Boundaries and responsibilities

My first full day of AAR has been full of boundary-pushing. (Yesterday I met a friend for the reception, and before that trekked across Montréal to see a new movie which turned out to be fantastic, Montréal-based John N. Smith's "Love & Savagery." I hope it makes it south of the border.)

I started with a panel on the new "Ethics and Religious Culture" curriculum required of all elementary and high school students in Québec - even those in private, religious schools. It was inaugurated just last year, and is still very controversial. Some professors described the historical background, pedagogical and political stakes, and some of the objections (from secularists as well as some religious communities), and then two teachers described their experiences with the curriculum. The panel was long enough for me to decide this was the the most thoughtful effort to instill religious literacy ever - its aims are the recognition of others (Charles Taylor's influence, I think) and the pursuit of the common good (Canada's a different continent than the US!). And then to worry if it was politically practicable. And then finally to conclude, as the teachers enthused about their experiences with it, that it can't be put into practice, at least not in a way attentive to the concerns of religious studies - one of the trainers of the "spiritual animators" who are to administer this curriculum didn't know that some of her students wouldn't be able to eat peperoni pizza! And yet, this was the most concrete example of an effort to include religion meaningfully in civic education I've heard about, and it would be wonderful if it could be done. If one could, what would one like children (at various stages of development) to learn, and are there ways to train teachers? Because of the separation of church in state, Americans haven't had to think about these questions, but they're crucial - a whole pile of our methodological questions suddenly no longer just academic. I'd like to learn more.

After a first foray into the book displays, it was the turn of the Transhumanism and Religion panel. Unconvincing papers argued that Heidegger would worry about "human enhancement" but Aristotle might conceivably approve of "embodied" (but not "disembodied") transhumanism. A more grounded paper arguing that the imago dei "is realized in hybridity and provides resources for living wisely in contemporary technosociety" was more interesting, until someone asked what connection there was between the liberating feminist discourse of the cyborg the paper invoked and the more barren movement of transhumanism - there's hardly any. Transhumanism seems naive and asocial. A final paper on "cryptoreligious models" in Ray Kurzweil's "singularity" left me nonplused, too. I remain convinced that thinking about transhumanism isn't optional anymore - the technologies are there, the dangers and promises of a fraying conception of human nature and community - but we're going to have to do better than this. (No, I'm not bitter that they turned down the proposal one of my students and I submitted!)

I skipped out of the business meeting of the Transhumanism and Religion consultation to catch the last part of a big panel reexamining the concept of "civil religion." Mistake - it reminded me of the paper-thin theories of secularity and post-secularity I explored last year. And the hopes of that period, just a few months ago, about a magical revitalization of the American idea by President Obama.

Then it was time for a plenary panel on legacies of colonialism in religious studies in the Americas, which ended up being about the horrors of "linguicide" and quite fascinating. A Latino philosopher asked if the seeds of the humanistic study of religion didn't perhaps lie in the judgments of Europeans that their farthest-flung colonial conquests had no religion and thus no souls: if they had no souls, you could relate to them without reference to theology. A part-Apache historian argued that the loss of a language is the loss of a theology, a way of knowing the world. An African-Nova Scotian poet imagined the religion of the first illiterate African Baptists of Halifax, reading some of his poems. And an autochthonous Québecois film maker told of her childhood experiences of being told her people were ignorant savages in the 1940s. The panel as a whole suggested that religious studies can and should be in the business of preserving old language and providing venues for the creation of new meanings, as a way of asserting the value of every soul.

There's no particular program to this itinerary of panels - I chose what seemed most promising and distinctive for each session time, not the ensemble. But they do add up to an intriguing sense of the boundaries and responsibilities of religious studies, in civic education, understanding the legacies and debts of the past, and looking forward to an increasingly technological future with the wisdom of all the world's ethics and religious cultures.

AAR

I'm off to the annual meeting of the American Academy of Religion, in Montreal, until Tuesday. Not sure I'll have a chance to blog while there, but will be sure to share some of what I find when I next have time online.

