Not Recognizing the invisibility of the Real

After finishing his doctorate my father accepted a six month position with the United Nations Development Program in New York City – a decision that routed us to Flushing, Queens instead of back to Pakistan. In the middle of a dozen or so 20 story apartment buildings was a playing area where the boys’ hierarchy was acted out. At the top was Donald, the son of an airline pilot, whose hero was General George Armstrong Custer. Surprisingly, I was not at the bottom, at least not immediately. That position was occupied by A, who, while being many inches taller and many pounds heavier than me, had been branded a coward prior to my arrival on Kessena Boulevard. The rest of the boys – Polish, Czech, Italian – mocked A for suffering his position below me. When one day the older boys outside our group realized this disorder in rank, they placed A in an impossible situation. Either he would have to fight me or endure their beating. I seemed to have no say in this, carried as I was by flows that seemed to me as incomprehensible as they were inevitable. As I struggled inside another circle, the fight itself was again inconclusive. Then A stepped back five feet and spit in my direction bellowing, "Anyway, you are nothing but a filthy Pakistani." My symmetrical response required no thought whatsoever, "Oh yeah, and you are nothing but a filthy American." And then came what I have come to see as a kind of Mobius twist. With rising posture he gloated, "Damn right I am an American, and proud of it." Laughter and snickering from the boys, silence from me. I stood there, befuddled. I had fought to a draw, the circle had not closed in on me, and still I had lost. Badly. Decades later I still want to account for his effortless comeback and for my frozen speechlessness.

Sitting there...

At the top of a hill, under a shade tree, I recall sitting and eating a military issue MRE. The tree grew at the hill crest, giving me a view of either slope. To my left, less than a hundred meters away, the structure that would soon be a clinic was taking shape. Twelve to fifteen hours per day for two months, you could sit there and see US soldiers at work. Further down the hill a bit, I recall seeing the baseball field that Sammy Sosa paid for and maintained. Every once in a while you would see some organized teams come out and play. Thinking of the baseball field reminds me of the merchandise that Sammy’s PR guy gave us on our arrival. In thanks for our humanitarian effort, every soldier got a t-shirt, a baseball cap, and a miniature baseball bat. Near the work site gate, the tent we set up for the guard was always occupied. Night and day, a soldier from the Dominican Republic would sit there, cradling his M-16. He secured the stacks of lumber, cinderblocks and construction equipment from locals. I would occasionally see locals gather in groups outside the fence near the tent. I suppose they would watch and talk about what those strangers were doing on the hilltop. Sometimes the guard-soldier would talk to the locals. I never spoke to the locals who lived there; I just watched them watch me. To my right, with my back turned toward the clinic, I could see thin tendrils of smoke drifting into the air, as cook fires burned among the rows of one-room, wood and tin shacks that stretched down into the valley below. That was the view that mesmerized me. The way the small houses were perched there, bending precariously with the contours of the hillside, hanging in poverty together. It was such a powerful sight. On the edge, they were so beautiful, so alive, so exotic, so scary, so sad, so infuriating, so confusing, so many things all at once. I took in that view each day I was there. That view has shaped me; it continues to shape me; it continues to occupy a part of me. It is part of my biography, part of my experiences, and somehow it is part of why I study what I study the way I study it.

Dancer Nous Trois (correction hoped for)

While conscious that too many of the posts originate from me, I am grateful to KP that at least I no longer can claim the longest post.

To take up the spirit of KP’s last post (but not to respond to it, for which I would like to wait a bit both for clarification and for creating some space) I want to say what is at stake for me in this project. My concerns can be described as aesthetic, relational/pedagogic, and political (political neither in the explicit or implicit sense but something in between.).

1. Aesthetic: What brought me to the dance of academic pursuits is an outrage I felt and feel at the condition of the world. Politics brought me to the dance. But while at the dance I have been dancing with a new partner – oddly enough my old traveling partner seems mostly not to be jealous because as a trio each of us has become a more intimate and better dancer. Once at the dance itself, I was and am amazed at how complex, nuanced, mysterious, and fully alive the world is. When I learn about each of your lives, I feel not only that I come to know the world better, but I am also awed by the concrete details through which abstractions come alive. To paraphrase Trouillot, the sources of my/our study are ALIVE.

This awe has become the primary and dominant desire I seem to seek to fill in this project. And it explains partially why I am partially and momentarily frustrated with what I take to be xaf’s (temporary?) evacuation from the field of autobiography as a primary living source. If I/we lose him, we lose a part of our living archive and a part of ourselves.

