Per Caritatem

The Anticipatory Corpse: Medicine, Power, and the Care of the Dying by Jeffrey P. Bishop

Cynthia R. Nielsen — Wed, 01 Feb 2012 14:34:08 +0000

Is it possible that death in some significant way constitutes the core, the very heart of contemporary medicine? Jeffrey P. Bishop argues in his recent book, The Anticipatory Corpse: Medicine, Power, and the Care of the Dying, that such is not only possible but is in fact the case. As both a physician and a philosopher, Bishop offers not only a philosophical analysis of how we have come to view death and the body, but he also unmasks—as an insider to the world of medicine—the violence present in contemporary medical practices.

In chapters one and two, Bishop elaborates the historical and philosophical basis of his critique of medicine. In chapter one, “Birthing the Clinic,” Bishop presents Foucault’s analysis of how in contemporary medicine the dead body becomes epistemologically normative. The new epistemology of death coupled with a metaphysics shorn of final and formal causes provides an ideal framework for viewing the “living body as a machine, as dead matter in motion” (60). In chapter two, Bishop shows how medicine and the state are intimately connected. As we move into the 19^th century, the state is more and more focused upon protecting public health. Once the categories of “normal” and “pathological” are taken up in various knowledge-networks (e.g. psychology), the role of medicine in the state is sealed. Chapters three through seven then deal more concretely with how this new logic plays itself out in contemporary practices concerning end of life care. In these chapters, we find such topics as physician-assisted death, how brain death has been redefined, the “real story” about organ transplantation, and debates over how to care for patients in a persistent vegetative state. In the final chapter, Bishop offers an alternative epistemology—an epistemology of life wherein theology places a central, saving role. Here Bishop takes Foucault’s call to imagine ourselves otherwise quite seriously. Rather than viewing the body as dead matter in motion, perhaps we should not so quickly write off the religious communities whose narratives and traditions are “informed by a different understanding of space and time, where location and story provide meaningful contexts to offer once again hospitality to the dying as both cura corporis and cura animae” (313).

Medicine is one of the most important and powerful institutions in the contemporary West. Yet, The Anticipatory Corpse is not only a book about medicine. Rather, medicine serves as an occasion for Bishop to examine the metaphysical and epistemological assumptions that animate much of modern Western technoscience, and thus much of Western culture. The book’s interdisciplinary nature, along with its careful analyses combined with concrete stories of real human struggles with death and dying , no doubt, will be of interest to those engaged in medicine, bioethics, philosophy, theology, and debates concerning public health policies; but all those interested in the place of the body in modern technoscientific culture will find it engaging and cogent.

On Jazz and Life: Playing Imperfectly in Real Time

Cynthia R. Nielsen — Tue, 24 Jan 2012 23:05:51 +0000

The term, “improvisation,” is often used in colloquial speech to connote activities, actions, or plans undertaken with little or no forethought or preparation. Similar ascriptions have been applied to musical improvisation—jazz in particular—in order to suggest that improvised music lacks the technical, intellectual, and cultural complexities and refinements of traditional Western classical music. As I have argued elsewhere,[1] I find the strict, rigid division assumed between jazz (as largely improvised music) and classical (as largely non-improvised music) to be inaccurate and misleading. There are, of course, improvisatory elements in classical music, ranging from the motif development that characterizes the compositional process to the performative variations of specific melodic lines ornamented and executed by the musicians themselves. Rather than a dichotomous view of composition and improvisation, I suggest understanding the two as occupying different “places” on a continuum and having the ability to move to a different “place” depending upon the degree of improvisatory space the particular composition or piece allows.

Having stated these initial caveats (with more to come), nonetheless, there are features that characterize jazz improvisation, distinguishing it from the common practices of Western classical composition. For example, the jazz improviser cannot take back, or as Lee B. Brown puts it, “erase,” the notes he has played in the course of his improvised solo.[2] In contrast, in the process of working out her composition, a composer can alter a theme, as well as a rhythmic or melodic motif, or she can decide to abandon the theme altogether in favor of a new one. This antecedent compositional activity is something we, as listeners, never experience. A jazz improviser does not have this past-time luxury but must play in the moment, in time. “He can only build upon the steps he has just taken.”[3] Brown calls this the improviser’s “situation.” This dynamic, out-in-the-open, present compositional activity in which the jazz improviser engages is, of course, risky. A player might exceed his technical abilities and thus be unable to recover from a lightening speed melodic run developed in conversation with the other musicians. Likewise, a soloist might begin a musical idea that starts off well and yet fails midway through the piece. Even so, risks and “imperfections” of this sort are, at least in part, what jazz enthusiasts appreciate, as they create an unfolding musical drama for the musicians and the audience. Stated with more specificity, because the jazz improviser always plays in real time and thus must choose to act (to choose not to play is also an act), her musical acts—failures and successes alike—become, in a very literal sense, part of the musical piece itself. As Brown puts it, in jazz improvisation, “[t]he risk-taking process itself becomes an ingredient in the result. […] With improvised music, all attempts at revision too become part of the music.”[4]

Notes

[1] See, for example, Nielsen, “What Has Coltrane to Do With Mozart.” See also, Gould and Keaton, “The Essential Role of Improvisation in Musical Performance,” 143–48.

