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Book Review – Imperialist Canada

Below is a book review I submitted to Canadian Mennonite.

Todd Gordon. (2010) Imperialist Canada. Arbeiter Ring Publishing.

Todd Gordon’s Imperialist Canada is perhaps not in the type of book typically reviewed in Canadian Mennonite.  It is not a piece of theology or a devotional work of spirituality; it is not written for or about the church; nowhere are Mennonites mentioned within its pages.  The content of this book, however, forms a clearly articulated account that I submit should be of great interest to Canadian Mennonites.  As the title implies this work is an attempt to demonstrate that Canada has and continues presently to operate under an imperialist logic and practice.  This portrayal of Canada is brought into direct contrast with popular caricatures of Canada as peacekeeping or a sort of benign moral compass for our southern neighbours at best or their obedient lackeys at worst.  Gordon argues that these caricatures exist simply because the global presence of the United States quantitatively overshadows the role of Canada not because Canada functions under any qualitatively different structure.  In this way Canada is now framed as a sort of junior (though maturing) player in global imperialism.  So what does it mean for Canada to be an imperialist nation and why is it important that we as Canadian Mennonites pay attention?

While the era of direct colonial control over nations by Europeans is (largely) over Gordon argues that the logic of imperialism that fueled colonialism remains intact.  Citing David McNally imperialism is described as “a system of global inequalities and domination – embodied in regimes of property, military powers and global institutions – through which wealth is drained from the labour and resources of people in the Global South to the systematic advantage of capital in the North” (26).  It is important to note that imperialism is here framed predominantly as an economic issue and more specifically a capitalist issue.  A significant contribution to this book is not only with regards to Canadian imperialism but to the growing sentiment that the logic of capitalism is reaching or has surpassed its carrying capacity (it is straining under the weight of its own growth).  This comes from the central (and profoundly simple) insight that “just like the other major capitalist powers, Canadian capital is driven by a logic of expansion” (10).  The phrase ‘economic growth’ is so deeply embedded in our cultural lexicon that we don’t often stop to think about the implications of our growth or why there is a need for growth.  For economically stable westerners economic growth means the material accumulation of things like funds, property and products.  How can such accumulation be made possible?  Gordon asserts that it is made possible by an imperialistic logic of expansion which will create advantages for the wealthy at the cost of the poor.  Gordon goes on to spend the bulk of his book demonstrating how Canada is directly and often independently involved in these sorts of practices.

Gordon follows Canada’s imperialist logic down several pathways.  Beginning at home Gordon looks at the clearest historical trajectory which is Canada’s relationship to First Nations people.  While these practices are given increasing (not to say sufficient) attention in the Mennonite church I will shift to the later chapters.  From domestic relations to First Nations people the book shifts to Canada’s global vision and outlines the implications and effects of the global liberalization of southern economies (often referred to as neo-liberalism).  The claim of neo-liberalism is that if smaller more impoverished economies can come on board as international trading ‘partners’ they can stand a better chance at improving their domestic quality of life.  Whatever the intention of these shifts in global economics the reality according to Gordon is that more affluent nations have been able to open up formerly isolated or marginalized nations where they are able to profit from extracting natural resources or exploiting cheap labour.  Here Gordon cites the expansion of Canadian based mining companies in places like South America or Canadian clothing manufacturers in Haiti.  And in contrast to public claims by neo-liberal advocates Gordon cites studies that shows poverty growing fastest in countries that have opened themselves up extensively to wealthy trading partners.  Proceeding chapters continue to outline how these imperial economic practices inevitably bring ecological instability, social unrest and military enforcement.  Particularly unnerving is the account of Canada’s role in overturning the democratically elected president Jean-Bertand Aristide in Haiti in 2004.

Gordon covers a vast and complex array of issues related to Canada’s domestic and foreign practices.  Many of the claims are of course contested by other groups and individuals.  One reviewer criticized Gordon for not being more balanced in acknowledging that many practices in the globalized economy can improve the quality of living in particular locations.  In some ways this criticism can be likened to those who cite the positive experiences of some First Nations individuals who attended residential schools.  It is important to give voice to people’s experience and part of the human spirit is its ability to exist and even flourish in a variety of circumstances.  These stories however cannot detract from those wishing to take a step back and examine the functioning of larger social structures or policies and their effects on people’s lives.  In this matter Gordon is clear in his claims.  Contemporary capitalism as it is expressed in Canada remains an imperialist and colonial project.  As such it is inherently and explicitly violent and needs to be rejected.  This is claim that the Mennonite church, as a peace church, must at very least understand and then to wrestle with how we can respond.  A peace theology with any integrity or hope of relevance must continue to understand and explore the economic structures that now weigh so heavily on so many.  Imperialist Canada offers itself as an important dialogue partner in that process.

