Ray on Cooppan

Cooppan, Vilashini. "Ghosts in the Disciplinary Machine: The Uncanny life of World Literature." Comparative Literature Studies 41.1 (2004): 10-36

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Hi Shashi,

Some thoughts on world literature as Cooppan describes it.

It is striking to hear Cooppan making claims for the key position that "literature" plays within disciplinary battles at a time when many scholars perhaps deem "the literary" to be a category we've left behind, whether for good or ill. Perhaps most helpfully, she frames literature's contribution to the historical question of "what is new that is not also old" (27).

I'm fascinated with Cooppan's claiming of "generalism" as a "timely critical method" (11), which allows the rest of the essay to place pressure on what "timely" means as a claim about reading history's relationship to the present. This claim to a generalism redirects the claim to mastery that underlies syllabus canon-building into a claim about the mechanics of knowledge. This move, like the vampirism she discusses at the end, threatens to spread to other fields and their critics. She shares much with Rey Chow, who makes parallel claims for comparative literature in Age of the World Target. It makes sense, given our current intellectual dispositions, that we think of our fields less as ontologies--world literature less as "a catalogue of what is"---than epistemologies--world literature as "a way of knowing and mode of reading" (29).

I found striking Cooppan's description of Ngugi wa Thiong'o's 1980 novel Devil on the Cross, which was written on prison toilet paper (18). When I brought my students to our State Historical Society, we found a number of essays written by a graduate student activist who was imprisoned during civil rights protests. One of these papers describes how police horses trampled a young African American girl to death. World literature, in this sense, would allow scholars to juxtapose both along the lines of not just so-called historical period and genre, but also medium, since the use of toilet paper signifies the State's dismantling of writing through material restriction and the writing act as engaged with the State.

Freud's uncanny helps us imagine the "simultaneity" of world literature's space-time, the parataxis that radically reorganizes the political divisions (which is not to exempt "politics" from our own knowledge goals) produced in the interests of national state-bureacracy. Is this what Cooppan characterizes as the "Cold War ... bureacratization of literary study" (14)? She leaves ambiguous the terms of this controversy. In any case, the uncanny, which helpfully describes how familiarity and alienation are bound, helpfully crystallizes Dimock's formulation of the "shared denationalization" that accompanies writing across national boundaries and "make[s] each Italian and not Italian, Russian and not Russian" (19).

That globalization is best understood as irreducibly contradictory and double is a commonplace for many critics based in the Humanities and perhaps in other knowledge formations. She works through a model of globalization that thinks "space through time" and emphasizes heterogeneous, disruptive effects (27).

Cooppan emphasizes perhaps heavy-handedly the spectral presence of traditions and contexts--("in a word, haunted" [27]), which is to focus on partial presence or on the present as traces, which is why she adopts the discourse of "haunting" that has been so useful in our current intellectual climate. This vocabulary seems useful for a broad array of humanities scholars discussing the presence of the global in the local.

Cooppan's right to pick up Jameson's point that no third world national culture is "autonomous," which is to say that all are differently bound with first-world cultural imperialism (18). As an aside, I am curious about her characterization of a "universal currency" that can be "pounds sterling or abstract theory" (28). Picking up on the language of "universal currency," my advisor told me that history was the "coin of the realm," specifically in interdisciplinary job interviews. In any case, I would be interested in finding out more about Reingard Nethersole's version of globalization, which demands "theory that focuses on disjunctions in the fold between the plural ways and the dominant way of world making" (22).

One of Cooppan's signature moves in this essay is to use teaching as research: her world literature class serves as a case study for this research article. Since an approach to world literature produces the logic of the course, the course becomes the site of authorial praxis. The article oscillates between conventional scholarly discussion and her class. She begins two paragraphs by anchoring them in class or students in ways that springboard into discussions of intellectual fields (24-25), while other paragraphs turn to "standard" texts. The overall effect is that the classroom becomes one among many texts.

I'm interested in the currency of genre as a keyword in American cultural studies. I keep returning to genre as a preoccupation I thought I left behind early in graduate school when I turned to cultural theory. While genre served as a privileged a primary unit of literary analysis as it did for such so-called old school critics as Northrop Frye, Dimock and Cooppan's focus extends cultural studies. By focusing on genre as a point of intersection between history and the global revitalizes "the literary" as a category at a particular moment when literary studies as a broad category encompasses the critical movements Marjorie Levinson discusses in her PMLA "New Formalism" article. Perhaps the recurrence of genre as a research concern of mine speaks to the very recurrence that Cooppan identifies as central to genre.