Long-lasting legacy

We had the last of a series of "teach-ins" on the history of the New School today, at least for this semester. (I presented at one, you'll perhaps recall.) Our topic was The University in Exile. One speaker described how the New School's quick reaction to the dismissal of Jewish academics in Germany was the natural extension of the work of "genius president" Alvin Johnson. Another described how the legacy of the University in Exile continued and continues to shape the graduate faculty's ethos, in supporting the democracy movement in Poland in the 1980s, etc. What made the inspiring history of the University in Exile particularly resonant for me this time however was the fact that one of the beneficiaries of its French incarnation, the École Libre des Hautes Études (the brainchild of the genius president when Hitler invaded France), just died - the great anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss, age 100! (Like many, I thought he'd long since passed.)

Secularize this!

The Times yesterday printed an article from the Associated Press with the following remarkable story:

The European Court of Human Rights ruled Tuesday that the display of crucifixes in Italian public schools violated religious and education freedoms, a decision that could force a review of the use of religious symbols in government-run schools across Europe. The court rejected arguments by Italy that the crucifix was a national symbol of culture, history and secularism. ...

Come again, the cross a symbol of secularism? What would a symbol of Christianity look like then?

Last leaves

Where angels fear to tread

This is on its way to being the official Lang Religious Studies food. Go on, try one. What does it taste like to you? I picked these up at the Little India market in Curry Hill, expecting them to taste, well, not any taste in particular, but some taste, surely a tasty taste. But phool makhana (popped water lily seeds, it seems) sort of doesn't taste at all. Yet oddly, while it it is almost disturbingly tasteless when you first pop one into your mouth, it's hard to stop popping, and then there's a sort of doppler effect of taste - the memory or aftereffect of taste without the experience of the taste itself. Different interpreters at today's religious studies information session found its tasty tastelenessness like cardboard, or stale air, but the best account was that it has the taste of impermanence.

Dilbert U

Had one of those days where you wonder if you've stepped into a parallel reality where your life has become an absurdist farce. In fact it must have been a parallel reality, because this sort of thing could never happen in this one!

-- A faculty senate spent an entire early morning session listening to an administrator responsible for student affairs describing her concern, the day some students took over a building, that they were in a building with a functioning boiler and no maintenance staff to look after it. And then some went on the roof - a roof without a proper railing. They were excited and could have fallen off! (She didn't have to say that it was lucky that the boiler didn't explode when the police broke in to save the students from themselves, as they might have concluded the students were terrorists!)

-- An institutional research representative explained to the assembled chairs of a seminar college that a new form of standardized course evaluation did not offer statistically reliable results for seminar-sized classes. The results, however, were still of interest as they were adjusted, in comparison to results from hundreds of other universities (presumably with larger classes), to cancel out distortions resulting from student enthusiasm, commitment, or hard work - factors beyond the professor's control. The chairs duly discussed whether unreliable quantitative information was preferable to none, and took an inconclusive straw vote.

The buzz

Meanwhile, back in Del Mar, six hummingbirds at once!! (Thanks to my dad for this amazing and unbelievably sharp pic - click it for life size!)

Top value

Here's someone's list of values. Do we share these values? I'm not sure why the billboards (Helen Keller, Albert Einstein, Muhammed Ali, Wayne Gretzky, Whoopi Goldberg, the Dalai Lama, etc.) and the witty television spots sponsored by these people don't make me happier. If they were commercials for Kodak or Hallmark, they wouldn't give me the willies the same way. The brief "About Us" on their website - In this day and age, it can be hard to believe an organization’s only goal is to encourage others to do good—but that really is why we exist. - makes me suspicious, too. Who is the Foundation for a Better Life? An unidentified benefactor pays for all of it, says the website. Is s/he like the forgiveness-fetishists at the Fetzer Institute, or the proto-fascist movement built on virtuous citizen's groups in Frank Capra's "Meet John Doe"? Actually, trusty Wikipedia tells us who the benefactor is, and where he's coming from. Hate to have to say I told you so.

