Free Speech…an illusion?

I know this is a bit late, but I do have some thoughts about the reading for this month. And, just to forewarn any staunchly academic readers, this post is verging more on unfiltered thoughts than on something structured and manicured. With regards to the readings this month, there is a common myth in the Euro-American context that Christianity is somehow fundamentally democratic. Talal Asad’s “Free Speech, Blasphemy, and Secular Criticism” seizes this idea and challenge’s its validity. One could even argue that western Christianity, especially of the United States brand, challenges free speech as much as Islam is purported to do. Politicians have been synonymously interchanging “Christian” and “Democracy” for many years in the social and political arena. Now it’s difficult to parcel out any difference in national rhetoric, hence the echo of “God bless America” after every major presidential speech.

Much of this ferment, I believe, has been created to cull and persuade the masses in similar ways as the extremist Muslim doctrine. It’s quite ironic that the “West and Islam” are so antagonistic toward each other and yet each need each other to justify economic, military, political, and social policy in different nation states. Edward Said underpins this point in his doctrine of Orientalism: it’s not so much just the problem of framing the Other, it’s that this policy has justified imperial rule for hundreds of years and continues today.

In the instance of the Danish cartoons scandal, there was a clear binary: democracy and secularism vs. tyranny and religion (21). These disparate positions are rhetorical constructs and can be interchangeable depending on how each county or region views each other. In fact, there is no binary in the U.S. context; democracy and tyranny comingle in a sort of yin and yang relationship. They feed off of each other and create contradictory ideas. For example, it’s acceptable that the conservatives castigate Obama and mark him as a Nazi, and, more specifically, Hitler himself. But, they also reject any rhetoric that might seem unpatriotic. This latter category has been loosely defined under the Homeland Security Act, which basically justifies the undermining of free speech in a democratic society for security purposes. Because of this contradiction, western society struggles with the same issues of fanaticism and extremism. Unless one is ultimately supporting Christian values, democracy, and U.S. policy, then free speech only an ideological construct and therefore an illusion.

How Many Wrongs...

Is critique secular? It’s clear that Talal Asad and Saba Mahmood took this question seriously when preparing these essays; and despite Mahmood’s tacked on last paragraph, the answer is a conclusive No! I’d be interested to hear what they had to say if they moved beyond this question, on to ask, for instance, should critique be secular? Or, how could critique be more secular? Their complication of the secular does more to expose the hypocrisy of interfaith dialogues and ecumenicism (liberal constructions) more generally than to suggest any means beyond, and becomes, unfortunately, another standard critique of empire, with the terms secular, religious, blasphemy, free speech, thrown in.

This book is critical, but is it critique? In a book that seeks to trouble binaries, it’s ironic that the driving logic of each essay is the revelation that there are two wrong systems at work. There’s no monolithic Islam…Okay. But, now there’s a monolithic West. For Asad, the West (and the secular!) is exemplified (as Imre pointed out to me yesterday) by neocons like Fukuyama, and by just plain old cons like Pope Benedict. And for Mahmood, the West is a juridical monoculture. To do a little generalizing myself, I’d say this ironic outcome is due to the elemental confusion within the particularly American school of ideology critique that thinks exposing ideology as such is somehow a moral achievement. In this version of critique two wrongs somehow make a right.

On his first page, Asad exemplifies the category error (or, metalepsis) that acts as a guiding principle: however one figures these vaguely defined antagonisms (between West/East, freedom/fundamentalism, secular/religious, Islam/Europe), it’s assuming too much to claim the debate over the cartoons within the “wider discourse [of] the West’s ‘War on Terror’ ” (20). Isn’t that “War” itself part of a wider discourse that this volume is trying to name? (And if this isn’t Asad’s claim, then he should watch his passive-voice generalizations: “the affair was discussed”; “the cartoon scandal was linked”, “it was argued” (20) etc.). Unmasking the onto-theology at work in liberal states isn’t even really necessary when both neocons and neoliberals (is there a difference?) have publicly and ridiculously appealed to and enlisted religion in their crusade for global democracy, from Ann Coulter’s loudly-touted imperative to Christianize the Middle East, to CNN’s thinktank darling Ayaan Hirsi Ali’s mission to ask for Rome’s help in converting “the immigrant Muslim fifth-column in Europe” (See her recent autobiography, or, last week’s TLS).