[2] Brown, “‘Feeling My Way’: Jazz Improvisation and Its Vicissitudes,” 114

[3] Ibid.

[4] Ibid., 119.

Look, a White! Philosophical Essays on Whiteness by Professor George Yancy

Cynthia R. Nielsen — Tue, 17 Jan 2012 15:50:05 +0000

For those interested in critical race theory and “whiteness” studies in particular, Professor George Yancy’s new book, Look, a White! Philosophical Essays on Whiteness, is a valuable resource. Dr. Yancy is an associate professor of philosophy at Dusquesne University. He is a well-known scholar in critical race theory and has written, edited, and taught on the subject of race for several years. As his institutional website notes, Dr. Yancy “is particularly interested in the formation of African-American philosophical thought as articulated within the social context and historical space of anti-Black racism, African-American agency, and identity formation. His current philosophical project explores the theme of racial embodiment, particularly in terms of how white bodies live their whiteness unreflectively vis-à-vis the interpellation and deformation not only of the black body, but the white body, the philosophical identity formation of whites, and questions of white privilege and power formation. He is also interested in the intersection between philosophy and biography, and how this intersection implicates normative issues at the level of praxis.” Not only is Dr. Yancy an excellent scholar whose passion for justice and desire to allow marginalized voices speak is abundantly evident (just check out his CV), but he is a kind, approachable, and generous person.

The following summary of Professor Yancy’s new book is taken from the Temple University Press website:

“Look, a White! returns the problem of whiteness to white people. Prompted by Eric Holder’s charge, that as Americans, we are cowards when it comes to discussing the issue of race, noted philosopher George Yancy’s essays map out a structure of whiteness.

He considers whiteness within the context of racial embodiment, film, pedagogy, colonialism, its “danger,” and its position within the work of specific writers. Identifying the embedded and opaque ways white power and privilege operate, Yancy argues that the Black countergaze can function as a “gift” to whites in terms of seeing their own whiteness more effectively.

Throughout Look, a White! Yancy pays special attention to the impact of whiteness on individuals, as well as on how the structures of whiteness limit the capacity of social actors to completely untangle the way whiteness operates, thus preventing the erasure of racism in social life.”

Dr. Yancy’s book is also available for pre-order via Amazon.com. I encourage you to order your copy now!

Remembering Martin Luther King Jr. in 2012: On How Not to Sleep Through a Revolution

Cynthia R. Nielsen — Fri, 13 Jan 2012 20:12:18 +0000

Taking as his point of departure the story of Rip Van Winkle, who, having slept for twenty years, awakens to a world he hardly recognizes, Martin Luther King Jr. develops the analogy in his speech, “Remaining Awake Through a Great Revolution,” to speak to contemporary issues of his day—issues still alive and well in our day. The important point about Rip Van Winkle was not that he slept for two decades but that he slept, as King puts it, “through a revolution.” When Van Winkle had ascended the mountain for his rest, he saw a picture of King George III. When he awoke twenty years later, the picture he saw upon his descent was not a monarch’s but rather George Washington’s. During his twenty-year “nap,” Rip Van Winkle was unaware of the significant social, political, economic, religious and cultural changes that had occurred.

Having captivated our attention with his sleeping metaphor, King begins to improvise on his theme.

There are all too many people who, in some great period of social change, fail to achieve the new mental outlooks that the new situation demands. There is nothing more tragic than to sleep through a revolution. There can be no gainsaying of the fact that a great revolution is taking place in our world today. It is a social revolution, sweeping away the old order of colonialism. And in our own nation it is sweeping away the old order of slavery and racial segregation. The wind of change is blowing, and we see in our day and our age a significant development. Victor Hugo said on one occasion that there is nothing more powerful in all the world than an idea whose time has come. In a real sense, the idea whose time has come today is the idea of freedom and human dignity. Wherever men are assembled today, the cry is always the same, “We want to be free.” And so we see in our own world a revolution of rising expectations. The great challenge facing every individual graduating today is to remain awake through this social revolution.

