Processing numbers and things

CUNY’s hosting this year’s ICR, and I was lucky enough to catch some great talks, including one by our hopefully-not-erstwhile member Leila Walker on Opium-Eater, bodies, selves, and Kant. This post will be my attempt to jot down some thoughts flowing from Marjorie Levinson’s mindblowing keynote, retitled “On Being Numerous,” from the program’s “Clouds and Crowds, Solitude and Society: Revisiting Romantic Lyric.” (Anne too has been majorly fangirling; hopefully she’ll be able to correct/expand my notes.)
Levinson’s talk was based on a reading of “I wandered as lonely as a cloud” outlining a “rabbit” interpretation against the more standard (and stronger! she admitted during Q&A) “duck” interpretation. The “duck” reading works on the model of the Classical episteme outlined by Foucault in The Order of Things, the “rabbit” reading according to the Renaissance episteme. (Or the other way round–I’m relying on my memory.) Except instead of focusing on epistemology, she focused on ontology. There followed a dizzying sequence of possible hermeneutic approaches which I won’t attempt to reproduce, but all of which work under the rabbit paradigm. Foucault’s Classical episteme operates by means of representation. Cloud, daffodils, stars, the speaker, they’re all representations.
Representation’s most “significant” (haha) function, Levinson pointed out, is not to assign a signifier to some readily cognizable signified, but to have that signifier stand for something which can only be cognized as a representation. Kant’s mathematical sublime served as one illustration, the sublime (or, in mathematics, the infinite) figuring as the representation of a failure in representation. The end-product of this representation, though, is a way of being-singular.
The regime of resemblance, on the other hand, captures an ontics of being-numerous. Nothing exists in itself, but only in resemblance to other things (an arbitrarily large set of other things)–through proximity, emulation, analogy, and something I’m not remembering. Somewhere Spinoza and Deleuze/Guattari make their way in there. Not to mention the granddaddy of modern set theory, Georg Cantor.
For me, I’m thinking about all of this in relation to postcolonialism. Namely, is there a way for postcolonial thought to escape the regime of representations? The “cultural turn” that I’m trying to track, I’ve realized, doesn’t so much take the anthropological notion of “culture” as its basis (culture as single, complex whole; works through symbols; must be analyzed through “thick description”), but emphasizes the importance of representations. Empire, colony, metropole, colonizer, colonized–hegemony, resistance, and hybridity, the mainstays of poco thought, work through representation.
What if, though, instead of thinking of the representations of beings, we thought about resemblances? I don’t, as yet, have any idea what that means or would mean. I just picked up Hardt and Negri’s Empire, looking for a Deleuzian take, and here they are on ontology:

[O]ntology is not an abstract science. It involves the conceptual recognition of the production and reproduction of being and thus the recognition that political reality is constituted by the movement of desire and the practical realization of labour as value. The spatial dimensions of ontology today is demonstrated through the multitude’s concrete processes of the globalization, or really the making common, of desire for human community.

One of my problems with Empire is that the authors’ invocation of the “multitudes” just seems so detached from the material, lived conditions of anybody who’s not a professional theorist, whether they’re subalterns, cubicle critters, adjunct labour, refugees, factory workers, whatever. Perhaps the way for me to engage with their work, is to save the concept of the multitude but to apply it to “individuals.” Thinking in terms of being-multitudinous.

 

Globalization, Post-Colonialism, and “White Culture”

Recently, I tweeted:

Katie Couric: “Ppl want to know–what is White Culture?” GB: “I– I don’t know” http://bit.ly/4SY0g #dumberthanpalin

(The GB stands for Glenn Beck.) I’ve only recently been able to force myself to watch clips of Glenn Beck, and I don’t think I’ve ever felt quite so viscerally nauseated from hearing someone speak. All the same–I don’t know what “white culture” is either.  And I can see myself throwing down the phrase in conversation/writing. I’d use in the sense Christian Lander, of stuffwhitepeoplelike.com uses it, as a critique of upper-middle-class privilege. E.g., White Culture places a high value on “saving the earth,” and thus forms social bonds through sharing tips on recycling and on how to “fly” to far away places in the world more often for less money.

