Reflexivity

I was an “honorary Eastern European” only for the 1 hour and 24 minutes it took Borat to run. Then I resumed my accustomed role as the earnest, pious, and self-righteous American who is mercilously mocked by Sacha Baron Cohen. This movie is funny, but only if you can step outside of the truly narrow frame in which most Americans live. Here we see ourselves – racist, sexist, homophobic, anti-semitic (Jewish and Muslim) – in all our high-faluting hypocrisy. This Review covers many of the highlights.
The humor is overly-crass in a few places, and falls flat in others, but when Cohen’s ‘straight man‘ draws out the extent of white supremacist and classist hubris one cringes behind the laughter. Or ought to. The situation that personally disturbed me the most was with the three college students and their degradation of women. Yes, the desire for slavery was/is sick but in the scene it came across (to me) as a mechanism to operationalize pathological violence against women. I enjoy the young men I teach and can only hope they aren’t living such double lives.
I saw the film with two Romanians and a Hungarian, seated in front of a Russian and an Australian. I know at least two Brazilians were in the soldout audience as well. How many of the rest of the crowd were internationals, celebrating the publicization of discriminations they might themselves often experience? I don’t know. There were many young people there, and frequent, loud laughter.
One of the sweetest scenes occurs with a group of young African-American men, who are among the very few able to accept a foreigner with apparently weak English language skills as a fellow human being. Underneath and behind Cohen’s humor are some sharp lessons about how we could all get along. (See how earnest I am?!!)

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P. Sainath spoke yesterday at the Labor Center regarding the growing inequality of the rich and the poor in India. Not about you, you say? Sainath discussed the rate of inequality being faster in the last fifteen years than in the previous fifty, and being “so carefully constructed.” He argues that the rich have seceded from the nation, that mass media is in cahoots with big corporations, and the intelligentsia is skilled at disassociating ourselves from the ugly downside of neoliberal capitalism.
He detailed the negative realities of the effects of global restructuring which are systematically diverting government resources from the poor and working classes (which, I clarify, includes much of the so-called middle class) to the wealthiest class. Explaining in precise language with poignant examples exactly how free trade creates certain market conditions which systematically deprive small landowners of sustainable use of their own property, resulting in an appalling suicide rate and the slow transfer of private land to corporate ownership. [NOTE: Bernie Sanders describes a crucial difference between free trade and fair trade.]
Proceeds of his book, Everybody Loves a Good Drought, go to a fund for the support of families who have lost their primary wage earner to suicide.
We should not be so surprised, Sainath suggests, at the level, depth, and extent of atrocities committed by humans against one another. It has been the case throughout history that the elite pleasure themselves at the expense of the poor. Sainath cited the example of “Empress” Victoria who, in 1877, held a huge public feast in her own honor from which the starving poor were brutally banned. Then he discussed Nero, who had much earlier promoted a huge feast to distract people from the devastation of the Burning of Rome. At this feast, according to an entry made by the historian Tacitus, people were burned at the stake to provide light for the festivities. No one protested.

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The media’s emphasis on the five year anniversary of the attacks on the World Trade Center and Pentagon blatantly reveals our cultural penchant for the short-term. I am not speaking of the grief of those who lost family members because that pain is of a different order than the rest of us who look on and talk about the event as if it is the lynchpin upon which the living of this day turns.
What if, instead of spending the day in various ceremonies of remembrance and mourning, we honored and celebrated the beginning of one of the most successful, powerful, and inspirational peace movements of all time? Today, September 11, 2006, is the 100th anniversary of satyagraha: the pursuit of truth initiated by Mahatma Gandhi in Johannesburg, South Africa, thereby launching the first modern movement of nonviolent resistance. An interview with Gandhi’s grandson was broadcast on Democracy Now on September 8th (the highlighted text above takes you to written transcript and links to audio).
Puru asks, “are we anywhere close to the truth?” A trailer produced by Arun Gandhi about his grandfather’s work introduces some of the resources available from the M.K. Gandhi Institute for Nonviolence. This cartoon depicts “the elephant” of Gandhi’s Passive Resistance Movement as a barrier in the path of the British which they could not move. Arun Gandhi argues that satyagraha is hardly “passive”.
I agree.
It takes tremendous effort to turn away from habitual resistances, the mirroring of other/opposing habitual resistances. Gandhi found another way. We must do the same.