Thanks for sending a thought-provoking article. Do send me other articles you're reading these days you'd like me to respond to and I'll do the same. :)

Ray

Shashi on Latour

Latour, Bruno. "Why Has Criticism Run Out of Steam? From Matters of Fact to Matters of Concern" Critical Inquiry 30 (Winter 2004): 225--248.

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Ray,

Here are some initial thoughts on Latour.

The article is very provocative and should be taken seriously despite its tendency to advertise "science studies" as a solution to the problems he raises. 1) Constructivism and indeterminacy is being used by our enemies. 2) Critics attempt to de-fetishize the world by pointing out how things are not in-themselves imbued with value but are imbued with our own projections and fantasies. 3) This process of debunking "facts" is contradicted by another critical tool, namely the use of 'objective' realities to point out how our actions and relations are not freely willed but overdetermined. 4) The contradiction between these two critical methods is not clearly seen because they are used on different objects and different times–––and the critic is always right!

This is all very smart but I have serious objections to it:

1) Criticism isn't about "taking away," about destroying as Latour argues it is currently. Rather, critiques already do what he asks fo them, add to the objects more perspectives and information to see how and why they have come to exist in the world. This is a part of my larger objection to the notion that criticism removes pleasure from, say, reading. On the contrary, I think critiques *add* a great deal of pleasure by pointing how the thing is produced, and all the (artistic) intricacies needed to make that production possible.

The same, I think, is true in the realm of politics. Radically historicizing a particular event, to point out only method of critique, isn't meant to destroy the event, to rob of its tragedy or joy, but to understand how it has come to be. The process, I think, is less about debunking as creating a pause, an opening call, one that hopefully delays the trigger pull, to think *more* deeply about the situation.

2) English studies is already called the "imperial discipline" because we feel nothing based in language is outside of our scope; that is, everything is fair game. Disciplinarity has its value especially when negotiating highly complex topics that require, to borrow my own phrasing, years of immersion. There is, of course, a need for (more) conversation among the disciplines; however, like the tokenism that has come to define "Diversity" in practice, much greater institutional support and infrastructure would be necessary.

Latour calls for something like this when he argues that any given "matter of fact" requires "a multifarious inquiry launched with the tools of anthropology, philosophy, metaphysics, history, sociology to detect" all that goes into making its existence possible (246). For any given individual to take this on is ridiculous.

But perhaps I am missing something crucial to his larger argument. I'm not sure. Another friend also sent me an article to push thinking through these issues. I have attached it and would love to hear your thoughts on it. I'd definitely like to keep this conversation going.

much love,

Shashi

Re-Active

I posted this article on invitation, to which Ray responded as follows. My response to the Latour article follows above, and Ray's response to an article by Vialshini Coopan is above that.

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Ray's initial response:

Hi Shashi,

This is great. And provocative. I like how you springboard from location and dislocation to its implications for criticism. And the tour, so to speak, of Anderson that leads to the very writing we read on the blog. I can't help but want to respond, especially since I'm invested in the same projects and the questions I want to ask you are the same questions I want to ask myself.

I'm especially interested in the gambit you make that invests our hopes to the project, if I may universalize it for a second, of critique. But what do we make of Bruno Latour's "Why Has Critique Run Out of Steam?" and paragraph 3 of Hardt and Wiegman's seminar on "Alternative Political Imaginaries" (http://www.jhfc.duke.edu/fhi/seminar/sem0809.php)?

I think you have your finger on the pulse of very contemporary questions, which is why I'm curious at a hyper-academic register. :)

Ray

Thread 1: Against the Conservative Grain

I wish I had written on Kruth's article---link and excerpts are in post just previous to this--- while I had its whole argument fresh in mind. This lack, however, has the advantage of forcing me to read closely the excerpts and ‘recover’ another politics from them. I’m not sure that Bruce would consider what he does with Friedman reading “against the grain” and hope that he gets a chance to answer that question himself. Whatever its name, it seems to have struck both of us because I too thought “How can we read this against itself?” when I stumbled on the article. Methodologically, this mode of recovery is predicated on very close reading; so, let me offer a few possibilities.

