Iranophobia: The Logic of an Israeli Obsession by Haggai Ram. Stanford University Press (2009).

In the context of frequent rhetorical sparring and escalating threats of nuclear destruction, little common ground is said to exist between Israel and Iran. Enmity between the two states is often framed as the product of irreconcilable geopolitical, ideological, and strategic differences. Iran’s support of terrorist organizations that seek Israel’s destruction, the regime’s religious character, and supposedly anti-Semitic leadership all appear to ensure confrontation between the two states. This supposedly self-evident “reality” is commonly invoked by politicians, claims-makers and the media. On the one hand, Israel is often portrayed as an oasis of democracy and shared values in a region supposedly characterized by Muslim extremism. Iran, on the other hand, is generally seen as decidedly “Other.” Governed by a hermetic group of religious radicals, the image most commonly presented of Iran is one of repression, backwardness and a lack of “rationality” with regard to geopolitics. If indeed Israel is seen as the primary exemplar of Western “modernity” in the Middle East, Iran is discursively constructed as a useful binary. It is precisely this seemingly self-evident dichotomy that Haggai Ram seeks to interrogate in Iranophobia: The Logic of an Israeli Obsession, a lucid account of Iran’s place in Israeli society’s social imaginary.

While much scholarly work on Israeli-Iranian relations frames tensions in geopolitical terms, Ram’s innovation is to evaluate the cultural and discursive foundations of those terms. Employing the sociological concept of “moral panic,” Ram takes on the commonly held notion that Iran and Israel are “natural” enemies. Instead, Iranophobia suggests that Israel’s “moral panic” finds its roots in cultural anxieties relating to Israel’s precarious conception of itself as essentially “Western.” Ram’s analysis argues that fear of Iran is in fact deeply connected to tensions generated by the presence of non-Western Jewish immigrants in Israel. These groups are seen as calling into question the state’s Ashkenazi (European) “ethnocracy” and complicating Israeli society’s perception of itself as fundamentally European and “modern.” The conception of Iran and Iranian culture as essentially non-Western, as some kind of “Other,” allows Israeli society to conceive of itself and build an identity in contrast to that country and its people.

Iranophobia begins with a discussion of Israeli-Iranian relations in a historical context, sketching a process of “Othering” that, in Ram’s words, represents the inauguration of Iran’s “radical alterity.” While official diplomatic relations did not exist during the time of the Shah, the regime represented for many Israelis a golden-era in Israeli-Iranian relations. Military cooperation and significant business ties were cemented, while Israeli businessmen frequently spent long vacations indulging in Tehren’s “Western” amenities and nightlife. Ram points out that both the Israeli and Iranian state shared a modernization process that ultimately sought to “transform oriental subjects…into deracinated replicas of Europeans, even while they remained affiliated to their own religious cultures,” later contending that “Israeli-Iranian relations before the revolution therefore rested on mutually constitutive perceptions of each other as carriers of the Western mission in the Middle East.” This point is significant, as it serves to buoy later claims with regard to Israel’s anxiety over Iran in the post-Shah period. If, for a moment, Iran had managed to transform itself into a nation that embodied the “civilizing” effects of Western “progress”—much like Israel—the Iranian Revolution seemed to point to the fact that politics and ideology could transform a country and people “back” into non-Western subjects. Ram explores how the Iranian Revolution seemed to have an important resonance in Israel, where officials and journalists openly despaired that the capitalist modernity and “progress” embodied by the deposed monarch would be replaced by a “regressive,” atavistic revolution. Pointing to the geopolitical shifts of that period, Ram argues that the shared ambition for a united Israeli-Iranian front against their perceived mutual enemies in the Arab world began to shift as Israel made piece with Egypt. Insofar as Ram suggests that Israeli society requires the perception of an existential threat, the concomitant peace with Egypt and unfolding Iranian Revolution witnessed a shift from fear of the “Arab threat” to that of the “Iranian threat.”

In subsequent chapters, Ram sketches the process by which Israel’s perceived “modernity” increasingly requires the amplification of the Iranian threat. This fear allows Israeli society to symbolically exorcize its own “unmodern” elements—which, according to Ram, consist of the increasing number of Middle-Eastern Jewish immigrants (Mizrahim) that are uncomfortably perceived to be questioning the future of secular, Western Zionism. Ram explores the tensions embodied in Israel’s claim to a shared Western culture, consistently undermined both by the possibility of Middle Eastern Jews “assimilating” Israel into the surrounding region, as well as the nascent settlement movement that belies the notion of secular democracy through its state-sanctioned religious mission. Thus, “what lies at the bottom of Israeli anti-Iran phobias is the disheartening feeling that present day Iranian realities are, in effect, actualizations of the Jewish state’s future.”

Later chapters explore post-9/11 relations between the two countries and the treatment of Iranian Jews by Israeli immigration officials and envoys from Jewish organizations. After 9/11, an apparent thawing of relations between the United States and Iran seemed to gain momentum as the countries appeared willing to cooperate in overthrowing the Taliban, a mutual enemy. Ram contends that the prospect of a diplomatic horizon between the United States and Iran was particularly disconcerting to Jerusalem. With somewhat less attention to empirically grounded evidence that for the most part characterizes Iranophobia, Ram suggests that the 2002 Karine-A affair (in which a freighter supposedly bound for the Palestinian territories with Iranian weaponry was intercepted by Israel) may have been an attempt by Israel and her supporters to undermine US-Iranian relations.

Later in the decade, Iran is seen as being used as a cover for Israeli military action. During the 2006 Lebanon War, Israeli leaders frequently invoked Iranian influence as a rationale for the ferocity of the Israeli response to Hezbollah. These invocations of Iranian influence allowed Israel to argue that it was functioning as a bulwark against the supposedly inevitable confrontation between Judeo-Christian values and the dangerous forces of radical Islam. By conflating the war in Lebanon against Hezbollah with the “Iranian threat,” Israeli military and civil leaders sought ideological cover for an extremely destructive war. Ram shows how politicians and commentators sought to associate Iran with the very creation and identity of the forces being fought in Lebanon. Eschewing any reference to political, cultural, and historical factors that might have led to the rise of Hezbollah in Lebanon, the war became seen as a fight between the secular Jewish state and the dark forces of global Islamic extremism. This discourse emphasized the Iranian state’s role in supposedly manipulating its “satellites” in Lebanon and the Palestinian territories, while ignoring the historical context in which these groups emerged. As Ram points out, from the point of view of mainstream Israeli public opinion, “Israel’s offensive war on Hezbollah was, in effect, a defensive war against Iran.”

The final chapter of Iranophobia explores the multiple, if somewhat bizarre, attempts by Israeli officials to convince Iranian Jews to immigrate to Israel. Unable to understand the continued presence of Jews in a state supposedly characterized by virulent anti-Semitism, Israeli immigration agencies offer Iranian Jews everything from housing to monetary gifts in order to facilitate their migration. Once again, Ram points out the contradictions that are embodied by Israeli society’s relationship to Iran and its Jews. Ram argues that the Shah’s attempt to “aryanize” Iranians and convince them that they were “really European in their origin” meant that Israelis were willing to lend tacit support and legitimacy to a continued Jewish presence in Iran. After the Shah, bereft of these de-orientalizing forces, Iranian Jews were expected to immigrate to Israel in order to participate in the “civilizing” mission of that state. Though many Iranian Jews have emigrated abroad, a significant number chose not to settle in Israel, but rather in the United States or Europe.

With some 30,000 Jews remaining in Iran today, Ram unpacks the simplistic assumption that their history has been one of unending persecution. Rather, he argues that the trajectory of Iranian Jews has been complex (much like minorities in societies throughout the world), comprising periods of discrimination and violence along with significant periods of cooperation and inclusion into the larger society. While pointing out the unevenness of this trajectory, Iranophobia correctly suggests that recognizing only histories of violence and exclusion appear particularly limiting and are consistently undermined by the historic record.

Though Iranophobia employs Moral Panic Theory in an innovative way through an understudied case, at times the theoretical arguments Ram proposes could benefit from a more sustained engagement. While a fundamental aspect of moral panic is the notion of the social reaction’s disproportionality, Ram does not consistently make the case that the responses are disproportionate to the material threats. This omission reflects Ram’s desire to avoid the danger of sliding into the realm of strategic and security analysis. Iranophobia indeed makes a compelling argument for a reassessment of the basis of Israeli-Iranian enmity; however, Ram elides the geopolitical implications of a nuclear-armed Iran. While his analysis of Israeli responsibility for this threat is quite useful, there are moments when the notion of moral panic does not seem an appropriate metaphor for the possibility of nuclear warfare between two nations. Indeed, Moral Panic Theory—as originally conceived by practitioners at the Birmingham Centre—sought to explain how the social uproar over relatively minor incidents was rooted in deeper cultural anxieties. Thus, Stanley Cohen’s classic work on the social reaction to small-scale disturbances at a British seaside resort is shown to relate more to anxiety over shifting post-war value systems than to the incidents themselves. While in some respects this framework aptly describes the cultural anxiety around the Mizrahim—Israel’s so-called “Others within”—it appears somewhat less analytically robust in describing the reaction to a nation of 65 million.

Whether the threat from Iran is overemphasized or not, it seems somewhat less feasible to assess the relations of two (nearly) nuclear powers within a framework whose very meaning suggests a situation that is not constitutive of a serious threat to society. This is not to say that the threat Iran poses has not been overemphasized by the media and claims-makers (“moral entrepreneurs” in the language of Moral Panic Theory). However, this does not necessarily negate the very real threat of confrontation between the two countries today. In particular, as Ram seeks to analyze the cultural reaction to Iran rather than the geopolitical aspects of this confrontation, it becomes difficult to assert the essential disproportionality of the response without engaging with the geopolitical realities of the relationship. Though Iranophobia covers new ground in articulating the discursive logic of this reaction, at times a more critical engagement with the veracity of Israeli claims would go a long way in proving the disconnect between fears and reality. These challenges aside, Iranophobia presents an innovative approach to studying Israeli-Iranian relations and should be seriously engaged with by anyone interested in the cultural foundations of this relationship. As consent among the local population is essential for any state’s long-term geopolitical strategy, the discursive underpinnings of society’s reaction provides unique analytical insights, as Ram has proved to great effect in Iranophobia.

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Imaginal Machines by Stevphen Shukaitis. Autonomedia (2009).

At every level, Imaginal Machines is a subversive text. Against the rising tide of complacency, Stephven Shukaitis sketches out new possibilities for political engagement that are at once seditious and savvy. Resolutely anti-disciplinarian (in both senses of the word), he leaps recklessly from philosophy to art criticism to social movement studies. In the book’s opening pages, Shukaitis promises to “connect Surrealism with migrant workers, the Industrial Workers of the World with Dadaism, and back again.” Against all odds, he does so, and with great aplomb. From its non-linear organization to its whimsical typeface, Imaginal Machines courageously defies convention. Throwing caution to the wind, the book explodes the limits of both what can be said and how it might be said.

Stylistically, Imaginal Machines is both entertaining and terrifically complex. The text overflows with prescient metaphors, digressions, in-jokes, and parenthetical observations. But these quips and asides are not merely adjunct to the primary text but rather rival the “main” narrative for attention. The subtext quickly becomes the surface, and in an affront to neo-positivist ways of knowing, Shukaitis bends his lyrical prose sideways and backwards, without ever compromising lucidity. Reflecting the uncertainty of postmodern times, nearly every declarative statement comes paired with a qualifier or a caveat. The result is a text that folds in upon itself with multiple levels of meaning.

