Žižek on Liberals and the Arab Revolutionary Spirit (and other fun Friday readings)

Six suggestions:
1. Slavoj Žižek, "Why Fear the Arab Revolutionary Spirit?"

In this essay Žižek takes to task those western liberals who are too cautious in their support of the Egyptian revolutionaries and protestors in other nations, arguing that such a move will repeat the mistakes of the past, when western help in shutting down Arab socialism helped give rise to Muslim fundamentalism. He concludes his little op-ed:

The hypocrisy of western liberals is breathtaking: they publicly supported democracy, and now, when the people revolt against the tyrants on behalf of secular freedom and justice, not on behalf of religion, they are all deeply concerned. Why concern, why not joy that freedom is given a chance? Today, more than ever, Mao Zedong's old motto is pertinent: "There is great chaos under heaven – the situation is excellent." Where, then, should Mubarak go? Here, the answer is also clear: to the Hague. If there is a leader who deserves to sit there, it is him.


2. John Summers, "Daniel Bell and The End of Ideology"

In this timely retrospective, Summers wonders why a book that categorized the death knell of socialist utopia is still considered so important. Here's a glimpse:

What is the legacy of The End of Ideology today? I think it lies in the sober, anti-romantic, wiser-than-thou style of political analysis and leadership on display on the night of January 25, hours after Bell died, in Barack Obama’s State of the Union speech. “Obama aims to realize the end-of-ideology politics that Daniel Bell and others glimpsed,” David Brooks opined in 2009, as if every Democratic president since John F. Kennedy has not feared an uprising from the Left, after the Left put them in power. Two years into Obama’s administration, the ironies and fatuities of the style deserve to be clearly stated. While the president claims the post-ideological, responsible center, he stands accused of promulgating socialism by Americans who have no memory, and little understanding, of socialist ideology; the electorate fights over party dogmas awkwardly labeled neoconservative and neoliberal; civic discourse runs thick with empty rhetoric of rebellion and revolution, interrupted by sporadic episodes of passionless violence; and political society, long lacking the New Deal consensus assumed by Bell and his cohorts, swings from apathy to protest and back again.

And a little more from this piece on how Bell's anti-ideology might have acted as the intellectual correlative of anti-politics, which might help us come to terms with whether or not Bell was a neoconservative:

But if ideology had ended, then how could “the reader” judge the contributions of The End of Ideology? Was Bell a neoconservative, his book an early signpost for the neoconservative path? He rejected the label, though not because he felt free of conservatism. In a minor paradox that gave his book its polemical energy, he claimed that his thesis exempted him from all labels, that he spoke from a nameless position beyond ideology. The neoconservative “designation is meaningless,” he insisted—not wrong, mind you, but “meaningless.” His book represented a “new cultural criticism” that “seeks to transcend the lines of the present debates and to present the dilemmas of the society within a very different framework.” In place of closed ideologies and forgone conclusions, he mated the spirit of openness with the discipline and tentativeness of new facts. In place of wild passion, he embraced “the hardness of alienation, the sense of otherness.”

3. Check out Nemo's excellent review of Daniel Rodgers, The Age of Fracture at the PhD Octopus blog.

Although it is obvious that Nemo mostly likes the book, he does question one of Rodgers's central claims, that intellectuals in the age of disaggregation quit thinking about limits placed upon people by power, instead thinking about the limitlessness of human agency. Nemo writes:"Is this really the case though? Is it true that thinkers such as Cornel West and Judith Butler really had less of a concern with institutions, history, and power than their predecessors?"

Actually, Rodgers does make one glaring exception to his rule: race. In his Chapter Four, "Race and Social Memory," he contends that though many sought liberation from the past in their optimistic attempts to re-imagine a limitless future—a postmodern future where power was inoperative—blacks could not escape the confines of power and history, written as they were onto their skin. So instead of seeking to escape history, they sought to flip it to their advantage. Black became a source of pride, history a point of continuity.

This leads me to my next reading suggestion:


4. Peniel E. Joseph, Waiting 'Til the Midnight Hour: A Narrative History of Black Power in America.

I just read this book for the first time alongside a class of undergraduate students. I found it beautifully written and cogently argued. It's more political and biographical than intellectual history, though Joseph does pause to analyze key texts such as Harold Cruse's The Crisis of the Negro Intellectual. In short, I highly recommend this book.

