#Temporal Chauvinism

[sourcreammachine]

consider. we make multiple advancements in temporal theory, and it becomes a near-fact that time travel is possible. it may be decades or centuries until it is accomplished, but it is known to be possible

per the theory, a form of multiversal time travel is possible. a traveller would be able to return to the past, creating an alternate timeline, observe and interact with it, affecting it, and then return to the timeline of origin. due to the active interference, definitionally, the alternate timeline will be divergent from the original timeline

the possibility of returning to the original universe, so necessitating the existence of a ‘true universe’, has staggering moral implications. a form of universal chauvinism emerges — only this timeline is real, others are mere simulacra, visions. you can fuck with the timelines as much you please, you can gladly doom every timeline you want… they’re not real. a denizen of a created timeline is as real as a fictional character, and as unworthy of respectful treatment. their timeline is doomed anyway, who cares. they’re not the original, true universe

one day a time traveller emerges. they observe something apparently unimportant, fuck about, then peace out. but their appearance makes one thing clear — this is a child universe. this isn’t real, per the above philosophy, this world will not proceed as it should — it’s a ‘doomed world’; you’re not ‘real’

how do you react

[penultimate-step]

so this is obviously just temporal chauvinism but I kind of assumed that the store near my house as a kid was a contemporary creation, in and of itself part of my own generation. So it's a bit disorienting to walk through it now decades later and have it be remarkably unchanged and filled with kids who are probably assuming the same thing

[forislynx]

Formulerat på ett annat sätt försvarar eternalisten ett slags temporal egalitarism. Den som anser att det är någonting speciellt med det innevarande ögonblicket gör sig skyldig till kronologisk chauvinism, eller "tidsrasism" - att utan giltigt skäl favorisera sin egen tid framför andras. De normandiska krigarnas tankar och känslor år 1066 är inte mindre verkliga än dina tankar och känslor, och de marsianska kolonisatörernas kroppar är inte mindre konkreta än din egen. Vår position i tiden gör oss oförmögna att se förflutna och framtida händelser, men det innebär inte att de är overkliga. Det innebär bara att de befinner sig någon annanstans - eller snarare i någon annan tid.

Philip Goff, Galileos misstag : till försvar av panpsykismen

[metrostartup]

Common Candidate a Storm in a Tea Cup? It is only another political gimmick by the dormant opposition and reactionary forces to destabilize the government

Dr Sudath Gunasekara. President Senior Citizens Movement, Mahanuwara 2.11.2009. Politically popular but utterly stale terms like political solution, devolution of power, minority aspirations and Sinhala Buddhist chauvinism and even independence of the press etc appears to have been eclipsed and temporally replaced by a newly invented political catch word; ƒÆ’‚¢ƒ¢-¡‚¬ƒ”¹…”Common…

[philipprhensius]

Ghost of my life

"If the 70s were in many respects better than neoliberalism wants us to remember them, we must also recognise the extent to which the capitalist dystopia of 21-century culture is not something that was simply imposed on us – it was built out of our captured desires." (Mark Fisher)  Ein Nachruf ist oft eine Art verschleierter Narzissmus, aber im Fall von Mark Fisher wird er für mich zur politischen Notwendigkeit. Denn es ist vor allem seine Kunst, das Persönliche politisch und das Politische persönlich zu machen, das mein Schreiben als freier Autor, Soziologe und Kulturwissenschaftler, aber auch meine Musik maßgeblich geprägt hat. Für ihn bedeutete der Satz "Das Persönliche ist politisch", dass das Persönliche unpersönlich ist und dass es oft trist ist, sich selbst zu sein, geschweige denn, sich ständig selbst verkaufen zu müssen. Kultur und deren Analyse waren für ihn immer eine Möglichkeit, aus der Starrheit des Ich zu flüchten.

Vor allem deshalb hallen seine Texte, aber auch die Interviews, die ich mit ihm noch zu seinen Bloggerzeiten als "k-punk" 2011 und 2012 in London zu Themen wie “Hauntology” oder “Occupy” geführt habe, bis heute nach. In seinen Essays über die Beziehung von Popkultur, Depression und Neoliberalismus zeigte er, wie stark das System, das er “Kapitalistischen Realismus" nennt, auf uns einwirkt. Das Lesen der Ideen im gleichnamigen Buch war epiphanisch, da sie eine präzisere Version dessen waren, das mir bereits als Kind Angst einjagte, wenn Erwachsene ihre Gespräche mit Sätzen wie: „Es ist so, wie es ist“ und "Da lässt sich nichts machen" beendeten.

Dass geistige Gesundheit heute wie das Wetter als natürlich verstanden wird, obwohl beides längst (auch) politisch bedingt ist. Dass in vermeintlich sorglosen Popsongs von Drake oder Katy Perry eigentlich eine "secret sadness of the 21st Century" steckt - zu erkennen im Perry-Song "Last Friday Night", für ihn ein Beispiel der "hedonistischen Depression": Der Zwang, uns ständig und überall zu vergnügen, ohne Lust zu empfinden. Dass ökonomischer Druck in den sich ausbreitenden prekären Lebensbedingungen zu allseits wachsender Angst führt, die Menschen immer konservativer werden lässt. Dass die junge Generation die Gegenwart oft mit einem "temporal chauvinism" verteidigt à la: "Es geht uns doch gut und früher war es auch nicht besser". Als seien wir selbst verantwortlich für das, was Fisher die "ästhetische Armut der Gegenwart" nennt.

Die Zukunft war für ihn jedoch ähnlich armselig – war er doch davon überzeugt, dass sie uns heute, im Zeitalter der „Pseudo-Gegenwart“, in der wir in „libidinöser Gefangenschaft“ des click-drive zugleich an Reizüberflutung und Erschöpfung leiden, immer mehr verloren geht. Dennoch blieb die Zukunft für ihn der einzige Ausweg. Nicht die Variante, die uns Apple und Microsoft mit ihren Updates verkauft, sondern eine echte. In Form eines future shocks, den Fisher vor allem in Musikstilen Jungle, Dubstep oder zuletzt Footwork spürte (“I’ve never heard anything like this”). Er selbst wird diese Zukunft nicht mehr erleben, aber sein Werk eröffnet etliche Pfade, um sie endlich zu betreten.

[fursasaida]

A lot has been said about Pelosi’s idiotic, offensive, bullshit statement about the Chauvin verdict, but what’s sticking in my craw more is actually Mayor Frey’s (of MPLS) similarly fuckshit statement. Please note the emphasis I’m adding to this with the bolding:

George Floyd came to this city to better his life. But ultimately his life will have bettered our city. The jury joined in a shared conviction that has animated Minneapolis for the last 11 months. They refused to look away and affirmed he should still be here today.

This is similar to Pelosi’s statement in that it casts George Floyd’s death as a kind of redemptive martyrdom for which “we” should be grateful, rather than a horrific tragedy that should make us angry or active or otherwise something other than placid and self-satisfied. But it exposes the underlying idea more clearly, and that idea is extraction.

This formulation says: George Floyd came to the city with hopes and intentions, and the city ate him to fuel itself. (It has been animated!) It says, the city robbed this man. It says, his future was never his future; it was fuel to continue and even improve the city. There is nothing mutualistic about what this says--no sense that people come to the city because of what they hope it can help them do, and in the process of achieving it their efforts also become part of the city, and all of these efforts, together, make the city what it is and make it better and more, even as they also make the city a place where people can achieve the things they want. (Even dry, conservative economists are capable of articulating “the city” this way, in their own terrible jargon.) The city apparently does not need people to live in it to be bettered. It only needs people to bring themselves to be ground up.

