quote | yalpertem

Poststructuralism: A Very Short Introduction, Catherine Belsey | Quote

Belsey, C. (2022). Poststructuralism: A very short introduction (Second edition). Oxford University Press. https://doi.org/10.1093/actrade/9780198859963.001.0001

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Chapter 6: Dissent

“A common misreading of poststructuralist theory—that it deprives us of the power to choose—is another instance of binary thinking. If the subject is an effect of meaning, if we are not the free, unconstrained origin of our own beliefs and values, if knowledge can’t be relied on, if mastery is an illusion, so the story goes, we cannot regard ourselves as agents in our own lives.

This is not how most poststructuralist thinkers have argued, however. Deconstruction indicates, on the contrary, that meanings, values, and what we (think we) know are all open to pressure for change. Psychoanalysis, meanwhile, sees unconscious desire as defying the values that culture proposes as proper objectives. Foucault also stresses the possibility of resistance—on the basis that power is always authority over something or someone capable of disobeying. (No one, as far as I know, claims sovereignty over turnips.)

In sum, Foucault’s model of social relations is unstable, mobile, transferable: the assumptions that reinforce power can be reversed to undermine it. Derrida’s philosophy, although it removes certainty, still requires choice and responsibility, ethical and political. Jean-François Lyotard argues against bland consensus. Gilles Deleuze and Alain Badiou, while distancing themselves in some respects from poststructuralism, draw in different ways on its insights to put forward radical views. Both assume that we take sides.

Responsibility

Much of Derrida’s later work has been concerned with ethics, the problem of right action in a world without foundational truths as grounds for choice. Religions, in contrast, depend on such grounding. They determine what we ought to do by appealing in the last instance to the will of God, as revealed to priests or prophets. The will of God is in this sense taken as universal and ultimate, a pure and absolute reality beyond which human enquiry cannot hope to go. Secular beliefs might well find another ultimate reality to occupy the same structural position of authority: reason, for example, or the moral law, or perhaps the laws of nature. Such metaphysical values are taken as the ultimate foundations on which all other values depend.

But if values are shaped by language, and language divides the world differently from culture to culture, there can be no appeal to a universal, grounding reality. The will of God might or might not exist but, as history has shown, it seems in practice to be a site of considerable struggle, since both sides in a conflict commonly claim it for their cause. Something similar goes for reason and nature. They are often cited, in the event, as supporting opposite points of view: right and left, feminist and anti-feminist, queer and homophobic, white supremacist and anti-racist.

Can there be, then, an ethics of deconstruction, an ethics without metaphysics? Derrida’s own work is sceptical and yet, he insists, ‘affirmative’. On the one hand, the element of the other in the selfsame—the difference within cultures, languages, subjects—undermines both totalitarianism and nationalism, as well as all other attempts to bring societies or groups into line with a single identity. On the other hand, Derrida argues, it does not do away with the responsibility to take account of the existing differences. Values not only have a history; they also differ from themselves. They can therefore be modified, if not in the light of a fixed idea of the good, at least in the hope of realizing, one day, the trace of an alternative that also informs them. Derrida calls this way of thinking ‘messianicity’: not the promise of a specific messiah, who would fulfil an individual scripture, Christian, say, or Jewish, but the expectation of a different future ‘to come’ (avenir à venir).”

The patriarchs: the origins of inequality, Angela Saini | Quote

i visited turkey after some time. at the airport, i saw several touristic ads about çatalhöyük. saini also writes about this place in the book. also about the ancient greece, soviets, and contemporary iran together with many other times and places.

Saini, A. (2024). Patriarchs: The Origins of Inequality: The Origins of Inequality. Beacon Press.

“Division is part of what gives patriarchy its power. The damage wrought by gendered oppression isn’t just economic or physical; it’s emotional and psychological. The effect of alienating daughters from parents, emotionally distancing wives from husbands, and demonizing those who don’t conform to narrow gender norms has been to foster fear and hatred of the very people in whom we might otherwise find comfort. We know that it’s possible to love and trust other human beings—our survival as a social species has depended on it—but one effect of this form of divide and rule has been to make us believe that we can’t.

It subverts our closest relationships.