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It took well over an hour for the thousands of protesters, from a hundred different groups and organizations, to pass by me in Kadikoy yesterday afternoon. I was immediately impressed by the wide age range (I bet the average would be late thirties/early forties), and the gender distribution (more men than women, it seemed). Conspicuous by their absence, however, were Muslims. Are they not against Israel’s military incursions into Lebanon? Do they not support a Palestinian state? Or is Istanbul less integrated than it seems? Perhaps there were many Muslim men and non-veiled women among the marchers but they were undistinctive. Finally, toward the end, one group of thirty veiled women appeared.

Later, someone explained that the groups in this march were all of the political left, and the religious right won’t mix with them in this kind of way: religious Muslims exercise their politics by different means. It reminded a bit of the debate at the hostel before I left, which included criticisms that there were too many different groups, with unclear agendas or simply gut-level reactions against what they don’t like with no thought to consequences or alternatives. This is always the problem of politics, of course, the challenge of building broad-based coalitions with clear and coherent strategies. What struck me most, however, was the fact of my friends’ concern for my physical safety.
I was encouraged not to let anyone know I’m American (the crowd might turn on me?), but then it became clear it was not the protestors that was the cause for concern. It is the police. Or maybe both. Some friends had witnessed a protest on Istiklak where shop windows had been broken and police had used tear gas. They also recounted stories of police suddenly lashing out and beating people for no reason. I argued that we must make the police accountable through visibility of abuses (media coverage etc), that we can’t let the threat of violence prevent peaceful protest.
At any rate, I probably would not have been so aware of the police if we had not had this conversation. As it was, I noticed them everywhere: on the dock when the ferry landed,

massed (in riot gear) behind the central stage area,

observing from rooftops (military I think, not police),

with back-ups lurking in nearby side streets.

The main road around the staged area was kept closed long after the march was over. Leaving the protest area was no problem, but I was struck by the fact that it was completely enclosed.

To enter, one had to be searched. The men were patted down. I was directed to a female officer who only peeked in my shoulder bag. I wasn’t searched as intensively, but the atmosphere was definitely designed to be intimidating: you had to really want to be “in” the protest, not so easy for people passing by to be drawn in spontaneously.
As far as I know, there were no incidents.

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It didn’t take peace long (however tentatively-constructed or believed in)to fall out of the headlines. Not in the NYTimes top three for the past three days.
I had promised to share all the links people forwarded; I apologize for the delay (but then it also seems I may have lost my interlocutors?) My chicken, your egg? Or vice-versa? :-/
August 10: Sirisha sent Israel in Lebanon: Wreaking Havoc and Violence by Sukumar Muralidharan.
August 11: Swati sent two links: for news & blogs on the situation in lebanon and a short video made by a film collective in beirut.
August 11: Yasser sent The Sinking Ship of U.S. Imperial Designs by Gilbert Achcar.
August 11: Jose from Belgium sent this statement by UNESCO’s Artist for Peace, Marcel Khalife.
August 14: one request to be removed from my mass mails on this topic
August 14: Puru posts in Reflexivity a link to a news story from his own blog, PaddleSweep.
August 20: from Esther sent Isreal and the Ayatollahs by Amir Taheri.

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The applause after the first number, Leonore Overture, No. 3, Op. 72, was overwhelming. Beethoven is usually rousing, but there was a quality to the upsurge of gratitude and appreciation that seemed to exceed recognition of the quality of the performance. My own guess is that a significant component of the emotion was sheer relief – for now, at least, the Israeli/Hezbollah ceasefire plan in Lebanon appears to be working.
This orchestra is the 1999 brainchild of intellectual and public critic Edward Said (a Palestinian); and conductor and pianist Daniel Barenboim (an Israeli). Its performances raise money to support young people from the Middle East and Israel to play classical music together. The Foundation, now based in Seville, Spain, issued a declaration in 2004, and

