At some point, I think I will speak nothing but academese. I’m afraid I’m almost there as it is.

I’ve realized that — although I don’t believe in karma, as such — it would do me well to reflect on my hubris. I need to be more humble, more careful, more thorough and more patient. I need to keep an open mind and an open heart, otherwise, as one of my favourite professors advised me, “You only know what you know.”

Adorno once wrote that “To write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric.” This statement is part of a broader focus of Adorno’s, and that of other social theorists and artists, to come to grips with the sheer horror of the Holocaust and modern suffering. Is it right, is it meaningful for art to exist after humanity’s witnessed such massive suffering? Recently, I came across a paper where the author wonders how we can make sense of reality itself after the cruelty of the Holocaust/Auschwitz. Adorno later said that suffering has a right to be expressed, and to be expressed through art.

There’s also the common refrain, if it weren’t for intervention in the world wars, “we would all be speaking German right now.” Throughout my pre-university schooling, on every 11th of November (or close to it), the school would organize ceremonies for Remembrance Day. “On the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month” the first world war ended, and so we commemorate the sacrifices of those who died defending our freedom.

I remember being wholly skeptical of the whole affair. I knew, see, that the British occupied South Asia until 1947. I wasn’t sure what I was supposed to be remembering, exactly, on Remembrance Day.

Of course, I speak English. India has the world’s largest English-speaking population. There are more Francophones outside of France than inside it, not in Quebec, but in Africa. So what’s German to us? What’s German fascism to us, when, as Césaire forcefully lays out, the techniques and methods of fascism were first practised on those colonized — the wretched of the earth — by those same, self-styled defenders of freedom and democracy?

And what is Adorno’s statement if not hubristic and self-absorbed? Was poetry not barbaric after the Belgians slaughtered up to 10 million people in the Congo at the turn of the century? Was poetry not barbaric after millions were enslaved and transported in great ships like cattle, when millions died at the bayonets of the European colonizers? If poetry is to be barbaric, it was barbaric long before the Holocaust.

The kind of barbarism perfected at Auschwitz, after all, wasn’t invented by German fascists.

In my last academic year (2006-2007), I took a course on aesthetics and politics at UofT, Marxism and Form (VIC401, based on the book of the same title by Fredric Jameson), taught by Eric Cazdyn. Taking the course was one of the more intelligent moves I made while at UofT. It was a graduate seminar and I had absolutely no idea what I was in for: it was probably only long after the full-year course had been completed, when I read Aesthetics & Politics cover-to-cover that I became relatively comfortable with the concepts discussed in the course.

Literature & Theory

I’d taken a course on English literature in the 20th century (ENG140). The emphasis of that course, as I recall (which I don’t recall well because I took it in the summer of 2004 while I was working full-time and taking another course on comparative politics) was not so much on the political or social implications of the texts (and we read some very good texts) as the moves within aesthetics, almost devoid of context — from romanticism to naturalism to … I don’t even remember. I do recall the professor’s analysis of the purple triangle in Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse, a recurring motif, the significance of which flew over my head and probably still would (unless it was related to the politics of queer liberation, which, I can assure you, it wasn’t). I’m probably being unfair to the course, we did read In the Skin of a Lion, as well as Waiting for Godot, and I remember something about postmodernism being discussed (so maybe the course was moving through the major trends of literature?). Though, at the time, in the class I was taking on comparative politics, I learned about the concept of post-materialism which made a lot more sense to me. I should go back to my notes and see if I can actually give a fair and balanced account of the course content. Suffice it to say it bored me, very much.

My next experience with literature was a course on graphic novels (The ‘New Comics’, VIC300) with Luca Somigli. I enjoyed the content of the course, I’d already read most of the comics covered before starting the course anyway; and, judging from the mark I got on my final paper, Prof. Somigli enjoyed my paper very much. I wrote about Joe Sacco’s Safe Area Gorazde and his use of stereotypes to advance his political and moral agenda. Still, the discussions of literary theory and aesthetic theory, most of which I don’t recall anyway, probably went flying over my head. From these, and other experiences, I’d reckon that the most difficult thing in taking courses that are entirely outside of one’s academic purview is to acquire and maintain the vocabulary. By vocabulary, I don’t mean just the meanings of new words, but the significances and usages thereof. It took me, for instance, two whole years to wrap my head around the idea of postmodernism.