5. Bill McKibben, "Catastrophic Weather Events Are Becoming the New Normal -- Are You Ready for Life on Our Planet Circa 2011?"

This is short. But I found it to be good ammunition for those illogical people in your lives who make the fallacious argument that the cold weather and storms we're experiencing refute global warming. (This coming from someone who spent two hours digging out my car on Wednesday.)

6. Ben Alpers, "Neoliberalism (Slight Return)"

In the hopes of rescuing this post from getting lost in the shuffle, please check out what I guess might be the last post on our long debate about neoliberalism. In conclusion, Ben and I agree on this important matter (which I wrote in my previous post):

"The neoliberalism (us) that Ben dug up for us—the neoliberalism of 1980s Democrats like Gary Hart—is a relatively important aspect of recent political history, but is not all that important in most larger contexts."

Happy Friday!

Žižek on Liberals and the Arab Revolutionary Spirit (and other fun Friday readings)

Six suggestions:
1. Slavoj Žižek, "Why Fear the Arab Revolutionary Spirit?"

In this essay Žižek takes to task those western liberals who are too cautious in their support of the Egyptian revolutionaries and protestors in other nations, arguing that such a move will repeat the mistakes of the past, when western help in shutting down Arab socialism helped give rise to Muslim fundamentalism. He concludes his little op-ed:

The hypocrisy of western liberals is breathtaking: they publicly supported democracy, and now, when the people revolt against the tyrants on behalf of secular freedom and justice, not on behalf of religion, they are all deeply concerned. Why concern, why not joy that freedom is given a chance? Today, more than ever, Mao Zedong's old motto is pertinent: "There is great chaos under heaven – the situation is excellent." Where, then, should Mubarak go? Here, the answer is also clear: to the Hague. If there is a leader who deserves to sit there, it is him.


2. John Summers, "Daniel Bell and The End of Ideology"

In this timely retrospective, Summers wonders why a book that categorized the death knell of socialist utopia is still considered so important. Here's a glimpse:

What is the legacy of The End of Ideology today? I think it lies in the sober, anti-romantic, wiser-than-thou style of political analysis and leadership on display on the night of January 25, hours after Bell died, in Barack Obama’s State of the Union speech. “Obama aims to realize the end-of-ideology politics that Daniel Bell and others glimpsed,” David Brooks opined in 2009, as if every Democratic president since John F. Kennedy has not feared an uprising from the Left, after the Left put them in power. Two years into Obama’s administration, the ironies and fatuities of the style deserve to be clearly stated. While the president claims the post-ideological, responsible center, he stands accused of promulgating socialism by Americans who have no memory, and little understanding, of socialist ideology; the electorate fights over party dogmas awkwardly labeled neoconservative and neoliberal; civic discourse runs thick with empty rhetoric of rebellion and revolution, interrupted by sporadic episodes of passionless violence; and political society, long lacking the New Deal consensus assumed by Bell and his cohorts, swings from apathy to protest and back again.

And a little more from this piece on how Bell's anti-ideology might have acted as the intellectual correlative of anti-politics, which might help us come to terms with whether or not Bell was a neoconservative:

But if ideology had ended, then how could “the reader” judge the contributions of The End of Ideology? Was Bell a neoconservative, his book an early signpost for the neoconservative path? He rejected the label, though not because he felt free of conservatism. In a minor paradox that gave his book its polemical energy, he claimed that his thesis exempted him from all labels, that he spoke from a nameless position beyond ideology. The neoconservative “designation is meaningless,” he insisted—not wrong, mind you, but “meaningless.” His book represented a “new cultural criticism” that “seeks to transcend the lines of the present debates and to present the dilemmas of the society within a very different framework.” In place of closed ideologies and forgone conclusions, he mated the spirit of openness with the discipline and tentativeness of new facts. In place of wild passion, he embraced “the hardness of alienation, the sense of otherness.”

