The Brexit Map

The main train station in Krakow, Poland exits directly into the Galeria Krakow, a large, relatively high-end shopping mall. On the second floor, there are two enormous maps of Europe, one above the entrance to a Carrefour grocery store and one on the facing wall. Below each is written the repeating slogan "Find your place in Europe."

Political maps generally reinforce the idea of nation states. By drawing borders, they create the visual impression that any two points within the same border, no matter how disparate in real space, are connected more to each other than they are to the outside world. (Russia might be the exception that proves the rule here; at the same time the map insists that Moscow and Vladivostok are both "Russian," the enormous distance between them on the paper quietly questions the notion of Russia as a unified country.) Political maps clarify borders, creating clean and fixed boundaries between states.  As Ken Alder points out in The Measure of All Things, his history of the creation of the metric system, the very act of measuring and charting space is tied up in the creation of nation states as unified, centrally governed blocks of space; the act of creating a national map undermines older traditions of local autonomy.

The map in Galeria Krakow works in the opposite direction, undermining nation states in favour of a purely cosmopolitan and pan-European sense of space. In so doing, it nicely clarifies a vision of European union with which so many populist and localist voters have recently expressed distain.

First, and most obviously, the Krakow map eliminates any overt reference to nations. National names and national borders are removed, and are present only implicitly in the names of national capital cities. That implication, though, is thin. Given the immediate context (a shopping mall), the sense is that these cities have been selected more for their commercial importance than for their political ones. The elimination of nations is reinforced by the slogan underneath: One's place is in Europe, not in France or Croatia. 

Second, the map establishes the city as the sole physical presence in a map of Europe. In a traditional map, the closed shape of national borders implies a kind of presence to the empty space within them, in the same way that by drawing a circle on a blank sheet of paper, you give a kind of mass to the space within the circle. Thus the empty space between, say, Paris and Lyon looks "French" because it is enclosed in the border of France, even if that space is literally blank on the map. 

Here, the effect is much different. The non-city space is rendered as pure absence. There is no difference between the space of rural France and the space of the North Sea; both are equally absent and irrelevant to this vision of Europe. Thus rural Europe is not just de-emphasized (a perhaps justifiable decision in a map of economic or population centres), but erased. One must find one's place in this transnational Europe in a city; nowhere else exists. 

Third, the language of this borderless, rural-less Europe is English. The city names on the map are in Polish (Praga is Prague, Warszawa is Warsaw, etc.). However, the imperative slogan is in English: Find Your Place in Europe. Just as, spatially, everything about the nation except its cosmopolitan cities is erased, so too are its national languages. The very command to find yourself within this transnational capitalist space is rendered in the default language of transnational capitalism. 

Here, then, is encapsulated something of the worldview Brexit and its populist cousins reject, a Europe in which the rural and the national are erased in favour of a network of interchangeable commercial nodes.

S-Town and the Comforts of Aesthetic Hierarchy

There was a moment there when podcasts threatened to do something different.

It is early days yet for this medium and, as in the early days of cinema and radio, genre lines and corresponding prestige seemed, at least for a few years, to be shifting rapidly beneath our feet. There have of course been, almost since the podcast's inception, the longform magazine-y shows that have perfected a fairly familiar form of narrative journalism: This American Life, Radiolab, and, more recently, Invisibilia. Brilliant though these often are, they mostly produce work familiar in its structure and subject matter and, generally speaking, work of the kinds already suited to Pulitzer Prizes and other such forms of institutional acclaim. That is to say, these magazine-y podcasts win the kind of praise granted to excellent magazine journalism.

But with the advent in 2014 of Serial, the This American Life offshoot, a kind of anarchy threatened to reign alongside these more staid versions of nonfiction podcasting. Season 1 of Serial resurrected the most exceedingly fun form of lowbrow crime reporting, granted it a kind of Paul Auster reflexive gloss, and won plaudits from every sector of cultural criticism in the process. Suddenly it seemed critical praise was due not just to the standard magazine fair, but to a genre usually the province of grocery store paperbacks. Serial Season 2 may have missed the mark in many respects, but it continued to upend aesthetic hierarchies in its willingness to make the true crime cliffhanger the dominant plot structure of critically-praised podcasting.

