Ferguson Reference

I have over-shared. I have treated very serious events that happen in the world as if they were demands for my opinion. Last night, a federal jury in St. Louis elected not to indict Darren Wilson, a white police officer, for killing Michael Brown, an unarmed black civilian. So, it would seem a perfect time to make my own comment on how patterns of dispossession and violence correlate in modern history, with American cases some of the best known.

Today, I have to remember that white consternation does nothing. What is meaningful comes from real listening one has done, on openly hearing voices of color and opening oneself to recognize a different subject of what is in effect a different country. For this, I am limiting comments here to reference to Ta-nehisi Coates' "The Case for Reparations". This essay is a work of history more sober and lucid than much of what is published by academic historians.

Last night, disproportionate amounts of the discourse focused on particulars: particular people's disrespect for property maybe associated with peaceful protest, particularities of police force-doctrine and whether and how Wilson followed them.

What this did was to obscure focus on the permanent structures "within which violence circulates" as Talal Asad says. It obscures focus on what race is and how it renders people of color vulnerable as others are not.

Arguing that race is not a determinate part of people's lives right now in the US is arguing against history. It is the same thing as arguing that anti-Semitism was created by a few malefactors in Germany in the 1930s without a long history dispossession. It is the same as arguing Apartheid was anomalous to what came before and after in South African history without recognizing the structures of the colonial and globalizing economies and the deployment of the concept of color.

Arguing America is the kind of place where everyone spontaneously, where everyone makes her own destiny and which destiny is accountable only to his own fault is to think we have an exceptional innocence and freedom from mutual responsibility.

No one who thinks about history can honestly think this, and no one has ever thought this about any place and time other than his own. It's this granting this ahistorical liberty and deference to those in our society with some of the most power and authority that we all have to do something about.

Can Xi Jinping Save the Humanities? Part 2: Cultivations

To continue from last time, I want to think about some prospects and histories of the humanities in considering the phenomenon of a state-sponsored social tradition, specifically Confucianism in contemporary China.

Like the Confucian revival, Western liberal arts can also be seen as form of learning imposed from a top upon those below. The 20th-century humanities, especially since the 1980s, are of course of a different sort than the putative Confucian revival in China. I want to keep that comparison and contrast in mind in thinking of a alternate possibilities for our beloved useless arts.

"Belles-lettres: what are they good for?" That's the name of a pop song written by many a college-dad. At least this is true of Petrarch, whose father forced him into law school, which he hated and was always trying to get at his poetic calling. To page forward some, the humanities survived the evacuation of Christianity from powerful universities in the late 19th century in large part to give a bourgeois elite a purchase on the values that defined an emerging order. Aristotle portable for running Africa or India.

This kind of culture was promoted by big institutions and the men who aspired to their vision. In turn of the century America, the institutions were private, in parallel to the development of religious and earthly humanistic studies in the Islamic world as studied by George Makdisi. But, in modern times virtually all higher education in Western Europe and East Asia came at the direction of the state. In these areas, the wealthy countries, state interest in culture also intensified in the production and curation of what many people call classics in modern Western film, theater and the visual arts.

This abbreviates a complicated story, but I want to suggest that state sponsorship, even in aggressive and chauvinistic forms, is a defining part of many of us consider humanistic refinements. The US National Endowment for the Arts may not be to American art what Cinecittà is to Italian film, but managerial forms of control bound up in manipulable ideas of social good are part of both. So, what could those models of flourishing tell us about the possibilities of what authorities might have in China with their new interest in traditional arts and letters?

With the humanities in the state they're in, how do we think about the values of our traditions in the arts and letters with the specific possibilities present in the state-led Confucian revival? I suggest we shouldn't automatically be so suspicious of formations like the Confucius Institute. We should at least remember that non-Western studies in the US would probably never have spread and thrived without the Cold War sponsorship of strategic studies by the federal government.

If academic and institutional norms don't reduce to us-free, them-unfree formulas, what might a vital, engaged and different humanities look like under official auspices of someone like President Xi? 

In China, the precedent I would think of would be an academic institution like the Beijing Film Academy and the Central Academy of Drama. From marquee-auteur directors like Zhang Yimou 张艺谋 and Jia Zhangke 贾樟柯 to their leading stars like Zhang Ziyi 章子怡 and Gong Li 巩俐, these two alumni lists are the most important in the flowering of Chinese film in the last two decades. Their star power and political savvy steered the industry out of the propaganda form into critical and commercial global standing, and they did it when so much else in China was shutting down.

Great directors may still need to sell out to earn blessings, and often their daring early work is obscured by mainland censors. Nevertheless, the carefully-supervised movie business has room now for skillful artists to negotiate the film-festivals and the broader market making movies as sharp, as sensual and as serious as any I've seen in the Atlantic film world. Might we imagine a state-run Chinese humanities similarly open to talented scholars? Might this in fact be easier when so many important academics already occupy quasi-bureaucratic roles in think-tanks and advisory boards?