I wrote a paper in January about the carceral system as a system for extracting time, as a “natural resource,” from the lives and bodies of racialized and criminalized people. In the paper I pointed out that “time” can mean a lot of things, and if we are going to talk about its extraction then we need to ask what it is in its “raw” form and what it is processed into and used for upon being extracted. I said that raw time was simply potential and possibility, and that from this potentiality of life state practices like harassment, surveillance, arrests, killings, incarceration, prison transfers, parole, all manner of political theater, and so on produce temporal products the state can use like duration, events, and rhythms. Rhythms are useful because they synchronize and organize the workings of the state’s various systems and integrate them into the coherent whole called territory. Duration means sustenance or maintenance: the continuation of the state’s current configuration. And events are useful because they a) can be used to construct other rhythms (like cycles of “reform” followed by crackdowns, adjusted for various political purposes) and b) are the things you hang a narrative on.

What these politicians are doing with their rhetoric is very literally processing the time, the potential and possibility, what Ruth Wilson Gilmore called “the resource of life,” that was taken from George Floyd into an event. (The trial itself was already doing that, of course, but now they are eventalizing the event further.) This event is supposed to link into the sanitized--”folkloric,” as Osita Nwanevu put it--narrative of the Civil Rights movement. The nature of that narrative is to lock struggle into the past, to treat the losses that were part of it as finished, justified, nobly necessary, and the objects of awe and respect rather than sources of grief or motivation. (ETA: Decent thread here pointing out how Biden’s explicitly linking last year’s protests to the 60s skips over decades of public mobilization in between, including the formation of BLM in 2014 when Biden was still VP.) Whether we regard this as extending that narrative into the present or shunting George Floyd’s life and death into the past doesn’t really matter. Either way, the future that is left open here for those of us alive to encounter it is what is called “the future anterior,” a future that is only an extension of the past--more of the same. The “future to-come,” as a meaningfully different and significantly unknowable future, a future with the “raw time” possibility of being different that makes the future what it is, is deferred. All these practices do that--separate future anterior from future to-come, and use the predictable guarantees of the former to generate value while deferring the latter.

Many, many Black and other intellectuals have written about how liberalism and capitalism have been built on extracting value from the people they racialize and criminalize. I doubt anyone reading this far needs that explained. I just find it revolting how clearly Frey has articulated that here. “Our city is better because it killed George Floyd. Be uplifted.” Yes, he ended on “he should still be here.” I suppose that’s better than if he hadn’t. But I can barely hear that closing over the first two sentences ringing in my ears.

[chicago-geniza]

What Stefania does not say but what I believe to be implicit in her preface--politically--is a pushback against the narrative of "competing martyrologies" already emerging in 1944 and coalescing/crystallizing around the Powstanie. Stefania argues against, hm. Against legend-history in favor of myth-reportage. How do I explain this. More in the morning, and inspired by skimming a 1940 folktale motif study from my great-uncle's library earlier, but she elaborates on her understanding of myth in the Pan Tadeusz essay. It grows out of Jung, archetypes, a universal humanism of...consciousness that recurs at the narrative level across cultures, that makes certain images, certain arcs, certain acts by certain character types compelling. There's the Universal Pan-Human that belonged to the cosmic in art until religion was nationalized, and then the national-specific and temporal-specific, i.e., the historical. It's when you try to claim that the Universal Pan-Human is uniquely national-specific or uniquely temporal-specific that you get both political chauvinism and bad art. So she can rightly claim that the Powstanie wouldn't have happened without the legacy of Romanticism, but *heroism* and *sacrifice* and ordinary people going down fighting for the sake of a cause higher than themselves--those abstractions, those principles, those Themes are not the sole property of the Polish nation, they are not Polish attributes As Such, they are not an emergent property of some nascent quality called Polish nationality. She writes about the ghetto uprising and uses very specific language--the language of 19th-century Romanticism, of *heroism*, of "ordinary people," with neither extraordinary courage nor extraordinary cowardice, but who *acted* under extraordinary circumstances and were thus transformed. She places the Powstanie and the ghetto uprising--the *people*, specifically, Jews and Poles--under the same descriptive banner in her language, both Universal Pan-Human AND national-specific, familiar to her Polish audience. Ok. More when I find Smocza 13 while unpacking or make the PDF not crash my computer

UPD: Adding this--about history as literary embodiment (and vice versa, since Romanticism was steeped in "historical epic"; recursive effect), and about making meaning from events after the fact

[kkintle]

The Sea, The Sea by Iris Murdoch ; Quotes

One of the secrets of a happy life is continuous small treats, and if some of these can me inexpensive and quickly procured so much the better.

There will be time and motive enough to prose on about my life when I shall have generated as it were a sufficient cloud of reflection. I am still almost shy of my emotions, shy of the terrible strength of certain memories.

I always felt that we were in the same boat, adventuring along together (…) We enjoyed and craved for each other’s company. What a test that is: more than devotion, admiration, passion. If you long and long for someone’s company you love them.

Is it true however? Well, it is not totally misleading, but it is far too short and ‘smart’. How can one describe real people?

Did I face it well? I think I did. Forgiveness and money were so ready as soon as I knew that she was doomed. That sounds cynical. I always loved her; and we were rewarded. At the very end we were both perfect. Poor Clement. That is a dreadful land, old age. I shall soon be entering it myself.

The image of Hartley changed in my mind from fiery pain to sadness, but never became blank. And in a way, I did keep searching for her, only it was a different and quite involuntary kind of search, a sort of dream-search.

Oh Hartley, Hartley, how timeless, how absolute love is. My love for you is unaware that I am old and you perhaps are dead.

‘I could have told you that country is the least peaceful and private place to live. The most peaceful and secluded place in the world is a flat in Kensington.’

I confess that I went to Peregrine not only for a drinking bout and a chat with and cold friend, but for male company, sheer complicit male company: the complicity of males which is like, indeed is, a kind of complicity in crime, in chauvinism, in getting away with things, in just gluttonously enjoying the present even if hell is all around.

‘We are such inward creatures, that inwardness is the most amazing thing about us, even more amazing than our reason. But we cannot just walk into the cavern and look around. Most of what we think we know are pseudo-knowledge. We are all such shocking poseurs, so good at inflating the importance of what we think we value. (…) People lie so, even we old men do. Though in aa way, if there is art enough it doesn’t matter, since there is another kind of truth in the art’.

‘And if there is art enough a lie can enlighten us as well as the truth. What is the truth anyway, that truth? As we know ourselves we are fake objects, fakes, bundles of illusions. Can you determine exactly what you felt or thought or did? We have to pretend in law courts that such things can be done, but that is just a matter of convenience. Well, well, it doesn’t signify. (…)’

‘(…) Do you know what marriage is like? You say she’s unhappy, most people are. A long marriage is very unifying, even if it’s not ideal, and those old structures must be respected. You may not think much of her husband, but he may suit her, however impressed she is by meeting you again. Has she said she wants to be rescued?

How very convenient these cliché phrases are, how soothing to the pained mind, and how misleading, how concealing.

It is an interesting fact about jealousy (…) that although it is in so many respects a totally irrational as well as totally irresistible emotion, it does show a certain limited reasonableness where temporal priority is concerned.