King then comments on how one can avoid the Rip Van Winkle syndrome and thus be attuned to pressing social and political issues and concerns. First, King encourages us to strive to “achieve a world perspective.” For those who believe “that we can live in isolation” and “live without being concerned about other individuals and other nations is sleeping through a revolution. The world in which we live is geographically one. The great challenge now is to make it one in terms of brotherhood.” In other words, King argues against social atomism and individualism which promotes one’s own self-interest above all else. In place of radical individualism, which as many political theorists and critics of classical liberal democracy have pointed out (Marxists, feminists, communitarians, critical race theorists), leads to alienation, oppression, and exploitation, King calls for solidarity and a concern for humans qua humans. None of this suggests that King is advocating for a post-racial society where we deny difference. Rather, he sees that in order to fight for justice, human rights, and the like, there must be some common bond, some unity that connects us and yet allows difference to manifest and even be celebrated. In other words, I see in King a desire to hold unity and difference in tension rather than to exalt one over the other. Listen in the following passage to King’s way of putting it:

all mankind is tied together; all life is interrelated, and we are all caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly. For some strange reason I can never be what I ought to be until you are what you ought to be. And you can never be what you ought to be until I am what I ought to be – this is the interrelated structure of reality. John Donne caught it years ago and placed it in graphic terms: No man is an Island, entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main [...] And then he goes on toward the end to say: any man’s death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind; and therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee. And by believing this, by living out this fact, we will be able to remain awake through a great revolution.

King’s second point is that we must work unceasingly and passionately to uproot and eradicate racial injustice in all its forms, personal or societal/structural. Having noted a number of positive strides in the fight for racial equality—“the Supreme Court’s decision outlawing segregation in the public schools, a comprehensive Civil Rights Bill in 1964” and so forth, King makes clear that these advances are only a beginning and that significant work remains to be done. Although there has been much success on legal fronts with respect to segregation laws, nonetheless, socio-political and economic issues continued to enslave American blacks (of King’s day and in our day as well.) For example, as King explains,

The Negro is still at the bottom of the economic ladder. He finds himself perishing on a lonely island of poverty in the midst of a vast ocean of material prosperity. Millions of Negroes are still housed in unendurable slums; millions of Negroes are still forced to attend totally inadequate and substandard schools. And we still see, in certain sections of our country, violence and man’s inhumanity to man in the most tragic way. All of these things remind us that we have a long, long way to go. For inAlabamaandMississippi, violence and murder where civil rights workers are concerned, are popular and favorite pastimes.

Racial injustice, as King reminds us, is not something that will simply work itself out in due time. Rather, it is something toward which we—black, white, brown, etc.—must labor. I conclude my brief commentary on King’s speech with a final passage, a passage that I find both powerful and unsettling. Why unsettling? Because like Rip Van Winkle I have a tendency to choose to sleep rather than remain awake during the revolution.

It may well be that we will have to repent in this generation, not merely for the vitriolic works and violent actions of the bad people who bomb a church in Birmingham, Alabama, or shoot down a civil rights worker in Selma, but for the appalling silence and indifference of the good people who sit around and say, ‘Wait on time.’ Somewhere we must come to see that human progress never rolls in on wheels of inevitability. It comes through the tireless efforts and the persistent work of dedicated individuals. Without this hard work, time becomes an ally of the primitive forces of social stagnation. So we must help time and realize that the time is always right to do right.

As you reflect on Dr. King’s words, I ask you to consider taking a concrete step to help an African American friend of mine, Michael X. Smith, (with whom I am have been corresponding for over two years) who is serving a life-sentence in prison for a crime of which he claims innocence. Please take a few minutes to read his story and, if you are so moved, to sign his petition for a retrial.

Peter Kivy’s Bach Bird Example, de Saussure, and the Already Present Significance of Music and Language

Cynthia R. Nielsen — Fri, 06 Jan 2012 23:56:03 +0000

In Michael Krausz’s article, The Tonal and The Foundational: Ansermet on Stravinsky, Krausz argues against Ansermet’s claim that Stravinsky’s atonal music is both sub-standard and unnatural. Krausz approaches the issue from a non-foundationalist epistemology, “which assumes that there are no uninterpreted facts of the matter and no single ahistorical Archimedean interpretive framework from which we can make our cultural entities intelligible” (383). To illustrate his point, Kraus cites Peter Kivy’s example of the “Bach-bird,” whose song brings to Kivy’s mind, Bach’s Little Organ Fugue in C.