The body of the text is centered around a series of case studies (though the notion of a case doesn’t align with the author’s method). Shukaitis takes us on a whirlwind tour of what others have called “alternative institutions” (several of which he was involved in personally) and offers a probing introspective analysis. Yet unlike other recent assessments of the global Left “scene,” which tend to be optimistic to the point of absurdity (for example, We Are Everywhere, NowTopia, Real Utopia), Shukaitis maintains his (self-)critical edge throughout. Indeed, Shukaitis is keenly aware that—by most measures of success—the Left is losing badly. For example, in a chapter on worker self-management (WSM), Shukaitis describes his four-year-long involvement with a worker-owned record label in vivid detail. But ultimately, he concludes that WSM may have limited radical potential (though his argument is significantly more complex), and in the process offers the type of deep self-critique that is painfully absent in most
Left circles.

The term Imaginal Machines merits some explanation. As Shukaitis notes, his title is borrowed from a term coined by Peter Lamborn Wilson (aka Hakim Bey), itself a derivative of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s desiring-machine. So the imaginal machine is “a particular arrangement or composition of desires and creativity as territorialized through and by relations between bodies in motion.” The idea of outer space figures prominently here. For Shukaitis, the metaphor of space is relavant precisely because it represents that which cannot be (entirely) known. In science fiction film, the music of Sun-Ra, and the popular imagination, space functions as a zone of limitless possibility. Shukaitis suggests that a politics bounded by the coordinates of the known world is hopelessly constrained. Instead, “an imaginal landscape is a precondition for actually finding a northwest passage in the physical world.” Whether or not space is operating at the level of metaphor here, it is a powerful heuristic device.

Imaginal Machines is often remarkable for what it doesn’t do. Though the concept of “radical imagination” emerges as a dominant theme, Shukaitis self-consciously refuses to mention C. Wright Mills, whose Sociological Imagination is usually considered among the most important contributions to the concept. For a traditional social scientist to write a book on the “imagination” without explicitly invoking Mills would approach blasphemy. But Shukaitis is no traditional social scientist (though he may be a blasphemer). Likewise, Karl Marx appears mainly through his metaphors (the architect and the bee, the old mole, “storming heaven”). Yet Marx lurks in the deep crevices of Imaginal Machines’ pages and his influence is never far from the surface. Though the book is, in part, a critical encounter (rencontre) between autonomist Marxism and poststructuralist theory, this is not Shuakitis’ main intellectual project.

While it adheres to some extent to traditional book-publishing conventions, Imaginal Machines strives to be a rhizomatic text with no beginning and no end—only a boundless middle. Characteristically, most of the book’s conclusions arise from the embedded case studies, while the book’s final chapter (the “actual” conclusion) opens up far more questions than it provides answers to. In the section on work and self-management, Shukaitis at one point recommends a politics based on “the constant immanent shaping and creativity that will not allow itself to ever be totally bound in a fixed form.” There is a sense here that Shukaitis is commenting on the very text he is producing—or better yet, the “work” of book-writing. If there is an enemy in Imaginal Machines, it is the idea of closure—that struggle should at some point cease, that the revolution should be contained, that organizations should seek permanence.
This opens the question of failure, another major theme in the book. For the post-9/11 Left, most of the last decade has been characterized by moods that don’t translate well into English—malaise, ennui, schaedenfreude, and melancholia. Large street protests seem to have quieted down, while, at the same time, the ever-resilient late capitalist state has demonstrated a unique ability to co-opt dissident movements. Of course, as Shukaitis reminds us, this is nothing new. thirty years ago, the threat of worker militancy and factory occupations famously portended the rise of worker participation committees, quality circles, and the team concept—a blow from which most unions have yet to recover. More recently, in continental Europe, widespread protests around (against?) precarious work were “answered” in the form of “flexicurity” (flexible security) regimes—a Phyrric victory at best. Yet accelerated cycles of recuperation—defeat via compromise—may well be a unique feature of post-Fordism. The task then becomes devising a politics that can resist the overarching tendency toward capture—even temporarily.

Here, Shakaitis draws heavily on the notion of infrapolitics, as posited by James Scott and popularized by the cultural historian Robin Kelley. Much like Deleuze’s minor politics, Kelley’s infrapolitics suggest a “hidden transcript of power…or a space that is somewhat encoded or otherwise made less comprehensible to those in power.” Shukaitis argues that in order to avoid recuperation, resistance must operate largely in the sphere of infrapolitics—beyond the watchful gaze of the state—and speak in ways that defy understanding. Perhaps the answer to Guyatri Spivak’s prescient question “Can the Subaltern Speak?” is a definitive “yes”—but not in ways that are universally intelligible.

The audience for Imaginal Machines is sure to be broad. On the one hand, the book is written by a movement insider with extensive knowledge of the contemporary American Left and is grounded in real political struggles. On the other, Imaginal Machines is a sophisticated endeavor, deeply informed by high theory (especially of the Italian autonomist and the French poststructuralist variety). Yet Imaginal Machines is not just another “social movement study” by an academic from the distant perspective of a “neutral” observer. Shukaitis constantly reminds us that actually-existing political practice is already immersed intheoretical presuppositions, just as good theory emerges from real struggles. But Shukaitis transcends and ultimately dispenses with the classic binary between “theory” and “practice” by masterfully weaving both into a seamless narrative. The result is the rare academic book that is certain to appeal to activists and organizers, but does not compromise its scholarly integrity in so doing.

This is a unique and extraordinary text that deserves wide attention. Just as Baruch Spinoza famously posed the question “What can a body do?” Shukaitis seems to ask “What can a book do?” The answer, it appears, is far more than we think.

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The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism by Naomi Klein. Picador (2008).

Naomi Klein’s The Shock Doctrine hit bookshelves and internet bookseller sites in 2007 just as the storm clouds of global economic crisis were about to burst. She was not in the least concerned with US housing and the subprime mortgage and foreclosure crisis which, however improbably on the face of things, triggered the global financial crisis and eventual economic meltdown. Her focus lay not in the uncontrollable global virulence of a supposedly local crisis lubricated by the instantaneous financialization of loans and debts and credits—when capital globalizes capitalist crises globalize apace—but rather in the deliberate application of economic shock therapy administered from Washington DC and other centers of global political economic control.

From the 1970s onward, from Chile to South Africa and from Poland to Iraq, the market discipline of neoliberal shock therapy, inspired by economists known as the Chicago Boys, was visited as a plague on the world’s poor while padding the Swiss bank accounts of the world’s powerful and wealthy. Nowhere was this plunderous accumulation starker than in Moscow where, as Klein puts it, “the rise of Russia’s billionaire oligarchs proved precisely how profitable the strip mining of an industrialized state could be.” There was no collateral damage in this three-decade rampage by capital. “Disaster capitalism” was precisely the point; the application of shock, up to and including the mass violent loss of life, was calculated and intentional and its costs anticipated. “Destroy and convert” might well have been the motto of disaster capitalism.

In Klein’s own words, supported by ample evidence: the Southern Cone of Latin America was “the first place where the contemporary religion of unfettered free markets escaped from the basement workshops of the University of Chicago and was applied in the real world … [it] did not bring democracy; it was predicated on the overthrow of democracy in country after country.”

That The Shock Doctrine has had a global effect is undeniable. Translated into twenty-five languages, it was an instant best seller in many countries and garnered numerous book prizes in Europe and North America including the prestigious Publisher’s Weekly book of the year prize. However improbably, it debuted at the top of the business best seller list of the conservative Sunday Times of London. Klein is a journalist, not an academic, but the care with detail and the multifold research that constitutes this book makes it far more than a “first draft of history”; rather, it is a decisive and committed analysis of a brutal epoch in the history of capitalism. That the book was so widely read and received such a positive reception in the popular media, even in business circles, suggests that it caught a wave of public and internal disillusionment with the ideological promises of globalization and neoliberalism.

Indeed, from Bangalore to Seattle, Quebec to Genoa, the anti-globalization movement in which Klein participated had already shown that the neoliberal steamroller could be challenged and there was an alternative. The erroneously named Asian economic crisis of 1997-1999 revealed disillusionment from within, as top shock doctrine economists such as Joseph Stiglitz and Jeffrey Sachs (treated rather gently in this book) jumped ship with withering critiques of “the project”; revolts in Latin America brought popular leftist governments to power in Venezuela, Brazil and Bolivia as well as others elsewhere later on; and while the so-called “War on Terror” represented an opportunistic global power grab—the Iraq War—its generous corporate welfare giveaways to Blackwater, KBR, Bechtel and a phalanx of corporate military suppliers notwithstanding, was a disastrous strategic mistake even in the Bush administration’s own terms. The global economic meltdown after 2007 was just another nail in the coffin.

Cribbing from German theorist Jürgen Habermas, we might say that by the early twenty-first century it was clear to many that neoliberalism was “dominant but dead.” Dominant because no global alternative had yet fully blossomed; dead because the neoliberal variant of capitalism was widely discredited and had long since stopped generating new ideas. Klein caught this disillusionment.

In a more positive vein, Klein’s book makes a significant gesture in the direction of repairing a long term political rupture. Academics tend to think of the McCarthy period and the early Cold War years as a time when socialists and communists were hounded from the academy, patriotic oaths of allegiance were required, and writers were black-listed. All of this was real enough, but arguably of greater importance was the cleavage established between socialist intellectuals on one side and working class organizers, union members, and striking workers on the other. Some of this political rupture was forced from the repressive apparatus of the state but just as often it was orchestrated by right wing union leaderships themselves.

A central merit of The Shock Doctrine, therefore, is Klein’s coverage of the violent repression of workers and unionists, the targeted assault on working-class power both before and during the capitalist shock treatment administered to various countries, and to a lesser extent her focus too on the organizational responses of workers, unions, peasants, women’s groups, indigenous movements and many others. Especially in the US context, Klein’s energetic prose helps reunite workers’ struggles with a long history of socialist ideas, aspirations and possibilities as she diagnoses the same onslaught against unions and working people in the United States itself (and in Thatcher’s Britain, for that matter), particularly in the brutal state clampdown after Hurricane Katrina broke the New Orleans levees in 2005 and the working class largely African-American population was corralled in the flood waters at the cost of an estimated 1500 lives.

To be sure, there are limits to Klein’s socialist alternatives. She is clear in condemning the brutal tragedy of Stalinism, but leaves the door slightly ajar for a kinder, gentler socialism. Yet her sense of alternatives cleaves just as much to a social democratic gloss on capitalism: a redistributive capitalism with strong state regulation over wages and working conditions, the provision of public health, housing and education, the nationalization of oil companies, banks and other crucial facilities—none of this is inimical to a parallel free market: “Markets need not be fundamentalist.” Like many on the left she holds fast, therefore, to the idea of a Keynesian style new New Deal. But this alternative strikes me, especially amidst continuing fallout from the global economic meltdown, as rather unambitious.

The old New Deal, moreover, was not such a great deal for many. First, Keynes himself was not interested in the diminution of social inequality or in social welfare per se, but rather in the narrow economic goal of stimulating investment via consumption. Second, the New Deal was geared largely to the white working and lower middle classes, selectively omitting coverage for African-Americans. This was most evident in the New Deal’s housing provisions which functioned to stimulate suburban development and white flight, with the consequent class and race geographies we now know. Third, as feminist and labor critiques have pointed out exhaustively, the various social welfare programs and union organizing concessions, whatever else they did, functioned as powerful means of social control and disciplining aimed first and foremost at women and workers.