Patriarchal power is, in one sense, no different from any other system of control. What sets it apart is that it operates even at the level of the family. Its Machiavellian force lies in the fact that it can turn the people nearest to us into the enemy. The evolution of this strategy can be traced through the practices of patriliny and patrilocality, which separated women from their childhood kin, and in the dehumanizing brutality of captive taking. We can draw threads between that history of detachment and control all the way to some of our more recent laws and beliefs. But we can’t assume that this has been the same all over the world. None of it was automatic. In some regions, patriarchal systems are thousands of years old. In others, they’ve become established only in the last few centuries.

Patriarchy as a single phenomenon doesn’t really exist, then. There are instead, more accurately, many patriarchies formed by threads subtly woven through different cultures in their own way, working with local power structures and existing systems of inequality. States institutionalized human categorization and gendered laws; slavery influenced patrilocal marriage; empires exported gendered oppression to nearly every corner of the globe; capitalism exacerbated gender disparities; and religions and traditions are still being manipulated to give psychological force to the notion of male domination. Fresh threads are being woven into our social fabrics even now. If we are ever going to build a truly fair world, everything will need to be unpicked.

Faced with a task this monumental, the fight for our equality can feel like a war of attrition. I myself have spoken at law firms and banks to women who want to know how they can move up the corporate ladder in sexist work environments, all the while oblivious to those cleaning up their offices after them for subsistence wages.

We’re yet to invent political systems that nurture the needs of the individual over the demands of the state, that cushion every one of us from the blows of this world. Even when all our laws are as fair as we can make them, when we’ve moved beyond our gender stereotypes to accept all people as they are, after our languages and cultures reflect values of equality, this doesn’t mean there won’t still be those out there trying to assert power over others in some new way.

As interminable as this struggle might seem, though, there’s a beauty to be found in it nonetheless. When we fight for equality, we don’t just fight for ourselves. We fight for others. And much of the time, that fight does get us somewhere. Without it, our lives could be so much worse. As a science writer who spends most of her time thinking about human nature, I find this to be the most extraordinary part of us. While researching this book, I’ve met and read the work of people who have laid down their lives and careers for the idea of human dignity and freedom. As much as we can’t bear to be treated unfairly, most of us can’t bear for others to be treated unfairly either—including strangers we’ve never met. We share in their pain. We want to help.”

Achille Mbembe, on necropolitics and colonial occupation

I was reading Achille Mbembe’s Necropolitics a few days before Hamas attacked Israel and Israel started bombings and blockades in the Gaza Strip. In the book, Mbembe takes the Gaza Strip as a central example, showing the continuities of colonialist practice in the contemporary world. I’ll note it down not to forget.

Mbembe, A. (2019). Necropolitics. Duke University Press.

—

“To return to Fanon’s spatial reading of colonial occupation, the late modern colonial occupation in Gaza and the West Bank presents three major characteristics concerning the working of the specific structure of terror that I have called necropower. The first involves the dynamics of territorial fragmentation—the sealing off and expansion of settlements. This process has a twofold objective: to render all movement impossible and to implement forms of separation on the model of an apartheid state. The occupied territories have thus been divided into a web of intricate internal borders and various isolated cells. According to Eyal Weizman, by departing from a planar division of territory and embracing a principle of creation of three-dimensional boundaries within a territory, dispersal and segmentation clearly redefine the relationship between sovereignty and space.

These actions, for Weizman, constitute “the politics of verticality.” The resultant form of sovereignty might be qualified as “vertical sovereignty.” Under a regime of vertical sovereignty, colonial occupation operates through schemes of over- and underpasses, a separation of airspace from the ground. The ground itself is divided between its crust and the subsoil. Colonial occupation is also dictated by the very nature of the terrain and its topographical variations (hilltops and valleys, mountains, and bodies of water). Thus, high ground offers strategic advantages not found in the valleys (better vision and self-protection, a panoptic fortification enabling the gaze to be directed in multiple directions). As Weizman puts it, “Settlements could be seen as urban optical devices for surveillance and the exercise of power.” Under the conditions of late modern colonial occupation, surveillance is oriented both inwardly and outwardly, the eye acting as weapon, and vice versa. Instead of the conclusive division between two nations across a boundary line, Weizman claims, “the organization of the West Bank’s particular terrain has created multiple separations, provisional boundaries, which relate to each other through surveillance and control.” Under these circumstances, colonial occupation not only amounts to control, surveillance, and separation but is also synonymous with isolation. It is a splintering occupation in keeping with the splintering urbanism characteristic of late modernity (suburban enclaves or gated communities).

