Review of Amartya Sen's "Identity and Violence: The Illusion of Destiny"

This book is interested in the question of human identity, its inherent multiplicity, and the choices that we make in regard to aligning ourselves with certain identities over others. We all have multiple identities, which Sen repeatedly points out. For example, he says of himself that "I can be, at the same time, an Asian, an Indian citizen, a Bengali with Bangladeshi ancestry, an American or British resident, an economist, a dabbler in philosophy, an author, a Sanskritist, a strong believer in secularism and democracy, a man, a feminist, a heterosexual, a defender of gay and lesbian rights, with a nonreligious lifestyle, from a Hindu background, a non-Brahmin, and a non-believer in an after-life" (p. 19). To what extent do these identities compete with one another? And in which ways are our senses of self and community vitiated when, instead of recognizing the fullness of all of these aspects, we recognize just one or two (for example, religion or nationality)?

Seeing the world as just sets of different religions imposes a "divisive power of classificatory priority" on the world which distorts and misshapes understanding of the people in it. When we point out that a terrorist is Muslim (or overemphasize that aspect of their identity), we fall into a trap of identify someone by just one identity - often the most inflammatory, controversial one. Suggesting that "not all Muslims are violent," which sounds like a helpful corrective measure, commits the same fallacy of associating one aspect of someone's identity - their religion - with their behavior. This is one of the fundamental mistakes that Samuel Huntingdon makes in his influential book "Clash of Civilizations." In referring to various regions as "the Christian world," "the Muslim world," or "the Hindu world," his conclusions are largely drawn from skewed perceptions of one aspect of a community's identity.

While Sen hardly touches on this explicitly, it is obvious that this can have important consequences for how the media covers news. In a time where even the most important stories get only a few minutes of coverage on a national broadcast, it is easy to see how the complexities of both individuals and communities are ignored. Historical misunderstanding can result just as frequently, as when the tradition of democracy, or religious toleration, is identified solely with Europe or the Occident. Sen discusses some of these just before the book starts to go into an irrelevant tailspin at approximately its halfway point.

These ideas are important. However, there isn't a lot here that most intelligent people who have considered these things couldn't have concluded for themselves. It's already more than a little obvious how detrimental this for people who consume a lot of news - which is what probably spurred many thoughtful people to think about this issue in the first place. Also, this book is about twice as long as it needs to be. The last sections of the book, about globalization and multiculturalism, are tangentially related to the book's thesis but really need another book of their own. Sen said early on in the book that he would emphasize the role of choice-making in the book, so more on social choice theory would have been appreciated, instead of the aimless wandering from topic to topic that is all the second half of the book provides. This would have been a good, if uncontroversial, article aimed at a more scholarly audience. There was no practical use in doubling its length to make a book. Unfortunately, this seems to be a common trait in Norton's "Issues of Our Time" series, as Kwame Anthony Appiah's "Cosmopolitanism" suffers from similar shortcomings.

Review of James Cuno's "Who Owns Antiquity? Museums and the Battle Over our Ancient Heritage"

[The above is mostly a reading of the text below, with an occasional aside thrown in for good measure, as they strike me as relevant.  I welcome questions, comments, or concerns about the material contained in this video.]

While still conspicuously ignorant of the subjects, museum acquisitions, museology in general, and the debates concerning (re)appropriation of “culturally significant objects” all fascinate me. James Cuno manages to cover all these bases in this book whose major question is: Do modern states have the right to demand the return of objects that may be deemed to have cultural, aesthetic, or national value? And if they do, what reasons validate this demand? 

Cuno’s short answer is that states don’t have this right at all. Instead, he sees the rise of these cultural reappropriation laws as a way of shoring up nationalist pretentions. His argument seems strong. Two of his chapters, “The Turkish Question” and “The Chinese Question,” examine this assertion in detail. For example, when the Ba’athists took control in Iraq in 1968, they adopted strict laws of cultural appropriation in concert with their virulently nationalist rhetoric. “Their intention was to create a ‘national-territorial consciousness resting upon the particular history of Iraq and, equally significantly, of what the regime, or a powerful circle within it, presented as the history of the Iraqi people.’ Central to this effort was an official drive to foster archaeology as a way of making people aware and proud of ‘their ancient past,’ including that of the pre-Islamic era. At the same time, the Party encouraged local folklore for the purpose of inspiring communities with a sense of internal Iraqi unity, and emphasizing Iraq’s uniqueness among the nations of the world at large” (p. 58-59). In other words, at least on the level of political propaganda, the purpose of these new laws was not to maintain and preserve ancient artifacts, but rather a proxy for a relatively new country to build a sense of cultural and national identity. 