How we remember

A friend in the theater recommended a new production of "Antigone" to me, saying it was the best thing she'd seen in a long time. I saw it this afternoon and I believe her. SITI Company's performance of the new version of "Antigone" by Irish playwright Jocelyn Clarke, directed by Anne Bogart, is a revelation. The brief run ends tomorrow, but one can hope it will return or tour. It's that good.

The set is nothing but a square of tables with chairs on diagonal on a bare black-sided stage; square, circular and parabolic pools of light and a nearly imperceptible soundscape make it feel like a world whose center is a conference - appropriate enough for a play which takes place in time of war, as the military leader decides how to deal with setbacks in Argos and rising dissent at home in Thebes, and, like everyone at the table, tries to wriggle free of the horrifying legacy of the house of Thebes. Periodically, one of the elders (played by Will Bond, facing us in the picture above) steps away from the table to face the audience and tells us one of the episodes of this awful history, starting with the rape of Europa. He starts the play this way:

How does it all begin? (pause)
How does it all begin? (pause)
How does it all begin? (pause)
It begins with a girl.
It begins with a bull...
(walks to another place facing the audience)
How does it all begin? (pause)
How does it all begin? (pause)
How does it all begin? (pause)
It begins with a daughter.
It begins with a war. ...

Amazingly, every iteration of the words "How does it all begin?" (and there are probably 15 in all) is different. The first is rhetorical, the second full of curiosity, the third full of dread, etc.

Once he tells one of the stories, its climax is always a moment where some victim - Europa, Chrysippus - accepts her/his awful fate, holds her/his tunic up to her/his chest (his hand makes an arc'ing movement as if rounding a pregnant belly), and the rest billows behind her/him like a purple sail. By the end, Antigone's story has joined this retelling.

This growing sense of the tragic past adds ever more complications to the war with Argos - why did it start? Whose war is it? But it also adds both depth and opacity to Antigone. Too easy just to say that she will do what's right and bury her brother Polyneikes despite Creon's command. It's not just about justice but about memory and identity. "How we remember is who we are," she says, she is her family or she is noone. And yet what is it to be the daughter of Oedipus, the descendant of all those bloody events we've heard about? When she declares to Creon "I'm not afraid to die," his response resonates: "Are you afraid to live?"

Eat local

Many other things work better in the concentrated density of urban settings, what about farming? I kid not: an article by Dickson Despommier in the newest Scientific American shows what "vertical farms" could look like. What's more, he argues that they are ecologically preferable to traditional farming, which would otherwise have to add an area equivalent to the size of Brazil to keep up with population growth by 2050. This 30-story farm, using and reusing city waste water and fewer fossil fuels than factory farms and food transportation, "could yield as much food as 2,400 outdoor acres, with less subsequent spoilage." Imagine: greener cities, wilder country... (See more and very stylish prototypes here.)

The Philharmonic!

Went to the New York Philharmonic tonight, on a whim. (Something else was planned, but the other person couldn't make it, and the internet helped me in less than 10 minutes to get a ticket for the Philharmonic. Turns out the Philharmonic was available for a similar reason - a trip to Cuba canceled at the last minute for some reason.) The program was friendly - Beethoven's Egmont Overture and Third Piano Concerto (with sometimes reserved Emmanuel Ax), then Bernstein's "Dance Suite from West Side Story" and one of the suites from Manuel de Falla's "Three-Cornered Hat." But the news was the orchestra's new Music Director, Alan Gilbert. Gilbert, who's a year younger than me, and a child of the Philharmonic, literally - both of his parents are violinists in the orchestra; his mother (who's Japanese) still playing, his father retired. He certainly seems comfortable up there, very nearly dancing to the Bernstein and de Falla. The Beethoven was by turns bold, agile and tender. But it was the Bernstein that made the evening for me, Gilbert and the Philharmonic bringing out all the cacophonous and diaphanous wonders that an earlier Music Director of the Philharmonic found he could put there as he adapted music from his opera/musical for a huge orchestra. Amazing percussion, dulcet strings, brass to make your hair stand ecstatically on end. At one point I heard the Rite of Spring and then, just seconds later, Tito Puente. Mambo! (Picture source.)