From an infrastructural point of view, a splintering form of colonial occupation is characterized by a network of fast bypass roads, bridges, and tunnels that weave over and under one another in an attempt to maintain the Fanonian “principle of reciprocal exclusivity.” According to Weizman, “the bypass roads attempt to separate Israeli traffic networks from Palestinian ones, preferably without allowing them ever to cross. They therefore emphasize the overlapping of two separate geographies that inhabit the same landscape. Where the networks do cross, a makeshift separation is created. Most often, small dust roads are dug out to allow Palestinians to cross under the fast, wide highways on which Israeli vans and military vehicles rush between settlements.”

Under these conditions of vertical sovereignty and splintering colonial occupation, communities get separated along a y-axis. The sites of violence duly proliferate. Battlegrounds are not located solely at the Earth’s surface. Underground and airspace are transformed into conflict zones as well. No continuity exists between the ground and the sky. Even the airspace boundaries are divided between lower and upper layers. Everywhere, the symbolics of the top (of who is on top) is reiterated. Occupation of the skies therefore acquires a critical importance, since most of the policing is done from the air. Various other technologies are mobilized to this effect: sensors aboard unmanned air vehicles, aerial reconnaissance jets, early warning Hawkeye planes, assault helicopters, an Earth-observation satellite, techniques of “hologrammatization.” Killing becomes precision-targeted.

Such precision is combined with the tactics of medieval siege warfare adapted to the networked sprawl of urban refugee camps. An orchestrated and systematic sabotage of the enemy’s societal and urban infrastructure network complements the appropriation of land, water, and airspace resources. Critical to these techniques of disabling the enemy is bulldozing: demolishing houses and cities, uprooting olive trees, riddling water tanks with bullets, bombing and jamming electronic communications, digging up roads, destroying electricity transformers, tearing up airport runways, disabling television and radio transmitters, smashing computers, ransacking cultural and politico-bureaucratic symbols of the proto-Palestinian state, and looting medical equipment—in other words, infrastructural warfare. While Apache helicopter gunships are used to police the air and kill from overhead, armored bulldozers (the Caterpillar d-9) are used on the ground as weapons of war and intimidation. In contrast to early modern colonial occupation, both weapons establish the superiority of the high-tech tools of late modern terror.

As the Palestinian case illustrates, late modern colonial occupation is a concatenation of multiple powers: disciplinary, biopolitical, and necro-political. The combination of the three grants the colonial power absolute domination over the inhabitants of the occupied territory. The state of siege is itself a military institution. It allows for a modality of killing that does not distinguish between the external and the internal enemy. Entire populations are the target of the sovereign. Besieged villages and towns are sealed off and isolated from the world. Daily life is militarized. Local military commanders have the discretionary freedom to decide whom to shoot and when. Movement between the territorial cells requires formal permits. Local civil institutions are systematically destroyed. The besieged population is deprived of their means of income. Invisible killing is added to outright executions.” (p. 80-3)

Javier Cercas, on fiction, faking, and Enric Marco

I’ll use the introductory paragraph for Enric Marco article in Wikipedia first:

“Enric Marco (12 April 1921 – 21 May 2022) was a Catalonian impostor who claimed to have been a prisoner in Nazi German concentration camps Mauthausen and Flossenbürg in World War II. He was awarded the Creu de Sant Jordi by the Catalan government in 2001 and wrote a book on his experiences. In 2005 he admitted his claims were false and returned his medal, after his deception was revealed by university researcher Benito Bermejo.”

Javier Cercas takes the case of Enric Marco as intriguing material for a novelist and tells both Marco’s story and the story of the novelist from the moment he encounters Marco. The passage below is one of the examples where the novel adopts an essayistic mode.

