From the ‘bringing oneself down to their level’ department…
A friend of mine came out of a short-term hibernation today, and to celebrate invited several people to a bar. It was nice - good jukebox, a Galaga arcade style video game, decent cheap beer, and conversation with smart, funny, good-looking people (and I don’t just mean my wife Angelica). Negri’s impending appearance in North America was mentioned (some conference in April in Canada), someone told a story about Negri trying to come to the US for a conference and getting given the run around by the government, not a denial but a permanent deferral of permission. Then Agamben’s “No To Biopolitical Tattooing” diatribe was approvingly referenced, his refusal to come here, his calling for others not to come here (which I don’t remember, I’ll have to look at that piece again).
I made a poor excuse for a joke, playing devil’s advocate, “yes, but without Europeans this place will just slide further into barbarism”, which got the wry and lackluster response it deserved. I followed it up with “what’d he should have done was urged Europeans to set up a fund to finance aspiring US expats!”
Someone (who I believe is either a graduate student or a professor) made a remark about staying here, feeling a sense of responsibility to try and stay here to make things better, that people leaving really would hasten the slide into barbarism. The word ‘intellectuals’ may have come up. Angelica made a comment about wanting to go live somewhere better, I said something about better states. The same person responded with “all states are bad!” I said, “Of course, line all the fuckers up, but in the mean time they’re not all equally bad in terms of a cynical calculation of fees for service based on tax dollars. If I was a citizen in a Western European country the deductions from my paycheck wouldn’t be more than half devoted to the military, and I’d get access to the vestiges of a welfare state. That’s what I’m in the market to purchase, a citizenship that gets me more for my money, but it doesn’t seem to be a buyer’s market and I don’t have a lot to negotiate with.”
A short, and to my mind naive and factually uninformed, back and forth ensued about how easy it is to get out of the US (”what’s stopping you?” “I can’t get a passport somewhere else.”), which I handled poorly. The response to suspected gesturing with no support is never tit-for-tat argument. The response is questions, “really, tell me more. How easy is it? How does it work? How do you know?” but I wasn’t thinking clearly enough (brain fogged by the beer I drank too quickly, my tolerance is lower because I’m usually the designated driver these days). Angelica made the remark about being first rat off a sinking ship, the remark about “staying and trying to make things better here” was repeated. I said “I can respect that perspective, but I don’t share it,” and Angelica added “I don’t see anything meaningful that I feel I can do”, both of which the final response was “I just feel too much intellectual responsibility.” I think I may have made a toasting gesture, and I turned to someone else to talk, breaking it off. Angelica went on, talking about wanting to have kids and how it mattered to her whether the kids will get healthcare in an emergency room or in a doctor’s office. In the car ride home later Angelica said she worried that she’d done what I worry I do sometimes, which is get conversationally aggressive to shut people’s stupid faces. I said I wasn’t sure, but that I’d beaten a strategic retreat to avoid precisely that, and because I’m trying to cultivate emotional responses as decisions rather than givens, and particularly studied indifference instead of irritation: irritation implies an undue level of importance.
But yeah, it was quite annoying. Intellectual responsibility? To who and to what? To the United States? To “the masses”? And “intellectual” responsibility? Meaning what, precisely? As in, being an academic one owes something to the plebs, to speak up for them? That we must echo Benjamin, there are still fronts here to be defended (in our seminars on Derrida and Lacan and Wittgenstein and Goethe)? Yes, because that’s the problem here in the US, lack of intellect and lack of responsible intellectuals who the state and capital foolishly pay to undermine their authority. From the long march through the institutions to an eternity marching in place in an institution… one last push for tenure comrades, then the revolution! Ugh.
I’ve got to get my reading list on ‘professionalism’ sketched out - the idea that there’s something about the sale of waged labor to/in the university that is a prior bad for the bosses is so prevalent, and it plays out within the dynamic that we in this setting have so much to say that needs to be heard and if only the unwashed many would prick up their ears to our insights …
I need more tools to understand the dynamics of these ideas and what people’s investments in them are, so I can stop getting so annoyed with it and start to see it as comical - to innoculate myself so the conversations will be predictable and obvious (because nothing dulls outrage like predictability and boredom).
I had some very nice fried waffle-shaped potatoes with ketchup, though, and got several sincere goodbye hugs when we got up to leave. And I scored 45000 points on Galaga, on only one quarter.
nice. on the galaga i mean… that game is freakin hard.
I recently watched “Arguing the world” which is a documetary about Irving Kristol, Irving Howe, Daniel Bell and another bloke who’s name I can’t remember. They were early socialist radicals at the end of the 1st world war that ended up becoming somewhat reactionary during the sixties. They, together started the magazine “Partisan Review” in the 50’s, Kristol started “Commentary” and Howe started “Dissent” all major journals of the American intellegensia.