However, to be positive for a moment, the topics addressed by Is Critique… are fascinating and rich. And I really enjoyed Asad’s brilliant allegory for the story of Christianity/Democracy (22-3), at least, until it was undone with the analysis of Jesus via free speech (34). It’s true and troubling that democracy at once claims to belong to Christianity (or more often to the pseudo-category “judeo-christian”, which pretends to be inclusive, to subordinate the minority to the majority through both its syntax and its pretence to be historical—but does it actually mean anything?) at the same time as it claims to be secular. But then Zizek does a fine(r) job of reminding us of Christianity’s historical hostility to democracy (First as Tragedy…). And this book at least hints at questions well worth asking. As Asad and Mahmood briefly bring up, it is productive to think this conflict in terms of integration, but what about imagining something worth integrating into? How can Asad’s discussion of the Lockean idea of identity being related to property (28) be fleshed out regarding real property, access to and ownership of material wealth? And would different property relations change anything for the subject of rights that Mahmood defines? But for the most part we’re reminded of things like how free speech is not freedom and is in fact a limitation (32).

My main concern is, as always, how this indictment of abstract equivalent values (which is not at all, as Asad argues, a characteristic of the nation state as such, but rather of its strange bedfellow capital) and its supposedly-attendant elimination of difference (24) implicitly posits difference as such as a virtue. And inevitably, by linking this equivalence to Western politics via alienation (24), the “other” becomes a figure for counterhegemonic or revolutionary resistance. Two wrongs don’t make a right, especially if you’re not even willing to call one of the wrongs a wrong, but insist that it is right(er) by default. Even in Mahmood’s intriguing critique of the juridical there are two wrongs: films offensive to Christians were banned under the same article as Turkey banned books offensive to its majority Muslim population.

Mahmood’s explanation of “Muslim piety” as a mode of perception unfathomable to Western minds is, also, not all that “other”. The sign/image of Mohammed is immediately tied to life; it marks a real relation rather than an arbitrary linguistic connection (76). But isn’t this similar (and perhaps even assimilable) to the Lacanian ideal ego, the image you assume? And then Mohammed or God becomes the ego ideal, the identity you assume to be watching you as you perform your ego ideal? Unfortunately, returning at the end of the essay to this very interesting description of the different modes of perception and relation to the divine in Christianity and Islam, we hear: “I read [the problem] not as an epistemological problem but in terms of the differential of power characteristic of minority-majority relations within the context of nation states” (89). That’s too bad, because it’s actually quite fascinating as an epistemological problem and (laudable, but) unnecessary as a critique of the nation state. This critique of the law as a site to achieve rights (because really this discussion is at bottom about who constitutes a subject of rights, and how such a subject is constituted and who gets left out. That’s always the at least implicit point of the ideology critique which takes as its mission the uncovering of inequality and hypocrisy) comes to a familiar conclusion: it’s biased in favour of the (religious) majority. Maybe a suggestion or two on how to further secularize legal apparatuses would spice things up! But in the end we get the feeling that Mahmood is as exhausted arguing with liberal democratic hegemony as some of us are hearing about it: “I am not sure if either the Muslim immigrant community or the European majority is prepared for such an undertaking” (89)

This American ideology critique that I’m critiquing here is necessarily limited and appears naïve because it wants to pursue the Marxist project without going over to Marxism. Why, for instance do none of our authors cite Marx’s “On the Jewish Question”? In fact, in her new book, Wendy Brown has a chapter called “The Jewish Question and the Woman Question”, yet Marx’s name comes up only twice in the whole book (Bauer gets only one reference!). This Marxophobia leads to an utterly facile moralization that’s not much worse than the uncritical “Us vs. Them”. So there is no us or them, and they are more like us than we think and less like us than we think in other ways, and we are much less like us than we like to think, so this way of thinking is wrong, and we should be more careful, and god forbid we should ask critical questions of a situation in which people died over tasteless cartoons because many of those questions will be asked by the usual gang of idiots and will lead to much similarly tasteless “public debate”. I’m always up for criticizing Christianity and liberalism and onto-theology, but if I were to write about it, I’d want to imagine ways of moving closer to something better than exposing wrongs; for example, let’s push this not-unfamiliar problem of the subject of rights and the place of institutions within its figuration. The essays we looked at this month clearly show that exposing two wrongs does little toward figuring a philosophy of Right.

