By Jeffrey C. Goldfarb, September 11th, 2012 
Today, we remember “9/11.” It’s a depressing day. I feel it personally, having lost one of my best friends, Michael Asher, 11 years ago, a victim of a terrorist attack, an attack that initiated deep and wide global suffering. Distant suffering, the deaths and mortal wounds of individuals and groups large and small, in Iraq, in Afghanistan, in Pakistan and elsewhere, including the four corners of the United States, combines with personal loss. The day is doubly depressing in my judgment because, tragically, remembering poorly has provoked more suffering than the terrorist act that started the whole mess, and this continues, guaranteeing that the suffering will not end. The term “9/11” and its remembrance are dangerous.
When I went to the ceremony commemorating the tenth anniversary of the terrorist attacks with my dear friend Steve Assael, a survivor, I heard too many blind patriotic cries, saw too many signs celebrating retribution and military might.
On the day Osama bin Laden was killed: I viewed with dismay the wild celebrations of young people outside the White House and elsewhere in the country. As I wrote here, their enthusiasm confused me. I didn’t understand it, though later with irony, I pretended I did as a way to call for the end of the war on terrorism.
And even as I shared my enthusiasm for the clarity and fundamental soundness of the Democratic Convention last week, specifically as it contrasted with the Republican Convention, the repeated reminders that Obama killed Osama turned me off. “Osama Bin Laden is Dead and GM is Alive,” Biden’s favorite slogan, I believe points the American public in the wrong direction. I understand why this served good partisan purpose, but find this deeply depressing.
Action is the major antidote for depression, and I have been self-medicating here at Deliberately Considered. Thus, . . .
Read more: 9/11: A Post on Memory and Forgetting
By Jeffrey C. Goldfarb, December 19th, 2011 
Ideological clichés are deadly. In 1989, the end of the short twentieth century (1917 – 1989) with all its horrors, I thought this simple proposition was something that had been learned, broadly across the political spectrum . I was wrong, and the evidence has been overwhelming. This was my biggest mistake as a sociologist of the politics and culture.
When Soviet Communism collapsed, I thought it had come to be generally understood that simple ideological explanations that purported to provide complete understanding of past, present and future, and the grounds for solving the problems of the human condition, were destined for the dustbin of history. The fantasies of race and class theory resulted in profound human suffering. I thought there was global awareness that modern magical thinking about human affairs should and would come to an end.
My first indication I had that I was mistaken came quickly, December 31, 1989, to be precise. It came in the form of an op ed. piece by Milton Friedman. While celebrating the demis e of socialism in the Soviet bloc, he called for its demise in the United States, which he asserted was forty-five per cent socialist, highlighting the post office, the military (a necessary evil to his mind) and education. He called for a domestic roll back of the socialist threat now that the foreign threat had been vanquished. Friedman knew with absolute certainty that only capitalism promoted freedom, and he consequentially promoted radical privatization as a solution to all social problems. This was an early battle cry for the neo-liberal assault of the post-cold war era.
The assault seemed particularly silly to me, and hit close to home, since I heard Friedman lecture when I . . .
Read more: My Big Mistake: The End of Ideology, Then and Now
By Jeffrey C. Goldfarb, October 28th, 2011 
Over the past week, big changes have occurred in the little virtual world of Deliberately Considered. We have put up a changed format that has been on the drawing boards for months. You will note that while now the text of only the most recent post is to be found on the home page, the titles and images of many more posts can be viewed and easily accessed. We have been thinking about doing this for quite some time, but rushed this week to get it going in response to events just south of my New School office in lower Manhattan, in Zuccotti Park and its neighborhood. We are part of the neighborhood and seek to have neighborly discussions.
The new format provides easier access to more of the unfolding reports, analyses and debates on our site, and allows us to bring forward posts past that continue to address pressing problems, particularly in the editors picks. And most important now, it will permit us to highlight more intensive investigations of pressing political issues, hoping to inform debate about those issues. Thus, now you will find the continuing posts on Occupy Wall Street.
Elzbieta Matynia and I find the occupation movement to be of great interest. For her, it is a case where her ideas of performative democracy apply. For me, the occupation is a clear case of the power of the politics of small things. We proposed and are now coordinating the Flying Seminar with our intellectual interests and our previous work together on the Democracy Seminar in East and Central Europe and beyond in mind. As we have already reported, it is off to a quick and extraordinary start. Occupy Wall Street and Shiroto no Ran on Tuesday, Adam Michnik on Saturday. And Deliberately Considered now has a space for the announcement of upcoming sessions of the seminar, for reports on the seminar sessions, including videos of the events, and for what I hope will be sustained ongoing discussions . . .