While I was running today (another ritual prevalent within White Culture), I had the idea of tentatively renaming my po-co list “Globalization, Post-Colonialism, and ‘White Culture’” (it had been previously tentatively renamed “Globalized Subjects, Globalized Objects”). Here are some possible white cultures I’ve come up with in their relation to globalization:

• OTOH, there’s the comfy globalization of the white liberal who values multiculturalism, believes “globalization” is inevitable, but in the long run will be beneficial to people both in the “First World” through access to different “cultures” and the “Third World” through economic “development.”
• OTOH, there’s the racist “White Culture” Beck appeals to for which fundamentalism is the best answer to globalization. (Sadly, it might be.)
• Overlapping with this group, though, are the white working classes, however broadly defined, who have lost out due to globalization.
• And as for the anti-globalization crowd (or alter-globalization crowd), the crowd who has heard of the “post-colonial,” isn’t that another white culture? (A recentish article in the Guardian by some Oxbridge lecturer in postcolonial studies drew some incredulous comments regarding her field.)

Here’s four white cultures in varying degrees of opposition to each other. What if it’s possible to think of all four as the same “white culture,” though, like Tyler’s definition of culture as a “complex whole”? (Although George Stocking warned us not to take that definition too seriously.)  I’m not even going to attempt to speculate on how this might be, but I suspect that a historical perspective will be useful.

Or think of it this way: is the “culture” invoked by the “cultural turn” around 2000 the same as the “culture” of post-war cultural anthropology? “Culture” in the former instance is often invoked dialectically with economics in the former instance, as in, globalization works both by cultural and economic means in a mutually reinforcing relationship. “Culture” in the latter instance is invoked in contrast to western modern “society” and nation-states. It’s past 3 am, so all I’ll say is that it’s reminding me of Hardt and Negri’s contrast between our current Empire and the imperialisms of the modern era. Maybe I’d like H and N better if the book was called capital C Culture, as opposed to modern lowercase c cultures.

 

Production is a Bitch

I’m not sure what to do about my PoCo list. I’ve been toying with the idea of titling it “Globalized Subjects, Globalized Objects.” I’m not quite sure why, so I’ll try to think aloud in this space.

First, my rationale behind the list is very much “anti-” in intention, like everything I do and am. I’m anti-colonizer/colonized binary. Mainly, this is because I don’t think China in the 19th century (or any other, for that matter) works within that model. Either you’re disciplinarily encouraged to ignore it, since only a small part of it was part of the British Empire, or you say it’s an “unofficial” colony, which, someone in Kazuo Ishiguro’s When We Were Orphans says, means that British policy could be more cruel. I still think this is too reductionist. Focusing on antagonism between China and the British Empire threatens to obscures the antagonisms within “China,” and Victorians were far more likely to be aware of these antagonisms than we are. An example from the Ishiguro book: Britain’s role in the Chinese Opium War forms the backdrop of the book, but it’s not imperial hegemony that makes the crucial twist, but black-market deals with “China,” done as much for expediency as for profit.

I’m also anti-culture. I’m not sure why. I realized this when I saw the title of Frederic Jameson’s The Cultural Turn (1998), and I decided that “culture” had been done to death. Maybe part of the reason behind this is that I feel myself completed disaffected by whatever “culture” exists around me today. Which of course gives me the alienation that’s the ticket to white-cultural-elitism of a certain kind although I’ve yet to find a place to gain admission. Culture, too, just seems to me to be hopelessly reductionist.

I’m reading Hardt & Negri’s Empire for this nebulously conceived list right now, and I was particularly struck by one line from the preface:

We intend this shift of standpoint [from the realm of ideas to that of production] to function something like the moment in Capital when Marx invites us to leave the noisy sphere of exchange and descend into the hidden abode of production.