At the risk of monolithicizing these two essays, two wrongs may prove that I’m right (or at least a third wrong): Asad thinks that the problem is that individuals are made into abstract averages—one vote is equal to any other (24). Mahmood warns religious minorities facing moral injury that majority attitudes are worth more than others (88). Maybe we can find in this contradiction a key to moving not just beyond Western religious bias, but perhaps even further.

Mahmoodian Fragments

Saussurian semiotics as Protestant? This is a novel idea. Made me wonder if the foundation of many of the theories that I like and agree with has “motivated” roots. Goodness: maybe they all do! What then?

But I wouldn’t mind some evidence: “aspects of Protestant semiotic ideology became embedded in more secular ideas of what it means to be modern” (72; emphasis added) is the best she can do?

Worse: “One finds in Saussure, argues Keane, a preoccupation not entirely different from that which agitated Calvin and other Protestant reformers: how best to institute the distinction between the transcendent world of abstract concepts and ideas and the material reality of this world” (emphasis added). Is “not entirely different” evidence of correspondent motivations? The cat on the mat and Marx’s table both have legs but only one of them is looking for a cheezburger. The other is a perverted table.

Critique is secular. Secular isn’t secular and critique isn’t critique. Saussure told me.

I simultaneously feel two contradictory impulses.

First: Mahmood’s shrill tone shuts down discussion and I think that’s bad. How to answer someone who knows you’re wrong before you open your mouth? She says she wants to maintain “discussion” and “tension” in the academy (91-92) but I’m not sure what kind of a discussion we would have. I would listen and perhaps quip sarcastically (quietly though).

Second: “Can we all get along?” asked Rodney King. Everyone laughed. No. Is the globalization of understanding a good thing? I think Zizek said that we don’t need more understanding; we need less understanding (sounds like something he’d say). Which doesn’t mean we need more hate, or stupid cartoons (would the debate have been different if they were funny? How does this fit with “taking things too seriously”?). To provide a literary example, I think we need to judge books by their covers—the problem is when we aren’t able to revise our judgments. Don’t we read literature because it helps us learn how to think carefully and change our minds?

I liked the part about religious discrimination as racism. Racism isn’t racism anymore. Mahmood told me.

I didn’t understand the argument Mahmood makes about the different forms of religious assimilation undertaken by Muslims and Christians: Muslims assimilate Muhammad (76) and therefore respond bodily and affectively to insults to Muhammad, whereas Christians maintain some kind of signifier/signified split between themselves and the artifacts of their religion, a split that insulates them from the pain of any insult to those artifacts? If this is the case, why would all those court cases suppressing anti-Christian films in Europe even be necessary?

I was raised by “hippy” parents at the church of bike-jumps and Tom Swift. I’m not sure what (if anything, cartoon or otherwise) would make me go to the window and shout, “I’m mad as hell and I’m not going to take it anymore.”

Is critique secular?

No, obviously not; or, hell no! I am not so much interested in what the book says on the matter, I just want to answer the title question.

I don’t think critique is secular for a few (not-so-)simple reasons. First, in critique we engage with the discourses that surround us, yes? Or, perhaps you don’t and live in your insulated, academic bubble in which you never come up for air. While I think “dominant discourses” is a term that gets thrown around so much as to be almost inconsequential, the dominant discourses of a large portion of the world are shaped by and through Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. These traditions do come into contact with other religions (e.g. Buddhism, Hinduism, etc.) but Western scholars tend to take-up a lot ideologies that Judeo-Christian-Islamic tradition has put forth. So, there is always a relationship to these religions, and although critique is not in the service of glorifying God, it is in the service of debunking what his followers say and uphold. Religious narratives and themes are everywhere in literature and popular culture, and their dissemination is taken up by those that both support and are against these traditions (Tomson Highway’s Kiss of the Fur Queen is an example of a text that engages Christianity but does not glorify it).

