Justin Erik Halldór Smith

It's Time to Stop Saying 'Caucasian'

I don't know why all these racists are worried about Caucasians being reduced to a minority in Georgia as a result of demographic shifts. In fact it's logically certain that Caucasians will always be the majority in Georgia: if one is Georgian, ipso facto one is Caucasian.

Oh wait. I thought we were talking about that other Georgia. Because when I say 'Caucasian', I intend it as an adjective that refers to the land and peoples between the Black and Caspian Seas.

The origins of the use of this adjective as an umbrella term for so-called white people are rooted, it seems, in the Ottoman slave trade. Thus in 1684 François Bernier reports having been to a slave market in Constantinople. He is spellbound by the ivory beauty of a Circassian (presumably Georgian) slave girl. He notes that women from the Caucasus region have been praised since antiquity as the palest and most beautiful slave girls in all the world, and he regrets not having enough money to buy her.

Phenotypically, the girl Bernier desired was most likely very similar to, say, the Chechen warlord Ramzan Kadyrov: blonde-haired, blue-eyed, yet for all that something altogether different from what, say, an Atlanta Republican maven has in mind when she imagines of herself that she is a 'Caucasian'.

A century later, Christoph Meiners would attempt to transform the designation into a natural kind: now Caucasians constituted, alongside 'Mongolians' and 'Negroes', one of the basic subtypes of humanity. The mountain region and its peoples came to stand in metonymically for a third or so of humanity. Who makes the cut has been a matter of much dispute over the centuries. For Blumenbach, Slavs were Mongolian, while Tatars (presumably because of their long presence in the extensive Caucasus region) were included as Caucasians.

The designation long served, as one of its principal raisons d'être, to ensure that Jews remained excluded from the fold, and any self-described member of the Caucasian race, if projected from the early 20th century to the early 21st and shown, say, an online dating profile that reads 'Race: Caucasian; Religion: Jewish', would take this as a straightforward contradiction. They would have been dead wrong, but that does not make us dead right. The sad fact is that the term, to the extent that it refers to anything other than the noble people of Georgia, Chechnya, and so on, functions simply as a way of dividing us off from them. For now, the us includes Slavs and Ashkenazi Jews but not, generally, Arabs and (most) Latin Americans. It is, in other words, as racist as the day it was coined. Though it excludes different groups in different eras, it exists for the sole purpose of exclusion.

Most Americans who describe themselves as Caucasians would likely be reluctant to include Kadyrov as one of their own, even if they were to learn that, on strictly technical grounds, he must count as Caucasian if anyone does. He is a Muslim, after all; he is bearded, wears a fez-like hat, is usually seen draped in ammunition, and would appear entirely out of place at your local Bed, Bath, & Beyond. But the original association of whiteness with the Caucasus appears to have been a sort of pre-racial Orientalism, which valued the beauty of the Caucasian slave girl in view of its exoticness. In other words, its object was a white person, but it was objectifying in exactly the same way the later fascination with, e.g., the Hottentot Venus would be.

So when the know-nothing North Carolina State Senator's wife, Jodie Brunstetter, says that gay marriage should be prohibited as a measure against the eventual elimination of the 'Caucasian' race, she should not just be condemned for homophobia, for the logical fallaciousness of supposing that if they weren't getting married gay people would be reproducing, and for the retrograde idea that races in themselves are anything worth conserving, as one might conserve Sumatran rhinoceroses. She should also be condemned for supposing that there is such a thing as the Caucasian race. There is not, and never has been.

Yet the reaction from progressive circles is to denounce Brunstetter for her homophobia and her sentimental attachment to the white race, while letting pass without notice, and even with explicit support, her identification of whiteness with Caucasianness. Or, alternatively, we find what appears to be utter confusion about the meaning of the latter term. Thus Erin Gloria Ryan asks in a post in Jezebel: "Does Jodie Brunstetter know that 'Caucasian' isn't synonymous with 'white people'?" And thus far I found myself thinking: yes! But then came the disappointment of reading on: "Caucasians," Ryan writes, "live in India, on the horn of Africa, the Middle East, and in South America. They're brown and white and black. What Mrs. Brunstetter means is 'Aryan'. You know, like what Hitler meant, but in America."

