New APPS: Art, Politics, Philosophy, Science

Travel Ban 2.5, the Camp, and the Airport

by Gordon Hull

On Wednesday night, the Trump administration implemented as much of its long promised Muslim Ban as it thought the Supreme Court would allow.  Travelers from a list of six countries who did not have a “bona fide” connection or “close familial relationship” to someone in the U.S. would be banned.  The administration interpreted the Supreme Court’s ruling as restrictively as possible – the Court said that a mother-in-law would be an example of a close familial relationship, but didn’t mention grandparents – so having a grandparent here (or being a grandparent there) isn’t a close familial relationship.  The ruling smacks of arbitrariness and was rolled out as secretly as possible, and it’s not even clear that it actually does much at all. Then again, the original ban also was a poorly-worded, arbitrary mockery of the rule of law.  For example, the “policy” began with zero warning, leaving travelers stranded in airports with no legal options.  So too, the six countries were allegedly named because of their propensity to breed terrorists, but no one from any of them has committed a terrorist act in the U.S. since 2001.  Countries from which terrorists have come – Saudi Arabia – are not on the list.  Some of the countries have no functioning governments, but Iran does.  And so it goes.  That’s what happens when you promise to get rid of Muslims and then realize that you can’t get away with just making that so by campaign promise.

In Homo Sacer, Agamben declares that the camp (the paradigmatic case of which is the Nazi concentration camp) is the archetype of modern power, suggesting that “the camp as dislocating localization is the hidden matrix of the politics in which we are still living” (175).  He proposes that the model of the camp can be seen in all sorts of institutions: the stadium at Bari where the Italians herded Albanian immigrants, the track where the Vichy herded the Jews before deporting them, and the halls at airports where foreigners asking for refugee status are detained, “all equally [are] camps” (174).  As someone who has read a lot of Adorno, I found this assimilation of airport waiting halls and the Holocaust somewhere between uncomfortable and offensive.  I am still uncomfortable with the comparison, but I do think some of the logic that Agamben is identifying is at work here.  That logic is one in which “the normal order is de facto suspended and in which whether or not atrocities are committed depends not on law but on the civility and ethical sense of the police who temporarily act as sovereign” (174).

Shameless Self-Promotion Dept: Papers on Foucault, and on Spinoza

I've just uploaded a (relatively minor) revision of my SPEP paper from this fall in Salt Lake City to SSRN.  The paper is ""Confessing Preferences: What Foucault’s Government of the Living can tell us about Neoliberalism and Big Data," and the abstract is:

Foucault’s 1979-80 Collège de France lectures, On the Government of the Living, offer one way to situate the development of his later work, and in particular to understand his supposed turn away from biopolitics and governmentality to ethics and subjectivity.  In this paper, I argue that (1) a unifying thread in most of Foucault’s work from the late 1970s onward is an increasing concern with the centrality of confession as a primary technology of power in the Christian West; and (2) Neoliberalism is deeply confessional, and therefore highly suspect from a Foucauldian standpoint.  (3) These connections are particularly evident in a Foucauldian reading of data analytics (“big data”).

 

I've also uploaded a somewhat older paper on Spinoza and finitude.  The  paper is "Of Suicide and Falling Stones: Finitude, Contingency, and Corporeal Vulnerability in (Judith Butler’s) Spinoza," and the abstract is:

This paper juxtaposes Judith Butler's reading of Spinoza with the commonly-received, originally Deleuzian, presentation of Spinoza as the "anti-Hegel" or as the presentation of "positivity" against Hegelian "negativity." Working via the key commentary by Pierre Macherey in Hegel ou Spinoza, I argue that, once we no longer are compelled to read Spinoza as Hegel's negation or opposite, the way is open to see a Spinoza who is profoundly concerned with human fragility and finitude. the Spinoza that emerges presents a more cautious, but also potentially more generous, approach to emancipatory politics.

To put the point too schematically, readings of the affirmative Spinoza tend to develop the importance of conatus as resistance, at the expense of developing an understanding of the importance of limitations imposed by our own finitude. It seems to me that much of Butler’s thought can be read as bringing those elements together. How do we understand conatus, and marshal it as resistance, given the inevitability of finitude and constraint as factors that structure the desires through which we actually live?

 

The Return of Sovereign Shaming

In May, a 13-year-old named Izabel Laxamana took a selfie wearing a sports bra and some leggings, and sent it to a boy at her school.  When school administrators heard about the picture, they contacted her parents.  What happened next defies easy comprehension: delivering on a threatened punishment for breaking his social media rules, Izabel’s father cut off her hair.  He then made a video of Izabel with her hair (in a pile on the floor), demanding that she say breaking their rules hadn’t been worth it.  The video found its way to social media.  Two days later, Izabel jumped off an overpass, and a day later, she died from her injuries. The reasons why Laxamana committed suicide are of course complex, and may or may not be because of the shaming (and the father may or may not be the one who posted it to social media).*  But the videoed retaliatory haircut seems to be real.  In a recent piece in Slate, Amanda Hess catalogues the sudden re-emergence of this medieval phenomenon – literally medieval; women were punished by having their hair cut off, often in public – and situates it as part of a more general re-emergence of the public shaming of teenagers by their parents:

Judith Butler and the Boycott of Israeli Universities

There is a certain lack of clarity in Judith Butler’s remarks at Brooklyn College, not so much in her words, but in what actions they may license or lead to. I have been discussing this with Sergio Tenenbaum, and here is what we do not understand.  (Thanks to Mark Lance for helping clarify the issues.)

