Author: asitoughttobemagazine

THE INBORN AUTHORITY

Posted on by asitoughttobemagazine

EdwardSaid_OutofPlace

Cover of Edward Said’s memoir Out of Place (1999).  Said is also the author of Orientalism (1978), Covering Islam (1981), and The Word, the Text, and the Critic (1983) among other works.

THE INBORN AUTHORITY

by Yahya T. Ali

In a video produced by the University of Southern California, a group of students from different backgrounds were brought together to discuss Arab and American films. The students were truly diverse, Arabs of different nationalities, Asians who were born and raised in Arab countries, an Iranian-American, and Americans from “Middle Eastern” backgrounds. It is important to note that these students were put in a position where they were thought of to be representatives of the everyday Middle Eastern person watching American movies. They spoke with loud-voiced authority on everything related to the greater Middle East (extending from Morocco, adn to India); while white Americans were very careful how to work their opinions of what they watched of, for example, Egyptian movies. While some of the Middle Eastern students were born and raised in Arab countries, many were born and have lived their entire lives in the United States.

When an Iranian-American, a girl named Layla, whose views were generalizing and never specific, was asked about how she obtained such knowledge of the Middle East, she simply replied “my readings; I spend a lot of my time reading about the Middle East”. To break this down, she has lived her entire life in America and has only been to Iran for a few vacations with her family. Aside from limited knowledge of Farsi, if any (sociologically speaking), her knowledge of the Middle East is the same as any American who has read similar books that she had; yet what privileges her over the white girl sitting next to her is that her name is Iranian and her complexion is immigrant-dark. What is alarming is that Layla is acting on a second-hand constructed knowledge of the Middle East that could have been acquired by anyone; however her ethnic/cultural background unfairly privileged her over others. It is fair to mention that an ethnic/cultural background does help, yet it would not justify grotesque generalizations that project the greater Middle East as all culturally homogenous.

Edward Said, in examining the media coverage of the Middle East (and/or Islam) observes many defects that discredit the knowledge and scholarship of the experts usually resorted to by the media. Two of the many shortcomings are:

  1. Essentialism (and thus, Racism). Many of the experts opinion on the Middle East as a culture, people and religion often portray an image of unchangeability and the existence of an essence from which negative actions are derived (anti-Semitic/American/West, undemocratic, despotic, misogynist, repressive, extremist, fanatic… etc).
  2. The non-existent representation from the Middle East. The absence of self-representation. And/or the lack of first-hand long significant experience in the Middle East.


Much has changed since the publication of Covering Islam, however. The number of immigrants from the Middle East surged in the 80s and 90s; from different countries, for different reasons, but generally from the area recognized by the media as unchanging and “all the same”. These Middle Eastern voices, however, lacked the academic background to support their statements which echoed Western Orientalist views. Rather than narrating personal experiences of despotism (and/or patriarchy, xenophobia, racism…etc), their narration has been used (interpreted as, and lead to become) a sweeping generalization that eliminates the peculiarities and uniqueness of each small community within the Middle East, and renders it and its people unchangeable. These experiences become further proofs for Orientalist views that dehumanize the Middle East to the public.

These personal experiences were used to assert a claim of racial/religious essentialism, whereupon oppression of women is not part of a world phallocentricism, but is instead an integral essential part of being Middle Eastern (Arab, Turkish, Persian, Pakistani…etc) and/or of being a Muslim. This has been established through the misleading channels and their audiences. These experiences by the “natives” of the Middle East would be directed by abrupt TV hosts and Orientalist western experts to draw the static image they desire to crystallize of the Middle East.

This could be either an honest mistake by the Middle Eastern “expert”, or a simple indifference about the way they are perceived. Some believe in Western superiority which makes them willing to be “native informants”; to inform the White Man of the atrocities committed by the Brown Man against the Brown Woman, as well as the brown minorities, (the brown gays, the brown unconventional religious groups…etc). So while Irshad Manji “Thank[s] God for the West”, Nawal El-Sadaawi vehemently and harshly rejects the White Man’s (represented by the Bush administration) calls for the West’s intervention in the Middle East to liberate it’s women; “We do not need you!”.

The native informant is thus created. This is not to speak of all scholars in the west with Middle Eastern ethnic/cultural background, but of those that are often quoted and interviewed by xenophobic, racist media as they serve as proofs of the brown uncivilized world in desperate need of the White Man’s missionary work.

The strength and authority these “experts” gain are direct results of their ethnic/cultural background. It is thought that this background is of significance because, the knowledge of those experts are supported by the advantage of:

  1. Having lived in the Middle East or at least have lived in a Middle Eastern immigrant community.
  2. Language (Considering the fact that Arabic is seen to be one of the most difficult languages to learn).

However, it is difficult to decide whether these factors could be advantageous or disadvantageous.

The views of these “experts” would be regarded highly as they are given the status of eye witnesses, and their words are not mere theories or second-handedly taken from books, but “testimonies”. (Everybody thought of Layla’s words to be first-hand and testimonial of nature).

Here I am questioning the significance of these “testimonies” when they are obviously personal, yet serve as the basis for a generalization that encompasses the whole of the Middle East geographically and historically. This only means that the generalization of the testimony is a result of institutionalized methods through which such “testimonies” go through and are processed to become further proofs of the unchanging essence of the Middle East. The way the Middle East is negatively projected in the media has been thoroughly discussed in many works, most notably in Edward Said’s Covering Islam.