Here I confess I just don't know what Ryan means by 'Caucasian' (a complaint that cannot be made, at least, about what Brunstetter means). I suppose there might be some scattered Chechens and the like in the Horn of Africa, and they might show a variety of complexions. But if the term is not taken to refer to someone from that mountain region, then I really don't know what it could be referring to except to that folk-category often described, alternatively, as 'white people'.

Invoking that other sinister and so-flexible-as-to-be-meaningless category of 'Aryans' only confuses matters; it too was once a non-racial category, referring to a certain caste in a certain region that we don't think of today as having much to do with whiteness, which became racialized principally in Germany as a result of certain rather ungrounded philological and linguistic speculations (by contrast with the physical-anthropological speculations of Blumenbach et al. in which the parallel notion of 'Caucasians' developed).

Neither 'Aryan' (except in the case of ancient North India) nor 'Caucasian' (except in the case of the southern Urals) ever had any serious application to human biological or social reality, yet Ryan happily goes along with Brunstetter in speaking as if there really are such things. It's time to scrap this bit of 18th-century racial mythology.

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On the Quebec Student Strike

I wrote this last week for a US publication, but it ended up falling through the cracks there, so I'll just post it here.

On April 23, writing in the Chronicle of Higher Education, Lilian Radovac aptly described the past few months of upheaval across Quebec as "the biggest student uprising you've never heard of." This movement, which began building from early February of this year, has at its peak involved over 300,000 students across the province. A demonstration on March 22 attracted over 200,000 participants to the streets of Montreal. There have been scores of arrests.

The official reason for the movement is student opposition to the announcement from the government of provincial prime minister Jean Charest of its intention to raise university tuition around 75% over the next five years, to a little under $4000 per year. At the end of this period, Quebec tuition will still be the lowest of all Canadian universities, which are in turn much less expensive than all American public universities.

In spite of what many outside of the province consider a deal too good to complain about, one frequent demand of the demonstrators is for something even better than what Quebec students had before the hikes: free university education for all. This is of course a tall order, and that it can be made at all has much to do with the unique place of Quebec in North American society, and with the sense of many in this province that it is a society based on a different set of values, and a different set of choices, than those of the rest of the continent. As Sameer Zuberi wrote recently in the Huffington Post, "Quebecers have made a societal choice to keep education accessible to all, regardless of income."

One question right now is whether Quebec will in fact be able to hold out against the consumer model of education that is sweeping the world around it. While it may be that the global economic forces behind these changes are too powerful to be resisted, many Quebec students believe that theirs is a special pocket of the world, one where there remains some hope that things can be done differently. This belief is utopian and traditionalist at once: in addition to insisting on a future for the university that any business model of this institution would deem unrealistic, it also insists on holding to a conception of the university that the business model supposes to be of no value in today's world.

The attitude of the government, and of university administrations, is stubbornly 'realistic', a realism that manifests itself in consistent unwillingness to engage in dialogue with the student demonstrators. Instead, university administrations have largely preferred to let the police, and in some cases private security firms, do their speaking for them, in the language of force. This is surprising, particularly after a pepper-spray incident at McGill University last Fall seemed to most in the Quebec university community to drive home the point that universities are better off handling their own affairs, even when these involve tremendous discord, rather than calling in outside force to do so.

Whether Quebec can hold out against broader regional and global changes or not, it is not difficult to see that there are larger social factors behind the discontent, of which the hikes are only one symptom, concerning the value of education and the future of the university. Many of the most engaged students, and many of the most vocal defenders of the strike among faculty members, are based in philosophy departments. It is difficult not to notice that it is the vision of the university that philosophers tend to hold --as a sanctuary for disinterested inquiry, and as a place where one begins a life-long process of cultivating wisdom and character-- that is currently under threat, and that this threat is part of the broader set of reasons that have brought the student movement into being.