While my musical consciousness is busy fitting the Bach-bird’s song into a possible Western notation, based on major and minor seconds, the Indian’s musical psyche is just as busy accommodating it to the world of microtones. Does he hear the cheerfulness of the Bach-bird’s song? Why should he? He doesn’t hear the same ‘music’ in it that I do. I should no more expect him to hear the cheerfulness in the Bach-bird’s song than the cheerfulness of Bach’s fugue. For he would need my musical culture to hear both of them; and that, by hypothesis, he does not have” (Peter Kivy, The Corded Shell, p. 92, as cited in Krausz, 383).

Kivy’s point is that in light of the fact that scales in the Western musical tradition are based on sequential patterns either alternating between major and minor seconds or composed of either major seconds (whole-tone scale) or minor seconds (chromatic scale), we in the West are accustomed to hearing music whose harmonies and melodies are based on these particular scales. In Indian and other non-Western music, the scales themselves are different and contain, as Kivy observes, “microtones,” that is, intervals smaller than minor seconds. Consequently, the harmonies and melodies derived from non-Western scales sound very different from those based on major and minor seconds. For many musically socialized in the West, Indian music sounds dissonant or out of tune; however, to those having grown-up listening to Indian or non-Western music whose scales contain microtones, the same music is considered consonant and beautiful.

Kivy’s observations seem analogous to Ferdinand de Saussure’s claims regarding language. That is, according to de Saussure, every meaningful sound is immediately connected with a certain concept. When I say the word “tree” to a community of English language speakers, this word/sign doesn’t somehow connect with a distinct universal concept “tree” shared by human beings. Rather, when I say tree to my fellow competent English-speakers, the sign is already meaningful—it already signifies. This is the point de Saussure makes when he claims that the sign is composed of two parts: the signifier (the “sound-image”) and the signified (the concept). By itself, the signifier signifies nothing. Stated otherwise, the signifier (“sound-image”) always signifies in connection with the signified (concept). This is markedly different from an Aristotelian view of language. For Aristotle, concepts are shared by all human beings and can be arrived at through a process of abstraction. Aristotle does acknowledge that the particular word that one might attach to a universal concept is conventional and depends upon one’s culture and language community. Thus, if I am Russian, I will attach the word “дерево” to the concept, tree; if I am Czech, I will attach the word “strom,” to the same concept. This view suggests that there is a kind of universal language of concepts that maps on at a later stage to particular, spoken languages. De Saussure finds this untenable, as we think in particular languages, whose words derive their meanings from within or internal to the language system itself. Moreover, de Saussure highlights the non-necessary connection between the mental image of an object and a particular word in a spoken language. In other words, to the question, “why is the mental image of this object possessing leaves and a trunk associated with the word “tree” in English?”, de Saussure answers, “it is a social convention.” This is not to say that one individual within a particular language community can call an object whatever he or she decides to call it. As Heidegger might put it, we are, after all, thrown into our language communities and find ourselves already immersed within a language that, as it were, has us. Similarly, de Saussure’s point is once you are “in” a particular language community, the arbitrary origin of the connection becomes stable and even something to which I, as an individual member of that community, must submit.

Resistance Through Re-narration Available Online at African Identities: Journal of Economics, Culture, and Society

Cynthia R. Nielsen — Fri, 09 Dec 2011 13:18:19 +0000

For those interested, my essay, “Resistance Through Re-narration: Fanon on De-constructing Racialized Subjectivities,” African Identities: Journal of Economics, Culture, and Society 9:4 (Dec. 2011): 363-85. DOI: 10.1080/14725843.2011.61441o, is now available for online viewing.

ABSTRACT

Frantz Fanon offers a lucid account of his entrance into the white world where the weightiness of the ‘white gaze’ nearly crushed him. In chapter five of Black Skins, White Masks, he develops his historico-racial and epidermal racial schemata as correctives to Merleau-Ponty’s overly inclusive corporeal schema. Experientially aware of the reality of socially constructed (racialized) subjectivities, Fanon uses his schemata to explain the creation, maintenance, and eventual rigidification of white-scripted ‘blackness’. Through a re-telling of his own experiences of racism, Fanon is able to show how a black person in a racialized context eventually internalizes the ‘white gaze’. In this essay I bring Fanon’s insights into conversation with Foucault’s discussion of panoptic surveillance. Although the internalization of the white narrative creates a situation in which external constraints are no longer needed, Fanon highlights both the historical contingency of ‘blackness’ and the ways in which the oppressed can re-narrate their subjectivities. Lastly, I discuss Fanon’s historically attuned ‘new humanism’, once again engaging Fanon and Foucault as dialogue partners.