Fall in the Lang courtyard, Act II

(Act I was weeks ago, but all those red leaves fell leaving the trees green again until this week!)

Questionable

I asked yesterday what was the matter with this question:

Isn't it true, though, that — as [C. S.] Lewis says — that the philosophy that we bring to our experience, to our observations, influences how we interpret them? Now, if we approach a miracle with a philosophy that has ruled out the supernatural, then we have to find some explanation for it.

The problem with the question - posed by Dr. Armand Nicholi in the popular PBS show based on his book The Question of God: Sigmund Freud and C. S. Lewis - is of course that it presupposes that miracles happen. More, it presupposes that they are clearly and self-evidently inexplicable events which only the dogmatically scientistic will feel a need to try to explain away. The name for this presupposition, especially in 2004 when the PBS series was first screened, is "intelligent design."

Now what was this doing on PBS? There's a sobering story here. But first a few words about the program. It starts in a way you can imagine made me howl: No matter what your faith or what you believe, a generically deep-voiced narrator intones, how each of us understand the meaning of life comes down to one ultimate question: does God really exist? Not only are non-theistic religions ignored, but here too the existence of what's supposedly at question is presupposed. The question is not "is there a God?" but "does God exist?" By not using the indefinite article, the question "does God exist?" lets "God" be a proper name, the name of a particular being, not a concept which may or may not have a corresponding reality. Nicholi (a Harvard professor - of psychiatry - who's taught a seminar on Freud and Lewis for 30 years) in fact has a very particular God in mind, but contrasting Freud and Lewis - picked as the most influential 20th century representatives of the "atheist" and the "spiritual worldview" - lets him be vague about it. Whether we realize it or not, all of us possess a worldview, he says. We make one of two basic assumptions. We view the universe as an accident or we assume an intelligence beyond the universe who gives the universe order, and for some of us, meaning to life. Are those really the only options? (Consider, for instance, emergence.)

The series follows the lives of Freud and Lewis in alternation, in dreadful reenactments with pompous British actors, significant-sounding classical music and Ken Burns-effects, narrated by the generic voice-of-God narrator - not Nicholi - with some distinguished talking heads from the world of scholarship. (That's the dying Freud below.) The rest of the time is devoted to a seminar of "thoughtful men and women" who discuss in interesting and often surprising ways topics Freud's and Lewis' experiences and ideas suggest to Nicholi. These seven panelists are a demographically interesting bunch - a Jungian analyst and a spiritual writer, both using Christian language though in an unorthodox way; a skeptical film-maker mindful of the history of the civil rights movement; a doctor who made the leap of faith to Christianity; an atheistic lawyer from Canada; a distinguished looking partner in a Wall Street firm with a view close to Lewis' own; and Michael Shermer, American skeptic at large. The first two were the panel's only women. The film-maker's African American and the doctor Korean-American. The atheist lawyer is Jewish. Nicholi is - well, a "Harvard University professor," what else need you know? Disinterested and trustworthy, probably liberal and sceptical, surely.

In fact, what the series does, especially effectively in the discussion segments, is suggest that all "thoughtful" people are part of the discussion about God, whether they realize it or not. There is a broad spectrum of views, with atheism at one end. People move around along this spectrum over the course of their lives, as did Freud and Lewis themselves, both raised in moderately religious households and atheists in college, though Lewis converted and Freud did not. Who wouldn't want to be part of a conversation like this? I'm sure a big part of the program's popularity (I think I recall it's being replayed during pledge drives) is its invitation to people to enter free-ranging discussions about spirituality they didn't think were possible.

