Saturday, November 5, 2011

The storm and Adorno

The storm hit us on Sunday and for five days we were without power. It's so hard to live without power particularly in the context of modern America. If one were in a village in Nepal or Tibet, perhaps it would have been manageable to live for weeks without power because then the imagination would not expect, would not have a known reference to look to. During this time, we took a suitcase of clothes and our dog, jumped into a car and drove as far as we could get at 9 PM that night. In semi-darkness, I grabbed whatever books seemed important to me at the time. On reaching a little bed & breakfast we had stumbled upon, I found myself reading the works of Theodor Adorno and the writers of the Frankfurt school e.g. Habermas. What it must have been like, writing in exile, away from home, leaving behind one's possessions, living in uncertainty, waiting to hear the latest news about the homeland. Adorno and his Frankfurt friends had escaped to America and would face a kind of inhumanity expressed in the form of passive indifference. This was something Kant had warned against when he wrote about the ethics of hospitality. Hospitality is not simply allowing the stranger to come and live temporarily in one's country, but it is also the spirit of making that stranger feel welcome. As Gayatri Spivak mentioned when she visited our class this week, the first thing most people are told when they are allowed to stay in a foreign country is the law of return. Perhaps it was all that pent up feeling of exile or facing passive inhospitality that drove Adorno to write about ethics inherent in aesthetics. Adorno emphasized the importance of "non-identity thinking" - the moment one moves beyond a subjectivity tied to identity connected with race, ethnicity, nation-state etc, one begins to understand subjectivity in terms of what Confucius would call 'human-ness' - an affinity with the human no matter where he or she is from. This is an affinity that seeks to understand rather than judge, that seeks to value individuals not so much for their usefulness but for the value of their humanity.

Austerlitz

A book that directly contrasts with "When we were orphans" is Sebald's "Austerlitz. This is one of the best books I've read this year. It is disorienting at first but starts to come together in the latter part of the book. All this is part of the whole sense of being lost, of losing one's childhood, of trying to piece the fragments while recognizing the fluid, slippery nature of memory. The book is an aesthetically and ethically brilliant work of memory set in the context of the holocaust.

When we were orphans

Just read this work and am appalled by it. In my opinion this is the worst of Ishiguro's work. It may be aesthetically well-written but I think it is ethically flawed primarily because it trivializes the massacre of the Chinese by the Japanese during WWII. The protagonist in his search for his mother is seemingly deluded and delusional in that his obsession causes him to ignore the reality of what is going on around him. Some could argue that this is part of Ishiguro's aesthetics, that he is not concerned about representing history but is instead exploring the instability of subjectivity which in part may reference the art for art sake's argument i.e. the work of art should be appreciated for itself not for some moral or transcendental message believed to be inherent in it. The question here concerns the ethics and responsibility of writers in adequately representing global trauma, global holocaust and global massacres without trivializing them. This is particularly so given that the book is written for western readers who may be less aware of the asian holocaust. By glossing over this event which is superficially mentioned in the background of the text, the author is complicit in the larger, political trivializing of this in the imagination of the west.

Monday, September 19, 2011

The thousand autumns of Jacob de Zoet

I'm not really a fan of historical fiction but recently had to read this book for a class. It's entitled "The thousand autumns of Jacob de Zoet" by David Mitchell and it's absolutely fascinating. Aside from all the intrigue and charges of over-romanticizing oriental culture, Mitchell deftly depicts in stunning clarity the extraterritorial transnational spaces that existed in the seventeenth century. These were essentially trading posts on artificial islands on colonized lands such as Java and governed by companies such as the Dutch East India Company. The text depicts this in-between space where the sovereignty of the nation state and state laws become ambiguous and fuzzy.

Monday, August 8, 2011

The Spectator

Today I'm pouring over articles published in eighteenth century peridoicals of Addison and Steele's Tatler and Spectator as well as Jonson's Idler. The periodicals mark literature's entry into the public sphere as so well argued by Habermas. Essentially, they established the foundations for literary education later in the late nineteenth century. What's particularly interesting to me is the obvious tensions between anicient and modern; critical reading and critical writing; the notion of taste and the notion of the popular. The function of the critic and the criticism's essential ties to public literary engagements become obvious at this point.

