“Jersey Shore” Is A Campaign Ad: On Citizens United v. FEC

The thing that surprises me most about the Supreme Court’s ruling in Citizens United v. FEC is the amount of surprise it has generated. Aside from the fact that there’s no way in hell that this Court takes this case in order to give the SCOTUS seal to campaign finance law by upholding the lower court’s decision, to draw a legal distinction between money and speech ignores social realities. Everyone is shocked and appalled that corporations will be allowed to spend as much money as they like affecting the population’s political consciousness as if this weren’t already the reality. The ability to spend directly on elections or candidates is only a clarification of corporate power, not an extension.

The Court’s ruling in Citizens United is an affirmation of corporate personhood; the idea that incorporated businesses have the rights of a person under the Constitution. As obscene as this sounds – and is! – is it any different that the way we think about corporations? We endow them with personal characteristics all the time – Microsoft is mean, as is Starbucks, Apple looks like Justin Long, etc. We develop relationships through products and advertisements; when people become fans of brands on Facebook, we might as well be adding them to our list of friends. Corporations speak all the time, in ads and press conferences, as well as through media owned by some of the largest and most profitable firms. Most speech is corporate, and all of it is political.

When the economist John Kenneth Galbraith wrote about “want creation” in The Affluent Society, he was talking about the political implications of corporate speech. Galbraith’s thesis is that in an “affluent society” like post-industrial America where most people have the necessities of life covered, producers have to create desires for unnecessary products through advertisement. The post-modern citizens thinks him- or herself too clever to fall for the ads that cram our streets and browsers. “Sure they’re there, but it’s not like I look at them,” we say, but we must look at them or else they wouldn’t be profitable. Advertising works and it creates more than sales, it creates consumers. The politics of consumption have never been more than one step away from actual government and in the 21st century, we’ve seen politicians transformed into advertised commodities. The Obama campaign was run as a hip marketing push with flashy fonts and catchy slogans, but it was also a classic example of want creation. Change, progress, hope, these were all things we found ourselves desiring and the best way to feel hopeful was to vote or volunteer. Whether the new candidate – or the new dishwasher for that matter – provides change isn’t the question, it’s about how the commodity makes us feel about ourselves. Media corporations have never had a hard time using airtime to shape public perceptions when it comes to politics, and now they evaluate candidates like beer. “He’s got great timbre in his voice, but he sweats too often.” “You’re right Jim, on the other side Palin tastes great and is less filling.” Compared to the ability to craft a political culture, deciding individual elections is child’s play.

But what’s the alternative, ban advertising entirely? Why, that would be censorship! This from the same people who argue that the Court erred, that corporations are not people and do not have the right to speak. If we have an overriding interest in letting people make up their own minds about elections, how come that interest doesn’t extend to letting people decide how to live, what or if to buy? If corporations aren’t people and their speech is subject to oversight by the republic of behalf of the people, then “Vote Republican” is not first on my list of messages to stop, it might not even come before Axe hair gel ads. The fence between political speech and other forms is artificial. Public discourse is profoundly political and any existing entity with the prominence of large corporations will influence the way we talk and think about things.

Kafka wrote “I do not read advertisement – I would spend all my time wanting things.” Sadly, the choice not to read ads no longer exists for those outside of hermitages. The risk of limitless desire is real, and yet the existence of advertisements confirms that we do read them. We spend all our time wanting certain things, the ones that happen to be sold. Public service announcements about the joys of reading or the dangers of drinking and driving barely make a dent in “Jersey Shore” and Bacardi ads, all on airwaves provided to corporations for free by the government. If prisons exist to make us think that we’re not always in prison as says the philosopher Maurice Blanchot, then campaign finance laws exist to make us think corporations don’t already influence how we see campaigns. If you don’t think advertising has anything to do with your desire or that your desire has anything to do with your politics, then you’re naive at best. Corporate power hasn’t changed since the day before the ruling, it has just become more clear. If the idea of corporations deciding elections bothers you, then you don’t have an issue with corporate speech, you have an issue with the existence of corporations.

Staying out of It

So I wrote around 500 words about the Nina Power – Jessica Valenti misunderstanding – because that’s what I think it is – before I realized that it was just a bad idea. Because I read one of each of their books this break, (I found them both fantastic and recommend them highly) I found myself doing the dude-who-reads-feminist-theory-and-then-tells-women-about-it thing. I’m trying not to do that any more. (For more on the phenomenon, check out Robin’s post about it on the SdS Womyn’s Caucus Blog.) Also, two young feminist bloggers arguing about stuff is something the media can’t get enough of and I didn’t want to contribute to the “cat-fight” discourse even if I called it for what it was. They’re both excellent writers and thinkers and everyone should read both of them. Framing them in terms of this sort of disagreement does a disservice to their writing. The people I was most impressed by were the commenters on Valenti’s blog who were well-informed and assumed the best of Power and Co. Anyone who can create that sort of forum on the internet is certainly doing something right. Anyway, if anyone wants to talk to me about how I generally agree with Power’s analysis but think American feminists like Valenti in their work around rape culture sets up a great foundation for radical anti-capitalist formulations, I would love to, but right now I’m going to shut up and listen for a bit. Thanks to Robin and all the other women in my life who keep me working on this stuff, I’d be much worse-off without you.