But if atheism's one end of the spectrum, what's at the other end? Funny you should ask. Sometimes the "spiritual worldview" seems to be anything that's not an atheist nihilism. Other times, notably when the Wall Street guy is talking, it seems to be a very specific Christian view of a world fallen into sin but yearning for redemption: This is not Plan A, I'd say, says the Wall Street guy. This is Plan B, which is a broken world, that free reign of evil is everywhere. And then you get this, from Nicholi: Lewis's worldview is very much based on a person that appeared in history. He looked very carefully at the historical documents, and this person who claimed to be God. And, indeed, Lewis concluded that this person was who he claimed to be, and that he died as he predicted he would, and that he rose again on the third day. Now if this person did appear today, so that we could experience him, would we believe? This is true to Lewis, but what's it tell us about "spiritual" positions which aren't Christian? What's really going on is that the spectrum is based on Lewis' life, not so much a spread as a trajectory from atheism to Christian faith. The New Agey women, the Jew and the skeptics don't make it to the end, but they're good conversation partners along the way.

Here's how the series closes: Is it possible that Freud and Lewis represent conflicting parts of ourselves? A part of us that yearns for a relationship with the source of all joy, hope and happiness, as described by Lewis. And another part that raises its fist in defiance and says with Freud — "I will not surrender." Whatever part we choose to express will determine our purpose, our identity, and our whole philosophy of life. This only seems even-handed. God's existence is once again presupposed, Freud a rebel, and a stand-in for the sinful part of each of us (dare I say: the Jewish part unable to accept Jesus as Lord?). Indeed Nicholi (this time it's him, not the generic narrator) pauses after "our purpose" long enough for certain listeners (including me!) to sense a question about afterlives spent in, well, different places.

So, a 4-hour special couched in the language of intelligent design with a barely concealed Evangelical apologetic beneath the surface, on PBS. How did it get there? Therein lies a tale. Turns out that Nicholi is one of Harvard's best known evangelical professors. (He's a cofounder of the Family Research Council.) Someone took his seminar and told evangelical entrepreneur Douglas Holloday about it. Holloday brought together funders (including of course the Templeton Foundation) so that he could offer it to PBS as a complete package. They took the bait. Holloday is the Wall Street Christian in the discussion - bottom right in the spread above.

I'm not making this up. It's described in D. Michael Lindsay's Faith in the Halls of Power: How Evangelicals Joined the American Elite (Oxford University Press, 2007):

The Question of God ... is an excellent example of evangelicalism's intellectually oriented outreach. ... Evangelical backers of the documentary wanted a "subtle, even-handed" account of the differences between Freud and Lewis, and insisted that the program "not preach" so that viewers could decide which perspective was truer to their experience. ... "PBS was critical for this type of project," says Holloday, because "their audience was our direct target." (104)

I showed some clips from "The Question of God" in Theorizing Religion on Tuesday, right after we'd read Freud's The Future of an Illusion. It wasn't my intention to put anyone in harm's way, just to raise questions about how public discussion about religion is formed in our time (as we did earlier with the Belief-O-Matic). Sometimes "spiritual" means everything and nothing, a relief from the dangers of "religion." Sometimes the situation is more complicated. But the program is very well made, its PBS cheesiness disarming. And Lewis seems so open and joyful, Freud so dogmatic and grim. Indeed, Lewis is associated in my students' minds with the Narnia books and the joys of childhood enjoyed throughout life, while Freud seems the pervy uncle who thinks childhood cheerless and adulthood even worse. And they're too young (imagine that!) to remember the scandals around "intelligent design." They didn't like being bamboozled by Evangelicals, but I suspect that Nicholi's seminar is still one many would take if they could. D'oh! It's working.

Rose in the subway

As I was waiting for the subway this morning, the lush scent of a rose suddenly engulfed me. It came from two creamy roses a woman had in her handbag a dozen meters away, their heavy scent pushed toward me by the pressure of an oncoming train.

Intelligently designed question

What's the matter with this question:

"Isn't it true, though, that — as [C. S.] Lewis says — that the philosophy that we bring to our experience, to our observations, influences how we interpret them? Now, if we approach a miracle with a philosophy that has ruled out the supernatural, then we have to find some explanation for it."

Details tomorrow!

Shameful

Jane Mayer has an article in the October 26th issue of The New Yorker which will chill your blood. It's about the attacks on Taliban and others in Pakistan the CIA is conducting by means of Predator drones. We hear about these attacks occasionally, usually when a target has been hit. A few bystanders are usually killed, too. Strangely, the concept of "collateral damage," used to widespread indignation by Cheney and Rumsfield during the invasion of Iraq, isn't invoked. It seems not to be necessary. No defense is given at all. And these attacks are on the rise in the Obama administration.