Maybe it’s because I’m a sucker for anything to do with Marx, but there’s something tremendously poetic, and yet mystifying (in a bad way) about this. I think in recent years, this has actually become a cliché, one which I’ve participated in as well. It goes something like this: take an everyday object around you, like the coffee you’re drinking, and trace it back to its “hidden abode of production,” become horrified by the injustice, and there’s your critique. Here’s how the NYRB review of Kiran Desai’s 2006 Booker-winning The Inheritance of Loss begins:

There are certain fictions upon which fair-minded, relatively affluent citizens of good will base their lives, the first being that we are indeed people of good will. This fiction is allowed by the belief that the infrastructure that makes life possible comes at a cost that is borne mainly by us. We vote to raise taxes, send money to the less fortunate, drink fair-trade coffee, and drive hybrid cars, all in a genuine effort to do the right thing. If, as Aldous Huxley says, the only completely consistent people are dead, then we are very much alive, failing most of the time to wonder how the food got on our plate, or the shirt got on our back, or where the man on the bicycle delivering Chinese take-out lives, or how he got there, too.

Seek ye out the hidden abode of production, rather than solely making “good” consumer decisions. It’s laudable, but it’s not enough–and I realized this when I hit a part where the reviewer (whom I will not name) completely misses the point:

Here is the immigration debate summed up in two words: can’t and won’t. The economies of scale that allow a place like the Gandhi Café (or the Stars and Stripes Diner, the Baby Bistro, Le Colonial, the Queen of Tarts, and Freddy’s Wok, to name a few of Biju’s previous employers) to compete require the fugitive labor of people like Biju who are willing to work long hours for little pay no matter how miserable the conditions, and no surprise, there are no Americans among them. It is globalization in our front yard, though blessedly hidden from us by the lawn ornaments saying cheap and plentiful, no questions asked. (And anyhow, inexpensive ethnic food makes us feel like global citizens ourselves!)

It’s not just “inexpensive ethnic food” that’s produced by “fugitive labor,” as Desai shows. At one point, Biju works in an expensive French restaurant (he’s fired when he gets into a loud fight with a Pakistani employee), and wonders if in Paris, French people cook French food. No: instead of Guatamalans, Mexicans, and Dominicans, it’s Algerians, Morrocans, Lebanese. White people upstairs (no matter where); coloured people downstairs (no matter where). It’s something I  particularly appreciated. When I was 18 or 19, one summer in Montreal I was having lots of trouble finding a job–not francophone enough, not white enough, not Chinese enough, not man enough, not woman enough. The only thing I found was some dishwashing job in a huge touristy restaurant that served lots of meat. (I’m vegan now, I was vegetarian then.) Dishwashing is fucking tough work. Most of the kitchen staff was brown (the one white quebecois I remember was particularly mean to me), mostly from Arab countries. Most of the wait staff, on the other hand, was white. That’s when I realized how shitty life is for most people in this world, especially most people of colour. But there was nothing particularly “global” about that restaurant, and the food wasn’t inexpensive either. This part of the book was probably the only thing in literature that reminded me of that miserable, eye-opening three-week period of my life before I quit the job.

What’s going on here? I’ll blame the culture model. Id est, “our” culture of middle-class multiculturalism depends on the exploitation of other cultures. I’m not going to deny that, but I think the economic model is more important. Meaning, global-north consumption (whether it’s ethnic, eurotrash, or american-as-apple-pie) depends on the exploitation of global-south production (and it doesn’t really matter about which culture of the global south). If we’re going to look at the “hidden abode of production,” our scope must be as narrow as possible (looking at the hidden basement kitchen of a chichi Manhattan restaurant) and as global as possible (looking at all those hidden basements, both in the global north and the global south). And this process has no end point, unlike tracing the history of one particular product.