To put this last point a bit more pessimistically: it is growing ever harder to study, to teach, and to do philosophy in North American universities. One has the sense, in fact, that from a high administrator's point of view, the humanities in general must appear as a sort of vestigial organ upon the university, something it hasn't yet lost fully through the process of evolution, yet something that no longer contributes to the central mission of the university. That mission is, increasingly, to 'partner' with the private sector. Among other things, this partnering requires that academics learn to speak, or to imitate, the language of the men and women of business. And this in turn requires that the short-term pay-off of inquiry be immediately evident, even, or especially, to those who are not participating in the inquiry.

Until recently the slogan of my own university was 'Real Education for the Real World'. That always rubbed me the wrong way, for a great part of philosophy is dedicated to the systematic investigation of the problem of the real world: of whether it exists, of how we can know whether it does, and, if it does exist, of its nature and ultimate causes. Philosophers can't assume at the outset that they know what sort of world one ought to be preparing for, and in this respect any philosophy that pretends to be preparing students for some pre-given, clearly defined 'real world' is fake philosophy.

Of course, by 'real world' what is implicitly meant is 'business world'. Late in March, Guillaume Charette, a law student at the Université de Montréal requested an injunction against the strikers on the grounds --often rehearsed by Quebec university administrations-- that students are not unionized workers and so it is literally impossible for them to strike; they are in fact consumers, who are only 'boycotting' a particular sort of service (and one for which they have already paid). Carl Bouchard, a history professor at the Université de Montréal, noted in response that on this narrow definition, we would also have to redescribe hunger-strikers as 'food-boycotters'. But the bigger problem with Charette's argument is that it misconstrues education as something that can be consumed, something that can be purchased, rather than as a process of self-cultivation, with which the university and its faculty are much better able to assist when the students do not take us to be serving them in the same way flight attendants or Starbucks employees do.

Ostensibly in the name of 'better service', universities are cutting corners and streamlining in a way that is jarringly similar to the recent upheavals in, say, the airline industry. Like almost every industry in recent years, more and more of the university experience is moving online. One often hears that the fate of the newspaper industry is the best guide to what will happen, with perhaps a decade's delay, to the university. I recently learned that my own university will soon be offering students the choice of submitting course evaluations (that is, assessments of my ability in introducing them to philosophy) by mobile phone. The student evaluation, once a necessary counterweight to the sometimes arbitrary authority of faculty members, is now reduced to a convenient iPhone app, a streamlining of the educational product that directly parallels the appearance of mobile-phone-based boarding passes. Both the educational and the travel technologies are meant to be used with equal casualness and insouciance.

One way to understand the current movement would be to suppose that there is a dawning awareness that being given handy new apps for submission of course evaluations is not at all the same thing as being listened to. At every turn, the Quebec government has reacted to the students' requests to open up lines of communication with something approaching contempt. The government's line has been that there is nothing to discuss, since the budget is already a fait accompli. But what this misses are the broader concerns about the fate of education. It also misses the value of the students' sincere effort to think about radically different --and, yes, unrealistic-- models of the fate of universities in an era in which the consumer model threatens to infect nearly all varieties of human social interaction.

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The Two Bobs: A Note on Cults of Personality

Once a year or so I permit myself to be alarmed by the maneuverings of Bob Avakian, the chairman of the Revolutionary Communist Party of the United States. Some years ago I was invited onto the radio show of one of Avakian's principal porte-parole, whose name escapes me now, but who is a well-known fixture at the lower end of the radio dial.

The subject was some uncontroversial thing, the indefensibility of the US invasion of Iraq or the like. At some point, when it came to discussing the propaganda operation leading up to this invasion, I invoked the name of Stalin, which stopped my host cold, and triggered a spontaneous defense of the Ossetian caudillo, who, I was told, might have had to take some extreme measures, but was sure nonetheless to end up 'on the right side of history'.