“These communities already perform functions essential to the economic system, and within the next decade, they are poised to become an important part of the political system.”

Taken alone, this sentence seems more analytic than critical and is perhaps even sympathetic to the need for political representation of Muslim communities. Despite the apocalyptic context, moreover, Kurth’s sensitivity to the link between economic power and political representation sets aside the question of religious difference for the moment. Instead, Muslims become something like unions and are united along economic (if not class) lines, which in turn serve as the axis of their power. Contrasted with fears of “turning Turk” and other religious notions, Kurth’s logic figures economic integration as the mode of attack; they take our jobs then they take over our country. In this way, Kurth is also ‘blaming’ capitalism and the drive for ever cheaper labor. If there wasn’t a demand for cheap, even illegal, labor power then the Muslim hoards wouldn’t have the economic power they have (or will have); if they don’t have economic power within our state then they certainly won’t have access to political power.

“The first will be a Western civilization or, more accurately, given Europeans’ rejection of many Western traditions, a post-Western civilization comprised of people of European descent. It will be secular, even pagan, rich, old, and feeble.”

This is a very odd statement and I have no idea what “Western traditions” Europeans have rejected. Kruth relies on a tautology; What makes Western civilization is its practice of Western traditions. Despite his free use of blanket signifiers like “Western,” Kruth implicitly recognizes the heterogeneity of those terms, so that Europe can be synonymous with “Western civilization” but also reject “many Western traditions.” More can and should be said here but time is short and I want to take up another phrase.

“It will be a kind of overseas colony of a foreign civilization, a familiar occurrence in European history, but this time the foreign civilization will be the umma of Islam and the colonized country will be Europe itself.”

This is Kruth at his best. By positing the inversion of European colonialism he (crudely) historicizes the present situation and reminds us that there might be political reasons why people are angry with the ‘West’. This sentence might even elicit shame or empathy for (the still) colonized peoples whose fear of, and anger with, invaders becomes understandable. Finally, because other work beckons, staging Europe as a future “colonized country” Kruth performs the grand gesture of colonialism, flattening out all differences of people within a continent so that it becomes a single space, a single state to be dealt with.

"Conservative" projections

http://www.amconmag.com/2007/2007_08_27/cover.html

Current social attitudes and demographic trends in the West suggest that there will be a continuation of low reproduction rates among Western peoples and therefore a severe decline in their populations. Conversely, there will be a continuation of high immigration of non-Western peoples into the Western nations and of higher reproduction rates among the non-Western communities in the West than among the Western peoples themselves. This will have major consequences not only for the military strategies of the Western nations but for their national security—and even identity.

The most dramatic consequences are likely to occur in Europe, where most of the non-Western populations will be Muslim. These communities already perform functions essential to the economic system, and within the next decade, they are poised to become an important part of the political system. Many European countries will become two nations, and Europe as a whole will become two civilizations. The first will be a Western civilization or, more accurately, given Europeans’ rejection of many Western traditions, a post-Western civilization comprised of people of European descent. It will be secular, even pagan, rich, old, and feeble. The second will be the non-Western civilization, descended from non-European peoples. It will be religious, even Islamic, poor, young, and vigorous. It will be a kind of overseas colony of a foreign civilization, a familiar occurrence in European history, but this time the foreign civilization will be the umma of Islam and the colonized country will be Europe itself. The two civilizations will regard each other with mutual contempt. In the new civilization, there will be a growing rage, and in the old civilization, there will be a growing fear. These will be the perfect conditions for endemic Islamic terrorism, urban riots, and mob violence: an Islamist insurgency within Europe itself.

...oh....it gets even better....

It is possible that the United States might also become two nations or even two civilizations, although this is not as likely as in Europe. It is probably too much to predict that in the Anglo nation there will be a widespread fear of some kind of Latino terrorism, although young Latinos in the United States may learn from their Islamic counterparts in Europe. It is quite plausible, however, that there will be Latino urban riots and mob violence. And it is very likely that there will be a widespread fear of Latino crime. Gated communities, which are already widespread in the southwestern United States, could become an even more central part of the Anglo way of life, the distinctive architectural style and urban design of the Anglo nation.

...and the flourish...

For the nations of the West, which have arrived at this historically unprecedented state, a viable strategy for the nation is no longer really possible because they are no longer really nations at all.