Globalized subjects, globalized objects. Subjects and objects, as opposed to cultures. Subjects that can only be  fucked over by culture after culture, or fuck over culture after culture, or both. An axiom, maybe: economic relations within the Hardt & Negriian Empire always far exceed cultural intelligibility. Even if you could track down the producers of your globalized objects, you’d be far from understanding the economic relations constraining all the agents involved. But even the recognition of that aporia is a cop-out. A starting point: the cultural model is apt to posit that the “relatively affluent” are free to roam between cultures, while the benighted underclass are victimized due to their cultural boundedness. No: the cultural underclass is forced to move, or to desire to move, between cultures, outside of kinship networks, outside of legal systems. Sometimes it works. Sometimes you’re lucky, sometimes hard work pays off, so you fuck other people over. Sometimes you’re not lucky.

 

A Year Without Summer

As you may have noticed (if you pulled yourself away from your work at all during daylight hours), we’ve been treated to one of the wettest summers in New York history. And for those of us who react to Vitamin D deficiency with extreme depression, lethargy, and feelings of isolation, it could be good to recall another Year Without Summer: 1816.

Following the largest volcanic eruption in 1,600 years, dust prevented sunlight from reaching the earth, lowering temperatures globally. The season’s uncharitable weather (frost killed crops across the northern hemisphere, leading to widespread starvation; Quebec City got a foot of snow in June) is associated with contemporary events and movements including the formation of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints and the dusty tinge of the sky in Turner’s paintings.

More relevant to us literary folks, however, is the doom-and-gloom writing associated with the year, including Byron’s “Darkness” and Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (begun in 1816). Is it possible that Romanticism is just the 19th century’s grunge period, a meteorological depression affecting a generation? Have I just traded one Seattle for another?

I will leave you with the Rogue Poem of the Week:

Darkness

I had a dream, which was not all a dream. 
The bright sun was extinguish’d, and the stars 
Did wander darkling in the eternal space, 
Rayless, and pathless, and the icy earth 
Swung blind and blackening in the moonless air; 
Morn came and went–and came, and brought no day, 
And men forgot their passions in the dread 
Of this their desolation; and all hearts 
Were chill’d into a selfish prayer for light: 
And they did live by watchfires–and the thrones, 
The palaces of crowned kings–the huts, 
The habitations of all things which dwell, 
Were burnt for beacons; cities were consumed, 
And men were gathered round their blazing homes 
To look once more into each other’s face; 
Happy were those who dwelt within the eye 
Of the volcanos, and their mountain-torch: 
A fearful hope was all the world contain’d; 
Forests were set on fire–but hour by hour 
They fell and faded–and the crackling trunks 
Extinguish’d with a crash–and all was black. 
The brows of men by the despairing light 
Wore an unearthly aspect, as by fits 
The flashes fell upon them; some lay down 
And hid their eyes and wept; and some did rest 
Their chins upon their clenched hands, and smiled; 
And others hurried to and fro, and fed 
Their funeral piles with fuel, and looked up 
With mad disquietude on the dull sky, 
The pall of a past world; and then again 
With curses cast them down upon the dust, 
And gnash’d their teeth and howl’d: the wild birds shriek’d, 
And, terrified, did flutter on the ground, 
And flap their useless wings; the wildest brutes 
Came tame and tremulous; and vipers crawl’d 
And twined themselves among the multitude, 
Hissing, but stingless–they were slain for food. 
And War, which for a moment was no more, 
Did glut himself again;–a meal was bought 
With blood, and each sate sullenly apart 
Gorging himself in gloom: no love was left; 
All earth was but one thought–and that was death, 
Immediate and inglorious; and the pang 
Of famine fed upon all entrails–men 
Died, and their bones were tombless as their flesh; 
The meagre by the meagre were devoured, 
Even dogs assail’d their masters, all save one, 
And he was faithful to a corse, and kept 
The birds and beasts and famish’d men at bay, 
Till hunger clung them, or the dropping dead 
Lured their lank jaws; himself sought out no food, 
But with a piteous and perpetual moan, 
And a quick desolate cry, licking the hand 
Which answered not with a caress–he died. 
The crowd was famish’d by degrees; but two 
Of an enormous city did survive, 
And they were enemies: they met beside 
The dying embers of an altar-place 
Where had been heap’d a mass of holy things 
For an unholy usage; they raked up, 
And shivering scraped with their cold skeleton hands 
The feeble ashes, and their feeble breath 
Blew for a little life, and made a flame 
Which was a mockery; then they lifted up 
Their eyes as it grew lighter, and beheld 
Each other’s aspects–saw, and shriek’d, and died– 
Even of their mutual hideousness they died, 
Unknowing who he was upon whose brow 
Famine had written Fiend. The world was void, 
The populous and the powerful–was a lump, 
Seasonless, herbless, treeless, manless, lifeless– 
A lump of death–a chaos of hard clay. 
The rivers, lakes, and ocean all stood still, 
And nothing stirred within their silent depths; 
Ships sailorless lay rotting on the sea,
And their masts fell down piecemeal: as they dropp’d 
They slept on the abyss without a surge– 
The waves were dead; the tides were in their grave, 
The moon their mistress had expir’d before; 
The winds were withered in the stagnant air, 
And the clouds perish’d; Darkness had no need 
Of aid from them–She was the Universe.

