No, Really, the Rupture of the “Bringing Democracy to Savages” Narrative (Egypt, Take 2)

Okay, as eager as I am to get back to pop culture, last week’s Egypt blog was just a mess. So, I’m going to do one more week of politics and clarify what I was trying to say last time. But soon, shiny happy “OMG TV representation is so crazy!”

Let’s rewind to last week and think about that tweet again and what it tells us about Egypt:

@saifedean Dear US government: We don't hate you because we hate your freedom; we hate you because you hate our freedom. #jan25 #Mubarak #Obama #Egypt

By itself, it gave me an “Aha!” moment, but what I figured out thanks to Wendy Brown’s Regulating Aversion: Tolerance in the Age of Identity and Empire was what it really meant.

So, we’ve got this ideology that says that the West is the beacon and arbiter of all things civilized. Only “we” are democratic, free, tolerant, etc., and “they” are inherently (constitutive-other-ly, in fact) none of those things.

Under this model, when non-Western countries refuse to acknowledge Western superiority and beg us to lead them into the light, they’re hopelessly backward. Nevermind that they may have different sets of values—the community over the individual, say—and don’t want to do things our way.

Nevermind, in fact, that the idea that things like religion are private is totally grounded in the Protestant idea that you have a personal, reasoned relationship with God and that it isn’t actually a model that’s portable to other types of religion, let alone other sorts of ways people differ from each other like race or gender.

No, no. None of that. “We” are right and “they” are wrong, end of story. “We” are superior in the way we tolerate things, which they don’t do. “They” are so intolerant that we refuse to tolerate their intolerance. “They” have to change and be more like us. This is not us being culturally imperialist, but a universal value of humanity that they refuse to recognize.

That, then, is what “we hate you because you hate our freedom” references—the insistence that non-Western cultures be exactly like Western ones or else be barbaric is bound to piss off those people getting labeled barbarians.

It’s only under a logic like this that the Washington Post can tell us that the “Arab world” has a “freedom deficit” and “political underdevelopment”—because there’s a norm they aren’t living up to. It’s a Western norm, but it’s seen as a universal norm.

There is, as I pointed out, a gesture away from the first part of the logic—“they” are inherently barbarous and un-free-able—with the WaPo arguing that the protests in Egypt, Tunisia, Jordan, Yemen, and elsewhere are “exploding, once and for all, the myth of Arab exceptionalism.”

But the second part of the logic still stands, where the West’s way of doing this is inherently superior, such that it amounts, as I suggested last week, to “Hey, those Arabs aren’t as irreparably backward as we always thought. They want to be like us after all!”

But this part is exactly what the protests in Egypt are rupturing, if we can see what they mean. The idea that “we” are the keeper of things like freedom and “they” aren’t allowed to be free or tolerant or internally diverse unless “we” bring it to them has to go out the window when there’s an uprising from within.

Not spurred by U.S. invasion, literal or figurative, but the people themselves in a non-Western place saying “We are SO done with this dictatorship thing.” The idea of resistant “savages” being forced or cajoled into freedom by a light-bringing West is looking a lot less reasonable these days.

That’s what I really meant to say. Tune in next time for The Peculiar Racialization of Rachel Berry.

Egypt, Or the Rupture of the “Bringing Democracy to Savages” Narrative

Once again this week, it’s a retweet by @Halfrican_One that gets me thinking—in combination with spending some time with Wendy Brown’s Regulating Aversion: Tolerance in the Age of Identity and Empire

First, since it came first, the tweet:

@saifedean Dear US government: We don't hate you because we hate your freedom; we hate you because you hate our freedom. #jan25 #Mubarak #Obama #Egypt

When I first read this, I had a “Huh.” moment. It rang true somehow, but I couldn’t quite put my finger on it.

But then I read Brown’s sixth chapter, “Subjects of Tolerance: Why we are Civilized and They are the Barbarians” (assigned to me years ago now but not gotten-around-to until exam time came calling) and it all fell into place.

The chapter, Brown says, explores “how and why liberalism conceives of itself as unique in its capacity to be culturally neutral and culturally tolerant, and conceives of nonliberal ‘cultures’ as disposed toward barbarism” (151).