We Can Change!: Business School Post-Crisis

As I write this, the number one most e-mailed business story at the NY Times Online is Lane Wallace’s piece about changing curriculum at business schools. The title of the feature is “Multicultural Critical Theory, At Business School?” a question whose answer is apparently “No” as there’s no mention of any such thing in the actual article. Instead, some business schools are adding what they’re calling “critical thinking.” This isn’t critical thought like Foucault or Adorno, it’s critical thinking as used in the title of my 10th grade English class. The meaning of this phrase shakes out to something like “thinking for real,” “thinking hard” or “really thinking,” but Wallace defines it as “[H]ow to imaginatively frame questions and consider multiple perspectives.” Why are some b-schools (around 25 percent according to the article) making their curricula more like my high school English class?

[E]ven before the financial upheaval last year, business executives operating in a fast-changing, global market were beginning to realize the value of managers who could think more nimbly across multiple frameworks, cultures and disciplines. The financial crisis underscored those concerns — at business schools and in the business world itself.

The implicit logic of a paragraph like this is that the financial crisis was a result of unimaginative thinking on the part of the business world. The discursive value of this narrative is that business schools (and the professionals they create) can be responsible organs of society if they think a little more like anthropology majors. The story the Times is pitching to its intellectual readership is that the financial industry screwed up by thinking like business majors instead of liberal arts majors. They’re sorry and they’re working innovatively to fix the problem.

The argument steadily devolves into marketing-speak and it makes this reader wonder if Wallace thought about the fact that the people she interviewed teach classes on how to sell shit. An MBA is a commodity with a flagging market, which means its time for a new branding strategy. The most infuriating part is the language the business professors use:

“I think there’s a feeling that people need to sharpen their thinking skills, whether it’s questioning assumptions, or looking at problems from multiple points of view,” says David A. Garvin, a Harvard Business School professor

and,

John J. Fernandes, president and C.E.O. of the Association to Advance Collegiate Schools of Business, estimates that only about 25 percent of association-accredited schools are making significant curriculum changes focused on what he calls “the creation of more sustainable leaders.” But he expects that to reach 75 percent in 10 years.

Professor Garvin of Harvard agrees, saying that there is “an imperative for change.” “At this point,” he said, “the forces for change are real, and the need for change is real, and the blueprints are already in process.”

The word ‘innovation’ appears in the article seven time. ‘Perspective’ appears modified by “global,” “multidisciplinary,” “many” and “multiple” – the last of which also modifies the perspective synonyms “points of view,” “frameworks,” and “lenses.” I have no idea what of this means in terms of the practice of business, but Wallace wrote it seven different ways in one article. The term “financial innovations” refers to ways of creating and marketing new securities – the same practice that gave birth to the crisis. It is insulting that the MBA factories can’t think of a better way to justify their existence than to use the same exact meaning-challenged word.

The problem with this story is that the financial crisis resulted from b-school graduates who had too much imagination. The system of securitization that investors used to make billions in retrospect verges on super villain status in its horrific intricacy. They imagined an entire fucking economy. Some graduates at Goldman Sachs were so innovative that they hedged their bets with an investment in the Democratic party which turned out to be a brilliant, if dastardly, move. The last thing we need is more creative investment bankers.

Part of the apologia is the rhetoric of social responsibility,

“If I’m going to really launch you on a career or path where you can make a big impact in the world,” explains the school’s dean, Garth Saloner, “you have to be able to think critically and analytically about the big problems in the world.”

Mr. Saloner says Stanford wants its business students to develop “a lens that brings some kind of principled set of scales to the problem.” In other words, he says, students need to learn to ask themselves, “In whose interest am I making the decision?”

If the students are making those decisions on behalf of a publicly traded company, then the answer is, by law, the shareholders. All the critical analysis in the world does not change the incentive structure of America’s finance markets.

Both of these graphs come from the Federal Reserve. The finance industry is based and debt; sustainable finance is a contradiction in terms. What we need is fewer b-school graduates competing to see who can design the most innovative financial products. A tax on financial transactions seems like a common-sense way to do this. We also need journalists who do not write sentences like,

That insight led Mr. Martin to begin advocating what was then a radical idea in business education: that students needed to learn how to think critically and creatively every bit as much as they needed to learn finance or accounting. More specifically, they needed to learn how to approach problems from many perspectives and to combine various approaches to find innovative solutions.