In addition, the old New Deal did not arrive in a vacuum. Its somewhat benevolent hand of the state was matched every inch by a thoroughly repressive posture. Thus, Franklin Roosevelt did not initiate the New Deal out of patrician benevolence, however much that is the liberal story that has come down to us. Rather, after 1933 he confronted rising labor militancy with more strikes in the auto, coal and other major industrial sectors; escalating unionization; high unemployment and the persistence of “hooverville” tent camps housing the homeless; and growing communist and socialist organization. FDR understood well that revolution was potentially in the cards and the New Deal was intended to blunt its momentum. But at the same time, the Roosevelt administration applied extreme repressive measures against strikers, unions, women’s organizations and the unemployed.

Advocacy of a new New Deal today, therefore, puts the cart of radical change before the horse of political organization. It was meant to save capitalism more than transform it, and the advent of neoliberalism in the 1970s proves the adaptability of capitalist class relations to multiple specific forms. FDR established the New Deal because he had to; he was under extreme political pressure. The lesson for today, and Klein would doubtless agree, is that the first step is one of building organized power among workers, racial and ethnic minorities, migrants, women’s and environmental activists, and so forth. Only then does the political power exist to seriously propose and fight for radical alternatives. The tragedy of the Obama administration’s first year in power is precisely that it failed to encourage the conversion of the mobilization that brought him to power into a political movement. That such a political movement would have held his feet to the fire, demanding vocally that campaign promises be met—and then some!—surely goes a long way toward explaining its non-appearance.

The Shock Doctrine is a legitimately angry and radical book. One gets the sense that Naomi Klein’s powerful narrative and evidence, which scream “SOCIAL REVOLT!” from every page, are fighting against her own caveat that a kinder gentler capitalism might just be finessed. More even than her earlier book, No Logo, this volume will have a lasting and radicalizing effect across old political chasms. 

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Losing the News: The Future of the News that Feeds Democracy by Alex S. Jones. Oxford University Press (2009)

“I don’t read the newspaper, I get my news online” is a phrase heard so often, it could be considered the battle cry of the digital-age. And as with any battle, this one is not without its casualties. Today it seems as if the entire country is declaring the passing of the newspaper industry. Newspapers are seen simultaneously as outdated relics and another victim of the multi-headed hydra known as the economic recession. In a particular stroke of irony, in the first nine months of 2009, the New YorTimes Business/Financial desk has published between ten and twenty stories

documenting the downfall of papers both large and small, including the Times itself. There is even a website, newspaperdeathwatch.com, started in March 2007, which is doing an unofficial body count of papers that have fallen by the wayside.

What the online generation may not be aware of is that most of the news they find on web sites such as Google, Yahoo, and MSN is drawn, in whole or in part, from the major national newspapers which they claim not to read. What would happen if news as we know it simply ceased to exist?

From this point of departure, Alex Jones, a newspaper reporter since childhood (a story which figures prominently in his account) brings us Losing the News. He sets the scene with a moment in h

Shorenstein Center Director Alex S. Jones with Franco Ordonez and Ames Alexander of the Charlotte Observer, at a 2009 panel on the future of reporting.

is career as a journalist whose beat was the press itself. He broke a story about a Kentucky newspaper family who decided to sell their papers in the face of family turmoil. That story was written in 1986, long before the current ‘crisis’ of the news industry came to the fore, though it had been facing the all-too-common consolidation process that was characteristic during the Reagan years and has only increased since.

This introduction, though it was about the selling of a newspaper, was more illustrative of the journalistic process that Jones and others like him prize as the essence of a trade. The story was in depth—6,500 words in the New York Times business section—took a lot of time and resources to write, and kept the reporter away from his desk where he could have been covering other stories. Nonetheless, the story was deemed important by the editor and the paper covered it. From the introduction, it is clear that the author is certainly nostalgic about his work, and he makes no effort to hide that fact. But, to simply cast this as a swan song of a bygone age would be to misrepresent why it seems to have been written. The author is wholly concerned with the implications of the loss of independent journalism for a democratic society.

The book makes the case that while news and newspapers will certainly persist, the nature of journalism is undergoing fundamental changes due to the circumstances facing newspapers, which Jones argues do the majority of original reporting on which other news media base their content. In his analysis, then, simply focusing on saving the newspapers as businesses will not be sufficient to save the news. “The news” as Jones conceives of it is more about standards of objectivity than the medium of columns and newsprint. He observes that, at their genesis, newspapers were often directly financed by unions and political parties; thus any thought of objectivity or verification would have been laughable. Professional journalism, Jones argues, was the result of both an increased financial stability which provided editorial independence as well as the establishment of a set of best practices. As journalism found its way into the academy, standards of objectivity were incorporated into a professional code, a sharp contrast from the days of William Randolph Hearst and “yellow journalism.”

The news is also determined by what is covered. His first major discussion outlines the different types of news one sees in a paper, be it a daily owned by an old newspaper family like his in Greenville, or one owned by a large conglomerate like the Gannet Company. At the center of any real newspaper are the “accountability” stories which range from the coverage of international affairs to policy debates in the congress and statehouses to local issues. Under the umbrella of “accountability news” are “bearing witness” stories, which are descriptive accounts of events, “explanatory” pieces which offer analysis of events and provide historical and/or present context, and finally investigative journalism, which is done against and in spite of powerful interests who would rather that certain events remain secret or covered in a very superficial fashion. Since the advent of professional journalism, these types of stories have been the lynchpin of any good paper and are thus called the “Iron Core”
of news.

Though these stories are often the least entertaining to read, they inform the reader of things that will affect their lives, be it directly or indirectly. However, the impact of these stories does not end with their publication. Accountability news has a second life in the subsequent analysis, which forms a second tier of reporting that is largely based on opinion. Editorials and other forms of “advocacy news,” in all the different media ranging from magazines to television programs to blogs are largely reactions to the accountability news produced by the paid reporting staffs of newspapers. Writers and orators on all sides of the political spectrum thus depend on the steady stream of information that newspapers provide. Political and social thinkers at least as far back as the founding of our country have seen a free and independent press as indispensable to our democratic practice. This is at the heart of the link between news and democracy envisioned by thinkers such as Walter Lippman and John Dewey, who Jones references in his chapter on “Media and Democracy.” Though Lippman and Dewey had different ideas of who ‘the public’ was and therefore who needed the news, the purpose remained consistent: to inform the citizenry for their more effective participation in self-governance.

The primary problem facing the news today is a financial one. Newspapers were at their zenith from the 1960s until the 1980s. Profits were high even at many small papers and so were investments in the quality of news; reporters were hired en masse and compensation for the work was handsome. The pursuit of truth was a prized value among the best of the profession, regardless of political persuasion. But, as Jones points out, truth is expensive and time consuming. The journalistic maxim of verification requires maintaining relationships with many sources and often protecting those sources under pain of prosecution and lawsuits. If papers like the New York Times and Washington Post weren’t financially stable, they would surely have caved under pressure from the federal government at notable moments such as the Watergate scandal and the publication of the Pentagon papers. More often, however, it is smaller local incidents that show the value of an independent press, whose role has time and again been to hold government and industry accountable for their practices.

Profitability is thus an essential element of providing the most objective news. Since the 1980s, and at an accelerated pace since the passage of the 1996 Telecommunications Act, newspapers, along with television and radio, have been consolidated into an increasingly small number of hands under the umbrella of large corporate media conglomerates. With the switch to a corporate model, newspapers have come to expect larger profit margins in the short term and are no longer as concerned with news as with attracting larger audiences and greater advertising revenues. In this model the iron core of news has taken a back seat. Sensational content such as entertainment coverage more commonly seen in magazines now finds its way into serious newspapers and is ubiquitous among local tabloids. Opinion pieces and syndicated columns replace locally oriented stories, leaving a paper with a local reputation but little local coverage. Likewise, content provided by government and business public relations desks, often unedited, have become a more common feature in news media of all forms.

While the new business model engendered a shift in the choices made by newspapers from within, top-down technological shifts further affected changes from without. Advertising, which has accounted for the viability of newspapers nearly since their introduction, has been adversely affected by web-based services such as craigslist and autotrader. The lower (and sometimes nonexistent) cost and increased visibility of internet advertising has created a serious obstacle for newspapers, which were once unparalleled in their ability to reach consumers. Falling advertising revenues forced papers to cut back on labor in the form of reporting and to increase pressure on the remaining staff. Jones gives numerous accounts of once-mighty newsrooms throughout the country that have been reduced to thin staffs of amateur reporters forced to fill quotas of content. The shift is perhaps most evident in the orientation of editors, who had erected a metaphorical wall between the advertising and news desks of their papers. Many of the same editors now must divide their time equally between these two tasks.

A third aspect of the crisis is the declining circulation of papers large and small. This is again connected with technological shifts that make print seem antiquated. While he imagines that there will always be some who prefer a print form newspaper, the availability of online editions, often for free, makes economic and practical sense for an increasing numbers of readers. That many people read New York Times stories through search engines such as Google News, which does not pay anything to the Times for its content and keeps the ad revenues for itself, renders the online editions of even large papers redundant, not to mention self-destructive, since it is precisely from these sites that Google gets its content. A compounding problem for circulation is the public faith in newspapers. Because so much of today’s journalism in all media is advocacy and opinion-based, a fact which bloggers and television pundits make no attempt to hide, the public has come to see news in all media as inherently biased. In sum, he sees newspapers being caught, and often lost, in a glut of news media without being set apart for their central contribution and particular ethos of objectivity and verification. The end result, for Jones, is that regardless of the work that goes into reporting, people see any story that they don’t agree with as a result of intentional skewing by the source. While there is discussion of some recent breaches of media ethics, such as the Jayson Blair case, more often than not journalists make an attempt at verification. If anything, Jayson Blair made the New York Times re-evaluate its scrutiny.

The casualties of this multifaceted crisis are laid plain in Jones’ book. The San Francisco Chronicle and to a lesser extent the Los Angeles Times and Boston Globe are all major market newspapers which have been forced to shed significant portions of their newsrooms. Medium-sized papers like the Rocky Mountain News and the Baltimore Examiner have been forced to close their doors, while others such as the Detroit Free Press and the Seattle Post-Intelligencer have moved to online and hybrid print-online formats. The Washington Post, New York Times and Gannet conglomerates have seen their share prices fall a great deal, out of proportion even with the precipitous market drop of October 2008. Considering these circumstances, it is unlikely if not impossible for newspapers to continue along on their old model.

The book concludes on a somewhat hopeful note, as Jones remains optimistic about the future of the news, if not with newspapers as its primary source. As the problem was framed as primarily financial, the question of “saving the news” gets tangled up with concerns around financing the news. He looks at exemplary cases of newspapers which, faced with the crisis, have devised creative strategies for engaging readers and remaining viable.

Obviously, news agencies of all sorts need to increase their web traffic in order to compensate for lost advertising revenue in print. Though newspapers do have relatively reliable names, the size of their operations has made their transition to the web slow. Jones is skeptical about the recent phenomenon of “citizen journalism,” where readers become collaborators and contributors to the news they read. The problem he sees is that though writing content is easy enough, citizen journalism is not beholden to the same standards as professional journalism. The blogosphere, though he points out some of its brighter spots, is equally suspicious because it is flooded with interested voices above which it is hard for even the best of them to rise. He is also, at best, ambivalent about a nonprofit model for newspapers, where donors and foundations would support newspapers instead of advertising revenue and circulation. Though in rare instances there have been large donations of time and resources, it is unlikely that foundations or donors would enter into long-lasting commitments with newspapers.