2017, however, has witnessed two events that have quickly put the usual aesthetic hierarchies back in place. First came the release of the widely panned Missing Richard Simmons. If true crime always threatens to veer into tabloid invention, Missing Richard Simmons made clear that podcast true crime was no exception to the rule. The once-a-week release schedule meant a series of breathy cliffhangers, each more disappointing than the next, and the narrative payoff was about as poor as could be: an emotional appeal to the show's titular missing person that hoped to hide behind pathos the fact that the show's investigate reporting revealed, more or less, nothing.

Second came S-Town, a story that returned longform podcasting to realist terrain, narrativised the abandonment of true crime, and was praised far and wide for doing just those two things. S-Town begins with the overt promise of true crime in its soapiest form: a murder and police coverup set in the gothic environs of a poor, racist, southern town. But, by the end of episode 2, the true crime genre is entirely abandoned. The murder turns out not to have happened, and the remaining 5 episodes turn to an exploration of the ersatz tipster's character. The remaining hours are essentially a form of realism: a careful study of the interaction between setting and character, replete with symbolism and nicely embedded in the larger cultural history of America. If a podcast can be Henry Jamesian, then this is a Jamesian podcast.

The confluence of Missing Richard Simmons' failure and S-Town's triumph have quickly restored true crime and realism to their usual aesthetic relationship: the former degraded, the latter exulted. This is in some ways disappointing. One of the exciting possibilities of Serial was that, through the new medium of podcasting, the lowbrow genre of true crime might be reinvented in highbrow terms in a way not really attempted since the era of New Journalism (beginning with Truman Capote's In Cold Blood and ending with Norman Mailer's The Executioner's Song). But the historical accident of Missing Richard Simmons and S-Town being released in rapid succession has meant that the critical appraisals of both genres have been returned to their comfortable norm. Missing Richard Simmons, though a single text, stands in for the failures of the entire true crime genre; S-Town, a particularly fine example of realism, proves the case that realism has always been a more important artistic mode.

Donald Trump: A Tyrant, but Whose Kind of Tyrant?

One reasonable criterion for the worth of nonfiction is longevity. How long is a book worth continuing to read? This has rarely been truer than at the end of a year in which so many political events have been declared "unprecedented." If recent events are truly unique in history, then surely books published prior to those events can have little to tell us about our current predicament, yes?

But, in fact, the opposite seems true, and both Brexit and the election of Donald Trump to the American presidency have created cottage industries searching for theorists and philosophers who speak to contemporary problems. Of this year's attempts to prove the prescience of older texts, few are more brilliant than Andrew Sullivan's argument that Plato accounts nicely for the rise of Donald Trump. I would like to take on a less ambitious task and hearken back only to Hannah Arendt's 1963 book, On Revolution.

In particular, I want to point to one of the many careful distinctions she makes in characterising the modes of power that emerged from the American Revolution. Arendt argues that the American Revolution (and, to a lesser extent, the French Revolution) bequeathed to us a definition of tyranny that is less precise than the one that preceded it. Prior to the American Revolution, Arendt claims, "tyranny" referred not to all types of one-person rule, but to one-person rule in which the ruler chose, of his own accord, not to rule in the public interest: "Since the end of antiquity, it had been common in political theory to distinguish between government according to law and tyranny, whereby tyranny was understood to be the form of government in which the ruler ruled out of his own will and in pursuit of his own interests, thus offending the private welfare and the lawful, civil rights of the governed." (Arendt 121).

Thus, for pre-Revolutionary philosophers and politicians, it was not kings per se who were tyrants; it was only bad kings who were tyrants: "Under no circumstances could monarchy, one-man rule, as such be identified with tyranny; yet it was precisely this identification to which the revolutions quickly were to be driven. Tyranny, as the revolutions came to understand it, was a form of government in which the ruler, even though he ruled according to the laws of the realm, had monopolised for himself the rights of action" (Arendt 121).