Thursday, August 4, 2011

18th century German Aesthetics

I spent the past week reading through five core classic German philosophers in aesthetics beginning with Baumgarten, and proceeding to Kant, Schiller, Scheling and Hegel. Baumgarten, credited for first coining the term aesthetics as the philosophical study of sensual perception, paved the way for aesthetics as a discipline. It was Kant, however who, in his 1790 publication of Critique of Judgment, established aesthetics as a philosophical discipline moving it away from aesthetics as the study of formal properties of art works instead emphasizing the ontological characteristics of art work through its relation to cognition, beauty, morality and the transcendental Absolute. Someone once told me that among all his three critiques, his last one i.e. the Critique of Judgment, was the least important. Yet, on reading Schiller, Hegel and various other secondary readings, I cannot help but see how absolutely influential Kant's ideas are. Almost every philosopher of aesthetics after Kant theorizes aesthetics based on one or another of Kant's claims or assumptions. One may ask what all this has to do with literature education today. In fact, I think Kant's critique is one of the first philosophical writings on aesthetics that is based on the significance of collective aesthetic judgment in the public sphere or what he terms "subjective universality". This subsequently paved the way for further theorizing on aesthetic and literature education. Another interesting point I found is that all five of these scholars situate their philosophy of aesthetics against scientific utilitarianism of their period. For example, Schiller states, "Utility is the great idol of the time, to which all powers do homage and all subjects are subservient". Much like today, they were reacting against the pragmatic-instrumental impulses of the time and in doing so, were fervently attempting to re-establish aesthetics as a core discipline.

Tuesday, July 26, 2011

Arcadia

Watched this play on Broadway a couple of weeks ago and then bought the play script to read. I must admit, it's been a long while since I watched a play that left me thinking for a long time. An aside here - I think the play might be better read than watched! What is brilliant about the play is that it seemingly leads you in one direction so that at the beginning, you follow along an investigative path; as you come to the end of Act one however, the play's philosophical interest comes to the forefront. It is encapsulated in the question asked right at the beginning "do you think God is a Newtonian" and the merger of investigation and philosophical debates, sexual love and mathematics, past and present all leads to the very powerful climax and the very problem of sponaneity that confounds determinism.

On the aesthetic education of man



I'm using this blog mainly to keep track of my own reading. I'm reading a couple of different things a day. I might read half a book, put it down and read a chapter of something completely different like a play script, move on to a chapter of something else and then return to the book. The trick is how to put all these things in conversation with each other?

Last few days however, I found myself drawn to the German Aesthetic tradition particularly during the period of 1790s when Kant wrote "Critique of Aesthetic Judgement". I started with Baumgarten who was the first to coin the word "Aesthetic" but referred primarily to the study of the sensuous. Then I went on to Schiller's "On the aesthetic education of man" - yes critics have said it is a problematic book because Schiller is not consistent with the technical terms he uses but it is enlightening how a lot of what he says resonates today. For example, the de-valuing of the arts at the expense of science, the privileging of rationality and reason at the expense of sense and feeling, the focus on time/finite at the expense of the infinite and that which is transcedental, beyond time. What I find most interesting is that unlike some contemporary scholars who call for a de-privileging within the space of this dichotomy, Schiller is calling for a third space: "But because both conditions remain eternally opposed to one another, they cannot be united in any other way than by being suppressed. Our second business is therefore to make this connection perfect, to carry them out with such purity and perfection that both conditions disappear entirely in a third one, and no trace of separation remains in the whole, otherwise we segregate, but do not unite" (location 775). This third space is one that then becoems inclusive of multiple realities, of a kind of hybridity at ease with indeterminacy "beauty, does not consist in the exclusion of certain realities, but the absolute including of all; that is not therefore limitation, but infinitude" (location 790).