3. Check out Nemo's excellent review of Daniel Rodgers, The Age of Fracture at the PhD Octopus blog.

Although it is obvious that Nemo mostly likes the book, he does question one of Rodgers's central claims, that intellectuals in the age of disaggregation quit thinking about limits placed upon people by power, instead thinking about the limitlessness of human agency. Nemo writes:"Is this really the case though? Is it true that thinkers such as Cornel West and Judith Butler really had less of a concern with institutions, history, and power than their predecessors?"

Actually, Rodgers does make one glaring exception to his rule: race. In his Chapter Four, "Race and Social Memory," he contends that though many sought liberation from the past in their optimistic attempts to re-imagine a limitless future—a postmodern future where power was inoperative—blacks could not escape the confines of power and history, written as they were onto their skin. So instead of seeking to escape history, they sought to flip it to their advantage. Black became a source of pride, history a point of continuity.

This leads me to my next reading suggestion:


4. Peniel E. Joseph, Waiting 'Til the Midnight Hour: A Narrative History of Black Power in America.

I just read this book for the first time alongside a class of undergraduate students. I found it beautifully written and cogently argued. It's more political and biographical than intellectual history, though Joseph does pause to analyze key texts such as Harold Cruse's The Crisis of the Negro Intellectual. In short, I highly recommend this book.

5. Bill McKibben, "Catastrophic Weather Events Are Becoming the New Normal -- Are You Ready for Life on Our Planet Circa 2011?"

This is short. But I found it to be good ammunition for those illogical people in your lives who make the fallacious argument that the cold weather and storms we're experiencing refute global warming. (This coming from someone who spent two hours digging out my car on Wednesday.)

6. Ben Alpers, "Neoliberalism (Slight Return)"

In the hopes of rescuing this post from getting lost in the shuffle, please check out what I guess might be the last post on our long debate about neoliberalism. In conclusion, Ben and I agree on this important matter (which I wrote in my previous post):

"The neoliberalism (us) that Ben dug up for us—the neoliberalism of 1980s Democrats like Gary Hart—is a relatively important aspect of recent political history, but is not all that important in most larger contexts."

Happy Friday!

Black Power on Campus: Looking for an Intellectual History

(This brief review of an older book is pertinent to USIH readers because the relative weaknesses of the book are directly related to the author’s lack of attention to intellectual history.)

The black power movement had a strong presence on campuses across the United States in the late 1960s and early 1970s, true at historically black colleges, such as Howard University, and at mostly white institutions, such as the University of Illinois. Black power on campuses was a movement of young people who were reacting to two forces: institutional barriers that transcended the de jure barriers of Jim Crow; and to the apparent failures of the earlier civil rights movement focus on assimilation and integration. It took the form of invented tradition: black power advocates, in response to the stereotypes about black culture and history that pervaded mainstream, white society, sought to accentuate and celebrate blackness, or a version of blackness. The celebration of blackness, of course, often constricted other forms of activism, and on campuses, often served to alienate some black students.

Joy Ann Williamson tells this history in Black Power on Campus: The University of Illinois, 1965-75 (2003), a useful and interesting case study, since the University of Illinois was over 98% white in the mid-1960s, and Champaign-Urbana was known to be overtly racist as a community. It is also a good case study because the majority of the black students on campus were from Chicago, 100 miles north of Champaign-Urbana, where black power and other forms of black nationalism had long flowered. Thus, it should have surprised nobody when tensions erupted on campus, as 250 black students were arrested for a sit-in at the student center on September 10, 1968. Somewhat ironically, just as the university took steps to admit more black students—in response to the emerging consensus that federal law required some form of affirmative action at public institutions—black students became far more militant in their demands. This irony was interpreted as unruliness by local whites, and by state legislators, who quickly enacted Draconian polices against student gatherings (that also targeted mostly white anti-war student protestors).

As Williamson tells it, black power was in part successful, as two institutional legacies of it remain on campus: a black studies program; and a black cultural center shared by students and the local black community. Williamson’s institutional history of these developments is thorough and instructive. She is especially good at dealing with the relationship between the Black Student Association (BSA), the organized manifestation of black student power, and the university, which ceded to some BSA demands so as to not be outpaced by inevitable changes taking place on campuses nationwide. For instance, the chancellor recognized that it would be a good move to create a black studies program well before the BSA demanded it, since hundreds of universities were following in the footsteps of San Francisco State College, the first to implement black studies—there, as a response to the student Third World Strike that shut down the campus and aroused political conservatives, including Governor Reagan. Williamson is great in detailing this history.