Notes from the Exodus

I would say the most concerted and continuous effort that I made in formal studies was in the area of biblical Hebrew. This is a sort of sad statement given the level of proficiency I have maintained. Recently though I have taken to preach on the OT passages of the Lectionary and, being summer, I find myself with a bit more time to work in the ‘original text’. This Sunday will be Exodus 1:1-2:10. I have greatly appreciated the small (and significant) nuances that have emerged from even a basic walk through the Hebrew.

Many of the observations can be made from the English as well.  The most clear is the precedent of ‘creation’ as a guiding motif in the Moses narrative.  We find Joseph and his brothers dead but the Israelites remained “fruitful and prolific” a common refrain in the creation story.

In light of this expanding foreign race Pharaoh decides to deal ‘shrewdly’ with them so they do not join the enemy.  The word join is a play on the name Joseph (to be added to) a figure of blessing for Egypt who has now been forgotten and his descendents are deemed a threat.

Pharaoh sets slave-drivers over the Israelites in work of ‘mortar and brick’ which is an allusion to the building of the Tower of Babel.

In response to Pharaoh’s increasing pressure on the people (and their increasing expansion) there is an order to kill the male children in child-birth.  Here we find the famous mid-wive’s of civil disobedience who do not follow the law.  What I find interesting is that their names, Shiphrah and Puah, indicate a type of ‘signalling’ of what is coming.  Shiphrah is a feminine form related to the Shophar which is a trumpet that is often used to refer to the coming of the presence of God (Ex 19:16).  Puah, as near as I can figure, is a variation on an onomatopoetic verb used to describe the sounds of a woman in labour, again ushering in the presence of something new.  The women here stand as the vanguard in the revolt creating space for the liberation of their people.

Verse 12 of chapter one contains two interesting expressions.  The NRSV reads,

the more they were oppressed, the more they multiplied and spread, so that the Egyptians came to dread the Israelites.

‘Spread’ is a suitable translation but does not have the visceral connotations as the Hebrew does in which there seems to be some implied ‘breach’ of a clear boundary.  When used in the relation to a holy space the word is often translated ‘break’ as in the Lord will ‘break out’ upon you.  ‘Dread’ is also a curious translation.  The word is not used often in the Hebrew Bible.  The term is used in several instances to refer to a sort of naseous sickness over a given situation.  It is the way the people feel after having eaten manna for too long.  It is the way a person can literally feel sick with fear.  Given some of the recent readings on abjection I picture this verse to be saying that the Egyptians tried to crush the Hebrews like a bug and ended up splattering guts all over them.

Thinking about the abject as neither subject (self) nor object (enemy)  also led me to consider another image that was not really illuminated by the Hebrew but important nonetheless.  Verse ten of chapter one reads,

Come, let us deal shrewdly with them, or they will increase and, in the event of war, join our enemies and fight against us and escape from the land.

In this construct the Israelite is neither self nor object.  They form a type of appendage to the Egyptian kingdom.  The abject is a part of what sustains the subject so long as it does not ultimately become the object (or worse become its own subject!).  So long as it does not ‘break out’ of the boundary set by the subject (read: colonialism).

And of course one of the more well known observations is how the ‘vessel’ that Moses is set adrift on is the same word for Ark used in the Flood account.

So anyway, we’ll see if this takes me anywhere closer to a coherent sermon.

Science and wealth

It is no real wonder that science is elevated to the status it has in our culture.  As a discipline it provides endless opportunities for new markets and new products.  All the while it contains no internal mechanisms or orientations by which to critique the manner and context in which it receives capital for further research and development.  The trick is to leverage our desire and value to be placed in the promises of science.

PS I do not hate science.