I love her, I thought, just as if I have been married to her all those years and have seen her gradually grow old and lose her beauty.

You’ve lived in a hedonistic dream all your life, and you’ve got away with behaving like a cad because you always picked on women who could look after themselves. And my God you told us the score, you never committed yourself, you never said you loved us even when you did! A cold fish with clear hands! But it was just luck really if the girls survived.

She summoned up my whole being, and I wanted to hold her and to overwhelm her an to lie with her forever, jusqu’a la fin du monde, and yes, to amaze her humility with the forces of my love, but also to be humble myself and to let her, in the end, console me and give me back my own best self.

After looking at the bright candles I could at first see nothing, and it struck me in an odd way that while I was talking to Hartley I had forgotten about the sea, forgotten it was there and now felt confounded and at a loss to find myself half blind among those terrible rocks.

The formation of my love for Clement, had been one of the main tasks and achievements of my life: that love which so often almost failed but never quite failed.

Being in love, that’s another slavery, stupid when you come to think of it, mad really. You make another person into God. That can’t be right (…) Real love, is free and sane. (…) Real love is like in a marriage when the glamour is gone. (…) Love. God, how often we uttered that word in the theatre and how little we even thought about it.

‘Yes, it’s strange, but in a way I do know you, and there isn’t anyone else who’s near me like that. I support it’s just because we were young, and later you cant know people, or I couldn’t.’

‘It’s happened fast because it’s right, it’s easy because it’s right.’

‘I wish I was dead, I think I’m going to die soon, I feel it. Sometimes I felt I would die by wishing it when I went to sleep but I always woke up again and found I was still there. Every morning finding I’m still me, that’s hell.’ ‘Well, get out of hell then! The gate’s open and I’m holding it!’ ‘I cant. I’m hell, myself.’

‘You just want someone to remember things with.’

It ceased at last, as everything dreadful has to cease, even if it ceases only by death. My presence, my cries, had no effect on her, I doubt if, in a sense, she knew I was there, although also, in a sense, the performance was for me, its violence directed at me.

I remembered, as I now did whenever I awoke, with a pang of anguish and love and fear, that Hartley was in the house.

(…) and although, with her disordered grey hair she looked old and mad, she seemed in that arrested moment like a queen.

‘And you are using this thing from the far past as a guide to important and irrevocable moves which you propose to make in the future. You are making a dangerous induction, and induction is shaky at the best of times, consider Russell’s chicken –‘ ‘Russell’s chicken?’ ‘The farmer’s wife comes out every day and feeds the chicken, but one day she comes out and wrings its neck.’

‘Not to worry. Sic biscuits disintegrat.’ ‘What?’ ‘That’s the way the cookie crumbles.’

We did not dare to say much to each other. By now I wanted the whole thing to be over. I could scarcely endure the idea that she might even now say ‘I don’t think I want to go after all.’; and the impulse to cry out ‘Stop!’ was a pain which I urgently wanted to be without. Perhaps she felt much the same.

James said, ‘I hope you don’t feel that I’ve influenced you in any way against your better judgement?’ ‘No.’ I was not going to argue that point. Of course he had influenced me. But what was my judgement, let alone better judgement?

‘Time can divorce us from the reality of people, it can separate us from people and turn them into ghosts. Or rather it is us who turn them into ghosts or demons. Some kinds of fruitless preoccupations with the past can create such simulacra, and they exercise power, like those heroes at Troy fighting for a phantom Helen.’

‘I’m not calling her a ghost. She is real, as human creatures are, but what reality she has is elsewhere. She does not coincide with your dream figure. You were not able to transform her. You must admit you tried and failed.’

‘(…) It is a mental charade, a necessary one perhaps, it has its own necessity, but not like what you think. Of course you can’t get over it at once. But in a few weeks or a few months you’ll have run through it all, looked at it all again and felt it all again and got rid of it. It’s not an eternal thing, nothing human is eternal. For us, eternity is an illusion. It’s like in a fairy tale. When the clock strikes twelve it will all crumble to pieces and vanish. And you’ll find you are free of her, free of her forever and you can let the poor ghost go. What will remain will be ordinary obligations and ordinary interests. And you’ll feel relief, you’ll feel free. At present, you’re just obsessed, hynotised.’

‘(…) When you’ve known someone from childhood, when you can’t remember when they weren’t there, that’s not an illusion. She’s woven into me. Don’t you understand how one can be so absolutely connected with somebody like that?’

‘(…) I gave her the meaning of my life long ago, I gave it to her and she still has it. Even if she doesn’t know she has it, she has it.’

‘Just like even if she’s ugly she’s beautiful and even if she doesn’t love you she loves you – ‘ ‘But she does –‘ ‘Charles, either this is very fine, very noble, or else you’re mad.’

‘(…) You mustn’t interfere in other people’s lives, especially married people. That’s in a way why marriage is so awful, I can’t think how anyone dares to do it. You’ve got to leave them alone. They’ve got their own way of hating each other and hurting each other, they enjoy it.’

‘”For in that sleep of death what dreams may come.”(…)’

Some kinds of obsession, of which being in love is one, paralyses the ordinary free-wheeling of the mind, its natural open interested curious mode of being, which is sometimes persuasively defined as rationality. I was sane enough to know that I was in a state of total obsession and that I could onlythink, over and over again, certain agonising thoughts, could only run continually along the same rat-paths of fantasy and intent. But I was not sane enough to interrupt this mechanical movement or even to desire to do so.

‘(…) And perhaps I was pleased to see you. We sometimes like to see people whom we hate and despise so that we can stir them up to further demonstrations of how odious they are.’

‘Jealousy is born with love, but does not always die with love.’

‘(…) Ordinary mediocre people think that if they confess one tenth of the truth they’re in the clear. You’ve made all your words into lies, you’ve devalued your speech and – in a moment you’ve spoiled the past – and there’s nothing to rely on any more.’

There were a few clouds, big lazy chryselephantine clouds that loafed around over the water exuding light. I gazed at them and wondered at myself for being too obsessed to be able to admire the marvels that surrounded me. But knowing how blind I was did not make me see.

(…) people can be light sources, without ever knowing, for years in the lives of others, while their own lives take different and hidden courses. Equally, one can be, and I recalled Peregrine’s words, a monster, a cancer, in the mind of someone whom one has half forgotten or even never met.

As James said, ‘If even a dog’s tooth is truly worshipped it glows with light.’

‘Can you hear the sea?’

‘I think you’re nearly through out of it. You’ve built a cage of needs and installed here in an empty space in the middle. The strong feelings are all around her – vanity, jealousy, revenge, your love for your youth – they aren’t focused on her, they don’t touch her. She seems to be their prisoner, but really you don’t harm her at all. You are using her image, a doll, a simulacrum, it’s an exorcism. Soon you will start seeing her as a wicked enchantress. Then you will have nothing to do except forgive here and that will be within your capacity.’

‘The sea is clean. The mountains are high. I think I am becoming drunk.’ ‘The sea is not all that clean,’ said James. ‘Did you know that dolphins sometimes commit suicide by leaping onto the land because they are so tormented by parasites?’ ‘I wish you hadn’t told me that. Dolphins are such good beasts. So even they have their attendant demons.’

‘What after all is superstition?’ said James, pouring some more wine into both glasses. ‘What is religion? Where does the one end and the other begin? How could one answer that question about Christianity?’