Read more: Deliberately Considered 2.0: The Flying Seminar, Occupy Wall Street and Our New Format
By Malgorzata Bakalarz, October 26th, 2011 
With mixed feelings I rushed to PS1, to see its September 11 show. The promise was indeed intriguing and somehow relieving: in a lavish shower of commemorative events, PS1 curator Peter Eleey wrote in his statement on the show that “the exhibition considers the ways in which 9/11 has altered how we see and experience the world in its wake.” The public commemorations seemed to be unthinking. Perhaps art would present a rich alternative.
Yet, I went to the show with some trepidation. I’m getting more and more uncomfortable with contemporary art curatorial projects: less for professional reasons, while working with an artist often invited to group shows, more personal reasons, as a viewer. Following Sontag, I might decry interpretation. Yet, I must add an important qualification. Art critics are not the problem. Curators are.
I find contemporary art all too often trapped in labeling, paradigm-itizing and contextualizing; as if the death of universal values art had been addressing for centuries became conclusive with the need of pinning down the reading of art and awarding more or less random collections of artworks under common thematic, paradigmatic labels.
It does not mean that I don’t appreciate interesting juxtapositions of artworks, revealing their unexpected meanings, which have been proposed by some curators of group shows. The issue starts when these juxtapositions are radicalized, with artworks only used as a mere illustration of a curator’s statement. The art curator becoming the artist, placed somewhere between film director and writer, seems to me to be a corrupted idea. I’m sure many curators would disagree with me, and I would like to underline that it doesn’t apply to the profession in general. Rather, I address the scary . . .
Read more: “Nine-elevenism” and My Discontents
By Gary Alan Fine, September 7th, 2011 
Sitting quietly at my desk yesterday, thinking my thoughts about earthquakes, hurricanes, and the glorious Libya campaign, I was awakened by a phone call. A radio reporter from one of our major Chicago stations called, asking for my opinion about a newly minted coloring book that is designed to help children remember the “truth” of 9/11. This effort from a company named “Really Big Coloring Books” is what they describe as a “graphic coloring novel.” Perhaps we should think of this as a “Mickey Maus” effort.
While the coloring book, rated PG by corporate description, aims at teaching children “the facts surrounding 9/11,” it is not without its red-state politics. The company claims proudly that “Our Coloring Books are made in the USA. Since 1988.” The production of coloring books has not, yet, been outsourced to Vietnam. The book, We Shall Never Forget 9/11: The Kids’ Book of Freedom, has as its target audience a group that can, in fact, never remember 9/11, but only know of the day through the visceral accounts that we provide. According to the publisher, “The book was created with honesty, integrity, reverence, respect and does not shy away from the truth.” When a publisher (no author is listed) suggests that a work does not “shy away” from the truth, he is suggesting that others are doing that very shying and that the truth is both unambiguous and uncomfortable.
The book is filled with accounts of brave Americans and dangerous Arabs, and the text reminds its readers, “Children, the truth is these terrorist acts were done by freedom-hating radical Islamic Muslim extremists. These crazy people hate the American way of life because we are FREE and our society is FREE.” Nice touch, particularly on the page in which “the coward” Bin Laden is shot, while using women and children as a shield. One wonders which age child is captivated both by Crayolas and by the moral philosophy of human shields.
But my argument is less about this . . .
Read more: Forgetting 9/11
By Jeffrey C. Goldfarb, August 25th, 2010 
My recent reflections on the debate over the Park Islamic Cultural Center have been fueled and inspired by my personal experiences surrounding the September 11 attacks and their aftermath.
After 9/11, I despaired. As I put it in The Politics of Small Things, it hurt to think. I knew that the people who attacked the World Trade Center really were a threat, but the political responses to the threat seemed to me to be wrong.
The attack hit very close to home. Two close friends were in the Towers, one survived, a childhood friend, Steve Assael, but one was killed, Mike Asher, my closest adult friend . On that fateful day, I didn’t know what had happened to either of my friends. In the days, weeks and months that followed, as I attended to personal consequences of the attacks, I was dismayed by the public response.
A war on terrorism was declared which didn’t make much sense, as the very real threat of Al Qaeda was not sufficiently recognized by anti-war critics. Terrorism and anti-terrorism seemed to be replacing Communism and ideological anti-Communism (the most radical and resolute form of which were Fascism and Nazism), and many who were critical of these tendencies were not realisticly facing up to the challenges of the day. Simple Manichaeism again overlooked global complexity across the political spectrum. There did not seem to be any alternative, as the Republican President was getting carried away, pushed by a broad wave of popular support, and the Democrats in Congress, and reporters and commentators in the media, dared not question the patriotic effervescence.
My book, which was dedicated to Mike, was an attempt to explore how alternatives on the margins did provide grounds for hope. Specific small interactions provided alternatives to faulty grand narratives, people meeting each other on the basis of shared concerns and commitments, speaking and acting in each other’s presence, developing a capacity to act in concert, i.e. constituting political power in the sense of Hannah Arendt. I knew how important such power was in the development of the democratic . . .
Read more: Park 51 and the Politics of Small Things
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