As mentioned above, the ethnic/cultural background could and could not be advantageous. Here, I see there are two types of “experts” on the Middle East:

  1. One whose ethnic/cultural background has been involved significantly in their life and was a vital integral part of their academic scholarship.
  2. One who’s ethnic/cultural background served as an excuse for lacking any significant genuine academic scholarship.

Scholars of the first category may or may not assert reductionist views of the Middle East. However, those who do, are not doing it out of an uneducated ignorant generalization or reduction, but out of an approach to polarize and consequently reduce the Middle East’s cultural, religious, national, political and historical diversity to one. In this one, there aren’t Islams, but one Islam practiced since the 7th century in ancient Arabia and continues to exist statically in the 21st century; “Arabs” is not a loose term applied to loosely connected ethnic groups with different histories, dialect-languages, backgrounds, nationalisms and sub-nationalisms, but they are one single “race” of turbaned people. This is done through a belief in a universality that prefers and places the West as the example of the best of what humanity could achieve. Thus, it is the West’s role to alter different world systems of belief to comply with the Western notions of democracy, liberty and freedom. In this case, their knowledge of the diversity of the Middle East’s culture and its complexity is intentionally disregarded as unimportant, due to their belief in a Eurocentric (Americocentric) universality. It is simply willed ignorance/unawareness.

This universality is not always western-oriented. It could be an Islamic universality. Al-Qaeda’s plan for world domination is based on Islamic universality. In the work of many Wahabi/Salafi groups, the different sects of Islam are either dismissed as non-Muslim (and automatically anti-Islamic), or merely as simple-minded Muslims albeit diverted from the true path of true Islam, and are in need of missionary work to guide them from the darkness of their ways, to the brilliant light of Islam.

Both are engaged in a process of reduction for the sake of a single universality. Both willingly and intentionally disregard the diversity of the Middle East in order to polarize and hierarchize. They practice willed intentional ignorance/unawareness. Both are truly aware of the complexity of the greater Middle East.

The second category experts would reduce the Middle East ignorantly as they generalize their experiences and support their generalizations with readings of simplistic reductionist views by Orientalists, simply because they do not negate their generalized personal views, but attest them. They are angry and frustrated with the problems that infest the Middle East, to which they have fallen victims; the calm and critical analysis that treats these problems as produced by a set of complex historical socio-politico-economic reasons, simply does not cut it for them. Good-Guys-Bad-Guys polarized analysis (reduction) appeals to them as it compliments their experiences, and gives them the flattering sympathetic, damsel-in-distress treatment, or as put by Spivak, the White Man saving the Brown Woman from the Brown Man. In addition, their “testimonies” are processed by the fear-inducing and xenophobic media. An appearance by Irshad Manji on The O’Reilly Factor established that the Middle East is all the same and that the Salman Rushdie affair is simply a product of the feeble-minded violent Muslims. Her concluding sentence, which probably could not have been any more pleasing to O’Reilly, the cherry on the top of her feeble analysis is: “It is we, Muslims, who are the problem”. (Other Irshad Manji writings and videos on youtube.com are as pleasantly reductionist as the previous statement).

“Experts” of this sort are genuinely ignorant of the diversity of the Middle East. Many do not have a significant strong academic background in Islam, Islamic history, Middle Eastern political history, Arabic language and literature, yet they speak with authority given to them by the media and whoever assumes that a knowledge of the Middle East and whatever is related to it, is essentially inborn in anyone of a Middle Eastern ethnic/cultural background.

I am not entirely dismissing the significance of an ethnic/cultural background. I am rather calling on a close examination of how it becomes significant or not to who is given the authority to speak on the Middle East. To assume that someone of a certain ethnic/cultural background has an authoritative knowledge of that culture, a knowledge that doesn’t need to be supported by an academic background, would be as preposterous as taking any John/Jane Doe off the streets of Anytown, USA to speak as an authority on, for example, the history of the Supreme Court. One should keep in mind that Mr/Ms Doe could even have some education on American history (e.g., a BA in history) that could be rephrased in his/her CV as “expert on American history”. In this case, we need to assess the level of education to determine whether it qualifies as an authoritative voice.

Usually, the person in the above example would never be considered qualified to speak on American History, but as Edward Said points out, a comparable example of Middle Eastern descent would be qualified if it’s the Middle East we’re talking about. While many Middle Eastern voices are now speaking up in the West, the media is still resorting to the ones that affirm the reductionist polarized image of the Middle East. The ethnic/cultural background could be completely irrelevant, yet it is established to be a (better) substitute for substantial significant academic scholarship.  What we need is a reassessment of authority on every level of this process.

–Yahya T. Ali was born in Kuwait. He is a short-story writer, has a BA in English Literature, and is currently working on a MA thesis in Comparative Literature at the University of Kuwait.

CINDY SHEEHAN’S SOAPBOX

Posted on by asitoughttobemagazine

CSheehan_Whitehouse

PRESIDENT OBAMA: GIVE PEACE A MEETING

by Cindy Sheehan

September 30, 2009

President Obama,

I know that you are only fulfilling your campaign promises to increase the violence in Afghanistan and Pakistan and I notice that not a significant amount of troops have been withdrawn from Iraq. However, even with your hostile rhetoric and promises to escalate the violence, many people voted for you because they believed you were the peace candidate.

Since the election, you have betrayed the progressive base that gave you victory on many occasions already, but the cause that keeps many of us motivated is the continued carnage in the Middle East. What bothers me even more, especially, is the fact that the so-called anti-war movement has given you a nine-month free pass and thousands of people have died, including hundreds of our own troops.