The management of grief

Read Bharati Mukherjee short story "The Management of Grief" - a really beautiful and moving transnational story. Mukherjee’s story is an example of transnational literature that complicates simplistic and deterministic accounts of globalization. For example, the context of the story involves the Air India Flight 182 terrorist bombing in 1985. The plane, having left Montreal en route through London to New Delhi, explodes over Ireland killing 329 people including 280 Canadians, 27 British citizens, and 22 Indians. In terms of airspace and casualties, the attack transgress national borders even though its rationale seems highly localized since it concerns Sikh militants disgruntled over the India government’s assault on one of Sikhism’s holiest temple. This is an example of how local politics in so-called periphery nations can affect the lives of those in “core” nations. The preceding investigations of the bombing take place, not in India, but in Canada for the next twenty years. Perhaps this is also Mukherjee’s intention in writing this story – to demonstrate that it is a cross-border issue that intersects with other nations and cultures. Thus, much of her story revolves around the idea of travel. The protagonist, Mrs Bhave, in attempting to reconcile her emotions over the loss of her husband and children, travels from Toronto to Ireland and then to India; while back in Canada, she follows a white social worker, Judith, to visit a Sikh family in an apartment dominated by Indian and West Indian community. Yet, it is this motif of travelling that conveys the sense of fluidity rather than a linear, uni-directional movement from core to periphery. This is most clearly evidenced in the scene when Judith gets Mrs Bhave’s help to persuade the Sikh couple to sign a release form that will enable a trustee to manage the couple’s finances. Though Judith, as a representative of the Canadian provincial government, appears altruistic in her offers to help the elderly couple manage their finances, she is not aware of the political implications of her act. By asking the couple to sign the release forms, they are entrusting the payment of the bills, investment of their money, and income to the state. Despite the real danger of losing all the material possessions they have, including their home, the couple continues to hold on to what they deem more important – their autonomy. This autonomy guarantees the freedom for this couple to hold on to their traditions and not allow a foreign state to intrude or influence their belief system which, in this case, means faith in God for the material rather than faith in the state. If signing the release form is representative of the symbolic act of releasing their sons, then autonomy also allows the couple to resist a Western cultural treatment of death by continuing to maintain the hope that their sons will return. When Mrs Bhave reflects that “in our culture, it is a parent’s duty to hope”, there is already an implicit dichotomy between “our” and “theirs” or us versus them. This dichotomy represents that imaginary border in which the “periphery” refuses to submit or conform to the culture and laws of the “core”.


Monday, June 27, 2011

Derrida's last interview

I've been doing a little research on Derrida. In his later works, Derrida applies deconstruction on concepts of ethics like friendship, justice, forgiveness, hospitality. One interviewer raised a question as to whether his childhood had any impact on his writings. As a Jew, Derrida faced a lot of persecution in his elementary school years so much so that he left school. I've also started reading Robert Eaglestone interesting book on postmodernism and the holocaust where he examines the extent to which Derrida and Levinas are haunted by the holocaust. Something strikes me about Derrida as well. For all his work on deconstruction, trace, undecidability, 'slipperiness' and so on i.e. the rejection of any fixed or final transcendental signified, there is a sense that Derrida is always trying to reach for it somehow, the purity of the term, the purity of the concept. He talks about the purity of forgiveness and much of his text defines what the impurity of forgiveness is (not what it is not for that idea cannot be fixed). Yet, isn't the whole paradox the case that there is a grand narrative at work here - which is precisely in the theorizing of the inherent escapability of any transcendental narrative? Perhaps this quote sums it up:

"I am at war with myself, it’s true, you couldn’t possibly know to what extent, beyond what you can guess, and I say contradictory things that are, we might say, in real tension; they are what construct me, make me live, and will make me die. I sometimes see this war as terrifying and difficult to bear, but at the same time I know that that is life" (Derrida, Learning to live finally: The last interview, 2007)