‘(…) But this power is dreadful stuff. Our lusts and attachments compose our god. And when one attachment is cast off another arrived by way of consolation. We never give up pleasure absolutely, we only barter it for another.’ (…)

What was my role in this play? I felt myself being relaxed and smiling like a man in a dream who cannot remember his lines but knows he can manage impromptu.

If there’s any fruitless mental torment which is greater than that of jealousy it is perhaps remorse. Even the pains of loss may be less searching; and often of course these agonies combine, as now they did for me. I say remorse not repentance. I doubt if I have ever experienced repentance in a pure form; perhaps it does not exist in a pure form. Remorse contains guilt, but helpless hopeless guilt which knows of no cure for the painful bite.

However life, unlike art, has an irritating way of bumping and limping on, undoing conversions, casting doubt on solutions, and generally illustrating the impossibility of living happily or virtuously even after (…)

Time, like the sea, unties all knots. Judgements on people are never final, they emerge from summing up which at once suggest the need of a reconsideration. Human arrangements are nothing but loose ends and hazy reckoning, whatever art may otherwise pretend in order to console us.

But am I so exceptional? We must live by the light of our self-satisfaction, through that secret vital busy inwardness which is even more remarkable than our reason. Thus we must live unless we are saints, and are there any? There are spiritual beings, perhaps James was one, but there are no saints.

There may be no saints, but there is at least one proof that the light of self-satisfaction can illuminate the whole world.

Of course this chattering diary is a façade, the literary equivalent of the everyday smiling face which hides the inward savages of jealousy, remorse, fear and the consciousness of irretrievable moral failure. Yet such pretences are not only consolations but may even be productive of a little ersatz courage.

That time of attentive mourning for her death was quite unlike the black blank horror of the thing itself. We had mourned together, trying to soothe each other’s pain. But that shared pain was so much less than the torment of her vanishing, the terrible lived time of her eternal absence. How different each death is, and yet it leads us into the self-same country, that country which we inhabit so rarely, where we see that worthlessness of what we have long pursued and will so soon return to pursuing.

There were no trains going where she was.

I cannot now remember the exact sequence of events in those prehistoric years. That we cannot remember such things, that our memory, which is ourself, is tiny, limited and fallible, is also one of the important things about us, like our inwardness and our reason. Indeed it is the very essence of both.

The only fault which I can at all measure is my own.

Anything can be tarnished by association, and if you have enough associations you can blacken the world. (…) In hell or in purgatory there would be no need of other or more elaborate tortures.

My love for you is quiet at last. I don’t want it to become a roaring furnace. If I could have suffered more I would have suffered more. Receive us now as if we were your children. Tenderness and absolute trust and communication and truth matter more and more as one grows older. Somehow let us not waste love, it is rare. Can we not love each other at last in freedom, without awful possessiveness and violence and fear? Love matters, not ‘in love’. Let there be no more partings now. Let there be peace between us now forever, we are no longer young. Love me, Charles, love me enough.

I suppose that is right, though there is a kind of impiety involved in letting any of James’s stuff go away. Do I then suppose he is likely to come back at any moment?

It is strange to think that when I went to the sea I imagined that I was giving up the world. But one surrenders power in one form, and grasps it in another.

[hauntedfalcon]

@metapphjores​​ TEMPORAL CHAUVINISM 

much like PacRim, I would like maybe... three prequels 

one that’s just Andy and Quynh, one that’s just the first two or three centuries of Joe and Nicky (no I do NOT want to see them killing each other over and over again! start it after they realize they love each other!!!), and then one after they all meet up, maybe going as far as when Booker arrived 

let them do history things!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 

@tenderjock​ Andy: so I bought one 

Joe: wait what 

Andy: watch this shit *shoots her own foot* 

Nicky: *impressed frown* 

Joe: it lacks a certain refinement 

[fightersforpeace]

A critique of the WPS agenda … from a postcolonial perspective

𝑨𝒓𝒕𝒊𝒄𝒍𝒆 𝒘𝒓𝒊𝒕𝒕𝒆𝒏 𝒃𝒚 𝑯𝒂𝒍𝒂 𝑨𝒃𝒊 𝑺𝒂𝒍𝒆𝒉

Women, Peace and Security (WPS) is now considered a global “norm,” deriving legitimacy from the Beijing declaration, the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW), UN Security Council (UNSC) Resolution 1325, and nine subsequent resolutions. Taken together, these instruments and the norms that underpin them are referred to as the WPS agenda. Nevertheless, after the adoption of these resolutions, several debates broke out on a global level about whether the WPS agenda and the concepts and practices it inspires have any purchase in the Global South, and how the postcolonial feminist perspective might have extended the scrutiny and critique.

One of the main critics of the WPS agenda is that the latter is inattentive to gender relations, masculinities, and gender hierarchies in the Global South. It assumes that peace is the natural outcome of women’s involvement in post-conflict processes.

Moreover, other critics were discussed and debated between postcolonial feminists and mainstream feminists such as the global South is accountable to western concepts and practices used in case studies in all over the world and where specificity and singularity are put aside. Plus, the discourse, used by feminists from the global North towards women of the global south, contains a lot of empowerment and protection as if the southern women are only victims and not a main player in the society. In the end, most feminists forgot that women coming from formerly colonized countries face two levels of oppression: one related to its own culture and the other is a residue from the colonization period.

All these criticisms can be related to two fundamental actions happening within the UN: the first one is that the Global North has access to funds and resources and, barring China and Russia, constitutes the three main actors within the UN Security Council, entrusted with passing critical resolutions that form the core of WPS. And the other is that large scale military interventions to restore peace are adopted by the UN Security Council is reviving colonial “rescue narratives” in sites of conflict in the Global South.

Women from the Global South are made accountable to western concepts and practices

When the 1325 Resolution was adopted by the Security Council (UNSC), most of the feminist activists and scholars were happy by the result and thought that the global road to gender equality and security have begun. Nevertheless, the incoming years revealed many loops in this resolution and agenda such as the internalization of western concepts and practices, if not domination, in the WPS agenda.

The WPS agenda is associated with successful advocacy efforts of non-governmental organizations, gender activists and feminist’s scholars with offices in New York, London and Geneva and mostly with the western members of the UNSC. Also, efforts to push the agenda forward are identified with governments, NGOs, and international organizations that are based primarily in the Global North. This has resulted to push an agenda with concepts culturally related to these countries values, which contributed to the widely shared assumptions about the Global North as the “conceptual, material and institutional home” of UN Security Council Resolutions related to the gender and security agenda. Thus, this situation can be translated into that Global South states and non-state actors are being accountable to Western concepts and practices and undermining local concepts and values.

The problem of case studies and best practices

One of the other criticism of the WPS agenda is regarding the case studies and best practices, where studies are done all the time to give a discursive meaning and universal character to this agenda. In this case, the Global South must perform the site of innumerable case studies, where people and societies are framed in a perpetual state of conflict and violence, and where local values and culture are forgotten.

The problem by deploying the concept of best practices in the implementation of the WPS agenda is that from one conflict region to another context, local values, culture differ. Even two situations of conflict in the same temporal and spatial geographies can demonstrate completely different gender norms, before, during, and after the conflict. “Best practices” thus, may be a useful policy term, but it does not capture the complexity of the situation on the ground. It, also, fails to highlight the complexities of these conflicts in which states are parties waging wars against their citizens or inter-state conflicts with foreign intervention or even separatist groups or terrorist groups.