That’s more specific? Jesus Christ.

American Psyche

There’s a type of prose piece whose main job is to be talked about. These articles or essays need not be right, or well-researched or particularly insightful but they reverberate through the chattering classes like self-satisfied church bells. Sometimes the commentariat calls this counter-intuitive journalism, usually when talking about Slate. This implies that the purveyors are gadfly-types who are chipping away at ossified public discourse by saying what everyone’s thinking but is too held back by convention to say. I like to think of it more as culture bait, calculated to jab at socially exposed nerves in order to get attention. I don’t blame the editors of the Times Sunday Book Review for thinking, “Hey, when was the last time people spent a week talking about the Sunday Book Review?” But Katie Roiphe’s article in Sunday’s Times about “Sex and the American Male Novelist” makes me wonder why writing can’t be provocative without being regressive.

Roiphe takes contemporary American male novelists to task for, well, being pussies in their writing about sex. At the same time she celebrates the likes of the Roth, Updike, Mailer and the rest for their ilk for acting as the nation’s id, exploring sexuality through their writing in a way Americans were too afraid to discuss outside their bedrooms. She sees the old guard’s frank depiction of base desire as representative of courage on the part of the authors. In Roiphe’s piece, being explicit is the same as being transgressive and edgy, whereas current authors (Chabon, Eggers, Wallace and some other white guys) find “the cuddle preferable to sex” and are just soft.

The Times essay is in many ways a response to another essay, which I guess makes this a rejoinder. Roiphe quotes from although never formally cites David Foster Wallace’s 1998 New York Observer review of Updike’s Toward the End of Time, “Certainly The End of Something Or Other, One Would Sort Of Have To Think” in which he formally denounces the “Great Male Narcissists” she applauds. But Wallace is no hack and he frames no simplistic second-wave denunciation of aggressive sex. Instead he views Updike in terms of his place as chronicler of “probably the single most self-absorbed generation since Louis XIV.” What irks Wallace is that Updike and his lot are so self-involved that they think, like Wallace’s own Oren Incandenza in Infinite Jest, they can fuck the existential pain away.

Roiphe predictably blames feminism for the death of GMN (the ‘N’ being ‘Novelists’ or “Narcissists’ depending on your affiliation and sass) sex writing and she’s probably not wrong. I’m no fan of the simplistic line against either Updike or Roth (having not read enough Mailer to comment) that rejects their works based on a perceived misogyny. Yes, the GMN are a bunch of self-involved men with a bunch of anxiety, a lot of it around women, but so are most published writers. Updike and Roth were transgressive because they confronted readers with desire that was otherwise locked away and expressed larger fears in terms of sex. For their protagonists, Roiphe mentions the literary stars Rabbit Angstrom and Nathan Zuckerman respectively, sex was about power and control, the one place to exercise an imagined masculinity while confronted with a changing world.

Thanks in large part to feminism, these scenes of sexual sublimation in which women are toe-holds on the sheer rock face of existence ring false. This changing world is the only one a lot of us have ever known and we don’t need to fuck women in the ass or cheat on our wives to make us feel okay with it. Roiphe writes about an acquaintance throwing out a copy of Philip Roth’s The Humbling for containing a sex scene that she found “disgusting, dated, redundant.” As for disgusting, the acquaintance is right, at least as far as the scene that turns rape and kidnapping into a wild threesome is concerned, but the fact that The Humbling seems dated is what makes it worth reading. Roth is far past his prime in terms of shock value, but a book about a broken old man having sex with a younger lesbian is improved when the author thinks a green strap-on has totemic significance. We feel the age in Roth’s relish to provoke.

None of this means sex is not still about power and control, but is it a surprise it is filled with a different kind of anxiety for a new generation of writers? The feelings produced by hiding a copy of Playboy under your bed and awkwardly watching a Girls Gone Wild commercial with your parents are distinct. What Roiphe describes as “a new frontier of sexual behavior: adultery, anal sex, oral sex, threesomes” is now what adolescents see when they click the wrong link or watch television at night. How can something still be offensive if it’s being sold to us 24/7? What formally shocked adults now shocks 12 year-olds who are allowed to watch Gossip Girl. This doesn’t make us necessarily any more sexually liberated than our grandfathers, but the market managed to filter out anything redeeming, anxious or philosophical from Updike and Roth leaving only insecure masculinity with nothing but a cock to defend itself. We are supposed to live up to the controversial sex of our predecessors without anything controversial left to do. Instead of seeing threesomes as verboten, the modern men knows all he needs is to buy enough hair gel and he can have as many girls as he wants at the same time. No wonder contemporary male authors have characters who don’t know what to do when they get what they’re supposed to want.