Overmedicated, Unwanted, Stigmatized, Powerless: America’s (Forgotten) Foster Children

Cynthia R. Nielsen — Sun, 04 Dec 2011 01:30:19 +0000

As Sharon Hays, Loïc Wacquant, and others have shown, dominant cultural narratives dispersed via mass media, political campaigns, educational and religious institutions and the like play a significant role in constructing social identities—for example, the “welfare queen,” the “black” male criminal, etc. Such narratives, along with others downplaying social responsibility (and overemphasizing an ahistorical, race-less, gender-less individualistic picture of responsibility, which fail to take into account the genuine disparities of experience between, for example, whites and blacks in America) influence public policies in ways that are often unacknowledged or not taken seriously.

As both Hays and Wacquant observe, the 1996 Personal Responsibility Act assumes and is underwritten by negative stereotypes of welfare mothers as social outcasts and moral delinquents. Following the lead of the aforementioned sociologists, I hope to engage in a (future) research project investigating the ways in which adopted, foster, and institutionalized children are likewise socially stigmatized by political, religious, and other narratives and how this influences legislation, family placement (i.e., what kind of families are considered as ideal, which are excluded and why), and long-term child development.

In addition, drawing from my dissertation research on Foucauldian power relations and socially constructed subjectivities, I imagine such a project unfolding via an analysis of the impact of certain medical practices and categorizations imposed upon institutionalized children (e.g., how do labels such as “mildly,” “moderately,” or “severely developmentally and emotionally challenged” influence or put pressure on children to take certain medicines and undergo certain psychological therapies with which they are uncomfortable?). Many children in foster care have reported that they experienced sexual, physical, and emotional abuse both in state care and at the hands of their foster parents.[1] Some of this abuse included being overmedicated. For example, in a 2004 study of a random sample of 472 medicated youth in foster care in aTexas facility ages 0 through 19 years, the disturbing findings are as follows:

Of the foster children who had been dispensed psychotropic medication, 41.3% received ≥3 different classes of these drugs during July 2004, and 15.9% received ≥4 different classes. The most frequently used medications were antidepressants (56.8%), attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder drugs (55.9%), and antipsychotic agents (53.2%). The use of specific psychotropic medication classes varied little by diagnostic grouping. Psychiatrists prescribed 93% of the psychotropic medication dispensed to youth in foster care. The use of ≥2 drugs within the same psychotropic medication class was noted in 22.2% of those who were given prescribed drugs concomitantly.[2]

The overall conclusion of this study was that “[c]oncomitant psychotropic medication treatment is frequent for youth in foster care and lacks substantive evidence as to its effectiveness and safety.”[3] Why then are these children being overmedicated? What is being done to prevent such abuse? Provocatively put, are these children being used as human lab rats? What resistance possibilities are available to these children given the asymmetrical power relations involved? (Just today I read this story in The Children’s Monitor, a publication of the Child Welfare League of America, confirming the abuse and overmedication of children in state care. For example, the article states that the children are given “doses that are too high”—some children were found to be on more than five medications simultaneously! In addition, children under age one were given high-powered prescription drugs, and given the multiple caregivers, the unstable state supervision, and lax regulations, the medicines prescribed are improperly monitored, which often results in “gaps in prescribed regimens.” By clicking the following link, Giovan Bazan’s Story of Twelve Years of Overmedication in Foster Care, you can listen to one young man’s story of his own person experience with overmedication the foster care system. He is now an advocate for children in state care.)

Additional problems with this complex nexus of the state, children, and foster families include proper screening of foster parents. How can we prevent foster parents from simply using the system for the remuneration they receive from the state? Why do so many children to suffer abuse in their foster families? If new legislation, innovative practices, or other models are helping in any of these areas, how might we make these “tools” available nationwide?

Besides drawing from the insights of sociologists, critical “race” theory, and moral philosophy, I want to consider the contributions faith-based communities might have to offer with respect to re-imagining and creating more positive, affirming, and inclusive views of adoption and foster care, while also exploring the ways that certain narratives in these traditions—for example, narratives overemphasizing the biological family as the ideal family—have actually cultivated and helped to shape negative and stigmatized views of adopted and foster children and families. This is both ironic and unfortunate because many of these traditions have rich theological and ethical resources to offer with respect to a more diverse and difference-affirming view of families.

Wacquant has argued that there is an intimate connection between U.S.prisons and welfare/workfare. The former overpopulated with African American males—the special targets of a neoliberal state practicing laissez-faire policies toward the top social strata and punitive paternalistic intervention toward the lower social strata—and the latter often constituting socially stigmatized wives, girlfriends, and children of these inmates. Just as Wacquant has discovered structural similarities between prison-fare and welfare/workfare, perhaps there are additional structural commonalities to be found in relation to child welfare institutions. Here my interdisciplinary study might include an examination of the architectural spaces in which these children live, paying attention to how such spaces impact a child’s emotional, intellectual, and physical development and well-being. My findings could then lead to new proposals with respect to implementing aesthetic and other improvements that serve and advance the welfare of institutionalized children.