Much the same thing happened to the young Turkey while trying to survive the birth pangs of early Ataturkism and subsequent westernization. “The emergence and the development of archaeology in Turkey took place under constraints that are deeply rooted in history. Confrontation between the traditional Islamic framework and the Western model, the endeavor to survive as a non-Arabic nation in the Middle East while the empire was disintegrating, the hostile and occasionally humiliating attitude of Europeans, and growing nationalism have all been consequential in this development … The pace that archaeology took in Turkey is much more related to the ideology of the modern Republic than to the existing archaeological potential of the country” (p. 83, a direct quote from Mehmet Ozdogan’s article “Ideology and Archaeology in Turkey”). In a similar way, the Elgin Marbles served as political symbols critical to the identity and “national spirit” of the modern nation-state of Greece, not just as archaeological artifacts. 

The claim to national identity is also a common one, and one that Cuno rejects with equal fervor. We are so used to the argument that this object or that belongs here or there because of the important part it plays in making a people who they are. However, these objects are often so removed in historical time that the number of things these artists shared with the supporters of cultural appropriation shared is vanishingly small. Look at contemporary Egyptians. They share neither a common language, a body of customs, a religion, or law with ancient Egyptians, yet we are still urged to believe that one is an integral part of the identity of the other – presumably because of geographical proximity. That dynamic thing we call culture has worked over dozens of centuries to produce these widely divergent changes. The claims of contemporary Egyptians on the cultural artifacts of ancient Egypt seem tenuous at best. The ever-presence of boundary-crossing and the impermanence of cartography both speak to the capriciousness that is “cultural identity.”

Cuno argues for what he calls “partage,” the provision of archaeological and historical expertise in return for the partitioning of important discovered objects. One of the only other alternatives would be to potentially let these objects onto the black market, where they would certainly lack the curatorial and historical expertise they would be afforded in a museum. 

While Cuno effectively cottons on to an important lesson of the last few centuries – that the modern nation-state will stop at nothing to traduce any obstacle that gets in the way of imparting its influence - he does go out of his way to paint many of these states as heterogeneous and uniform in their power, which is misleading at best. Not all nascent nations practiced nationalism, either on an ideological or pragmatic level, with equal vim and vigor.

As convincing as Cuno’s arguments were, I often found myself reversing the cultural tables and asking myself what I would do if, for whatever counterfactual historical reason, an original copy of the Declaration of Independence or the Constitution had found its way into the halls of the Kremlin or the Forbidden City. Could Americans who argue against cultural reappropriation laws have the intellectual courage to say, with a straight face, that it doesn’t matter that these objects are not permanently housed in the United States? Then again, we’re much closer in historical time – in language, heritage, culture, and mores – to the people that created this country than the contemporary Chinese are to Shang-era potters or the contemporary Greeks are to those brilliant artisans who created the Elgin Marbles, which may further complicate an already intricate argument. 

Whatever your opinion on the issues, provided you had one prior to exposure to this book, it will make you re-think how art, identity, cultural appropriation, and museum-building are all intimately connected. It does a wonderful job at raising intelligent questions about how these concepts are linked.

Review of Julia Kristeva's "Hannah Arendt: Life Is A Narrative"

[The above video is mostly a reading of the text below, with an occasional aside thrown in for good measure as they strike me as relevant.  I welcome questions, comments, or concerns about the material contained in this video.]

This is a collection of five Alexander lectures that Kristeva delivered at the University of Toronto in 1999. It attempts to delineate certain aspects of Arendt’s political philosophy, including her idea of the political, the vita activa/vita contemplative distinction, and the influences of various thinkers, especially Aristotle and Heidegger on Arendt’s body of work. Kristeva’s main focuses are Arendt’s conceptions of language, the self, “political space,” and the body, addressing all with a particular focus toward their deployment and usage in political life. 