The literary missing-link between the GMN’s and the contemporary wussy boys is Brett Easton Ellis. In his novels the reader sees what self-avoidance through sex becomes in an era of post-industrial commodity capitalism. There are no taboos Ellis’s characters can’t buy and through its realization, masculinity reveals its violence and emptiness. In American Psycho, the narrator Patrick Bateman has all sorts of transgressive sex including murderous violence that would have made any of Updike or Roth’s characters reach for the closest phone to call the cops. And he does it with the same bemused detachment with which he listens to Huey Lewis. There is nothing of free love left in Ellis, the sex may be animalistic, but it has the rationality of a stock trade. The same group of feminists who denounce Updike and Roth have fought Ellis each step of the way even though he’s on their side. When Clay shuts the door on the grotesque tableau of rape and abuse at the end of Less Than Zero, Ellis shows the reader that consummated desire is not the same as salvation. He depicts the collision between taboo sexuality and late capitalism, and it is monstrous.

In post-Reagan America, the aggressive depictions of sex Roiphe remember reek of insecurity and decay, they are commercial, cold and not very sexy. Contemporary authors are left in a different historical position vis-a-vis their sexual anxiety. Only a surface reading of Infinite Jest could yield “Characters … often repelled or uncomfortable when faced with a sexual situation.” The quotes Roiphe uses from the novel describe Oren, a cerebral football player who seeks solace where the writers told him he should: between the legs of a married woman. Yet he finds no cure even as he traces infinity on his lovers’ naked sides. This isn’t a case of feminism making men weak, it’s men learning from the past. Ellis, after all, based Patrick Bateman on his father.

The fact that I identify more with Hal Incandenza than Alex Portnoy doesn’t make Portnoy’s Complaint any less a great book. The fact that it would not be written today does not make it any less a great book. Roiphe is fighting a straw-man insofar as Wallace writes about being an Updike fan and casually mentions having read around 24(!) of his books. I like Updike too, even if I prefer Roth. What they wrote is still relevant, even if it fails to provoke. If anything, men about whom those books were written still run the military. Understanding their sexual anxiety is probably not a bad idea. But yearning for a time when men wrote about how they would save themselves through the sheer metaphysical power of their conquering dicks is silly. We’re far too anxious for that these days.

Updike and Roth, as well as Ellis, wrote culture bait in their own ways, but they never pined for an imagined past. They expanded taboos outward, stretching them to the breaking point in the process. These days too much of what grabs headlines seems to point backward, as if the past will always be more controversial than the future. Young forward-looking transgressive voices exist, even on sex, but for them to get exposure publishers and editors need to stop picking fights with feminists just for the exposure. In the mean time, if you want to read some writing that pushes on contemporary ideas about sex, check out anything by Jeanette Winterson but especially Written on the Body. I know she’s a girl (and British and a lesbian!) but her descriptions of sex without gender are as erotic and powerful as anything those old guys ever wrote. And just as challenging.

To Pull Or Not To Pull: Anxiety and American Degenerate Art

Previously the longest I’d ever spent on deciding whether or not to pull a zipper was around thirty seconds and it had to do with how cold it really was. This was until I saw Nelson Leirner’s 1967 composition Homenagem a Fontana II (Homage to Fontana II) at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis. I was there with my siblings and my mom as well as some aunts, uncles and cousins. It’s an artistic family and no reunion would be complete without a trip to the local modern art spot. I usually go see art on my own because the way I behave around art tends to weird people out. It started during a trip to the Met while I was in New York with the staff of my high school paper. I found myself staring at one of Robert Motherwell’s Elegy to the Spanish Republic canvasses for an hour. One of the best collections of modern art in the world could not pull me away from that one painting, I peered into it and thought and thought, all of it rooted in Motherwell’s abstract figurations. So now when I go to art museums, I walk around until I find something that captures me and then I stand there looking like a heavy-handed performance piece about how little time Americans spend looking at art. This leaves me with little to contribute to the “What pieces did you like?” conversation afterward.

On the Walker trip I took long looks at pieces by some of my favorites Jeff Wall and Jasper Johns before settling on the Leirner and a zipper-induced panic attack.

I would call it a painting except that if the category of ‘painting’ means anything, then this one doesn’t fall under it. Homage is made of pieces of fabric stretched and zippered together in two (visible) layers. The picture does not do justice to the colors of the fabric which are at the same time vibrant and worn. What got me to pause at first was the name of the piece. I’m a big fan of the Argentinian painter Lucio Fontana who was known for taking his (almost) completed paintings and slashing the canvasses with knives. He was involved with the spatialist movement and saw the slashes as opening up the work to another dimension of space. But what has always intrigued me – as it did in Rauschenberg’s Erased de Kooning Drawing – was the process of destruction as creation. That erasure and cutting could be as productive creatively as drawing or sculpting is one of the more imaginative parts of modern art. This is also where I run into problems with my friends who don’t see erasing and painting as similarly valid techniques.

