unfreedom after 11 September - Zizek
http://www.csudh.edu/dearhabermas/zizek03.htm
A Justice Site
Slavoj Zizek
Mirror Sites:
CSUDH - Habermas - UWP
California State University, Dominguez Hills
University of Wisconsin, Parkside
Soka University Japan, Transcend Art and Peace
Created: November 23, 2001
Latest Update: November 23, 2001
Faculty:
jeannecurran@habermas.org
Olivier at tapcourse@yahoo.com
takata@uwp.edu
subjectivity, multiculturalism, sex and unfreedom after 11 September Interview with Slavoj Zizek
Teaching and Review Essay by Jeanne Curran and Susan Takata.
Copyright: Jeanne Curran, Susan R. Takata, and Individual Authors: November 2001.
"Fair Use" encouraged.
On Friday, November 23, 2001, Marcia Ian forwarded this post to the
Psychoanalysis of Culture and Society List:Subject: An interview with Zizek: forwarded from another list'The one measure of true love is: you can insult the other'
The interview:
Interview with Slavoj Zizek spiked. By Sabine Reul and Thomas Deichmann. 15 November 2001.The back up is printed here because I had some trouble accessing it. The essay will go up soon. Pay particular attention to Zizek's explanation that the terrorism is within us. We need to talk about that. And about what Zizek means by "unfreedom." These are near the end of the file.
Note the paragraph halfway down the file on the CNN report of the little seven-year-old girl who's willing to tolerate her father's death for her country. What is Zizek suggesting here?
"The Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Zizek has gained something of a cult following for his many writings - including The Ticklish Subject, a playful critique of the intellectual assault upon human subjectivity (1).
"At the prestigious Frankfurt Book Fair in October 2001, he talked to Sabine Reul and Thomas Deichmann about subjectivity, multiculturalism, sex and unfreedom after 11 September.
"Has 11 September thrown new light on your diagnosis of what is happening to the world?
"Slavoj *i*ek: One of the endlessly repeated phrases we heard in recent weeks is that nothing will be the same after 11 September. I wonder if there really is such a substantial change. Certainly, there is change at the level of perception or publicity, but I don't think we can yet speak of some fundamental break. Existing attitudes and fears were confirmed, and what the media were telling us about terrorism has now really happened.
"In my work, I place strong emphasis on what is usually referred to as the virtualisation or digitalisation of our environment. We know that 60 percent of the people on this Earth have not even made a phone call in their life. But still, 30 percent of us live in a digitalised universe that is artificially constructed, manipulated and no longer some natural or traditional one. At all levels of our life we seem to live more and more with the thing deprived of its substance. You get beer without alcohol, meat without fat, coffee without caffeine...and even virtual sex without sex.
"Virtual reality to me is the climax of this process: you now get reality without reality...or a totally regulated reality. But there is another side to this. Throughout the entire twentieth century, I see a counter-tendency, for which my good philosopher friend Alain Badiou invented a nice name: 'La passion du râÃ', the passion of the real. That is to say, precisely because the universe in which we live is somehow a universe of dead conventions and artificiality, the only authentic real experience must be some extremely violent, shattering experience. And this we experience as a sense that now we are back in real life.
"Do you think that is what we are seeing now?
"Slavoj *i*ek: I think this may be what defined the twentieth century, which really began with the First World War. We all remember the war reports by Ernst J��r, in which he praises this eye-to-eye combat experience as the authentic one. Or at the level of sex, the archetypal film of the twentieth century would be Nagisa Oshima's Ai No Corrida (In The Realm Of The Senses), where the idea again is that you become truly radical, and go to the end in a sexual encounter, when you practically torture each other to death. There must be extreme violence for that encounter to be authentic.
"Another emblematic figure in this sense to me is the so- called 'cutter'- a widespread pathological phenomenon in the USA. There are two million of them, mostly women, but also men, who cut themselves with razors. Why? It has nothing to do with masochism or suicide. It's simply that they don't feel real as persons and the idea is: it's only through this pain and when you feel warm blood that you feel reconnected again. So I think that this tension is the background against which one should appreciate the effect of the act.
"Does that relate to your observations about the demise of subjectivity in The Ticklish Subject? You say the problem is what you call 'foreclosure'- that the real or the articulation of the subject is foreclosed by the way society has evolved in recent years.