This got me Googling the radio program I had innocently agreed to be on, which landed me after a few clicks on the website of the RCP-USA, learning all about the elusive Chairman Bob. A veteran of the '60s student movement in Berkeley, Avakian is now the leading Maoist figure in the US. Fine. that's his thing, and surely there's a place for it. There is a legitimate debate to be had about the historical legacy of the great leap forward. I am a pacifist, and I think that it was not worth it; I understand however the arguments of those who draw to our attention the fact that, through the bloody violence of it, China really did effect a great leap forward, and that therefore I should be interrogating myself about the ways in which my own flaccid pacifism helps maintain the interests of the imperialist lackeys, the paper tigers, etc.

That's all exciting stuff to debate. But what I can't go along with is the conscious cultivation by Avakian and his enablers of a cult of personality around this rather unexceptional Californian. It's remarkable to see them working at it (Avakian has even said, in response to the criticism that there is such a cult: "I certainly hope so— we’ve been working very hard to create one."). This does at least help me to put Maoism in perspective. When I've read Mao, and been utterly put off by the cultic aspect of it, I have sometimes tried to tell myself that this must be something deeply rooted in Chinese culture, and that cannot but come across as odd when translated into English and presented as a universalizable revolutionary doctrine. Why, after all, even if I ultimately judge that the great leap forward was worth it, should I give the slightest shit about Mao the guy? Why should I care about that stupid face of his? It must have something to do, I've often told myself, with ancestor worship, with cultural legacies I simply can't understand, just like I can't understand pangolin worship or couvade.

But the RCP has managed to duplicate precisely the tone of the unbelievably deadpan party-line correctness we know from the Little Red Book, yet transplanted into familiar American situations. Consider this testimonial about Chairman Avakian from a certain Carl Dix, entitled "Traveling with Chairman Avakian: A Determined Revolutionary Leader, and a Fired Man, for Decades." Dix was a member of the Black Workers' Congress from Baltimore, who was hosted by Avakian during a visit to New York. They had a discussion about some minor points of doctrinal difference between the BWC and Avakian's own group, after which, so Dix testifies, the "discussion I had with Bob Avakian was a very important turning point in my life. It is no exaggeration to say that because of it I was able to stay on the revolutionary path." Dix goes on:

The carrying forward of this line struggle is a testament to the correctness of the line that Bob Avakian has led the RCP in forging from the months leading to its formation down to the present. And it is a testament to the importance of us all learning from the approach and method he has brought to the revolutionary struggle for all of the more than three decades that I've known him.

Avakian keeps out of sight these days, and we are not told by Dix when this meeting took place, so we are left with the impression of a mythical encounter, of something fable-like that takes place outside of history but that serves as a seed for the beginning of history: like the Buddha's first witnessing of poverty. Notwithstanding his reclusion, the RCP website assures us that Avakian has an "irrepressible sense of humor" (just the other day I was irked by the assurance from Jobbik, the extreme right-wing Hungarian political party, that their leader Gábor Vona "is perhaps most notable for his disarming sense of humour, which frequently causes members of the audience at Jobbik public forums to be doubled-up with laughter." Why do political leaders who advance themselves through the threat of violence always feel the need to explicitly insist upon their own good humor?)

And now the RCP has a campaign underway that they're calling 'BA Everywhere', which is "aimed at raising big money to project Bob Avakian’s voice and works throughout society—to make BA a household word." It's being supported by something they're calling "The BAsics bus tour" (sic). Sunsara Taylor participated in one of these tours, and explained its importance as follows:

[T]he more that we are promoting Bob Avakian as who he actually is and what he is actually indispensible to (revolution aimed at the emancipation of all of humanity), the more we will be drawing forward and engaging the biggest questions of this revolution and bringing growing numbers into it.

In short, hail Bob.

Some of us of a certain age and from a certain part of the world will have trouble suppressing the memory of a different Bob, the fictional idol of the satirical Church of the SubGenius. Here the name 'Bob' was evidently chosen precisely for its uramerikanisch sonority, for its quintessential regular-guy sort of American anonymity. Bob is himself completely non-descript; he is to be worshipped not because he is exceptional, but precisely because he is a cipher. 