Since you took office, 125 of our irreplaceable young have been killed in what you called a “dumb war” in Iraq and 223 in what I call the “other dumb war,” Afghanistan. I have been waiting for a mother of one of those needlessly killed troops to demand a meeting with you to ask you: for “What Noble Cause?” her child was sacrificed.

No such mother has come forward and since your rhetoric is eerily similar to the Bush regime and you are reportedly considering strategies for Afghanistan before you condemn more than the 21,000 troops you have already condemned, I am requesting that you meet with a contingent of the true Peace Movement that will be assembling outside your house this Monday, October 5th at noon.

You are listening to your “Afghan War Council.” McChrystal, Clinton, Gates, Mullens, and Petraeus who have all fully demonstrated their Hawk credentials, and what do you really think they will tell you? It is a War Council after all and will inevitably lead our country further down the path to ruin.

Many people supported you because they say you are “smarter than Bush.” Bush would never meet with voices of reason and it appears that the voices you are listening to are extremely unreasonable, also.

President Obama, meet with us and show the country and the world that you are at least willing to listen to opposing view- points.

Give Peace a Meeting.

Peace is the only logical solution to the human made diseases that plague our planet and Peace never gets a seat at the table.

Peace will heal the economy.

Peace will heal the environment.

Peace will heal the geo-political tensions.

Peace is the only way out.

Our Peace Contingent will be ready to meet with you any time on Monday the 5th. Just say the word, we’ll clear our calendars!

Cindy Sheehan

Peace Contingent Representative


This piece first appeared on Cindy Sheehan website: Cindy Sheehan’s Soapbox on 9/30/09.

CRITICAL LEGAL STUDIES III

Posted on by asitoughttobemagazine

KeithHarring

Detail from an installation, The Ten Commandments, at Deitch Projects in New York City by Keith Haring, 2009 (original panels 1985). Photo by 16 Miles of String.

CRITICAL LEGAL STUDIES AS A SPIRITUAL PRACTICE, PART THREE

by Peter Gabel


III.

In my view, CLS “stopped,” or perhaps “paused,” about fifteen years ago because it lost track of this spiritual and moral foundation. One reason for this was the dissipation of the social movements of the ‘60s themselves, which undermined the intuitive social ground of confirmatory recognition which made this spiritual dimension visible to CLS teachers and writers and audible to our listeners and readers. A second reason influencing the dissipation of the movements themselves was the collapse of socialism and the Marxism that had supported it, which for 150 years provided the principal metaphor for the morally transcendent communal horizon against which the shortcomings of the present society had been measured. A third factor intimately bound up with the other two was the rise of the New Right as a conservative moral response to the social challenge and disruption that the movements of the ‘60s had introduced into public space, with the Reagan Revolution championing deregulation, an attack on entitlement programs, and an originalist, new-federalist constitutionalism that sought to delegitimate the public sphere itself as an arena of collective moral action. Faced with this loss of footing at both the experiential and ideological levels (or at the levels of both intuitive understanding and reflective interpretation), we lost confidence in the forward trajectory that had united us. Deprived of an anchor-point in the future that could unite our project in the present, we tumbled back into the social separation of the wider system–our professional “roles” congealed around us and our social identities were reabsorbed by the hierarchical institutions we had hoped to transform.

The ascendancy of the indeterminacy critique and its separation from the spiritual and moral foundation within which it was originally located was an expression of this social and moral hemorrhage, as CLS became increasingly identified with a specialized analytical technique of doctrinal deconstruction that could be assimilated by the academy as merely a school of legal thought. And robbed of its morally compelling message, CLS has proved no match for the Law and Economics movement as its principal competitor to be the successor to the normative paradigms of the New Deal (Legal Realism and the Legal Process School); for the Law and Economics movement is rooted in the moral ideal of the market as the social realization of individual liberty and popular democracy. Indeed, at the ontological/epistemological level, it is difficult to distinguish the CLS of the indeterminacy critique from the Law and Economics movement because they both presuppose that free of illegitimate constraints, the world is a free competition (or a “democracy of interpretations”) among the free choices (or ideas/convictions) of individual actors, with the CLS critique of the authority of abstraction and any socially binding universal vision being the analogue to the Law and Economics critique of Big Government. Neither point of view apprehends the world as an intersubjective life-world with an intelligible social essence that can be the basis for moral insight and transformative social action.

But it’s not too late! For the way out for CLS is to return to its original instincts as a righteous social transformation movement and this time recognize that there is a spiritual basis for our understanding of the social individual that is rooted not in the materialism of Marxism or state socialism, but in the enlivening mutual recognition, or Love, that was always at the heart of the movement out of which CLS was born. Human beings are bound together not primarily by their relationship to the means of production or any other shaping practical medium, but by the desire for confirmation within a loving community that will have overcome the legacy of alienation and social separation. The work of CLS is both to illuminate how that legacy has created a legal culture that has legitimized this alienation by making it seem natural and just, and by beginning to construct a new legal culture that would strengthen and help to realize the loving bond between us: the bond that actually unites us as social beings.

This calls not for a rejection of past CLS work, but for a reclaiming of the spiritual dimension of that work. And this in turn requires a reunderstanding of the indeterminacy critique as being merely an analytical moment within the synthesis of a moral critique, as a kind of analytical insight that indicates that the world is open-textured but not going nowhere, and that legal reasoning’s claims that would fix the world in idealized, reified abstractions legitimizing injustice and alienation are actually a passivizing defense against the freedom and creative challenge of social vulnerability and uncharted possibility.