Leirner takes the cosmically implicated creation-destruction dialectic and comes up with … zippers! Play dominates in Homage, every move of a zipper is destructive and creative at the same time, doing away with a previous incarnation and inventing a new one. This picture is only one form of Homage, as the work itself cannot possibly be captured. The purpose is the play, the joyful creative destruction that can be performed over and over with different results. The viewer becomes not just an interpreter, but a co-producer. At least, conceptually.

Here’s the picture I took of the placard next to Homage. It’s a bit small, so here’s the text:

Nelson Leirner was actively involved in a continuous project to challenge the way in which the art world grants critical and commercial value to objects. In São Paulo, Brazil, in 1967, he presented the exhibition Mass Production of Painting–Pictures at Cost Price, which featured a series of multiple paintings titled Homage to Fontana. The artist insisted that the works, composed of colored fabrics and zippers, be sold for no more than the cost of materials. At the same time, he alluded to the contemporaneous success of Italian artist Lucio Fontana, celebrated for his ruptured, sliced, and perforated canvases. Originally, Leirner invited the audience to use the zippers and thereby join him in the creation of multiple formal configurations, turning the romantic gesture of the solitary artist into a participatory and reversible one.

The romantic and false gesture of the solitary artist. Leirner begs the question that if art has value because of its meaning and the meaning is read by the viewers, then why should it cost more than its raw materials? But if all production is social, then why would only art work this way? He prods at market systems of distribution with zippers and fabric. It’s a conceptually fascinating work – the exact type I get stuck to. And yet, there’s something horrific about the last sentence in the museum description. When we hear or see the word ‘originally’ we expect it to be contrasted with something that happened later to change the situation from this original position. I doubt Leirner decided one day that the concept of his piece was bullshit and that no one should be allowed to touch it any more. It could happen, but I think that might be worth including in the description. Instead, the present-contrast is contained in the statement below the description: Please do not touch. What happened is that Leirner lost and his work costs a bunch of money and it’s in a museum and the people would ruin it with their grubby little hands if they were allowed to be co-creators.

The description is then a grotesque mockery of art’s revolutionary potential. What was supposed to be threatening becomes a conceptual curiosity for tourists. “Look honey, zippers!” As Leirner “succeeds” as an artist by museum inclusion, he fails as a theorist whose purpose is not to think about the world but to change it. I stood transfixed, getting angrier and angrier. When I decided this was something I wanted to write about, I pulled out my phone to take a picture. I got the one of the description card but when I backed up to take a picture of the work itself I got a tap on the shoulder from the museum employee who told me that taking photos of the art was not permitted. In my daze I had forgotten that behind every masterpiece is a museum cop.

I stood in front of the work for 45 minutes deciding whether or not I was going to pull a zipper. I’m pretty sure it was the context – family trip – that kept me from doing it and getting kicked out. That said, it was a human failing not to experience the piece as the artist intended and as I desired. I understand the argument that if everyone played with the piece, it would hasten its destruction, but that is the only way this current work could exist. What the Walker has up is a disgusting destruction of Homage. As with as destruction there is creation, but what’s produced here is a gloating reminder that an individualist conception of production has triumphed. They might as well have burned it, recorded it on video, and shown it on a sexy LCD flat-screen. But such things are no longer done.

So this is how America deals with degenerate art. That’s what Homage is, by questioning the assignment of value according to markets and singular production, Leirner calls into question the dominant ideology. The revolutionary potential must be halted, but burning art receives too much attention these days. Perhaps the canonization of Robert Mapplethorpe was the final demonstration that a culture-war jihad on artists wasn’t a great tactic for preserving the status quo. Putting the art in a museum, where it can be watched, is more reflective of American forms of social control. We interact with art in places where we are meant to feel uncomfortable. We keep our voices down preventing discussion and debate. We consciously move from piece to piece, nodding in appreciation, always careful not to get too close.

I stood there getting more and more anxious at the violence I saw on that wall. And then I felt silly for taking the piece so seriously, which did not help. I stepped outside for a cigarette in the snow with my brother who suggested tagging the bathrooms or dumping a pile of scrap metal in the hall. I feel like the second one must have been tried already. But he’s right to say that if art can be revolutionary, then the museum as it exists much change. Leirner is right, art is a social production and it belongs to all of us, certainly art like his. Next time I’m in Minneapolis, I’ll take a small step for the destruction of the museum by pulling a zipper and getting myself kicked out.