Also, since religions are some of the most “traditional” institutions in the world, they are often under the most vehement criticism or critique. Religions are applauded when they change their traditions (such as the Anglican church’s female bishops) and attacked when they do not (such as the very rigid dogmas of the Roman Catholic Church). We like to see religions change with current theories on what it means to be a subject, but we’re really willing to admit the influence religion and religious rhetoric has over our current academic predicament.

What would academia look like if we left every narrative, and every ideology that grew out of religion, and thus became truly secular?

Devotion to Critique

I did not know that I was “allowed” to consider critique in terms of its affective elements of “self-cultivation” — “reading, contemplation, engagement, and sociality” (Mahmood 91). Though I realize this is an impossible and problematic admission, I’ve always felt that when I engage in critique, I am/should be striving for my own objectification. I should labour to first identify my identity politics (White, straight, North American, lower-middle class, agnostic), then empty out these subjective prejudices, sensitivities and processes...really I should empty out my identity. I imagine offering myself up to some larger (secular) project, which is more about observing, through a removed posture, the politicized operations of other people's “ethics” rather than the deeply individualized ideations and experiences of “morality.” There is this perception that morality is normatively defined only in relation to religion. As a class, I believe we have already interrogated the resistance to include approaches and topics that seem religious, for fear they are not critical or, borrowing Mahmood’s term, “satirical” enough (90).

As a student, I tell myself, “see, look what you've done to contribute to the advancement of— to use the same descriptors Mahmood troubles— ‘tolerant’, ‘democratic’ and putatively secular critique (90). Really, though, my confession shows a prohibitive, normalizing and moralistic connection to my object of study: academic discourse. Like Mahmood suggests, there must be room to talk about injury and punishment, here (70). And there must be room to seek an address in “intersubjective” (89) relations between secular critique and religious dogma, particularly if both of these bodies rely on “normative” ideas of truth (90). Following from what Mahmood proposes, I think this address cannot reduce either pole to the material (religion as racial, and critique as the objectifying explanation of materials like the Danish cartoons), or the abstract (religion as non-material and non-racial, and critique as entirely intellectual).
But how would this play out? How do we prevent respective systems of belief from collapsing during collision?

Dancing Underwear, or, the Sanctity of the Market

A pair of Michael Jackson’s underwear sold for a hefty $1,000,000 in 2008. On the face of things, the clean(ish) white cotton was no different than the kind weaving fruit of the loom products across the globe. The king of pop, however, made these tighty whiteys dance with a market value galaxies beyond your run of the mill undergarments. Something of the now dead pop star, so the idea goes, was in the fabric.

Saba Mahmood makes the case that the debate around Muslim outcries following the 2008 publication of Danish cartoons depicting the prophet Muhammad hinged on a key assumption around the so-called secular/religious divide in contemporary thinking. Where the defenders of secular reason frame the debate around questions of linguistic structuralism—Muslims, on this account, never learned the irreducible split between signifier and signified—Mahmood makes the case that western juridical practices discriminate against “assimilative models” of signification (76). The difference, she makes clear, is between non-indexical sign systems (the word chair is not a chair) and one where “Muhammad [is] the mark of a relation of similitude [wherein] he is a figure of immanence in his constant exemplariness, and is therefore not a referential sign that stands apart from an essence that it denotes” (76). The claim rests on an understanding of Muslim relationality (here called schesis or the latin habitus) where the sign of the prophet is not so much a sign as it is a recapitulation of a transubstantiated (forgive the Christian diction) relation constituted immanent, rather than transcendent, to community. Parodies of the prophet, Mahmood and her fieldwork suggests, are offensive not just to the idea of Muslim community but to the very essence that holds it together.

This seems like a smart way to frame the debate and to more generally reveal the fallacious (and inconsistent) divisions institutionalized in law across the West (her stuff on ECHR is a prime example of this). My point is simply an addition to Mahmood’s critique of secular reason: there’s nothing secular about insisting Michael Jackson, or any part of him, is in a pair of underwear. And of course the underwear exchange (Christian Aguilera had a pair sell for more a few years ago) is not just about idiots believing celebrity essence can be found in the fabric of undergarments; rather, it’s about the subject-object relation insisted upon (and naturalized through) a system predicated on exchange-value (that is, value determined not by the object but by the totality of relations of production and the exploitation therein). Marx’s example of the wooden table brought to market, of course, reveals that “as soon as [a thing] emerges as a commodity, it changes into a thing which transcends sensuousness. It not only stands with its feet on the ground, but, in relation to all other commodities, it stands on its head and evolves out of its wooden brain grotesque ideas, far more wonderful than if it were to begin dancing of its own free will” (Capital vol. 1 164). Million-dollar underwear sullied with the essence of the Michael Jackson—and the less hyperbolic but equally mystical quality of commodity exchange we experience every single day—index a primary contradiction in secular thinking. Call it capitalism or call it celebrity fetishism, the point here is that the emblem of secular society (the market) takes what is sacred on the level of religious relationality and makes it silly on the level of objects and the people who make them.