But this also requires a new agenda for our movement that cooperates with the world-wide spiritual-political initiatives that have sprung up since the post-’60s era from which CLS first emerged, and that would be tremendously supportive of our efforts. These spiritual-political initiatives include the religious renewal movements that are linking the spiritual ideal of the beloved community to social action and social change; spiritually informed secular movements like the Network of Spiritual Progressives that are trying to invent new forms of spiritual activism while rethinking foreign and domestic social policy reforms to emphasize spiritual transformation rather than merely liberal redistribution of resources and rights; [FN31] and the efforts of the environmental and ecology movements to link the redemption of the planet with social healing and sustainable, cooperative economies.

All of these efforts require a new legal culture that links justice with explicitly spiritual outcomes–outcomes that foster empathy, compassion, and social connection rather than the vindication of liberal rights in a legal order founded upon the fear-based separation of self and other. One lesson that CLS scholarship itself has taught is that it is impossible for a social transformation movement to be successful without an ability to express its own ideals as also ideals of justice that can achieve legitimate political expression through legal culture. Without that, as Karl Klare, Alan Freeman, and many others have shown, [FN32] the movement’s radical ideals will be recast and stolen away by the liberal interpretations those movements will suffer through the prism of legal assumptions that actually contradict them. Thus while the movement must create the “parallel universe” that can affirm the ontological/epistemological validity of the possibility of a society based on love and mutual recognition, the movement also requires a legal expression of itself that declares this same realization of love and mutual recognition to be indispensable to just outcomes of social conflicts.

Such a parallel justice system has already begun to sprout up across the legal landscape, alongside the antagonism of self and other, presupposed and reinforced by the mainstream’s adversary system. Among its manifestations are the truly remarkable restorative justice movement, which understands crime and social violence as expressive of a breakdown in community and aspires to apology and forgiveness through direct encounters between victims and offenders as a means of restoration of the communal fabric; [FN33] the transformative and understanding-based mediation movements that make compassion a central objective to the resolution of civil conflicts; [FN34] the new forms of spiritually-informed law practice that are redefining the lawyer-client relationship as a non-technical, holistic relationship in which lawyers bring a substantive moral and healing vision to bear on the client’s perception of his or her “interests,” and the relation of those interests to the well-being of the larger community; [FN35] and the transformation of legal education away from a focus on the mere manipulation of existing rules and doctrine, toward a more humane and spiritually integrated conception of law and justice.

What these new efforts need from a revitalized critical legal studies movement is a scholarship and pedagogy that provides in every field a critique of existing law and legal culture that reveals the limitations of the liberal world-view out of which the existing order was constructed in the centuries since the Enlightenment, and that points toward the socially connected community that ought to be its successor. It is this intellectual piece of the puzzle that is lacking from all of the recent efforts to transform legal practice in the ways I have just described; all of these efforts without exception, as far as I know, challenge the individualized, antagonistic, and despiritualized character of the adversary system without challenging the substantive content of existing law or the analytical thought process of legal reasoning. Both of these elements of legal culture–the critique of the substance of legal rules and doctrine, and the critique of detached, analytical rule-application through abstract, logical technique resting on a normative foundation–require a cadre of intellectuals to help disassemble what is and point to what ought to be, as a “moment” in the transformation from the individualistic, liberal world we inhabit to a post-liberal socially connected, loving, and compassionate world to which we aspire.

So, for example, a CLS course in Contracts should subordinate its use of the indeterminacy critique to a meaning-centered critique emphasizing how the rules presupposing the legitimacy and desirability of individualistic, self-interested bargains (adjusted by a touch of concern for “the reliance interest”) among an infinite number of socially disconnected strangers bound by no common moral purpose or spiritually bonded social community outside their respective blood relatives are rapidly destroying the planet, in part, by making use of liberal abstractions like freedom of choice that make it appear that this lonely destiny is what people really want. Or a course in Torts should make it clear to students that there is more to the obligations born of our essential connection to each other as social beings than the duty to not pull chairs out from under each other as we are about to sit down to dinner, or not to smash into each others’ cars, or injure each other with exploding Coke bottles–that the bond of recognition itself, and what Emmanuel Levinas calls the ethical demand of the face of the Other, [FN36] means we have a duty to “rescue” each other, that we must take care of each other, including the poor, the homeless, and those who lack health care.

CLS scholars and teachers should extend–and in many instances already have extended–this kind of critical analysis to every area of law, including developing a critical reflection on the Constitution as a liberal and individualistic document that was a great advance in its time but now must be transformed to embrace a newly evolving vision of spiritual community that was not even conceived of as a universal necessity in the late eighteenth century when it was drafted. Concomitant with the transformation of doctrine must come a transformation of remedy, beyond money damages passed between socially separated litigants conceived as interested only in material outcomes, and beyond a due process model of civil and criminal procedure that links justice to merely the vindication of rights through the dutiful monitoring of a fact-based public hearing that leaves the parties as disconnected or more disconnected than when their legal process began. And finally, supporting such a re-visioning of doctrine, remedy, and process must be a rethinking of legal reasoning itself that goes beyond the normative circularity of the application of indeterminate rules presupposing the legitimacy of the secular liberal order toward a morally grounded reflection anchored in the common effort to realize the values of love, compassion, and mutual concern and well-being that are being carried forward by the movement itself as it tries to link the transformative element of its own social being with a new legal knowledge that would be expressive of it.