Cercas, J. (2017). The Impostor (F. Wynne, Trans.). Maclehose Press.

”

Like Marco, the novelist does not create his fiction out of nothing: he creates it from his own experience; like Marco, the novelist knows that pure fiction does not exist and that, if it did exist, it would not be remotely interesting, and no-one would believe it, because reality is the basis, the fuel that drives fiction: and so, like Marco, the novelist creates his fictions by painting and distorting historical and biographical truth, by mixing truth and lies, what actually happened with what he wished had happened, or what would have seemed interesting or fascinating if it had happened, but did not happen. Like Marco, who studied history and listened carefully to the central characters of history and assimilated their stories, the novelist knows that he needs a foundation for his lies and this is why he researches thoroughly, so that he can thoroughly reinvent reality. Marco, moreover, has all the qualities required of a novelist: energy, fantasy, imagination, memory and, more than anything, a love of words; almost more so for the written than the spoken word: from the first, Marco has not only been an indiscriminate reader, he has also been a compulsive writer, author of countless stories, poems, articles, biographical fragments, manifestos, reports and letters of every kind that clutter his archives and have been sent to countless people and institutions. Vargas Llosa is right: Marco is a genius because he succeeds at everything, in real life and for many years in what great novelists only partly achieve in their novels, and even then only for as long as it takes to read them; that is to say, he deceives thousands and thousands of people, making them believe that he was someone that he was not, that something that did not truly exist actually existed and that what is actually a lie is in fact the truth. But Marco’s genius, of course, is only partial. Unlike great novelists, who in exchange for a factual lie deliver a profound, disturbing, elusive, irreplaceable moral and universal truth, Marco delivers only a sickly, insincere, mawkishly sentimental story that from the historical or moral point of view is pure kitsch, pure lies; unlike Marco, great novelists make it possible, through their paradoxical truth – to know and recognize the real, to know ourselves and recognize ourselves, to gaze into the reflecting waters of Narcissus without dying. So, of Marco is a genius, is he also monstrous? And if he is, why is he?

The answer is obvious: because what he did is something that can be done in novels, but not in life; because the rules of a novel are different from the rules of life. In novels, it is not only acceptable to lie, it is obligatory: the factual lie is the path to literary truth (and this is why Gorgias says that he who deceives is more honest than he who does not deceive); in life, on the other hand, as in history or in journalism, lying is “an accursed vice”, to quote Montaigne, a baseness and an act of violence and a lack of respect and a violation of the first rule of human coexistence. The result of mixing a truth with a lie is always a lie, except in novels, where it is a truth. Marco deliberately confused fiction and life: he should have mixed truth and lies in the former, not the latter: he should have written a novel. Perhaps if he had written a novel he would not have done as he did. Perhaps he is a frustrated novelist. Or perhaps he is not, and perhaps he could not settle for writing a novel but wanted to live it. Marco turned his life into a novel. This is why he seems monstrous: because he did not accept who he was and had the audacity and the effrontery to invent himself out of lies; because in life, lies are a bad thing, whereas they are a good thing in novels. All, needless to say, except a novel without fiction or true story. All novels other than this one.

” (pp. 204-5)

Sara Ahmed, on Diversity and Repair (ref. Bend it Like Beckham)

A quote from Sara Ahmed’s book ‘On being included: Racism and diversity in institutional life’ where she’s doing field research with diversity workers. From universities to private companies, she traces the challenges and tactics of these workers.

Ahmed, S. (2012). On being included: Racism and diversity in institutional life. Duke University Press. p. 163-5.

”

Diversity and Repair

One of my aims in this book has been to write about experiences of being included. Inclusion could be read as a technology of governance: not only as a way of bringing those who have been recognized as strangers into the nation, but also of making strangers into subjects, those who in being included are also willing to consent to the terms of inclusion. A national project can also be understood as a project of inclusion—a way others as would-be citizens are asked to submit to and agree with the task of reproducing that nation. [20]

Others have written of the current moment as a time in which the liberal promises of happiness and freedom have been extended to those who were previously excluded. For example, Jasbir Puar elegantly describes how a new class of (affluent, white, male) queer subjects are being “folded into life” (2007: xii, 24, 35, 36). The fold into life is an invitation to live; more than that, it is an invitation to live well, to flourish. The good ethnic as well as the good homosexual might be the ones who choose life, where life means being willing to become worthy of receiving state benevolence. To be included can thus be a way of sustaining and reproducing a politics of exclusion, where a life sentence for some is a death sentence for others.