Furthermore, case studies are carefully selected to suit the Western governments’ strategic priorities, intervention goals, and funding rationale; some areas are over-researched (like sexual violence in wars), while others are marginalized (such as state violence against indigenous people and gender minorities). How this is happening? For some, the weak states and civil society agendas of the Global South are controlled and influenced by donor grants, research funding, and support for outreach activities who mostly comes from Western agencies and Governments.

Therefore, based on these ideas discussed above, for some postcolonial feminists, the WPS discourse endorses a particular liberal vision of equality and peace that does not appear to be inclusive of all interests and experiences. Besides, state-led National Action Plans (NAP) which are emphasized as part of the WPS agenda, end up endorsing the state’s narrative of the conflict and its marginalization and discrimination plus these “Western” concept of peace, security and gender. This lead to some feminists to shed the light on the dual oppression that women are facing in the Global South in general.

Dual oppression of women in postcolonial states

For many feminists in the Global South and postcolonial theorists, women in general, are facing dual oppression in postcolonial states based on the residue of oppression from the colonial area, the native oppression, and the fluidity of gender norms that were challenged under colonial masculinity.

Many feminists and postcolonial theorists pointed out that “anti-colonial resistance” was not “anti-colonial critique,” and that the chauvinism and authoritarianism of colonial states had to be challenged, and there were many struggles within the larger anti-colonial movements, such as women’s movements against patriarchal traditions and violence. The priority is for what independence or changing society?

The debates around the situation of women particularly and gender, in general, have addressed the issue of the dual colonization of women, oppressed by both native and foreign patriarchies. As well these debates highlighted the lack of acknowledgement of differences in feminist understandings of women’s global oppression, where the difference is not just between the West and the other areas of the world but even within these areas or even in the same country. Furthermore, these debates highlighted the problematic history of feminism as imperialism, where feminists have been complicit in both the production and the marginalization of the gendered subaltern.

Other criticism towards the WPS agenda explained that most literature and debates perceive women in the Global South as victims.

Improve the woman “out there”

Throughout the discourse towards gender issues in the Global South, many terms have used that lead to “Empowerment” and “save the women” in this region, which continues to be co-opted and invoked by many. This discourse leads many scholars to point out that this scenario of “saving women” is part of the colonial/imperial literature.

Let’s take for example the references to 1325 (UNSC Resolution) in the preamble of Security Council Resolution 1483 on Iraq. These references could be seen as a positive case if we take into consideration that it gives legitimacy to women’s role and inclusion in the reconstruction and nation-building process in Iraq. Nevertheless, we could also analyse it another way: 1325 is being used as a tool to justify military occupation on behalf of “liberating” women. Furthermore, “The Global War on Terror” is another appropriate example of Western efforts aimed to rescue Afghan women from the Taliban. The problem is that feminists were complicit in supporting that effort of “saving and liberating women” in both cases as if they are providing a moral compass to governments and the people. And nobody asked the “women” in these countries what do they want? Maybe for them, they are other ways to ameliorate their situation outside of the discourse and practices of “gender equality”. In fact, in specific contexts, women may value gender complementarity rather than gender equality. In such situations, “gender equality” and “empowerment,” as defined can be unproductive and even potentially damaging concepts.

As discussed above, the discourse aimed at issues of the Global South is focused on the “protection” of women in this area and not an actor with its tools and values. And for some scholars, this can be seen as a considerable pressure to improve a lot of the women “out there,” from state agencies, neoliberal global institutions and even corporate interests, who fund both WPS research and practical initiatives.

References:

Aoláin, F. N. “Situating Women in Counterterrorism Discourses: Undulating Masculinities and Luminal Femininities.” Boston University Law Review 93, no. 3 (2013): 1085–1122.

D’Costa, B. “Learning to Be a Compassionate Academic.” Australian Journal of International Affairs 71, no. 1 (2016): 3–7.

Grewal, I., and C. Kaplan. “Postcolonial Studies and Transnational Feminist Practices.” Jouvert: A Journal of Postcolonial Studies 5, no. 1 (2000), http://english.chass.ncsu.edu/ jouvert/v5i1/grewal.htm.

Otto, D. “Women, Peace, and Security: A Critical Analysis of the Security Council’s Vision.” London: LSE Women, Peace and Security Working Paper Series, 2016.

Parpart, J. L. “Imagined Peace, Gender Relations, and Post-Conflict Transformation: Anti- Colonial and Post-Cold War Conflicts.” In Women, Gender Equality, and Post-Conflict Transformation: Lessons Learned, Implications for the Future, edited by J. P. Kaufman and K. P. Williams, 51–71. New York: Routledge, 2016.

Article supported by IFA-ZIVIK

[frederickwiddowson]

Exodus 8:16-19 comments: a plague of lice

Exodus 8:16 ¶  And the LORD said unto Moses, Say unto Aaron, Stretch out thy rod, and smite the dust of the land, that it may become lice throughout all the land of Egypt. 17  And they did so; for Aaron stretched out his hand with his rod, and smote the dust of the earth, and it became lice in man, and in beast; all the dust of the land became lice throughout all the land of Egypt. 18  And the magicians did so with their enchantments to bring forth lice, but they could not: so there were lice upon man, and upon beast. 19  Then the magicians said unto Pharaoh, This is the finger of God: and Pharaoh’s heart was hardened, and he hearkened not unto them; as the LORD had said.

The court magicians could counterfeit the rod turning into a snake, the surface water turning into blood, and the frogs. However, they could not produce the lice. The Egyptians hated lice. Lice were a sort of personal horror to them. The remains of lice can even be found in Egyptian tombs. They were so sickened by the infestation of lice that normally Egyptian men and women shaved their heads and the hairstyles you see on statuary and tomb paintings represent wigs. The Ebers Papyrus, listing many medical remedies, contains remedies for lice as well.

This is very personal. I am reminded of the symbolic significance of the first wonders; the serpent, the blood, and the frogs. But, with lice I am reminded of the personal horror and nausea this entailed, much like the Philistine lords being afflicted with painful hemorrhoids in 1Samuel 5. The symbolic wonders that may have told a story of spiritual significance were able to be copied by the heathen magicians. But, this very personal pestilence was all God’s own. God even warns us now in our lives in many other ways, often, before afflicting us personally to turn us from our sin to Him.

Each of these plagues affect things that were worshipped as gods by the Egyptians. The earth the lice came from was no different. God is punishing not only the Egyptians, and the entire ancient world by example, but their devils, their gods.

Exodus 12:12  For I will pass through the land of Egypt this night, and will smite all the firstborn in the land of Egypt, both man and beast; and against all the gods of Egypt I will execute judgment: I am the LORD.

In God’s ministry of reconciling man to Himself we have come to a critical point. As I pointed out in my comments on Genesis the ancient world had deteriorated spiritually to a point where idolatry was the norm, where gods were created who were gods of a particular city and family, and where the God who created mankind was ignored or forgotten. Political gods were part of a nation, a cultural entity’s sense of self-identity. A nation, an ethnic nationality, was justified by its political gods much like the Hindus and Muslims who battled at India’s independence from the British in the late 1940’s or the so-called Christian governments of Britain, Russia, and Germany during World War One or the fundamentalists of America who glorify the state with flags on the pulpit and celebrations at every national holiday and support any martial effort of this country no matter what the reason or consequence. It was all done to the glory of their gods, not the God of the Bible or creation. Yes, I am saying that many Christians in America today, Britain, Russia, and Germany in times past, and Hindus and Muslims worship false gods, devils, and not the God of the Bible. Their gods are wrapped in a flag, a political ideology, and a cultural chauvinism. That is why they hate each other so and why they kill each other so easily. But, even supposedly non-religious people will fight and die over secular gods whom they call ideals and ideologies thinking they have escaped the plague of religion. It is not so. Communists and other atheist ideologies are also bloody killers, trying to create a perfect kingdom out of millions of victims and great suffering they cause.

