The Port

Yellow, blue, red paint,
with holes torn in different sizes,
revealing hard brown flesh—
or perhaps bones, more accurately.

Slow and smooth,
stiff necks and arms flow above
dark blue water with its opalescent skin.

Little men flail in tiny cages
—brains for brawny monsters—
monsters deaf to their own shrinking importance,
humbled in the soft hum of smaller machines.
People in plastic hats pace and peer,
tracing paths over rough, mossy concrete.

Mountains in the background tower over the horizon—
mountains from long before such strong robots—
and mountains that will last
long after the metals grind to sediments,
passing through bellies of squishy pink worms.

Science, Art, and Exploitation: Brecht on Cultural Subversion

            Brecht begins “A Short Organum for the Theatre” by inspecting how art relates to social relations. “This theatre justified its inclination to social commitment by pointing to the social commitment in universally accepted works of art, which only fail to strike the eye because it was the accepted commitment.” (179) What is clear here is that all works of art rely on social commitments. The most invisible of these commitments are the most banal—the least challenging to our assumptions of how things should go (which is often, simply, the way things tend to go). So, when Brecht’s theater challenges social norms, criticisms of Brecht’s works—on the grounds of their tendency to express social commitments—ring hollow. Legitimate criticism must acknowledge that all works of art have social content value, so if one is to criticize a work of art on the basis of its social commitments, those criticisms are only legitimate when they confront the content-values of those commitments. As such, works of art that do not foreground critical positions tend to perpetuate the status quo.

Brecht concerns himself with relationships between science and art, especially in their figuring of culture and social relations. First, on p. 184, he says that the bourgeoisie have stopped science from illuminating the relations between people “during the exploiting and dominating process.” Regardless of the intention, the meaning of the quoted section is multiple: the “exploiting and dominating process” can apply to primitive accumulation; settler colonization; cultural hegemony; worker relations; identity relations, like those of “race,” gender, sexual preference, etc.; neocolonialism; big data, and probably other social phenomena. In fact, humans’ exploitation of nature shares a relationship to humans’ exploitation of other humans. On p. 185, Brecht points out that attitudes that were once reserved for natural disasters now apply to “undertakings by the rulers.” Brecht then says, “But science and art meet on this ground, that both are there to make men’s [sic] life easier, the one setting out to maintain, the other to entertain us.” When Brecht says that science makes people’s life easier by maintaining the status quo, it seems to me that he is, in some sense, being sarcastic. If we consider that he sees his theater project as potentially subverting the status quo, along with the fact that he sees science as exploiting nature and exploiting humanity—all for the sake of domination by the bourgeoisie—he cannot mean that science is purely beneficial to society. So when Brecht says, “In the age to come art will create entertainment from that new productivity which can so greatly improve our maintenance, and in itself, if only it is left unshackled, may prove to be the greatest pleasure of them all,” he may be unintentionally predicting how modern society’s science and art do more to enrich the wealthy few than to liberate the underprivileged masses.

Decoloniality in Geography: The Legend of Humboldt and the Residue of the Enlightenment

Last week, an issue that we talked about was what Foucault described as “our impatience for liberty.” It seems to me that Dettelbach’s analysis of Humboldt speaks to this concern. Today, Humboldt is remarkable both for the innovations that he made, as well as his tendency toward Romanticism and toward wild conjectures (the eudiometer here comes to mind). Humboldt seems to have fashioned himself as a hero; as such, his rush to discoveries was not well moderated by patience or prudence. Relevant to the rest of this week’s readings, the patience and/or prudence that may have been missing were conspicuously (although, normally, for Humboldt’s time) absent in their treatments of non-European peoples.

Sidaway’s writing reminded me of an earlier discussion that we (as a class) had on the importance of historiographical analysis of geography as a discipline. If it were not clear before, I think that Sidaway makes a strong argument that this kind of analysis can help us to consider the biases in the discipline and to try, in ongoing and in future works, to account for those historical biases, and especially, the distortions and exclusions that might result from those biases. As Sidaway points out, even intentional attempts to criticize the products of these biases can have difficulties escaping them. Livingstone, in Sidaway’s view, glorifies Western exploration and geography, while failing to acknowledge so many non-Western contributions. This suggests that the West and the non-West are never completely separate, even if the story privileges one over the other. Perhaps, as Pratt seems to point out, they even construct each other mutually, as the conception of difference for the sake of exploitation of the non-West necessitates the flawed narratives referred to in Sidaway.