This supposed “barbarism,” Brown contends, is the result of nonliberal/nonwestern societies being “depicted not only as relentlessly and inherently intolerant but as potentially intolerable for their putative rule by culture or religion and their concomitant devaluation of the autonomous individual” (166). That is, the West imagines itself as tolerant and imagines tolerance as a universal value. What it won’t tolerate, though, is intolerance.

So, there’s a lot going on there, and I haven’t gotten back to Egypt yet, but sit tight.

This only makes sense in a situation under which, by self-nomination, “liberal societies become the broker of what is tolerable and intolerable” (166). This, in its turn, relies on the ideas of “culture as separable from political power and political power as capable of being cultureless,” which are, Brown argues, “what permit principles of liberal democracy to be universalizable without being culturally imperialist” (170).

Okay, so if principles of liberal democracy are imagined to be universal rather than a culturally-imperialist imposition, and if tolerating (not embracing or celebrating, mind you) difference is one of those principles, and nonwestern societies are imagined to be intolerably intolerant, they start to look like they’re inherently unable to live up to those universalized ideals.

If all of this seems like a stretch, let’s turn to some news coverage of the protest in Egypt. The Washington Post tells us that the “Arab world” has a “‘freedom deficit’ signaling the political underdevelopment that accompanied many other economic and social maladies.” Their level of freedom is a “deficit,” and they’re “politically underdeveloped.” If that doesn’t smack of an imperialist-minded universalization of a Western norm, I don’t know what does.

(Though, while I’m on the subject, et tu, WaPo? I’d expect this racist, cultural-elitist, anti-Islamic crap from the Wall St. Journal [AKA the print edition of Fox News], but you? You’re an upstanding journalistic institution, I thought. Maybe I’m wrong about your rep.)

They go on to say that “all these developments seem to come as a surprise to the Obama administration, which dismissed Bush's ‘freedom agenda’ as overly ideological and meant essentially to defend the invasion of Iraq. But as Bush's support for the Cedar Revolution in Lebanon and for a democratic Palestinian state showed, he was defending self-government, not the use of force.”

This is again interesting, because it assumes that the only kind of invasion or imposition that matters is the military kind. But the idea that everyone has to govern themselves in exactly the way that we (Americans, Westerners) do is cultural imperialism.

But hey, they redeem themselves, right? They say that “the massive and violent demonstrations underway in Egypt, the smaller ones in Jordan and Yemen, and the recent revolt in Tunisia that inspired those events, have affirmed that the answer is no and are exploding, once and for all, the myth of Arab exceptionalism.”

Unfortunately, they don’t mean what we would like them to mean, because the next sentence is “Arab nations, too, yearn to throw off the secret police, to read a newspaper that the Ministry of Information has not censored and to vote in free elections.” Which essentially amounts to “Hey, those Arabs aren’t as irreparably backward as we always thought. They want to be like us after all!”

This is particularly cultural imperialism given that, as Brown points out, under this same logic democracy is imagined to be inherently hostile to culture or religion or any group identification other than the nation.

Unless that religion is Christianity.

Or, maybe, only if that religion is Islam. As Brown points out, there has been a cyclical repetition of the idea that “those people can’t be trusted; they aren’t like us, their allegiance is really to X”: it was Jews who were imagined inherently traitorous in the 19^th century, communists in the 20th, and it’s Muslims today (166).

Which I guess brings us back to Nidal Hasan again

So those are my (admittedly somewhat disorganized) thoughts about Egypt.

Tucson, Part 2

Since there was a Part 1 it was inevitable that there’d be a Part 2. But I think I’ll stop here unless something else really interesting comes up.

Today’s blog is inspired by two tweets retweeted to me (ages ago, now) by my friend @Halfrican_One:

@m_clem Faisal Shahzad's politics are no less incoherent than Jared Lee Loughner's. But one is a "Muslim terrorist", the other "just a wacko".

@andishehnouraee Let's not generalize about large groups of people based on Jared Lee Loughner's actions, unless it turns out he's Muslim.