2. Relational/pedagogic: After my proposal defense I had a full year of writer’s block before getting on with the dissertation writing. The block was coupled with other issues having to do with the health of various family members – my brother had attempted to take his life at about the same time, for example. Nevertheless, my family’s health was not, I think, the sufficient cause for my block. Rather, I think it had to do with having fallen for my new partner at the dance (awe of nuance and complexity) and forgetting who brought me to the dance and why I came.

The professionalizing aspect of graduate school is alienating, isn’t it? So alienating that the body rejects it and resists it. The body demands an acknowledgement of the political aspects of the academic dancing. So it blocks any easy continuation into awe for awe’s sake, professionalization as its own end. What struck me as a paralysis was really a sign of health!

When I was sitting on dissertation committees at Syracuse (19 of them), part of my unselfconscious plan was to make sure that the tension and balance between awe and politics/ethics was sustained rather than purged. Mostly faculty mentors acted out professionalization and therefore alienation. As an antidote, I asked students to answer in written form the following question: “What is in it for you in all this?” The posing of the question and the student’s effort to answer it had many positive consequences (and sometimes not so positive) of which one was that it led, or rather often led, to an “unblocking,” a “de-alienation” and a partial return to a balance that comes from the “dance-a-trios.” (Why shouldn’t I have a bit of fun writing this, yes?)

I no longer have graduate students. But when I meet them (and anyone whom might not smite me merely for asking) at gigs or at conferences, I feel a certain desire not only to get to know them but also to pose my question. Or, getting to know them through my question. I don’t think I was trying to perform a service or a mission. Rather, I am moved to ask the question on behalf of both my dancing partners – outrage and awe; politics and infinite curiosity.

Sometimes the question stumps people (for a while). When this happens I feel no remorse for my role in this part of their “stuck-ness.” On the contrary a partial paralysis in the face of this question seems a good thing to me. (For more on this please refer to my tape #14 C, take 9 – “on the use and abuse of the surpluses generated by capitalism at universities.”)

3. Political:

A) I noticed years ago that the “white” students would sail through graduate school while the “brown” and sometimes the “women” students would often have blocks. I took this to be systematic and structural. When this pattern seemed to repeat itself at our second panel in S.D.– whites supporting agency and contingency, others supporting determinacy -- again I took this to be systematic and structural. Both my dance partners are keen to explore this bifurcation – I am keen on it both politically and aesthetically.

B) Part of my politics is about solidarity. I want to be part of community of people who can love/support each other and engage in these issues.

I want to end here for the moment. The overlap between our needs doesn’t have to total for us to engage each other, yes? But it might be worth it to know if there is an overlap and what constitutes it.

Part of talk I gave at U of Florida earlier this year

Topic: The overall theme of the symposium is methodological pluralism in the social sciences. The particular theme of this conference is Accounting for Culture in Politics. Therefore, we would ask that direct your remarks to the way in which culture impacts (or is irrelevant to) your observation of political phenomena in your different fields of interest and, more particularly, how your preferred methodology enhances and, perhaps, places limitations upon your research.

Title: Inside Out: From Methodological to Critical Pluralism

I want to start by asking us to consider the homology or overlap between macro social structures and biographies. Because of my belief in the significance of this overlap, I have come to suppose that it is less that we “choose” our methods and more that they select us. So, if as graduate students we are confronted with “choosing” a method and a topic for our writing, then it might be a good investment to ask how we came to be in graduate school in the first place. It pays, I think, to strive for a balance between learning what methods are out there and uncovering how we got here.

At this symposium, this balance seems to need little additional support on the side of “what is out there” -- or so I presume. I want to dedicate most of my energy on sorting out “what is in here.” I think we are each of us born into a nest – a nest of expectations provided by our parents and relatives. Their hidden, silent but determining expectations shape our self-understandings in a manner few of us will ever quite understand. In effect, rather than living our own lives, we live the lives that our families expect of us – and this despite their protestations that they had/have no agenda in raising us (and perhaps especially then). If we make the same case for our parents, then we can anticipate an infinite regress, right? Our family members were themselves a result of and a response to the hidden but powerful expectations of their families. If so, this moves us rather easily to consider macro structures – of historical social forces, for example. Here is where my claim about homology and overlap kick in. It seems to me that the micro-structures of individuals/families are the same or at least similar to those of the larger social structures. If this seems plausible, then part of what it means to be born into a nest requires me/us to consider what I want to call ‘a space/time warp or wound’ – a dominant theme, puzzle, paradox, tension, contradiction, or social problem that permeates a particular part of the global social fabric. Some social problem on the social horizon occupies everyone within a nation, a community, and a family. The visible and invisible forces of that problem – in my case, poverty, development, progress, the Cold War – shape how my parents build my nest.