During the first two lectures, Kristeva convincingly makes the case that at the center of Arendt’s political thought rests several distinctions which enable us to live political lives (political in the sense of Aristotle’s famous ζῷον πολιτικόν, the observation that we are by nature social animals, not necessarily party politics). She says that we interpret, understand, and react to our world through and by our unique ability to create narratives. The ability to share life, action, and thought in an interactive human matrix arises from what Nietzsche called the “shaping power” of human memory. Kristeva beautifully sums up her argument in the first part of her book, in my judgment the best, in the following way:

"Throughout the life of narrative seen as a 'quest' for shareable meaning, it is therefore not a total and totalizing work that Arendt seeks. But neither does she seek the creation of a political space that would be in itself a 'work of art.' To see the essence of politics as a welcoming phenomenality, a locus of pure appearance that has been freed from the schema of domination, seems to represent an aestheticization that does not correspond to Arendt's thought. The aestheticizing reification of politics that we can see in National Socialism does not reveal the non-political essence of the political, as was once said, but its death. For Arendt, if political life is separate from its story, which demonstrates to all (dokei moi) its conflicts, it is to the extent that political life resists its own aestheticization, sees itself as an activity (praxis) that cannot be reduced to a simple product (poiesis), and allows itself to be shared by the irreducible plurality of those who are living” (p. 42-43).

The third lecture is a reading of several fiction writers, including Dinesen, Brecht, Sarraute, and Kafka, with emphasis on the implications their work has for political action. While interesting, I didn’t find Arendt’s reading, or Kristeva’s reading of Arendt’s reading, especially compelling. 

In the last two lectures, she mostly discusses the political relevance of forgiveness, memory, and judgment. Kristeva is makes some peculiar statements about Arendt, i.e., like that Arendt wasn’t aware of the large corpus of eighteenth century treatises on aesthetics and taste. I find this highly unlikely, considering Arendt’s near-encyclopedic knowledge of Western philosophical traditions. 

Overall, this book could have been much better if Kristeva herself was a political philosopher, though she does bring interesting points to the issue at hand considering her background in theory and psychoanalysis. It was enjoyable to get to read a synthesis of Arendt’s work from someone whose work epitomizes interdisciplinarity, and does not rest purely within the realm of political science or philosophy. But this is ultimately a double-edged sword for this book. While I always found Kristeva’s arguments thoughtful and well-argued, they always lacked a certain historical force that could have been better lassoed with a “tighter” focus on Arendt’s purely historic-political métier. 

Review of Czeslaw Milosz's "The Captive Mind"

[The above video is mostly a reading of the text below, with an occasional aside thrown in for good measure as they strike me as relevant.  I welcome questions, comments, or concerns about the material contained in this video.]

“There are occasions when silence no longer suffices, when it may pass as an avowal. Then one must not hesitate. Not only must one deny one’s true opinion, but one is commanded to resort to all ruses to deceive one’s adversary. One makes all the protestations of faith that can please him, one performs all the rites one recognizes to be the most vain, one falsifies one’s own books, one exhausts all possible means of deceit.” – Arthur Gobineau, from ‘Religions and Philosophies of Central Asia’

“The Captive Mind,” written in the early 1950s immediately after Milosz was awarded political asylum in France, is one of the first attempts to articulate the appeal of Communism (or, more broadly, dialectical materialism) to the intellectuals all over Eastern Europe. 

Central to the novel are four characters identified by Milosz only as Alpha, Beta, Delta, and Gamma (but who we know enough about to identify as the very real authors Jerzy Andrzejewski, Tadeusz Borowski, Jerzy Putrament, and Konstanty Ildefons Gałczyński.) Each of the four has uniquely different relationships to writing, and thinks differently about the way dialectical materialism affects their writing. In Alpha’s youth, his far-right politics calls him into writing with the force of “moral authority.” He later eschews these politics and becomes a Catholic who speaks out against anti-Semitism. After World War II ends, Alpha’s writing ideologically aligns itself with the puppet governments that set themselves up on Eastern Europe, and he is later seen only seen as a literary prostitute by his former friends. Beta, a poet who spent two years in Auschwitz and Dachau only to later be released by American soldiers, later swallows the pill of Murti-Bing and writes hard-line ideological defenses of Leninism and Stalinism. The experiences of Delta and Gamma are equally typical accounts of when the mind of an intellectual bumps into an intractable ideological system which inevitably evolves into “ketman,” meaning an outward acceptance of an idea while still holding on to unspoken reservations. In fact, this word, originally from the Arabic, was imported into English by Arthur Gobineau himself (see the quotation above). 

