Albert Memmi (1920 - 2020)

Albert Memmi, the great Tunisian-Jewish anti-colonial writer and theorist, has passed away at age 99.

Late last year, a friend and I had the early sketches of a plan to host a conference in honor of Memmi's 100th birthday (at the time, the most common response to this idea was for people to exclaim "he's still alive?"). That was put on brakes after the coronavirus hit, but there's no question Memmi remains worthy of study and (now) memorialization.

Albert Memmi was born in Tunis in 1920. In his early life he was involved in socialist youth movements, and during the Nazi occupation of Tunisia he was interned in a slave labor camp (from which he escaped). After the war, he became one of the leading intellectual lights of the movement to free Tunisia from French colonization. What Fanon was to Algeira, Memmi was to Tunisia, and for many years Memmi's book The Colonizer and the Colonized was read alongside Fanon's The Wretched of the Earth as cornerstone texts of decolonial theory. That is much less true today, possibly because Memmi's later work was more conservative, possibly because Memmi was emphatic throughout his career that he viewed Zionism as the decolonization movement of the Jews.

Unfortunately, following independence Memmi found that Tunisia had little place for Jews, and he exiled himself to France where he spent the remainder of his life. He wrote a trilogy of books -- Portrait of a Jew, Liberation of the Jew, and Jews and Arabs -- which have been widely overlooked but which I think are each superb explorations of the Jewish condition that continue to resonate to this day (many excerpts from these books have been featured on this blog). He continued to write prolifically, culminating in a follow-up to The Colonizer and the Colonized titled Decolonization and the Decolonized in 2006. This book was controversial, as Memmi evinced a marked conservative turn, and there are parts of it that made me wince as a reader. But that does not mean it is not worth reading, as is the broader corpus of Memmi's amazing life's works.

While Fanon famously died extremely young, Memmi's career as a writer spanned well over a half-century, witnessing tremendous revolutions in his homeland and in the disciplinary areas he wrote upon. Hence, I've sometimes described Memmi as the version of Fanon who got to watch the decolonization story actually unfold. By itself, that makes him a fascinating character. But Memmi deserved to be read and praised in his own right, not simply as a shadow of Fanon.

May his memory be a blessing.

Edward Said on the One-State Solution

Edward Said was a fervent proponent of a one-state, binational solution to the Israeli/Palestinian conflict. But unlike some, he at least recognized legitimate reasons to worry about it. These quotes, from an interview Said did with Israeli journalist Ari Shavit, are very illuminating:

 On the status of the Jews in the bi-national state he tirelessly advocated, Said told Shavit, “But the Jews are a minority everywhere. They are a minority in America. They can certainly be a minority in Israel.” 

Regarding the fate of that minority in Arab Palestine, Said conceded, “I worry about that. The history of minorities in the Middle East has not been as bad as in Europe, but I wonder what would happen. It worries me a great deal. The question of what is going to be the fate of the Jews is very difficult for me. I really don’t know. It worries me.” 

In addressing this concern, the critic of imperialism looks to “the larger unit” and recalls another empire. “Yes. I believe it is viable. A Jewish minority can survive the way other minorities in the Arab world survived. I hate to say it, but in a funny sort of way, it worked rather well under the Ottoman Empire, with its millet system.  What they had then seems a lot more humane than what we have now”

Each of these are interesting in their own way. The first is striking for just how blase it is -- Jews have been minorities before, they can be minorities again. What's the big deal?

Of course, history suggests that it might be quite a big deal, and in the next segment Said -- to his credit -- at least acknowledges that. In contrast to those who suggest that only an Islamophobe could possibly worry about the status of Jews as minorities in a single state, Said at least has the historical literacy to recognize there are real reasons for concerns. It "worries" him. It worries us too! It's a very real and live worry!

And then the final section, which is perhaps the most ironic -- calling back to an older, truly imperial order where the territory was not in Jewish or Palestinian hands. Maybe things were better off when some third party was in charge and could force the Jews and the Palestinians to stop squabbling and live together. Call it the "no state for two people" solution -- but the yearning for a far more explicit period of foreign dominion is, to say the least, fascinating from a figure like Said.

To the Edge Roundup

Yesterday, I did the unthinkable. I not only left Google Chrome, I left it for a Microsoft browser (Edge). Chrome had basically stopped running Facebook and Twitter, and so far so good on Edge (though it seems to have trouble with Berkeley's proxy server).

Anyway, the high holidays and related travel kept me off the blog for awhile, so I have quite a few things to clear off the ol' browser.

* * *

Yaacov Lozowick remarks on his Israeli Orthodox shul's experience with a newly-hired female Rabbi. It is fascinating reading.

Venezuela creates the "Hugo Chavez Prize for Peace and Sovereignty", awards it to Vladimir Putin. I think I can honestly say that there's no more deserving recipient.

This is a stellar, stellar piece by Brown undergraduate Benjamin Gladstone on the links between anti-Zionism and anti-Semitism. It really deserves more than "roundup" status on this blog, but I find myself without much more to say on it other than "read it".