"Slavoj *i*ek: The starting point of my book on the subject is that almost all philosophical orientations today, even if they strongly oppose each other, agree on some kind of basic anti-subjectivist stance. For example, J��n Habermas and Jacques Derrida would both agree that the Cartesian subject had to be deconstructed, or, in the case of Habermas, embedded in a larger inter-subjective dialectics. Cognitivists, Hegelians - everybody is in agreement here.
"I am tempted to say that we must return to the subject - though not a purely rational Cartesian one. My idea is that the subject is inherently political, in the sense that 'subject', to me, denotes a piece of freedom - where you are no longer rooted in some firm substance, you are in an open situation. Today we can no longer simply apply old rules. We are engaged in paradoxes, which offer no immediate way out. In this sense, subjectivity is political.
"But this kind of political subjectivity seems to have disappeared. In your books you speak of a post-political world.
"Slavoj *i*ek: When I say we live in a post-political world, I refer to a wrong ideological impression. We don't really live in such a world, but the existing universe presents itself as post-political in the sense that there is some kind of a basic social pact that elementary social decisions are no longer discussed as political decisions. They are turned into simple decisions of gesture and of administration. And the remaining conflicts are mostly conflicts about different cultures. We have the present form of global capitalism plus some kind of tolerant democracy as the ultimate form of that idea. And, paradoxically, only very few are ready to question this world.
"So, what's wrong with that?
"Slavoj *i*ek: This post-political world still seems to retain the tension between what we usually refer to as tolerant liberalism versus multiculturalism. But for me - though I never liked Friedrich Nietzsche - if there is a definition that really fits, it is Nietzsche's old opposition between active and passive nihilism. Active nihilism, in the sense of wanting nothing itself, is this active self-destruction which would be precisely the passion of the real - the idea that, in order to live fully and authentically, you must engage in self-destruction. On the other hand, there is passive nihilism, what Nietzsche called 'The last man' - just living a stupid, self-satisfied life without great passions.
"The problem with a post-political universe is that we have these two sides which are engaged in kind of mortal dialectics. My idea is that, to break out of this vicious cycle, subjectivity must be reinvented.
"You also say that the elites in our Western world are losing their nerve. They want to throw out all old concepts like humanism or subjectivity. Against that, you say it is important to look at what there is in the old that may be worth retaining.
"Slavoj *i*ek: Of course, I am not against the new. I am, indeed, almost tempted to repeat Virginia Woolf. I think it was in 1914 when she said it was as though eternal human nature had changed. To be a man no longer means the same thing. One should not, for example, underestimate the inter-subjective social impact of cyberspace. What we are witnessing today is a radical redefinition of what it means to be a human being.
" Almost all philosophical orientations today agree on some kind of basic anti-subjectivist stance
"Take strange phenomena, like what we see on the internet. There are so-called 'cam' websites where people expose to an anonymous public their innermost secrets down to the most vulgar level. You have websites today - even I, with all my decadent tastes, was shocked to learn this - where people put a video-camera in their toilets, so you can observe them defecating. This a totally new constellation. It is not private, but also it is also not public. It is not the old exhibitionist gesture.
"Be that as it may, something radical is happening. Now, a number of new terms are proposed to us to describe that. The one most commonly used is paradigm shift, denoting that we live in an epoch of shifting paradigm. So New Age people tell us that we no longer have a Cartesian, mechanistic individualism, but a new universal mind. In sociology, the theorists of second modernity say similar things. And psychoanalytical theorists tell us that we no longer have the Oedipus complex, but live in an era of universalised perversion.
"My point is not that we should stick to the old. But these answers are wrong and do not really register the break that is taking place. If we measure what is happening now by the standard of the old, we can grasp the abyss of the new that is emerging.
"Here I would refer to Blaise Pascal. Pascal's problem was also confrontation with modernity and modern science. His difficulty was that he wanted to remain an old, orthodox Christian in this new, modern age. It is interesting that his results were much more radical and interesting for us today than the results of superficial English liberal philosophers, who simply accepted modernity.
"You see the same thing in cinema history, if we look at the impact of sound. Okay, 'what's the problem?', you might say. By adding the sound to the image we simply get a more realistic rendering of reality. But that is not at all true. Interestingly enough, the movie directors who were most sensitive to what the introduction of sound really meant were generally conservatives, those who looked at it with scepticism, like Charlie Chaplin (up to a point), and Fritz Lang. Fritz Lang's Das Testament des Dr Mabuse, in a wonderful way, rendered this spectral ghost-like dimension of the voice, realising that voice never simply belongs to the body. This is just another example of how a conservative, as if he were afraid of the new medium, has a much better grasp of its uncanny radical potentials.