If CLS would embrace the moral and spiritual agenda that I’m proposing here, it would instantly revitalize itself. Everywhere today there are law students and young legal scholars trying to figure out how to devote their lives and work to addressing the problems of global warming and the destruction of the environment, to overcoming the social violence and irrationality of religious fundamentalism and pathological, secular nationalism, and to challenging the human indifference of corporate globalization and its blind and reeling world markets. But Marxist materialism can no longer speak to these new generations of potential activists who have become aware that these problems require a spiritually grounded solution, and after a thirty-year assault by the New Right, no one believes any longer in the model of regulatory government as morally capable of containing and altering a civil society founded upon Fear of the Other and private self-interest. A new spiritual activism actually connecting Self and Other is clearly what is needed, and it is already coming into being in hundreds of hopeful incarnations. If CLS were to rediscover itself as the legal-intellectual expression of that world-wide effort, it could once again challenge legal education and legal scholarship to become vehicles of the creation of a better world, connecting the worthwhile body of work already produced by its older generations with new, more spiritually confident work yet to be written by the young.

What’s the problem, guys and gals?

–Peter Gabel

Peter Gabel is former President and Professor of Law at New College of California and is Associate Editor of Tikkun magazine. He is also Co-Director with Nanette Schorr of the Project for Integrating Spirituality, Law, and Politics.

Peter Gabel thanks Duncan Kennedy, Michael Lerner, Michael McAvoy, Gary Peller, and Matthew Wilkes for helpful comments and criticisms.

This piece was originally published in a special issue of the Pepperdine Law Review, Vol. 36 (2009).

Further Reading:

Critical Legal Studies as a Spiritual Practice, Part One by Peter Gabel, 10/28/09

Critical Legal Studies as a Spiritual Practice, Part Two by Peter Gabel, 10/30/09

Footnotes:

31. See generally The Network of Spiritual Progressives, http:// www.spiritualprogressives.org/ (last visited March 3, 2009).

32. See generally Klare, supra note 22; Freeman, supra note 23.

33. See David Lerman, Restoring Justice, Tikkun, Sept./Oct. 1999, at 13.

34. See, e.g., Robert A. Baruch Bush & Joseph P. Folger, The Promise of Mediation: The Transformative Approach to Conflict 14 (rev. ed. 2005) (emphasizing the transformative power of “recognition”); Gary Friedman, Challenging Conflict: Mediation Through Understanding (2009) (discussing “understanding-based” mediation movements).

35. See, e.g., Douglas Ammar & Tosha Downey, Transformative Criminal Defense Practice: Truth, Love, and Individual Rights–The Innovative Approach of the Georgia Justice Project, 31 Fordham Urb. L.J. 49 (2003).

36. Emmanuel Levinas, Totality and Infinity: An Essay on Exteriority (Alphonso Lingis trans., Duquesne Univ. Press 1969).


CENTRAL AMERICA

Posted on by asitoughttobemagazine

ManuelZelaya_Brazilianembassy

Honduran President Manuel Zelaya speaking to supporters from his place of forced exile at the Brazilian embassy.

TAKING REFUGE IN THE BRAZILIAN EMBASSY

by Jim Dorenkott

Honduras continues its decline in the jaws of a coup which now passes its 90th day. For those not keeping up with developments: democratically elected Honduran President Manuel Zelaya was kidnapped in the middle of the night by the Honduran military, and flown to Costa Rica. His supporters have been mobilizing every day since then demanding his reinstatement. At present, he’s holed up in the Brazilian embassy in the Honduran capital of Tegucigalpa, courtesy of that countries’ leader, President Lula da Silva.

The United States on the surface is helping end the crisis so we read in the newspapers. However, not reported is the flow of taxpayer money going to Honduras from the Millennium Challenge Corporation. It continued a full 57 days after the coup. A report from the Center for Economic & Policy Research showed that the $190 million Honduras expected from Millenium had not been cut off after the coup. Compare that to freezing that spigot 1 day after the coup in Mauritania and 3 days after the coup in Madagascar. Wondering why?

Maybe Chiquita Banana Corp a known supporter of the coup has influence on Hillary Clinton who sits on the Millenium Challenge Corporation. board? “Chiquita in Latin America” by Nikolas Kozloff in Counterpunch spells out the connections in this “banana republic.” Perhaps the arrogance of the coup makers defying the whole world can be explained that they have stashed away plenty of money to deal with the expected sanctions thanks to this tolerant US policy and convenient loophole. Sanctions indeed!

The coup makers have been ruthless in their suppression of free speech and assembly. The media reports one death but that is not what the social organizations have been reporting from inside the resistance. Teachers have been kidnapped from their home and tortured. This is not hard to imagine when you realize that the notorious 316 Battalion Death Squad from the 80s has been given a new role by Zelaya’s replacement, Roberto Michelleti the propped up “new president”. One of 316 Battalion’s notorious leaders Billy Joya Amendola has been named by Michelleti as a special advisor and put in charge of reshaping the security forces.

So far that has only consisted of purging Zelaya loyalists, but once the death squads are reactivated human rights observers fear a return to the deaths and tortures when John Negroponte was ambassador to Honduras under Reagan. So many of these death squad members were trained in the School of the Americas in Georgia that some in Alba want to make it a precondition for membership that their countries not send their soldiers to the School of the Assassins as it is called by many. Once again people will call for the closing of the SOA in Georgia this coming November in protests which draw over 15,000 people organized by www.soawatch.org.

That the oligarch’s have chosen Honduras as the first newly emerged democracy might relate to it’s history of having been dominated by rightist dictators. Clearly many in Latin America tonight in Bolivia, Uruguay, Ecuador, Chile, Brazil, El Salvador, Guatemala, Nicaragua, Venezuela, might be worried that they could be next. They have all lived under terrible torture and murder regimes supported by the US foreign policy. During Reagan’s presidency an estimated 500,000 people were killed, disappeared or tortured.