 

Blogging Fail

So I told myself that I would do Part II of “In Which the Long Nineteenth Century Stretches its Legs,” but I didn’t. Here is, instead, a little snippet from the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philsophy page on Adorno:

Because of the shift in capitalism’s structure, and because of Adorno’s own complex emphasis on (modern) art’s autonomy, he doubts both the effectiveness and the legitimacy of tendentious, agitative, or deliberately consciousness-raising art. Yet he does see politically engaged art as a partial corrective to the bankrupt aestheticism of much mainstream art. Under the conditions of late capitalism, the best art, and politically the most effective, so thoroughly works out its own internal contradictions that the hidden contradictions in society can no longer be ignored. The plays of Samuel Beckett, to whom Adorno had intended to dedicateAesthetic Theory, are emblematic in that regard. Adorno finds them more true than many other artworks.

Seems relevant to the things I’ve been thinking of.

 

Mia: Drive-by Racism for the Chinese

I’m reading Lata Mani’s Contentious Tradition: The Debates Around Sati, wherein she quotes a missionary, William Ward, who talks about the caste system in India by analogy with Chinese shoes: “like all other attempts to cramp the human intellect, and forcibly to restrain men within the bonds that nature scorns to keep, this [caste] system, however specious in theory, has operated like the Chinese national shoe, it has rendered the whole nation cripples” (Qtd. in Mani 133)

 

Absinthe

We Victorianists are such trend-setters, I tell you!
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/13/dining/reviews/13wine.html?_r=1&scp=2&sq=absinthe&st=cse

 

For Mia

Hey Mia! I’m reading Mike Davis’s incredible Late Victorian holocausts . Everyone should read this book, which reveals some horrific skeletons in Victorian closets, but I’m recommending it to you in particular, if you’re interested in late Victorian China or the tea, silk  and cotton trade (the last looms large over North and South ).

 

Hey Mia, was thinking about your Great Exhibition project: have you thought about exhibitionism in general? Have you considered the “hottentot Venus”?

Also, the Crystal palace, like the Twin Towers, was once the victim of a tightrope stunt. And the glass house in the botanical garden in my native Bangalore is a replica of said palace. Great Exhibition trivia.

 

Teh Googlebombz!

Amazon Rank

Don’t fuck with with the twittersphere.

I just took the following screenshot:

 

This. Is. So. Wrong.

Amazon FAIL!!!! Glitch my ass!!

OTOH, #amazonfail fail: 

A SUICIDE PREVENTION BOOK? REALLY, AMAZON? I hope they feel great next time they hear about a suicide…fucking cocksuckers. #amazonfail