Avatar And Anti-Colonial Resistance

With the end of the semester comes a few things: time to go see movies, time to write blog posts, and a giantsnowpocalypse. Last week, my dad, brother and I braved the weather to go see Avatar. Luckily, I had been insulated from the some of the hype. I had seen a positive review or two and an article about the development of the Na’Vilanguage, but I did not have especially high expectations. I also had not seen a movie in 3D yet and was curious how that would turn out.

Before I start analyzing the shit out of this movie, let me say that it was really good. The 3D world of Pandora (the alien planet) is immersive and intricate. I felt like I could have watched it Planet-Earth style with descriptions of the fantastically imagined world. The story was thankfully simpler than most of these epic action flicks. The writers let the complexity of Pandora and her Na’Vi inhabitants fill the story-space of annoying sidekicks and significant objects. Avatar runs long at around 160 minutes, but it doesn’t have any to spare and the experience isn’t one shot too long. I would recommend it to even my most educated film-snob friends.

That said, I’m an English major and the film is a text. In the following analysis, I’m not trying to say the film is racist or anti-racist or that Jim Cameron is an imperialist or a closet-supporter of Leonard Peltier. I’m concerned with the way cultural products like Avatar put elements of our society on display. I’ll be looking at what the movie says about the way we talk – our discourses – about race and colonialism. I’m not saying anything is good or bad for  the movie, just what I see in it. First I’ll go through what I thought was a bit problematic about the film from a post-colonial perspective, before arguing for a different reading. This is your official spoiler warning. You are warned, but I wouldn’t worry about knowing the secrets before seeing Avatar, you probably won’t enjoy it any less.

Quick and dirty plot-summary: Avatar, set in 2154,  is about former-Marine Jake Skully (Sam Worthington) who’s paralyzed from the waist down, but gets enlisted in a colonial project on the alien planet Pandora. Jake’s brother was a scientist and part of the avatar project in which humans remotely guide human-Na’vi hybrids in order to learn about the indigenous population under the watchful eyes of caustic-but-good-hearted Dr. Grace Augustine (Sigourney Weaver). Jake’s avatar falls into the hands of the Na’vi and he becomes integrated into their society. When the corporation and its mercenary forces decide to wipe out all the natives they need to in order to get to vast reserves of the precious metal “unobtanium,” the scientists and Jake join with the Na’vi to fight off the corporate invaders and send them back to Earth.

In the Na’vi, Cameron seems to have created the other par excellence. The indigenous people are 9 feet tall, blue with big yellow eyes and the physiques of hipster boys. They have broad noses and prominent foreheads and a long black braid. The braid is where the “magic native-nature connection” is given a tech twist. The Na’vi use nerve fibers at the end of their braids to connect to their horses and wyverns and can guide them through thought. It’s like their own USB connection to Mother Nature. The Na’vi can also plug into some external hard drive tree and listen to the voices of their ancestors as well as connect to each other so as to enhance the power of their linked swaying and praying. It’s silly and plays into old stereotypes of native peoples as mystically connected to nature, but it also seems like something I would have thought of in fourth grade, in a good way.

There’s also a seriously noble savage thing going on with the Na’vi. They’re portrayed as primitive yet civilized in their manners. We never see them eat and it would be hard to imagine their table manners. There are no scenes of Na’vigrooming or any other practices that traditionally mark “savage” people. A great effort is made to make sure nothing about the Na’vi could be culturally objectionable. They live more or less like primitivist hippies and we all sympathize at least a little with primitivist hippies, especially if they’re doing okay on their own. Yet at the same time, the Na’vi are aliens. This tension reaches an awkward breaking point when two Navi (or one and one avatar) have sex. Cameron stays on the side of relatability and Na’vi sex ends up looking a lot like human sex. Yes, it is between the invader-avatar and the native princess. Yes, they are automatically married afterward. They may be aliens, but they’re prudes just like us, so it’s okay.

All the voice acting for the Na’vi is done by actors of color. At least when we meet the aliens, we know who they’ll sound like. I really can’t quite decide how I feel about this racialization of the Na’vi. Ever since Jar Jar Binks, I instinctively flinch when aliens start talking like black people. The cultural association between black Americans and aliens is an old and enduring one (think Brother from Another Planet and the music of Parliament Funkadelic, Lil Wayne and Kid Cudi). This connection between aliens and social alienation is complex and I don’t trust Hollywood to handle it well – need I mention Jar Jar again?  On the other hand, in a story of colonization primarily for an American audience, would it be better to have some white actors in there? Or some black colonists? I think probably not. Colonization – including current economic practices we call neo-colonial – and the corporate-military alliance of which it is a product, has been conducted by and for the profit of white people against people of color, and I think it’s good Cameron depicts it that way. Using prominent Cherokee actor Wes Studi as Na’vi chief (and can’t we get some non-hierachical aliens?) Eytukan leaves little to the imagination as far as the allegorical element is concerned.