As Arendt argues here, from the experience of republican government emerged the idea that any form of non-democratic government was ipso facto tyrannical. The individual in power might make good decisions or bad; either way, her failure to gain sanction from the people she governs constitutes a form of tyranny. It is in this sense that a certain kind of conservative can see President Obama's use of drones as tyrannical even while, when push comes to shove, supporting the specific decisions he has made. It is Obama's failure to consult Congress or the people directly, not the rectitude of his actions per se, that constitutes tyranny.

The pre-Revolutionary distinction between forms of one-person rule is, I want to suggest, being revived before our eyes in the phenomenon of Trumpism.

In the eyes of Trump's critics, his selection of certain companies for scorn, his decision to "save" a Carrier plant in one place while ignoring workers in another--that is to say, his decision to rule almost without policy and only by caprice--constitutes tyranny as such. We might concede that, yes, the nation or the world is better off with those few jobs saved and that Carrier plant open; but we still object to the way in which Trump "monopolise[s] for himself the rights of action." If jobs are to be kept in the United States, we insist, this ought to be done through a rational policy debated in the legislative and executive branches.

Trump's fans, however, adhere to an older, pre-Revolutionary definition of tyranny. Under this sense of tyranny, these acts are not tyrannical because, though they may stem from one-man rule, they uphold the public interest. Under this definition of tyranny, Trump may be capricious and may rule outside the bounds of republican norms. However, he only becomes a tyrant insofar as his actions advance his own interests to the exclusion of the nation's. If he saved 700 manufacturing jobs, who cares how he did it?

Trump's critics, then, have their work cut out for them. Marshalling evidence that Trump acts without the consent of Congress or without public consultation will convince few for whom such acts are not the problem. Unlike during the Nixon era, in which the question was only whether evidence of the crime could be found, in the Trump era it is a question of how to define the crime itself.

Antarctic Notes 2: Exploration, Imperialism, and Tanks

"They were the direct ancestors of the 'tanks' in France." 

--Apsley Cherry-Garrard

Why do we dislike imperialism? The obvious answer is its victims; in expanding their empires from (primarily) European bases, imperial nations subjugate other people, sometimes with genocidal consequences. Understandably enough, the effects of imperialism on these colonised people have received the lion's share of attention in postcolonial criticism.

The European (and, in one case, Japanese) exploration of Antarctica in the late 19th and early 20th centuries offers an interesting case study in this context. If it is indeed the effects on subjugated peoples that makes us object to imperialism, then attempts to "conquer" the South Pole should register differently; there being no Antarctic people to subjugate, there should be little to object to.

And, indeed, this is the case. Tales of Antarctic adventure certainly strike us as less problematic than parallel imperial tales from the "scramble for Africa" and the "settling" of the North American  plain written in roughly the same period.

That said, reading the narratives these explorers left behind suggests that there is something internal to the act of conquest itself that troubles us. Beneath the heroism, legitimate scientific curiosity, and awe at the beauty of nature in these stories there lies a sense that these men's self-assurance and fixity of purpose is itself problematic, that the lack of introspection here is, even absent concrete and immediate victims, still destined to end poorly.

This nagging sense of something wrong with the Antarctic imperial project bursts through to the narrative surface very occasionally. The most striking example of this is in Apsley Cherry-Garrard's The Worst Journey in the World. The Terra Nova expedition, of which he was a part, had brought with it early versions of snow mobiles which they hoped would allow them to move supplies from their camp on the Antarctic coast to supply depots further inland. In assessing their utility after the fact, Cherry-Garrad makes this striking statement:

"Did they succeed or fail? They certainly did not help us much, the motor which travelled farthest drawing a heavy load to just beyond Corner Camp. But even so fifty statute miles is fifty miles, and that they did it at all was an enormous advance.... The general design seemed to be right, all that was now wanted was experience. As an experiment they were successful in the South, but Scott never knew their true possibilities; for they were the direct ancestors of the 'tanks' in France" (Cherry-Garrard 332).