Ultimately, the solution for Jones is for newspapers to find a way to reconnect with their readers while remaining economically viable. While he bemoans the loss of reporting staff in newsrooms throughout the country, he recognizes that this may be a response to overexpansion while times were good. Newspapers must find ways to cut costs and perhaps endure a period of lower profits. But, in the face of all this, the core of accountability news must not be sacrificed. With accountability news at its core, he feels newspapers can adopt new strategies that cater to the mediums readers prefer. Content can be provided for print readers, online consumers, and even those that prefer to read their news over their cell phones. This would allow papers to remain in print while capitalizing on new outlets and remaining relevant to the next generation. Regardless of the format, Jones is concerned with saving the news for what matters most about it, its role as an objective source of information for citizens in a democracy.

All told, Losing the News offers a breadth of information on a timely issue that is of critical importance. The author is a true insider who cares deeply about the future of the industry both economically and ideologically. As such, he is critical of the direction papers are heading and the motivations that have brought them there. Through his historical and contemporary discussions of the role of newspapers, an effective case is made for why we need news as a centerpiece of a democratic society. He frames the crisis and the solutions in terms of the principles of the industry, the journalistic ethos, and the economic strength that makes adherence to it possible.

With that in mind, the critical flaw of the book is its grounding in the industry. Perhaps, because the author is a professional journalist and a part-owner of a newspaper, he can’t see beyond the profit motive to examine strategies that might exist outside of it. As such, it is easy to see why he is so skeptical of a non-profit approach to news. While it is certain that economic strength has had some positive impact on news coverage in the past, that might not be the
way forward.

The book also doesn’t do enough work highlighting the strengths in emergent online reporting. Though the Daily Beast and Politico may simply be “truth squads” who hold mainstream media like newspapers accountable through their tertiary reporting, sites such as Salon.com and Slate produce original investigative reporting that is severely lacking even among the best print sources. The point is well taken that the massive proliferation of the blogosphere can lead to sensory overload; but some standout sites have risen above the clatter to provide original and useful reporting that adheres to many of the same standards of quality that have characterized newspapers at
their best.

A book written by an industry luminary during perhaps the greatest panic that industry has ever known cannot help but suffer from some flaws of judgment and even some name calling. Regardless of that, the history and the grounding in theory that the book provides is incredibly valuable. One can’t help but heed Jones’ warning that the news must be saved if democracy is to persist. If there is no effective way for the public, however that is defined, to obtain verified, objective information, democracy will
surely suffer.

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Like beauty, the value of the United Nations lies in the eye of the beholder. Case in point, David Rothkopf’s recent screed on Foreign Policy.com (“You Can’t Spell Unproductive Without the Letters U and N”) against the world’s largest multilateral organization, the latest in a long line of vitriolic—and largely misinformed—attacks on the institution.

David Rothkopf

Only a few years ago, John Bolton, at the time the US ambassador to the UN, declared that taking ten floors off of the secretariat would make little difference in its operation. Superfluous or not, those ten floors managed to survive Bolton’s UN tenure largely unscathed. Although Rothkopf’s rant, too, will likely dissolve away into the digital archives of misguided foreign policy analysis, his argument deserves a second, serious look.

That Rothkopf should be the source of this broadside is unfortunate, because he otherwise seems to be, on the whole, brilliant. His credentials are top-notch: head of a global consulting firm, appointment to the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, author of the enjoyable read, Superclass (which drilled into the networked elite pulling the powerful levers behind the machinery of globalization) and another widely praised book on the National Security Council.

All of this makes his piece all the more confounding. Apparently Rothkopf, like many others (including many US policymakers), doesn’t know what the UN is.

Rothkopf makes three bold claims. First, that the “UN” has lacked a backbone since its inception and, what’s more, was actually designed to be “invertebrate.” Second, that the ideas underlying the Security Council are, literally, elementary: “Basically the organization was designed along the lines of the conflict resolution sessions my daughters’ elementary school used to use when students got into a fight.” And third, that the organization is not even worth the building it occupies.

Rothkopf’s condemnation is a clear echo of Bolton, reflecting more the criticisms thrown around at Turtle Bay than what the UN actually does. He suggests shutting the place down and renting the building out as condos because “even in a down New York real estate market it is almost certain to be a better return on investment for the dollars poured into that white elephant on the East River than ‘outcomes’ like the proposed sanctions on Pyongyang.”

This kind of argumentation is worse than scorching a straw man, ignoring the ways in which the UN is a positive tool for the exercise of US power, designed in the image of the US ideal.

To begin with, Rothkopf repeatedly refers to the “UN,” when it’s clear that he’s really talking about the Security Council, the body that handles matters of international peace and security. But to reduce the United Nations to a mechanism for conflict resolution, as Rothkopf does, misses the point. The theory underpinning the composition of the council, rather than elementary, is a rather nuanced and high-minded concept in international relations known as collective security. Put simply, an attack on one member state constitutes an attack on all. The logic behind the theory is to create significant disincentives for aggression, thereby increasing stability among the society of states. The best example of collective security at work was the council’s response to Iraq’s 1990 invasion of Kuwait.

Rothkopf has a point, inasmuch as during the Cold War, the Security Council remained deadlocked, with the United States and the Soviet Union able to wield their vetoes to effectively block any action against their interests. But to suggest that the body was designed without a spine or that it was founded on facile ideas is ludicrous. If anything, it traces its origin directly back to one of the finer US presidents, Woodrow Wilson.

Worse still, to talk about the UN as if it were only the Security Council, though disturbingly common, neglects the reality of the last six decades. Bluntly stated, today the UN is essentially a service organization. One could argue, and I probably would, that the UN is doing more than any other state or international organization to satisfy “the obligations of the social contract in the global era,” as Rothkopf phrases it. After the United States, the UN today exercises command control over the world’s largest number of deployed military forces. UN peacekeeping missions currently number sixteen, with nearly 100,000 uniformed personnel deployed.

UN agencies also feed the hungry, house the displaced and save the lives of children on an unparalleled scale around the world. The World Food Program will feed 105 million people this year. The UN Refugee Agency (UNHCR) cared for 25 million people last year, most of whom had fled war and chaos. UNICEF works in the poorest countries to provide children fresh drinking water, immunizations and equal access to education, among other things. Imagine that: an organization committed to serving those from whom the least benefit is to be gained—namely, the poor, the dispossessed, the desperate. And most of its programs fight to sustain funding every year.

This is to say nothing of agencies like the UN Development Program (which has been working to strengthen governments in the developing world for decades), or the international criminal tribunals for Yugoslavia and Rwanda, or the International Atomic Energy Agency, or the World Health Organization, which has served as the global coordinator in the rather impressive response to the swine flu.

Even the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund, both of which provide American foreign policymakers with concrete mechanisms to extend influence around the globe, technically fall under the UN umbrella.

None of this should be interpreted as some blind faith in the UN as an organization. Without a doubt the UN secretariat and assorted agencies are poorly organized—even disastrously so—and almost institutionally geared for waste and inefficiency. A management chart of the entire place would elicit shudders, if not outright shouts of terror, from a Fortune 500 executive. There’s also no question that the Security Council looks like a plan drawn up by the victors of World War II, not by the major and emerging powers of today. And yes, there are disasters, such as the Human Rights Council, which has made a mockery of its name.

But throwing stones at “the UN” in order to criticize the latest resolution on North Korea as toothless is not only shallow, it’s simply wrong. Because a deliberative body exists does not mean that the United States will always get its way. And when you actually try to make sense of other states’ actions, in this case Russia and China, it becomes clear that they may actually be coming around toward a more muscular condemnation of North Korea’s nuclearization. That is, they are increasingly approaching the US position.

Arguing that the politicization of the Security Council justifies ridding
the world of the UN is not just intellectually dishonest. It’s at odds with US interests.

