Fragmented thoughts on "The Age of the World Target: Atomic Bombs, Alterity, and Area Studies"

As I sit here reading Rey Chow’s article while marking up the PDF and typing on my computer—the fifth personal computer that I’ve owned in the last twelve years—I’m reminded that the origin of the personal computer is the IBM 701, which was developed as part of the Korean War effort.  This article thoughtfully highlighted our uncritical reception of warfare—a sort of resigned acceptance of it as a daily fact of life always happening in the background, as a backdrop to daily life—in a compelling way.  It does make one think about the extent to which military logic is at work in all levels of daily life in the U.S.

The idea of synecdoche also resonated throughout this article.  The asymmetry of the “above and below” war, and the idea of the target both led me to think of her explanation of seeing the world as a picture as a form of synecdoche in which the world is experienced as a part rather than a whole. By using this discussion to problematize area studies, Chow raises significant questions about the logic of area studies and the type of knowledge that it produces.  Following Said and Harootunian, Chow advances the argument that area studies reproduces dominant epistemologies at the expense of an arena where "genuinely alternative form of knowledge production might have been possible" (42).  

I have to say that the final paragraph left me seriously considering her question: “why, then, when the United States is perceived to be threatened and weakened by incompetent leadership, should bombing not be the technique of choice for correcting the United States itself?”  The idea of turning the logic that the United States uses on others against itself is, in a way, a very simple question.  Yet, because of the U.S.'s dominance throughout the world, the question feels more extreme than it seems like it should.  Given the audacity of her question, is she advocating revolutionary violence or simply being provocative?  In a more general sense, I'm also wondering if the idea of turning the logic of violence in on itself within the United States because of “incompetent leadership” is questionable since it seems like most political leadership is incompetent by nature? 

seeing the picture

 This morning on NPR, a Syrian activist was speaking about how he hacks into the facebook accounts of activists who are picked up by the government. He removes all information that could be used against these revolutionaries and replaces them with pornographic images, anything to distract govt. officials looking for information that might help them charge these young activists. Information is collected and disseminated in so many different ways now and I want to link this with something else but for now, I want to go with the listener or viewer who is spectator.

In thinking about the visual presentations or representations of war, I was struck by Rey Chow's account of how the overpowering image of the mushroom cloud obscured a different narrative where Japan was not the victim of violence but the perpetrator. It is something I never thought about or heard of till now. It makes me realize how powerful certain narratives or representations can be so that they obscure other narratives or get normalized.

The caption of the images alter or shape the reception, the spectator. Puar cites Songtag and suggests that as information photos defy any need for the "elucidation of captions. The force of comprehension occurs not via what these photographs mean, in their contextual and symbolic specificity, but through what these images do - do to us, to the Iraqi prisoners, to the US. guards, to our sentimentalizing and hopeful notions of humanity, justice, peace. In other words, their productive force of affect renders language impotent: by looking we experience all that we need to know" (109).

Of course, these sentences take another meaning when we take into consideration the ease with which photos are taken and disseminated and whose bodies are presented to the world and whose are maintained as sacred. The photos of Abu Ghraib did go away, Puar says, and the events were reconstructed by the perpetrators and not the victims. I am trying to read the forms of visual representation keeping in mind what we have already read about testimonies and memoirs. The form that it comes in is "othering" as it states its position as one who sees, who witnesses, who keeps record, or has the eye or the language.

What does it mean to render language impotent? Is it really language we are referring to or something else? Our references, for example? Our method or medium of reception which is almost a form of commercial exchange. I am struggling a bit with Puar's book because it is speaking to many things but perhaps by tomorrow I will have a better way of putting things together. Or perhaps, that is the point - putting things together is exactly what is impossible anymore because the picture comes already framed.

Puar traces, throughout her book, the queering of the male terrorist body as an integral part of homonationalist discourse. Her thoughts on the Abu Ghraib scandal, and the manner in which it perpetuates Orientalist discourse was especially fascinating. I particularly liked when she exposed the hypocrisy of American condemnations of Middle Eastern societies for their supposed homophobia by pointing out that sodomy had been made legal throughout the U.S. only a year or so before Abu Ghraib, and that the fixation with the supposed homophobia of Middle Eastern societies allowed Americans to ignore the homophobia, racism, and misogyny of their own troops. It is the sort of decontextualizing of events that we have been discussing throughout the course--the West is able to critique the East for its homophobia because it refuses to acknowledge or perceive its own faults. She identifies this willful blindness as the “counterpart to the obsessive pathologizing of the individual” (52). While American victims of tragedies are allowed the privilege of feeling grief or trauma, “people who have lost loved ones as a consequence of US foreign policy elsewhere are not depicted as sufferers of trauma or injustice” (53).