"The same applies today. Some people simply say: 'What's the problem? Let's throw ourselves into the digital world, into the internet, or whatever….' They really miss what is going on here.
"So why do people want to declare a new epoch every five minutes?
"Slavoj *i*ek: It is precisely a desperate attempt to avoid the trauma of the new. It is a deeply conservative gesture. The true conservatives today are the people of new paradigms. They try desperately to avoid confronting what is really changing.
"Let me return to my example. In Charlie Chaplain's film The Great Dictator, he satirises Hitler as Hinkel. The voice is perceived as something obscene. There is a wonderful scene where Hinkel gives a big speech and speaks totally meaningless, obscene words. Only from time to time you recognise some everyday vulgar German word like 'Wienerschnitzel' or 'Kartoffelstrudel'. And this was an ingenious insight; how voice is like a kind of a spectral ghost. All this became apparent to those conservatives who were sensitive for the break of the new.
"The most dangerous thing today is just to flow with things
"In fact, all big breaks were done in such a way. Nietzsche was in this sense a conservative, and, indeed, I am ready to claim that Marx was a conservative in this sense, too. Marx always emphasised that we can learn more from intelligent conservatives than from simple liberals. Today, more than ever, we should stick to this attitude. When you are surprised and shocked, you don't simply accept it. You should not say: 'Okay, fine, let's play digital games.' We should not forget the ability to be properly surprised. I think, the most dangerous thing today is just to flow with things.
"Then let's return to some of the things that have been surprising us. In a recent article, you made the point that the terrorists mirror our civilisation. They are not out there, but mirror our own Western world. Can you elaborate on that some more?
"Slavoj *i*ek: This, of course, is my answer to this popular thesis by Samuel P Huntington and others that there is a so-called clash of civilisations. I don't buy this thesis, for a number of reasons.
"Today's racism is precisely this racism of cultural difference. It no longer says: 'I am more than you.' It says: 'I want my culture, you can have yours.' Today, every right-winger says just that. These people can be very postmodern. They acknowledge that there is no natural tradition, that every culture is artificially constructed. In France, for example, you have a neo-fascist right that refers to the deconstructionists, saying: 'Yes, the lesson of deconstructionism against universalism is that there are only particular identities. So, if blacks can have their culture, why should we not have ours?'
"We should also consider the first reaction of the American 'moral majority', specifically Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson, to the 11 September attacks. Pat Robertson is a bit eccentric, but Jerry Falwell is a mainstream figure, who endorsed Reagan and is part of the mainstream, not an eccentric freak. Now, their reaction was the same as the Arabs', though he did retract a couple of days later. Falwell said the World Trade Centre bombings were a sign that God no longer protects the USA, because the USA had chosen a path of evil, homosexuality and promiscuity.
"According to the FBI, there are now at least two million so-called radical right-wingers in the USA. Some are quite violent, killing abortion doctors, not to mention the Oklahoma City bombing. To me, this shows that the same anti-liberal, violent attitude also grows in our own civilisation. I see that as proof that this terrorism is an aspect of our time. We cannot link it to a particular civilisation.
"Regarding Islam, we should look at history. In fact, I think it is very interesting in this regard to look at ex-Yugoslavia. Why was Sarajevo and Bosnia the place of violent conflict? Because it was ethnically the most mixed republic of ex-Yugoslavia. Why? Because it was Muslim-dominated, and historically they were definitely the most tolerant. We Slovenes, on the other hand, and the Croats, both Catholics, threw them out several hundred years ago.
"This proves that there is nothing inherently intolerant about Islam. We must rather ask why this terrorist aspect of Islam arises now. The tension between tolerance and fundamentalist violence is within a civilisation.
"Take another example: on CNN we saw President Bush present a letter of a seven-year-old girl whose father is a pilot and now around Afghanistan. In the letter she said that she loves her father, but if her country needs his death, she is ready to give her father for her country. President Bush described this as American patriotism. Now, do a simple mental experiment - imagine the same event with an Afghan girl saying that. We would immediately say: 'What cynicism, what fundamentalism, what manipulation of small children.' So there is already something in our perception. But what shocks us in others we ourselves also do in a way.
"So multiculturalism and fundamentalism could be two sides of the same coin?
"Slavoj *i*ek: There is nothing to be said against tolerance. But when you buy this multiculturalist tolerance, you buy many other things with it. Isn't it symptomatic that multiculturalism exploded at the very historic moment when the last traces of working-class politics disappeared from political space? For many former leftists, this multiculturalism is a kind of ersatz working-class politics. We don't even know whether the working class still exists, so let's talk about exploitation of others.
