Wednesday, April 11th, 2012 
Upon boarding the flight back last Wednesday night from NY to Berlin I picked up the Sueddeutsche Zeitung (SZ), finding on its first page a picture of Guenter Grass, holding a pipe. The headline read “Ein Aufschrei” (An outcry): Guenter Grass warns of a war against Iran: “the literature Nobel Prize Laureate’s claims that Germany should not provide Israel with Submarines.”
I did not read the poem, “What Must Be Said” on the flight (being busy with two young children and recurring attempts to sleep), but thought that, from that headline, I would support an outcry against attacking Iran. I like poetry making the first pages of centrist (left-leaning) newspapers, and as for the pipe and the submarines, they are signs of older times, part of performing memory in Germany around Grass who is identified with the pipe, the 68’ers and Germany’s underwater adventures, and its declared commitment to Israel’s security. So be it. But now I have my concerns about the not very good poem and about the controversies surrounding it.
In the taxi ride back home, we heard discussions in all news channels (as the driver browsed from one to the next) about Grass’s anti-Semitism, which perplexed me. We read the poem at home and were underwhelmed. Thomas Steinfeld noted in the SZ on Wednesday night, it is not Grass’s first poem. Actually, the first published one made him join group 47 in 1955, and his poetry has always been full of exaggerations. Exaggerations are part of the poetic form, we are reminded, and Grass went wrong here, as he erred about, for instance, “trying to save the collapsing GDR from the German Federal Republic.”
I would like to focus a bit on the language of the lyrical prose, preserving and highlighting parts of it that have been overlooked, like the discussion of comparable moral standing and silence, and the performance of national memory narrative.
In the German (and Israeli) discussion following Grass’s poem, the focus has been on the attack on Israeli atomic policy, on Israel’s moral superiority in the Middle East and on . . .
Read more: What Can be Said about Guenter Grass’s “What Must be Said”?
Monday, April 9th, 2012 
This in-depth post is the first in a series on the question: Why Poland? To skip this introduction, click here.
A few years ago, I was invited to give a series of lectures in Lublin, Poland. I was promised that the lectures would be translated and published as a book. It was a promise, never fulfilled. But preparing and giving the lectures was a very interesting exercise, nonetheless. It gave me an opportunity to start reflecting on how my research and public activities in Poland before the fall of communism could inform public life there “after the fall.”
I prepared and presented three extended lectures. The first was on media and the politics of small things, a topic that I have focused on in recent years. The other two lectures were on topics I haven’t explored further, but I think may be of interest to readers of Deliberately Considered. I will reproduce the lectures in the coming weeks. Today’s in-depth post: the first of three posts addressing a simple question I have often been asked, “Why Poland?” Later, my second lecture, another frequently asked question: “Why Theater?”
Why Poland? It was a question first posed to me by my mother. She wanted to understand why it was that I had chosen to do research in the country from where her parents fled. It was a question motivated by the troubled relationship between Poles and Jews. It is a topic that I have not spent much time addressing professionally, though I have had to deal with it personally. The lecture I gave in Poland was one of the rare times that I publicly addressed the topic, making the personal professional.
The lecture made three distinct moves, responding to the issue of the relationship between Jews and Poles from three different vantage points: the first, today’s post, was the most personal, built upon reflections on my personal experiences as a researcher in Poland in 1973-4. The second . . .
Read more: Why Poland?: Poles and Jews Before the Fall of Communism
Monday, April 9th, 2012 My mother was not pleased when I told her that I would be going to Poland to do my dissertation research, thirty-five years ago. “Why Poland?” This was not a simple or innocent question, motivating it were the horrors of the twentieth century, and the pain and suffering of her family. For, I am the grandson of Victor and Brana Frimet who came from the small town of Bulschwietz near the city of Lemberg (Lwow to the Poles, Lviv, to the Ukrainians). The Frimet’s memories of their times in that place, then Poland, were not sweet. This was a town, a city, a nation and a region where multiculturalism has not been a very happy matter, as it was not for much of twentieth century Europe, especially for my people. My grandparents left in 1920, and they never looked back, never regretted leaving “the land of their fathers.” Our relatives who remained perished in the Holocaust. Why, then, was I going back?