The first two chapters are incisive in evoking the spirit of the Communism-addled writer who struggles to balance his “priorities.” But the middle chapters on the writers seem as untrue – not false in the strict sense, but lacking the clarity of the moral-political-aesthetic themes with which he was trying to deal - as the ideology with which they are struggling. While they are presented as individuated, personal characters, the reader gets the feeling that Milosz is to turn them into archetypes while at other times working deliberately against this, which has an odd way of turning them into alienating abstractions for the reader. 

Perhaps most of all, this book serves as a tocsin. By now, an entire generation of Europeans has had the ability to write, think, and speak publicly about whatever they wish, the very fact of which possibly renders Milosz’s book a peculiar curio from the doldrums of intellectual history. For many Americans, whose questions of freedom are restricted to whether or not one is allowed to burn their draft card or a Koran, or utter a prayer in school, reading “The Captive Mind” may very well have a stultifying effect. If that happens, the book runs the risk – we all run the risk – of it becoming still even more relevant than it is now. 

Review of Sheldon Wolin's "Democracy Inc.: Managed Democracy and the Specter..."

[The above video is mostly a reading of the text below, with an occasional aside thrown in for good measure as they strike me as relevant.  I welcome questions, comments, or concerns about the material contained in this video.]

Sheldon Wolin begins his book by looking at the effects that September 11, 2001 had on the public, and especially how those effects were refracted though the media. He suggests that the reaction was practically singular and unanimous: popular opinion was consolidated through media apparatus, dissident voices were marginalized or silenced, and fear of a distant, unknown enemy (the ubiquitous “Islamic terrorist”) was encouraged. After 9/11, the miasma of terror created the perfect foil for the construction of a permanent state of fear, which the government used for a reason to use military tribunals, and indefinitely suspend prisoners. All the while the military and its surrogates became increasing privatized by corporate hegemons in the name of “protecting the free market.” Suddenly we had a “global foe, without contours or boundaries, shrouded in secrecy” (p. 40). How did this happen? 

Wolin suggests that, at the heart of American governance, are two countervailing forces. The “constitutional imaginary” (embodied by popular elections, legal authorization, etc.) – so named because it is the predominant logic of the Constitution – “prescribes the means by which power is legitimated, accountable, and constrained. It emphasizes stability and limits” (p. 19). The power imaginary, however, “seeks constantly to expand present capabilities.” Wolin suggests that the power imaginary began with Roosevelt’s New Deal policies, but expanded disproportionately with the inception of the Cold War. The constitutional and power imaginaries may seem mutually exclusive, but they co-exist uneasily within our ersatz American democracy.

Wolin uses these concepts to build an idea that he looks throughout the entire book – that of “inverted totalitarianism,” which is what he claims America is. To understand what he is doing here, it is important to look at how classical totalitarianism (that of Stalin, Hitler, and Mussolini) functioned. These worked through 

- the subversion and eventual destruction of legislative, governmental, and bureaucratic avenues 

- single-party control of the state through the presence of a charismatic leader

- boasts of its totalitarian character and attempts to actively rally the people behind state propaganda

- excites the populace into a frisson over something (racial superiority, anti-Semitism)

If you turn these on their head, you get what Wolin calls inverted totalitarianism. He defines this as “a new type of political system, seemingly one riven by abstract totalizing powers, not by person rule, one that succeeds by encouraging political disengagement rather than mass mobilization that relies more on private media than on public agencies to disseminate propaganda reinforcing the official version of events.” (p. 44) It has, among others, the following properties:

- instead of subverting traditional democratic channels, it utilizes them to achieve its predetermined ends

- denies its totalitarian nature

- pacifies, stunts, and retards popular mobility

- operates via the impression of a multi-party state (Democratic/Republican) with the illusion of at least two different sets of political ideals with a conspicuous lack of the aforementioned charismatic leader

These are just the barest of bones of Wolin’s argument. He includes a through intellectual genealogy of how he thinks we have placed more and more of an emphasis on the power imaginary, with insightful examinations of Hobbes, Machiavelli, Leo Strauss, and Plato. He also spends a lot of time looking at how the deliberate consolidation of media and corporate power within the United States has made this coup much easier.

I found the idiom of inverted totalitarianism an interesting one for looking at contemporary American democracy, even though it has its weaknesses. It is one of the few books on the subject that I have read that is just as considerate of twenty-first century American history as it is of classical political theory, and it strikes a beautiful balance. This is the best kind of critical theory in that it puts into lucid language what many people have suspected. Sometimes it just takes someone from Princeton to articulate it this well.