An ancient hall of Topkapi Palace, the Hagia Eirene Museum was sold out but we obtained standing room only tickets and wound up sitting (comfortably enough) in the rear stairwell (our view from below, first half; for the second half we made it to the uppermost stairs). Acoustically, I was amazed at the sound. It was stunning. I wondered about performances in this space over the millennia (!) and the constitution of audiences. What kinds of court intrigues and politics occurred during and regarding public performances? How public was “public”, then? (I was unaware at the time of the cancellation and reinstatement of the concert for political purposes.)
I haven’t attended a live orchestra performance for at least 20 years. Various impressions flitted through my mind mixed with vague memories of growing up. Have I heard these pieces before? It was an educated audience, no one applauded falsely between the many movements of Schubert’s Trout Quintet. After the third or forth movement the audience and musicians had cohered. The warmth of the summer evening and lack of ventilation heated up the air to the edge of discomfort: the discipline of sitting still and listening was released in a full group rustle of throat-clearing, rapid brochure-fanning, and general bodily rearrangement. Such was reenacted in each pause thereafter.
What a contrast with Depeche Mode and its audience’s constant, unrestrained movement and attention leapfrogging between the music, mobiles, location, beer…
I also thought about voice and modern-day, mass-mediated politics. I imagined mideast politics as a symphony. There’s the constant thrum of the violins, the basics of everyday life, ebbing and cresting in twitters, chirps, and plucks of melancholy, pleasure, contentment, discord. Occasionally deep swells converge in coordinated harmonies, complimenting or contesting other tides. The deeper strings, brass and woodwinds vacillate among drawing out the dark power of living and accentuating the surface manifestations of conflict and dissension. Percussion marks the points of decision. Commit or retreat but know that whichever is chosen is consequential, even if only circumstantially so.
I know my characterization is crude: I am not a musician. But I felt the music and this is what I thought: a strong voice was needed to pound the drums long and hard enough to force political forces to stop the surface burst of unbelievable human violence. Let’s say the voices of my friends raised in outrage were the cellos and horns, and I came in as a woodwind. Or perhaps I was a lone French Horn against the trumpets. My notes were heard (?) as a threat to the cohesion of the necessary cumulation of voice (sound, power). I would prefer to be positioned as a complementary voice playing an alternative melody, or striking my notes along a different yet compatible scale (but this may be out of my control). What matters to me is the overall “sound” &emdash; the co-generated orchestral production. What a good conductor does is balance the volume of each section (sometimes even each individual instrument) so that each thematic strand is auditorily consonant with every other; but the conductor cannot make this happen, the musicians must be responsive, they must trust the conductor’s ear, which hears that which they cannot.
I suppose I came up with this analogy because of a section in Brahms Symphony No. 1 in C Minor, Op. 68. I am not sure which instrument it was, perhaps (?) the contrabassoon. Its sound was almost too deep, too soft to be discerned yet Barenboim coaxed it up, quieting the violins just enough for the lone voice to emerge with the distinctiveness of its own rhythm.
Of course, the difference in social relations and musical collaboration are that there are no conductors (or too many, smile) for social relations. There is also little precedent for such wholistic orchestration in societies or groups where, for instance, we are mostly strangers to each other. Hence, our attunements are more likely random and historical rather than deliberate and visionary.
At the end of the concert I wanted more. So did the vast majority of the audience, and I believe the musicians did too. No go. Maybe Barenboim wasn’t feeling well; maybe he was affected by the absence of the double-bassist who had been called back to Berlin for some reason (leading to an alteration in the program). Who knows. The love was there.
The audience’s appreciation did not dim after that first round of applause, making me wonder if it was “only” the music after all. Or perhaps the even more simple effect of the fundraiser wine we had to gulp before entering? The music was extraordinary, of that there can be no doubt. The setting was magical, the timing historic, the company superb. (Erdem did make sure there was no confusion about our relationship.)

The title of the orchestra is from Goethe’s poem of this name, West-Eastern Divan, “in which he brings the poetic culture culture of the Islamic and Western worlds together” (liner notes). Goethe is noted for beginning to learn Arabic after the age of 60 as well as for truthfully representing “the Eastern spirit of poetry.” Imagine! Old dogs can learn new tricks!

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“The Man Who Would Be My Wife” treated me to a day lounging on the Bosphorus, nested into a bay with dozens of other boats with their precious cargoes of families and friends.