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As El Salvador transitions from decades of conser- vative rule to the administration of leftist President Mauricio Funes, the country faces an international showdown triggered by a restrictive free-trade agree- ment between the United States and Central Ameri- ca. Canada’s Pacific Rim Mining Corporation is suing the government for its refusal to allow it to mine gold in El Salvador’s rural north. If Pacific Rim succeeds in securing the $100 million settlement it seeks, a trou- bling precedent would be set. At stake is a question that affects all nations: Can private interests trump national sovereignty under international law?
Pacific Rim initiated arbitration proceedings against El Salvador with the World Bank’s International Cen- ter for Settlement of Investment Disputes (ICSID) on April 30, 2009. The corporation argues that El Salva- dor violated investment rules in the US-Dominican Republic Central America Free Trade Agreement (DR-CAFTA) which is confusing on its face, seeing as Canada is not a party to the accord. (Pac Rim fun- neled the lawsuit through a US subsidiary.)
Company officials charge that the government has violated their “investor rights” by refusing to approve an Environmental Impact Assessment (EIA) submit- ted by the company. Without this approval, Pacific Rim cannot obtain a mining permit.
The company insists that its operations pose no threat whatsoever to El Salvador’s ecological stabil- ity and public health, but a wide array of community leaders, activists, and environmental experts disagree. They contend that Pacific Rim’s assessment offers little evidence supporting the company’s “green min- ing” claims, and serves as a smokescreen to obscure the adverse socioeconomic impacts gold mining is likely to produce in the small, densely populated na- tion. These social movements contend that it’s Pacific Rim that should be sued. Says Rodolfo Calles of the anti-mining activist group Mesa Frente a la Minería Metálica: Pacific Rim and other “extractive compa- nies in question have violated national laws, caused environmental damage, provoked economic losses, generated conflicts among communities, corrupted government officials, and offended religious leaders.”
Thus far, El Salvador’s movement against precious- metal mining in El Salvador has succeeded in com- pelling the government to fight Pacific Rim’s strong-
arming. But questions remain concerning Funes’s resolve to stand defiant in the face of international pressure. These concerns have grown in recent weeks following a spate of murder and violence directed at anti-mining activists.
This wave of intimidation began with the murder of Marcelo Rivera, a teacher, community leader, and political activist involved in the anti-mining fight. Ri- vera, who went missing on June 18, was discovered weeks later in a remote section of Cabanas depart- ment. An autopsy revealed that he had been tortured extensively before his windpipe was crushed, and his body dumped in an unused well. Activists continue to challenge Salvadorian authorities, who claim that this was an ordinary crime committed by members of a Salvadoran gang, to investigate what they say was a politically motivated assassination.
Since then, local media have been targets of sab- otage and threats for their coverage of the Pac Rim lawsuit. Information Radio Victoria discovered its transmitter stolen shortly after reporting on the min- ing case, and at least four journalists covering the is- sue have received death threats. Bay Area IndyMedia reports that the journalists were “threatened to be the ‘next on the list’” and would fall victim to those who “‘also spoke in San Isidro,’ making a clear reference to the link between these events and the disappearance and murder of…Marcelo Rivera.’”
Violence has also been directed at the Catholic Church, which has stood as a staunch ally of anti- mining activists throughout the dispute. A colleague of Rivera’s, Father Luis Quintanilla—himself a fre- quent target recently of threats against his life—was stopped by four hooded men on a road in Cabanas and forced from his vehicle. The priest threw himself down a gully to avoid what many believe would have been his murder. Quintanilla later released a copy of the text message he received shortly before the inci- dent. It reads, “Extermination…you motherfuckers better stop stirring people up if you don’t want to end up like Marcelo. We’ve got eyes on you.”
background
Pacific Rim began exploring the country’s potential for gold exploitation nearly seven years ago, chart- ing a vein system that covers considerable portions of El Salvador’s northern reaches. It commenced op-
erations at what it claims was the invitation of the government’s Ministries of the Economy and the Environment, which issued exploration permits in 2002 under the neoliberal administration of Fran- cisco Flores. Since then, the corporation has identi- fied some twenty-five sites for gold extraction across seven national departments, and invested upwards of $80 million.
While global corporations haven’t historically seen El Salvador as promising territory for mining, Pacific Rim significantly extended its base of operations as gold prices exploded on the international market. With the value of gold nearly tripling since 2001, the company assured shareholders that it was discovering “bonanza gold grades” and making “exciting gold dis- coveries” that would expand opportunities for future investment and high returns.
Meanwhile, Salvadorian environmentalists, civil society organizations, and others in the country grew increasingly alarmed about the potentially adverse ef- fects of gold mining. Critics point to the threat of wa- ter and soil contamination from chemical residue in the wake of mining operations (miners use cyanide- laced water to extract gold from subterranean rock, which, experts contend, makes its way back to local reserves tapped for drinking). That all of Pacific Rim’s sites are located along the country’s longest river, the Rio Lempa, has environmentalists especially wor- ried. The river’s basin extends nearly halfway across the country, supplying much of the nation’s drinking water. Moreover, the Lempa runs through Guate- mala and Honduras as well, increasing the likelihood that contaminated water could spread throughout the region.
Pacific Rim denies that these concerns are real. The corporation claims that it would detoxify any water used for mining, leaving local water sources cleaner than they were previously. “You could basically stick a cup in the water and drink it,” Pacific Rim’s Barbara Henderson recently boasted to the Miami Herald. “We’ve met all conditions under the law. So there’s no basis for the government of El Salvador to fail to make a decision [about issuing mining permits].”
Not so, say experts. Robert Moran, an independent, nonpartisan hydrogeologist, undertook a technical review of Pacific Rim’s environmental assessment in 2005, concluding that “it would not be acceptable
to regulatory agencies in most developed countries.” In his final report, Moran notes that “The public EIA review process is clearly lacking in openness and transparency… only one printed copy of the EIA is available…within all of El Salvador. The public must review and submit written comments on this 1,400 page document within a period of ten working days. No photocopies or photos of any part of this docu- ment may be made.” More- over, Moran points out that the EIA completely ignores “many of the environmen- tal impacts encountered at similar gold mining sites,” and voiced concerns about the fact that “the signifi- cant uncertainty of [its] seismic risk calculations” and a number of other is- sues were presented in the document in English only.
Page —GC Advocate—September 009
Local activists Fight back
These concerns were met with popular unrest. La Mesa Nacional Frente a la Minería Metálica in El Salvador (the National Working Group against Mining in El Salva- dor), an umbrella organization for coordinating nationwide action, has led the charge. Beginning with local organizing and small-scale protests, La Mesa and its partner organiza- tions have managed to make min- ing a central issue in Salvadoran politics. Activists scored an early victory when Pacific Rim agreed to freeze its operations at the compa- ny’s Santa Rita mining site in 2006, while negotiating a resolution to its clash with local anti-mining organi- zations. Though the meeting failed to reach a mutually acceptable com- promise, local organizers success- fully used the gathering to attract the attention of the media and the government, and garner broad national and interna- tional support.
Momentum behind the movement increased fur- ther when the Conference of Bishops of the Roman Catholic Church issued a statement of opposition to mining operations in El Salvador. In addition to enumerating the adverse consequences of mining to El Salvador’s people and environment, the bishops castigated Pacific Rim’s economic justification for gold mining operations. “No material advantage,” the bishops warned, “can be compared with the value of human life.”
The combined effect of local resistance and reli- gious backing had a decisive impact on government decision-making. With public opinion polls showing a clear majority in opposition to gold mining, and despite its initial enthusiasm for Pacific Rim’s min- ing proposals, officials from the ruling conservative ARENA party refused to issue the company permits to begin extracting gold from underground deposits. In essence, the government ceased to acknowledge Pacific Rim’s existence. Repeated complaints and ap- plications for permits were filed by the company with government ministries, and promptly ignored.
Since then, La Mesa has continued to push the en- velope. Not trusting that government silence on the permits issue equaled support for their cause, the organization presented a bill for congressional con- sideration in 2006 that would ban all precious met- al mining in El Salvador. While the bill was almost immediately withdrawn from deliberation, it wasn’t forgotten. Shortly after Funes took power, the Frente Fabarundo Martí para la Liberación Nacional (a left- wing opposition party, better known as the FMLN) resurrected the proposed legislation and presented it to El Salvador’s National Assembly for a vote. Accord- ing to the Latin American Herald Tribune, the pro- posed law would grant Pacific Rim and other foreign companies six months to discontinue operations be- fore being ordered to leave the country.
Legal action
With its prospects for obtaining permits grinding to a standstill within the government bureaucracy, and opposition forces gaining the advantage locally, Pacific Rim filed a notice of intent in December 2008 to bring El Salvador before an international arbitra- tion tribunal to resolve the dispute. Specifically, the company claimed that El Salvador violated the spirit of nondiscrimination enshrined in Chapter 10 of the DR- CAFTA agreement, by allowing domestic com- panies to pollute while denying the same privilege to Pacific Rim.
The agreement, which El Salvador signed in 2006, allows multinational corporations to sue governments covered by it for cash compensation when their po- tential for profit has been undermined by measures that are tantamount to expropriation. But because Canada isn’t a signatory to DR-CAFTA, Pacific Rim
isn’t technically entitled to Chapter 10 protections as it claims. Nevertheless, the corporation routed the lawsuit through the backdoor of its US-based subsid- iary Pac Rim Cayman LLC, and relied on the services of an American lobbying firm to ensure support from Capitol Hill.
Under DR-CAFTA’s Chapter 10 proceedings, par- ties to a dispute are mandated to respect a 90-day consultation period before filing their claims in court. Pacific Rim’s December filing ensured that their threatened lawsuit would coincide with El Salvador’s national election three months later. According to Burke Stansbury, an activist with the Committee in Solidarity with the People of El Salvador (CISPES), the claim was timed to affect the electoral outcome. They “either us[ed] the threat of a lawsuit as leverage or [as] a strategy to help ARENA win the election,” Stansbury told the Pacific Free Press in February.
If this was true, Pacific Rim miscalculated. Out- going president Antonio Saca remained firm in his rejection of the corporation’s demands, rendering the case a non-issue during the election. Yet Saca’s refusal to give in to corporate pressure—whether politically motivated or based on genuine concern for his country—had the effect of kicking the Pa- cific Rim can down the road for the incoming Funes administration.
On April 30, Pacific Rim filed for arbitration with the ICSID, demanding a $100 million payout for damages. “The company’s claims under CAFTA,” the company announced in a press release, “are based on the government’s breaches of international and Salvadoran law arising out of the government’s im- proper failure to finalize the permitting process as it is required to do and to respect the company’s…legal rights to develop mining activities in El Salvador.”
La Mesa’s Rodolfo Calles sees things differently. “Operating permits are not automatic; that is, the current mining law does not oblige the government to provide [permits] after having allowed exploration. Pacific Rim submitted an Environmental Impact As- sessment that did not meet environmental require- ments, and was not able to demonstrate that its min- ing projects would not pollute the environment…In our view, it is Pacific Rim that should be sued, not the Salvadoran state; It is the company that should com- pensate the country and not vice versa.”
Early indications, however, suggest that Funes will pursue a compromise solution instead of risk- ing a costly settlement. “We’re not in a position to be losing litigation. That money should be allocated to social programs,” El Salvador’s Secretary of Technol- ogy recently noted. Indeed, if the arbitration tribunal rules in Pacific Rim’s favor, El Salvador would be pro- foundly crippled by the $100 million payout. Perhaps more troubling still, the verdict would send a signal to other multinationals in Central America that the law sides with corporate interests over the protection of local populations.
Nevertheless, a negotiated settle- ment offers equally disturbing pos- sibilities. The most likely would be an amendment to existing environ- mental and mining laws, allowing foreign corporations easier access to El Salvador’s natural resource deposits. In all likelihood, the Mesa Nacional/FMLN-sponsored anti-mining legislation would be shelved indefinitely, and oppor- tunities for peaceful resolution of local concerns increasingly fore- closed.
On top of Pacific Rim’s case, on March 16, another international mining firm added to the pressure by threatening an additional DR- CAFTA lawsuit. A joint venture of American companies, Commerce Group Corp. and San Sebastian Gold Mines, Inc. (Commerce/San- seb), filed a notice of intent to claim compensation for additional $100
million for the government’s alleged failure to renew a permit to mine gold and silver at the San Sebastian Goldmine near Santa Rosa de Lima, in the depart- ment of La Unión in El Salvador.
The prospect of mounting lawsuits has led to calls from activists demanding that El Salvador revisit the terms of its international trade agreements. “The de- mand of Pacific Rim against El Salvador recalls the need to review international treaties signed by previ- ous governments, especially CAFTA, and reverse—or at least modify—those aspects that are most harmful and violate our sovereignty.”
Hopeful signs from Washington?
The mining companies’ lawsuits—along with the vi- olent repression of recent protests in Peru—represent the latest example of failure by US trade agreements to bring prosperity and progress to the region. US policymakers, including Barack Obama, seem to ac- knowledge as much: bilateral trade agreements with Panama and Colombia continue to stall, and pressure to amend the North America Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) continues to build.
Yet hopes that the social movement against min- ing in El Salvador would find an ally in Obama have been unrealized. Obama, who voted against the pas- sage of DR-CAFTA as a senator, spoke out passion- ately on the campaign trail against free trade agree- ments (FTAs) that privileged economic gain over the welfare of local populations under threat. And “with regards to provisions in several FTAs that give foreign investors the right to sue governments directly in for- eign tribunals,” Obama promised, “I will ensure that this right is strictly limited and will fully exempt any law or regulation written to protect public safety or promote the public interest.” As president, however, Obama has so far failed to meaningfully act on an issue he himself acknowledges desperately demands attention and change.
The president reportedly will outline a new vision of equitable trade in a major speech at the Group of 20 meeting in Pittsburgh at the end of this month. There, Obama will hopefully forge plans for a new approach to trade that would meet his goal of preventing foreign corporations from gaining “an economic advantage by destroying the environment” and amend NAFTA and possibly other FTAs to “make clear that fair laws and regulations written to protect citizens…cannot be overridden at the request of foreign investors.”
In some respects, unfortunately, it’s already too late for Salvadorans affected by Pacific Rim’s activi- ties. The failure of Funes and other likeminded “part- ners” throughout the region, like Obama, to stand up for these communities under threat, sets a regret- table precedent—that concern for corporate profit overrides that for human beings and their environ- ment—a precedent that would invest even Obama’s most eloquent rhetoric with the hollow timbre of false promises.

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A recent editorial in the New York Times by Stanley Fish, “What Should Colleges Teach?” generated enough controversy and enthusiasm to merit that he write two follow up pieces. In the first, Stanley Fish argues that the problem with English composition courses is they don’t teach composition at all; rather, they are poorly masked cultural studies courses focusing on history, political thought, and the like. Echoing George Orwell’s famous piece “Politics and the English Language,” Fish criticizes the prioritizing of a general, catch-all “humanities” education in composition courses if it comes at the expense of basic grammar and mechanics.