To conclude, I want to think about the analogy of film and scholarship in a different light. Aside from these auteurs, most Chinese movies broad and forgettable, conservatively adherent in story-form and content. That is to say, it is hard to compare them favorably to most Hollywood movies at any given time. The point is that the excesses and incongruities of the system sometimes let through beautiful and challenging work.

If the humanities grow in China with state sponsorship, the system that directs or challenges thoughtful scholarship will be different than ours. However, at a time when the liberal arts are in serious trouble in the liberal West, we shouldn't limit our thinking to concern about the convenience or chauvinism of a Confucian humanities. We need to be more aware of the partiality and politics of our own disciplinary formation to appreciate how others might work.

Genealogy of Normals

Why do we talk about genealogy and what do we mean by it? "We" here are humanists, ostensibly the scholars furthest from disciplinary engagement with biological science where genes and descent are discussed in literal terms.

I'm considering this question because of something I said offhand without really thinking about it. The other day in discussion section I found myself describing the 19th century mass extinction of social and cultural forms. Continuing the prehistory motif, I think I mentioned the Permian-Triassic extinction event, the "great dying" around 250 million years ago. I wanted to explain a massive reduction in diversity in a familiar way and to convey a sense of objectivity to it. What had been a massive and complicated array of life-forms was reduced hugely, and one particular strand, your diapsid reptiles if you will, would become dinosaurs, diversifying to rule in the Mesozoic age.

To take the example of political thought, I suggested to the class, one could at the middle of the 19th century define very different kinds of public or collectivity particular to Islamic, Confucian, and Western liberal traditions. In the 19th century, the last model triumphed, and within a hundred years it filled every evolutionary niche, and all political situations are judged as successful or failed nation-states with better or worse legal codes. There are references to sharīʿa in the constitutions of Muslim countries; there is the sign of the supreme ultimate on the South Korean flag, but these are phenotypes belying the common genotype of the nation-state. The genetics presented in statist forms of partisanship, bureaucracy, and nationalism is of a new kind. Perhaps non-Western nation-states have exclusively Western formal features, perhaps they reflect a blend of hegemonic and local forms, but they are definitively new.

How is this the common sense account? It is handy, meaning it was at hand, and I used it because I wanted to borrow the authority commonly associated with sciences. When I'm just talking, and not thinking about things in the writerly way, I associate science with clarity. So, I wanted to borrow one of the clearest depictions there and that's a dominant metaphor of modern power: that of evolution. For the students I was talking to, I don't think I gave them something too irresponsible. But the evolutionary genealogical model isn't the fittest for more intense forms of discourse.

There are two reasons for this: 1) I don't know evolution, not really, and 2) gene-flow doesn't capture the interface between knowledge and power that's at the heart of meaningful modern intellectual historiography.

First, evolution: what is that? My understanding, like quite a lot of humanities and social-science types I know, is a collection of 19th-century tropes like the Darwinian struggle, meaning a justification of the ways of power already in place conveniently located in a racialized discourse at hand.

Second, this limited reception of Darwin can't capture a lot of what transforms in traditions as they flourish or fail. What metaphor of parentage or adaptation explains the relationship of fertilization and mutual transformation between the Buddhist and indigenous Chinese traditions in the 7th through 11th centuries? Perhaps sophisticated bio-ecological understandings like scientists today might have could do this, but nothing in the theory-shorthand many of us do.

So, if this isn't the best, why is it hard to resist? I think that has to do, at the very least, with Nietzsche and Foucault. However, I want to suggest that both forms of genealogies leave a lot of room for rethinking for intellectual historians.

In sum: Nietzsche's Genealogy of Morals was an act of violation, defaming the sanctimony of liberal and Christian values in associating them with slaves, with slaving, with the shame and self-loathing inflicted by those impotent in violence. Foucault took this de-elevation further in locating the agents of development in microphysical processes, the reorganizations of space and time hour by meter that are commensurate with modern power. Both are valuable, but we need more to come to terms with the thought structuring, responding to, and obscured by our world.

The problem with even those genealogies point to origins, to points and processes of speciation, to concretes of historicity of which we need to be more critical than we have been before. In difficult environments, life forms change over generations or they die, and this modern environment is particularly hostile to certain forms of self-formation and communal mutuality.

However, to understand forms of spiritual or intellectual sustenance in the margins of public society or among vulnerable people, we will need an idea of tradition or continuity between life and death, in suspense. Understanding what might become of Confucianism or Anglicanism, or the much more complex case of sharīʿa jurisprudence, need to account for how living forms might become more porous and plastic than they have been before. In this, the questions of influence or heritage to which the genealogical explanation incline us are limiting rather than opening. 

Nevertheless, the fact that the genealogical or genetic model is the model at hand for a lot of us is significant in and of itself. It after all is an immanent product of the processes we are trying to come to terms with.