I take from Pratt’s definition of “planetary consciousness” that part of her argument lies on the notion that modernity does not, in the end, recognize a periphery to its center. Instead, everything is subsumed under modernistic epistemological frames (tangential, but perhaps helpful, is to think of how science’s relationship, under modern Christian theology, came to be thought of as congruent with God’s design [only for this to later seem to lead to some secularistic tendencies]). In this way, the whole world is subject to measurement and mastery, waiting to be exploited in whatever ways it might, even under protest, eventually allow (is not this measurement and mastery exploitative in the first place?). This seems to be governed by a kind of modernistic and tautological ethics by which whatever modernists do is right because it is modern and, therefore, progressive. Humboldt’s role (as well as others’ roles) in these transatlantic “progresses” was (were) direct and appears to have been complicated by these issues of modernity.

I find that Mignolo’s essay is helpful to me for thinking about coloniality and decoloniality. I find that the interior-exterior paradigm is helpful (p. 20), especially as Mignolo thinks of us as operating within modernity in order to try to analyze modernity. It seems to me that decoloniality often adopts a strategy of trying to analyze the interior from a position that is exterior. This could seem complicated, but my understanding is that this is sometimes accomplished by interrogating the terms that lie at the center of our modernistic thinking.

Also, the way that Mignolo highlights the importance of the Americas in developing capitalism made sense to me, as well as the development of what he calls “Creole double consciousness” (pp. 31-7). I also liked the way Mignolo ties these things together by looking at how the concepts of the Western Hemisphere and the North Atlantic are imposed. It seems to me that it is this imposition that is often at the root of the problem. Although one might argue that abstraction often produces problems, it seems to me that it is one thing to abstract in a way that foregrounds contingency and it is another thing to abstract in ways that impose atemporal absolutes, universals, and essentialities. I think that, when Mignolo talks about everyone’s inevitable, necessary responses to the “‘Westernization’ of the planet” (p. 51) it is this imposition with which Mignolo is taking issue.

Dettelbach, Michael. The Face of Nature: Precise Measurement, Mapping, and Sensibility in the Work of Alexander von Humboldt.” Studies in History and Philosophy of Science, Vol. 30, No. 4. Amsterdam: Elsevier Science. 1999. 473-504.

Foucault, Michel. “What Is Enlightenment?” The Foucault Reader. New York: Pantheon. 1984. 32-50.

Mignolo, Walter. “Coloniality at Large: The Western Hemisphere in the Colonial Horizon of Modernity.” CR: The New Centennial Review, Vol. 1, No. 2. East Lansing: Michigan State University Press. 20o1. 19-54.

Pratt, Mary Louise. Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation. New York: Routledge. 1992. 1-143.

Sidaway, James Derrick. “The (re)making of the western ‘geographical tradition’: some missing links.” Area, Vol. 29. Hoboken: Wiley-Blackwell. 72-80.

What is Progress? How the Enlightenment is Ruining Everything

It seems that, fundamentally, the Enlightenment is about an ideal of progress. I think that part of Foucault’s point is to question this notion of progress and to consider how the attitude of modernistic progress is what helps to define modernity.

Much of Kant’s work seems to have been predicated upon the idea that some people have greater value in society than do others. The way that he moralizes people’s positions in society is consistent with certain conceptions of Christian theology at the time (although he certainly seems to manipulate certain contemporaneous aspects of Christian understanding) and it seems to address certain needs of the state and of the bourgeoisie. By conceiving of human nature and human progress in certain ways, and by conceiving of human endeavors in terms of their usefulnesses, his call for rationalization seems to fit within broader ideas of what people should be and what they should do. For Kant, I think that there is a way by which he forms a social hierarchy based on those aspects of humanity that he privileges.