Fish’s perspective generates in me (an English composition, creative writing and literature instructor), an ambivalent reaction. On one hand, the transformation within academia brought on by waves of queer theory, feminist theory, culture studies, postcolonial studies, etc., was inevitable and has improved scholarly endeavors in ways that are profound and overwhelmingly positive. And importantly, the weaknesses Fish attributes to the focus of these disciplines—in particular, his belief that undergraduates are worse writers because colleges have instead tried to make them “better citizens”—may very well come from any number of reasons, including a general decline in the American public school system (not the use of, say, popular film in the classroom to teach cultural analysis).

But it’s important to note that Fish is not critiquing at its base the importance of these disciplines. Of the composition courses he examined before writing the editorial, he says: “instruction in composition was not their focus. Instead, the students spent much of their time discussing novels, movies, TV shows and essays on a variety of hot-button issues—racism, sexism, immigration, globalization. These artifacts and topics are surely worthy of serious study, but they should have received it in courses that bore their name, if only as a matter of truth-in-advertising.”

After six years of teaching college English—creative writing, composition, and literature courses—I agree for the most part with his main ideas. The first difficulty, of course, is that no two universities are alike, just as no two communities are alike. My former undergraduate students in the Midwest (Indiana and Missouri) were fair to middling writers, but their critical thinking skills left much to be desired. Much of this was due to a failure in the public education systems in those states (which are notoriously lacking), as well as a general culture which discouraged critique of authority—and by authority, I mean anything ranging from your high school principal to MTV to the National Rifle Association. I was (and continue to be) very fond of my students from these states and feel I can understand as a Midwesterner myself (though not accept) their reticence to question the status quo.

By contrast, I have my students in New York. I am often in awe of their sophistication regarding social issues at such a young ages, yet find they struggle somewhat more with basic mechanics and writing skills. The significant consequence is that, though my students here bring much diversity of experience to the classroom (in terms of age, race / ethnicity, sexual orientation, political orientation, and economic background), as well as a generally sophisticated and complex way of looking at politics, media, and the world around them, they have a very difficult time expressing this in their essays. This leads me to believe that my students do not need assistance learning how to think critically, in particular about their society or about pop culture. Fish notes that the emphasis in composition courses is often on these subjects, and I would agree wholeheartedly that there is something fundamentally misguided (if benevolently intended about such an approach. Instead, my students need help articulating their already interesting, complex, and idiosyncratic ideas about the world, at the most basic level. They need help identifying and using the nuts and bolts of the English language.

Both these groups of students have writing issues which are basic enough to fundamentally impinge on the expression of their arguments: passive voice, subject / verb agreement, spelling and punctuation, etc. I’m not sure in what ways (or why) the secondary education system is failing our students, but because I myself am trained to teach rhetoric, argumentation, and literary interpretation, I frequently find myself at a loss for how to address more basic problems.

Can anyone stomach another sentence diagram? I’m not sure when I last did a sentence diagram—after all, I’m only a bit more than a decade older than my students, and was thus more or less subject to the same public school upbringing. I’d be lying if I said I was entirely comfortable breaking down the more advanced nuances of grammar and sentence structure. Yet Fish acknowledges this, asking: “What good is it to be told, ‘Do not join independent clauses with a comma,’ if you don’t have the slightest idea of what a clause is (and isn’t), never mind an ‘independent’ one? And even if a beginning student were provided with the definition of a clause, the definition itself would hang in mid-air like a random piece of knowledge. It would be like being given a definition of a drop-kick in the absence of any understanding of the game in which it could be deployed.” Instead, he advocates for a slow and steady approach, in which a composition course is more or less a series of lessons that works on the sentence level, breaking down various structures both to see how they function in the English language and as pieces of a larger argument.

There is the issue of how diversity expresses itself in writing. My background and passion is in creative writing and poetry, so my own hesitations arise when I think of teaching a class that bulldozes difference—that attempts to eradicate unique expressions or ways of speaking in formal writing. After all, Flannery O’Connor wouldn’t have become the writer she is if she had abandoned all her Southernisms in favor of a more anesthetized, standard English. But the fact of the matter is I’m not teaching creative writing, and as O’Connor’s own essays make clear, she knew when and how to turn it off (and strongly advocated doing so). Fish addresses this in his third editorial, saying: “… you must clear your mind of the orthodoxies that have taken hold in the composition world…: ‘We affirm the students’ right to their own patterns and varieties of language — the dialects of their nurture or whatever dialects in which they find their own identity and style.’” He continues: “The issue is whether students… will prosper in a society where norms of speech and writing are enforced not by law but by institutional decorums. If you’re about to be fired because your memos reflect your “own identity and style,” citing (dialects of nurture) is not going to do you any good.

He in no way disagrees that the prioritizing of “standard English” is wielded unfairly against those who are less formally educated, but points out that while “it may be true that the standard language is an instrument of power and a device for protecting the status quo, that very truth is a reason for teaching it to students who are being prepared for entry into the world as it now is rather than the world as it might be in some utopian imagination—all dialects equal, all  habit of speech and writing equally rewarded. You’re not going to be able to change the world if you are not equipped with the tools that speak to its present condition. You don’t strike a blow against a power structure by making yourself vulnerable to its prejudices…. And if students infected with the facile egalitarianism of soft multiculturalism declare, ‘I have a right to my own language,’ reply, ‘Yes , you do, and I am not here to take that language from you; I’m here to teach you another one.’ (Who could object to learning a second language?) And then get on with it.” Despite the many ways that language changes—being itself a living, breathing, adaptable animal—it is still true that the American workplace has marked a certain writing style as being that which is useful, strong, intelligent, analytical and practical. And that style typically follows standardized sentence structure and grammar rules which, in my experience at least, we are increasingly failing to offer to our young students.

I am one of those English teachers that assigns reading—– and a lot of it. My students read Hemingway, Stein, Updike, O’Connor, Faulkner, Bambara, Tan, and the like; essentially, I assign as many words to them without inciting potential mutiny. And they’re accountable for it, and must write in class spontaneously and often about what they’ve read. This is simply because, like most teachers, I teach the way I learned, and I learned to write by reading, and then reading some more. The knowledge that our public schools and American culture generally is gently but consistently recoiling from the art of reading gives me energy and conviction about my courses.

But Fish’s essay has convinced me that it’s time to face my own demons and come up with some grammar and sentence structure exercises that at least approximate being interesting. I like this idea that teaching students how to write is akin to teaching them a second language—I may make this analogy in class tomorrow, before a lesson on sentence fragments. And then I’ll get on with it.

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RENEE MCGARRY AND JESSE GOLDSTEIN

We heard it officially this week. The nation has been in a recession since 2007, and we’ve all witnessed CUNY feeling the pinch. Undoubtedly, there are times when we, as both students and adjuncts, feel powerless, and probably times when we feel scared and alarmed. Do we have to? And what can we do to feel more empowered?

Of course we can (and should) attend protests and rallies. We can (and should) call the governor, the chancellor, our legislators, and our moms. But we often don’t feel the immediate impact of these actions. We all know that change takes time and effort, yet we can feel disheartened when our hard work seems unseen, ignored, unnoticed. Rallies and protests and phone calls are important, but they are singular actions that can leave us with post-event let down.

We need to stay active in this fight in our everyday lives.

Our suggestion? Let’s each and every one of us take it to our classrooms. In my classroom, I spend day after day with students, never once hearing their stories, and certainly never telling them mine. I always have an excuse: I’m an art historian—how do politics fit into my class? It’s just not my style. There are 90 students in that room! It will be chaos.

But then I wonder, what if, for just fifteen minutes, we talked about how a tuition hike would impact that girl who sits in the middle of the front row and has never missed a class? How would a long-term adjunct losing his job impact that kid who sits in the back and needs a letter of recommendation for graduate school? How many of my students would have to rearrange their schedules if yet another MTA hike went through? If my rent goes up, how many more jobs will I have to take on and how much less attention will my students get?

If, like me, you’re not always comfortable engaging on this level with your students, think about how you can work these issues into your syllabus. Relax in your department lounge for awhile and ask other members of your department how they would approach topics that are outside of your usual range. Is there a way to work the history of CUNY activism into your class? Or the current city, state, and national economic crises? It may seem impractical at first, but once you start brainstorming with your colleagues, you’d be surprised what you can come up with.

Along those lines, the Adjunct Project is happy to announce that the week of March 30th through April 3rd will be CUNY Equity Week, an opportunity to extend and expand this process during the Spring Semester. For all or a portion of a class during this week, we are asking that both adjuncts and full-time faculty make a coordinated effort to incorporate information on adjunct teaching conditions into class lessons. You may have a class discussion, a persuasive letter exercise, a statistical analysis of adjunct and full-time wages for the same workload, or an extra-credit assignment to find a link between course materials and adjunct labor.

Additionally, this year we are providing access to materials that will help you and your students map the CUNY system. You can use our materials, and you can be as creative as you want to be. Start the conversation in your classrooms and your departments. Think about CUNY and where it is and where you want it to be. We’ll also offer organized brainstorming sessions to help you determine how to best make CUNY Equity Week for you. If you’re interested in working on discipline-specific projects, or anything involving the upcoming week, please contact us at theadjunctproject@gmail.com.

Another way we can become better teachers and students is to recognize the impact that juggling so many roles and responsibilities has on our lives and our health. With that in mind, the Adjunct Project is will host a series of wellness workshops over the spring semester. In these, there is the potential to take away a toolkit of exercises, nutritional advice, and coping strategies that will keep you safe and sane as you continue your career in school and beyond. 

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Roberto Unger’s latest book The Self Awakened: Pragmatism Unbound is no less than a call for a completely revitalized, repoliticized, and – some would say paradoxically – radicalized form of philosophical pragmatism. For Unger, pragmatism has lost touch with its more radical roots and has managed to become “the philosophy of the age” not through its success in challenging existing structures of thought, or by making institutional change possible, but by “shrinking” from these real challenges. Pragmatism, according to Unger, has become “emasculated,” the mere plaything of academics, and has thus lost much of the radically transformative potential that is implicit in its central tenets. It is exactly this transformative potential that Unger sees as the vital element of a revitalized pragmatism and the lodestone for the future direction of philosophy more broadly.

Although the book is deeply indebted to the major pragmatist thinkers of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, especially John Dewey and his ideas of democracy and social reconstruction, Unger’s book spends surprisingly little time discussing the work or the ideas of previous pragmatists. For instance Unger spends only 12 pages discussing John Dewey, mentions William James and C.S. Pierce only a handful of times each, and gives little more than a passing mention to George Santayana and Ludwig Wittgenstein – most of this in one short chapter. Meanwhile Cornel West (Unger’s colleague at Harvard University) and Richard Rorty, two of the most notable and oft quoted of the new pragmatists, appear only in spirit. This lack of attention to actual pragmatist philosophers may initially put off those like myself, who opened Unger’s book eager to discover a potentially new approach to some by now very old ideas, but despite the lack of detailed analysis of previous pragmatists, there is still plenty to consider here for anyone interested in both the legacy and future of pragmatism as a political philosophy. Indeed, Unger spends so little time discussing previous pragmatist thinkers, it seems, precisely because he is too busy eagerly developing his own ideas about the future cultural and political potential of philosophy.

Pragmatism, suggests Unger, is not merely a collection of philosophers or even a philosophical program per se; it is instead best defined as a philosophical tendency, a way of thinking that values but ultimately fails to do justice to the “central themes” of “agency, contingency, futurity,” and “experimentalism.” For Unger, pragmatism offers a useful beginning, it offers the hope of real personal empowerment, effective democracy, and cultural transformation; but the failure of pragmatism, like other philosophies, is that its initially radical ideas, it’s attacks on what Unger calls the “perennial philosophy,” have been undermined by a seemingly benign but actually destructive adherence to a form of naturalism that places man within a larger natural realm to which he must ultimately remain bound. For Unger, this “god’s-eye view” of the universe, which insists on looking at humanity as situated within a larger determining natural or metaphysical structure – rather than focusing on humanity from the perspective of man – is precisely the problem with pragmatism as its currently understood.