During his first nine and a half months in office, he has authorized as many C. I. A. aerial attacks in Pakistan as George W. Bush did in his final three years in office. ... a rate of approximately one bombing a week. So far this year, various estimates suggest, the C. I. A. attacks have killed between three hundred and twenty-six and six hundred and thirty-eight people. Critics say that many of the victims have been innocent bystanders, including children. (37)

Let me put that in numbers you'll understand: between 326 and 638. (Presumably the New Yorker's style sheet discourages the use of numbers.) Just this year. And don't imagine they at least always hit their target. For the most celebrated hit, Baitullah Mehsud, it appears to have taken sixteen missile strikes, and fourteen months, before the C. I. A. succeeded in killing him. During this hunt, between two hundred and seven and three hundred and twenty-one additional people were killed, depending on which news accounts you rely upon. (45)

I translate again: between 207 and 321. Mayer shows the many issues raised by this program, from the unaccountability of the CIA (and its civilian subcontractors) to the unreliability of information about targets, from to the violations of Pakistani sovereignty to the anger such attacks generate among its innocent victims and how the Taliban benefit from it, from the US government's supposed opposition to assassinations to the moral and psychological implications of the fact that the drone over Pakistan is guided from the distance and safety of Langley, VA. How did this pass under our radar?

Those numbers again: between 326 and 638. This year alone. And With public disenchantment mounting over the U. S. troop deployment in Afghanistan, and the Obama Administration divided over whether to escalate the American military presence there, many in Washington support an even greater reliance on Predator strikes - from George Will to Joe Biden. It has indeed occurred with remarkably little public discussion, given that it represents a radically new and geographically unbounded use of state-sanctioned lethal force (38). It's almost as if it's not really killing - the Predator's kin have innocuous names like Gnat.

Were it still the Bush administration, we'd all be up in arms. This article would be as necessary reading as the articles by Seymour Hersh in whose footsteps Mayer walks.

(By the way, the regularization of drone warfare is one more way in which the remarkable Mexican sci-fi film "Sleep Dealer"- which will be screened November 12th at the upcoming Digital Labor conference - has proved prophetic.)

Taste of Fall

Come Fall, I bring out my favorite Japanese tea cup - those falling leaves and needles have become the taste of Fall for me! (Okay, so I sometimes use it at other times I the year, too.) I've had the cup for ages - picked it up in Japan when I used to go there every year. Brings the taste of that back, too.

Hopelessly French

Lest you think I do nothing but take pictures of autumn leaves, a quick report on something I read over the weekend. It came at the recommendation of a colleague in cultural studies who described it as the best account of the crisis of culture in thirty years. That seemed worth following up, especially as this work seems to be one of the inspirations of our campus anarchists. I scored further cred by ordering it at my local bookstore Unnameable Books.

L'insurrection qui vient appeared in French in 2007 and is a hopelessly French book - hopeless, that is, in a very French way. Words sing, paradoxes gleam, totalities are exposed, and nothing less than civilization (or its impossibility) is at stake. True life, impossible to describe without falsification, is found not in ideas, structures, movements, relationships or identities but in the interstices, the demimondes, perruques and black markets of the real. The team of writers (they think of themselves as a commune) are anonymous - one of the "zones of opacity" they encourage readers to "multiply" (107). But they're the same anonymous people whom the police arrested as they tried to sabotage the electricity of the French rails. This manifesto calls for acts of disruption of this kind all over, which they hope will break through the institutions of security, management and control which hide the emptiness of our endeavors from us. This will lead us from the thoroughly bankrupt present - which includes entirely bogus political, personal and intellectual struggles - to... well, where? The closest they come is in a parenthetical:

The interruption of the flow of commodities, the suspension of normality (it’s sufficient to see how social life returns in a building suddenly deprived of electricity to imagine what life could become in a city deprived of everything) and police control liberate potentialities for self-organization unthinkable in other circumstances. (119)