My answer to my mother’s question was filled with the naiveté and the self-centeredness of youth. I was looking for adventure. I wanted to visit Europe after I had completed my studies. I had a good dissertation proposal to study theater in Poland, and a major foundation was willing to pay for a year’s preparation and language study and a year or more of research and living expenses in Europe. This was a great opportunity, both personal and professional. For me, the pain of my people and my family were things of the past, to be remembered and understood, but not something that should restrict my ambitions and plans. In retrospect, mine was “the wisdom of youth.”
Because I was not restricted by the very recent past, which seemed not so recent to me, I could attempt to develop the capacity to remember and to understand, as would never have been the case had I been constrained by my mother’s memories of her parents. But the insight of my mother’s question persists. It sheds light on many of the problems I have faced in the course of my research and experiences in East and Central Europe, and it may help us understand the problems of clashing collective memories . . .
Read more: Why Poland?: Poles and Jews Before the Fall of Communism
Friday, April 6th, 2012 
Cynicism is a key cultural characteristic of the political right today. It’s aggressive, different from cynicisms past, much more than the enervating political orientation and questionable political tactic that I studied in the Reagan era. It is central to the “conservative” brand, first clearly presented at “fair and balanced” Fox News. It was shockingly revealed in the speech Mitt Romney gave to the Associated Press editors on Wednesday. I fear that this cynicism has also invaded the Supreme Court and think it is quite apparent in the response to the Trayvon Martin case in Florida.
Romney’s speech pivoted around the open mic exchange between Presidents Obama and Medevev of Russia. Romney sees in this the key that can unlock the mystery that is the Obama presidency:
“Barack Obama’s exchange with the Russian President raises all kinds of serious questions: What exactly does President Obama intend to do differently once he is no longer accountable to the voters? Why does “flexibility” with foreign leaders require less accountability to the American people? And, on what other issues will he state his true position only after the election is over? …
He wants us to re-elect him so we can find out what he will actually do…
With all the challenges the nation faces, this is not the time for President Obama’s hide and seek campaign…
Unlike President Obama, you don’t have to wait until after the election to find out what I believe in – or what my plans are. I have a pro-growth agenda that will get our economy back on track – and get Americans back to work.”
Given the unsteadiness of Romney’s political commitments, this is an odd attack, as was noted by the talking heads on cable after the speech, but I think much more troubling is the way that Romney used a relativity trivial informal exchange between two presidents to provide a cynical account of Obama’s “hide and seek” politics.” This explains the basic pattern of criticism of Obama that Romney, his Republican rivals . . .
Read more: The Aggressive Cynicism of Mitt Romney and His Party: A Cynical Society Update Part 2
Wednesday, April 4th, 2012 
BBC America recently broadcast Jamie’s American Road Trip. Jamie Oliver is not an academic, nor is he an ethnographer. Yet, he is an educator. His stature as a British celebrity chef, television personality, and food activist has given him a platform to explore important issues. Through his active engagement and his charitable foundation, he has helped find ways to give needed skills and jobs to unemployed young people, improve food services in schools in England, and help turn attention to the problems of obesity. He has tried to do similar things in the United States with less success. But his American road trip, nonetheless, presents a vivid portrait of American society through the special perspective of what and how we eat and prepare to eat.
Jamie’s American Road Trip began production in America shortly after Barack Obama became President in 2009. Through food and culture related to it, Oliver traveled as a stranger, and an outsider. He observed and asked this question in a companion cookbook, “We’ve all heard about the American dream … but what is the American dream?” Oliver locates this question within what he describes as a “kick-ass” recession and the election of America’s first black president. Oliver’s road trip to the United States is a backstage look at cultural issues in transition: the tough areas of East Los Angeles; a working cattle ranch and rodeo in Wyoming/Montana; the underground and immigrant areas of New York City; hard hit areas of New Orleans and rural Louisiana; a diagonal slice of the deep South in Georgia ranging from trailer park life to a lady’s tea social; and a small community on a Navajo reservation where a local chapter president is trying to preserve and revive tribal food and culture. Oliver helps us use small things to help us reflect on larger issues.
During six episodes, viewers encounter issues relating to: immigrant communities, gang violence, drugs, the hardships of rural life, homelessness, racism, economic hardships, the underground economy, problems with the health care system in . . .
Read more: A Portrait of America: Jamie’s (Food) Road Trip
Monday, April 2nd, 2012 
During two weeks under Morocco’s sheltering skies, one loses a granulated sense of current American civil discourse. Sipping mint tea in the souks of Marrakesh, the world filtered through the International Herald Tribune, it appeared that Iranian nuclear policy, gas prices, and the health care challenge were sucking up American discursive oxygen. I was vaguely aware that a teenager had been shot in a small town in Florida, but across the ocean that seemed like a routine tragedy in a nation awash in firearms. Teens are often shot and often shooters.
