Transnationalism: October 2004 Archives

I've been getting clearer about some of the academic impulses (indoctrination?) that I've been resisting. This, from Paul Claudel on Bourdieu's principle of aesthetic distance, sums it up:

"This typically intellectualist theory of artistic perception directly contradicts the experience of the art-lovers closest to the legitimate definition; acquisition of legitimate culture by insensible familiarization within the family circle tends to favour an enchanted experience of culture which implies forgetting the acquisition. The 'eye' is a product of history reproduced by education."

This is my required question for Lisa's course on Class Cultures.
Where my head is with all of the above is the convergence among curriculum in all my classes and in my head around the mediated construction of subjectivity.

My question is influenced by the lecture given by historian Dipesh Chakrabartty at Mt. Holyoke on Thursday, 10/28. He talked about two impulses informing historical work that parallel our discussions about embodiment. One impulse is disembodied and leans toward rational, objectivizing distance - essentially (it seems to me) a variant of Bourdieu's principle of aesthetic distance. The other impulse is embodied - the desire to "inhabit" the past one is exploring, to engage the senses. His argument was that historians need to be more self-reflexive about protecting some of the necessary distance in order to employ a degree of rationality while being responsive to the embodied forms of mass media and certain forms of democracy that have produce different, non-Habermasian publics.

Stephen said something provocative last night about a realization he and Leda had come to about some tensions between their respective trainings....I've come to question most of what I learned in my formal social justice education training (I think it tended to paradoxically play into the reification of isms rather than their dissolution), yet I'm wary of more deeply-embedded biases that seem, from the non-domestic point-of-view, to characterize U.S. perceptions of how to solve/resolve questions of difference. For instance, Aihwa Ong, in the introduction to Flexible Citizenship: The Cultural Logics of Transnationality, argues that

This article in The Nation, by William Greider, looks provocative. It takes on the "values" of capitalistic endeavor (or the lack thereof) and provides examples of people/firms doing it differently. It's grounded in labor politics in the US, so not suitable for my current project, but I wonder if one of the places I'll "end up" is being about to say something about "macro-values" (?) and real-life effects....

~ Mike, from the English Dept (Rhet/Comp) shared this with me awhile back but I hadn't followed up until now.

Class is gonna go to a lecture by him this Thursday - yeah! Field Trip! :-)

I'm checking out his recent book, wonder if it will be useful in my lit review...

Hmmm. Probably not this time around, since it is focused on India, and I'm constrained to do this project within the EU. I *am* thinking, though, that one of my sites could be Turkey, since they are in queue for membership. The difficulty I may run into though, i snot knowing enough about other examples and analyses to a) know what to look for, and b) know what lenses to apply.

The cab driver who took me to the airport yesterday, Mr. Hailey, has driven a cab in DC for 46 years! What stories he could tell, eh? I asked him what had changed the most, and he said concerns for his own safety. That's sad, eh? He used to go to all places in the city, even those with a reputation for being dangerous. Now, he steers clear of them, concentrating on the airports because the folks flying in/out are usually (95% of the time, in his estimation) engaged in some kind of business, trying to get to a meeting or get home from one.

I bailed on the conference this afternoon; went into DC to spend some time at the new National Museum of the American Indian. I got on the Metro going the wrong way (!) and two amazing things happened.

First, I met a "road engineer" (if I remember his title correctly), who I'd name but....don't wanna get him in trouble (if there's any chance of that). It's a pretty high-up job in the hierarchy of train engineers, he troubleshoots on the tracks themselves. We're sitting there on the bench, and start chatting.