I don’t really understand what Chow means when she says, “From being negative blockade to being normal routine, war becomes the positive mechanism, momentum, and condition of possibility of society, creating a hegemonic space of global communication through powers of visibility and control” (34). I understand her argument regarding the manner in which war has become normative, woven into our daily lives--from the technology we use regularly--which conditions us to think of the world as objectified and thus target-like--to our constant awareness of wars occurring across the globe. But I am not sure why she asserts above that it is the “condition of possibility of society” (34). Anyone have any thoughts?

racism and hypocrisy

Langston Hughes raises some questions with regard to the Vietnam war that seem so obvious and yet seem to be the very medium of obfuscations by the colonist in building the divided world. Hughes asks if small nations will be allowed to work out their own destinies in the age of super-states and nations. He also asks if the war raises the call how "under-developed countries became under-developed in the first place....Why in short, does so much of the world eat to little and so little of the world eat too much? (244)" He later argues, "A racist society can't but fight a racist war - this is the bitter truth" (Hughes, 244)

The black populations were the first "Viet Cong" victims, after the native Americans and yet, they are asked to die to kill South-east Asians to "liberate" them. The hypocrisy at the root of Western and in this case American nation is profoundly intentional (and Hughes, Sartre, Malcolm X and Walker use that as a starting point of their arguments). These texts, particularly "Walker's Appeal" allow us to think back to the notion of "bare life" or "mere life" and necropolitics. It also makes me think about the Holocaust and how impossible it seems to speak of the sacredness of the Holocaust or the crime in "grading" the (dis)quality of these various camps.

Malcolm X's speech echoes the causes and conditions of this hypocrisy and states that progress does not extend to the African Americans. He states that segregation is against the law. His insight is staggering - to suggest the US can give no justice to African Americans because civil rights keeps the blacks exactly in the same place - and that the fight has to be extended to the world, into the jurisdiction of human rights.

These writings are so moving because they are calling for a reevaluation of the self, of the conditions of AAmericans and within that reevaluation, is the demand for justice, to die or kill if need be. "Walkers Appeal' makes that same conclusion. Mere life is not worth living.

The readings for this week push further on the role of the police (state), capitalism and its relationship to colonialism and neocolonialism (the white American, Malcolm X reminds us, is rich because the black man has worked to make that possible). It also allows for thinking of the continuing forms of terror, exploitation, and crimes against humanity. What is the recourse, in the present time, for justice?  We could argue that internal genocide persists and I wonder to what extent we could re read Malcolm X's questions and apply them to the current state. What is progress or is racism still where it was?

Is "Adverse Possessions" too idealistic?

Meister’s discussion of the intertemporal and intratemporal nature of justice was thought-provoking and compelling as was his discussion of the problems with counterfactual causal claims (250).  However, I became suspicious of his argument once he rooted reparations in the capitalistic “options theory” of the pricing in the stock market.  I find this theory highly problematic since much of the injustices that require reparations stem from capitalism.  How equipped is capitalism to deal with the problems that it generates? 

It seems to me that the idea of a constructive trust is an innovative approach to this issue that introduces many important possibilities for reparations, such as the idea of moving away from damages-based reparations and the contingency that even if revolution itself does not occur there is still a scenario in which “grievance itself could still have a calculable value” (p. 253).  I also support the attempt to make “the liquidation of historical grievances conceivable” (p. 255) since the advocates and detractors of reparations that he has outlined in the article show how polarized this debate is.  However, I remain skeptical of this model because it does not seem to address the sophisticated and unethical ways that the market is manipulated, which are exemplified by recent practices that led to the ongoing financial crisis from 2008.  It seems like this market-based approach lends itself to new forms of injustices, like the environmental example that he used on p. 243, but that are not as clear cut as that example because manipulations of the market in the future are not necessarily something that are easily predicted in today’s terms.

The idea of victims under or over-valuing their grievances (p. 254-255) also seems problematic to me because it seems to further rob them of agency by suggesting that the aggrieved are incapable of coming up with a reasonable/adequate response to their suffering.  Having a mediating figure seems logical in the form of having a constructive trust administered by some party, but the admission that this set up is political further complicates this plan since today's political environment proves to be utterly ineffectual at managing the most basic state issues TODAY, how in the world could politics be relied on to adequately manage past injustices, especially those that were administered and authorized by the state?  

So, I don't think that I've necessarily answered my own titular question, but I am still left with this question of how idealistic is this proposition?

Mbembe and Williams

This week I am particularly interested in Achille Mbembe's "Necropolitics" and Randall Williams's introduction to The Divided World.

1) Interestingly enough, I believe Mark Driscoll's Absolute Erotic, Absolute Grotesque: The Living, Dead, and Undead in Japan's Imperialism, 1895-1945 takes one of its jumping off points from Mbembe's "Necropolitics." I read Driscoll's book last year in a class on Japanese imperialism, and it's a good example of how to use Mbembe's ideas for something much larger.