An Israeli lawmaker for Kulanu is pregnant through IVF ... and the father is her gay best friend (I could write headlines for US Weekly)! And best news of all -- her colleagues and her country seem to support her regardless of whether they fall on the ideological spectrum.

There's a controversy burbling in some corners of the conservative "academic watchdog" (for lack of a better term) community regarding off-color remarks by Yale Philosopher Jason Stanley, and he's issued a response to that controversy that I found exceptionally thoughtful and perceptive.

One of the most important skills to develop as an academic is the ability to read things you disagree with and nonetheless recognize how they can be insightful, nuanced, and perceptive. Since Zionism and "settler-colonialism" is in the news (see my extensive remarks here), I thought I'd give a recommendation to one such paper I just read: "When Does a Settler Become a Native? (With Apologies to Mamdani)" by Tel Aviv University scholar Raef Zriek. It's a very interesting paper, even though I don't find all the analysis compelling (and I've communicated to the author that his argument would greatly benefit from engaging with the Mizrahi case).

Academic Freedom versus Academic Legitimacy: The Berkeley Palestine Class

A few days ago, Berkeley administrators suspended a course in progress titled "Palestine: A Settler-Colonial Analysis". As it happens, I'm relatively familiar with the course, and became aware of it well before it found itself in the middle of a national controversy. And so observing this chain of events has been like watching a car crash in slow motion. I knew it was coming, and knew it would be awful, but there was a depressing inevitability about the destruction.

I first became aware of the class when I spotted some advertisements for it which prominently featured those ridiculous maps. That inspired me to look into and read the syllabus, and what I saw was not exactly impressive. It was indeed entirely one-sided, taking a single conclusion as a given and not demonstrating an iota of interest in alternative vantages. Basically, it was not a course that did Berkeley proud in terms of its pedagogical merits.

At the same time, I also found out that the course was a "Decal"  offering -- courses designed and led by undergraduates, for undergraduates (this also put an end to my brief consideration of enrolling or auditing -- they're not open to graduate students). My understanding is that faculty review and oversight of these courses is relatively minimal (though I'm not sure about the exact amount of standard supervision). Most of the classes are on relatively fluffy topics, really more of a way to secure a few easy credits and explore a fun topic. They are not representative of the standard Berkeley offering; they don't say much of anything about Berkeley as a whole other than that we let undergrads design some courses, and some undergraduate-designed courses won't wow me with their sense of depth or nuance. So I figured there really wasn't much worth saying. You give undergraduates power to design classes, and some of those classes won't perfectly embody recognized pedagogical ideals. Quelle surprise.

Then, a few days later, mention of this course started to burble up on my Twitter feed. I did my best to give a fair, non-alarmist description: Yes, the class looks pretty one-sided, no, it's not reflective of Berkeley as a whole -- it's an undergraduate-designed class that will only enroll a dozen or two. At the same time, the subliminal message I was trying to send was much more straight-forward: Let it go. Just let it go. LetItGoLetItGoLETITGO.

Alas, nobody ever lets these things go. The hysteria machine spun into action, and then the class was suspended. The official rationale is that it failed to get certain approvals. This reeks of pretext, and it might not even be that -- this post, though overwrought at times, proffers compelling evidence that the class in fact fulfilled all the procedural requirements it needed. And the thing is, every step in the process was eminently predictable. Of course Berkeley is the sort of place that would produce a class like this, and of course we have faculty members who don't care enough inculcating good pedagogical habits that they'll give it their unmitigated approval. And then of course it will get out, and of course the usual suspects on the Jewish right will blow up in a hysterical overreaction to a tiny undergraduate seminar. And then of course Berkeley administrators rush into the worst, most panicked response possible and suspend the class without even contacting the course facilitator, making a mockery of academic freedom in the process, and then of course that suspension will become proof that it is impossible for even the meekest "criticism of Israel" to be aired in academia. (And then of course someone will call for a sit-in, because this is Berkeley and every damn thing needs to be a sit-in, and then of course Simone Zimmerman will propose having it at Berkeley Hillel, as opposed to the university office that actually made the decision, because some people haven't met a forest fire they didn't ache to pour gasoline on).

So my basic position at the moment is that I hate everyone. This is not for me an uncommon sentiment when it comes to either Berkeley decision-making or discourse about Israel and Palestine, so I guess you could say I'm used to it. But now that this bonfire has well and truly surged out of control, I guess I'll offer my two cents after all.

Right now, the debate has fallen into the usual rut: either the class was great and thus canceling it was an academic freedom violation, or the class is awful and thus canceling it was no academic freedom violation whatsoever. This dichotomy conflates two separate questions -- "was the class pedagogically sound" and "was Berkeley justified in suspending it" -- and it is that conflation which is worth breaking down. A few years ago I wrote a very short essay entitled "Academic Freedom versus Academic Legitimacy", and I've analyzed a few academic freedom controversies through that lens. The basic thrust of the article is that "academic freedom is a constraint on remedies": It does not block criticism of bad academic choices -- the decision to invite a certain speaker, or to construct a one-sided syllabus, or to forward a terrible argument -- it simply takes off the table certain responses. You can't ban "bad" speakers, or punish those who invite them. You can't fire tenured academics for publishing awful arguments. And you can't cancel classes just because their design is pedagogically objectionable.