Field Manuel

An interview on the Daily Show with a co-author of "The Counter-Insurgency Field Manuel," used by various military forces and available for sale. Most interestingly, various anthropologists, economists, and even Human Rights Watch were consulted while writing this work and "thinking through" (their phrase) new tactical challenges.

http://www.comedycentral.com/motherload/index.jhtml?ml_video=92011

Bruce, you're right that we ought to acknowledge the "limited but actual conflictuality" between the university and other non-identical and potentially incompatible sites.

I am reminded of Spivak's anecdote over dinner about a student who wondered why she had to read books when her father, who was an immensely successful pillar of society, didn't, and her reply that for some reason, her father felt it important to send his daughter to this school in order to read books.

I hadn't heard the language of "unfair trade practices" as a form of national comparison and blame yet, but it does sound scary, especially since it seems to draw on the "fair trade" language that suffuses "ethical consumerism."

In terms of "buying foreign," are there any movements that take up parallel messages?

I wonder if the Comedy Central's critique of Fox's fairness and balance is itself mirrored in Colbert's arguing against himself in the "Formidable Opponent" sketches:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Tree_Biting_Conspiracy/The_Colbert_Report_recurring_elements#Formidable_Opponent

Terrified + Service

Update (8-26): can't seem to get the link working so here is the address:

www.lrb.co.uk/v29/n15/meek01_.html

This article is truly terrifying. It is also a strong case for State control of the military, despite all the violence that has created. I may post something on after I finish the article but this thought alone is worth considering.

‘Our corporate goal is to do for the national security apparatus what FedEx did to the postal service.

Update: 4pm


The article, primarily a book review, is fairly critical of the work in question and raises many interesting issues. For our conversation, however, I would like to focus on the phenomenon of privatization of the military, not just in terms of security forces but also in 'peripheral' duties (laundry is offered as example but shouldn't be the paradigm for understanding 'peripheral'). There are two issues of particular interest here. First, my horror at the (growing) presence of such private military units is also a desire for state control of the "security apparatus." Needless to say, I find this reaction troubling and recognize within it the limited conceptual frame I have for understanding the presence and use of military forces. That is, while I entirely distrust private firms with military operations I also (generally) distrust national governments with such duties. Two alternatives spring to mind: 1) A direct referendum to the public to approve or disapprove of any particular military operation. (I am thinking of larger decisions like invading Iraq, Darfur, Rwanda etc) 2) The need for a transnational oversight on such decisions, which in our current framework would fall to the U.N. One could float the rather scary idea here of a transnational meeting of military chiefs, especially on issues like ethnic cleansing and the like. I have never heard of such a meeting and would be curious to see what kind of proposals come out of it.

(These thoughts are scaring me)

A second issue to consider goes back to solidarity and the sacrifice one is willing to make for those within that circle.

At heart, the difference between the modern professional soldiers of the US or British armies and the PMCs [private military contractors] is not that great. They are volunteers. They join up for the money, to test their courage, for the kit, for the guns, to find out what it is like to kill and to have somebody try to kill you, for the camaraderie, to impress women and to get away from them; patriotism, too, is an element, and a desire to belong to a team.

This is one of the most interesting passages in the article because it brackets "patriotism" and the "desire to belong to a team" together, virtually as afterthoughts; this is indicated grammatically by their placement after the semicolon and the use of "too" as a link between the primary reasons already offered and the current secondary one. The radical difference in scale between patriotism and teams is nullified, an intriguing move that I don't think is inaccurate. Most obviously, there is a general sense of solidarity between you and others engaged in the same aim. There is, however, a more interesting reading, one that makes fighting for one's country and fighting for one's fellow soldiers the same. In a profound conversation with a student who served four tours in Iraq, he told me that while in training one is taught to think only as a unit, a small group for which every member is responsible. At bootcamp, if I make mistakes then my group is punished. (He mentioned getting caught eating a doughnut and having to watch his unit do pushups for an hour) In actual combat, then, he would give up food rations that he himself needed so that another member of his unit would be ok. I found this, amongst many other stories he told, to be a very powerful explanation of how solidarity is thought/ felt in combat.

In talking to this student, however, it struck me that concern for one's unit subsumes patriotism so that serving the nation is only thought through concern for your unit. Indeed, one is trained to think this way. I do not, then, die for my country but rather for the soldiers I am there with.