God is judging mankind here by proxy for its decay into the lunacy of national gods and cultural gods, as even the modern Christian merely worships a god who is a reflection of his own political beliefs, paranoia, and bigotry.

The magicians acknowledge that, because of their inability, they realize that this is proof of the God of the Hebrews involvement. This is not a saving acknowledgement however, as we see the Pharaoh, as a god-man, the only physical and living emblem of the gods on earth for the Egyptians, set his heart to oppose the God of the Hebrews, who, unknowing to him, is the God who created him and sustains him.

The Egyptian Pharaoh was the incarnation of gods on earth as he lived and when he died he was the representation of the god of the underworld. Pharaoh was a false god in the flesh. He, of course, possessed by devils, and filled with pride and exaltation, like the Beast of Revelation, sets his heart of stone against the God who created Him.

Some part of mankind will follow God through the only physical representation He has ever had, the incarnate God, the physical body of the invisible God, the Lord Jesus Christ, the Word of God by which all things were created and are sustained. But, it began with one man, Abraham, coming out of Ur of the Chaldees, and now this one group of people, the Hebrews, coming from Jacob, who was called Israel, who will depart from Egypt as Abraham departed from Ur and as the Christian looks forward to departing a judged world that is shrouded in darkness, a condition of which one proof is decay and death, the greatest temporal plague of all.

[compneuropapers]

Interesting Papers for Week 25, 2017

Locomotion Enhances Neural Encoding of Visual Stimuli in Mouse V1. Dadarlat, M. C., & Stryker, M. P. (2017). Journal of Neuroscience, 37(14), 3764–3775.

Newly acquired audio-visual associations bias perception in binocular rivalry. Einhäuser, W., Methfessel, P., & Bendixen, A. (2017). Vision Research, 133, 121–129.

Multisensory cue combination after sensory loss: Audio-visual localization in patients with progressive retinal disease. Garcia, S. E., Jones, P. R., Reeve, E. I., Michaelides, M., Rubin, G. S., & Nardini, M. (2017). Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance, 43(4), 729–740.

Medial Prefrontal Cortex Reduces Memory Interference by Modifying Hippocampal Encoding. Guise, K. G., & Shapiro, M. L. (2017). Neuron, 94(1), 183–192.e8.

Do low spatial frequencies explain the extremely fast saccades towards human faces? Guyader, N., Chauvin, A., Boucart, M., & Peyrin, C. (2017). Vision Research, 133, 100–111.

Engrams and circuits crucial for systems consolidation of a memory. Kitamura, T., Ogawa, S. K., Roy, D. S., Okuyama, T., Morrissey, M. D., Smith, L. M., … Tonegawa, S. (2017). Science, 356(6333), 73–78.

Persistent Single-Neuron Activity during Working Memory in the Human Medial Temporal Lobe. Kornblith, S., Quian Quiroga, R., Koch, C., Fried, I., & Mormann, F. (2017). Current Biology, 27(7), 1026–1032.

The Dual Nature of Early-Life Experience on Somatosensory Processing in the Human Infant Brain. Maitre, N. L., Key, A. P., Chorna, O. D., Slaughter, J. C., Matusz, P. J., Wallace, M. T., & Murray, M. M. (2017). Current Biology, 27(7), 1048–1054.

Human seizures couple across spatial scales through travelling wave dynamics. Martinet, L.-E., Fiddyment, G., Madsen, J. R., Eskandar, E. N., Truccolo, W., Eden, U. T., … Kramer, M. A. (2017). Nature Communications, 8, 14896.

Activation of perineuronal net-expressing excitatory neurons during associative memory encoding and retrieval. Morikawa, S., Ikegaya, Y., Narita, M., & Tamura, H. (2017). Scientific Reports, 7, 46024.

A saturation hypothesis to explain both enhanced and impaired learning with enhanced plasticity. Nguyen-Vu, T. B., Zhao, G. Q., Lahiri, S., Kimpo, R. R., Lee, H., Ganguli, S., … Raymond, J. L. (2017). eLife, 6(e20147).

Dopamine neuronal loss contributes to memory and reward dysfunction in a model of Alzheimer’s disease. Nobili, A., Latagliata, E. C., Viscomi, M. T., Cavallucci, V., Cutuli, D., Giacovazzo, G., … D’Amelio, M. (2017). Nature Communications, 8, 14727.

Artificial spatiotemporal touch inputs reveal complementary decoding in neocortical neurons. Oddo, C. M., Mazzoni, A., Spanne, A., Enander, J. M. D., Mogensen, H., Bengtsson, F., … Jörntell, H. (2017). Scientific Reports, 8, 45898.

Mesoscale Architecture Shapes Initiation and Richness of Spontaneous Network Activity. Okujeni, S., Kandler, S., & Egert, U. (2017). Journal of Neuroscience, 37(14), 3972–3987.

Development of contrast normalization mechanisms during childhood and adolescence. Pei, F., Baldassi, S., Tsai, J. J., Gerhard, H. E., & Norcia, A. M. (2017). Vision Research, 133, 12–20.

Role of proBDNF and BDNF in dendritic spine plasticity and depressive-like behaviors induced by an animal model of depression. Qiao, H., An, S.-C., Xu, C., & Ma, X.-M. (2017). Brain Research, 1663, 29–37.

Visual acuity of the honey bee retina and the limits for feature detection. Rigosi, E., Wiederman, S. D., & O’Carroll, D. C. (2017). Scientific Reports, 7, 45972.

The Emergence of Directional Selectivity in the Visual Motion Pathway of Drosophila. Strother, J. A., Wu, S.-T., Wong, A. M., Nern, A., Rogers, E. M., Le, J. Q., … Reiser, M. B. (2017). Neuron, 94(1), 168–182.e10.

Multiagent cooperation and competition with deep reinforcement learning. Tampuu, A., Matiisen, T., Kodelja, D., Kuzovkin, I., Korjus, K., Aru, J., … Vicente, R. (2017). PLOS ONE, 12(4), e0172395.

Cerebellar granule cells encode the expectation of reward. Wagner, M. J., Kim, T. H., Savall, J., Schnitzer, M. J., & Luo, L. (2017). Nature, 544(7648), 96–100.