So, on the one hand, it is perfectly valid and legitimate to raise concerns about this course and how it was constructed. As I said, I read the course's syllabus, and it had plenty in it to object to. The problem was not that it adopted a "colonial" or "settler-colonial" analytical frame -- I think there is a very interesting course to be written along that dimension. The problem was that it adopted that frame in a remarkably narrow, ideologically-blinded way. "Balance" is an impossible goal, but good pedagogy demands that when one centers a course around a given theme, one at least acknowledge a range of views that properly bear on its complexity. The course as it stands is akin to a class titled "Palestinians: A Made-Up People?" with 15 weeks of readings all answering "yep." A class like that would be an embarrassment, a joke, an obvious failure to meet reasonable pedagogical standards.

This is why when I teach my seminar on anti-discrimination, my syllabus includes an array of thinkers ranging from Cheryl Harris to Gerald Rosenberg to Charles Lawrence to Antonin Scalia to (a whole unit on) Clarence Thomas. Anti-discrimination is a big, important topic, and while I can't expose my students to all views (let alone all views "evenly"), I would be embarrassed if I only relayed to them those arguments which mirrored my own. To do that would be to confuse being a teacher with being an advocate; it would represent a failure to meet basic standards of pedagogy and intellectual inquiry.

But on the other hand, these objections simply have no bearing from an academic freedom standpoint. Academic freedom means that, sometimes, people are going to teach classes that I think fail to meet basic standards of pedagogy and intellectual inquiry. That comes with the territory. Academic freedom is a constraint on remedies; it means that, whether warranted or not, objections that a class is "imbalanced" or "biased" or even just pedagogically terrible cannot be rectified with a suspension or ban. That option is (or should be) off the table. The decision to suspend the course is flatly incompatible with any legitimate understanding of what academic freedom entails. and Berkeley should be embarrassed that it did it.

To be sure, it is reasonable to demand of members of the Berkeley academic community that they try to meet certain basic pedagogical standards when designing courses -- that they at least try to avoid narrow and ideologically lazy course constructions and present topics with an eye towards their full nuance and complexity. Decal, in particular, should be a venue where we try to inculcate young students with these academic values -- namely, that one's role when designing and teaching a class is different than when one is participating in one (let alone leading a protest rally). It demands something different out of us, and what it demands can be especially difficult to give if one is personally close to the subject matter. To the extent that a significant portion of the Berkeley academic community is indifferent to those values -- simply does not care about courses being thinly disguised agitprop or forums for indoctrination -- that would indeed suggest a deep and serious failing in our university. But again, "academic freedom" means that we are limited in the remedies we can bring to bear against such failings. Right now any conversation we might have about these "cultural" failings will be drowned out, appropriately so, by the more obvious breach of academic freedom.

And let's be clear: the erosion of academic freedom norms has ramifications far beyond Berkeley. Sometimes, as here, it will be a "pro-Palestinian" course offering that is suppressed; elsewhere, it will be "pro-Israel" or Jewish or Zionist scholars who are threatened with exclusion from the academic community. Too many people are quick to cheer one while angrily crying "censorship!" at the other. But true academic freedom has no fair-weather friends. Either you back it, or you don't. The decision by the Berkeley administration to suspend the class was wrong. I suspect it will eventually be overturned (perhaps with some token modifications to the course; almost certainly with quintuple the attention paid to its offerings than would have resulted if the "pro-Israel" right had Just. Let. It. GO.), and it should be. That doesn't mean it wasn't a problematic offering, or that it adequately embodied the ideals we should aspire to as teachers and scholars. But academic freedom is not restricted only to those curricular offerings which meet my standards of ideal pedagogy. If we have a problem with a Berkeley undergraduate course, our solutions must be consistent with the basic ideals of academic freedom that enable open inquiry and free discussion in the modern university.

UPDATE: I have on good authority that the course has been reinstated. There may be some minor changes to the syllabus wording, but apparently no changes in the reading. More (linkable) information once I obtain it.

UPDATE x2: Here is a Forward article on the reinstatement. Hopefully that brings this sorry episode to a close.

Memmi on "What is a Zionist?"

I'm finally sitting down to try and make some progress on my pile of books. Reading Professor Zasloff inspired me, what can I say. And the book that I've actually been making some real progress in is Albert Memmi's Jews and Arabs (Eleanor Levieux, trans., Chicago: J. Philip O'Hara 1975). Memmi, of course, is a Tunisian Jewish writer whose work I've praised before. But the chapter I'm reading now ("What is a Zionist?") makes some particular important and erudite points.