Within hours of touching down at JFK, I learned that the killing (or, some insist, the murder) of Trayvon Martin in Deland, Florida, constituted that now-common spark that creates a blaze in the public sphere. As is so common when the insistent force of the image outruns mundane evidence, people were making forceful pronouncements, selectively parsing the facts of the incident. Trayvon was transformed from a Skittles-eating kid to a talking point. Anytime an adolescent dies, we should weep, but should we pounce?
As many have noted, from Attorney General Eric Holder on down, Americans have great difficulty – perhaps cowardice – in discussing the pathologies and the possibilities of racial contact. Even our president is palpably anxious behind his bully pulpit. So rather than discussing the broad structural challenges of race relations we often rely on idiosyncratic moments, often tragic ones: Bernard Goetz, the subway vigilante; the dragging death of James Byrd; the wilding attack on the Central Park jogger; and, of course, OJ. Now we discuss the shooting death of young African-American Trayvon Martin in a suburban gated community. Each of these instances is a rare and atypical moment, but they are magnified to reveal pervasive racial animosities and resentments. And frequently what we believe is at some remove from how the events evolved.
The jury is still out on Trayvon’s shooting, or perhaps with more accuracy the jury hasn’t yet been called in. But on that evening of February 26th, 17-year-old Trayvon, wearing a hoodie, was returning to his father’s home in a gated . . .
Read more: Hoodie Nights: Trayvon Martin and the Racial Politics of Small Things
Friday, March 30th, 2012 
It’s been a big week for cynicism in the news. Involved as I was with the book party for Reinventing Political Culture and teaching preparation, I didn’t realize that this would be the case until an A.P. reporter called on Tuesday morning. I get such calls every two years or so about some cynical development in the news as a part of the election cycle, as the author of The Cynical Society, This time the journalist focused upon two headlines: the “etch a sketch” remark by a Romney campaign aide and President Obama’s open mic remark in his conversation with President Medvedev.
I perversely enjoy these periodic interviews. Because I wrote a book with cynicism in the title, I am asked to provide rapid responses to questions about latest cynical manifestations. This provides some kind of public confirmation that my academic writing has some continuing relevance beyond academic circles. Yet, I must admit, there is cynicism in the asking and the answering.
Sometimes the journalist and I have a robust interesting conversation. At other times, I am at a loss for words, because I am busy with other things, hadn’t really given much thought to the issue, or know that what I have to say will not serve the journalist’s needs. But even when I am not sure what to say, the journalist presses and I usually comply. She needs a quote to build up her piece, to get “expert opinion” because journalistic convention stipulates that she should not express her own judgment explicitly, and I recognize the convention and willingly comply, concerned primarily that my name is spelled correctly and my institutional affiliation is properly identified, hoping that the sentence or two that the journalist draws from our conversation resembles what I actually think. Cynically speaking, I do this because I know that to appear in public is good for my and The New School’s reputations, and there is always a chance that what I say may matter a little.
I have talked with Nancy Benac, the reporter who called Tuesday, . . .
Read more: A Cynical Society Update: Part 1
Wednesday, March 28th, 2012 
Daniyal Khan is an undergraduate student at the Lahore University of Management Sciences (LUMS). He is working on his thesis “Heilbroner and Weber: Economics as a Science, Economics as a Vocation.” This contribution was stimulated by his research on that project. -Jeff
In A Brief History of Economics: Artful Approaches to the Dismal Science, Ray Canterberry states that Robert Heilbroner:
…attributes his social conscience to his feelings of indignation when he realized that his mother could give orders to her chauffeur only because his beloved “Willy” needed the money and she had it. “Willy” was an intimate yet “William” was a servant, distinguished only by the formal driver’s uniform that he wore. (pg. 334)
He concludes the section on Heilbroner’s vision of capitalism by noting that “his [i.e, Heilbroner’s] vision is little removed from his early concern about his mother’s wealth being the source of domination of poor Willy Gerkin, his surrogate father.” (pg. 337) If it is indeed the case that this particular life-experience was central in shaping Heilbroner’s vision of capitalism, then it gives way to a few interesting and illuminating implications.