Economic systems and the narratives they employ, as well as the ethos they produce must also be considered. As Margaret R. Somers and Fred Block have argued, American culture breathes market-driven air, and as a result “market fundamentalism” has played a leading role in reshaping how our society views welfare.[4] Similar to Wacquant’s and Hay’s conclusions, these scholars emphasize how new narratives are created that ignore or downplay larger historical, sociopolitical, and structural factors (such as systemic “racism” or “racial” bias). As a result, poor people are often unjustly constructed and construed as criminal, perverse, and the only ones to blame for their condition. For example, women who bear children out of wedlock are depicted as morally deficient and thus responsible for the burden they must bear. If a woman in this condition turns to welfare, the dominant “poverty to perversity” narrative depicts her as lazy, debauched, and overly reliant on the state and the “real” work of responsible citizens. Certain religious narratives likewise enter the picture, criticizing these women for abandoning their children for the workplace or for not being able to find a “respectable” mate.[5] Given the current anti-welfare ethos in theU.S., how might we begin to recreate a more positive, compassionate view of social welfare? Part of the re-form process—whether reforming legislative policies or re-forming the American imagination—is to raise public awareness of the structural “racial,” “gender,” and class disparities in place in American society, all of which produce tremendous challenges for impoverished women and children.

Notes

[1] See, for example, Michelle Cole, “Abuse in children’s foster care: State officials call for outside review.” Oregonian. Published, Sept. 2, 2009; accessed Oct. 15, 2011: http://www.oregonlive.com/politics/index.ssf/2009/09/abuse_in_foster_care_state_off.html.

[2] Julie M. Zito, Daniel J. Safer, Devadatta Sai, et al., “Psychotropic Medication Patterns Among Youth in Foster Care,” Pediatrics (2008), e157. (The online version of this article, along with updated information, can be accessed at: http://pediatrics.aappublications.org/content/121/1/e157.full.html).

[3] Ibid.

[4] See, for example, Margaret R. Somers and Fred Block, “From Poverty to Perversity: Ideas, Markets, and Institutions over 200 Years of Welfare Debate,” American Sociological Review 70 (2005): 260–287.

[5] See, for example, Sharon Hays, Flat Broke with Children: Women in the Age of Welfare Reform , 231–35.

Gregory on the Compatibility of Augustinian Liberalism and a Feminist Ethic of Care

Cynthia R. Nielsen — Fri, 25 Nov 2011 19:37:59 +0000

I have been reading Eric Gregory’s excellent book, Politics & the Order of Love: An Augustinian Ethic of Democratic Citizenship. Although I do not have time to give a full review of the book, I want to summarize and highlight some of the themes that I have found intriguing and noteworthy. First, besides chapters devoted to Augustine and modern liberalism, Arendt’s Augustine, and Augustine’s relation to the Platonists and the Stoics, Gregory devotes an entire chapter to Augustine and feminist political theory (chapter 3). Augustine, of course, was not a feminist, and his views on women have been criticized on multiple occasions. Nonetheless, Gregory shows how his variant of Augustinian liberalism and certain emphases in feminist theory are compatible and how bringing the two into conversation offers significant advances to current socio-political theory. In particular, Gregory believes that a feminist “ethic of care” provides needed correctives to deficiencies in liberal political theory, especially those social contract theories which tend reduce politics to mere (self-serving) interests.

Gregory engages several feminist theorists; however, I shall focus on his treatment of Joan C. Tronto. Rather than dismiss liberalism as yet another failed modern project, Tronto seeks to complete and correct its shortcomings. While Tronto advocates for care as a moral ideal for citizens, she does not argue for some naïve, overly sentimentalist notion of care blind to the evils and injustices of our concrete existence. As a feminist theorist, Tronto is acutely aware of the various asymmetrical power relations constituting the body politic and how dominant groups employ “race,” class, and “gender” for oppressive purposes. Her awareness of an ongoing interplay between, as Gregory would put it, love and sin is “relevant for Augustinian civic liberals who draw upon Christian love and keep realist observations about power and sin in full view” (167). Unlike antiliberal critics, Tronto does not disparage rights-talk and the importance of political equality, nor does she promote a political theory that flattens all diversity and otherness. Rather, her ethic of care “emphasizes the values of attachment, community, and social responsibility,” while condemning the fictive main character of liberal theories, namely, man as autonomous, detached, and (purely) rational. Like other feminists, Tronto criticizes

this fiction in terms of a hypermasculine understanding of autonomy linked to an abstract account of freedom as sheer power to initiate action. But, for Tronto, this fiction already is premised on a false choice between autonomy and dependence within the liberal imagination. The need for care does not fit into liberal models that see only autonomy or dependence. In reality, she claims “since people are sometimes autonomous, sometimes dependent, sometimes providing care for those who are dependent, humans are best described as interdependent” (Moral Boundaries, 162).[1]