[O]ne cannot propose any effective liberation if the specificity of each condition has not been grasped. That is why I protested so strongly when attempts were made to reduce the colonial problem first, then the Jewish problem, to a matter of class struggle . . . . It is reductions such as those which have made the ideology of the political left in Europe impotent.
[...]
What, then is the meaning of the oppression of the Jew? I have demonstrated [in prior work] that the Jews are not oppressed only in the practice of their religion, or only as a religious group; they are not oppressed only as a cultural group; nor only in the exercise of their political rights, nor only in their economic activities, etc. The Jews are oppressed in every one of their collective dimensions. In other words, they are oppressed as a people.
[...]
[W]hether we like it or not, we are looked upon as a special category of foreigners and we are treated as such. Unlike our universalists, the Jewish masses know this and take it into account. The Jewish masses never have more than a limited amount of confidence in their fellow citizens. That is why they constantly confirm their unity, for they know that when a catastrophe occurs, the only help they can hope for will come from other Jewish communities that have been temporarily spared. People ought to stop stupidly repeating that such solidarity cannot be allowed! That it is a reverse form of racism and other such nonsense. It is a perfectly natural self-defense reaction on the part of an endangered group. Let people stop persecuting the Jews, first, and then we ill see what they can be reproached with.

Thus, the Jews are oppressed as a people. If we accept the idea that liberation should be achieved on the basis of the specificity of each case of oppression, then we are now in a position to take another step forward: oppressed as a people, it is only as a people that the Jews will be genuinely liberated. Today, however, the liberation of peoples still retains a national physiognomy.
[...]
. . . . I have not been more sparing in my criticisms of that young state [of Israel], of its political errors or its theocratic self-satisfaction. . . . All this, however, is merely a matter of criticizing details. The essential and undeniable fact is that from now on, the State of Israel is part of the destiny of every Jew anywhere in the world who continues to acknowledge himself as a Jew. No matter what doubts or even reproofs certain of Israel's actions may arouse, no Jew anywhere in the world can call its existence in question without doing himself grave harm. And the nonJews, especially the liberals, must understand that Israel represents the still-precarious result of the liberation of the Jew, just as decolonization represents the liberation of the Arab or black peoples of Asia and Africa.
[...]
. . . . I did not hide the fact that these new ties, this sentimental solidarity with the new state, were likely to intensify the climate of suspicion in which Jews everywhere have always lived. But we have always been in danger. I do not believe that we can be in greater danger. Let us at least face danger with dignity. Above all, and once again, the perspective of accusation must be reversed. If the Jews had not been so accused, threatened, and periodically prevented from living, they would not have tried to secure a possible refuge. It is really too presumptions of the people who have persecuted us for centuries, who have made us second-class citizens, often despite their own laws, to dare to reproach us with this ambiguity that they have cultivated in us regardless of our protests, our efforts, and the sometimes shameful pledges we gave them. What they call our double allegiance was forced upon us. We would have liked nothing better than not to need it!

What exactly is a Zionist?

A Zionist is anyone, Jew or non-Jew, who, having found that the Jewish situation is a situation of oppression, looks upon the reconstruction of a Jewish state as legitimate: so as to put an end to that oppression and so that Jews, like other peoples, may retrieve their dimensions as free men.

Or again, anyone who considers the liberation of the Jews as a Jew desirable.

Albert Memmi, Jews and Arabs 92-97 (Eleanor Levieux, trans., 1975) (emphasis original).

Who is Who?

Mondoweiss (link warning) reposts Winona LaDuke:

"...euro-americans in the United States can't talk about Gaza, because we can't talk about Israel. Because we can't talk about the fact that the world is not suffering from a Israeli/Palestinian conflict, but that the world is suffering from the fact that Europe has never been able to deal with it's 'Jewish Question' without some sort of intense barbarity and horror from the Inquisition to the Holocaust. And that Europe, in particular 'Great' Britain, the masters of divide an conquer 'solved' the problem by supporting the radical, terrorist, extremist Zionists and their mad plan to resettle the 'homeland.' We can't talk about Israel because we can't talk about Wounded Knee. Because we can't talk about Sand Creek or Carlisle 'Boarding School.' Because we can't talk about forced sterilization or small pox blankets or Kit Carson and his scorched earth policy in the Southwest. Because we have Andrew Jackson on our twenty dollar bill. Because we are one huge settlement on stolen land. We can't talk about Israel because we are Israel."

We need to start with the racist exclusion of Sephardic and Mizrachi Jews from this story, since that exclusion is rampant in virtually all discourse about Israel and particularly shines through here. Israel exists in part because "Europe has never been able to deal with it's [sic] 'Jewish Question' without some sort of intense barbarity and horror," but also in part because the Arab world has been equally fruitless in its effort to resolve its "Jewish Question" without resorting to same. To reiterate: a plurality Israel's Jewish population is of non-White European descent. The median Israeli Jew is in Israel not because Europe couldn't resolve its Jewish problem, but because the Arab world couldn't resolve theirs. We can fairly say that the Arab world had historically been better than Europe in its treatment of Jews, we can also note that isn't a particularly high bar to clear. The important point is that the "Jewish question" is not solely a European phenomenon, and pretending that it is erases both the lives and life experiences of Israel's considerable non-White European population.