Notes on Theology of Money – Chapter 1

Modern thought in its Cartesian heritage has distinguished two types of power namely physical power (mechanics) and human power (will).  Politics normally requires both conceptions.  Goodchild adds a third saying that the political is also characterized by an ‘energy’ that cannot be reduced to either which “guides and authorizes the action of will on will” (30).  This power must be accounted for (in political theology) otherwise it will become totalitarian under the veil of the ‘democratic subject’.

Modern thought has been humanistic in three related senses. 1) The human is constituted as independent from the divine 2) Th human subject is constituted through rational self-reflection and self-determination 3) The human subject demonstrates mastery over external nature.  The three major domains of mastery have been science, technology, and economics.  All three are proving to be presently unmasterable.  We are learning to face the reality that the human subject is profoundly limited in its sphere of influence and control.  But impotence “is one thing that must be excluded a priori from the representation of the sovereign subject” (34).

Because sovereign self-determination is only a political theory it must evoke “violence, severance, suspension, negation, or flight . . . to demonstrate the reality of power” (35).  For this to have any effect it must act in accordance with or overcome other human and non-human forms of power.  Goodchild offers an ‘alternative direction of thought’ away from the modern conception of mastery. In which “it is possible to enter the mediation of the concrete” (37).  This is an attempt to think imminently.  “It is here that a truly incarnate political theology is to be sought” (37).

The conversion of thought towards concrete reason, by means of a consideration of these political bodies, has a dual effect: it changes the content of reason, turning away from laws and first principles toward concrete problems and mediations, and it changes the nature of reason, since reason no longer stands over and above the concrete but must itself pass through concrete mediation (38).

Thought and inquiry must pass through bodies for it to gain substance.

As Jacques Lacan once said, “Man thinks with his object.” Contemporary philosophy, political theory, and theology can make no further progress without consideration of money (38).

Property, sovereignty, and credit become united in the body of money.  Money participates in and brings together the realms of the nonhuman, the human, and belief and desire.  In modernity, money is the political body par excellence. . . . Money effectively symbolizes the value of property, the sovereignty of freedom, and the power of desire (39).

These observations lead to a radical questioning of how these fundamental aspects of life relate and are conditioned by each other in relation to money.

In these relations power in the form of capital has been accepted as the primary mode of organization and production, even more primary than what is ‘natural’ (agriculture).  In light of a reality (money) that has become both creator and object of value the question is then asked,

What political bodies can still be created that will attribute a different hue or gravity to all particular things represented under their light?

Wedding homily 2.0

New opening line . . .

Dearly beloved our gathering creates an alternative coding that will not impact the substance of your present or future relationship.  However, the codes may be just strong enough to create a space that can offer itself as a non-destructive social narcotic.  And this, this is not a bad thing.

Yes, I just got back from my cousin’s wedding.  The chicken was juicy.  The bar was free.  And the speeches were actually quite funny.  And all kidding(?) aside I look forward to getting to know the new addition.

A post on an essay on abjection

Having comes across the use of the abject as a conceptual tool to think through political theology and pacifism I did a little digging and came across Julie Kristeva’s Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection (link to full pdf); a text cited as forming some of the theoretical basis for the concept’s later development.  The opening paragraph is worthy of a slow read,

There looms, within abjection, one of those violent, dark revolts
of being, directed against a threat that seems to emanate
from an exorbitant outside or inside, ejected beyond the scope
of the possible, the tolerable, the thinkable. It lies there, quite
close, but it cannot be assimilated. It beseeches, worries, and
fascinates desire, which, nevertheless, does not let itself be seduced.
Apprehensive, desire turns aside; sickened, it rejects. A
certainty protects it from the shameful—a certainty of which
it is proud holds on to it. But simultaneously, just the same,
that impetus, that spasm, that leap is drawn toward an elsewhere
as tempting as it is condemned. Unflaggingly, like an inescapable
boomerang, a vortex of summons and repulsion places the
one haunted by it literally beside himself.

And the concluding the opening section,

A massive and sudden emergence of uncanniness, which, familiar as it
might have been in an opaque and forgotten life, now harries
me as radically separate, loathsome. Not me. Not that. But not
nothing, either. A “something” that I do not recognize as a
thing. A weight of meaninglessness, about which there is nothing
insignificant, and which crushes me. On the edge of nonexistence
and hallucination, of a reality that, if I acknowledge
it, annihilates me. There, abject and abjection are my safeguards.
The primers of my culture.