Now the Church of the SubGenius was described by at least one of its prominent members as a 'very serious joke'. This is an approach to life that makes sense to me, which explains my at least tangential affiliation with the SubGenius crowd at an earlier stage of my development.

A serious joke is still a joke, and it is for exactly this reason that I would still contend that anyone loyal to this latter Bob, who does not exist, is leagues more sophisticated intellectually (and, I would argue, politically) than a follower of the Bob with whom we began. The Church of the SubGenius is trying to penetrate to the essence of mass movements, is exploring, through irony, what it means to line up behind some image of a head. Here there could be no real talk of 'correctness', and the literal mind that knows only correctness and incorrectness can only fear and hate the mind that works at another level. I have no doubt that Avakian would send the frivolous pranksters behind the SubGenius to the fields if he ever gained power.

Of course, the thing is, he most certainly won't, and it's in this connection that the intentional cultivation of a cult of personality seems so ridiculous to me. In order for such a cult to work, there it has to have the power of coercion behind it. Show me a single example, anywhere in world history, of a cult of personality that is not backed up by threat of force. It's a straightforward contradiction. Without such a threat, Chairman Bob is literally just a chairman, like the chairman of a school board, or of a Future Farmers of America milking competition. Even if the RCP were to seize power, its coercion could really only be exercised after the shit's already gone down. In the meantime there is simply no way that Chairman Bob could reasonably hope his dimly glowing personality might have sufficient purchase on (say) my attention to be able to bring about the cult he desires. How could it, when I've got the other Bob to amuse me?

Bob Avakian could become an important figure in my life, when, after the revolution, he sends his thugs to arrest me for this here display of gross incorrectness. I guess that's a chance I'm willing to take. Until then, as the other Bob says, give me slack.

Probably the Best Visual Pun on an Ancient Sanskrit Grammarian and a Light Italian Repast Ever

Pussies vs. Dicks in Putin's Russia

Amateur neo-Kremlinologists will by now have heard of Pussy Riot, a league of masked anarchist feminist punks who, until recently, could be spotted around Moscow performing their music, uninvited, in public spaces. Their career was cut short when two of their members were detained by Putin's security forces. Here is a clip of what appear to be various performances, to the tune of their best-known song, "Kropotkin-Vodka":

 

As far as I know, no one has yet attempted to translate the lyrics into English, so let me give it a try:

Occupy the city with a frying pan
Go out with a vacuum cleaner, reach orgasm;
Seduce the battalions of police virgins.
The naked cops rejoice at the new reforms.

Cunt to the sexist fucking Putinites!

Kropotkin-Vodka floats in their stomachs
You're doing fine, and the Kremlin bastards
Are having a rebellion of the johns, poisoning is fatal
Blinkers won't help, meet Kennedy.

Cunt to the fucking cop stooges.

I must have slept, the day again is for oppression,
Brass knuckles in my pocket: feminism, that is,
Carry your soup to eastern Siberia,
So that [Pussy] Riot can be sufficiently vulgar.

Cunt to the sexist fucking Putinites!

If I were to attempt an analysis, I would point out that on one level it appears that something is getting lost in the translation of a certain species of Western anarchist feminism into the Eastern European context. The formula here seems to be the assertion of a radical political stance through straightforward, in-your-face vulgarity-- something that I think is rather foreign to Western feminism. But I also think it's a mistake to try to interpret this as a borrowing or a derivation from the West: in fact it connects up with a long history of political dissent in Russia, and more broadly in Eastern Europe, through the public assertion of sexuality, most of which has not traditionally been overtly feminist. Most recently, we had the case of Voïna (War), an artists' collective that was brutally supressed by the KGB, or whatever they're calling themselves these days, after painting a giant phallus on a drawbridge that rises right next to the security forces' headquarters in Moscow. Banksy rushed to their support, though one suspects that he would have considered graffiti like this rather less interesting if it were to appear in London or Los Angeles.