However, where Williamson is strong in institutional history, she is weaker in intellectual history. Despite her many claims about how conceptions of “blackness” changed to suit the movement, the reader never gets a sense of what this means. Few of the primary intellectuals sources of black power are cited or interpreted. This makes the text duller than need be. Where the author does include such sources, the text flies off the page. I’ll conclude by way of an example. The BSA defined blackness in terms of militancy. A poem from their newspaper Black Rap gives us a sense of this:

Black enough to belong to the BSA
but too white to come to meetings
Black enough to have lived in the ghetto
but too white to return
Black enough to understand our lingo
but too white to speak it
Black enough to wear an Afro
but too white to appreciate it
Black enough for your Honkey friends
but too white for me.

Black Power on Campus: Looking for an Intellectual History

(This brief review of an older book is pertinent to USIH readers because the relative weaknesses of the book are directly related to the author’s lack of attention to intellectual history.)

The black power movement had a strong presence on campuses across the United States in the late 1960s and early 1970s, true at historically black colleges, such as Howard University, and at mostly white institutions, such as the University of Illinois. Black power on campuses was a movement of young people who were reacting to two forces: institutional barriers that transcended the de jure barriers of Jim Crow; and to the apparent failures of the earlier civil rights movement focus on assimilation and integration. It took the form of invented tradition: black power advocates, in response to the stereotypes about black culture and history that pervaded mainstream, white society, sought to accentuate and celebrate blackness, or a version of blackness. The celebration of blackness, of course, often constricted other forms of activism, and on campuses, often served to alienate some black students.

Joy Ann Williamson tells this history in Black Power on Campus: The University of Illinois, 1965-75 (2003), a useful and interesting case study, since the University of Illinois was over 98% white in the mid-1960s, and Champaign-Urbana was known to be overtly racist as a community. It is also a good case study because the majority of the black students on campus were from Chicago, 100 miles north of Champaign-Urbana, where black power and other forms of black nationalism had long flowered. Thus, it should have surprised nobody when tensions erupted on campus, as 250 black students were arrested for a sit-in at the student center on September 10, 1968. Somewhat ironically, just as the university took steps to admit more black students—in response to the emerging consensus that federal law required some form of affirmative action at public institutions—black students became far more militant in their demands. This irony was interpreted as unruliness by local whites, and by state legislators, who quickly enacted Draconian polices against student gatherings (that also targeted mostly white anti-war student protestors).

As Williamson tells it, black power was in part successful, as two institutional legacies of it remain on campus: a black studies program; and a black cultural center shared by students and the local black community. Williamson’s institutional history of these developments is thorough and instructive. She is especially good at dealing with the relationship between the Black Student Association (BSA), the organized manifestation of black student power, and the university, which ceded to some BSA demands so as to not be outpaced by inevitable changes taking place on campuses nationwide. For instance, the chancellor recognized that it would be a good move to create a black studies program well before the BSA demanded it, since hundreds of universities were following in the footsteps of San Francisco State College, the first to implement black studies—there, as a response to the student Third World Strike that shut down the campus and aroused political conservatives, including Governor Reagan. Williamson is great in detailing this history.

However, where Williamson is strong in institutional history, she is weaker in intellectual history. Despite her many claims about how conceptions of “blackness” changed to suit the movement, the reader never gets a sense of what this means. Few of the primary intellectuals sources of black power are cited or interpreted. This makes the text duller than need be. Where the author does include such sources, the text flies off the page. I’ll conclude by way of an example. The BSA defined blackness in terms of militancy. A poem from their newspaper Black Rap gives us a sense of this:

Black enough to belong to the BSA
but too white to come to meetings
Black enough to have lived in the ghetto
but too white to return
Black enough to understand our lingo
but too white to speak it
Black enough to wear an Afro
but too white to appreciate it
Black enough for your Honkey friends
but too white for me.