But put that aside, and let us unpack. LaDuke observes that the history of Jews in Europe is of Europeans slaughtering Jews. She accurately identifies the conditions Jews were facing in Europe that presaged the Zionist movement. Under normal circumstances if one is caught in an abusive relationship the right rational response to get the hell out of there, which is of course what Jews tried to do. But this response -- not sticking around to be slaughtered -- is labeled by LaDuke as "radical, terrorist, extremist [and] mad." Which just goes to show how upset people are, how jarring they find it to their expectations of what should be, when Jews don't die. Within the space of a single sentence LaDuke concedes that Jews in Europe were subjects of brutality and horror, then presumes that their desire to get out from under that thumb and go somewhere else to govern their own lives is naught but some sort of dominationist psychosis.

Even if one didn't think rebuilding a Jewish state in Israel was a legitimate response to European brutality (which lays upon LaDuke the obligation of proffering an alternative program for Jews beyond "sit around and hope Europe figures out a 'solution' to its 'Jewish question' before the next killing spree"), this is still a rather amazing explication of the mindset surrounding Zionism from the Jewish vantage point. But of course, the "Jewish vantage point" is precisely what's excluded from LaDuke's discussion. What we have instead is a substitution of foreign ideologies and symbolic interpretations of Jewish political action for what Jews said about themselves and perceived their own situation to be. In form, to be sure, this isn't a particularly uncommon form of anti-Semitism, but it is still worth pointing out. And I borrow again, as I love to do, from Christine Littleton: the heart of non-anti-Semitic method begins "with the very radical act of taking [Jews] seriously, believing that what we say about ourselves and our experience is important and valid, even when (or perhaps especially when) it has little or no relationship to what has been or is being said about us."

All that being said, there is a link here between how we talk about Israel and our inability to reckon with our own colonialist history, which can actually fairly be closely tied to colonialist and dominationist impulses. There is amongst the European West a deep desire for absolution from a history of racist sins -- a history of colonialism being only but one. This desire is genuine, but it is also typically "cheap" (as in Bonhoeffer's "cheap grace") -- we want the absolution, but don't want to pay the penance.

Israel is valuable because it serves as a useful point of projection for our own sense of moral inadequacy. Opposing Israel offers psychological guilt-release. It is a scapegoat in the literal sense -- we can place our sins upon it and, through sacrifice, gain absolution (the goat, of course, actually pays the penalty). Moreover, unlike more plausible targets for absolving Western sins (e.g., the European states themselves), Israel is relatively marginal, relatively weak, and relatively isolated. One cannot express rabid anti-Americanism of this sort without incurring significant costs. The US isn't going anywhere, and if it did, it would entail severe costs on the people seeking absolution. Israel could plausibly be thrown down, and if it did it would entail virtually no costs on those "repenting". As I remarked once before: "all the joy of liberal guilt-induced self-flagellation, except the wounds show up on someone else's body." For all the talk about Israel's terrifying power, it's Israel's relative marginality and weakness (compared to Europe or America or England) that renders it an attractive target.

The framework of "we are Israel" is very interesting from this standpoint. Wouldn't it make more sense to say "Israel is us"? After all, even if we thought that Israel was a valid case of colonialism (which it isn't), surely it isn't the paradigm case. When the United States distributed smallpox blankets or massacred Native Americans, we weren't emulating the Israeli example. The absolute worst you can say about Zionism -- ignoring, as LaDuke does, the massive difference in motivations and circumstances, and erasing non-European Jews entirely, and making a ton of other concessions to unreality -- is that it was emulating the European example. If that's the case, Israel is flawed as we are, but also as complex as we are and as redeemable as we are.

But note the subtle shift of responsibility here -- our misdeeds are characterized as following another's evil example. Israel stands in for our own misdeeds -- it is the platonic ideal of our own wrongs. We are not intrinsically bad, we're only bad insofar as we're "Israel". Our absolution comes when we're no longer Israel. It offers a way to maintain a sense of moral growth and possibility by externalizing the source of the sins onto another body deemed irredeemably corrupt.

This move only works effectively when "we" and "Israel" are unified as a single entity -- it would not be penance to oppose somebody else's wrong, after all. And so Israel must be refolded into the very European community whose brutal anti-Semitism caused (in part) its formation in the first place. This is why adopting an independent Jewish narrative of Zionism is so dangerous -- acknowledging there is such a narrative and that it runs independent from (and often orthogonal to) the story of European depravity would threaten the fictive unity between Israel and "us", essential for the vitality of the repentance project. And so it is that the Jewish perspective is squeezed out and replaced with a foreign entity; our own evil spirits personified. That, of course, is something very useful. But it is cheap grace.

Recasting Avatar

The VC has already brought attention to one property rights interpretation of a tale generally thought to be left-leaning (The Lorax). Today, Ilya Somin points to another example of the genre: David Boaz on Avatar:

Conservatives have been very critical of the Golden Globe-winning film “Avatar” for its mystical melange of trite leftist themes. But what they have missed is that the essential conflict in the story is a battle over property rights....

But conservative critics are missing the conflict at the heart of the movie. It’s quite possible that [director] Cameron missed it too.

The earthlings have come to Pandora to obtain unobtainium. In theory, it’s not a military mission, it’s just the RDA Corp. with a military bigger than most countries. The Na’vi call them the Sky People.