The spoils of lunch were followed by a light dinner, delicious dessert,and regional fruit.
The juxtaposition of leisure and pleasure with radical politics (“the extreme side of communication”) has been on my mind. How does an individual justify the personal exercise of privilege while people are being killed? I know I need the space and time to be thoughtful instead of reactionary. The danger, I guess, is in being lulled into aesthetic perception as a permanent desire.
Said and Ali have a brief discussion about “a Chinese wall” between art and politics (69-70). As I understand their use of the metaphor (the reference being new to me), it refers to the institutionalization of a separation between aesthetics and politics, such that art is (supposedly) produced for art’s sake alone, with no political content or possibility (?) of social commentary. Said argues that literature-for-literature’s sake is also false and a recent construction: false because “culture…is hopelessly involved in politics” (103) and a development (in the West, particularly English culture) only of the mid-19th century.
Said declaims to Ali: “I agitate against myself!” (105). Not only against orthodoxies but also against settling into a predictable pattern “governed by things like my own past work” (105). Said’s intellectual restlessness leads him to proclaim the possibility of transgression as a social fact:
“…there’s always an opportunity, no matter how one feels oneself up against the wall with no alternative but to submit &emdash; which is usually what it’s all about in the end &emdash; there’s always an opportunity to do something else. There’s always an opportunity to formulate an alternative, and not either to remain silent or to capitulate” (108).

Yes, and . . . formulating alternatives requires change, requires the enactment of a difference between who I was yesterday and who I am today. Tendrils of the past cling tightly. Reluctantly, I strive to extract myself from the enticements of their grip.

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I feel the strain of trying to change discursive tracks. :-/

Tejal and Jed both commented, continuing this conversation.
My words have not been meant as justification for Israeli military actions. I Do Not Support the invasion and destruction of Lebanon. I am also not trying to rationalize the violence, provide excuses, or otherwise contribute &emdash; in any way &emdash; to US imperialism. I Am Trying to diversify the ways we talk about this appalling and apparently unending conflict. I intend my comments as a small contribution to the establishment of a public space for a polyphony of knowledges about current events and historical trends in this embattled region of the MidEast.
I imagine that creating epistemologies is the task of public intellectuals. I trust that among us are persons with enough brilliance, passion, commitment, and ideological flexibility to co-create an alternative worldview that might provide leverage to those in government and business who also seek peace and shared prosperity. I believe it is the task of intellectuals to discover and implement a new language for political dissemination and media consumption.
The grooves of perspective, opinion, and insight from all angles are as deep and well-worn as the histories that produced them. Repeating the arguments is compelling and even comfortable. Polemics compel by expressing the full range of emotional and psychic agonies induced by the experience of injustice. Everyone feels wronged. The felt experience of oppression demands naming: its sources must be pinpointed and called to account.
Identifying with the claims of pain &emdash; whether they are overtly polemical or subtly reasoned &emdash; can also bring a form of comfort. One joins with others in a felt community of comradeship, of belonging. The collective “we” is reinforced (along whatever grounds: nationalism, ethnicity, religion, colonizer/oppressed); simultaneously “they” are solidified as enemy. Burke discusses the quality of self/other identification inherent in language use. Applying this lens to public rhetoric (roughly governmental statements and political posturing) and public conversations (including “elite” and alternative journalism, email networks and blogs) one can discern a pattern of canalization: in this regard we are all colonized.
I do not exclude myself. I know that my words will reveal my own complicity with the systems of oppression that have shaped me. I anticipate and depend upon others to teach me about myself. It is in this learning, if we can manage to do it together, that theories of discourse and the social construction of reality can be applied practically in deliberate collaboration.
There are risks. Friendships may be threatened. Alliances may be weakened. This, as I understand it, is the inevitable price of a politics without guarantee (Stuart Hall). I choose to exercise faith that the promises &emdash; albeit unknown &emdash; of venturing into such co-creation and dialogic relationship must outweigh fear.

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“A voice belongs first to a body, then to a language” (52).
Negar told me about an Iranian saying, that learning another language adds a new person to your self. Yes, new capacities, new zones of expression and perception, yet what Berger says is also true, the voice &emdash; in its emotion-inducing physicality [my qualification] &emdash; remains the same. This use of the word “voice” is different than Blommaert’s conceptualization of “voice” as the operationalization of intersubjective, discursive power. The intersubjective part is the part between real individuals engaged in real time (face-to-face synchronic time or asynchronous technologically-mediated time &emdash; as in the turn-taking among myself, Yasser, Jeff, Amanda, and . . . you? wink! Why not?!!)
The discursive part is the larger framework of relationships in which each of us is embedded and all of us partake. Every time we speak (via our physically-embodied voice or through written text), each utterance spins forward along a dialectical trajectory as an outgrowth of previous exposure and knowledge. Simultaneously, each utterance opens onto a potential new vista, an unknown dark zone. “Dark” because not yet lived: unexperienced, and therefore unknown. (Thanks Negar; and original thanks to Chris Baxter, who played with calling me a “dark ally” during the 2005 Supporting Deaf People Online conference.)