I chuckled a little at the second one, but it was one of those “this is cleverly worded but I am sad that it’s true” chuckles.

That is, it is, as I discussed last week, the case that everyone immediately wanted to link Loughner to right-wing anti-government rhetoric, Sarah Palin, and the Tea Party. But all of those people were equally quick to push back on that link (blood libel, anyone?). And the Right is culturally powerful enough that it worked. So it came to be that it was insisted that he wasn’t representative of any group, just a lone guy who went off the deep end.

But as these tweets point to what would have happened if it had been a different group he’d been connected to, however tenuously. If he were Muslim, or had been raised Muslim, or even had a Muslim-sounding name, that would have been the immediate explanation. And if he were exactly as crazy as he is, citing exactly the same mishmash of sources, it would still be the explanation.

Because--at least since 9/11, though maybe before; who can remember now?--Muslims automatically fall into that suspicious category in the American imaginary. There’s a sense in the general public that they can never quite be real, true citizens, that their loyalties are always divided, because Islam is inimical to America. It’s bullshit, of course, but that seems to be what people believe.

So, again, if nothing else good comes out of Tucson, it seems to be a moment to look hard at ourselves. Jared Lee Loughner is as American as apple pie because the shooting spree is as American as apple pie. In some sense, Nidal Hasan is utterly American, too, for all he really did have specifically Muslim-extremist connections, because he used our time-honored way of mass-killing. It’s Columbine. It’s the Beltway sniper. It’s Virginia Tech and, close to home for me, it's Lindhurst High School.

Fewer guns with fewer bullets in them would be an improvement. So would a better mental health system. But as long as this is the standard way of doing rage in this country, any pissed off crazy person is going to think the best thing to do is get their hands on guns and bullets and go shooting.

Let's start there.

Tucson, Part 1

Yeah, I’m blogging about Tucson. Me and everyone else, right?

It’s interesting and telling that a soon as the Tucson shootings happened the general consensus was to decry the heatedness of contemporary political rhetoric. This was most apparent on the Left, and in the mainstream media—which, while not “Left” in any real sense, is somewhat to the left of the Right on most things that aren’t support of capitalism—but some Righty folks got in on it too, though I can’t find any trace of it now so maybe that was just wishful thinking on my part.

Because, as much as war imagery is common—the Right was surely quick to point out times the Left had used it too—even to the conflation of the two as in that famous Clausewitz quote that “war is politics by other means”--which gets misquoted just as often in reverse--it does seem to have reached a new level sometime in the last few years.

Much has been made of the Palin “target” diagram (since removed from her site despite insistence that they weren’t supposed to look like crosshairs), but it’s only the tip of this iceberg.

After all, “liberal hunting permit” got me 80,000 results on Google Images this morning. It even comes in flavors: this one or this one or this one or this one. Under this metaphor, people on the Left side of the political spectrum are no better than animals, and they're to be shot on sight. The Most Dangerous Game, anyone? Or, you know, The Pest (which, John Leguizamo’s character was obnoxious enough in that thing to make it a more sympathetic proposition).

Of course, liberals aren’t the only thing people want to hunt. Illegal immigrants are popular. Terrorists, too.

Sometimes, the Left and terrorists are even conflated.

But you know what I didn’t find a permit to hunt? Conservatives. The only remotely righty thing I found that people had made a “hunting permit” sticker for was C.E.O.s (couldn’t find a good linkable image, but it’s out there).

People on the Left were angry about Bush. Really, really angry. They called him a war criminal, a terrorist, compared him to Hitler. The images are less findable now that he’s out of office, but they can be dredged up if you look. What they didn’t do was advocate shooting people like him on sight. That’s new. And it’s troubling.

And even if it doesn’t turn out to have had anything to do with Jared Lee Loughner’s shooting rampage (which it looks like it didn’t), we should still take this opportunity to look hard at this development in political rhetoric. ‘cause it’s scary.

Wikileaks and the End of the (Presumption of) Innocence

Okay, I’m going to wade into this Wikileaks thing. I may come to regret it, but here goes.