More distantly, we have the pornographic novel-cum-memoir It's Me, Eddie, written in the 1970s by Eduard Limonov during his sojourn as an impostor Refusenik in New York City, long before he became a mercenary in Serbia and, finally, returned to Russia to found the so-called 'National Bolshevik Party': a bizarre mix of hateful fascist ideology with subversive street theater and clever manipulation of 20th-century political iconography. (To the right is a photo of me speaking, but not agreeing, with said fascist pornographer, circa 1996). More distantly still, we find the work of the Yugoslav director Dušan Makavejev in the late 1960s and early '70s, who, like the Russian examples cited, seems to have been excited by the idea, which can be traced back to the 'Freudo-Marxism' of the Soviet avant-garde in the 1920s --before Stalin's imposition of socialist realism as the only legitimate form of aesthetic expression--, that true political liberation can only come with sexual liberation, or as Wilhelm Reich put it, and as Makavejev aggressively reminded us in his film about the apostate German psychoanalyst and communist: 'Fuck freely, comrades!' 

So Pussy Riot, I mean to say, joins a distinguished lineage. But one thing is different this time around: the oppressive state against which the avant-garde is recalcitrating has grown more sophisticated, adaptable. In the West, this adaptability takes the form of 'greenwashing'; in China (as that one Slovenian guy is always mentioning), the state has figured out that it is better off not suppressing Buddhism altogether, but rather putting forth its very own, party-approved Dalai Lama to undermine the authority of that Western media darling in exile in India. The Putin regime, in turn, has responded to the Pussy Riot problem not only by brutal suppression (though that too), but also by propping up its very own aggressively sexual, masked, subversive, avant-garde-ish answer to Pussy Riot. As reported recently at Snob.ru (I haven't quite figured out what Snob is all about; all I know is that it is a consistently interesting source of news and information coming out of Russia, and, perhaps not unrelatedly, its servers are currently down), and as confirmed by a simple YouTube search, there is now a character going by the name of 'Dick Riot', roving around Moscow, making an ass of himself.

He claims to be an independent journalist who happens to support Putin, and protests rather loudly when he is asked whether his stunt is being supported directly by the Putin regime. To be honest I can't really figure out what he is on about in the YouTube clips of him, but he seems like a rather unpleasant person. Anyway what is of interest about him is that in today's Russia such a man as Dick Riot could be one of the derivative products formed in reaction to the hybrid of Eastern European sexual-political subversion with Western feminism that is Pussy Riot.

Putin is no Stalin, and the fact that he has been able to consolidate power in the era of YouTube is in part a result of his ability to coopt the forces of would-be subversion, forces that to which a tyrant like Stalin could respond only through utter suppression. Usually, this cooptation is simple Berlusconi-style media manipulation; surely the most vulgar example of this was the 'Tear Something Up for Putin' campaign, in which nubile young women could win their very own iPad2 by submitting a video of themselves sexily tearing something up that, it was understood, represented Putin's cowardly enemies. One of the most favored submissions featured a Playboy-ready young woman tearing up a pile of US dollars.

But the reaction to Pussy Riot, perhaps, shows a new sort of cooptative sophistication. It responds to the avant-garde not with more, louder, sillier, glossier air-brushed nonsense, sustained by the hope of a new iPad, but rather with a figure that supposedly emerges from the fringes himself, bearing a mask, pulling stunts, playing the merry prankster. Of course, there is nothing at all avant-garde about Dick Riot, and in fact the substitution of 'dick' for 'pussy' is deeply, literally, illustratively reactionary, exactly like the disgruntled proposals we often hear in the United States for the creation of a 'National Association for the Advancement of White People'. The very first lesson of feminism, learned by pretty much all non-australopithecines in the West a long time ago, is that feminist and 'masculinist' perspectives on one and the same thing are not, so to speak, enantiomorphs of one another. They are different because the feminine is always the marked category; everything is a dick unless otherwise specified.