Kristeva in her work on abjection attempts to hover over a fundamental human experience; perhaps the fundamental human experience which is the inability to acknowledge or face our impotence in subsuming life within the bounds of our meaning.  To acknowledge that there is ‘something’ that I cannot recognize as a ‘thing’.

This is the literal shit of human life that I cannot rid myself of so I must always cleanse myself.

This is the desire for mother/father that is at once good and evil (or neither or both).

This is the inherent decay of death within food that is needed for life.

This is the eternal coding of a divine people who will not be assimilated.

These are seemingly universal realities which we cannot live with or live without.  These experiences raise fundamental questions of boundary.  Inside/Outside; Self/Other.  I came from my mother but I cannot return there.  Shit comes out one end but I would vomit trying to put it in another.  I desire to relate intimately but I cannot maintain the space between us I only vacillate between control and abandonment.  What cannot be assimilated as One or faced directly in opposition forms the abject.  A live body can be loved or fought but a dead body . . .

Kristeva traces the expression of abjection primarily in the Judeo-Christian stream orienting herself in Freud and then looking at taboo and ritual in Mosiac law and then the internalization of abjection in Christianity and with it the formation of ‘sin’.

Kristeva then spends several chapters exploring the content of French novelist Louis-Ferdinand Céline.  Celine is a writer of the abject as he continual hovers over the points of life where boundaries break down and where the abject is named and gagged over in fear and attraction (the Jew, the mother).  In his writing Celine attempts to push back the coding of the word to arrive at expressed emotion and with the allowance and facing and expressing of horror.  There is an attempt to explore expression that eludes or throws off the over-structuring and binding of the symbolic.  Kristeva offers this description,

With Celine we are elsewhere. As in apocalyptic or even
prophetic utterances, he speaks out on horror. But while the
former can be withstood because of a distance that allows for
judging, lamenting, condemning, Celine—who speaks from
within—has no threats to utter, no morality to defend. In the
name of what would he do it? So his laughter bursts out, facing abjection, and always originating at the same source, of which Freud had caught a glimpse: the gushing forth of the unconscious, the repressed, suppressed pleasure, be it sex or death. And yet, if there is a gushing forth, it is neither jovial, nor trustful, nor sublime, nor enraptured by preexisting harmony. It is bare, anguished, and as fascinated as it is frightened.

And then further,

A laughing apocalypse is an apocalypse without god. Black
mysticism of transcendental collapse. The resulting scription
is perhaps the ultimate form of a secular attitude without morality,
without judgment, without hope. Neither Celine, who
is such a writer, nor the catastrophic exclamation that constitutes
his style, can find outside support to maintain themselves.
Their only sustenance lies in the beauty of a gesture that, here,
on the page, compels language to come nearest to the human
enigma, to the place where it kills, thinks, and experiences
jouissance all at the same time. A language of abjection of which
the writer is both subject and victim, witness and topple. Toppling
into what? Into nothing more than the effervescence of
passion and language we call style, where any ideology, thesis,
interpretation, mania, collectivity, threat, or hope become
drowned. A brilliant and dangerous beauty, fragile obverse of
a radical nihilism that can disappear only in “those bubbling
depths that cancel our existence” (R, 261). Music, rhythm,
rigadoon, without end, for no reason.

With Celine we reach a sort of climax in which our abjection has moved from external taboo and internal sin to the practice of literature as able to evoke the fascination, fear and power of horror.  In her conclusion Kristeva then asks, And yet, in these times of dreary crisis, what is the point of emphasizing the horror of being?  Here are excerpts of her response,

For abjection, when all is said and done, is the other facet of religious,
moral, and ideological codes on which rest the sleep of individuals
and the breathing spells of societies. Such codes are
abjection’s purification and repression. But the return of their
repressed make up our “apocalypse,” and that is why we cannot
escape the dramatic convulsions of religious crises.