The major theme that resonated with me was their comming to grips with “America.” This is something off the bat that I don’t really have any real resonance with but I could see the documetarian, one very smart Joseph Dorman, attempting to diagnose in the film.
This event of watching the film coincides with a few other incidents: I have been reading Husserl’s “Crisis of the European Sciences” where he argues for a crisis in particularly “european” destiny. Again here my question was “why do I care what white people do?” Then I read, by just coincidence, Edward Said’s “Reflections on Exile” (I often think of myself as an intellectual in exile) where he remarked that New York is in the late twentieth century what Paris was in the early twentieth century (now i get the sense that I’m a Benjamin of the 21th century). Said also mentions hanging out with Lionel Trilling who was a prominent figure in the New York intellectual scene that “Arguing the world” portrayed.
So this, and your comments above, and my present condition of being an intellectual in America brings this question to the fore: What is my relation to America?
Or, to unfold the question a little:
why is the specificity of America for me today?
Why does America figure prominently in my thinking (although I am at times willfully suppressing it)?
In a way, I come from a perspective that really could buy into the idea of the “american dream”… or maybe a more sobering “american situation.” There are more opportunities for academics here, more than anywhere else… that is a statement of sheer fact. In essence, for a mediocre intellect like mine to have a chance of developing into an at least decent writer and thinker that I think I am, an American education was crucial. This is no joke, if I stayed in Taiwan, there would have been no chance of graduate school at all. There is a strange dialectic here; simultaneously, I have been given the chance to support myself doing intellectual work but at the cost of being entirely within an institutional framework. Like all dialectic situations; there are real costs but the conditioned kind of freedom it allows is nonetheless freedom.
I really don’t care about americans and the american way of life… whatever that is. But I do recognize that america is a special place. perhaps a singularity. a VERY special place.
America could have done worse, de jure segregation could still be in effect, I might have not been able to sit at a table with you -counterfactually, this could have been reality.
In “Arguing the world”, one of the points mentioned was the second world war. It was a profound shift in these 4 thinkers lives. They all grew up in the Jewish ghetto of Brooklyn and the Bronx, retaining a sense of the Jewish old-worldness (perhaps a kind of cosmopolitanism) and up till the war, none of them “felt” really american. But after that experience, it was a decision they all had to make.
I think I see that decision on my own horizon. Its a strange and profound thing I believe. My first inclination is to say, fuck it all, I don’t care about america. But on second thought, I think i owe alot to the american situation and to the opportunities and people I’ve met within it (you included).
a real aporia. perhaps by my mid 40’s I can finally decide what “america means to me.” For now, its an open question.
Comment by Tzuchien — November 15, 2005 @ 9:47 am
I think basically you’re just meant ot stick it out fighting a rearguard action until atheism is made illegal. At that point you get to claim political asylum in Sweden. Sweet.
Comment by mark — November 15, 2005 @ 1:47 pm
hey Tzuchien,
Yeah, I’m a Galaga rockstar. I like hearing about this stuff from you, but I don’t relate to/understand the responsibility or the owing. In a way one could say I owe my dad’s union a lot as that was a big part of what I had growing up etc, and I do have a softspot for the IBEW as a result, but I’m not sure what else this debt amounts to. To my mind, the stuff you’re describing strikes me as a cool set of pragmatic opportunities, but I don’t know what the specialness is beyond that (and every place is singular and special in some fashion, the question is how and for what), nor do I know what it would mean to be responsible to that, to owe something to that beyond a recognition on the personal level (”this is part of where I came from”) and some type of fondness for things that remind you of that. I certainly don’t see why any of this means you ought to remain in the US if you decided you didn’t want to.
The other thing is that you don’t seem to be making any implicit claim about your importance here (don’t get me wrong, you’re a fucking champ), whereas I took the remark about intellectual responsibility in the context of preventing a slide into barbarism (there was some remark that I took to be intended serious, riffing on my bad joke and responding to my saying I’d fly the coop if I knew how, something like “that’s when the real slide into barbarism would occur”). That’s one of the things that really bugged me about it, the implied presumptions about an us that’s needed by some themm, the image of some group who - by being academics - have their fingers in the dikes preventing a total flood of reactionary events. I’m going stop on this as it’s quite petulent (petulant?) of me. I do want to think about this stuff more, though, the in the contexts of academic labor and professionalism, ideas about being really important and so forth (and in at least some parts of the humanities, of being really radical) because of the jobs we do. I think it’s part of what keeps parts of universities rolling along (Fortunati remarks somewhere about love being connected to the wage, I think one could say that some academics - and certainly a great main employees ’social justice’ related NGOs - get paid partially in self-righteousness and satisfaction, it’s something I’d like to think more about).
take care,
Nate
ps- Mark, rearguard action implies a little more organization than really exists. Moving to Sweden would rule, everyone there is atractive and in a band. Do you ever run into any of these “don’t leave, stay here and work for change” dynamics in circles you move in? It’s come up in a number of conversations I’ve had within various lefty orbits.