So in that respect Dick Riot is not just reactionary but also redundant. That the Putin regime would be able (directly or indirectly) to produce such a creature, as its pseudo-avant-garde response to a genuinely subversive phenomenon, makes sense when we recall what a dick Putin himself is. I sat at a desk across from that morose little man in 1990, when he was consigned by the Gorbachev regime to a sinecure watching over foreign students at Leningrad State University. I swear I'm not making it up when I say this: I remember thinking, this guy's got a problem. But he's managed to do a lot with his problem, and again I think much of his success has to do with his adaptability. Stalin squelched the avant-garde. A tyrant with any hope of sticking around in the age of YouTube will take a different, more supple approach.

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David Graeber, Debt: The First Five Thousand Years

Reviewed at Bookforum. To read the whole review, go here.

... Graeber argues that the expansionist wars of the Axial period were motivated largely by the need to find new sources of precious metals to plunder; a development that came at around the same time as the innovation of coinage systems and the rise of a new professionalized soldier class. All this spurred a new sort of debt: the kind that could be abstracted from goods. This, in turn, motivated reflection on humanity's place in the world, and gave rise to what we know today as the great Axial Age religious and philosophical traditions: particularly Confucianism, Buddhism, Christianity, and Greek philosophical rationalism. Underpinning all this was the question of how debt should be paid, or whether it can be paid at all.

The guiding principle of Graeber's sweeping global history is that debt must not remain the exclusive property of economic historians, and moreover, that anthropologists are better equipped to take on the issue. The foundational myth on which economics rests, and which Graeber relishes debunking, is the "touchingly utopian" idea that money emerged directly out of primitive barter systems and had only to do with interest-maximizing exchange. Arguing against this from an anthropological perspective, Graeber claims that debt is the basis of society, and as such is inherently ineliminable. He illustrates this point through the example of debt to one's parents: to seek to cancel that debt would be impossible. Graeber describes a system of gift-giving in traditional societies that takes place over time, and involves gifts of slightly more or less value than the ones that preceded them, thus ensuring that everyone is always slightly in debt or in credit to everyone else. This sort of debt, he says, is nothing less than the continual creation of society. It is not so much that we owe something to society, but that society "just is our debts."

A Note on the Occupations

There must be a word, and probably one beloved of Bolsheviks, for what is occurring right now: there is a sort of apodicticity, an undeniability to it all, one that makes someone like me a bit ashamed to have not seen it earlier. Just two or three years ago my mind still drifted off to more beautiful distractions every time someone started to get indignant about bailing out bankers, or drew that tiresome, overwrought contrast between 'Wall Street' and 'Main Street'. I've always, to be honest, had a difficult relationship to political engagement. A vivid memory still lingers of a lie-in, circa 1988, somewhere in the suburbs of Sacramento, around the pumps at a Shell station. "Free South Africa, Boycott Shell!", we were meant to chant, as the zit-faced teenaged pump attendant looked on confusedly, no doubt thinking to himself: What's South Africa? The historical moment was just wrong, or I didn't have the wherewithal to stick it out through the lean years of activism, through the early post-Cold War period of optimistic triumphalism and end-of-history, end-of-ideology ideology. I just didn't have the right temperament for it. It's my shortcoming, not history's. I admit it.

But the thing about this moment that I am trying to get at is that one doesn't need the right temperament in order to be carried along with the mass upheaval. To say, I'm sorry, this just isn't really my thing, is really nothing other than to say, I am an asshole, a wretch. And furthermore, fuck you. To say that this is just not one's thing would be morally the same as that puerile gesture of the Chicago stock traders who announced with a sign in the window of their skyscraper, We Are the 1%. To not acknowledge that the various Occupations are good and right is to side with those cretins. There's really no other choice. 

