getfiscal posted:

you might have read "socialism betrayed" which is another CPUSA book

that was it

clanzy posted:

im gonna read tropic of cancer because my infinitely tall blond anarchoteen friend ordered me to

it is a real bad book. good luck tho it's enjoyable in some senses but also really frustratingly bad in others

getfiscal posted:

you might have read "socialism betrayed" which is another CPUSA book

how long has the cpusa been a weird pro small-business party that called obama a great friend of socialism or w/e

Hi IWC, hope all is going well there. As you have no doubt gathered from Dad's travelogues, we are loving Turkey. We are very lucky to have Kemal as our guide-he has a PHD in ancient history & also mythology. He really brings history alive & there is so much of it here. He is also a very liberal muslim & has given us an interesting slant on Islam. Our co-travellers are also interesting- an African-american couple from L.A who are both very religious Christians but very liberal politically & very open to learning about Islam. They are also very well travelled & we have had some very interesting discussions.
Tomorrow we are off to Ephesus which is important for historians & for christians.
The weather is wonderful so hope it continues.
Love

stegosaurus posted:

getfiscal posted:

you might have read "socialism betrayed" which is another CPUSA book

how long has the cpusa been a weird pro small-business party that called obama a great friend of socialism or w/e

probably ever since the 70s and 80s when everyone was just an undercover fbi agent anyway

see also: this forum

Ironicwarcriminal posted:

babyfinland posted:

aw

Kemal advises us that the view of the Sunni Moslems in Turkey (90% of the population) is:

- Islam says you don't kill. Therefore suicide bombers are not representing true Islam.

- Islam requires that there be no-one between the individual and God, therefore it's just you and the Koran – if a cleric, or the church, or anyone tries to tell you how to interpret it, this is not true Islam.

- Arabs are sh*ts, and their concept of Islam is not acceptable.

(Don't blame me, I'm just passing this on.)

thats basically true i guess

Ironicwarcriminal posted:

emails from my archetypical baby boomer parents on holiday

Hi IWC, hope all is going well there. As you have no doubt gathered from Dad's travelogues, we are loving Turkey. We are very lucky to have Kemal as our guide-he has a PHD in ancient history & also mythology. He really brings history alive & there is so much of it here. He is also a very liberal muslim & has given us an interesting slant on Islam. Our co-travellers are also interesting- an African-american couple from L.A who are both very religious Christians but very liberal politically & very open to learning about Islam. They are also very well travelled & we have had some very interesting discussions.
Tomorrow we are off to Ephesus which is important for historians & for christians.
The weather is wonderful so hope it continues.
Love

lol ur parents sound exactly like mine

The teleological model that the mosque participants seek to realize in their lives is predicated on the exemplary conduct of the Prophet and his Companions. It would be easy to dismiss this ideal as a nostalgic desire to emulate a bygone past, a past whose demands can never be met within the exigencies of the present. Yet to do so would be to miss the significance of such a telos for practical ethical conduct. Among mosque participants, individual efforts toward self-realization are aimed not so much at discovering one's "true" desires and feelings, or at establishing a personal relationship with God, but at honing one's rational and emotional capacities so as to approximate the exemplary model of the pious self (see chapter 4). The women I worked with did not regard trying to emulate authorized models of behavior as an external social imposition that constrained individual freedom. Rather, they treated socially authorized forms of performance as the potentialities-the ground if you will-through which the self is realized.

Messick argues that prior to the introduction of the modem legal system in Yemen, the shari`a, while based on a set of founding texts, was not so much a system of codified rules as it was a set of discursive practices "lived in social relations, in human embodiers and interpretive articulations" (1993, 152). These discursive practices entailed not only secondary commentaries on the founding texts, but also the practical ways in which a variety of social actors used the shari`a to resolve a range of problems and settle arguments.

Tradition may also be understood along the lines of what Foucault calls a "discursive formation," a field of statements and practices whose structure of possibility is neither the individual, nor a collective body of overseers, but a form of relation between the past and present predicated upon a system of rules that demarcate both the limits and the possibility of what is sayable, doable, and recognizable as a comprehensible event in all its manifest forms." Talal Asad, in drawing upon the work of Alisdair Maclntyre (Maclntyre 1984, 1988), proposes a notion of tradition that is commensurable with Michel Foucault's work on discursive formations (T. Asad 1986).'R Asad suggests that Islam is best regarded as a "discursive tradition" whose pedagogical practices articulate a conceptual relationship with the past, through an engagement with a set of foundational texts (the Quran and the hadith), commentaries thereon, and the conduct of exemplary figures. Tradition, in this sense, may be conceived as a particular modality of Foucault's discursive formation in which reflection upon the past is a constitutive condition for the understanding and reformulation of the present and the future. Islamic discursive practices, in this view, link practitioners across the temporal modalities of past, present, and future through pedagogy of practical, scholarly, and embodied forms of knowledges and virtues deemed central to the tradition (T. Asad 1986, 14). Clearly indebted to Foucault's conception of power and discourse, Asad's formulation of tradition draws attention both to micropractices of interpersonal pedagogy, through which the truth of a particular discursive practice is established, and to the macrolevel of historically sedimented discourses, which determine the possibility of what is debatable, enunciable, and doable in the present. Tradition, viewed in this way, is not a set of symbols and idioms that justify present practices, neither is it an unchanging set of cultural prescriptions that stand in contrast to what is changing, contemporary, or modem. Nor is it a historically fixed social structure. Rather, the past is the very ground through which the subjectivity and self-understanding of a tradition's adherents are constituted. An Islamic discursive tradition, in this view, is therefore a mode of discursive engagement with sacred texts, one effect of which is the creation of sensibilities and embodied capacities (of reason, affect, and volition) that in turn are the conditions for the tradition's reproduction. Significantly, such a concept does not assume all-powerful voluntary subjects who manipulate the tradition for their own ends, but inquires into those conditions of discursive formulation that require and produce the kind of subjects who may speak in its name.

The difference between these two views turns upon contrastive understandings of the relationship between bodily behavior and the pious self: for Amna, performative behavior may signify a pious self but does not necessarily form it. For the women I worked with, bodily acts (like weeping in prayer), when performed repeatedly, both in public and private, endowed the self with certain qualities: bodily behavior was therefore not so much a sign of interiority as it was a means of acquiring its potentiality. I use the term "potentiality" here in its Aristotelian meaning, in which it does not suggest a generic faculty or power, but is linked to the abilities one acquires through specific kinds of training and knowledge.' This usage of "potentiality" implies that in order to be good at something one undergoes a teleological program of volitional training that presupposes an exemplary path to knowledge-knowledge that one comes to acquire through assiduous schooling and practice.

Another crucial difference between Amna's understanding of performative behavior and that of the mosque movement participants lies in their conception of the role authoritative role models (such as Abu Bakr who is legendary for his ability to cry profusely during prayers) play in the shaping of the virtuous self. Note how emphatic Amna is about the kind of reflection that should inform one's emulation of Abu Bakr's behavior: one cries not simply because Abu Bakr cried, but because through reflection upon Abu Bakr's conduct one finds those spaces within oneself that identify with his ability to cry. In other words, according to Amna, Abu Bakr's conduct should not be unthinkingly reproduced but should serve as the ground upon which reflection about the "true I" proceeds. In contrast, for the women I worked with, an exemplary model was not where one discovered the "true I" but was a means to transcend the "I" that is invested in ephemeral pleasures and pursuits. Moreover, in contrast to Amna, many of the mosque participants believed that to emulate Abu Bakr's habit of weeping during prayers was not wrong precisely because it was through this mimetic reproduction that one eventually came to acquire the moral character of the exemplar. Note that self-reflection plays a different role in this conception in that it is aimed toward molding the "I" to approximate an authoritative model whose immanent form is the necessary means to the substance the "I" is to become. In other words, bodily form in this view does not simply represent the interiority (as it does for women like Amna), but serves as the "developable means" (T. Asad 1993) through which certain kinds of ethical and moral capacities are attained.

Note that for Ashmawi, unlike for the women I worked with, modesty is less a divinely ordained virtue than it is an attribute of a "decent and wise person," and in this sense is similar to any other human attribute that marks a person as respectable. Furthermore, for Ashmawi the proper locus of the attribute of modesty is the interiority of the individual, which then has an effect on outward behavior. In other words, for Ashmawi modesty is not so much an attribute of the body as it is a characteristic of the individual's interiority, which is then expressed in bodily form. In contrast, for the women I worked with, this relationship between interiority and exteriority was almost reversed: a modest bodily form (the veiled body) did not simply express the self's interiority but was the means by which it was acquired. Since the mosque participants regarded outward bodily markers as an ineluctable means to the virtue of modesty, the body's precise movements, behaviors, and gestures were all made the object of their efforts to live by the code of modesty.

In light of this ongoing debate, a consideration of the mosque participants' understanding of virtuous action raises yet another set of interesting questions regarding Butler's emphasis on the significatory aspects of bodily performatives. As I mentioned earlier, the mosque participants do not understand the body as a sign of the self's interiority but as a means of developing the self's potentiality. (Potentiality here refers not to a generic human faculty but to the abilities one acquires through specific kinds of embodied training and knowledge, see p. 147.) As described in chapter 4, the mosque participants are in fact strongly critical of the nationalist-identitarian interpretations of religiosity because these views treat the body primarily as a sign of the self rather than as a means to its formation. One might say that for the mosque participants, therefore, the body is not apprehensible through its ability to function as a sign but encompasses an entire manner of being and acting in which the body serves as the developable means for its consummation. In light of this, it is important to ask whether a theory of embodied performativity that assumes a theory of linguistic signification (as necessary to its articulation) is adequate for analyzing formulations of the body that insist on the inadequacy of the body to function as a sign?

The fact that the mosque participants treat the body as a medium for, rather than a sign of, the self also has consequences for how subversion or destabilization of norms might operate within such an imaginary. Note that the mosque participants regard both compliance to and rebellion against norms as dependent upon the teachability of the body-what I called the "docility of the body" in chapter 1-such that both virtuous and unvirtuous dispositions are neccesarily learned. This means that the possibility for disrupting the structural stability of norms depends upon literally retutoring the body rather than on destabilizing the referential structure of the sign, or, for that matter, positing an alternative representational logic that challenges masculinist readings of feminine corporeality. Thus, anyone interested in reforming this tradition cannot simply assume that resignifying Islamic practices and virtues (like modesty or donning the veil) would change the meaning of these practices for the mosque participants; rather, what is required is a much deeper engagement with the architecture of the self that undergirds a particular mode of living and attachment, of which modesty/veiling are a part.

The recalcitrant character of the structure of orthodox Islamic norms contrasts dramatically with the politics of resignification that Butler's formulation of performativity presupposes. Butler argues that the body is knowable through language (even if it is not reducible to language); corporeal politics for her often ensue from those features of signification and reference that destabilize the referential structure. In Butler's conception, insofar as the force of the body is knowable through the system of signification, challenges to the system come from interventions in the significatory features of that system. For example, Butler analyzes the reappropriation of the term "queer," which was historically used as a form of hate speech against lesbians and gays, but which has now come to serve as a positive term of self-identification. For Butler the appropriation of the term "queer" works by redirecting the force of the reiterative structure of homophobic norms and tethering the term to a different context of valences, meanings, and histories. What is notable for the purpose of my argument here is that it is a change in the referential structure of the sign that destabilizes the normative meaning and force of the term "queer." In the case of the mosque movement, as I have argued above, a change in the referential structure of the system of signs cannot produce the same effect of destabilization. Any attempt to destabilize the normative structure must also take into account the specificity of embodied practices and virtues, and the kind of work they perform on the self, recognizing that any transformation of their meaning requires an engagement with the technical and embodied armature through which these practices are attached to the self.

Edited by babyfinland (Sept. 8, 2012 01:43:46)

Ironicwarcriminal posted:

deadken posted:

Ironicwarcriminal posted:
emails from my archetypical baby boomer parents on holiday

Hi IWC, hope all is going well there. As you have no doubt gathered from Dad's travelogues, we are loving Turkey. We are very lucky to have Kemal as our guide-he has a PHD in ancient history & also mythology. He really brings history alive & there is so much of it here. He is also a very liberal muslim & has given us an interesting slant on Islam. Our co-travellers are also interesting- an African-american couple from L.A who are both very religious Christians but very liberal politically & very open to learning about Islam. They are also very well travelled & we have had some very interesting discussions.
Tomorrow we are off to Ephesus which is important for historians & for christians.
The weather is wonderful so hope it continues.
Love


lol ur parents sound exactly like mine

i wouldn't be surprised if the parents of most posters in the zone got on really well at a dinner party

they would have a lot to talk about, having raised special needs children

Ironicwarcriminal posted:

deadken posted:

Ironicwarcriminal posted:
emails from my archetypical baby boomer parents on holiday

Hi IWC, hope all is going well there. As you have no doubt gathered from Dad's travelogues, we are loving Turkey. We are very lucky to have Kemal as our guide-he has a PHD in ancient history & also mythology. He really brings history alive & there is so much of it here. He is also a very liberal muslim & has given us an interesting slant on Islam. Our co-travellers are also interesting- an African-american couple from L.A who are both very religious Christians but very liberal politically & very open to learning about Islam. They are also very well travelled & we have had some very interesting discussions.
Tomorrow we are off to Ephesus which is important for historians & for christians.
The weather is wonderful so hope it continues.
Love


lol ur parents sound exactly like mine

i wouldn't be surprised if the parents of most posters in the zone got on really well at a dinner party

your dad even writes "travelogues," my dad did the exact same thing