I suspect a lot of this had to do with the fact that I didn’t really think such terms and courses would be of much use to me — I was focusing on getting into medical school, not graduate school — and no one in life science or the kind of political science I was taking at UofT really cared about such things. That makes me wonder, as an aside, do Straussians bother to acknowledge postmodernism or think it worthy of being addressed? I don’t know of anyone like Harvey Mansfield — whose translations of The Prince and Discourses on Livy are superb — having written on Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic of Unmanly Liberal Academics.

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In 2000, I created a web site on Malcolm X, which has since become one of the major Malcolm X web sites on the Internet. It reflects a good deal on the ideology I adhered to and the way I approached things at that time, when I was 15 and completing grade 9 in Scarborough as a proto-Islamist. The site has remained stagnant, particularly ideologically — indeed, I put a disclaimer that the site is meant to present Malcolm within “an Islamic context” — although I’ve changed considerably, religiously and politically. It’s also remained stagnant in terms of content, the last substantive update being in 2005.

Academically, there was a surge of sustained interest in Malcolm X in the late 1980s and early 90s, in the midst of which Spike Lee produced the film in 1992. This interest reflected the growing relevance of Black nationalism as a response to the conditions of most Black people in the United States — Public Enemy was on point. Academics were commenting on Malcolm X leading up to and following the film. At some point in the 90s this interest seems to have tapered off. Another surge of interest surfaced in February 2005, around the fortieth anniversary of Malcolm’s assassination — commemorated by a special release of the Malcolm X DVD and mainstream media interest, but not (as far as I can tell) any substantial academic interest. That is, with the exception of Manning Marable at Columbia University who is now writing a biography of Malcolm.

I keep finding myself coming back to the question of Malcolm X, as well as the question of the web site. While I haven’t read anything relating to Malcolm substantially in a while, the myriad videos posted on the Internet have allowed me to instead watch him speak. Recently, I’ve bought several books containing his words and containing words about him. As I’ve developed politically and academically, however, the site has lagged behind.

Additionally, many people don’t know, exactly, what Malcolm X stood for (he himself had a hard time with that) or what his significance is to radical politics — he’s been reduced to a symbol and a phrase, “by any means necessary”.

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There’s a used bookstore way up the street. I find myself dropping by from time to time to see what they have — the first time I went I was interested only in the comics. Later, I went looking for other kinds of books, academic books. They used to have a whole set of writings of Marx and Engels from Progress Publishers that weren’t there when I visited yesterday. I also found a huge book, Film Theory and Criticism: Introductory Readings — the second edition from 1979. I looked into the most recent editions, and they are, for the most part, the same, with a few essays added here and there. I also found Rius’s Marx for Beginners. (“To Craig, A little light but politically correct humour. Happy Birthday! David. Summer, 1987.” I didn’t really find the book funny.)

There’s a shelf full of ‘classics’ of literature — Penguin Classics and the like. I saw a couple of copies of Albert Camus’s The Outsider, and I considered buying one. The problem, of course, was that it was a translation from the French. And I was supposed to have read the French in grade 12. Mme Liscio had wanted us to read Jean-Paul Sartre’s Huis Clos as an introduction to existentialism and Camus’s L’Etranger as an introduction to the philosophy of the absurd. I read the former, but barely read the latter, relying instead on free online study notes — which, needless to say, were a very poor substitute. After I graduated from high school I made little effort to keep what French I had learned fresh. I did, at one point, sign out a French comic book from Robarts — Stigmates — in a failed attempt to improve what little French I had rattling around in my mind.

In the summer of 2006, as Israel executed its war on Lebanon, I realized just how much was written on the subject in French — obviously, a lot to do with Lebanon’s colonial past. But it was when I came back to Sartre — reading Search for a Method for my Marxism & Form class — that I began to regret more deeply my lack of advanced French reading skills. Then I watched The Battle of Algiers — and I could not, for the life of me, keep up with the spoken French and I had to rely on English subtitles. Then came readings of Rancière, Badiou, as well as rumblings of Althusser, Balibar, so on, and that increased the desire to be able to access them in French. Not to mention Frantz Fanon. It’s like regretting not having learned German so as to be able to read Marx, Lukacs, Brecht, Benjamin, and others in their original language — only I did know French. And still do, to some extent.

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Kant says shooting the ball violates the categorical imperative.
Hegel says just play offside.

Outside Bahen at about 6:30 on Monday.

Edit (7/31/07):
Posted this nearly a year ago, now I realize it’s from the Monty Python sketch, The Philosopher’s Football Match. The correct quotation is:

Hegel is arguing that the reality is merely an a priori adjunct of non-naturalistic ethics, Kant via the categorical imperative is holding that ontologically it exists only in the imagination, and Marx claiming it was offside.