This is a problem for me, a simple practical problem, in that I've constructed my life largely on the proposition that things that don't matter can be made to matter, and that there's a beauty in elevating them in this way. I've insisted on the beauty and dignity of arcane research projects, of finding universes in a grain of sand, as the saying goes; of retreating. But now I honestly don't know how to carry on in the same vein. I've largely gone silent in this space, for instance. More importantly, I'm finding it harder to justify my rather dogmatic research-for-research's sake approach to the mission of higher education and the humanities. I am still put off by those who would transform the university into a sort of activists' community center, and I still believe that in an important sense it is to unwittingly cede to neoliberal pressures to demand to see the pay-off, in terms of contemporary societal relevance, of the projects scholars and students take on. But still, I confess that in the current climate I am not insensitive to the accusation that to care overmuch about, say, 16th-century theories of fermentation, and to see these as a haven from one's own epoch, amounts to a sort of moral failure.

But what is it about this moment, as opposed to, say, 15 years ago, that makes this sort of failure particularly inexcusable? It has something to do with that word I'm looking for but can't find. Of course there were always people saying, If you're not part of the solution, you're part of the problem. And they were always right, but not to such an extent, I don't think, that living a life of retreat and willed irrelevance had, in virtue of their dictum's truth, anything unseemly about it.

What has changed is that things really have got much worse, even in the course of my own lifetime. In fact, I was born right around the moment of the great global lurch towards the worse, when the relatively stable capitalist order of the post-War era mutated into its hyper-capitalist descendant, an order that could only survive through rapacious growth and constant innovation of new methods of exploitation. I don't need to recite the details as if they were unavailable elsewhere (thanks, Google), but the tragic feature of recent turbo-capitalism, for me, is that with the socialization of risk, and the corrolary privatization of profit, every last corner of our lives, of our experience and our consciousness, has been financialized, has been taken over by considerations of cost, of market viability. Everything that's dear in the profound sense has become dear in the pecuniary sense: palpably, explicitly dear. 

And this is where I think anyone who cherishes those things that are thought rightly to be without a price, or that might have a price, but a price that doesn't really capture why they're dear, ought to come out in support of the Occupations. Anyone who wishes that life could be based on the proposition that there are things of value that nonetheless lie outside of the scope of this nebulous thing called 'the Market' ought to be pushing back now, if there is to be any hope for future thriving (which in my case means getting back to the history of the concept of fermentation). This is, I mean, a juncture at which even those who would really rather stay non-political have no choice but to take a side, and at which it is simply self-evident which side that is. I think the word I'm looking for is 'crisis': this is a crisis moment.

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When I went to Wall Street a week ago I was, I must acknowledge, put off by the lumpen element, by the 9-11 truthers and all the other frivolous conspiracy theorists: seething with ressentiment, imagining back rooms filled with certifiably evil string-pullers. This is a fantasy whose historical connection to anti-Semitism remains, I think, too evident for any decent person to tolerate it. The world is messed up, yes, but for structural reasons that can be entirely understood, and not as a result of hidden machinations. I found myself thinking: alright, I understand why this come-one-come-all approach is desirable, and I like the metaphor of the rhizome as much as anyone. But couldn't there at least be a minimal party line that would nip this movement's incipient goofballism in the bud? Many will say that we are big enough, and upstanding enough, to let these characters linger without any vitiation of the true message about economic injustice, but our reaction was certainly different a year or so ago when one or two yokels showed up at a Tea Party rally carrying signs that, say, reminded us of Obama's racial identity.

I don't know what exactly should be done to keep the message focused and (to go back to the original connotation of this term) 'correct'. But I do think that now more than ever before it is urgent to rally people behind the idea that they have the resources to understand what's wrong with the world, and to do so without invoking dark complots. Conspiracy theories make me want to vomit. I hate them like I hate the real misdeeds to which they are a reaction, and I think moreover that they abet these misdeeds rather than challenging them. I think, finally, that what is most noble and hopeful about the current movement is the impressively non-conspiratorial and deeply responsible approach of the majority of people involved, who are simply telling it like it is: conveying self-evident truths that you must be either a goofball or an asshole to reject.

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