It seems to me that the develop of the Enlightenment, in some ways, might have been a response to the Crusades, the Reformation, British land reform, and colonialism and calls for further colonizations. If it helped to justify different forms of expropriation, discipline, formation of a working class, colonization, Patriarchy, and the like, then maybe it was through things like the idealization of progress and Kant’s call for us to “dare to know.” What these examples appear to have in common is that each is a case of some people’s liberties to effect personal progress (fulfillments of desires) to be privileged over other people’s liberties from harm (denials of harms, or, in some cases, even fulfillments of certain kinds of needs). Perhaps Kant’s racism is an indication that Kant’s philosophical positions were necessarily bound with the rationalization of formations of privilege and underprivilege. Reflective of these unequal sets of privileges, it seems to me that the Enlightenment may have always already been about mastery of the universe as a way of promising that anyone can have whatever they want, given some constraints (one would seem to need the time and resources to fulfill their desires, at least). By privileging certain forms, and methods, of knowledge formation, those with access to those knowledge practices appear to be encouraged to do what is necessary in order to effect progress (even Kant, while describing his geography course, privileges certain aspects according to their industrial usefulness [see long quotation from Kant on Elden’s p. 11]). In essence, what occurs to me is that maybe personal enrichment has always been already tied to the formations of knowledge that have been encouraged by the Enlightenment, always already privileging some people at the expense of others, leading to the fulfillments of some people’s desires at the expense of other people’s needs.

All that having been said, and getting back to Foucault, I think that what the readings show is that the relationship between social concerns and the production of knowledge is a complicated one. On one hand, as Foucault puts it, we seem to have an “impatience for liberty.” Here, I think that Foucault probably means that we have an impatience for the developments of new capacities. These developments of these new capacities come with their own problems, including that new capacities can bring about new forms of harm and can exacerbate old forms of harm. On the other hand, the process of developing new capacities often leads to other kinds of questions. Who has access to the tools necessary for producing knowledge? Who has access to knowledge? What is meant by knowledge? How is the knowledge used? How is the knowledge framed? What does it mean if we propose that we can know everything? How do these concerns affect individuals and societies? Plenty of other questions could be added to this list and I think that all of these and many of those not included are probably worthy of plenty of inspection perhaps even before we try to develop new capacities.

Elden, Stuart. “Reassessing Kant’s geography.” Journal of Historical Geography. Amsterdam: Elsevier. 2008. 3-25.

Foucault, Michel. “What Is Enlightenment?” The Foucault Reader. New York: Pantheon. 1984. 32-50.

Louden, Robert B. “Anthropology from a Kantian point of view: toward a cosmopolitan conception of human nature.” Studies in History and Philosophy of Science. Amsterdam: Elsevier. 2008. 515-22.

What Is Modernity?: A Response to Benavides’s Conception of Modernity

(note: I may use gender-neutral “they,” “their,” and “theirs” to refer to imagined persons)

 

Benavides’s point seems to be that modernism may have always existed within Abrahamic religions and that these religions provided fertile ground in the West on which to plant the seeds of modernism’s most pronounced characteristics. Benavides also gives examples of modernism in non-Abrahamic religions but he focuses more on the Abrahamic religions.

An interesting point that Benavides makes is how thinkers in the West have tried to understand scientific facts as in accordance with the will of a jealous god—at least in theory, rendering incompatible potential investments in magic (pp. 190-1). Something like, The world works as it does by God’s will, and looking outside God and His laws is (at least) foolish. This has the potential effect of legitimating scientific engagements, and it seems reasonable to state that, to some degree, this potential has been realized.

That said, Benavides’s way of discussing science strikes upon an irony. Central to his thesis is the notion that self-reflexivity lies (likely in conjunction with other aspects) at the core of modernism. On p. 188, Benavides refers to Elvin to say that one characteristic of modernism lies in “power over nature in the form of capacity for prediction.” Here, Benavides, by way of Elvin, appears intent on defining science. However, science was not framed in terms of predictive power until Karl Popper proposed Falsificationism as a response to backward-looking—and, in Popper’s eyes, insufficiently capable of prediction—theories from Marx and Freud. Today, we may properly assert that there are issues worthy of attention in referring to Marx’s and Freud’s theories as “scientific,” but this does not seem to have been the consensus before the early-to-mid-20^th century. Benavides seems to clearly illustrate historical ties between science and modernism, as well as other issues.