To get the unobtainium, RDA is willing to relocate the natives, who live on top of the richest deposit. But alas, that land is sacred to the Na’vi, who worship the goddess Eywa, so they’re not moving. When the visitors realize that, they move in with tanks, bulldozers and giant military robots, laying waste to a sacred tree and any Na’vi who don’t move fast enough.

Conservatives see this as anti-American, anti-military and anti-corporate or anti-capitalist. But they’re just reacting to the leftist ethos of the film.

They fail to see what’s really happening. People have traveled to Pandora to take something that belongs to the Na’vi: their land and the minerals under it. That’s a stark violation of property rights, the foundation of the free market and indeed of civilization.

I think that's a perfectly tenable interpretation of the movie. I'd question, though, how strong the dissonance is with the "face" (leftist) message.

It is certainly true that the sort of leftist thought that Boaz is identifying Avatar with hardly identifies as capitalist. But that hardly means they can't speak in term of property rights. Indeed, while the anti-colonialist theory being drawn from here would likely not cast things in terms of individual plot ownership, they certainly are quite willing to assert cultural "ownership" of certain plots of land, territories, or resources. Indeed, the Na'vi seem to view these territories as collectively owned by "the people" (there is no indication that any one person in the community owns the land or the unobtanium). This raises a harder question for capitalist theorists than Boaz cares to admit, as capitalist entities have always had trouble figuring out how to handle (read: have felt comfortable ignoring completely) notions of property ownership that were not sufficiently individualistic. The doctrine of terra nullius was applied to claim that places such as Australia weren't actually "owned" by anyone, since the land wasn't titled in a manner that was comprehensible according to contemporary proto-capitalist norms.

But anyway. I think contemporary leftists are more anti-corporate than they are anti-capitalist. The argument in Avatar is that given sufficient power, corporations would be quite willing to ignore such capitalist niceties as property rights and freedom of contract (at least when it suits them). Put differently, the same priors that suggest a corporation would be indifferent to good liberal values like "don't slaughter the natives" would equally suggest that the corporation would be indifferent to good libertarian values like "contract with the natives". The corporation is going to take the least expensive path, whatever that may be, and unless some entity is their to raise the cost of the "killing the natives and taking their property", there's no reason to believe that market economics of all things will act as a restraining force.

So Avatar is an indictment of anarcho-capitalism, to a point, but the twist is it making the further claim that the necessary condition for an anarcho-capitalist hell is not absence of government, but simply corporations more powerful than government. The Ecuador example* I've sometimes cited would seem to be most directly on point.

There, the state had given the Texaco Oil virtually free reign in the country's outland regions. The company responded by engaging in massive environmental degredation at the expense of the nation’s Amazon community. Affected citizens were told that there was no redress available from the company because Texaco was a private corporation and thus not party to relevant treaty law, they would have to go to the state for aid. However, since Texaco’s revenues were 4x the entire GNP of country, and in any event the company was actively backed by the US government, few believed that the nation could stop the environmental destruction even if it were so inclined.

Obviously, there's two problems going on here. The first is the Ecuadorian government's willingness to enable Texaco's predations at the expense of the property rights of the locals. The second is Texaco's willingness to completely circumvent normal legal protections and remedies for the local populace, simply by virtue of the fact that it was actually "bigger" than the state itself.

It is quite easy to see why a country like China would dislike Avatar -- it threatens their exploitative ideology just as much as it would Texaco's. But the moral of the story isn't "yay for market power" so much as it is illustrative of the need to a) establish governmental norms that strongly protect personal rights, particularly of marginalized groups and then b) make sure corporations don't gain so much power that they're able to out-muscle the government.

* Chris Jochnick, "Confronting the Impunity of Non-State Actors: New Fields for the Promotion of Human Rights." Human Rights Quarterly 21.1 (1999) 56-79

When Gibberish Goes Wrong

The head of the Carleton Conservative Union sent me a link to a piece called The Post-Left: An Archeology and a Genealogy, calling it "provoking". For the sake of the college I am leaving behind, I can only hope he meant something other than "thought provoking", or if that's too much to ask, "provoking thought about how awful it would be to believe this is worthwhile scholarship", because otherwise I have serious fears about what my dear Carleton conservatives consider to be a compelling argument.

[Update: Thus far it appears my prayers have been answered, as all the responses from the CCU listserve I've received have been in agreement that this article is only "provoking" in the sense of making me want to throw something.]

The author of the piece is one Gabriel Noah Brahm Jr., and the outlet he published it in is known as Democratiya, a journal dedicated to book reviews. In their own words:

Democratiya aims to be accessible to 'the common reader'. The discipline of the plain style, and a refusal of the obscurantist prose of contemporary academia, is today a political act of the first importance. We seek good writing, less adorned and more luminous, as well as thoughtful analysis, and a bit of style. Anyone seeking a model should look at Dissent. Careful exposition of the central arguments of the book under review is important. But so is the critical response of the reviewer. Authors will have a standing right of reply and reviewers a standing right of rejoinder.