This is a troubling thought because it narrows down, rather than expands from, patriotism and the (ultimate) sacrifices it ostensibly makes possible.

My student used my class as an opportunity to introspect on the reasons and feelings of his experience in Iraq––my syllabus focused on the mechanisms of "othering;" last time he sent me an email, he asked if I had seen a particular anti-war documentary. The decorated soldier, however, said he did not regret serving because his unit was better protected and led because of his presence.

Institutions and hope

The idea of institutions paying for dissent that whatever its content, would have to be described as genuine-- to me that's a necessary idea for anyone considering the limited but actual conflictuality that governs the relationships between different sites and sorts of power

Thanks for this insight Bruce; you’re right, this is indeed an uncomfortable thought that forces a more nuanced view of institutional power and the clashes it produces within and between these bodies. Acknowledging salaried dissent as both limited by these sites of production and real is difficult to think, for me at least, because it inverts the kind of messiness that I am used to. That is, it has become rather routine and commonsensical, unfortunately, that dissent (especially the academic variety) is always already subsumed within the machination of capitalism and/or knowledge/power. Dissent, in this view, is not only limited by sites of production but to them as well; this is a mode of radical insularity that deadens any efficacy such efforts may have.

Ah, knee jerk nihilism.

To acknowledge salaried dissent––a weird, ill-defined term––as real complicates easy cynicism and cautiously grants agency to our work. I am still uncertain, however, if conflicts between institutions open spaces of intervention. My first thought is to think of Ranciére’s advice that one needs to declare one’s rights in a situation when the very possibility of being heard (and the agency to speak) is denied. This, it seems to me, may be available when there is an overlap in authority and thus conflict. A second possibility, one that pertains to our vocations more directly, is that the creation and sanctioning of dissent in one institution (e.g. the university) puts that body in conflict with other institutions (e.g. the military). Although this is a simplistic rendering, it does offer the possibility of seeing localized dissent create ripples in other spaces.

If Comedy Central foregrounds the polarization in order to undercut ironically the possibility of fairness and balance, does this strategy open a third space that critiques polarization?

I would offer that such a strategy reinforces polarization but in such a way that one no longer claims to be “fair and balanced.” Rather, do as Comedy Central does and own up to your political bias. Secondly, and rather oddly, while obviously mocking Fox News’ slogan and programming structure (Democrat show followed by Republican show), Stewart and Colbert are the balance to Fox News. That a left-leaning (I wouldn’t want to call them liberals) comedy duo balances a news channel is a troubling gauge of political discourse at the moment. I do, however, think that Colbert’s success is a mark of hope.


Excellence/ Prestige & relation to China:

I agree with you Ray that the non-referentiality of concepts like “fair-trade” and “excellence” serve as a mode of translation that ignores historical and spatial specificity; Bruce is maddened by this as well. Two thoughts: First, the interrogation of such terms as they appear in public discourse is a key site of intervention. Questioning the use of words like “fair” and “excellence,” it seems to me, would open up possibilities for interrogating (read: blaming) particular instances of, say, American gunboat diplomacy without excusing (or praising) Chinese labor or trade practices. Obvious perhaps, but I think academics should take on such projects, especially in public forums. Second, and more apologetically, these terms are a way, albeit a poor way, to negotiate the need for universal categories of judgment without falling into the trap of ethnocentrism. That is, they are part of the accessible cultural lexicon, which we have a particular expertise with; how we change that vocabulary and to what we change it to is an open question.

Excellence, Dissent, and the Fair and Balanced.

Thanks for the link to the funnier note. The humor of it is interesting given your interest in the Colbert Report: choose Mac or Windows, choose Democrat or Republican. The alliterative genre we might call "parodic propaganda posters" highlights the either/or, the us-and-them, the binaries that are held at arm's length through parody.

Ah, parody. Like the Democrat Daily Show and "Republican" Colbert Report, the "fair and balanced" balancing act that we know from Fox News that really isn't fair and balanced. The Comedy Central parodic critique of fairness and balance. Maybe there is no fairness and balance given that both polarities emerge from the same structure: Fox fairness and balanced is as fair and balanced as Comedy Central's. Or are they?

If Comedy Central foregrounds the polarization in order to undercut ironically the possibility of fairness and balance, does this strategy open a third space that critiques polarization?

As I look at "Chepod," I am reminded of this.