These governments are moderate left ranging from democratic socialist to social democratic. They have all been elected and all allow the marketplace and private enterprise to function. The favorite trick is to characterize Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez or Evan Morales of Bolivia as being authoritarian which means what when they are elected by margins of 70%? These are enormously popular elected officials who are guiding their countries to combat poverty, homelessness, lack of education, jobs etc. The first thing they do is raise the literacy rate to 100% because they want their people to be able to read and think for themselves. In fact when the coup was attempted against Chavez people who surrounded the palace and demanded his return said over and over we made this constitution and we will die for it.

Zelaya is accused of attempting to change the constitution for personal gain and extend his term. My September 16th blog entry “The Lies About Honduras We Believed” shows how absurd and impossible that was. All the smoke and noise about “Crazy Zelaya” as they try to portray him obscures the real facts. It was the people who demanded a constituent assembly to change the constitution, and he agreed because it was the right thing to do. It was not him foisting this plan to usurp power on an uninformed populace. They understand their constitution was written by the death squad regime to prevent any real democracy or opportunity, and given the chance that is the first thing they want to change. Oligarchs fear that and thus the sideshow of Zelaya and his “crazy political moves”.

–Jim Dorenkott

Further Reading:

The Lies About Honduras We Believed by Jim Dorenkott, 9/16/09

CRITICAL LEGAL STUDIES ll

Posted on by asitoughttobemagazine

KeithHaring_TenCommandments_2

Detail from an installation, The Ten Commandments, at Deitch Projects in New York City by Keith Haring, 2009 (original panels 1985). Photo by 16 Miles of String.

CRITICAL LEGAL STUDIES AS A SPIRITUAL PRACTICE, PART TWO

by Peter Gabel


II.

During Friday night Shabbat services at my synagogue Beyt Tikkun in San Francisco (Beyt Tikkun means House of Healing and Repairing), we always go outside in a whirl of dancing, holding hands in long lines, and singing Tov Le’Hodot La’Adonie (“It’s Good to Give Thanks to G-d”). By this time, our rabbi has already stipulated that the God we do not believe in does not exist so that we do not have to spend our time worrying about it, and our goal is to elevate our awareness, to apprehend the miraculous nature of the universe as we turn away, at “sundown,” from the mysterious great ball of fire one million times larger than our own planet and face the other billions of fireballs in what we call the sky. To apprehend this magnificence while singing and dancing with other whirling comrades is just Wow! as the prayers say. It takes you out of the humdrum flatness of everyday existence, in which this same earth and sky appear as mere objects before us as we carry out our functional activities, in which our minds are racing from thought to thought distracting us from Being Present, or better yet, in the words of Ram Das, from Being Here. Even more, the whirl of the spiral dance allows us to make eye contact with each other, to actually see each other as radiant spiritual beings, with open hearts and bursting with recognition as we share this amazing experience of where we actually are, where we have actually been all day. How remarkably different this collective encounter is from the reciprocal withdrawnness, from the mutual solitude of the day, as we woke up, got out of bed, dragged a comb across our heads, found our way downstairs and drank a cup, and somebody spoke and we went into a dream. [FN14]

The very purpose of this spiritual practice is to bring ourselves into contact with the world behind the world, by lifting our spirit to deepen our awareness of the phenomena before us so as to unveil a spiritual and moral meaning that is obscured by the leveled-down empirical perception of everyday life. The poet William Blake brilliantly captured the necessity of this deepening of awareness for gaining access to truth when he said, “We are led to Believe a Lie When we see [with], not Thro’, the Eye.” [FN15] And it is just this kind of access to another dimension of reality that is sometimes made possible by social movements, in which people emerge from the passive station of their reciprocal isolation into a new kind of connection, a new “mutual recognition,” that allows the seemingly fixed appearance of the world to dissolve, revealing a spiritual depth that had previously been “unconscious” in the sense of inaccessible to conscious knowledge. [FN16] Historical moments touched by these movements often produce outpourings of intellectual and cultural creativity, as people in disparate locations begin to express the new insight in a burst of music, literature, intellectual work, and activism, all of it seeking to “realize” what we’ve been given an intimation of. And the work that is thus produced can have the effect of altering the entire social landscape to such a degree that no one is free not to admit some relation to what is going on, not to “admit that the waters around you have grown,” [FN17] to swim or to refuse to swim and try to get the waters to go down.

The 1960s was certainly such a period, and I suspect that forty years later many of us in this room are still trying to establish our relationship to the breakthrough of consciousness that altered our way of seeing the world itself and the meaning of our existence within it as we ourselves constitute it. By way of analogy to my description of the elevation of consciousness during the Shabbat service at my synagogue, the ‘60s should be understood as a dawning of awareness that unfolded through the overlapping influence of the civil rights movement’s illumination of injustice, the evocative power of Martin Luther King, Jr., the linguistic fissures and image-scrambles produced by the Beat poets, the song, dance, and creative movement of rock n’ roll, the youthful moral eloquence of JFK, and the consequent emergence of a student movement, a women’s movement, a gay liberation and sexual liberation movement, and an environmental movement that expressed an opening up of the heart allowing a new kind of sight into what we came to see as the insanity of the fixed and rigid posture and thinking that was producing the Vietnam war, with its 55,000 American and three million Asian dead. [FN18]

Within the critical legal studies movement that was itself an expression of this upsurge in awareness, we were confronted by a “legal order” and hierarchical institutions that supported this order that seemed to allow no room whatsoever for the sense of love, hope, and transcendence that we felt ineffably all around us. On the contrary, it seemed to be an enormous, spiritually dead thought-machine that produced and reproduced both hierarchies and rules that made the world of the war, and racial hatred, and sexual repression, and environmental destruction appear entirely normal and inevitable. And this disjunction between our dawning, idealistic awareness and the professional settings in which we found ourselves as young adults led us to throw ourselves into trying to (a) take apart the fixity of, and (b) reveal the meaning of what everywhere surrounded us.