If I can get away with it, I might say that long before I am born physically “I” am already trying to puzzle out something. I am born into a space/time warp or wound. Or rather, a particular instantiation of that space/time warp or wound is what I am. The subject matter for my life’s work is pre-determined. This does not mean I will follow that subject -- I might ignore it, delay it, distort it, and deny it. What I cannot do is change it since it constitutes me as a particular being.

Even if all this is plausible, and lets assume for the sake of following where this preamble might lead that it is at least conceivable, my sketch still remains indeterminate. It leaves two important questions unanswered: First, why do some of us then still think we can “choose” our methods? And, second, in addition to selecting our subject matter, does our space/time warp and wound also select our method? Lets start with the first one. I would submit that students from the third world – those from the former 2nd world muddy this theory a bit – usually seem comfortable with the idea that their subject matter selects them. Thus the first question reduces itself to: Why do 1st worlders think they can choose their subject matter? The quick and flip answer to that question is: because relative to 3rd worlders, they think they can. The better answer is that, usually, they are ignoring the forces that shape them. They are delaying their confrontation with those forces, distorting them, and mostly denying them. Because, in my view, there is only one real topic that has selected them: what to do with their unearned power and privilege? That they think they can choose their methods strikes me as the illusion. This illusion is a significant aspect of what makes someone a 1st worlder.

That takes us to the second question. Here I want to invoke Carol Gould’s reading of Karl Marx’s Grundrisse, in her Marx’s Social Ontology. I am going to refer to the book even though it has been a very long time since I read it. Her claim, if I remember correctly, is: “ontology depends on politics.” That claim already has within it the idea that epistemology – and to me the two, ontology and epistemology are not separable – also depends on politics. It’s a simple idea most recently (1980s) popularized in the IR literature by Robert Cox. The idea is that we create the categories by which we apprehend the world as a means of trying to solve practical and political problems.

If the problem I am trying to solve is how to understand poverty, development, progress, and the Cold War, and I consciously or sub-consciously perceive that the manner in which 1st worlders study this problem is part of the problem, that is, that their positivism, their quantitative-ness, their economism, the seeming apolitical-ness of their methodology, the hierarchy built into their pedagogy, and their idealist imperialism is part of what creates poverty, development and underdevelopment, theories of progress, and the hot stalemates of the Cold War, then even without knowing why, I might move towards methods that are anti-positivist, qualitative, ethnological, infused with politics from the start, egalitarian, and anti-imperialist. If for whatever reasons the forces of imperialism shift their methods 180 degrees, I will probably respond in kind.

So, to answer my second question: yes, I suspect that the space/time warp and wound also selects our particular methods.

If I am overstating my case – although at the moment I mostly feel fine about what I have just written – such an overstatement might still serve the purpose of shifting the balance of energy from the “what methods are out there?” to “what am I already searching for?” (Or, what forces are moving through me in search for their own resolution?)

Given these kinds of commitments, I will be using most of my 30 minutes to uncover how the space time warp and wound has shaped my subject matter and my methods. The point will be to present my biography -- as it pertains to culture and IR and as it pertains to methods – so that such a narrative allows others to consider theorizing their own biography.

The Two Panels

When I was first reading Xaf's post, I thought the writer was Patrick. Interesting and curious that you two seem to line up here. I cannot agree with you that the main difference was plot.

For me the difference was more stark. When Kiran and Patrick revealed their "anti-politics," the audience picked that up as the main note for response. As a result the discussion headed towards the politics of our project. An interesting place for it to go.

The second panel produced more of a "raw" confessional -- especially from the brilliant and breakthrough performances we got from Naren and Jacob. The audience responded in kind.

Because they did so we had a series of confessions or plots. That allowed a pattern to emerge. Hima and Naren jumped on that pattern. The agent/structure dichotomy nicely mapped onto the white/brown difference. That is what I saw.

I think its a good idea for us to have an explanatory statement. Kiran, perhaps you could give us the assignment. Perhaps each of us could do one. Or, one of us could start the draft and we could each work on it.

Indeed, negotiating such statement might be a good way to bring out the tofu in this blog and the project.

Two parts of the triangular overlap

If (if) what we are doing can be conveyed by the overlap between theory, history, and auto-biography (hence forth "primary self-source") then here is a quote from Michel-Rolph Trouillot that I think gets to two parts of the overlap:

"History did not need to be mine in order to engage me. It just needed to relate to someone, anyone. It could not just be The Past. It had to be someone's past." (Silencing the Past, 142)

Help me with this offering

Cribs whisper.

Cribs whisper.
Wounds opine.

Cribs whisper.
Wounds opine.
Theory heals.

Cribs whisper.
Wounds opine.
Theory heals.
Now what?