Don't think I didn't enjoy it. (I confess, I read some of it aloud with a French accent.) Some of its insights - as work, self, economy, environment, politics, organization, etc. are exposed as hollow - are electric. Some tastes, on city/country, environment, and the "clash of civilizations":

We’ve heard enough about the “city” and the “country,” and particularly about the supposed ancient opposition between the two. From up close or from afar, what surrounds us looks nothing like that: it is one single urban cloth, without form or order, a bleak zone, endless and undefined, a global continuum of museum-like hypercenters and natural parks, of enormous suburban housing developments and massive agricultural projects, industrial zones and subdivisions, country inns and trendy bars: the metropolis. Certainly the ancient city existed, as did the cities of medieval and modern times. But there is no such thing as a metropolitan city. All territory is subsumed by the metropolis. Everything occupies the same space, if not geographically then through the intermeshing of its networks.
It’s because the city has finally disappeared that it has now become fetishized, as history. … Control has a wonderful way of integrating itself into the commodity landscape, showing its authoritarian face to anyone who wants to see it. It’s an age of fusions, of muzak, telescoping police batons and cotton candy. Equal parts police surveillance and enchantment! ... The metropolis is this simultaneous death of city and country. ...
There still remain some fragments of the city and some traces of the country caught up in the metropolitan mesh. But vitality has taken up quarters in the so-called “problem” neighborhoods. It’s a paradox that the places thought to be the most uninhabitable turn out to be the only ones still in some way inhabited. (52-55)

There is no "environmental catastrophe." The catastrophe is the environment itself. The environment is what’s left to man after he’s lost everything. Those who live in a neighborhood, a street, a valley, a war zone, a workshop—they don’t have an “environment;” they move through a world peopled by presences, dangers, friends, enemies, moments of lie and death, all kinds of beings. Such a world has its own consistency, which varies according to the intensity and quality of the ties attaching us to all of these beings, to all of these places. It’s only we, the children of the final dispossession, exiles of the final hour—who come into the world in concrete cubes, pick our fruits at the supermarket, and watch for an echo of the world on television—only we get to have an environment. ... What has congealed as an environment is a relationship to the world based on management, which is to say, on estrangement. ... No material habitat has ever deserved the name “environment,” except perhaps the metropolis of today. The digitized voices making announcements, streetcars with such a 21st century whistle, bluish streetlamps shaped like giant matchsticks, pedestrians done up like failed fashion models, the silent rotation of a video surveillance camera, the lucid clicking of the subway turnstyles, supermarket checkouts, office time-clocks, the electronic ambiance of the cybercafé, the profusion of plasma screens, express lanes and latex. Never has a setting been so able to do without the souls traversing it. Never has a milieu been more automatic. Never has a context been so indifferent, and demanded in return—as the price of survival—such an equal indifference from us. (74-75)

There is no “clash of civilizations.” There is a clinically dead civilization kept alive by all sorts of life-support machines that spread a peculiar plague into the planet’s atmosphere. At this point it can no longer believe in a single one of its own “values,” and any affirmation of them is considered an impudent act, a provocation that should and must be taken apart, deconstructed, and returned to a state of doubt. Today Western imperialism is the imperialism of relativism, of the “It all depends on your point of view”; it’s the eye-rolling or the wounded indignation at anyone who’s stupid, primitive, or presumptuous enough to still believe in something, to affirm anything at all. … A century ago, scandal was identified with any particularly unruly and raucous negation, while today it’s found in any affirmation that fails to tremble.
No social order can base itself for long on the principle that nothing is true. Yet it must be made secure. … Containing all affirmations and deactivating all certainties as they irresistibly come to light—such is the long labor of the Western intellect. The police and philosophy are two convergent, if formally distinct, means to this end. (92-94)

Leafy Brooklyn

More Fall colors, top and bottom from Brooklyn - Park Place on the way to the B/7 and the view from my apartment window toward Manhattan. At left a spectacular harvest spread at the Union Square Green Market, which you can already feel contracting towards the the apple and pumpkin market to which winter reduces it.