"This notion of tolerance effectively masks its opposite: intolerance
"There may be nothing wrong with that as such. But there is a danger that issues of economic exploitation are converted into problems of cultural tolerance. And then you have only to make one step further, that of Julia Kristeva in her essay 'Etrangers ous mꭥs', and say we cannot tolerate others because we cannot tolerate otherness in ourselves. Here we have a pure pseudo-psychoanalytic cultural reductionism.
Isn't it sad and tragic that the only relatively strong - not fringe - political movement that still directly addresses the working class is made up of right-wing populists? They are the only ones. Jean- Marie Le Pen in France, for example. I was shocked when I saw him three years ago at a congress of the Front National. He brought a black Frenchman, an Algerian and a Jew on the podium, embraced them and said: 'They are no less French than I am. Only the international cosmopolitan companies who neglect French patriotic interests are my enemy.' So the price is that only right-wingers still talk about economic exploitation.
"The second thing I find wrong with this multiculturalist tolerance is that it is often hypocritical in the sense that the other whom they tolerate is already a reduced other. The other is okay in so far as this other is only a question of food, of culture, of dances. What about clitoridectomy? What about my friends who say: 'We must respect Hindus.' Okay, but what about one of the old Hindu customs which, as we know, is that when a husband dies, the wife is burned. Now, do we respect that? Problems arise here.
"An even more important problem is that this notion of tolerance effectively masks its opposite: intolerance. It is a recurring theme in all my books that, from this liberal perspective, the basic perception of another human being is always as something that may in some way hurt you.
"Are you referring to what we call victim culture?
"Slavoj *i*ek: The discourse of victimisation is almost the predominant discourse today. You can be a victim of the environment, of smoking, of sexual harassment. I find this reduction of the subject to a victim sad. In what sense? There is an extremely narcissistic notion of personality here. And, indeed, an intolerant one, insofar as what it means is that we can no longer tolerate violent encounters with others - and these encounters are always violent.
"Let me briefly address sexual harassment for a moment. Of course I am opposed to it, but let's be frank. Say I am passionately attached, in love, or whatever, to another human being and I declare my love, my passion for him or her. There is always something shocking, violent in it. This may sound like a joke, but it isn't - you cannot do the game of erotic seduction in politically correct terms. There is a moment of violence, when you say: 'I love you, I want you.' In no way can you bypass this violent aspect. So I even think that the fear of sexual harassment in a way includes this aspect, a fear of a too violent, too open encounter with another human being.
"Another thing that bothers me about this multiculturalism is when people ask me: 'How can you be sure that you are not a racist?' My answer is that there is only one way. If I can exchange insults, brutal jokes, dirty jokes, with a member of a different race and we both know it's not meant in a racist way. If, on the other hand, we play this politically correct game - 'Oh, I respect you, how interesting your customs are' - this is inverted racism, and it is disgusting.
"n the Yugoslav army where we were all of mixed nationalities, how did I become friends with Albanians? When we started to exchange obscenities, sexual innuendo, jokes. This is why this politically correct respect is just, as Freud put it, 'zielgehemmt'. You still have the aggression towards the other.
"You cannot do the game of erotic seduction in politically correct terms
"For me there is one measure of true love: you can insult the other. Like in that horrible German comedy film from 1943 where Marika R�� treats her fiancîgery brutally. This fiancîZs a rich, important person, so her father asks her why are you treating him like that. And she gives the right answer. She says: 'But I love him, and since I love him, I can do with him whatever I want.' That's the truth of it. If there is true love, you can say horrible things and anything goes.
"When multiculturalists tell you to respect the others, I always have this uncanny association that this is dangerously close to how we treat our children: the idea that we should respect them, even when we know that what they believe is not true. We should not destroy their illusions. No, I think that others deserve better - not to be treated like children.
"In your book on the subject you talk of a 'true universalism' as an opposite of this false sense of global harmony. What do you mean by that?
"Slavoj *i*ek: Here I need to ask myself a simple Habermasian question: how can we ground universality in our experience? Naturally, I don't accept this postmodern game that each of us inhabits his or her particular universe. I believe there is universality. But I don't believe in some a priori universality of fundamental rules or universal notions. The only true universality we have access to is political universality. Which is not solidarity in some abstract idealist sense, but solidarity in struggle.
