Random Thoughts on the Film and the Book Excerpts

Response to the film:

When scholars in this film are asked to talk about self-examination, they turn to the issue one’s relationship with others and with the world at large. Avital Ronell proposes, for example, ethical relatedness (“The responsible being is one who thinks he is never responsible enough.”); Peter Singer reflects upon the ethics of individual consumption in relation to others. And Kwame Anthony Appiah’s monologue is specifically about the cosmopolitan mindset. While watching Appiah walking through an international airport with his suitcase and talking about his cosmopolitan family background (“I have the privilege of growing up in a couple of places. My mother came from England; my father came from Ghana.”), it suddenly occurred to me that to a number of people, including scholars (I do not mean Appiah), cosmopolitanism is perhaps more like some kind of capital to possess than a social ideal to strive for. Some people feel that they are superior to others because they think they have the knowledge and skills, or economic means, which can provide them with transnational mobilities that make ordinary people envy. For example, university professors are invited to different places in the world to attend conferences and deliver lectures; and this may be considered by them as an intellectual asset to show off. Now returning to cosmopolitanism as a social ideal. Cosmopolitanism envisages a world in which everybody is responsible for each other collectively, and in which diversities and differences are acknowledged and respected. This concept is tantalizing indeed, but it is equally vague. So it is worth pondering whether this utopian vision could be pinned down empirically in current situations (not just in the sense of the global exchange of goods) and whether the idealistic sentiment in mind could be transformed into concrete actions.

Response to the book excerpts:

Not until the early 1980s after the opening-up policy in China did Chinese scholars of foreign literature came into large contact with the Western literary discourse. New Criticism was the first literary school that was introduced into China, though it, by that time, had already fallen out of favor in the West. Now with three decades past, New Criticism teaching techniques still hold sway in almost all English departments in China at both graduate and undergraduate level. I picked up French theories hither and thither, and my knowledge of them is really patchy. Still, I indicated in my PhD application research proposal (“Exploring Contemporary American Cityscapes through the New Yorker Stories”) that I would draw on Michel de Certeau’s The Practice of Everyday Life, together with many other scholarly sources such as Jane Jacobs’s The Death and Life of Great American Cities and Jonathan Raban’s Soft City, to examine the literary representation of particularized experiences of urban individuals in concrete realities. I first got to know his ideas when I was working as one of the TAs translating for the summer course “Feminist Cultural Studies” taught by two professors visiting our school from the University of Michigan. It was the first time that I was introduced to, in a more systematic way, diverse French intellectuals such as Michel Foucault, Michel de Certeau, and Pierre Bourdieu. If I am to situate my PhD project in an intellectual tradition, I hope it can reflect the rich legacies of everyday life theorizing. Some representative thinkers include Lefebvre, Debord, Certeau, and Bakhtin. Lefebvre in his Critique of Everyday Life criticizes the well-entrenched disregard for the everyday life and stresses its resistant qualities against alienation caused by modern consumer capitalism. Debord mourns for the degradation of social life from being into having and now into appearing, and proposes, together with other Situationists, the ideas of détournement and derive for an unalienated “authentic experience.” Certeau, unlike Lefebvre and Debord, who call for a total revolution of everyday life, discovers the creative nature of consumption and popular culture and celebrates the spontaneous energy of ordinary people. Bakhtin emphasizes the carnivalesque quality of the everyday, which can transgress the routinized and habitual aspects of daily life. I hope these intellectual resources with their micro-level perspective will in some way enlighten my exploration of the individual experience in the urban environment.