This last sentence is shocking. Writing in England in 1922, with the consequences of World War I (including the battlefield deaths of many of survivors of Ernest Shackleton's Imperial Trans-Antarctic Expedition) all around him, Cherry-Garrad draws a direct connection between his own project and the horrors of the war.

Cherry-Garrard's memoir is otherwise notable in its lack of psychological insight; to Cherry-Garrad, every member of the Scott expedition was brave, stoic, patriotic, and good-natured to the end. That flatness of psychological insight makes this one sentence that much more striking. Here Cherry-Garrad breaks through, seemingly accidentally, to a remarkable piece of cultural insight: that British exploration, even in its most victimless and scientific mode, leads not incidentally but directly to the technology of warfare and the wreckage of the Great War.

Thus, to an Edwardian explorer maybe even more clearly than to us, the problem of imperialism is not just the victims external to its function, but the mindset and methods internal to it.

Antarctic Notes 1: Edwardian Form

One way to organise literary forms is on a spectrum from those which allow the fewest possible voices to speak to those which allow the most to speak. Thus we might see the possible range of literature running from the most monological, closed, didactic forms (propaganda of one form or another--Upton Sinclair at his worst, for example) to the most polyphonous, dialogic, and open-to-interpretation forms (the more sprawling realist novels, certain forms of experimental poetry, postmodern collage, and so forth).

It is fairly widely accepted that one end of this spectrum is less ethical, progressive, democratic, etc., than the other. That is to say, it is fairly common place to see the didacticism of Sinclair or later proletarian fiction as authoritarian and bad, and to see the openness and polyvocality of, say, Djuna Barnes or Thomas Pynchon as democratic, open-to-debate, and, therefore, good. The multiple voices in the works of these more esteemed writers encourage diversity of perspectives thereby undermining the authoritarian politics embodied in the forms at the other end of the spectrum. Or so the usual reading goes.

Reading Apsley Cherry-Garrard's The Worst Journey in the World suggests a politics of form absent from the typical reading described above. Cherry-Garrard's memoir describes Robert Falcon Scott's ill-fated attempt to discover the South Pole, and Charry-Gerrard's own role in it. In many ways, despite the hyper-masculine, perfectly Edwardian subject matter of exploration conquest, and the extremes of human endurance, the book's form appears more typical of later postmodern writers' collage and multiple voices. That is to say, the book's form is remarkably "democratic." Throughout the book, Charry-Gerrard includes other writers' work in the form of scientific papers, diaries, letters home, and later recollections that allow him to elaborate on topics in which he is not expert and events for which he was not present, as well as to give other people's perspectives on events he has already described first-hand. Indeed, at times these quotations almost overwhelm the writer's own voice, taking up pages at a time. His deference, in particular, to Scott's diary tends to render Cherry-Garrard's own voice almost secondary within his own text.

These citations and quotations, however, serve almost the opposite purpose to those usually lauded in polyvocal, dialogic literature. Rather than showing a great diversity of voices contesting each other or illuminating multiple perspectives, the polyphony here serves only to highlight the remarkable unanimity of the voyage's personnel. Every voice agrees as to the purpose and value of the voyage, the nature of the obstacles faced, and the heroism of the men in facing them. The controlling metaphor here is not the multicultural fabric or bustling agora, but one taken from the polar journey itself: multiple men yoked to a sledge, working together to pull in the same direction.

Thus Cherry-Garrard's book suggests a different possibility for multi-voiced literary forms: a distinctively Edwardian vision of many people all speaking to the same purpose, working toward the same goal. There is no postmodern diversity or parallax here; only solidarity and unanimity. Thus emerges from Cherry-Garrard's form something like the Edwardian postmodern or, perhaps, the Edwardian anti-postmodern. Or, perhaps, the last glimpse of a total unity of purpose before World War I would make any such thing inconceivable.