In the book, Driscoll wants to "foreground the ways human and nonhuman resources stolen from colonial and domestic peripheries, together with excessive profits jacked from colonized renters and subaltern wage laborers, built Japan's imperial behemoth" (6).
Driscoll cites Mbembe, for example, here:

Reframing Marx's language and transcoding it into the mass cultural discourse of Tokyo in the 1920s, capitalists depend on the mugging grotesque of the living, erotic labor of subaltern and proletarian others for their very existence. Although some of the secondary and tertiary effects of Japan's imperialism could arguably be construed as "modernizing" for those who still accept that idiom, the suffering of colonized subaltern laborers enduring existential states Mbembe (2003) defines as "being-in-pain" was its primary cause. [. . .] So in this book I link dialectically the necro-logic of expropriation--colonial pillage and capitalist profiteering, what I call, following the Japanese sociologist Akagami Yoshitsuge (1931), the grotesque--with the bio-logic of creative, desiring life, what I call, after Minakata and his followers, the erotic. (6-7)

Driscoll does this complicated thing going from biopolitical (subjectivities left to fend for themselves or living labor),  neuropolitics (commodified, dead labor where the subject lives for commodities rather than for life), to necropolitics in very much the Mbembian sense (undead death or subjectivities who are de-ontologized and killed off).

So I think there's a lot we can do with this but i'd like to go over some questions, like what does Mbembe exactly mean in becoming a subject (14)? He says the human becomes a subject "in the struggle and work through which he or she confronts death. [. . .] Becoming subject therefore supposes upholding the work of death" (14).

2) in working with both Mbembe and Williams, there is also the ideas of sovereignty and decolonization movements. Sovereignty, according to Mbembe, is the "power and capacity to dictate who may live and who must die" (11). how can sovereignty work with decolonization? the obvious way it works is that decolonized subjects are taking sovereignty and basically power over their bodies/lives back into their own hands. but from there, what? do we run into the problems that mieville brought up with property and enclosures, that the sovereign is the singularity that merely follows in the path of what came before in terms of labor and property?
Richard Falk notes that "human rights progress, while definitely subversive of statist pretensions in certain key aspects, still remained generally compatible with the maintenance of existing geopolitical structures of authority and wealth in the world and, as such, exerted only a marginal influence" and mainly looked "outward to identify abuses in Communist and Third World countries" (qtd. in Williams 16), much less in their own backyard in the Pacific.
so to that end, are sovereignty and decolonization at odds? if they work together as they do in the hawaiian sovereignty movement, can this lead to decolonization and something more?
i feel like there's something more to this but can't tease it out....

3) hey, finally got around to looking up that DEFEND HAWAII thing. This is the website and this is what they say about their products, which are mostly tshirts and apparel with the logo:

Our mission is to DEFEND HAWAII
Hawaii is often referred to as ‘the melting pot’ because our diversity in PEOPLE as well as cultures. When Hawaii is home base, literal location is not a factor. The familiar tread, tying us, is always ALOHA. DEFEND HAWAII simply strives to preserve the notion, to DEFEND the Aloha Spirit, the Hawaii way of life. Wherever you are, you’re PROUD to be from Hawaii, representing the culture and it’s essences.
Our AR-15 Logo is often questioned, but a gun is the strongest symbolized statement for the word DEFEND. The logo is not meant to provoke violence, but rather figuratively suggest protection by the highest means. We’re here to plant the proverbial seed, initiate a positive thought process. To Defend Hawaii, is to Defend Aloha..

death, violence, revolutionary

M-Ponty writes beautifully and there's a seductive quality to his arguments. We return to certain ideas again - one that stays with me is the notion that we are all devoid of innocence, humanity as an essence and humanity as a practice, verb and noun, etc. etc.

There is, however, also something in his text that makes me wary and that's largely because I still have a shaky background in all things revolutionary but I'll try to say why. Perhaps I am not getting the dialectical thrust.

1) I am not sure certain enough has been established for me to be confident in the ability of the proletarian to hand justice, to know the shape of the future that is man for man, that is more close to "humane" than liberalism provides. That is to say, the violence that comes from these practices revolutionary are "better" or "worse" or "less" or "more."It seems to me that he's trying to annul the binaries of good and bad especially in terms of speaking of humane actions but there is an elevated position that is accorded to the revolutionary.

2) It seems to the relation between intention and action is not clear to me. Sometimes only action matters and yet a revolutionary acts because of the idea/intention for a particular world in the present. This presents some difficulty in understanding temporality - present, presentness - "we are not spectators, we are actors in an open history" (92).

In such a situation, I wonder if we are talking about an ebbing and flowing of violence, but never a cessation. Or do I think this way because I cannot see the possibilities that the revolutionary can? Or is it the idea that we have to focus on, not on 'ifs" and "buts"

 There are a few passages I would like to think about in terms of why it is so particular to Marxists.

"The Marxist has recognized the mystification involved in the inner life; he lives in the world and in history..." Decision for a Marxist, "consists in questioning our situation in the world, inserting ourselves in the course of events, in properly understanding and expressing the movement of history outside of which values remain empty word and have no other chance of realization" (21).

"Trorsky, Bukharin and Stalin are all opposed to the liberal ethics because it presupposes a given humanity, whereas they aim at making humanity."

There's a lot more. I do think this is a beautiful text. I wish we could read each page and savor it and argue. I agree with other posts, the meaning of all these terms - liberty, violence, peace, justice, humanity, are gradually fading. And perhaps that is why I am also suspicious of revolutionary, proletarian, possibility...