I give this brief prologue just to highlight all the more the ridiculous manner in which Brahm writes. Here is a sentence from his "review" (I never did figure out what precisely he was reviewing -- an observation which rapidly took on multiple layers of meaning as I muddled through). Not just any sentence either: the very first sentence:

A synchronic (structural) and diachronic (historical) analysis of today's anti-Western left is sorely needed.

And here is the first sentence of Part I ("Archeology of the Post-Left: The Case for Discursive Regime Change"):

Post-left thought is an exercise in ressentiment unhinged from politics in the Aristotelian sense of politike, or the 'art of the common life.'

"Common reader", indeed. Now, I like good old fashioned jargon as much as any fine leftist. And I know it when I see it. So tell me: Is there any doubt at all that Brahm is trying to mimic the very "obscurantist prose of contemporary academia", that of the very leftists (or post-left or whoever it is he's talking about -- more on that in a moment) he's reacting against?

So the review is a catastrophic failure of style (is this a political failure "of the first importance"?). Perhaps it can do better under the "thoughtful analysis" or "careful exposition" rubrics. It'd be an easier task for me to evaluate if I had any idea what Brahm is reviewing, but it is never specified -- Brahm appears to want to take on the entire "post-left" writ large. Not quite a "review" then, but still, maybe Brahm can make some insightful argument on what the "post-left" is, and why we should care.

Or maybe not. Brahm does, to his credit, give a reasonably (for an obscurantist academic, anyway) coherent list of six tenets held by the "post-left":

1. Inverted Exceptionalism. Take the old 'exceptionalist' idea and flip it. America is unique among nations – just not uniquely good, that's all. The horrid US, with its crude consumer culture, unparalleled racism, and war-mongering politicians, is to blame for everything.

2. Post-Zionism. Ditto the above for Israel. One is the tool of the other in the US-Israel relationship, though it's not clear which is which. For Walt and Mearsheimer, Israel manipulates the US. For Chomsky, it's the reverse. In any event, Israel's right to exist is put in question (at best).

3. Third Worldism. The wretched of the earth ('multitudes,' whatever) are not just unlucky but morally superior to the earth's beneficiaries. Empowered by powerlessness to take the place of the proletariat in conventional Marxist doxology, the Third World Other can do no wrong. It's all 'resistance' whatever it is, up to and including terrorism. In this salvation myth, any two-bit despot – from Hugo Chavez to Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, Hasan Nasrallah, even Osama bin Laden – can be seen to represent a salutary rebuke to American Capital and The West. So the millenarian imagination persists, after 'the end of history'.

4. Cultural Revolution. It's Manichean also. Because of #1 and #2, a complete transformation of consciousness is needed to wipe away all the micro-corruptions of US-led capitalism, and replace these with more salutary (revolutionary) habits of mind (to be discovered thanks in part to #3). Eventually, everything 'bourgeois', 'white' and 'male' will have to go. For now it can all be 'deconstructed'. Stir in to this 'methodology' heavy doses of Sixties-style antinomianism and Seventies-style New Ageism, and you have a heady cocktail: the mind slips its moorings.

5. Totalitarian Ideology. Ah, but moorings are so very reassuring when one finds oneself adrift! In The Origins of Totalitarianism, Hannah Arendt outlined the closed-world world-view of the totalizing mind and its self-serving auto-validating procedures. She was talking then about Stalinism and Nazism, but it works for the post-left too (if that sounds like a harsh comparison, see #6 below). [4] For inside the cramped and airless theoretical space of the post-left one finds that (a) every question receives an exhaustive total explanation, situating the smallest detail of an argument within a vast theodicy with no outside and little room for ambiguity or surprise. Nothing escapes and no light gets in, while (b) such explanations are independent of and resistant to experience. The post-left's is an entirely 'a priori' structure of thought. And this inclusive, arbitrary narrative without a referent is also (c) ultra-consistent. Why not, when you're making it up as you go along? Not only does everything fit that gets in, and nothing gets in that doesn't fit, but the results are always the same: the same demons, the same victims. And finally (d) we find the ascription of collective guilt to 'enemies'. The condemned in the post-left scheme of things will be judged not according to what they do or say or think but what they are. The post-left, in short, offers its followers a tidy picture of a messy world, suitable for lazy and credulous minds.

6. Islamism. With #1-5, the nascent post-left prepared the way for the embrace of radical Islamism after 9/11 as a form of 'resistance', indigenous to the Third World (#3), aimed at a guilty US (#1) and Israel (#2), striking a blow for 'difference' (#4), that simply had to be good in some way (#5). And it was this final element, I suggest, that catalyzed the other ingredients to produce the post-left proper.

Hopefully that dispelled any doubts that my mockery of its style resulted from passages out of context! In any event, I read this section, and I am at once illuminated and confused. Illuminated, because I think I've got what Brahm means by "post-left". Someone is "post-left" if they think that America and Israel do everything wrong and are the supreme evils, that the "third world" can do nothing wrong, that we need a revolution to correct these corruptions and erase every vestige of them, in a narrative is totalitarian and all encompassing, and that the immediate political manifestation of the whole deal is an embrace of militant Islamism. None of these elements are cited anywhere, of course, despite the fact that the essay is footnoted.