There are a number of things that are perplexing about the whole Wikileaks drama-fest. First, why is it that people only started calling for Assange’s head, suggesting he be charged with treason (which, you can’t ‘cause he’s not a citizen of the U.S., yo), etc. when the site released the diplomatic cables? Wouldn’t it make more sense that the information about Guantanamo, Iraq, or Afghanistan would have been more sensitive than the fact that the Vatican doesn’t have smartphones? Is it really true that torture and civilian “collateral damage” death is less embarrassing to the United States than candid assessments of allies? And, if so, what the hell is wrong with us?

Then there’s that sexual assault thing. There’s no doubt that Assange is full of himself (if his OKCupid profile were still up, you could see for yourself, but here’s a Forbes post about it). So it’s actually pretty believable that he did that thing that dudes do sometimes and didn’t pay particularly close attention to what his partners wanted him to do or not do when they had sex, taking what was actually a specific kind of consent to be a free-for-all. And because he (allegedly) did that in Sweden, it’s considered sexual assault. There's an interesting analysis over at Feministe.

Now, does the U.S. benefit from the way the accusation works to discredit Assange? Absolutely. You can see how free-speech-and-democracy advocates have rallied behind him and even posted his bail. Does he deserve to be presumed innocent until proven guilty, as his supporters have argued? Also absolutely.

But the people who are arguing that these women have “cried rape” at the prompting of the U.S. government just to put Assange out of commission are reprehensible. Way to reproduce the idea that rape is just something women make up to hurt men, y’all. What decade is this? Shouldn’t assault victims be presumed truthful until proven mendacious? People are really not going to talk about being violated lightly.

Assange can be an asshole who thinks he’s god’s gift to women, the universe, and everyone in his personal life and still a great crusader for openness in government; in fact, the evidence I’ve seen so far suggests that that’s exactly the case. We don’t have to deny one to make the other one true, and the chatter in comments happening at places like TechCrunch suggests that people aren’t recognizing that he can be both.

That TechCrunch post points to the last thing that I’m finding weird about this whole incident. The title asks, “Hey, Assange’s Celeb Supporters, What Time’s Your Protest Outside Quantico? Oh.” It’s a good point. Popular, celebrity, and activist support has been strangely lacking for PFC Bradley Manning. Under military law, it seems, he doesn’t get to be presumed innocent until proven guilty, but it doesn’t mean that he shouldn’t still be held so in the court of public opinion.

If Manning did do what he’s accused of, that doesn’t actually make the situation any more clear-cut. As people have pointed out, though passing on the information is a violation of military and civilian laws and chargeable as treason, there’s an argument to be made that in making the information public the leaker (Manning or otherwise) was actually staying true to the spirit of democracy.

Knowing that things were being done that were in violation of everything the military and the nation are supposed to stand for, the leaker can be seen as loyal even to the point of sacrifice (the penalty for treason being execution) rather than traitorous. But that’s not the story that’s being told.

Presumed-guilty-Manning’s story isn’t being told much at all, in fact, because Assange’s is so much flashier and more star-studded. As a culture, we seem to generally be concerned about the injustice being apparently done to one relatively powerful man and not the women who may have been violated or the soldier who may be executed.

In a sense, with the Assange circus, the whole point of Wikileaks—holding the powerful accountable—is getting lost.

May the Force be with Who?

I’ll admit that I teared up a little while reading “'The Force' is with you, Katie” on CNN.com this morning. This ruins my tough-guy image, I am sure.

This seems to be a pretty common response to the situation, the way CNN told it. In the era of rampant bullying and suicide (or, at least, rampant coverage of things that are not at all new), there’s an outpouring of support from other people who got teased, whether for their fan practices or anything else

Reading about a 7-year-old shamed, by teasing, out of using her beloved Star Wars water bottle does that to us these days, which it didn’t used to. And indeed, my first response was “Hm, maybe fandom’s being mainstreamed after all,” since CNN is framing harassment of people for their fan practices as a problem.

But then I thought about it some more.

This was a cute little white child engaging in fan practices. Not an adult who we might (still) expect to “know better,” and a member of that white-female category we’re all culturally programmed to protect.