Butler says, first:

the academic and cultural boycott seeks to put pressure on all those cultural institutions that have failed to oppose the occupation and struggle for equal rights and the rights of the dispossessed . . . When those cultural institutions (universities, art centers, festivals) were to take such a stand, that would be the beginning of the end of the boycott

I take it that universities rarely take a stand about such matters, and especially not publicly funded universities. Who has ever demanded, for example, that the University of Texas should take a stand on the death penalty in Texas? (Very few people, if any, advocated sanctions against Witwatersrand University or the University of Cape Town during apartheid, though they may have been fairly adamant about not consuming South African products or attending sports events involving South Africa.)

BDS, Brooklyn College, and the Daily News

[Please note: Quite a few updates / links are placed below the fold; I will continue to update as events unfold, with those of crucial import above the fold.]

A petition in support of academic freedom at CUNY.

UPDATE, Wed 6 Feb, 12:30 pm CST: The "progressive" pols cut-and-run from their previous letter.

UPDATE, Wed 6 Feb, 12:30 pm CST: Mayor Bloomberg lays it out, plain as day and clear as a bell:

Well look, I couldn’t disagree more violently with BDS as they call it, Boycott Divestment and Sanctions. As you know I’m a big supporter of Israel, as big a one as you can find in the city, but I could also not agree more strongly with an academic department’s right to sponsor a forum on any topic that they choose. I mean, if you want to go to a university where the government decides what kind of subjects are fit for discussion, I suggest you apply to a school in North Korea.

The last thing that we need is for members of our City Council or State Legislature to be micromanaging the kinds of programs that our public universities run, and base funding decisions on the political views of professors. I can’t think of anything that would be more destructive to a university and its students.

You know, the freedom to discuss ideas, including ideas that people find repugnant, lies really at the heart of the university system, and take that away and higher education in this country would certainly die.

This is a city that loves and protects freedom—academic freedom, religious religious freedom, sexual freedom, cultural freedom, political freedom.  We are the freest city in the world, and that’s why we’re the greatest city in the world.

Assembly, political space, and the human microphone

 

This is a simple, powerful talk by Judith Butler at OWS, calling upon the classic "very well then, we demand the impossible" trope, and ending with the wonderful line, "we're standing here together, making democracy, enacting the phrase, 'We the People'."

And here's  the text of a longer talk by Butler in Venice about constituting political space while acknowledging the material precarity of bodies, developed alongside a critical analysis of Arendt's notion of a political "space of appearance." The overall aim is set forth here, I believe:

a different social ontology would have to start from the presumption that there is a shared condition of precarity that situates our political lives.

A brief excerpt from the beginning of the talk sets out some of the main lines of thought: 

assembly and speech reconfigure the materiality of public space, and produce, or reproduce, the public character of that material environment. And when crowds move outside the square, to the side street or the back alley, to the neighborhoods where streets are not yet paved, then something more happens. At such a moment, politics is no longer defined as the exclusive business of public sphere distinct from a private one, but it crosses that line again and again, bringing attention to the way that politics is already in the home, or on the street, or in the neighborhood, or indeed in those virtual spaces that are unbound by the architecture of the public square....

But in the case of public assemblies, we see quite clearly not only that there is a struggle over what will be public space, but a struggle as well over those basic ways in which we are, as bodies, supported in the world – a struggle against disenfranchisement, effacement, and abandonment.

I'd like to add something here about the way the human microphone works, quite literally, to amplify the constitution of political space by assembled bodies. The human microphone offers an entry into examining political affect in the enacting of the phrase "We the People" at OWS. It shows us how direct democracy is enacted by producing an intermodal resonance among the semantic, pragmatic, and affective dimensions of collective action.

Jason Read: Butler and Malabou on Hegel

Over at Unemployed Negativity, friend of the blog (and sometimes even co-blogger) Jason Read writes on a new book by Judith Butler and Catherine Malabou, Sois mon corps: une lecture contemporaine de la domination et servitude chez Hegel. Order the book here. Read's post is here. First two paragraphs:

In the history of philosophy there are some texts that are difficult to say anything new about. These texts are so dominated by one influential reading that it becomes difficult, even impossible, to say interpret anew. Paradigmatic in these respects is the brief section of Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit known as the “master slave dialectic” or “lordship and bondage”.This section is so dominated by Kojeve’s canonical reading that is almost as if his words were already there on the pages of Hegel’s text.

This is one reason why Judith Butler and Catherine Malabou’s exchange on “Domination and Servitude” published in French as Sois mon corps: une lecture contemporaine de la domination et servitude chez Hegel is engaging. It is a reading of this all too well known section of Hegel’s text, but one that dispenses with the preoccupations of a previous generation in order to reread Hegel. Butler and Malabou each address Hegel from their particular philosophical commitments and engagements: Butler’s intervention is framed by her reading of Hegel in The Psychic Life of Power and Malabou continues her development of plasticity in her reading of Hegel.

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UPDATE (JP): I reviewed Malabou's Plasticity at the Dusk of Writing for NDPR in Feb 2010.