Firstly, it challenges Heilbroner’s own contention expressed in Behind the Veil of Economics: Essays in the Worldly Philosophy that visions can hardly be traced back to the experiences that determine them:
At this deepest level of social inquiry [i.e. at the level of vision] our analytic and expository powers diminish almost to the vanishing point. We can say very little as to the sources of these constellations that we project into the social universe. Few of us can trace to their social or personal roots the experiences that frame our own visions. (pg. 198)
Secondly, it shows how consciousness of the social expression of Marxian self-alienation – the self-alienation of the proletariat from the bourgeois capitalist class – in a member of the capitalist class can lead to a far reaching vision and imagination of the latent possibilities within capitalism as broadly defined by Heilbroner.
From these two implications, I wish to turn towards a . . .
Read more: Masters and Servants in the U.S. and Pakistan: Insights and Missed Opportunities
Monday, March 26th, 2012 By Tim Weldon | 
In early October a “Think Tank” sprung up in Occupied Zuccotti Park – Liberty Square. This wasn’t the average think tank; there were no wealthy private donors, no agenda driven research topics, and not a cushy chair or mahogany desk to be found. We had a blanket and eventually a carpet, some signage that we’d rummaged up from stray things left about in the park, and a small space that had to be reclaimed/cleared and cleaned every day for our 12pm start. This was nothing like the pristine halls of the Brookings Institute.
What we did have, though, were ideas and a seemingly endless number of people excited about them. Random passers-by, stalwarts of the occupation, lunchtime bankers, after-work social workers, they were all present, and all had a voice. We talked about race relations, corporate personhood, OWS finances, whether this new world of Liberty Park could ever be anything but a microcosm of the larger society as a whole. Anything was up for discussion, and there was always something to talk about, something to listen to, and always a way to feel engaged in the new revolutionary dialog that had been sprouting up all over the country and world.
Unlike a typical think tank, the People’s Think Tank became an institution organically. We didn’t sign a corporate charter, file any legal registration papers with the state, or even hire any academics (they came organically as well). We handed in a piece of paper with our email addresses on it, a paragraph about what our working group would be, and just simply sat back and let the energy of the people involved in the occupy movement take us wherever it did. It didn’t take long before the Think Tank was a fixture in the park, a place where many were introduced to Occupy, its topics, and its horizontal discussions, dialog, and discourse.
The Think Tank has changed mightily today. It is no longer fixated on . . .
Read more: The OWS Think Tank: Then and Now
Friday, March 23rd, 2012 
I want to make sense of resistance, and more: to inform it and take part. This has been a central thread of my intellectual and political life.
My latest projects examining this have taken place in new and old forms, Deliberately Considered and my most recent book, Reinventing Political Culture. This Monday at 7pm, we are having a party for the book at The New School, 6 East 16th Street, Room 1103, the Wolff Conference Room, co-sponsored by the New School’s Sociology Department and its Transregional Center for Democratic Studies, my two primary intellectual homes. It will mostly be a party, with opportunities for guests to buy the book, at a discount, signed, if you like, but as we gather, my dear friend and colleague, Elzbieta Matynia, and I will also use the occasion to publicly discuss some of the implications of the Reinventing Political Culture, especially as it addresses two related questions. What scholarship can contribute to critical political life? And, what is a public sociology?
I hope the readers of Deliberately Considered who are in and around New York come to enjoy the party and take part in the discussion. The wonders of the Web allow for the circle of discussion to be much broader, for New Yorkers and for those who can’t make it on Monday.
Actually, the discussion started last Wednesday. Elzbieta and I met to talk about the book and the plans for the party over a delicious cappuccino at Taralluccci e Vino on 18th Street near Union Square. She was in a notable self-reflective mood. What is it that we do? How does it relate to what other more professionally oriented scholars do and to what those who are more involved in direct political action (in power and resisting the prevailing powers) do? She talked about some presentations she has coming up: one in a conference at Harvard on women and the Arab Spring, the title of her talk will be “Revolution and its . . .
Read more: Making Sense of Resistance: An Invitation to a Book Party and Discussion
|
A sample text widget
Etiam pulvinar consectetur dolor sed malesuada. Ut convallis
euismod dolor nec pretium. Nunc ut tristique massa.
Nam sodales mi vitae dolor ullamcorper et vulputate enim accumsan.
Morbi orci magna, tincidunt vitae molestie nec, molestie at mi. Nulla nulla lorem,
suscipit in posuere in, interdum non magna.
|
Blogroll
On the Left
On the Right
|