Mar+2nd

March 2

Proximity and immediacy; à THEY DO NOT KNOW THE DISTINCTION BETWEEN SUBJECTIVE AND OBJECTIVE; Should “emotion” and Shock be instrumentalized feeding voyeurism and scopophilia as catalysts for social change? Anxiety, then, is an affect, not an emotion; the only affect which is beyond all doubt and which is not deceptive. Whereas Freud distinguishes between fear (focused on a specific object) and anxiety (which is not), Lacan posits anxiety as not without an object: it simply involves a different kind of object, one that cannot be symbolized as other objects are. Introduce affect; Ayman: Why is Israel so powerful in spite of the whole world knowing? Why is it going on for so long? (Palestinians resisting for that long) Israel/Palestine as the past of the US and Canada…

Guerrilla and revolution vs. national liberation vs. resistance;

On Iran: []

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Little Mosque in the Prairie scene with the feminists []

MIDTERM (Summary of the answers for them); Create their own knowledge and critical tools for analysis; Looking up words and doing the work every week.

Part I: à The quality of the way in which you presented the action. Some of you presented movements generalizing them: “Guerilla Girls” or “Reverend Billy” or “Environmental movements” –without giving any details or information about the geo-political stakes; i.e., Why is Starbucks immoral? (Relationship between coffee growing in Africa and Latin America and the exploitation of the peasants; how they are paid nothing, etc.) What is FEMINISM and why is it necessary to speak out about the male monopoly in the artworld? (Long history of the oppression of women and women’s movement); “Culture jamming” as a form of cultural propaganda, etc. A good response will be analytical rather than descriptive of the action, based on both the guidelines I pasted on the email for you that I gave them and on these questions. Most of them have forgotten to embed the action in the historico-political context and have gotten minus points for doing less than the research necessary.

Part II (were trick questions): Degrees of creativity and the quality of the THOUGHT you produced; many were terrified about the prospect of drawing links (this is THOUGHT)… they were hard questions but many of you did pull it off. Dialogue between victims and spectators, let consumers be producers, etc. Susan Sontag AND Spectacle: She does make the link and it is in the readings and in my notes; as students of VCC you should know what is spectacle; she has a critique on “spectacle”: “Reality as becoming spectacle is provincial; It universalizes the viewing habits of a small, educated population living in the rich part of the world, where news has been converted into entertainment; “everyone is a spectator”; and that there is no real suffering in the world; It is a cliché that images have little effect.” Sontag and Enzenzberger and Walter Benjamin and Sontag: same thing. If you chose B: Again, to be critical or at least ambivalent about this form of collaboration between Hewlett-Packard and the inhabitants of a small village in India; covered in “activist” rhetoric to create a niche in the market for their product. “empowering women”; “giving them the means of production” (and not charity)… Some of the outraging incidents that come out: provided them with solar panels to create electricity SOLELY for the printers and cameras; They were trying to “fulfill desires and dreams” as opposed to needs. (This is capitalist ideology at its worst) The “visitors” were condescending with the locals… the “graphic facilitation” device; and saying that their “dreams on the wall” empowered them. Photography as a “technological need” missing in their lives; “Women making profit” (Supplies: paper, parts missing, things breaking down…)

Rebecca has really good notes; A scandal if you pasted your homework and a bigger scandal if you pasted someone else’s homework (the answers I posted) as your notes. Not so much at the quality of the notes but the work each one of you invested in your notes.
 * Notes:**

What happens in your brain when you study and work hard? You become smarter… also by learning new words and by being able to make connections –and this takes practice and work;


 * Iran, Oil, autobiography and feminism. What do they have to do with one another?**

Orientalism and Persepolis; Orientalism is the relationship between the West (Occident) and the East (Orient); Edward Said: The West created a dichotomy (Europe’s constitutive others, political and theological, Judaism and Islam); Romantic notion of the Orient or seen with prejudice and racism. European view that they are backward and that they do not know their own history and culture. Thus, the West created a culture, history and future; (political imperialism of Europe in the East);
 * Orientalism**:

Orientalism is a style of thought based upon ontological and epistemological distinction made between "the Orient" and (most of the time) "the Occident." Thus a very large mass of writers, among who are poet, novelists, philosophers, political theorists, economists, and imperial administrators, have accepted the basic distinction between East and West as the starting point for elaborate accounts concerning the Orient, its people, customs, "mind," destiny, and so on. . . . the phenomenon of Orientalism as I study it here deals principally, not with a correspondence between Orientalism and Orient, but with the internal consistency of Orientalism and its ideas about the Orient. . despite or beyond any correspondence, or lack thereof, with a "real" Orientalism. Said makes the claim that the whole of Western European and American scholarship, literature, and cultural representation and stereotype creates and reinforces prejudice against non-Western cultures, putting them in the classification of Oriental (or "Others"). The heart of the matter in understanding Orientalism is this power relationship and how the Occident has used and continues to use and understand the Orient on its own terms. In the nineteenth century, "Oriental Studies" was an area of academic study. But the West had to create the East in order for this study to take place. Said asserts that according to the Occidentals, the Orientals had no history or culture independent of their colonial masters. Orientalism is more an indicator of the power the West holds over the Orient, than about the Orient itself. Creating an image of the Orient and a body of knowledge about the Orient and subjecting it to systematic study became the prototype for taking control of the Orient. By taking control of the scholarship, the West also took political and economic control. In light of the current situation in the Middle East and the terrorist destruction in the U.S on September 11, Said's theory is particularly illuminating. U.S. attention is on the Islamic people of the Middle East, and the understanding of the mainstream seems to be that is that these Arabs are "other" people, people not like us, people who have strange values and beliefs. And, it goes without saying that the society of strange people is inferior. It is obvious from the popular news media that Orientalism is still very much alive. Islam is misunderstood and distorted when the prejudicial connotations of the past are not challenged. All of the scholarship of the West, studying the religion, language and culture of the Middle East, has not promoted a better understanding of Islam. For many Westerners, Islamic society is still understood in terms of the West's Oriental history (the heathen violent fighters of the Crusades), and not in the context of followers of a religion that shares much with both Judaism and Christianity. There is a profound ignorance about reality that enables this inaccurate and prejudicial view. Awareness of this "Orientalism" is an important first step. Said's premise in Orientalism is that the West has a long history of purposefully misunderstanding the Middle East. The Western imagination of the Middle East bears little resemblance to the reality, and this inaccuracy is used to justify our political and economic course. If we are to truly assist in achieving a resolution to the current crisis, we must examine not only the "Orientals" but also ourselves.
 * The history of Orientalism: **
 * The current situation and the future: **