[tunnels-end]

As in all conceptual reflections, in this case there is no universally shared concept of community, only particular articulations that overlap, complement, or sit at acute angles to one another. I will rely on the definitions and expositions of a number of writers for examples of conceptualizations about community as a political ideal. All these writers share a critique of liberal individualist social ontology, and most think democratic socialism is the best principle of social organization. I claim acceptance for my analysis only within this general field of political discourse, although I suspect that much of the conceptual structure I identify applies to an ideal of community that might be appealed to by more conservative or liberal writers. I criticize the notion of community on both philosophical and practical grounds. I argue that the ideal of community participates in what Derrida calls the metaphysics of presence and Adorno calls the logic of identity, a metaphysics that denies difference. The ideal of community presumes subjects can understand one another as they understand themselves. It thus denies the difference between subjects. The desire for community relies on the same desire for social wholeness and identification that underlies racism and ethnic chauvinism on the one hand and political sectarianism on the other. Insofar as the ideal of community entails promoting a model of face-to-face relations as best, it devalues and denies difference in the form of temporal and spatial distancing. the ideal of a society consisting of decentralized face-to-face communities is undesirably utopian in several ways. It fails to see that alienation and violence are not only a function of mediation of social relations but also can and do exist in face-to-face relations. It implausibly proposes a society without the city. It fails to address the political question of the relations among face-to-face communities. The ideal of community, finally, totalizes and detemporalizes its conception of social life by setting up an opposition between authentic and inauthentic social relations. It also detemporalizes its understanding of social change by positing the desired society as the complete negation of existing society. It thus provides no understanding of the move from here to there that would be rooted in an understanding of the contradictions and possibilities of existing society.

Iris Marion Young, “The Ideal of Community and the Politics of Difference”

[badiajordi]

George Floyd i els temporers

George Floyd i els temporers

Estem indignadíssims i ho manifestem amb l’entusiasme que ens dona saber que tenim raó i que estem al costat dels bons. No som tothom, però sí que som molts i encara que no en siguem prous. Que a la Casa Blanca hi hagi Donald Trump i no pas Barack Obama, tranquil·litza i, fins i tot, engresca.

L’assassinat de George Floyd, ofegat pel policia Derek Chauvin a Minnesota, ens ha commocionat. Estem…

[esbagreestobeindecisive]

In Praise of Slowness By Henry Martyn Lloyd

IN AN ATTEMPT to view its treasures in less than nine minutes and 43 seconds, three youths run recklessly through the Louvre, laughing breathlessly. The scene, from Jean-Luc Godard’s 1964 Bande à part, is one of French cinema’s most famous. Invoked in the conclusion to Michelle Boulous Walker’s Slow Philosophy: Reading Against the Institution, it is made to capture the malaise that grips contemporary philosophy in its institutional context, where the demands of speed and efficiency dominate at the expense of considered contemplation, and where the rapid production and consumption of knowledge have almost completely displaced the pleasures of the text. As Boulous Walker bluntly asserts, “this is not how we look at art.”

Godard’s image is striking for its visual poetry. By contrast, the dominant if somewhat covert image of Maggie Berg and Barbara K. Seeber’s The Slow Professor: Challenging the Culture of Speed in the Academy is striking for its banality. Teenagers working casualised jobs on a minimum wage serve homogenized products devoid of nutritional or aesthetical value to obese, diabetic, and utterly docile consumers. Fluorescent lights accentuate garish plastic furniture and everybody smiles, although nobody knows why. Welcome to McUniversity.

Much has already been written about the corporatization of higher education, the state of the contemporary academy, and particularly the state of the humanities. There has been enough diagnosis. What is needed now is a response that seeks to identify and cultivate a space for resistance within the modern corporate university, for keeping “alive the craft.” It is against the consumptive “student experience” model of education, the productive “publish or perish” culture and their corollaries, that Boulous Walker and Berg and Seeber set themselves. And they do so with a much-needed sense of optimism that such resistance is still possible.

Berg and Seeber are literary critics with positions in English departments. Their own disciplinary affiliation, however, sits very lightly on their book; they have deliberately avoided writing a “300-page scholarly tome [their] colleagues would likely be too busy to read.” While the subgenre of the “campus novel” makes a significant contribution to their task, rather than studying literature directly, Berg and Seeber have successfully adopted a personalized, testimonial, and self-consciously anecdotal approach. The result is that, regardless of disciplinary identification, very few academics will fail to find their own experiences reflected in those of the two authors. Recognizing that policy responses to the malaise of the university would only exacerbate problems caused by an already top-heavy institution, Berg and Seeber take the locus of resistance to be the working life of the individual professor. Their manifesto is structured around the quotidian and very practical aspects of the academic life: time management, teaching, researching, collegiality, and collaboration.

Boulous Walker’s project is, by contrast, to ground a specific rejoinder from within philosophy. In the terms she deploys throughout her book, philosophy as the love of wisdom is increasingly set against philosophy as the desire to know, a forensic and exhaustive desire that all too often stands in the way of the transformative potential of wisdom. Philosophy as contemplation is set against philosophy in the service of mechanistic appropriation, technological enframing, calculative thinking, and instrumental reason.

There are echoes here of the idea that the only locus of resistance to modernity is art: rather than running through galleries, we need to “understand how much there is to gain and to experience in standing for extended periods in front of major art works.” For Boulous Walker, “complex works of philosophy require a similarly committed viewing.” The cheap version of the idea that “only art can save us” is that in the face of ever-increasing technological enframing, and given the death of God, salvation can only come from the pen/brush of a brilliant artistic Messiah in a stunning work of avant-garde art. Much more plausibly, Boulous Walker makes it clear that salvation lies less in the work itself — be it artistic or philosophical — than in the form of contemplation with which we regard the work. She, too, takes the individual to be the locus of resistance to the McUniversity.

¤

The idea of slowness — of slowing down — is central to articulating a response to the crisis of the contemporary university. Boulous Walker and, much more explicitly, Berg and Seeber draw from the slow food movement as a curative to the modern McUniversity. Yet while the slow movement does challenge the pace and standardization of contemporary culture, it need not do so in the name of sloth or of a pre-urban pastoral romanticization:

The slow movement is not a counter-cultural retreat from everyday life, not a return to the past, the good old days … neither is it a form of laziness, nor a slow-motion version of life […] Rather it is […] a process whereby everyday life — in all its pace and complexity, frisson and routine — is approached with care and attention.

For her part, Boulous Walker has written an extremely classical work of philosophy that serves a progressive agenda. It is “classical” in the sense that it is a return to the discipline’s oldest and most enduring self-conception: philosophy as philosophia, the love of wisdom. And her agenda is “progressive” in the sense that at the heart of the work there is a reframing of philosophy that is simple, powerful, and startlingly original. Various traditions within modern philosophy have held that the locus of knowledge is internal to the subject and is to be found in the self-sufficient resources of the thinking self. By contrast, the attractiveness of Boulous Walker’s manifesto is its turning of philosophy outward. Philosophy is reconsidered as a fundamental engagement with the other, and the preeminent activity of the philosopher is the act of reading.

Boulous Walker’s observation that philosophers do not so much think as read is simultaneously startling and utterly banal. Yet in a tradition widely obsessed with the pure act of thinking, the shift in self-understanding is profound. If the model of the philosopher as thinker encourages the fantasy of the self as a heroic, self-reliant, first-person agent, the model of philosopher as reader necessitates a rethinking of this. A reader reads what is written by another; to read well is to open oneself to the authorial voice of the other. If the model of philosophy as pure thinking encourages the chauvinism that is too often a feature of philosophy’s self-conception, the model of philosophy developed by Boulous Walker is intrinsically open to disciplines that philosophy often defines itself against history, literature, and aesthetics more broadly. Reading, and reading well, can never be conceived of as something that is the exclusive purview of philosophy. Nor can what is read be limited to philosophy narrowly construed, but it must include literature, the arts, or film.

The real innovation of Boulous Walker’s book is its understanding of philosophia — the love of wisdom — in terms of the love of reading. The point is not that philosophers do not read, or that they ought to read more, but that philosophy needs to rethink what it is to read, and to think carefully about what it is to read better. Hence the importance of slowness.