One issue I do have is the depiction of the Na’vi’s triumph over the corporate invaders. The Na’vi are of course hunter-gatherers, although not overly peaceful ones. They use bows-and-arrows tipped with poison and ride awesomewyverns. (For anyone who could throw a spiral in elementary school, a wyvern is like a small dragon). But the humans have mechs and helicopters and lots of guns. Actually, one of the least believable things in the movie is lack of progress in military technology in 144 years and it still wouldn’t be a contest in terms of military strength. But the Na’vi have what all people of color have when they beat white people: a mystical connection to nature and a white dude in charge! Just when things are looking grim, Gaea-equivalent Eywa sends giant badass animals to wreck the humans, in order to preserve the balance of nature. The Na’vi didn’t beat a Western military with wooden weapons, nature beat them. American (or stand-ins like the corporate militia in Avatar) military defeats cannot be shown unless they involve other-worldly powers getting involved. We often talk about Vietnam in the same way, talking about how America lost the war to the jungles of the Vietnam rather than the bullets of the Vietnamese. With the way the media describes it, it would be easy to think the U.S. is helping the Afghanis and Iraqis  in their countries and fighting someone or something separate and different. Cameron seizes upon this cliché in order to depict what we otherwise cannot imagine: the defeat of a Western military power.

Also, the prophecy-called hero of the indigenous resistance is a white former-marine playing astral projection dress up. I’m just saying.

But here’s where things get interesting. The Na’vi win. And not like in Pocahontas which is set against the viewer’s knowledge of the genocide that was well under way at that point in history. Since this is a future world, they win for real, sending the colonizers – represented by the corporate-military alliance of Parker Selfridge (Giovanni Ribisi) and the K.I.A. Colonel Miles Quaritch (Stephen Lang) back to Earth at the barrels of guns or in pieces. But it isn’t just theNa’vi sending the invaders away, the scientific team (Skully, Dr. Augustine, avatar guide and science dork Norm Spellman (Joel Moore), their military pilot Trudy Chacon (Michelle Rodriguez) and Dr. Max Patel (Dileep Rao)) joins the Na’vi very quickly. There is no discussion of non-violent resistance or any real attempt to negotiate, the intellectuals – including all the women and people of color among the humans – show no hesitation in siding with the thecolonized against the colonizer and shooting humans. By the end of the film we have a clear division between the white male capitalist imperialists fighting ruthlessly for profit and everyone else siding with the indigenous Na’vi fighting to save their homeland. The best line in the movie is when Quaritch says to Skully in the heat of battle, “How does it feel to be a traitor to your race?” The film’s answer is: Great! In this way, Trudy is perhaps the most interesting character. She’s a member of the military, but through her contact with the scientists gains empathy for the Na’vi. She refuses to fire missiles at the natives’ home, this is according to the traditional script. But what isn’t is when she rapidly turns her guns on her fellow soldiers. There’s no discussion of how she knows the men on the other side and has served with them, nothing about their wives and kids. She dies in combat, and there was never a question of an ethical third-way.

Avatar’s most important depiction is the threat posed by colonialism. There is no question in the film that human settlements on Pandora can lead to anything but destruction. The invaders must be met with immediate and overwhelming force if victorious resistance is possible. This necessity is something everyone in the film understands but is almost never the message of media representations. Usually they end with reconciliation, as if mutual understanding were the goal the whole time instead of repelling colonizers. In Avatar, any understanding of the indigenous people means war with the invader. A friend sent me this piece which sees Avatar as a white guilt film, and I guess it is insofar as white people as its beneficiaries can’t talk about colonialism without feeling guilty. What sets Avatar apart is that it suggests a positive alternative to paralyzing guilt: becoming a traitor to the dominant race. Maybe the violence just makes for a crowd pleaser, but the fact that the movie ends with intellectuals and those outside traditional ideals of white masculinity joining indigenous people to successfully fight off an invading army of corporate mercenaries left me leaving the theater very happy.

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At least when we meet the aliens, we know who they’ll sound like.

Rahm Emmanuel And The Meaning of “Small”

I know I haven’t posted here in a while, but this article about the White House’s involvement in trying to weaken Sarbanes-Oxley put me over the edge and back in the game.