When do we speak most about "excellence"? It doesn't strike me that we talk about it much within our own departments. Where it seems to pop up is when I speak to administrators, alumni, and legislators. I wonder if the concept of excellence only comes up in translation: that is, when there needs to be a universalist category for standards (which, I suppose, are at least partially universalist). We may also find the discourse of "excellence" in award descriptions ("Shashi wins the Pepsi-Cola Prize for Excellence in Scholarship") partly because these terms reify a material process that is contingent and historical rather than transcendent, as terms like "excellence" and suggest. Frank Donoghue compares it to "prestige" in terms of its lack of referent:

[P]restige, is dangerously nonreferential, eerily similar to “excellence,” which Bill Readings critiqued in The University in Ruins. Prestige is a dimension of a college’s public relations rather than its day-­to-­day practices; it is the province of development officers and enrollment
managers, not professors. ("Prestige," Profession 2006 157)

The non-referentiality of these terms and the branding of the knowledge economy may explain why, in one survey, respondents listed Princeton as one of the top ten U. S. law schools even though Princeton has never had a law school (Robert H. Frank and Philip J. Cook, The-Winner-Take-All-Society, 149 in Donoghue 157-158). Neither your nor my institution's law school will be able to rank as highly as Princeton's.

I like your formulation that, in terms of knowledge production, we produce dissent. You're right that it nicely dovetails with Bruce's point that tenured faculty are well-paid, professionally "successful" dissenters and that dissent may well be licensed by larger picture (capitalism? imperialism?) in ways about which we must not remain complacent.

In terms of "fair trade," I am reminded of how a Democratic Senator appeared on Lou Dobbs yesterday or the day before talking about protecting American jobs. He talked about securing borders in order to protect from illegal aliens and supported "fair trade" in a critique of NAFTA. He introduced a point by saying, "Some globalization-supporters of free-trade may call me a xenophobic protectionist, but..." I've only heard of "fair trade" as a concept in the supermarket aisle and at hippie open-air markets. Has it gained recently a kind of flexibility that allows it to be used in "securing borders" discourse?

Trading Solidarity

images that we might mistake for socialist posters are instead recuperated to sell cars.

Indeed. This is said about the appropriation of revolutionary figures and symbols into banal consumerism. I am thinking specifically of Che merchandise. Tattoos are similarly characterized as a mainstream subversion. (Here, one also sees the need for more nuanced categories or schema for understanding our world. Tattoos, for instance, may have nothing to do with subversion per se, but may be a vote of confidence in the permanence of an affective relationship to someone or something, including a particular brand of politics.)

On a funnier note, check this out.

“to whom are these representations of labor selling? Why this now? What does this move say about our historical moment?”

These are the fundamental questions, among others, that we are trying to deal with. I mean “we” in both the narrow and broad sense: this blog and its reader-participants, and also the larger intellectual community.

Thinking along the lines I drew before, let me offer that these representations of labor are being sold to labor itself. Specifically, the Toyota ad I referred to was showcasing a four-door sedan, which is more or less understood as a family car. Family, then, expands from one’s direct kin to the lager ‘family’ of fellow workers and even more broadly the nation. The car is an explicitly middle-class car spread across a ten thousand dollar range between its base model and the top end. The ‘labor’ buying this car ranges from line workers to middle management, the latter being spread across many economic sectors not merely the automotive. Labor, in its role as consumer, is being sold its own production as a mode of solidarity with other labor. Strange and brilliant (in that evil genius kind of way).

Fair trade coffee, to use an example with which I have some familiarity, seems to carry similar affective loads. ‘Family,’ or solidarity perhaps, is expanded transnationally to include workers in the developing world through consumption habits that demonstrate some desire for their well-being. Cynically, of course, one is always skeptical what ‘fair trade’ actually means to the field workers in terms of living conditions or if, like ISO9000, it is merely a purchased label that makes our coffee more palatable. Holding both conditions as valid but not entirely true, I submit that the pressure for and availability of ‘fair trade’ goods is a positive step toward what Robbins would call “feeling beyond the nation” More specifically, consuming ‘fair trade’ products is a move toward ‘cosmopolitan’ affect because it is an attempt to bring our daily lives into greater harmony with our desire for a more equitable world. At its best, and I realize I may be overly generous here, ‘fair trade’ coffee, hybrid cars and such trends hint toward the incorporation of larger solidarities into our everyday culture.