What we have here is a cute little white girl child who was being forced into a narrow box of femininity because her classmates said Star Wars was just for boys. And yes, clearly that is total bullshit, and it’s a good thing that people were able to recognize that such that when her mom blogged about it, the story went viral.

Yes, it is pretty cool people in the industry got involved to support her, but it’s a problem that by “support” we mean “they sent her stuff.” I don’t want to support a model of fandom wherein being a fan is all about consumption rather than affect, and if that’s what “acceptance” or “mainstreaming” of fandom is, I don’t want it.

Then there’s the fact that the boy child Scooby-Doo fan who dressed up as Daphne for Halloween didn’t get an outpouring of merchandise and support from Hanna-Barbera. (Or, I guess, Warner Brothers now. Thanks, capitalist conglomeration!)

In fact, his mom even blogged it that way: “If my daughter had dressed as Batman, no one would have thought twice about it. No one.” The girl child bravely loving Star Wars is a hero. The boy dressing as a female character from Scooby-Doo is an incipient homosexual cross-dressing serial killer. (I kid you not, read the comments).

So, then, who is it that gets to be the poster child for fandom? Which fans are suitable subjects of human-interest stories? Which practices? These are things we need to consider.

Fandom and Biopolitics

Reading some selections from Society Must Be Defended clarified a number of things for me, theoretically. First it helped me understand why I’ve never been comfortable describing the processes my research examines as “disciplining” fans, despite my adviser encouraging me to do so.

It also helped me understand why I’ve always liked History of Sexuality, Vol. 1 so much more than Discipline and Punish—which I previously just had to take on faith wasn’t due to my having completed substantially fewer readings of the latter or the former being shorter.

The reason for both of these (dis)inclinations, as it turns out, is biopolitics.

“Biopolitics deals with the population,” Foucault specifies (245); its “purpose is not to modify any given phenomenon as such, or to modify a given individual insofar as he is an individual, but, essentially, to intervene at the level at which these general phenomena are determined, to intervene at the level of their generality” (246), and it is this kind of generality without an investment in the individual that is what I’m noticing as having happened with respect to fans in the age of the Internet.

This, then, is why “discipline” hasn’t ever seemed to fit; the processes of the production of fandom that I look at in my research don’t involve “individual bodies that can be kept under surveillance, trained, used, and, if need be, punished” (242).

“Unlike disciplines,” the production of socially-sanctioned fandom doesn’t “train individuals by working at the level of the body itself. There is absolutely no question relating to an individual body” (246), and neither does any “question relating to an individual body” enter into either my research interests in general or my research on fandom in particular.

Discipline, that is, is intimate. Biopolitics is anonymous, and so are the kinds of operations of power I’m interested in: contemporary media companies implement policies to encourage some outcomes and discourage others (243); the production of a valorized conception of fandom functions to teach the population of media consumers the way to manage and/or optimize itself (244).

Indeed, even techniques that Foucault describes as being deployed by states to manage national populations that would seem to be entirely irrelevant are actually useful tools for thinking about how the status of fandom has changed in the last decade or so; Foucault discusses the shift from epidemic to endemic problems as how public health is managed (243-4), and there is definitely a sense in which fandom has moved from being an outside phenomenon that happens to media companies to being a persistent condition that is internal to the media system to the extent that companies plan for and around it.

Similarly, the discussion of state racism parsing out “what must live and what must die” (254) is clearly the same dynamic (though on a very different scale) as the delineation of “good,” to-be-encouraged vs. “bad,” to-be-stopped fan practices.

Furthermore, there is a sense in which fans or media consumers are divided into populations—perhaps, as Foucault described it in History of Sexuality, produced as species—on the basis of these practices, and these populations are not only gendered but in some sense racialized.

Foucault argues that, though discipline is the older technology and biopolitics came along later, the latter didn’t supersede and replace the former, but rather they are now both in circulation in society for different purposes.

He notes that “the element that circulates between the two is the norm. The norm is something that can be applied to both a body one wishes to discipline and a population one wishes to regularize” (252-3). This, then, explains why, in my discomfort with the term discipline, normalization seemed to better fit the work culture was doing with respect to fandom.

So, to sum up, it turns out that biopolitics does it better.