Decolonization II

"Circumstantial evidence indicates that the shock of Narlikar's death was responsible for giving me a snow-white father to set beside my ebony mother; but (although I don't know how much you're prepared to swallow) I shall risk giving an alternative explanation, a theory developed in the abstract privacy of my clocktower . . . because during my frequent psychic travels, I discovered something rather odd: during the nine years after Independence, a similar pigmentation disorder (whose first recorded victim may well have been the Rani of Cooch Naheen) afflicted large numbers of the nation's business community. All over India, I stumbled across good Indian businessmen, their fortunes thriving thanks to the first Five Year Plan, which had concentrated on building up commerce . . . businessmen who had become or were becoming very, very pale indeed! It seems that the gargantuan (even heroic) efforts involved in taking over from the British and becoming masters of their own destinies had drained the colour from their cheeks . . . in which case, perhaps my father was a lat victim of a widespread, though generally unremarked phenomenon. the businessmen of India were turning white."
--Salman Rushdie, Midnight's Children

Decolonization

The Sublime Subject of Sublimation

(see what I did there?)

The ironic thing about reading about a sublimating agent like capitalism, as a result of which "all that is solid melts into air," is that the reading remains solid, thick, dense and profoundly unsublime. In reading Das Kapital, the few moments of "OMG! So, lyke, this is how value is created?!?" or "Oooh! the extent to which we fetishize the commodity form is kind of kinky" are far outweighed by "ugh! if he references that damn coat ONE MORE TIME...." All in all, the shit's pretty tedious. Perhaps it gets better as it goes along, but I wouldn't know because I put it down (for now) to pick up Giovanni Arrighi's The Long Twentieth Century.

I should have known from the title this would be a longue durée engagement. I must have fallen asleep at least four times just reading the introduction.

(In my defense, I've been binging on Zizek and marshmallows. His thought is acrobatic, agile, nimble, vertiginous and heady--like an intellectual sugar rush--plus I have the sneaky suspicion he write his speeches in Slovenian and translates them into English extemporaneously, adding an element of danger and theatricality to the process--you're just waiting for him to mess up. All in all, it's like watching a contortionist do his thing while juggling several swords. that are on fire.)

If Zizek is like that, then reading Arrighi is like, well, like listening to a renowned SUNY Binghamton Sociologist lecture on the last day of school before summer vacation. I mean, all the stuff is really good, but you're just waiting for the bell to ring so you can jump out of your seat and be first in line for the ice-cream truck.

But at the same time The Long Twentieth Century promises to be an iconoclastic thriller. Not only does he plan to forgo the traditional analysis of the shift from feudalism to capitalism (no one cares about feudalism!) in favor of Braudel's focus on the shift "from scattered to concentrated capitalist power" (11), he agrees with Braudel that capitalism and the market economy are not identical with one another and that the market economy is a wholly different animal from capitalism which is "absolutely dependent for its emergence and expansion on the state power as constituting the antithesis of the market economy" (10).

This is radical because it completely undermines the neoliberal free market ideology touted by institutions such as the IMF and World Bank which argue that economic growth should be the primary goal of peripheral nations even at the expense of state and social development. For Arrighi, this is reordering the proverbial cart and horse. A nation cannot have capitalist economic growth without stable consolidated state mechanisms to in service to it. This is old news (as Noam Chomsky will tell you) for the states that successfully transformed their status from peripheral to semi-peripheral in the last 50 years (see Asian Tigers, BRIC) were the ones that disregarded the neoliberal free-market prescriptions of global financial institutions.

The implications of an argument like Arrighi's for the failed and fledgling states of sub-Saharan Africa, Asia and South America are massive. Rather than blindly following prescriptions from global financial organizations that undermine domestic stability, focus first on building a strong, consolidated state in service of capital (assuming the state wants to assimilate into the world capitalist system) then worry about economic growth. In short, if you build it, they will come.

I'm also excited to read about capitalism's cyclical evolutions from Venice, Genoa and Florence to Holland then Britain and now America.

But what excites me the most is the intellectual intimacy between Arrighi and Wallerstein (on whom I have a huge crush for his ability to synthesize a global systems theory and his fondness for sub-Saharan Africa). Not only does Arrighi reference Wallerstein and his delicious world systems theory, Wallerstein helped shape the book's direction and revise it.

And you said the Clarkson library had no books.

Is this a phallogocentric argument, or are you just happy to see me?

"It is thus a properly Nietzschean paradox that the greatest loser in this apparent assertion of Life against all transcendent Causes is actual life itself. What makes life 'worth living' is the very excess of life: the awareness that there is something for which one is ready to risk one's life (we my call this excess 'freedom', 'honour', 'dignity', 'autonomy', etc.). Only when we are ready to take this risk are we really alive. Chesterton makes this point apropos of the paradox of courage:

A soldier surrounded by enemies, if he is to cut his way out, needs to combine a strong desire for living with a strange carelessness about dying. He must not merely cling to life, for then he will be a coward, and will not escape. He must not merely wait for death, for then he will be a suicide, and will not escape. He must seek his life in a spirit of furious indifference to it; he must desire life like water and yet drink death like wine."