Here we come to the key split that developed within CLS. For the part of the work that was motivated by “taking apart the fixity” of the legal order became the indeterminacy critique, and the part that was motivated by “revealing the meaning” of that order became the critique of alienation, to which I shall now turn. Located within this historical process, it is clear, I hope, that the work of these two strands within CLS was at first complementary, in the sense that both were intended to be in service of a breakthrough to another level of social being and knowledge in which our idealistic vision of a more loving and caring world would become possible. That they became separated was too bad, the result of the effects of fear and loss of confidence in our transcendent hopes as we were complexly enveloped by the rise of Ronald Reagan, by tenure struggles, and related dilemmas of personal identity as we ebbed away from each other with the ebbing of the ‘60s themselves, and by the resulting defensiveness and separation within our own groups. But for reasons that I will return to, we are now approaching a new historical moment in which a reunification of our efforts may become possible.

In the case of both the Shabbat service consciousness and the social movement consciousness, a transformation of our social being takes place that allows a transformation of our knowledge of the world. In each case, prior to the transformation, we exist underneath the weight of our inherited conditioning, cemented within our pre-existing social roles, eyes darting away from each other’s gaze, withdrawn into our separateness and seeing the world from a detached state, a solitude which we assume to be natural, the way things are. Without realizing it, we exist in a state of secret Fear of the Other, preoccupied unconsciously with keeping the Other at a distance, and in a state of denial of the world’s loving and transformative energy. [FN19] We try to close ourselves up, and to treat the world around us as equally closed or fixed, because we are afraid to reveal what has not been confirmed. But through the outbreak of connection permitted by the singing and dancing and expressive discourse of the service and movement, we attain a new level of mutual recognition which in turn confirms a new kind of insight into the “fallen” and despiritualized nature of the world. From a philosophical/epistemological point of view, a change in both the subject and object occurs, such that the being of the knower finds a new moral platform with which to see the world as suffering under the weight of its own alienation and separation, and the being of the known object or “world” becomes suddenly transparent in its depth-dimension as something not fixed according to its prior surface appearance, but as alienated and in need of a restorative salvation. Or to put this in yet another way: The recovery of each of us as subjects through the spiritual elevation of mutual recognition provides the inter-subjective ground that reveals the moral deficit in the world as object-of-knowledge. Martin Luther King, Jr. made exactly this point when he defined Justice as “love correcting that which revolts against love.” [FN20]

Thus the type of insight that emerges from the ratcheting up of awareness allowed by the upsurge of confirmatory recognition is an inherently spiritual and moral awareness that both critiques the falsity of what is as an alienated appearance trying to deny its own falsity, and at the same instant points in a moral direction toward bringing into being a world that embodies the connection that has allowed our confirmatory recognition to take place. [FN21] Why would we want to kill the Viet Cong? They are not “them,” they are us, G-d’s children, and furthermore, we are not the “fellow Americans” that Lyndon Johnson keeps referring to, but vessels of universal humanity scattered apart in an historical shatter that must be repaired. [FN22] As we elevate our awareness by uplifting each other through a new mutual recognition, fixed nationalities appear as imaginary, as collective defense mechanisms born of an entire world of mutual fear, and in need of a compassionate spiritual redemption so that we as “peoples” might appear to ourselves not as alien threats to each other, but as unique incarnations of a common humanity.

To the strand of CLS that emerged from this kind of insight, the problem with law was not that it was indeterminate and therefore a mask for political choices made by free individuals, but that it was serving as a legitimating vehicle for our alienation from one another, making our alienation appear to be the embodiment of justice and obscuring our true spiritual and moral destiny as communal beings, a destiny that we had glimpsed through the redemptive insights of our participation in the movement. In reality, it was this “alienation critique” that was the entire basis for the CLS critique of law as legitimating ideology, because the critique necessarily refers to a transcendent moral horizon to challenge the ideology’s claims to legitimacy. For as I have already said, insofar as an aspect of legal ideology is “believed in” as a moral discourse supporting the status quo, it cannot be dismissed by a showing of its logical indeterminacy, but only by revealing, through our anchorage in a transcendent moral vantage point, the “determinate” meaning of the legal ideology as an act of legitimation, as a kind of advertisement for a morally impoverished state of affairs.

This then is the true relationship between CLS and what this conference is calling a “Higher Law”–a higher law not as a metaphysical or religious abstraction, but as an embodiment of the presence of social justice manifesting itself in the real world through a spiritually elevating movement that provides a moral horizon for revealing what must be changed about the world, in part through the progressive transformation of legal culture, through law.