"If we are engaged in the same struggle, if we discover that - and this for me is the authentic moment of solidarity - being feminists and ecologists, or feminists and workers, we all of a sudden have this insight: 'My God, but our struggle is ultimately the same!' This political universality would be the only authentic universality. And this, of course, is what is missing today, because politics today is increasingly a politics of merely negotiating compromises between different positions.
"The post-political subverts the freedom that has been talked about so much in recent weeks. Is that what you are saying?
"Slavoj *i*ek: I do claim that what is sold to us today as freedom is something from which this more radical dimension of freedom and democracy has been removed - in other words, the belief that basic decisions about social development are discussed or brought about involving as many as possible, a majority. In this sense, we do not have an actual experience of freedom today. Our freedoms are increasingly reduced to the freedom to choose your lifestyle. You can even choose your ethnic identity up to a point.
"But this new world of freedom described by people like Ulrich Beck, who say everything is a matter of reflective negotiation, of choice, can include new unfreedom. My favourite example is this, and here we have ideology at its purest: we know that it is very difficult today in more and more professional domains to get a long-term job. Academics or journalists, for example, now often live on a two- or three-year contract, that you then have to renegotiate. Of course, most of us experience this as something traumatising, shocking, where you can never be sure. But then, along comes the postmodern ideologist: 'Oh, but this is just a new freedom, you can reinvent yourself every two years!'
"The problem for me is how unfreedom is hidden, concealed in precisely what is presented to us as new freedoms. I think that the explosion of these new freedoms, which fall under the domain of what Michel Foucault called 'care of the self', involves greater social unfreedom.
"Twenty or 30 years ago there was still discussion as to whether the future would be fascist, socialist, communist or capitalist. Today, nobody even discusses this. These fundamental social choices are simply no longer perceived as a matter to decide. A certain domain of radical social questions has simply been depoliticised.
"I find it very sad that, precisely in an era in which tremendous changes are taking place and, indeed entire social coordinates are transformed, we don't experience this as something about which we decided freely.
"So, let's return to the aftermath of 11 September. We now experience a strange kind of war that we are told will not end for a long time. What do you think of this turn of events?
"Slavoj *i*ek: I don't quite agree with those who claim that this World Trade Centre explosion was the start of the first war of the twenty-first century. I think it was a war of the twentieth century, in the sense that it was still a singular, spectacular event. The new wars would be precisely as you mentioned - it will not even be clear whether it is a war or not. Somehow life will go on and we will learn that we are at war, as we are now.
"The explosion of these new freedoms involves greater social unfreedom
"What worries me is how many Americans perceived these bombings as something that made them into innocents: as if to say, until now, we had problems, Vietnam, and so on. Now we are victims, and this somehow justifies us in fully identifying with American patriotism.
"That's a risky gesture. The big choice for Americans is whether they retreat into this patriotism - or, as my friend Ariel Dorfman wrote recently: 'America has the chance to become a member of the community of nations. America always behaves as though it were special. It should use this attack as an opportunity to admit that it is not special, but simply and truly part of this world.' That's the big choice.
"There is something so disturbingly tragic in this idea of the wealthiest country in the world bombing one of the poorest countries. It reminds me of the well-known joke about the idiot who loses a key in the dark and looks for it beneath the light. When asked why, he says: 'I know I lost it over there, but it's easier to look for it here.'
"But at the same time I must confess that the left also deeply disappointed me. Falling back into this safe pacifist attitude - violence never stops violence, give peace a chance - is abstract and doesn't work here. First, because this is not a universal rule. I always ask my leftist friends who repeat that mantra: What would you have said in 1941 with Hitler. Would you also say: 'We shouldn't resist, because violence never helps?' It is simply a fact that at some point you have to fight. You have to return violence with violence. The problem is not that for me, but that this war can never be a solution.
"It is also false and misleading to perceive these bombings as some kind of third world working-class response to American imperialism. In that case, the American fundamentalists we already discussed, are also a working-class response, which they clearly are not. We face a challenge to rethink our coordinates and I hope that this will be a good result of this tragic event. That we will not just use it to do more of the same but to think about what is really changing in our world.
"Dr Slavoj *i*ek is professor of philosophy at University Ljubljana, Slovenia. He is currently a member of the Directors' Board at Kulturwissenschaftliches Institut in Essen, Germany.
"Sabine Reul is sub-editor and Thomas Deichmann is chief editor of Novo, spiked's partner magazine in Germany. See the Novo website, where the full interview is published in German."
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Representations of the Intellectual - Edward Said (Arabic)
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Altschuler, Glen C. "Let Me Edutain You." New York Times 4 Apr. 1999, sec. 4A: 50