“We are accustomed to imagine the immediate context of human life in society and culture as a little place within a big world–nature, the universe, being. What we think of that world, and what we think of our thinking about it, seem, according to this habit, to be what matters most in the definition of a philosophical position. Thinking about us and our relationship to man-made constructs seems a mere sideshow.”

This god’s-eye view of man, as Unger describes it, is not only philosophically untenable, but undermines the human potential that pragmatism in its purer sense offers to the individual human agent. Unger uses the example of John Dewey. Central to Dewey’s philosophy of experience is the idea of an agent that is intimately and constantly engaged in the creation and reconstruction of her environment. Dewey describes aesthetic experience as simultaneously a “doing” and an “undergoing”; thus, in Dewey, there is a constant interchange between the self and the world, an interchange that in these moments allows for an almost unlimited potential of before unknown forms and new relations. But introduce the god’s-eye view of the naturalist, the view of man as merely part of a larger series of natural forces, not of his own making, over which he has only limited or technological control, against which he is “merely a tool of natural evolution,” (35) and what was a radical philosophy becomes only an ameliorative one. Dewey’s ideas become merely the tools to adapt to, but not to actually affect, change.

The implicit contradiction in Dewey’s thought between a world of total possibility and a world limited by the structures of naturalism is exactly the problem with pragmatism as it has been received. “A radicalized pragmatism,” says Unger,

“more faithful to its own intentions, must resolve this ambiguity decisively in favor of the agent and his ambitions. But how? The naturalistic picture of the confined and dying organism contains a powerful truth. A philosophy that takes sides with the agent must not deny this truth. It must, however, reveal how we can redirect thought and reorganize society so that the vision of the agent able to use contingency against constraint becomes more real, and the picture of the toolmaker made into a tool of natural processes indifferent to his concerns becomes less real.”

This critique of a dogmatic naturalism is central to Unger’s argument. “Our most powerful interests turn out to be engaged in this denaturalization of society and culture, in this radicalization of experimentalism, in this turn from fate to invention” (7). And it is precisely this attempt to re-imagine a society founded on the principles of continual reconstruction and revision that provides the starting point for a radicalized form of pragmatism designed, ultimately, to inaugurate a new global political culture. Indeed, as other critics have noted, Unger’s philosophical and political concerns are really unavoidable responses to the crises of globalization. As more and more of our daily experience becomes directly informed by larger cultural and societal structures – the nation state, the free market, the Byzantine and labyrinthine legal systems under which we live – a concern for the continual reconstruction of those structures becomes paramount.

According to Unger, Western philosophy has been at odds with what he calls, borrowing Leibniz’s phrase, the “perennial philosophy.” This philosophy, which was articulated in the west most notably by Plato, affirms an attainable real somehow outside of experience and culture, knowledge of which provides insight into the way things really are, and has, although continually challenged by later western philosophers since Kant, withstood all attempts to get beyond it. From Kant’s subject-centered categories of the understanding, to Hegel’s “history of our individual and collective self-construction,” (5) to a shrunken form of pragmatism, bound by naturalist tendencies of thought, the “perennial philosophy” has nonetheless continued to re-assert itself. In this way it has become an impediment to actual cultural and social change. These “rejected options,” as Unger calls them, form the base of a concerted, but ultimately failed resistance to the perennial philosophy. The potential of a truly unbounded pragmatism lies in the radicalization of this dissent against the perennial philosophy and, in an appropriately pragmatic way, Unger spends the rest of the book outlining the philosophical plan for this radicalization of pragmatism, considering its implications for philosophy, society, politics, and democracy.

Unger begins this process, ironically enough, by turning first to a discussion of the failings of American pragmatism. Although Unger argues that pragmatism ultimately fails because of its various compromises with naturalism and its concessions to the claims of the “perennial philosophy;” its radical foundations nonetheless offer a useful structure to begin again. This structure, Unger argues is founded upon four “central themes,” as he calls them: “agency,” “contingency,” “futurity,” and “experimentalism.”

In recognizing the innate transformative potential that individual experience offers when it operates within human society, its resistances and its claims, its transgressions and its transcendences, pragmatism values the individual agent and thus the concept of “agency.” For Unger this recognition of the dignity and value of individual experience as both an end and a means of transformation is central to his belief that we must see the world outside of us from within the human world and abandon our ideas of understanding from the god’s-eye perspective of the “perennial philosophy.” As agents, we then experience the concepts of “contingency” and “futurity” as immediate facts that we live in a world where time and chance are not ephemeral categories but are experienced as real forces that exert their influence upon us.

“Even the most intimate and basic aspects of our experience are colored by the dogmas of culture and the institutions of society. We cannot rigidly divide our experience into the personal and the collective, the transient and the permanent. Historical time seeps into biographical time.”

In other words, our lives are limited, but importantly, they are limited largely by circumstances that we have the power ultimately to transform. Pragmatism, especially as it is articulated in Dewey, insofar as it asserts the need for continual reconstruction and the satisfaction of the needs of the human agent, recognizes this contingency as fact. Our attempts to then effectively deal with this contingency require a sense of futurity, an ability to think about the future world as different from the world we experience today, a sense of moving beyond the current constraints of our existence into new possibilities. “Futurity should cease to be a predicament,” says Unger, “and should become a program. We should radicalize it to empower ourselves. That is the reason to take an interest in ways of organizing thought and society that diminish the influence of what happened before on what can happen next.”

The last and most important of these central themes that Unger articulates is also the most Deweyan: “experimentalism.” Indeed, Dewey’s entire social philosophy is in many ways founded upon the idea of experimentalism as intelligent practice. In How We Think Dewey says that:

“The change of attitude from conservative reliance upon the past, upon routine and custom, to faith in progress through the intelligent regulation of existing conditions, is, of course, the reflex of the scientific method of scientific experimentation. The empirical method inevitably magnifies the influences of the past; the experimental method throws into relief the possibilities of the future.”

For Unger, like Dewey, “experimentalism” is a fundamental means of progress and represents what Unger calls the “social embodiment of the imagination.” It is the very concept of the “new” working itself out in society.

Any attempt to create a culture of experimentalism and to institute a radicalized version of pragmatism would however, Unger argues, first require “the development of an unsettling conception of humanity,” one that finally accepts and celebrates the personal over the impersonal. This celebration of the personal, although it is dependent on a conception of the individual as a self-possessed and context transcending agent, continually transformed through struggle with society, is, importantly, more than mere individualism. This conception of humanity does more than simply value the liberties or freedoms of the individual, but requires instead a movement away from thinking about the world as somehow already complete, existing independent of and distant from our individual selves, our actions, our desires, and our needs, towards a world where our individual experience is embraced and judged meaningful. It does not see the self as separate from the world, but as intimately engaged with it, and requires that we give up the classical emphasis on the value of impersonal knowledge over subjective experience and that we embrace the concept, already so prevalent in the literature of the last 200 years, of ourselves as transforming agents within a world of our own creation.

The religious moral and aesthetic movements that have shaped our civilization and through it set the world on fire, have wholly reversed this priority [of the impersonal over the personal]. They have affirmed the precedence – in fact, in knowledge, and in value – of the personal over the impersonal. It is our own world – the world we create through action – that we can understand more intimately and confidently; the rest of reality we master only by an overreaching that we cannot avoid and cannot trust. Having made our own world, we can remake it. We can, as Marx said, ‘make the circumstances dance by singing to them their own melody.’

Although Unger spends a fair amount of time discussing the ways in which these core philosophical conceptions work themselves out in relation to self-consciousness, experience, and what he calls “the antinomies of time and objectivity,” the truly interesting part of Unger’s book is the way that it heeds the author’s call to actively consider the implications of this new way of thinking, and how best to put that thought into practice.

Like so much of Unger’s other more recent work, The Self Awakened: Pragmatism Unbound is, at heart, concerned with practical solutions to the problems of the world and this practical concern is exemplified by the titles of chapters eight, nine and ten: “What Then Should We Do?” “Society,” and “Politics.”

The first of these three chapters, “What Then Should We Do?” both articulates the problem as it stands and offers a broad solution to that problem. If we are to overcome the obvious allures of the “perennial philosophy,” if we are going to institute a culture of “resistance and reconstruction,” we must first understand “the causes of division and unhappiness in our experience” that drives the desire to instead seek out the comforts of the fixed and the settled.

Like so many of Unger’s philosophical formulations and statements, these causes come in a nicely packaged set. The first problem we must overcome is the struggle between the manifest and the hidden worlds of reality, between our need to “save the appearances,” to “enhance and deepen the visionary immediacy of the world,” and the irresistible endeavor of thinking about the world in causal terms. Because a world of complete appearance would be without struggle or meaning, we find ourselves forced to try to understand “more and more of the world causally.” This causal understanding

“threatens, however, to move us further and further away from the vindication of the manifest world, raising the specter that our phenomenal experience may, under its light, seem an allegory or a hallucination. The more we penetrate the causal background to this experience, and represent it in the time-resistant language of mathematics, the further away we move from the experienced reality of time, difference, and action.”

The other two sources of our unhappiness revolve around our pervasive need for others as well as our own struggles to overcome our “rigidified selves” and their routines. This need for others, Unger suggests, is always associated with the threat of subjugation. “The price of connection may be dependence and submission…telling us how, in our assumed roles, to think, feel, speak, and act.” At the same time, in our efforts to transcend our circumstances, we continually find ourselves struggling against the oppressive nature of the essential repetitions and habits of our own personalities, without which we are incapable of self-definition. In short, Unger asks the question:

“How could we begin to overcome the conflict between the enabling requirements of self-affirmation: to be connected to others, and yet not to pay, for this connection, the price of subjugation and depersonalization; to be able to engage in a particular society and culture and yet not to surrender to it our powers of resistance and transcendence?”

Although these problems are existential in nature and Unger admits that there are no quick solutions and any change in our relationship to these ideas would require more than a single lifetime of cultural effort, there are political moves that we can take now to make that change less destructive and dividing. Central to this political solution is to create a culture “whose practices and discourses turn against themselves, and shorten the distance between the reproduction of the existent and its reorganization.” This is the same idea, more or less, that Unger mentions earlier in the book when he describes the structure of a culture founded on the central theme of “experimentalism”:

“The overriding criterion by which to measure our success in approaching an experimentalist ideal in politics is success in making change less dependent on crisis. A calamity – often in the form of economic collapse or armed conflict – can break any order. Even in the partly democratized societies of the contemporary world, those who would reform the established social order will ordinarily need to count on crisis as their ally. To render politics experimental is to dispense with the need for this ally. It is so to organize the contest over the mastery and uses of governmental power…that the present arrangements and practices multiply opportunities for their own revision. Change becomes internal.”