Insofar as buying ‘foreign’ cars was animated by a desire to support (fellow) labor, understood in that ad as unionized American workers, then consuming ‘fair trade’ products represents an extension of that same “imagined community” and its potential affective ties. Both are, from a generous and optimistic view, steps toward a cultural ethos that incorporates ‘global feeling’ into everyday experience.

Perhaps "production" is worth emphasizing here: the "product" of knowledge here may be linked not only to "quality" indicators as ISO 9000, but also college rankings and ambiguous terms such as "excellence" that are used by alumni organizations, state legislators, and disciplinary (and cross-disciplinary) award systems.

Damn! The hammer falls on we who are paid to dissent. (I’m thinking of Bruce during Stoler’s colloquium). I know this is part of your research and I would love to hear more of your thoughts on rewarding “knowledge production,” especially when the product is—ostensibly—dissent.

Buying Foreign and Quality Standards

Your notion of "buying foreign to support local workers" is a striking formulation. Also fascinating is your description of the "film of workers wearing UAW hardhats and badges on their shirtsleeves," which illustrates some of the ways in which labor sells: images that we might mistake for socialist posters are instead recuperated to sell cars.

One may be skeptical about the effects of representing labor to support the automotive industry. In an era in which labor seems to be losing ground--often literally, when territorially restricted by borders that regulate labor flow--to the relative liquidity of capital, to whom are these representations of labor selling? Why this now? What does this move say about our historical moment?

The ISO 9000 standard is interesting because it has been used by businesses to sell "end products and services" even though, as you quote, the standard is intended only to certify business processes. Which raises the question: is the conceptual border between "business processes" and "end products and services" a porous boundary? Is this conceptual flexibility being used to sell colleges and universities, with consequences for how administrators, students, and other stakeholders envision knowledge production? Perhaps "production" is worth emphasizing here: the "product" of knowledge here may be linked not only to "quality" indicators as ISO 9000, but also college rankings and ambiguous terms such as "excellence" that are used by alumni organizations, state legislators, and disciplinary (and cross-disciplinary) award systems.

Can you clarify how you're thinking about fair trade in the context of "Support America and American Unions: Buy Foreign"?

Buying allegiance

I would love to see or have a summary of the Consumer Reports issue you mentioned. Generally speaking, however, 'Japanese' companies manufacturing in the U.S and 'American' companies manufacturing elsewhere ruptures any easy allegiance to domestic producers, sloganized as "buy American." Although I know it will fail, let me invert the slogan for the sake of a thought experiment.

"Buy foreign:" This slogan would knot allegiance, that is affective ties to a larger social body, in all sorts of interesting ways. First, one would buy foreign cars in order to support local workers. I remember a string of Toyota ads form a few years ago that tried to localize their brand. The ad showed their top selling car, which was then second to the Ford Taurus, and the voice over announced that it was made in their new Cleveland (?) plant. Film of workers wearing UAW hardhats and badges on their shirtsleeves, smiling into the camera, were the penultimate scenes; video of the car, obviously, closed the ad.

The strategy was to breakdown a long standing prejudice of buying "imports" by demonstrating that they were not in fact imported at all. No, they are produced by fellow Americans like you and me: union boys, blue collar folks. Despite my cynicism for clothing capital in nationalism, one does have to acknowledge that those plants employ a huge number of people and help grow that space's economy. While part of the profit goes to the larger transnational corporation, part also gets reinvested into that plant, that community and into workers' incomes. One also 'supports' the unions and their hard won 'victories'––nothing can be said without scare quotes––which is also an implicit support for decent working conditions, livable wages and such. (As a contrast, I am thinking of the lack of such labor organizations––their violent suppression actually––in developing nations)

Support America and American Unions: Buy Foreign.

Weird.

I am sympathetic to some obvious objections: 1) Belonging to a Union dampens but does not end the exploitation of the working class. 2) So, what we are talking about here is a liberal-reformist argument rather than what is really necessary, an overturning of the entire capitalist system and its perpetual class antagonisms. 3) This thinking and the action it advocates––buy foreign––naturalizes (?) capitalism as the system within which one has to work, a system in which one's agency is limited to rearranging deck chairs rather than getting off the damn boat.

Yes.