Kristeva then turns to the (psycho)analyst in conclusion,

And yet, it would perhaps be possible for an analyst (if he could manage to stay in the only place that is his, the void, that is, the unthinkable
of metaphysics) to begin hearing, actually to listen to himself
build up a discourse around the braided horror and fascination
that bespeaks the incompleteness of the speaking being but,
because it is heard as a narcissistic crisis on the outskirts of the
feminine, shows up with a comic gleam the religious and political
pretensions that attempt to give meaning to the human
adventure. For, facing abjection, meaning has only a scored,
rejected, ab-jected meaning—a comical one. “Divine,” “human,”
or “for some other time,” the comedy or the enchantment can
be realized, on the whole, only by reckoning with the impossible
for later or never, but set and maintained right here.Fastened to meaning like Raymond Roussel’s parrot to its chain, the analyst, since he interprets, is probably among the rare contemporary witnesses to our dancing on a volcano. If he draws perverse jouissance from it, fine; provided that, in his or her capacity as a man or woman without qualities, he allow the most deeply buried logic of our anguish and hatred to burst out. Would he then be capable of X-raying horror without making capital out of its power? Of displaying the abject without confusing himself for it?

Probably not. Because of knowing it, however, with a
knowledge undermined by forgetfulness and laughter, an abject
knowledge, he is, she is preparing to go through the first great
demystification of Power (religious, moral, political, and verbal)
that mankind has ever witnessed; and it is necessarily taking
place within that fulfillment of religion as sacred horror, which
is Judeo-Christian monotheism. In the meantime, let others
continue their long march toward idols and truths of all kinds,
buttressed with the necessarily righteous faith for wars to come,
wars that will necessarily be holy.Is it the quiet shore of contemplation that I set aside for myself, as I lay bare, under the cunning, orderly surface of
civilizations, the nurturing horror that they attend to pushing
aside by purifying, systematizing, and thinking; the horror that
they seize on in order to build themselves up and function? I
rather conceive it as a work of disappointment, of frustration,
and hollowing—probably the only counterweight to abjection.
While everything else—its archeology and its exhaustion—is
only literature: the sublime point at which the abject collapses
in a burst of beauty that overwhelms us—and “that cancels our
existence” (Celine).

Upbuilding as unedifying

Well it was a fairly quick tear through Upbuilding Discourses in Various Spirits.  Overall, as I mentioned in my last post, I was not impressed.  It was piece of simple and thoroughgoing introspection.  The basic thrust was that every individual is able to live joyously, but joy comes through suffering because suffering is the teacher of obedience and obedience of all things is necessary for joy.  I continue to grant Kierkegaard some margin on this stream of his thinking because it seems apparent that our contemporary subjective constitutions remain relatively flaccid.  However, where I see a necessary and critical rejection is in how this plays out in some of his examples.  Kierkegaard typically wants to drive a qualitative distinction between external influences and internal formation.  It is important for him that there is nothing external that can overcome an appropriate internal orientation (alone before God).

There are many assumptions inherent to this position.  It assumes a form of suffering based on recognition (i.e. people knew Kierkegaard was a genius, but perhaps also insane).  This assumes a rejection.  It does not explore the enmeshed relationship of abuse in which the very form of relating (and identity) can create a double-bind in the experience of the abused (an abusive spouse can express absolute need and revulsion in almost the same moments).  Kierkegaard concedes, in good Pauline literalist fashion, that if someone can choose their freedom then they should do so but then goes on and uses the actual example of a woman who bears “all the difficulties and caprices and insults of her husband” (I think you mean “shit” Kierkegaard . . . although I don’t know the original Danish) so that on the outside it looks like “a happy marriage”.  There is no redeeming the direction Kierkegaard takes this and in fact I would argue it goes against his very premise of individuality.  To “suffer meekly” in this instance is bind herself perversely to her husband and not “stand alone before God”.

Next is Works of Love.  I have read through it twice already.  I remember the second half holding the most engaging portion.  I am feeling the first signs of real lag in this reading schedule.  My pace is great but this last volume took a little wind out of my sails.  It did, however, raise an interesting conflict in my mind.  To what extent should I skim those works I am not interested in or agree with?  I know that is up to me and doesn’t really matter.  However, I have often given up reading something because it somehow attained lower worth.  Given that I have invested so much time in Kierkegaard (and have a thesis project with him on the horizon) it seemed important to practice the discipline of reading ‘unedifying discourses’ for the very purposes of understanding the logic that reacts against my thinking.

I blame Kierkegaard

My son is not yet two years old (well, in a couple of weeks) and as I write this I can hear him in the baby monitor repeating why, why, why as he falls asleep?  I blame Kierkegaard.

Is it just me or have the natural sciences unjustly appropriated the word ‘why’ as their mantra?  Isn’t theirs a question of how?