Confused, because while I certainly can think of people who embrace some of these elements (though rarely in the cartoonish version Brahm lays out), and perhaps can conceptualize someone adhering to all of them, I am given no serious reason to believe that this nexus of views represents anything approaching a movement, much less an influential one, even amongst "the left". Though "post-left" would seem to imply something "beyond" or "after" the left, it is clear Brahm believes the ailment he so meticulously describes to be some sort of malignant sub-species of leftist discourse. At this point in my read, my feeling was that even if this argument was being robustly maintained, I have no idea what it has to do with "the left". Would it not be just as sensible to say that these "post-leftists" hate the "conventional(?)" left, and vice versa, and proceed from there? Not if the purpose is to engage in the academic S&M that constitutes supposedly liberal folks flogging "the left".

It's possible I am wrong, of course, and the "post-left" infestation is in fact running wild through left-wing circles. Already, however, there is reason to be skeptical on this accord. If the plague were so wide-spread, one would expect it would be easy to find examples -- and once found, they would be, you know, "left." Alas, this appears to be too much to ask. Of the three people he identifies as indicted under this model, only one can in any true sense be identified as of the left at all. Noam Chomsky is most certainly left-wing. Stephen Walt and John J. Mearsheimer most certainly are not, unless neo-Realism is suddenly a leftist ideology. Why they are persistently lumped in with the left eludes me, save the fact that they nourish the idea that only leftists have problematic views with regards to Israel -- hardly sufficient reason for the categorization. There goes "intelligent analysis." But it was a flippant reference anyhow. Maybe if we keep going, we will see how post-leftism is a persistent thread throughout the theorizing of the left academy.

No, as it turns out, our original instinct was correct after all. To buttress his argument that the "post-left" as he describes it is a salient force, Brahm cites to ("engages with" would be far, far too kind) a grand total of four people (not including the aforementioned one-off for Chomsky, Walt & Mearsheimer): Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri (who should really count as one since they co-wrote the book in question), Saba Mahmood, and the ever-present Judith Butler. It is not even worth our time to "address each in turn," for the simple reason that even if they all had co-written a book together arguing precisely this "post-left" ideology that Brahm says is so prevalent, four people are not enough to prove even a trend, let alone a worrisome one. In fact, from what little I know of them, I would not be surprised if both Hardt & Negri, and Mahmood, would fit roughly under Brahm's post-left frame. H&N are old-school Marxists, of course, and old-school Marxism has fallen somewhat out of style amongst the rest of the left, as Brahm might have noticed if he had stopped fighting the Cold War along with the rest of us. Mahmood I've been singularly unimpressed with when I've come across her, but that does not happen often. Regardless, even with this meager cast of characters Brahm does not actually link back the words of these authors to his six-element list of post-left tenets. One might think that if you're struggling that mightily to find a soul to fill your scarecrow, there might be larger problems afoot.

It's Butler, however, that deserve special mention here. The citation to Butler comes not to one of her academic texts, but to an answer she gave during a Q&A session after delivering a speech, as reported by a blog, so already we're on shaky terrain. This is the sentence Brahm devotes to her: "Judith Butler, professor of Rhetoric at Berkeley, and leading figure of the post-left, endorsed Hezbollah and Hamas as 'part of the global left'." (But are they "post-left"?) Now, recall Brahm's third element of what constitutes "post-left" -- that the third worlders (of which Hezbollah and Hamas are presumably a part) can do no wrong. Now, append the part of Butler's quote which he leaves out, but which is quite present in the blog post he links to in the footnote: "but [it] doesn't stop us from criticizing them."

Selective quotation is a grievous academic sin, particular when it leaves out such important modifiers like "but". In this case, the "but" seems to knock Butler conclusively out of the "post-left." The third world, it seems, can do wrong after all! Butler specifically says that their membership in the "left" (however defined) doesn't preclude that. In other words, her argument is the precise opposite of the typology Brahm puts her in. This is borderline academic misconduct -- though perhaps his peers will take into account the entirety of the article and conclude its actually parody. To be blunt, it's his only hope.

To be very, very kind, Brahm is shadow-boxing at a nearly non-existent foe (and losing). To be less kind, he's trying to smear a wide swath of "the left" via association to this phantom via a menagerie of dodgy argumentative practices. One of Brahm's early complaints about the "post-left" is that its "explanations are independent of and resistant to experience." Experience teaches us that virtually nobody is making the arguments Brahm is talking about, and that those who are possess virtually no influence. And experience has now continued to teach us that -- when writing and reacting to the arguments of the left in all its diversity and splendor -- we should look to brighter and more sophisticated thinkers than Gabriel Brahm.

Israel and Post-Colonial Studies

I agree with Phoebe, this book looks fantastic. Unfortunately, unlike Phoebe Carleton's library is not so extensive, so I have to plead with the Inter-Library Loan service to get me the whole issue of Israel Affairs upon which the book is based.

But still, excitement city.