Books about White People

Here is a picture of five books, all published between 1969 and 1972:

And here is a sixth, published in 1969:

I came across these while unpacking books into a new bookshelf, and had for the most part forgotten about both owning them and having once read each of them. (The occasion for first reading them was a dissertation chapter on Norman Mailer's journalism.) The books are striking today for their contemporary relevance.

Each deals with what, in the wake of Richard Nixon's election, seemed to be a movement toward a kind of white identity politics. White Americans, particularly working-class white Americans,  these writers argue, had come to see themselves as a kind of aggrieved identity group and were now voting on those grievances. The result was the election of Nixon and a a cultural "backlash" against the Civil Rights movement and the counterculture. The writers presented here disagree considerably both about the legitimacy of these grievances and the likely longterm political consequences of them.

What they agree upon, however, is that whiteness had been, in the late 1960s, politicised. Once taken as simply the given background of American life, whiteness was now the terrain of political discussion, its meaning and value argued over by professional critics and shop foremen alike. 

This is perhaps the first lesson these books hold for our current cultural and political moment. It is not so much that Donald Trump is like Nixon (to the extent that either of them is psychologically knowable from afar, they seem strikingly different). Rather, it is that the politicisation of whiteness was a necessary precondition for the rise of both. To put that more starkly: politicised whiteness would seem to be a threat to progressive politics, and perhaps to the political order as a whole. 

The second lesson these books hold is that not all identities are politicised equally. Each of these books speaks to the concerns of white voters and of working-class voters and they for the most part see the working class as white by default. All of that remains mostly true of our current concern with and politicisation of white Americans. (The one important difference might be the post-industrial blurring of the distinctions between working-class, unemployed, and chronically under-employed people.)

The Nixon-era books, however, politicise another identity category, one that is almost entirely absent from political discussion today: White ethnicity. Pieces of a Dream is subtitled The Ethnic Worker's Crisis with America, and that concern with ethnicity is a theme that runs through all six books. The difference between a descendent of English Americans and a descendent of Italian or Lithuanian ones was, in the Nixon era, front and centre. Today, it hardly registers.

There is, maybe, a glimmer of hope here. Not that the identity category of "white" might be segmented into different ethnicities and pitted against itself, but that identity categories might be re-articulated in different and more productive directions. To put that another way, the importance of ethnicity to writers 50 years ago is a reminder that all politics is identity politics. A person is no more "naturally" an Italian American than she is a white American, nor more naturally a "worker" than she is a "Christian." Cultural work is required to create and then to politicise each of those ideas. And if our culture has, at this moment, created and then politicised the idea of a monolithic whiteness, then it might in the future create and then politicise categories which today seem irrelevant to politics and which might, looked at from a distance, hold more political promise: neighbour, producer, conservationist, caregiver, etc. 

Writers once thought it crucial to figure out the meaning of Slavic-Americanness; today they could hardly care less. Perhaps, then, we might one day worry not at all about what it means to be white, having turned our attention instead toward what it means to look after children or care for the elderly. 

Persepolis, Islamophobia, Unit Planning

Should we teach Persepolis? Marjane Satrapi's graphic novel and memoir of her youth in revolutionary Iran is, at this point, clearly a part of the high school canon. And perhaps rightly so; it certainly checks a lot of boxes: Given it's visual nature, it is accessible to weaker readers, and yet complex in theme; it is a female- and minority-authored text adrift in a white, male sea still too full of Shakespeare, Hemingway, and Jack London; it allows students to take a "literary" approach to a text type still sometimes dismissed as childish or simplistic (I had such a conversation with a parent just today); and, lastly, it allows students relatively easy introductory access to literary nonfiction, a genre worthy of study in its own right and granted renewed importance by the Common Core State Standards. So the book works on a number of levels.