ANT352Y1
South Asia: Practices, Theories, Representations 52L

This course examines the institution of the royal court in the ancient New World as a nexus for negotiation of power and assertion of cultural identity. Case studies concentrate on the Maya; Aztec and Inca cultures provide important comparative contexts. We also explore the integration of textual and material evidence in investigating ancient cultures.
Prerequisite: ARH305H1
This is a Social Science course.

I think I was 6 or 7 years old when I recognized the difference between South Asia and South America.* Maybe younger. I think it was around the same time when I realized how absurd oxymorons like “ancient New World” can be.

* Someone fucked up. This is the course description for ANT421H1, which, apparently without any sense of irony, is entitled “Royal Courts of the Ancient New World”.

ANT426H1
Orientalism: Western Views of the Other 39L

Language and imagery representing the “oriental” in the West. Emphasis on representations of the “Semites”, the Islamic peoples of North Africa, the Middle East and South Asia, as well as the Jews from the mid-nineteenth to the mid-twentieth century.
Prerequisite: ANT323Y1/ANT329Y1/any 300-level course in INI/VIC/NMC/Jewish Studies

Three guesses as to what one of the primary reading materials for this course is. Maybe I should take it and focus on comics, but it’s not offered this year. Besides, in reading over thirty years of Marvel Comics I’ve only ever once come across an Arab superhero. Arabian Knight. He wears a turban, has a scimitar, and flies on a magic carpet. I kid you not:

(That was part of Marvel’s Contest of Champions in 1982. Two years later in 1984 Marvel had a Secret Wars event. Here is one of the funniest videos I’ve seen in a long time, re: Secret Wars.)

Sometimes — most of the times — it’s hard to escape the feeling that at the end of the day I’m one of the smartest dumbasses I know. I’ve been at this University for three years and the most original and convincing work I’ve done is reconciling the place of virtue and passion in Rousseau’s Levite of Ephraim; or analysing the role of stereotypes in Sacco’s Safe Area Gorazde. Oh, and my first year epic — Tolkien’s use of Faramir of Gondor in the Lord of the Rings as a representative of his own motivations, ideas, fears, etc. If the expression on your face is somewhere between “what the fuck?” and “what the fuck?” then welcome to my life.

And then, all that shit isn’t all that original anyway. So in the end, what have I accomplished? Nothing. What have I learned about what I want to do? Nothing. All I know is what I don’t want to do, and that’s what I’m probably going to end up doing.

I’ve learned how I’ll probably never know how many genes, exactly, were on or off (or somewhere in between) in shaping my nose, unless (and perhaps even after) I get my genome mapped out. Or at least that part of it — the nose part. If there is a nose part. There are probably nose parts, spread out all over the place. I also know what my kidney looks like, under a microscope. Okay, not mine, but a rat’s. Apparently they’re very similar. I drew real live (dead) human bones once (more than once). I’ve also learned that a dead man’s half-back-torso is heavy, and, when stored in formaldehyde in a fridge, smelly. But I knew that latter part from grade eleven pig dissection.

I’ve come to accept the theory of evolution as conclusive. I no longer believe homosexuality is something to cringe at, and defend it. All that and more, and none of it in the classroom. For all it matters I could’ve been panhandling in the Toronto Reference Library or Robarts these past three years. As long as I had access to a computer and the Internet I would’ve been fine. I also would’ve been spared reading Rousseau’s Levite of Ephraim. Which, admittedly, is a very short read.

In the end, I feel like I’m a little bit of everything, not enough of anything, and far more confused about my future than I have a right to be.

Any academic who writes or lectures on colonialism or the colonial experience will quote, cite or otherwise refer to Joseph Conrad (particularly the Heart of Darkness), often directly, at least once, and usually twice or more in his or her output (i.e., writings, lectures, etc.).

I am currently carrying out a massive research project to try and prove this thesis. (Well, no, not really.)

POL majors: stay away from POL323, unless you have trouble sleeping. Even when the instructors get involved and enthusiastic, the course content is more sleep-inducing than advanced calculus. It’s boring, uninteresting crap that some dead white guys wrote hundreds of years ago and we study now because — well, apparently these brilliant men had brilliant things to say, and hid it in deeper layers upon layers of meaning, because some despot would otherwise have their head. And now it is our duty to go through this stuff and contort our minds and bodies to come up with esoteric shit that only four people on the planet give a shit about — and if we don’t agree with those four and a half people then we’re clearly wrong in our interpretations (how can you be “wrong” in fucking political philosophy?). I fucking hate this course. Biggest mistake I made this year.