Comment by Nate — November 15, 2005 @ 9:22 pm
There was a discussion at least partly related to this on the Archive, I made a comment there that I’ll reproduce here …
“I’ve got to admit to falling into a bit of the old exceptionalism now and then, it’s a hard habit to avoid since I’ve lived here in the US my whole life. It’s been a series of hard knocks for the national ego (which touches a lot of us who are embarassed to realize it’s also built into us) since september of 2001 up through the most recent hurricanes etc.
My partner works at a pre-school (I think you say creche?) housed an elementary school. She came home from work today saying it was really cold at work today. The school’s started turning the heat off on the weekends, and keeping the heat lower the rest of the time because of a combination skyrocketing energy costs (estimated 50% higher than last year) and budget cuts. I have to admit that this strikes me as the kind of thing that “doesn’t happen here” according to the ideas about “here” and “what happens” that I was raised with (including the idea that there were good jobs available, another one that’s fallen by the wayside). I asked my partner about it and she said the same, that this is not something that fits with the idea of america that we were inculcated into as kids (of course, we’re not universal figures). It’s not a category I’d defend, or even one I use to think really, but it’s interesting to compare those ideas with the state of things here I think (not to be catastrophist or anything).”
*
I feel a bit egocentric referencing this, but it continues to be on my mind and came up again in conversation with Angelica last night a little. Also, what feels like a decline of conditions here is I think entering into how ‘my’ university is treating the clerical workers’ union right now - who may go on strike in January - though I think the decline is more being used ideologically by the universtity, less than it’s something like an objective cause of the university’s aggression toward employees.
Comment by Nate — November 16, 2005 @ 3:10 pm
I have never encountered the idea that people should stay somewhere and help it be better. In Australia there has always been a brain drain and people generally just demand that the government do more to incentivise for people to stay (to little avail). Everyone goes on about moving to relatively left-wing New Zealand. In England, no-one ever says anything like this, I think mostly because they don’t have to, especially as there is nowhere to go to escape the increasing political repression and general rightward drift.
Comment by mark — November 17, 2005 @ 3:32 am
the only time actually that I ever have encountered this ’stay where you are and make things better’ was in an Australian play about an Australian academic living in America called Myth, Propaganda and Disaster in Nazi Germany and Contemporary America, in which the Australian (if I remember correctly) tries to flee from the authorities, but his American wife refuses to go because she believes in fighting for America. So basically, Australians believe that there might be some value in Americans staying and fighting for America, but not necessarily in Australians staying here. I think this is spot on, because really Australia is just an ajunct to America so it is what Americans do in respect of America that matters to us, and indeed to much of the world. How’s that for pressure?
Comment by mark — November 17, 2005 @ 3:39 am
hi Mark,
That’s a didactic title, eh? I imagine it’s not as good as Sexual Perversity In Chicago or We Won’t Pay! We Won’t Pay!. I don’t feel any pressure because I feel an American’s entitlement to do whatever the fuck I please. I just wish that more border cops elsewhere would recognize that their shitty little states are just adjuncts to mine and get out of my way with their demands for visas and all that. It is interesting that you can’t think of anyone else who has a “stay here and fight” attitude. To continue being snarky, I imagine those same folks with the “stay here” attitude would applaud if I decided to go on some patronizing liberal relief effort. It reminds me a bit of the foolishness around US anarchists who got really wrapped up in a bad analysis of white skin privilege, and ended up saying that nothing would ever start to happen until whites renounced their own privileged positions as whites - and so, in the name of antiracism all nonwhites were rendered nonagents who won’t become agents until whites decide. Similarly folks in other countries are reliant on the activity of north americans exercising responsibility. Basta, no more whinges for tonight.
take care,
Nate
Comment by Nate — November 17, 2005 @ 4:12 am
That play was absolutely awful. It was two or three hours, seemed like four, of psychic torture.
Plot: middle aged wisened academic is kindapped by bad secret police for no reason, or perhaps for having projected his waning libido onto a moslem student. He is then tortured and killed while his wife has to give up writing episdoes of CSI to become a rerun of the Madres de la Plaza de Mayo. No, seriously. What makes the play particularly nasty is not that academics are portrayed as the victims, which is a distortion of the reality of mostly non-academic victims, but that the academic is persecuted for doing nothing. There are academics rotting in US detention centers now, but not for doing nothing. Puke!
Comment by TCO — November 20, 2005 @ 1:13 am
I concur with this assessment of this terrible play.
Comment by mark — November 20, 2005 @ 9:36 am