There is a problem, though, with teaching Persepolis in the high school classroom: Islamophobia. In some senses, the text combats Islamophobia in that it introduces students to the details of a particular moment in the history of one Islamic society, including some of the fissures that divide that society, and in so doing it undercuts some of the sillier abstractions that pit a monolithic "Islamic World" against a "Western" one.

Beyond that basic emphasis on historical specificity (and that point is not nothing in a world that still too often trades in ahistorical colonialist generalities), the text does not bear out a postcolonial or anti-Islamphobic reading. For example, on the very first page of volume 1, the text establishes the Islamic headscarf as a potent symbol of unfreedom, juxtaposed against the previously free world of French, secular education. This trope continues for the duration of volume 1, with French education associated with equality of the sexes, individual liberty, and an honest pursuit of truth. In the final pages, these symbolic resonances are made literal as Marji escapes the Iranian revolution to a European boarding school, thus finding artistic freedom in the West when she could not in the Islamic East. The myriad ways in which Islam (and not Marji's parents' secular vision of the world) is associated with violence and repression are obvious enough, from stories of torture at the hands of the Islamic regime to women's protests quashed by Islamist thugs to a pointless war deploying tens of thousands of child soldiers.

(To push the point slightly further, the text puts Marx to fascinating use. Throughout the book, the truly idealistic revolutionaries are Marxists and the pragmatist champions of the status quo are westernised liberals; it is only the Islamist revolutionaries who are craven--represented as primarily interested in a crude sort of Puritanism, sadism, and misogyny. Thus the forces of classical European revolution, liberal capitalism and Marxism, are synthesised into twin pillars of good intentions while it is the non-Western revolutionary force, Islamism, that is cast as the bad guy.)

One would not want this postcolonial point to swerve too far into a criticism of Satrapi herself. It goes without saying that her experience of the Iranian Revolution should be widely read and understood, and that her criticisms of the, by the all accounts, terrible revolutionary government of Iran are entirely warranted. It is also entirely correct that a story of horrific sexual violence committed by men against women is of particular interest in an era of heightened concern about sexual assault and a renewed interest in the relationship between gender and violence. So, to put that more succinctly, there is no question of veracity here, or at least not one I am aware of or qualified to make, nor any question of best intentions on Satrapi's part.

The issue, though, is, as it always is in an English classroom, one of selection. Students will not be exposed to infinite representations of Islam, nor will they be exposed to texts in a political vacuum. And so it might seem that, in 2016, for a European or American or otherwise "westernised" audience, a text that represents Islam primarily as un-freedom is problematic. Does it reinforce Islamophobic stereotypes that are otherwise widely circulated in the culture and also politically problematic? I think this answer is largely, "yes."

So what, then, is one to do? The simple answer would be, "Don't teach Persepolis." But that, in turn, raises potentially bigger problems about quiet censorship and the narrowing of the canon to only the most certifiably "liberal" (in the 21st-century, American, collegiate sense of the word) texts.

The answer to this conundrum is neither political nor literary; it is curricular. The problem with teaching Persepolis as the sole representation of Islam students encounter is that you are teaching Persepolis as the sole representation of Islam students encounter.  And here in lies the problem with the English Language Arts unit built around a particular text. Were students to read Persepolis in the context of several other, diverse representations of Iran or of Islam, the problems Persepolis raises would largely disappear. To take just one example, one could imagine discussing Persepolis' veil imagery in the context of The New Yorker's recent article on Islamic modelling and alternative views of beauty and freedom.

Both texts, of course, would have to be consciously taught in order for these matters to come to the fore. And this, it seems to me, is a strong argument in favour of ELA units based not in specific texts (even when supplemented by additional short pieces) but in broad questions. If the question was, "What does Islam represent?", it would be hard logically to conclude that the best way to answer the question is by reading a single person's representation of Islam. If, on the other hand, the model underlying the unit is that we are teaching a specific text, in this case Persepolis, then other readings will appear at best ancillary, and arguably as wastes of time. Thus, in this narrow context, the problem of representation becomes not one of politics but one of curriculum.