I think this analysis provides an astute reading of both the politics of the state and those forms of politics premised on being willing to be the recipients of benevolence. If we start from our own experiences as persons of color in the institutions of whiteness, we might also think about how those benevolent acts of giving are not what they seem: being included can be a lesson in “being not” as much as “being in.” The “folding into life of minorities can also be understood as a national fantasy: it can be a “fantasy fold.” We come up against the limits of this fantasy when we encounter the brick wall; we come up against the limits when we refuse to be grateful for what we receive. As Gail Lewis has convincingly shown, the inclusion of racial others by institutions implicit in the creation of the category “ethnic minorities” can mean, in practice, being “managed through a regime of governmentality in which ‘new black subjects’ were formed” (2000: xiii). “Being included” can thus be to experience an increasing proximity to those norms that historically have been exclusive; the extension of the norms might be not only a fantasy but also a way of being made increasingly subject to their violence. [21] We are not then simply or only included by an act of inclusion. In being “folded in,” another story unfolds.

The smile of diversity is a fantasy fold. Diversity is often imagined as a form of repair, a way of mending or fixing histories of being broken. Indeed, diversity enters institutional discourse as a language of reparation; as a way of imagining that those who are divided can work together; as a way of assuming that “to get along” is to right a wrong. Not to be excluded becomes not simply an account of the present (an account of becoming included) but also a way of relating to the past. Racism is framed as a memory of what is no longer, a memory that if it was kept alive would just leave us exhausted. Fanon once commented very wisely how slavery had become “that unpleasant memory” ([1952] 1986: 115). It is almost as if it would be impolite to bring it up. In the book Life in the United Kingdom, on which British citizenship tests are based, there is one reference to slavery and that is to abolitionism (Home Office 2005: 31). The nation is remembered as the liberator of slaves, not as the perpetrator of slavery.

The empire has even been imagined as a history of happiness. In a speech given in 2005, Trevor Phillips describes empire as a good sign of national character: “And we can look at our own history to show that the British people are not by nature bigots. We created something called the empire where we mixed and mingled with people very different from those of this island.” Happiness works powerfully here: the violence of colonial occupation is reimagined as a history of happiness (a story of hybridity, of mixing and mingling). The migrant who insists on speaking about racism becomes a rather ghostly figure. The migrant who remembers other, more painful aspects of such histories threatens to expose too much. The task of politics becomes one of conversion: if racism is preserved only in our memory and consciousness, then racism would “go away” if only we too would declare it gone.

The promise of diversity is the promise of happiness: as if in becoming happy or in wanting “just happiness” we can put racism behind us. We can use as an example here the film Bend It Like Beckham (2002, dir. Gurinder Chadha). [22] The film could be read as offering a narrative of repair. Reading this film in the context of an analysis of institutions is useful—a way of connecting an institutional story with a national story. The film is not only one of the most successful British films at the box o≈ce; it is also marketed as a feel-good comedy. It presents a happy version of multiculturalism. As one critic notes: “Yet we need to turn to the U.K. for the exemplary commercial film about happy, smiling multiculturalism. Bend it like Beck- ham is the most profitable all-British film of all time, appealing to a multi-cultural Britain where Robin Cook, former Foreign Secretary, recently declared Chicken Tikka Masala the most popular national dish. White Brits tend to love Bend it like Beckham because it doesn’t focus on race and racism—after all many are tired of feeling guilty” (D. McNeil 2004). What makes this film “happy” is partly what it conceals or keeps from view. It might o√er a relief from the negative feelings surrounding racism. We can note that these negative feelings are not identified with those who experience racism, but with “white Brits”: the film might be appealing because it allows white guilt to be displaced by good feelings. The subjects for whom the film is appealing are given permission not to feel guilty about racism; instead, they can be uplifted by a story of migrant success.

”