Saturday, June 25, 2011

I've started reading Jacques Ranciere's "The Ignorant Schoolmaster" and I find this text really liberating. It begins with a compelling story of a professor who asks his Flemish students who have no knowledge of French to read and analyze a French literary text. The capacity of his students to decipher the text without his help astounds him. Ranciere's text is an important reminder about the notion of believing in an inherent intellectual capacity in every human being. What happens if we begin with equality, this assumption that "all men have equal intelligence (by this he is not referring to IQ but intellectual capacity to learn), instead of inequality (which frames much of educational discourse)? "To explain something to someone is first of all to show him he cannot understand it by himself. Before being the act of the pedagogue, explication is the myth of pedagogy, the parable of a world divided into knowing minds and ignorant ones, ripe minds and immature ones, the capable and incapable, the intelligent and the stupid." What I like about Ranciere's work is his underlying ethics of concern for the empowerment and liberation of those who are continually marginalized or voiceless.

Tuesday, June 21, 2011

The Elephant Vanishes

Just read the story "The Elephant Vanishes" by Haruki Murakami in his short story collection. One of the points he raises is the manner in which superficiality has pervaded everyday conversations so people no longer know how to communicate beyond the shallow and mundane. We have "markers ... to follow" and unconscious borders that ensure conversations do not move beyond talking about dressing, rents, jobs and mundane news events. In an ultra technocratic modernised world overly concerned with maintaining balance and orderliness, the consequence is an imbalance of perception - of perceiving value in the useless and not finding value in the 'useless'.

Sunday, June 19, 2011

Deconstructing 'Forgiveness'

I'm re-reading Derrida's "On Cosmopolitanism and Forgiveness" for an in-class presentation next week. It's interesting how Derrida expands on Kant's notion of hospitality. This work demonstrates clearly Derrida's work of deconstruction on concepts like hospitality and forgiveness. To forgive what is forgivable is not the pure notion of forgiveness which can only forgive the unforgivable. It is the inherent contradiction of the unconditional versus conditional in the term 'Forgiveness' that renders its undecidability.

http://www.amazon.com/Cosmopolitanism-Forgiveness-Thinking-Action/dp/0415227127

Visual thinking

Privileging the visual over the written - a write-up on one of my articles:
http://creativityseminar.blogspot.com/2011/03/visual-thinking-for-writers.html

Saturday, June 18, 2011

Defining 'Poethics'


'Poethics' is a term I have coined to illustrate the necessary intersection between aesthetics and ethics. I am currently working on a research paper integrating the aesthetic theories of Kant, Levinas, Derrida. For example, in the Levinasian distinction between the saying and said, the said is what has been culturally determined and through which language and cultural symbols are derived; the saying is what becomes subjected to the rules of cultural discourse but which resists this subjection at the same time. Thus, the saying has signification beyond totalizing systems. It is in this sense that the aesthetic constantly refers to a transcendental otherness that pushes us to respond to the other. The ethical is necessarily tied to the poetic and hence, the term ‘poethic’ describes the process in which the saying interrupts the said by evoking and placing the suffering face of the other continually before us. In this sense, one may also argue that the role of aesthetics is to rupture all symbolic forms or cultural expression by the face of the other that is both beyond phenomenology and more originary than culture. Yet, this is not compelled by an unconditional love for the other; instead, it is grounded on an unconditional obligation

International conference on new directions in the Humanities at Granada Spain

Just returned from a fabulous and magical trip to Granada, Spain. I was invited to give a plenary talk at the International Conference for New Directions in the Humanities held at the University of Granada. I shared on the role of aesthetic education in its cultivation of cosmopolitan sensibilities.


A write-up on this award appeared on TC’s Arts & Humanities blog: http://artsandhumanities.pressible.org/lizhoelzle/suzanne-choo-award-choo-award


A highlight for me during this short five day trip was also the conference dinner which was held in the open just across from mesmerizing views of the mountains. I also had time to tour the maginficent Alhambra palace in Granada.

New wiki site for creativity conference

We had a fabulous time co-organizing the Creativity, Play, and Imagination across Disciplines conference held at Teachers College, Columbia University from May 26 to May 28, 2011. We've set up a new wiki site as a space for conversations to continue: http://createplayimagine.wikispaces.com/