Israel sees itself as part of Europe, not as part of the Middle East; Early on, Israel formed alliances with Iran, Turkey and Ethiopia (Non-arabs) Cultural superiority of Iran and Israel towards the Arabs; his was because of a misperception by Israel, shared by the US: the Iranian Revolution was seen in the West as no more than a discontinuity in the western narrative of a historical progression from backwardness to western-style secular modernity. It was an aberration, a reaction against modernity that would be corrected over time. The ideological basis to the revolution was seen as “hollow”; “pragmatists” would soon pull it back on to the path of western material progress, the only course that made sense in the western optic. This is why both Israel and the US have been so preoccupied by signs of pragmatism and an obsessive hunt for “moderates”. And whenever Iran’s revolutionary leadership has shown any signs of pragmatism in its foreign policy, it reinforced the US and Israeli view that this would lead eventually to an alliance with Israel. In reality, it was the West’s materialist “modernity”, on which Israel’s doctrine was justified, which repelled Iranian leaders the most. But though they were at odds with the US and Israel over their vision of society and their efforts to spread a culture of secular, materialist and free-market society across the region (which many Iranians saw in turn as archaic, and even colonialist), they did not want to defeat Israel militarily. The revolution was not conceived with an aggressive regional ambition; it did not threaten Israel or the US in conventional military terms. In 1988, after a messy, debilitating war lasting eight years, Iran reached a ceasefire with Iraq. But the years 1990-2 saw two events that changed the outlook for the whole region: the Soviet Union imploded and Saddam Hussein was defeated in the first Gulf war (1990-1). These events removed both the Russian threat to Iran and Iraq’s threat to Israel. It left Iran and Israel as unchallenged rivals for leadership and pre-eminence in the region, and it saw the US emerge as a unipolar, unchecked power. srael’s main fear was to be seen as a liability by the US during the Gulf war, rather than a friend. At the same time the prospect of Iran emerging as a pre-eminent regional power threatened Israel’s hegemony by opening the possibility of a US-Iranian rapprochement that risked eclipsing Israel’s relationship with the US. More seriously, Israel risked its military deterrence: its survival depended on its military supremacy, which a resurgent Iran might remove. When the Labour government under Yitzhak Rabin, elected in 1992, decided to drop the strategy of wooing the periphery and instead opted to make peace with the Arabs, this was a radical reverse of strategy. This shift placed Israel and Iran on opposite sides in the new equation, and the change was as intense as it was unexpected: “Iran has to be identified as Enemy No 1,” Yossi Alpher, at the time an adviser to Rabin, told the //New York Times // four days after Bill Clinton’s election victory. And Shimon Peres, the other most senior Labour figure, warned the international community in an interview in 1993 that Iran would be armed with a nuclear bomb by 1999 ([|5] ). The US swing towards a Manichaean vision of pro-western moderation versus Islamist extremism has taken regional polarisation well beyond Ben-Gurion’s more modest objective of creating a balance of forces and deterrence. In their aim to break the resistance throughout the Muslim world to a secular, liberal vision for the future, the US and its European allies have instead provoked mass mobilisation against their own project, as well as radicalisation and hostility to the West.

Khalidi: Oil and foreign intervention and foreign control oil as a valuable commodity; the British govrment: contorled a monopoly on the oil industry (the Anglo Perisan Oil Company: which came to dominate its neighbors)

Nationalization of the oil industry in all Middle Easter countries during the 1970s. In 1901 a British businessman, William D’Arcy, had obtained from the Iranian government a sixty-year concession that gave him the “exclusive” to exploit, traide, obtain… Iranian petroleum products; Churchill’s ships: oil powered as opposed to coal-powered; (naval revolution…) he made Britain dependent on oil; 1913: Britain ha dphysical control over the area where oil was located; During WWI: Iran was occupied in the South by the British and by Russia in the north; Nationalization of the Oil –after WW2. (1951) British controlled the oil in Iraq and Kuwait;

Auto-biography as opposed to //confession//; Imaginary (drawings) and symbolic as opposed to from //realism//. (Eshrat has an interesting critique on the link between //Persepolis// and the fact that it is a comic book); Persepolis combines political history and memoirs; 20 years of history though the story of a little girl and her family; Class differences and Socialism;

Islamic Revolution and the Islamic Guardians and the underground, the black market;

PErsepolis: starts with the imposition of the veil; demonstrations against the veil; We observe the changes in the regimes (Ideology, habit, claiming allegiances, changing opinion and changing icons or public figures); Leftist Revolution vs. Islamic Republic To unite people through Marxism or through religion? Islam as a political and social form of government; Religious leaders do not know how to govern; Former revolutionaries as the enemies of the republic; Iranian fundamentalists vs. Iraqi Shiite allies against saddam; Invasion of Iran by Iraq.