--Slavoj Žižek. "From Homo Sucker to Homo Sacer." Welcome to the Desert of the Real.

This is an excerpt from Žižek's essay, which is ostensibly an admonition for the radical left to invigorate its stance; to 'step outside of the box' so to speak; to earn the designation 'radical.' This specific excerpt reads as a description of Nietzsche's Overman in contrast to the Last Man (which Zizek argues that we in advanced capitalist societies are [which is terrifying to me because, unlike Nietzsche, I am not so optimistic and do not look forward to the type of Overman that a society such as ours will usher in]).

For Žižek, this strand of reason (the above excerpt) is the logical corollary to his argument which simultaneously conflates and denounces global-capitalist/hegemonic/Western fundamentalism on the one hand and Islamic religious fundamentalism on the other hand. However, his argument is in itself fundamentalist and conservative. Perhaps this is a case of (assuming the political spectrum is cyclical) swinging so far left that one arrives on the right.

The imagery in the Chesterton reference (soldiers, enemies, recklessness, the duality between courage and cowardice, drinking death like Socrates drank hemlock) appeals to a classical sort of masculinity. It draws upon the same ideological sentiments that the Western Right appeal to when it inveigles young men to die for their country and that the Islamic Right appeal to when it asks young believers to die for its cause. Only in Žižek's case, the radical left is meant to place this "excess of life" in service of a (correct) cause. (But perhaps this hyperconviction is what makes their stances so radical?)

There's a reason Nietzsche prophesied through the mouth of Zarathustra and not his own: The most efficacious rhetorical framework for conveying his message was thus far the domain of the prophets. And because his was a counterargument to Judeo-Christianity he had to reach to the opposite pole (Eastern, specifically Persian, tradition) to find an analogue. It is difficult to imagine Nietzche's philosophy being delivered with the dry, rational, post-enlightenment vocabulary of his day.

All of that is to say that Žižek's argument (not in general but in this specific instance is conservative).*

But my main problem with his argument is that as this socialized being called "woman," Žižek provides me no point of entry. Even in countries that allow women to serve in the armed forces, women are universally prohibited from combat roles. The role of soldier is not one what we have a direct relation to. So for woman, Žižek's soldier metaphor can never transcend the level of metaphor. Secondly, the excess of life he refers to as " 'freedom', 'honour', 'dignity', 'autonomy', etc." is not even absolute for men. Their expression of it is limited by society and the state. But for women, in general, this expression is even more proscribed, making it less readily accessible as a mechanism for transcendence. Lastly, the recklessness he appeals to as a the fuel of this radical leftist stance is, socially, the domain of testosterone charged adolescent boys. Not only are women (not inherently, but by socialization) alienated from this space, men of a certain age are as well.

To clarify, this is not a feminist argument per se. While what Žižek argues, specifically in this excerpt, is overtly phallogocentric, I am not asking for an écriture féminine translation. I have a problem with essentialist assertions like this by Luce Irigaray:

"woman has sex organs just about everywhere...feminine language is more diffusive than its 'masculine counterpart'. That is undoubtedly the reason...her language...goes off in all directions and...he is unable to discern the coherence."

Or this by Rosmarie Putnam Tong:

"male sexuality, which centers on what Cixous called the "big dick", is ultimately boring in its pointedness and singularity. Like male sexuality, masculine writing, which Cixous usually termed phallogocentric writing, is also ultimately boring" and furthermore, that "stamped with the official seal of social approval, masculine writing is too weighted down to move or change"

Statments like these depend upon a reimagining/falsification of history as well as a flattening of what it means to be a woman. Perhaps I'm a "self-hating woman" a la de Beauvoir but, in general, I find "masculine writing" fascinating, exciting and revolutionary.

That is except for this particular excerpt by Žižek.

All of that being said, Pervert's Guide to Cinema is still my second all-time favorite movie and I hope we can still be friends.

*Some would argue that this contradiction in Žižek's thought should come as no surprise as his primary orientation is no orientation at all. They argue that he is one of those postmodern intellectual acrobats, deconstructing and shape-shifting for the pure fun of the exercise and to demonstrate his intellectual agility. However, he states on p. 49 of Welcome to the Desert of the Real, that the dilemma of Cultural Studies is whether (post-9/11) they will "stick to the same topics, directly admitting that their fight against oppression is a fight within first world capitalism's universe—which means that, in the wider conflict between the Western first world and the outside threat to it, one should reassert one's fidelity to the basic American liberal-democratic framework? Or will they risk taking the step into radicalizing their critical stance; will they problematize this framework itself?"

Decolonization

"and the fading clothes in the old almirahs were distributed amongst the sweeper-women and other servants on the Estate, so that for years afterwards the heirs of William Methwold were cared for by men and women wearing the increasingly ragged shirts and cotton print dresses of their erstwhile masters."
--Salman Rushdie, Midnight's Children