White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emmanuel has always had a special place in my heart for being the real basis for West Wing Deputy C.O.S. and childhood (okay, not just childhood) inspiration Josh Lyman, but this shit is inexcusable. The White House – through Emmanuel’s “gavel-wielding veins” – is backing Rep Carolyn Maloney’s (D-NY) amendment to the Investor Protection act of 2009 that would continue to exempt firms with market capitalization of less than $75 million from reporting requirements designed to begin in 2010. As if the White House trying to weaken a consumer-protection bill weren’t bad enough, there’s this graf in the Huff Post story:

The White House position, according to those familiar with Emmanuel’s argument, is that small businesses should not be the focus of onerous regulations because they aren’t the ones causing the problems. And if the Maloney amendment passes, it would allow Democrats to say they’re the champions of small business.

This is just appalling. Here’s a hint in trying to figure what is and what is not a small business: the use of the words “market capitalization.” Democrats can claim to be the defenders of small business with this amendment just like Republicans claimed to be the champions of the middle class with their tax breaks for the rich. Add to this John Nadler’s (D-NJ) amendment to extend it to firms with under $700 million in market capitalization, also in the name of “small businesses” according to his spokesman. Just in case anyone though that a major economic crisis would shock the country into really going after the Nero-esque financial sector, this is reality. Sorry.

When Americans think of small businesses, they think of this:

 

 

 

 

 

 

And that’s what politicians are counting on when they defend lightening regulation on $699 million firms. This is craven and misrepresentative with real consequences for our political culture. If we can’t trust the abstractions our politicians use – and we clearly can’t – then we can’t trust what they say in general. If our leaders are using different literal referents for their abstractions than we are (e.g. a half-a-billion dollar corporation as a “small business”) then public debate is an exercise in semantic games instead of policy. This is more or less what my thesis is about, so if you want another 100 or so pages on this issue and Marx, get back to me in May.

Verdict on Child Rape: Still A Crime

First, sorry for abandoning y’all, the last couple of weeks have been hectic but I’ll do better. For now I just want to make some points about Roman Polanski. There is no excuse for drugging and raping a thirteen year-old. There is no excuse for drugging and raping anyone. There is no excuse for drugging and/or raping anyone independently. Being very good at your job is not an excuse. Mike Tyson was a very good boxer, but he went to jail because he raped a woman. AND YOU CAN’T FUCKING DO THAT. I don’t know when child-rape became defensible again, but count me out. Not to mention, the guy’s a fugitive, it’s not like you can run away until the law forgets about you. Unless you’re rich and famous.
I want to make the point that Hollywood isn’t monolithic and there are surely still some actors and actresses who won’t defend a fugitive rapist, but it really is embarrassing for them. As my crush Jill Filipovic lists, the numbers are not encouraging. Here’s her list of Polanski supporters: Pedro Almodovar. Wes Anderson. Natalie Portman. Kristin Scott Thomas. Darren Aronofsky. Diane von Furstenberg. Julian Schnabel. Martin Scorsese. Tilda Swinton. Gael Garcia Bernal. Penelope Cruz. That makes me very sad. I mean, Darren Aronofsky? Really? I guess judging the person by the quality of their art is a bad idea. Thanks for reminding me, I guess.

The point I really want to make about the whole thing though is a thought experiment. Imagine that Roman Polanski is black. Now tell me how many years he would have been in prison as of today.

Budget Transparency The Hard Way

Any of you who have been following budget issues at UMD know that budget transparency has been a huge problem, with the actual budget under lock and key at Hornbake Library. When I asked the administration about it at the town hall, VP for Administrative Affairs Ann Wylie ($266,602/year, not bad Ann, not bad…) told me it was already online. I told her she was lying and President Mote clarified that anyone could see it at the library. Here was Wylie’s quote: “I’m not going to take the time to post it online to the world. I don’t feel that it’s my responsibility to put it online, to put our people’s salaries all over the nation. Why do I have to? I have no obligation to publish it.” Well Wylie might not feel she’s under an obligation, but I do. Here for the first time on the interwebs is the budget for the University of Maryland College Park. (Thanks to SGA legislator/student power organizer Kenton Stalder for going and getting this out of the vault. Buy him a beer and he’ll tell you how he did it.)
Keep it mind budget transparency isn’t just an end to itself. At nearly 900 pages and without a table of contents, this document is almost impossible to read and interpret. Budget transparency is important for a lot of reasons, but one important one is accountability and shared governance when it comes to cuts. Without the budget, there’s no way anyone but the administration can make realistic cut suggestions. Unfortunately, this budget isn’t nearly comprehensive enough. For instance, after a few cursory searches I found a budget line for nearly $5 million in outside consulting fees listed under student services. “Outside consultant” is not nearly good enough, where is this money going and could it be put to better use? We need major institutional reforms and asking everyone to pitch in for cuts without giving everyone the same knowledge in terms of where we could cut from is ridiculous and we shouldn’t stand for it. For some inspiration, here are some more students fighting for, among other things, budget transparency and shared governance: