The Question of the Foreigner

Derrida opens Of Hospitality by repeating the phrase “the question of the foreigner.” In his characteristic style, he repeats the phrase, lending emphasis on different words in the phrase in order to draw out its many connotations. These terms have much to say about transnational literature as well as the security of national boundaries. Here are a few of the different meanings that “the question of the foreigner” can have:

The question of the foreigner

---the questions that the foreigner asks the native. Why do you do this thing this way ? Why do you have this habit? The foreigner questions in an anthropological way, his attempt to understand a different society opens up implications that society could be different. The foreigner’s questions challenges the organization of society, the conventions which govern it. The question suggests an alternative way of doing things, a different practice. It suggests that things do not need to be this one way. They could be very different. The cement of society softens in the face of this question. The question does not need to be hostile to have this effect, it could be playful, slightly innocent even, a naïve asking, rarely though does it have the simplicity of a child, who usually receives a definitive answer from the educating adult, whereas the foreigner is given a more cautious answer.

---the problem of the foreigner. Perhaps in relation to the first questions of the foreigner, the native answers by challenging the legitimacy of the foreigner to belong, to visit, to exist here. The “problem” of the foreigner immediately posits an answer, to ask the question suggests a hostility, a suspicion , a distinction between we, who discuss the question, and those who are questioned. To raise the question is to assume a position of security outside the question. The question identifies you as not foreign. To ask about the Jewish question in the nineteenth century, or the Palestinian question today, or the immigrant question is to speak from the somewhere outside the question’s object. The questioner is not within the question.

---to interrogate the foreigner. The question of the foreigner serves to answer his question with another. Who are you? What do you want? Why are you here? This question reveals a concern that the foreigner brings trouble, that a potential disaster follows the foreigner, has motivated the foreigner to arrive upon our shores. Is he here to steal from us or to bring secret violence? Oedipus at Colonus, is the foreigner cursed? Does he bring a god’s wrath with him? Is he Orestes? Doe she carry a bomb in the form of a plague or something in his shoe? The Greek scapegoat was once as threatening as a refugee terrorist might seem to us. We have not gotten beyond superstitious fear.

---to doubt about the foreigner –does the foreigner even exist as a full person any more? What being has the foreigner lost by leaving his home? Is the state of foreignness a diminishment of being? Does the foreigner have less weight, credibility, currency (to use Paul Simon’s phrase)?

--the overall question of being, which the foreigner raises? To exist as a refugee is to wonder about the security of existence. The grounding of humans’ being becomes less certain by being foreign. This questioning does not necessarily lead to a loss of significance: for we can ask whether the foreigner is weaker than the native or stronger? Is the foreigner a helpless supplicant, or a worldly traveler, or a trickster sophist, come to sell us his story. Anyone who has lived in a foreign country has a more complicated relationship with his native land.

Marketing your Class

This week I went to several lectures and dinners in which all sorts of professors were expostulating the need to insert a greater sense of marketing in to how they teach the humanities. This sounds great, if by marketing we mean something like persuasion. Professors should certainly strive to convince students that a subject matters, they should show its importance in the world, and not just pedantically assume that just because the topic has been considered important in the past that it will continue to be so. We should be light on our feet, witty, approachable, smiling.

The problem with marketing as a university principle arises when the very disciplines are structured according to a rewards system that is meant to mimic a market. Universities are not actually organized like an economy. They bend over backwards to reorganize themselves as if they were but the inherent hierarchy means that they do not operate through their own mechanisms. There is always the hand of an administrator acting as if he or she were the invisible one allocating resources. The free market model is more often a jargon to justify policies that administrators perceive as marketable, but not because the market has chosen them through its own operations.

Universities use business economics as a model, but they are not actually operating as an open system of competition. The very structures that are meant to measure the economic value of a discipline end up restricting their competitiveness. For example, any university that rewards departments for having high enrollment needs to enact rules on how to count students. Even in fields where interdisciplinarity is considered important, the mechanisms that measure the market flow of enrollments end up restricting it.

Students, for example, are routinely told they must take courses within their department because of enrollment counts. This of course undermines the free flow of the market. The reason students are treated like precious commodities within a mercantilist economy is that all department advisors know they are being measured by an administration that wants to see high numbers. Thus they prevent students from taking courses outside their department. The administrative mechanism that is intend to measure market place movements ends up hampering that very ebb and flow. Only by not counting enrollments and by lifting restrictions on where students take courses will a college simulate a market.

The real trouble is that universities are not interested in just selling classes. They also want to produce smart graduates, innovative research, famous professors. Marketing does not produce the most intelligent argument. The tendency is to develop a product so that it appeals broadly by deploying the most common denominator within the target audience. Very complex thought may go into designing the product, there is indeed often great art in simplicity, but most things up for sale are not so well thought through. They fit a familiar pattern; they confirm existing tastes and prejudices. History departments, if they were driven by market forces, would teach nothing but the American Civil War, World War Two, maybe some Roman history if it did not involve too much Latin.

Marketed products are not supposed to disturb the expectations of the audience. Television appeals to the assumptions that the audience already possesses; rarely does it seek to alter them, more often than not it confirms them by giving them a product that is consciously crafted to excite the feelings that have already been shown to exist. Innovation is important to marketing design only in order to distinguish a product from its competitors, but only to the extent that the new image promises a variation on an already familiar pattern.

If university courses were structured like sit-coms or reality shows then they would quickly stop developing new ideas. They would sell lots of seats perhaps, but they would not actually generate creative innovation. Instead they would reiterate the status quo, as opposed to changing it.

Humanities Mole

Over dinner with a speaker from England, he mentioned that King’s College, London was going through gut-wrenching budget cuts and that all sorts of humanities faculty were threatened with elimination. This sounded much worse than what is going on in University of Nevada, Reno, awful as those cuts are. I mentioned that I knew some German faculty at King’s College. He said they were probably at risk.

Imagine my surprise when upon googling the news, joining the Facebook page in protest to the cuts, reading through The Guardian on the matter, and finding a string of blogs that it turns out that the guy I knew from back in Berlin a few years ago was himself the professor/administrator held responsible for the cuts. According to an ocean of commentary, it seems that this German scholar has reached the height of professor, entered into an administrative appointment and is now administering the new budget plan upon the humanities.

One way to save German at universities—be the professor who works with the administration to reduce the humanities. I had never really thought of this strategy—rather than trying to save German language and culture instruction, one should ascend to the level where one administers the cuts to other departments as well as one’s own. This sounds almost like a brilliant John Le Carré plot. The administrator eliminating the humanities is actually working for the humanities. He’s a double agent.

Clearly more investigation is required, but the brutal truth remains, clever ironies or not—London is chopping down philosophy and the humanities in general. You, too, should look into the matter.

Air War

Aerial attack always seems justified to those in the sky. The subtle distinctions that decide actions on the street are unintelligible from above.

It will take a long time for the perspective from the ground to give the other side of the story. Slaughterhouse Five was published 24 years after the firebombing of Dresden.

The newly leaked footage of two Apache helicopters shooting a cluster of Iraqis on the ground is not likely to elicit the domestic moral and emotional groundswell that critics of the American occupation might expect.

http://wikileaks.org/

Europeans might be horrified, but Americans have for too long now seen cop shows in which the audience automatically identifies with the camera in the police car or up in the helicopter. Whomever is being depicted in the grainy film must be guilty, otherwise they would not be in the crosshairs to begin with. If you are “caught” on an official video, you are doing something wrong—this presumption will lead audiences to side with the US military.

The contrast between the familiar American voices of the pilots versus the vague humanoids running on the ground will further pull viewers’ allegiances toward the US military. Yes, the gunners are callous and cocky in their gleeful annihilation of the Iraqis on the street, but again only audience members who have not played a violent video game before, nor watched a teenager play one, will really be surprised at the pilots’ jocular tone.

The audience is immune from the violence, with the camera circling in the air, our screens on our laps, at our desks. The war has been dragging on, no one is surprised that terrible things happen.

The difference that the vantage point makes is brought out vividly at the end of the video, when US troops arrive in vehicles, soon they run around much like the Iraqis killed minutes before, except this time they are uniformed men racing with wounded children in their arms.

Surely there is no real sociological difference between the Americans in the helicopter and those in the humvees, yet one bunch is cracking jokes about not bringing kids to a battle (how about not bringing a battle to kids?) and another bunch seems to be moving very quickly to save them. The Americans on the ground are racing to pick up the bodies of the people who had just a few minutes earlier been trying to pick up the bodies of the first victims. The only difference is that the Americans are in uniform and they are running in a deliberate direction because they do not think the helicopter will shoot at them. The Iraqis at the beginning of the video were milling around on the street, also not believing that they will be shot at from the helicopters.

These videos are immediate, even the leak did not take long—two years, but the slow moral process, the back and forth debate over what was justified or not, will drag on.

I remember in 1993 leading a group of retired UCLA graduates on a trip up the Mosel and down the Rhine. For the most part, these were very conservative people, from Orange County. The kind who tell you that Mexicans are ruining the California school system and that Germany is a nice place because it is so white.

There were two quiet guys who kept away from the others, modest and not particularly wealthy, if you asked them had they ever been in Germany before, they would say no, but they had been over it. They had both served in bombers during World War Two, felt they had done the right thing in the war, but now they wanted to come back fifty years later to see the place they had bombed.

They were shy, kept to themselves, didn’t eat and drink like the other travelers. One of them had gone to Stanford on the GI bill and studied German after the war. They were uncomplicated, not particularly arrogant or defensive, they just wanted to see the country, maybe talk to some of the people there.

The Poet's Name

I have learned recently not speculate on the letters that make up a person’s name, that literary musings do not amuse when they are about your proper name. If I imagine some one speculating about my name, it instantly brings back vicious childhood teasing, and why would that be different for anyone else?

Still what a boon for the imagination when in the midst of a noisy Dionysian party a quiet friend slipped me a copy of John Koethe. What’s a German professor to do, but become intrigued? Is there some secret connection that the letters of the poet’s name spell out? An affinity affirmed, a lineage that requires the adjustment of just one letter?

Well, it’s not that simple. John Koethe is his own very serious poet, not someone swiftly tucked into a familiar envelope of literary history. If anything, reading Koethe reminds me of first encountering John Ashbury in the New Yorker, and wondering how to decipher the lines.

Goethe was not often turned around to contemplate memory. In that sense he was Classical –always facing the horizon ahead, anticipating more knowledge, yet unfamiliar treasures on the next island. His moodiness came in youth, so that when he yearned, it was for what he could not now have, as opposed to what was lost in recollection. The opening to Faust 2 was the one connection I could find between Goethe and Koethe.

Really there is more K in Koethe than Goethe.

He writes as an American who has read so much philosophy that his intimate feelings speak as theory. No romantic language of simplicity, no turning the speech of the ordinary farmer into self-revery. His introspection sounds not just like someone who has read Proust, but who has also absorbed the last forty years of Proust criticism. Koethe’s poem seem to have internalized the grammar of literary criticism, so that they speak the voice of a professor recollecting his life.

Falling Water, the poem I was assigned, and the one that produces the most Google hits, has the private voice of an academic. It recounts taking a trip, getting divorced, raising children with self-conscious turns. He moves directly from a personal thought to a general statement, as if abstracting quickly away from himself, a move that a therapist once pointed out to me.

So Koethe is not a poet who speaks from another time and place, he belongs very much to our own. He is the intensely learned middle American university professor, and not the alienated cliché who's grumbling that he should be teaching back East. Koethe seems too Buddhist for such resentment. His poems describe intellectual thought in place, where he now lives, so that the distances he contemplates are temporal, his own life, but not the lures of an island off on a distant shore.