In short, Tronto brings to the fore failures in the liberal imagination, yet her solution is not to give up on liberalism as a viable political theory or condemn it as somehow inherently flawed and destined to produce nihilism. Rather, she unmasks the false dichotomies and choices liberalism creates—either pure self-interest or social responsibility—and argues for a non-naïve political theory that values cooperation, solidarity, and interdependence. In other words, she argues for an ethic of care with the potential to transform liberal thought and praxis; a care that “can help change the way we see the political world” (171). Even so, like many Augustinians, Tronto recognizes that an ethic of care can be abused, misused, and employed for unjust purposes. This should come as no surprise to Augustinian liberals, who, following the lead of the North African saint, hold no utopian views regarding political regimes, democratic or otherwise. That a rhetoric of care can be used for exploitative purposes “should not mean that liberal democracies can proceed as if care is not necessary for a political practice responsive to injustice, persons in need, and the social conditions that frustrate human flourishing” (171).

Tronto’s focus on care and creating new values for democratic citizens is consonant with Gregory’s larger project of promoting “an Augustinian ethic of citizenship for the morally ambivalent conditions of liberal democracy”(13)—an ethic which takes seriously the need to cultivate virtuous citizens whose various loves respect the dignity and difference of others.

I hope to blog more on Gregory’s insightful book in the months to come, as it has given me much food for thought.

Notes

[1] Politics and the Order of Love, 167.

Négritude’s Role in Reforming Marxism and the Relevance of the “Race” Question for All Human Beings

Cynthia R. Nielsen — Wed, 09 Nov 2011 00:17:02 +0000

Aimé Césaire (1913–2008), engaging in deconstruction before deconstruction began, calls Western Enlightenment to account for its uncivilized practices and its inability to deal with the concrete, existentio-political concerns of people “on the ground.” That is, European “Western civilization” for all its claims to Enlightenment and progress has proved “incapable of solving the two major problems to which its existence has given rise: the problem of the proletariat and the colonial problem.”[1] Unlike the white Marxists, including Sartre, Césaire and other black Négritude writers could not separate the class problem from the race problem, nor did they overlook the connection between capitalism and colonialism. As Rabaka observes, “Césaire understands European civilization to rest on the colonization of non-Europeans, their lives, labor and lands. His Negritude, like Du Bois’s and James’s discourse, was a revolutionary humanist enterprise,”[2] attuned to the sufferings of all those exploited by the machinery of colonialism and slavery. Although appreciative of Marx, the Négritude movement (and Fanon as well) sought to expand and revise Marxist teachings not only to include but also to give top priority to “race”-based economic exploitation.[3] As Césaire puts it, the Communists “acted like abstract Communists” in their failure to address the “Negro problem.”[4] In contrast, the colonized and enslaved, given their concrete experience of racialized existence past and present, do not have the option to overlook the race question; thus, concludes Césaire, Négritude has a crucial role to play in the ongoing reformation of Marxism. “Marx is all right, but we need to complete Marx.”[5]

Césairean Négritude is thus concerned not only for the “political emancipation” of oppressed blacks but also, as we have seen, one of its chief goals is the creation of a positive black social identity. However, in the context of colonialism, with their past already written and their present constantly under construction, the opportunities afforded the colonized to shape and develop their own identity are severely restricted and practically non-existent. Because the colonial system is built on the exploitation of blacks and non-European others, the oppressed are increasingly viewed as things or as non-human animals. This reduction of humans to the subhuman realm harms both the colonized and the colonizer, and thus, leads to the degradation of society at large. Césaire refers to this phenomenon as the “boomerang effect of colonization.”[6] As he explains,

colonization […] dehumanizes even the most civilized man; that colonial activity, colonial enterprise, colonial conquest, which is based on contempt for the native and [is] justified by that contempt, inevitably tends to change him who undertakes it; that the colonizer, who in order to ease his conscience gets into the habit of seeing the other man as an animal accustoms himself to treating him like an animal, and tends objectively to transform himself into an animal. It is this result, this boomerang effect of colonization that I wanted to point out.[7]

In his writings, Fanon also highlighted the damage inflicted upon humankind as the result of colonizing practices. Like Césaire, Fanon was convinced that when humans, through repeated acts of self-deception, eventually habituate themselves to treat other humans as animals and objects, they perform a violence on themselves that has a tendency to produce ripple effects throughout the entire social body, including the “white” part of the body politic.[8]

Notes

[1] Césaire, Discourse on Colonialism, 31.