I read Berger and translate his words into mine. “It is prudent to believe that the large is more real than the small. Yet it is false” (53). He is discussing the myth of scale, the myth that suggests that the macrosocial is more real (e.g., more powerful) than the microsocial. “If we are trapped, my heart, it is not within reality” (53). He writes to his love as I wish to write to mine. The point, however, has wider application: let me attempt to articulate it precisely.
If we &emdash; for instance Muslims, Christians, Palestinians, Israelis &emdash; are trapped it is not exclusively because of impersonal institutional forces grinding out grim realities such as the devastation in Lebanon. We are “trapped” also within our own individual, personal and private (dialectical) trajectories. Our “hearts” (our loves, passions, dreams and visions) are constrained by “a vestige of the fear reflex to be found in all animals, in face of another creature larger than themselves” (53).
A major factor that feeds this fear is the loss of home. Berger ties the loss of home explicitly to emigration. More words about emigration are necessary, Berger claims, “to whisper for that which has been lost” (55). Emigration can be understood as the driving feature, the essential characteristic, of global transnationalism. Whether one chooses to move to another country temporarily or permanently, for purposes of education or work, or is forced to move for literal survival (to work or to seek asylum), what is threatened by this move is home. Edward Said discusses this too, in the extraordinary re-ordering of his conception of self that was required when he was sent to boarding school in the US.
“Originally,” Berger explains, “home meant the center of the world &emdash; not in a geographical, but in an ontological sense” (55). He continues, “To emigrate is always to dismantle the center of the world, and so to move into a lost, disoriented one of fragments” (57).
When the physical site of home is lost (left, taken away, inaccessible) one resorts to “the habit which protects” (64) and “the psychic level of turning in circles in order to preserve one’s identity” (63).
”Home is no longer a dwelling
but
the untold story of a life being lived” (64).
In the absence/loss of my own home, I turn in circles to preserve my identity as a lesbian (resisting being positioned by others as a heterosexual woman), and for some years now I have tried to tell the story of my life being lived. This is the other side of de-centering fragmentation: “Not out of nostalgia, but because it is on the site of loss that hopes are born” (55). “The very sense of loss keeps alive an expectation” (63). Berger argues romantic love is one of the things that can grow from this soil. Meanwhile, “we live not just our own lives but the longings of our century” (67): “the century of banishment” (67).
I embody these longings, as do many of my friends. It is evident in their/our words. What shall we together make of them? Berger is optimistic:
“Eventually perhaps the promise, of which Marx was the great prophet, will be fulfilled, and then the substitute for the shelter of a home will not just be our personal names, but our collective conscious presence in history, and we will live again at the heart of the real. Despite everything, I can imagine it” (67).

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My friend Yasser has just sent his self-described “fourth apocalyptic email in three weeks.”
I blogged earlier, including some of the resources he sent, and a few days later I wrote more on my personal view.
My concern with Yasser’s framing is its one-sidedness. I AGREE, emphatically, that the violence needs to end, but arguing that only one side needs to cease actually adds fuel to the fire. Hezbollah’s tactics also need to come under scrutiny.
With Yasser, and Naomi Klein (see her letter), I urge anyone who can to support the efforts of the Saniyeh Relief Center in Beirut. But – as we publicly engage the horrors of this war – those of us who fashion ourselves intellectuals concerned with social justice cannot afford the luxury of an “obvious” villain or victim.
How do we break out of the dialectic? If we can’t find a way, who will?
Yasser included an article, A World in Love with Death by Eduardo Galleano (who I think is great). Unfortunately, in the linked article above his claims and associations go too far: the UN is not the US even though the US plays with it like a toy), civilian death in wartime is a fact of every war not just Israel’s vs Hezbullah. This is kind of rhetoric is simply sloppy. Galeano is right that the Europeans cast their own problem (their own internalized anti-semitism) out of western Europe and into the Middle East but the Arab nations need to stop using this as an excuse to position Palestianians at the constant brink of rage of devastation. The Jewish people are from there just as much as any Arab or Persian ethnic group.
[The Lebanon Forces link above is from planetary movement, which also included a link to irrepressable.info from Amnesty International (go there, sign the pledge before a key international meeting this upcoming November: "I believe the Internet should be a force for political freedom, not repression").]
This opinion piece from the NYTimes, Lebanon’s Force for Good recalls a previous diplomatic effort that worked.

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