But more to the point: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QG0quz3Gu8g

Secular Critique

Sorry for the delay!

A few of you have mentioned that it's difficult to relate critique to your personal lives, or that so-called politics and current events aren't interesting. I suppose I have the opposite stance, in that it's hard for me to see how these things don't relate to our everyday existence, from interpersonal relations (not just meeting people from other cultures, but interacting with others in general) to how we conceive of ourselves as citizens (subject to the laws and policies of the state, but also with a responsibility to social justice). I've struggled with seeing other people's perspectives, especially during religious debates, such as the head scarf law in Quebec--my strong secularism is either supported or compromised by different/conflicting aspects of my (also strong) feminism. I've always found that the critical skills I learn in school are never separate from the problems I encounter in my own life, and in fact help me understand the inevitable contradictions that are a part of all of our experiences. Throughout my twenties, it's been clear to me that as I mature in my life, I also do in my work -- not a one-way causality, but developing concurrently. In as mild a way as possible, I'd like to point out that a lot of people don't have the privilege to go about life without critique or without an awareness of "politics" and how structures of power affect us. It's important to have these questions thrust upon us if we wouldn't approach them willingly, at the beginning of our research, because no matter what we're studying, we should not attempt to elide these so-called political questions. Why can't we all get along? For the most part, individuals do. Let's consider, then, how people are put or place themselves into groups, and the power dynamics that structure those groups in our society and among societies.

Angela's (funny, not offensive) Far Side cartoon is a good example of clashes between semiotic systems. As Mahmood points out, it's not so much that Mohammed is represented, as there has been Islamic art representing him before. The reference in the Far Side cartoon is a fairly politically neutral aphorism, so not galvanizing angry mobs. Depicting Mohammed as a terrorist, on the other hand, is hardly neutral. In fact, I don't believe the mobs were riled up until some mullah somewhere for political reasons brought the cartoons to a greater audience a few months after the publication. And, yes, I do think the cartoons were meant to offend, and the Far Side cartoon was just a play on a common saying (which is a lot of what Gary Larson does, he's not meaning to offend). Jyllands-Posten is a right-wing publication and the cartoons above all are undeniably racist. Their intentions are beside the point, though. The semiotic system the cartoonists were assuming and that of the Muslim audience are different, according to Mahmood--this is something she argues independent of intention. Considering how heterogeneous the Muslim world is, though, it seems like she's making a specific argument about a specific type of offense, albeit one that is the most relevant to her question of secular critique (which I think should have probably taken up more space in her essay).

I tried to fit in some of Living in the End Times during my leisure time over the break. We can make fun of Fukuyama as much as we want, but it does seem like we've sort of resigned ourselves to a certain type of political and economic system that is apotheosis or end. Zizek and others frequently point out how it's easier to imagine the destruction of the planet than it is to imagine the end of capitalism (and better for the box office too, no doubt). No more revolution, just some tweaks here and there. It's so important to be aware (critical!) of what we take for granted as the secular, best, rational way of existing in the world, and Mahmood's essay illuminates how these assumptions operate not only on the grand scale of geopolitics, but even on the smallest syntagmatic units. I've considered myself such a strong secularist my whole life that the ways in which spiritual traditions have shaped my ideas about language and interpretation have never been foremost in my own critiques. In Alberta I've encountered many religious people and realize that I need to be more flexible and understanding of that perspective, whereas before I would feel comfortable dismissing religion altogether. What I'd like to discuss are the ways that we see our political (and other) assumptions creep up in our academic lives, especially in scholarship that is not overtly political or what one would call "theoretical."