[2] Rabaka, Africana Critical Theory, 122.

[3] Commenting on the capitalism of his day, Césaire writes, “capitalist society, at its present stage, is incapable of establishing a concept of the rights of all men, just as it has proved incapable of establishing a system of individual ethics” (Discourse on Colonialism, 37).

[4] Ibid., 85.

[5] Ibid., 86.

[6] Ibid., 41.

[7] Ibid. Frederick Douglass makes similar comments about the social degradation that takes place in a slave society. For example, Douglass describes how Mrs. Auld, his master’s wife, who at first treated Douglass humanely and with compassion, eventually becomes socially habituated to see him as a slave, that is, as nothing more than property to be used to further the goals of white society. (See, for example, Douglass, Narrative of the Life, 40).

[8] Césaire, in fact, claims that Nazism came about as a result of the “boomerang effect.” Employing his linguistic whip, Césaire unleashes a series of verbal strikes calculated to leave their marks on Europe’s back and perhaps reawaken its anesthetized conscience. “First we must study how colonization works to decivilize the colonizer, to brutalize him in the true sense of the word, […] a gangrene sets in, a center of infection begins to spread; and that at the end of all these treaties that have been violated, all these lies that have been propagated, all these punitive expeditions that have been tolerated, all these prisoners who have been tied up and ‘interrogated,’ all these patriots that have been tortured, at the end of all the racial pride that has been encouraged, all the boastfulness that has been displayed, a poison has been distilled into the veins of Europe and, slowly but surely, the continent proceeds toward savagery. And then one fine day the bourgeoisie is awakened by a terrific boomerang effect: the gestapos are busy, the prisons fill up, the torturers standing around the racks invent, refine, discuss. People are surprised, […] they wait, and they hope; and they hide the truth from themselves, that it is barbarism, […] the crowning barbarism that sums up all the daily barbarisms; that it is Nazism, yes, but that before they were its victims, they were its accomplices; that they tolerated that Nazism before it was inflicted on them, that they absolved it, shut their eyes to it, legitimated it, because until then, it had been applied only to non-European peoples; […] they have cultivated Nazism, […] they are responsible for it” (Discourse on Colonialism, 35–6).

Feminist Perspectives on Music as Performative and Political

Cynthia R. Nielsen — Sat, 29 Oct 2011 19:16:58 +0000

Related to my previous post on the philosophy of music, I want to say a few words about feminist perspectives of music, which like Adorno’s and Attali’s accounts are also attuned to the social and political dimensions of music. In particular, feminist musicologists such as Susan McClary and Ruth A. Solie seek to unearth the various ways that patriarchal narratives and practices have shaped our views of music. Keeping with certain shared feminist philosophical and political concerns, feminist theorists promote a diverse, multiple, inclusive view of music and are suspicious of theories limiting what counts as “genuine” music. Highlighting that such narrowly defined accounts have tended to portray Western, male-dominated, European (classical) music as the norm or ideal form of music, feminist theorists show how female composers and performers have been systematically excluded from making significant contributions to this musical “canon.” Rather than stress static, homogeneous, ideal musical forms, feminist musicologists emphasize diverse musical styles and dynamic musical practices—practices arising from particular historical periods and addressing specific socio-political concerns. As with other cultural practices, music too informs our views of “gender.” As a social force, music can help both to solidify and to subvert “gender” stereotypes.

Although unified with respect to their common goal of liberating women from all forms of patriarchal oppression, feminist music theorists employ diverse and, at times, conflicting philosophies and strategies. For example, some feminists appeal to an alleged “feminine essence” rooted in biological differences between the sexes. Consequently, those working in this vein of feminist thought argue for a distinctly female or matriarchal art, characterized by “natural” feminine traits—traits or characteristics often set in opposition to “natural” male traits. Perceiving dangers in the gender essentialism underlying the concept of matriarchal art, other feminist theorists articulate a social constructivist account of “gender,” applying constructivist theoretical principles to their analysis of music. That is, just as “gender” is constructed via socio-political practices, institutions, cultural narratives, and the like, so too our understanding of what “true” music is, who counts as a “master,” and what counts as an ideal musical work or performance is shaped by our views of “gender.” Thus, music, like “gender,” is performative and political, taking shape through embodied practices and emancipatory struggles.