Indeed, this institutionalized change is central to Unger’s politics and Unger’s politics are closely related to his conceptions of the future structure of society. This society, which Unger refers to as “the perpetual reinvention of the future,” should embrace as its fundamental reform the process “by which we shorten the gap between our context-preserving and our context-transforming activities.” In other words, a society founded on radical pragmatism would embrace experimental change as a virtue rather than a thing to be feared and avoided. Unger alternately calls this form of society “experimentalist cooperation” and “democratic experimentalism,” and argues that this kind of society is already best exemplified in the innovative and cooperative practices of some of the best businesses and universities. But these forms of society are, Unger argues, highly exclusionary, and available to only a small portion of the people on the planet, many of whom live outside of formal society in conditions of extreme poverty. Like Dewey, Unger sees a democratization of these processes as a vital way of reorganizing society in a more fundamentally meaningful, just, and efficient manner. But this reorganization requires certain fundamental conditions of educational and economic equality, solidarity, and cooperation in order to be successful. That means:

“No accumulation of entrenched inequalities – whether of opportunities and resources or of respect and recognition – must be allowed to subsist that has as its consequence to deny any group or class the occasions and the means for action and engagement.”

In an even more explicitly political gesture, Unger ends his discussion of society by arguing that any future vision of society must side “with the classical liberals and progressives against the liberals and social-democrats of today in two decisive and connected respects.” First of all, Unger says this society must create a diffusion of power and opportunity so that the increased power of each individual is guaranteed, and secondly that it “diminish the dependence of transformation on crisis,” by rejecting the idea of any single blueprint for society and seeking instead to create that society through a series of cumulative changes. If this sounds a lot like progressivism, that’s because, in many ways, that is exactly what Unger is calling for in his politics. What makes Unger’s progressivism different, however, is that it takes as one of its central aims, the construction of a society that successfully integrates transformation as a part of its structure and thus allows for even further progressive change.

This new kind of progressivism is founded on challenging the ingrained assumptions about the irreconcilable differences between “revolutionary politics” and “routine” politics. For Unger revolutionary politics is really a myth, whose convulsive consequences actually become an alibi for the continued practice of the ameliorative routine politics of social democracy. In other words fear of revolution drives even more the perpetuation of entrenched, unbending systems of order, within which ameliorative moves are all that is possible.

“With its fantastical idea of changing the whole, the notion of revolutionary politics becomes in practice an alibi for its opposite: the humanization of an order we no longer know how to reimagine or to remake.”

What Unger argues for, however, is a rejection of this dichotomy and an embrace of what he calls “revolutionary reform.” “The real revolutionary politics,” says Unger, “is revolutionary reform…What we should want is a form of political life enabling us to change everything in social life, one thing at a time. It may be gradualist in its method, but revolutionary in its outcome.”

For Unger, the institution of this revolutionary reform requires a radicalization of democracy. This means dramatically increasing the level of democratic participation so that we may “strengthen in the political life of the people the sense of effective individual action, overcoming the sense of futility of political action and shortening the distance between politics and the rest of social experience.” It also means a series of important reforms and innovations, including: combining the features of direct and representative democracy; upholding and revitalizing the liberal principles of fragmented constitutional power, without giving into the conservative desire to keep real political change at a minimum; create greater diversity of political options by allowing certain sectors of society to “opt out” of the dominant political system without repercussions; and valuing and strengthening the capabilities of the individual as a source of continued transformation. “A democracy reorganized in the light of [these] five institutional ambitions…splits the difference between citizens and prophets as well as between practical tinkerers and citizens. The conception of political life it proposes is not a crushing of private concern by public devotion; it is rather a pushing outward of the range of our ordinary interest.”

Unger’s vision, as many other critics have noted, is remarkably romantic and his ideas can seem at times, to be decidedly Keatsian, valuing and recognizing the paradoxically liberating fact of ourselves as dying organisms. Indeed, although Unger spends a significant portion of the book discussing the practical implications of his ideas, it is the visionary and literary nature of his language that stands out, and this book, like all good philosophy, is as much a part of our literature of ideas as it is a political or philosophical text.

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A scene from Charles Ferguson’s documentary No End in Sight.

Two documentaries currently playing in theaters, Charles Ferguson’s No End in Sight – soon to end an exclusive New York engagement at Film Forum and opening at the Quad Cinema on Sept. 7 – and Jason Kohn’s Manda Bala (Send a Bullet), at the Angelika Film Center, offer riveting glimpses of two highly different, yet highly similar, worlds: Ferguson’s film the rarefied world of George W. Bush’s administration during its march to war with Iraq and in the calamitous early months of the American occupation of Baghdad, Kohn’s the apocalyptic city of São Paulo, Brazil. Both are affecting cinematic depictions, using quite different means and techniques, of power spun horribly out of control, the dysfunctional, dystopic Baghdad and São Paulo and their respective victims and elites merging into a single nightmarish portent of urban chaos, guerrilla warfare, and governmental impotence, the capital of the twenty-first century.

No End in Sight is really much more about the closed-door decision making of Bush Administration officials than it is about life under the occupation; indeed, the footage of occupied Baghdad and irate, bewildered Iraqi citizens presents its material not so much as subjects in their own right, but as human proof of the Olympian carelessness of the best and brightest of American policymakers from Sept. 11, 2001, to the summer of 2003. The film excels first and foremost as a talking-heads movie in the style of Errol Morris’s The Fog of War, which focuses so intently on every tic and twitch of Robert McNamara as to, while highlighting his endless self-justifications and recriminations, simultaneously render him somehow more than human: a portrait of power and of one of power’s servants, an important player on the historical stage. No End in Sight achieves a similar success in its unflinching, close-up interviews with officials such as former Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage, former United States Ambassador to Iraq Barbara Bodine, and former Chief of Staff for Secretary of State Colin Powell, Colonel Lawrence Wilkerson, all of whom bluntly and in detail – and, sometimes, as with the impish Wilkerson, with humor – recount their version of the events leading up to the US invasion in 2003. In the process they fairly demolish the ever more finely spun, but nevertheless wholly untrue, tissue of lies, untruths, prevarications, and outright fantasizing that imperfectly clothed the administration’s nakedly cynical grab for power. That Bush’s rationale for war was at once completely false and dangerously beguiling – the cries of Big Bad Saddam and his nuclear wolf frightening credulous Americans and a supine Congress into believing the gaudy fabrications of a whimsically dangerous boy president – will be no secret to most, or at least to anyone who regularly follows, say, the sardonic editorials of Frank Rich and Paul Krugman, or the jeremiads of Lewis Lapham and the editors of The New York Review of Books, to say nothing of the passionate partisans of the blogosphere, all of whom have been tireless in cataloging the administration’s numerous malfeasances. No End in Sight puts a much-needed human face on the architects of the war, most of whom, as with those named above, reveal themselves as cautious, thoughtful professionals, men and women focused more on pragmatic questions than on ideological agendas, men and women, too, of conscience: empire builders, yes – the larger question of the morality and ultimate efficacy of American power projected through military force is never raised, reducing a stark political problematic for the United States in the twenty-first century into a question of planning and mechanics – but at least empire builders conscious of gravitas imperii, the weight of rule, and not the rapacious brigands who ran America’s ship of state aground under Bush’s feckless captaincy. While the film’s interviewees were also running the ship, albeit in a lesser capacity than the Dread Pirate Cheney, No End in Sight meticulously shows how Bush’s inner circle assiduously ignored the advice of these experts, all of whom were summarily shoved aside when their ideas drifted too far from the White House’s neoconservative party line. Thus the film, like The Fog of War, tempers its questioning of its subjects’ complicity in the events they recount with a well-earned sense of their fallible humanity, and serves as a moving record of the effects, moral and otherwise, their decisions have had on them. A standout among the voices in the film is Major General Paul Eaton, who from 2003 to 2004 was in charge of training the reconstituted Iraqi Army. His story, filled with missed chances, betrayed loyalties, and dashed expectations, maps out better than most the lost chances, despite the folly of the war’s initial planning, for some kind of stability following Saddam’s fall and before the onset of the insurgency. A few times during his retelling Eaton blinks back tears, overcome with sadness at the waste of life, American and Iraqi, during this disastrous war of choice. This and other moments in No End in Sight are real triumphs, moments in which we empathize with the film’s subjects, recognizing them too as the war’s victims – however removed from the blood and carnage – and, through this empathy, better understand the war’s prolonged and tragic effect on us all.

Manda Bala is ostensibly a look at kidnapping rings in the city of São Paulo, a city that frighteningly embodies what may be the face of urbanity for millions in the coming century: a city of sharp contrasts between the hyper-rich and the dirt poor, in which glittering towers soar over a landscape of ramshackle shantytowns; a city given over to factionalism and violence, in which, perversely, kidnappers who prey on the city’s rich use their ill-gotten money to illegally fund development projects, such as orphanages and sewers, in the slums; a city obsessed with security and surveillance, in which one obviously paranoid man dreams of one day receiving not one but several subdermal microchip implements, so that he could still be locatable via GPS satellite should one of the transmitters embedded in his skin be found and cut out; a city in which crime and victimization are not so much the random events feared in any large metropolis but a phenomenon as ubiquitous as the smog of Los Angeles or the overcrowding of Tokyo, in which plastic surgeons grow rich from reconstructing ears cut off by kidnappers as grisly threats to their victims’ families. In other words, Manda Bala is the wet dream of anyone who’s ever pored over a book by visionary city historian-apocalyptic seer Mike Davis, or anyone, indeed, who’s experienced or even thought about for a moment the startling, criminal disparities of life, death, rights, and dignity between the developed and developing worlds. The film’s greatest strengths are cinematic, its phantasmagoric display of exotic, improbable locales, such as a frog-growing farm that acts as a money-laundering enterprise for the kidnappers, and fascinatingly enigmatic people, such as one of the kidnappers, who discusses his activities dispassionately and seemingly without interest, his gaze intense from behind a black-and-green ski mask. The film’s weaknesses derive from these same strengths, as Manda Bala frequently eschews analysis and demographics in favor of expressionistic imagery and a pulsating Tropicália score; Kohn could perhaps have lingered longer on the hard data behind the dazzling shots, and proved a nexus of sociological fact to its protagonists’ tales of violence and fear. One also looks for a corrective vision, however slight, that is lacking from the film’s expose of São Paulo and its terrors; upon reflection, kidnapping gangs and frog farms seem not entirely unusual responses to the near-unstoppable pressures of population growth, poverty, resource depletion, and crime that face the developing world, and I missed a sense of urgent, if not outraged, advocacy that should perhaps accompany such a long gaze into the abyss (Kohn spent five years making Manda Bala). But the film is magnificent disaster tourism and eco-porn for all that, and at times reaches a poignant juxtaposition of image, narrative, and mood that renders most of the above criticism moot.

Finally, James Mangold’s 2007 remake, due out Sept. 7, of Delmer Davies’s 1957 masterpiece 3:10 to Yuma is a perfect opportunity to see Davies’s original film, a tense psychological study of murderer Ben Wade (played magnificently against type by Glenn Ford, who died almost a year ago today on Aug. 30, 2006) and the reluctant do-gooder Dan Evans (Van Heflin), who must keep Wade from escaping and get him on the eponymous train of the title, and from thence to prison. A good part of the movie takes place with the two men alone in small rooms, Ford deliciously plumbing Wade’s seductive, evil side as he attempts to cajole, wheedle, terrify, and otherwise manipulate Dan Evans into giving him freedom. The trailer for the new version, starring Christian Bale and Russell Crowe, promises much more kinetic thrills and chills, revealing in 30 second spots more horses, gunplay, and explosions than graced the entire 92 minutes of Davies’s original, which is the kind of taut, reflective moviemaking that Hollywood has largely abandoned today. But the original 3:10 to Yuma is one of the most effective cinematic portraits of menace I’ve ever seen, a menace that Crowe (who plays Wade in the remake), no matter how successful he is as a thug and brute off-screen, will probably never summon up on-screen. 

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