One issue that Benavides is concerned with is that of ritual. On p. 196, Benavides mentions how ritual goes from the religious context to the economic. He refers to E. P. Thompson’s, “Time, Work-Discipline and Industrial Capitalism,” in which Thompson says, on p. 90: “In all these ways—by the division of labour; the supervision of labour; fines; bells and clocks; money incentives; preachings and schoolings; the suppression of fairs and sports—new labour habits were formed, and a new time-discipline was imposed. (found in Past and Present).” Work habits become banalized and serve to mark out our lives in industrial routines.

I am not convinced that Benavides does not fall short of completion in his analysis, though. Perhaps modernism is really about something more than the tension between aesthetics and technology, more than (the surely fraught) social relations and power, more than scientism, more than the internalization of ritual, and more than the dismissal of mysticism, among other points that Benavides raises. Is it not also true that modernism supposes that anyone can have whatever they want, given certain constraints (the accomplishment of any wish-fulfillment requires time and resources)?

At the end of section II, on the top of p. 190, Benavides suggests something that approaches the idea that modernist promises are unlimited, but he never fleshes the idea out. To consider a kind of genealogy of modernism, the Enlightenment was born of the Renaissance, which occurred as a kind of colonization of thoughts and practices of Arabic Muslims in Al-Andalus (Moorish Iberia). In essence, the Moors had translated Classic texts, and Western Christians decided, while killing and forcibly removing the Moors, to appropriate these Moorish practices. The practice of translation and reinterpretation of Greek and Roman texts eventually gave way to the Enlightenment period. Arguments made during the Enlightenment helped to justify colonization and what is sometimes referred to as “primitive accumulation.”

In the West, there has historically been a legitimate debate over what are termed “positive” and “negative” conceptions of freedom. Under the Enlightenment, freedom has been conceived of in such a way that fulfillments of desires for some, at the expense of the denial of needs for others, is sometimes thought of as a reasonable idea in the formation of, and debate over, social relations.

This liberalization of the promise of material gain, and the supposed happiness that might come with it, appears different from what would have been allowed by social relations in Rome, Greece, or in Europe’s feudalistic Middle Ages. However, this brings up another complication in Benavides’s argument.

When Benavides, on p. 190, claims that modernism has represented a tendency away from transcendentalism, perhaps it could be said that what he is tracking is the replacement of transcendental grace with a kind of transcendental satisfaction—i.e., instead of thinking of “a rejection of any notion of transcendence,” perhaps one form of transcendence substitutes for another. Or, we could think of it as secular enrichment in this life replacing sacred salvation in the afterlife. Finding satisfaction in one’s life by gaining material wealth seems to increasingly become a driving force for people’s regular actions. Previously, working to survive while adhering to religious laws may have more often been thought of as reasonable and good in its use of one’s time. This appears to be so true that even those who seek sacred salvation might sometimes still seek prosperity while they remain on Earth. No longer does “the virtuous poor” bear any real social significance.

Benavides, Gustavo. “Modernity.” Critical Terms for Religious Studies. ed. by Mark Taylor. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. 1998. 196-204.

Two Serbias

Just beyond Belgrade,
a cornfield sprawls
from one edge of the horizon to the other.
Highways pass over it,
like anachronistic eggshell ribbons, hanging in the sky.

From the field,
farmers mostly ignore
the strips of serial art passing by,
as rancorous old trains transport Slavs back-and-forth
between the city and the North.

A few kilometers past the cornfield,
between other cornfields and uniform red brick apartments,
with their red clay roofs,
a bronzed, slightly greasy man,
wearing three-day old scruff and an ill-fitting t-shirt,
speaks with an old lady at a fruit stand.
His messy belly jiggles as he laughs,
while she clutches a pristine old Orthodox Bible in one hand
and a cane in the other.

Parts of Belgrade thrive;
ecru facades of modern, functionalist buildings,
with lighted Latin letter signs,
are erected between larger, more functionalist,
rusty, slowly-imploding Soviet relics, adorned by Cyrillic characters.

Outside the city,
Serbs eschew internet for bright yellow flowers
and familiar beers with lifelong friends and family,
as they wait for modernity to remember them.