The sense in which slowness is deployed here is very broad. “Slow reading” is not to be understood in opposition to “fast reading.” There is nothing per se problematic with speed- or skim-reading; there are occasions when speed is necessary. Sometimes, for Boulous Walker to read slowly means returning to a text to reread and reconsider it at whatever speed. At other times, slowness means carefully ruminating on a text while doing something entirely different: jogging, swimming, staring out the window, sitting in traffic. At other times, it means leisurely and carefully sinking into the mood of the work. Slow reading is often characterized by its intensity: it involves a fine-tuned attention to detail and nuance. And openness: “Slow reading is important precisely because it provides us with the attentive quality necessary for openness to occur.” Pleasure is important here, but so is a certain amount of discomfort. Boulous Walker is advocating reading as an act of meditative contemplation that has transformative potential, which opens the self to the possibility of a reorientation vis-à-vis knowledge and the other.

Berg and Seeber generally understand slowness in a more literal, temporal sense. This is especially true in their chapter on time management and timelessness, which is in direct response to a body of literature that includes such inviting titles as The Efficient, Effective Professor and which, among other things, suggests that professors “be smart about which work [they] save for the weekends,” and perhaps rise at 3:30 a.m. in order to write undisturbed from 4:00 to 6:45 a.m. This is apparently not suggested in jest. Berg and Seeber respond in part by using less frenzied literature to indicate that once we work past our productive peak, we begin to simply waste time; we can in fact achieve more by working less. They also invoke the idea of “timeless time” by which they mean objective time that effectively passes unnoticed.

“Flow” is the major metaphor here. Although it has some purchase in psychological research, the idea of “flow” has become something of a New Age-ism and so is resistant to deeper analysis. What Berg and Seeber are really calling for is perhaps better described as “free time” within which to work in an unscheduled, non-purposive, and therefore creative mode. “We need time to do nothing.” Here Boulous Walker’s deployment of the philosophical tradition allows her to say more, even if she does so in a genre that perhaps not all readers will find inviting.

Like the idea of slowness, reading too is understood by Boulous Walker in a very broad sense. One of the more interesting aspects of the book is a discussion of reading as listening. The point is made against a tradition that generally takes sight to be the privileged metaphor for knowledge; sight permits a certain distance between the object and the subject. But for sight to operate well, it requires interdependence with the “lower” senses such as hearing and touch. It is particularly the act of listening that provides a useful alternate metaphor for knowledge. Listening promotes proximity and nearness: immersion. Yet “the patience of attentive listening involves an open exchange where listening is not mediated by shared understanding, but by difference. Attentive listening respects the other’s difference.”

The return here to an understanding of philosophy as fundamentally dialogical is not accidental: listening to the other is the precondition for knowing. Attentive listening provides the necessary interval or hesitation that makes it possible to avoid consuming or integrating the other.

Reading is not a neutral activity; there is no innocent reading. Reading never is, nor ever ought to be, a complete abandoning of the self in favor of the text. Boulous Walker exemplifies what this means, as she draws on large parts of the established canon of philosophy — including Plato, Nietzsche, Levinas, Adorno, Beauvoir, and Irigaray — but also from less well-known figures such as Luiz Costa Lima, Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht, and Robert Musil. It is in her focus on Simone de Beauvoir’s reworking of Sartre’s philosophical ontology that Boulous Walker’s own model of philosophy-as-reading is exemplified: “Beauvoir remains philosophically connected and yet independent from Sartre.” This reading, which has been characterized by Michèle Le Dœuff as “operative philosophy,” only occupies a few pages of direct discussion in Boulous Walker’s book, but is an important exemplification of the model of philosophy she advocates. Without becoming side-tracked in a performative display of the language’s inability to refer to anything other than itself, Boulous Walker carefully reads Le Dœuff as she reads Beauvoir who in turn reads Sartre.

¤

What is needed is a rethinking of the relationship between professionalism and amateurism within the university. To be a professional academic is to be paid to work in a specific discipline. The professional academic teaches several courses a year to (hopefully) interested, engaged students; grades diligently and quickly; answers emails and attends to administrative duties; supervises their graduate students conscientiously; publishes regularly; applies for and hopefully occasionally gets external research grants. In this sense, the professional is contrasted with the person who does not perform these duties well enough.

The professional is also marked out as opposed to the “amateur,” the person who may read in their spare time and discuss what they read with friends, but who will likely not take it upon themselves to submit to the rigors of the professional life. The amateur may read an interesting article or whole books, but they will probably not read an oeuvre in full, nor will they read the voluminous and often boring secondary literature.

In both these senses, professionalism is marked out as a positive term through a disjunction with its negative other: you cannot be both a professional and an amateur at the same time. But there is another, older sense in which amateurism can be understood. The word itself stems from the Latin amator — lover. The amateur is motivated by love. In this sense, professionalism and amateurism are, in theory at least, perfectly compatible with each other. It is often forgotten that philosophia in its Socratic form is love of wisdom in the sense of an erotic desire for the good and the beautiful. Boulous Walker reminds us of this and develops the point using Plato’s Symposium and Irigaray’s reading of that text. But there is much more to be said about the modes of love, as well as the possibilities and dangers. Here Boulous Walker develops some of the most interesting and applicable sections of Beauvoir’s The Second Sex: the discussion of romantic and authentic love.

Berg and Seeber’s defense of amateurism takes the form of a call to retrieve the pleasures of the profession. The theme is developed throughout the book, but it is in the chapter on the pleasures of teaching that the theme is addressed most directly:

[P]ositive emotions facilitate learning, so it seems reasonable to suggest that they will also enhance teaching. It is neither frivolous nor incidental to ensure that we enjoy ourselves in the classroom: it may be crucial to creating an environment in which students can learn.

Their analysis here is quite specific with sections on nervousness, timing and non-verbal communication, breathing, laughing and humor, listening, pacing, and the use of narrative and storytelling. Pleasure is inimical to corporatization. It is here that the McUniversity model of homogenized product delivery can be most directly and successfully countered.

It goes without saying that an excess of amateurish behavior by those paid to behave otherwise is a threat to the contemporary academy. But this is hardly the problem. A far more serious danger is that posed by an excess of, or a misconstrual of, professionalism. Where professionalism is understood merely in terms of speed or haste, of the mechanistic, efficient, and too often thoughtless performance of professional duties, it sets itself against amateurism in the sense of love, desire, and pleasure. It is this malignant professionalism that prevents academics from being both professionals and amateurs.

In quite different registers, both of these books offer a much-needed curative to the rampant McUniversity. Neither relies on the hope that the upper administration will suddenly find a policy response to stop the rot. Both affirm the agency of the individual, and argue persuasively that they can effect change through the manner in which they construct their professional amateurism. Berg and Seeber offer a therapeutics ground in the pragmatic and practical, and their book deserves to be widely read for this. Boulous Walker operates at a higher level of abstraction drawing on a tradition that has since its ancient beginning taken philosophical therapeutics as central. In doing so, neither succumbs to the idea that the university can only survive if it can professionalize sufficiently to remain effective in the context of late capitalism. Nor do they suggest that the only future is a flight from the academy or for that matter from modernity.

Together they reconstruct a professional amateurism that is neither amateurish nor ill from malignant professionalism. The university continues to bring together willing students with professional academics and the moments of learning that continue to occur have transformative and subversive potential. Within the corporate university, love of wisdom, desire, and pleasure can still be found.