I am at the limit of my ethical thought here. While I want to advocate for a revolutionary overturning of the world capitalist system, I also don't want the desire for such ethical cleanliness to handcuff thinking through the immediate and horrifyingly uneven distribution of wealth. Neither is as diametrically opposed to each other as I have just laid out and perhaps this is the space for a "double gesture," another idea I would like to think through.


Also, I find the question you raise about 'quality' to be both really interesting and something I can't quite comment on. Here are, however, some quotes form Wikipedia. The first regards ISO 9000 and the second "fair trade" advocacy.

"Certification to an ISO 9000 standard does not guarantee the compliance (and therefore the quality) of end products and services; rather, it certifies that consistent business processes are being applied. Although the standards originated in manufacturing, they are now employed across a wide range of other types of organizations, including colleges and universities. A "product", in ISO vocabulary, can mean a physical object, or services, or software."

"As have most developmental efforts, fair trade has proved itself controversial and has drawn criticism from both ends of the political spectrum. Some economists and conservative think tanks see fair trade as a type of subsidy that impedes growth. Segments of the left criticize fair trade for not adequately challenging the current trading system."

I'd have to do further investigating to find out more about what happened with Madison supermarkets.

Just some preliminary thoughts:

I like the way you frame the question of "keeping money in the neighborhood" in terms of larger questions, ones that call to question the slogan, "Think global. Buy local."

How mobile are services like haircutting?

How does the concept of quality figure into debates around ethical consumerism? How have people used the concept of quality to promote some interests over others? Perhaps more specifically, how do markers of quality, such as organic certification and ISO 9000 certification (which companies pay dearly for even though it certifies only management practices but companies have used to suggest something greater)? What kinds of power have institutions of certification gained and lost under the banner of ethical consumerism? One thinks of markers of certification in terms of the branding phenomena to which Naomi Klein draws our attention.

How do arguments over quality change in transnational contexts? Or does quality as a concept figure historically in debates around transnational markets?

You helpfully foreground the problem of automotive markets in the question of "domestic" and "foreign" cars when companies with "Japanese" names have more assembly plants inside the U.S. than those with "American" names, which have more assembly plants outside of the U.S. I'm reminded of a recent Consumer Reports I can look up if you're interested.

So further thoughts on capital & affect:

I'm not entirely sure what happened with the supermarkets in Madison. Did they decide after a year that the stores weren't profitable anymore and then bailed?

A part of this dialogue reminds me of our conversation in Bruce's class about Saving Private Ryan, the chief lesson of which was the ability/ desire to "sacrifice for something bigger than yourself." There are two things that occur to me relative to our positions and the particular items of our conversations, namely good and services.

First, should one simply accept inferior goods/ services for a larger cause (here, keeping money in the neighborhood)? The knee jerk answer for me is an emphatic YES! However, there are several things to reconsider. I'm not very sure that I would want this particular proprietor to continue if the services are that bad; that is, my stubborn support for this business could keep another (local) service provider from setting up shop. The denial of the latter possibility seems to both take away agency from local business people and grant too much power to big companies; after all, they are slaves to the profit motive and cannot rely on either the affective relationship or the word-of-mouth a more local person could, or at least could to a greater degree.

Secondly, the desire and emotion to support a local business, even if that means overpaying, seems like a luxury. Personally, my monthly food budget leaves little room for additional costs even if the desire is there. Our class conversation about organic + local produce comes to mind. Strangely, it seems that those who are most concerned and 'enlightened' about these issues are also those who generally don't have the money to support such environmentally and economically sustainable endeavors. That, of course, is a vast generalization.

Finally, and here I lay my crude cards on the table, one should also consider affective relationships to larger, even transnational businesses. For instance, I don't see myself buying, or even advocating another to buy, a domestic car. They are simply not competitive in a large set of crucial categories, including fuel efficiency. Being from a union town, however, this is both problematic and potentially inflammatory. Also, in making the "competitive" argument, I am aligning myself with a capitalist ethics, a bloody economic Darwinism which, however problematic, is also driving environmental (read: fuel efficiency) issues. In this spirit, I'm advocating my friend to buy either a Honda Civic or Toyota Prius, even if the latter is more of an emotional buy than a genuine alternative. Still, and I know this smacks of liberalism, the presence of these cars and 'green friendly' advertising does seem like a good step.

Ok...I think I shifted our conversation just a bit but that's what happens I suppose.