Here are eight examples from CLS that appeal to a higher law so defined:

• Karl Klare’s critique of the Supreme Court’s use of a new post-New Deal ideology of “social conceptualism” to steal away the democratic aspirations of working people as they expressed themselves through the upsurge of the labor movement (Judicial Deradicalization of the Wagner Act and the Origins of Modern Legal Consciousness, 1937-1941). [FN23]

• Alan Freeman’s critique of the Supreme Court’s use of an individualistic conception of racial discrimination as bad acts by isolated “perpetrators” as a way of naturalizing and legitimizing the ongoing societal racism suffered by its victims (Legitimizing Racial Discrimination Through Antidiscrimination Law). [FN24]

• Duncan Kennedy’s demonstration of how Blackstone’s Commentaries absorbed and transformed the legal statuses of feudal hierarchies (from The Law of Wrongs to Incorporeal Hereditaments) to rationalize the emerging bourgeois hierarchies of pre-liberal societies in the eighteenth century (The Structure of Blackstone’s Commentaries). [FN25]

• Paul Harris’s and my account of how the architecture of courtrooms induce deference to the legitimacy of legal hierarchies in a way that confers political legitimacy on social and economic institutions that claim to be expressions of popular will, but are actually expressions of social alienation (Building Power and Breaking Images: Critical Legal Theory and the Practice of Law). [FN26]

• Mary Joe Frug’s critique of the legitimation of male toughness in common law contract doctrine from the vantage point of women who care about the welfare of their contracting partners (Re-reading Contracts: A Feminist Analysis of a Contracts Casebook). [FN27]

• Anthony Cook’s articulation of the importance of experientially-based insight, growing out of religious practice and social struggle, to the reconstruction of just communities (Beyond Critical Legal Studies: The Reconstructive Theology of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.). [FN28]

• William Forbath’s analysis of how the American labor movement’s moral vision of an egalitarian society rooted in mutuality and solidarity was constrained and reshaped by workers’ encounter with the individualist categories of American law (Law and the Shaping of the American Labor Movement). [FN29]

• Rhonda Magee Andrews’s argument that the realization of equality within the meaning of the Fourteenth Amendment requires legal recognition of the existential suffering and denial of humanity produced by racial subordination and the creation of remedies based on a substantive vision of human dignity (Racial Suffering as Human Suffering: An Existentially-Grounded Humanity Consciousness as a Guide to a Fourteenth Amendment Reborn). [FN30]

None of these works makes use of the indeterminacy critique, and all of them are moral statements in which existing (or then-existing) legal regimes obscured or deflected the struggle for a more humane and just world.

–Peter Gabel

Peter Gabel is former President and Professor of Law at New College of California and is Associate Editor of Tikkun magazine. He is also Co-Director with Nanette Schorr of the Project for Integrating Spirituality, Law, and Politics.

Peter Gabel thanks Duncan Kennedy, Michael Lerner, Michael McAvoy, Gary Peller, and Matthew Wilkes for helpful comments and criticisms.

This piece was originally published in a special issue of the Pepperdine Law Review, Vol. 36 (2009).

Further Reading:

Critical Legal Studies as a Spiritual Practice, Part One by Peter Gabel, 10/28/09

Footnotes:

14. See The Beatles, A Day in the Life, on Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band (Parlophone 1967).

15. William Blake, Auguries of Innocence, in The Complete Poetry & Prose of William Blake 492 (David V. Erdman ed., Anchor Books 1988) (1965).

16. This is among the main themes of my book, Peter Gabel, The Bank Teller and Other Essays on the Politics of Meaning (Acada Books 2000) (see especially What Moves in a Movement? on page 184).

17. Bob Dylan, The Times They Are A-Changin’ on The Times They Are A-Changin’ (Columbia Records 1964).

18. Bernard Weinraub, 30 Years Later, Cake and Credit Cards in Saigon, N.Y. Times, May 1, 2005, available at http:// www.nytimes.com/2005/05/01/international/asia/01saigon.html.

19. See Gabel, supra note 15, at 87-92 (discussing a full development of these ideas in the chapter, The Blockage of Social Desire: The Circle of Collective Denial and the Problem of the Rotating Lack of Confidence in the Desire of the Other).

20. Martin Luther King, Jr., Montgomery Bus Boycott, in Ripples of Hope: Great American Civil Rights Speeches 210, 213 (Josh Gottheimer ed., Basic Civitas Books 2003) (1955).

21. See Peter Gabel, The Phenomenology of Rights-Consciousness and the Pact of the Withdrawn Selves, 62 Tex. L. Rev. 1563, 1567-69, 1586-91 (1984).

22. The reference is to the teaching of the Kabbalah that our alienation is expressive of an original shattering of G-d’s Divine Light that must be repaired through the work of tikkun olam, the healing and repairing of the world.

23. Karl E. Klare, Judicial Deradicalization of the Wagner Act and the Origins of Modern Legal Consciousness, 1933-1941, 62 Minn. L. Rev. 265, 301-03, 322-25 (1978).

24. Alan David Freeman, Legitimizing Racism Through Anti-Discrimination Law: A Critical Review of Supreme Court Doctrine, 62 Minn. L. Rev. 1049, 1052-57 (1978).

25. Duncan Kennedy, The Structure of Blackstone’s Commentaries, 28 Buff. L. Rev. 205 (1979).

26. Peter Gabel & Paul Harris, Building Power and Breaking Images: Critical Legal Theory and the Practice of Law, 11 N.Y.U. Rev. L. & Soc. Change 369 (1983).

27. Mary Joe Frug, Re-reading Contracts: A Feminist Analysis of a Contracts Casebook, 34 Am. U. L. Rev. 1065 (1985).

28. Anthony E. Cook, Beyond Critical Legal Studies: The Reconstructive Theology of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., 103 Harv. L. Rev. 985, 989-93 (1990).

29. William E. Forbath, Law and the Shaping of the American Labor Movement (1991).

30. Rhonda V. Magee Andrews, Racial Suffering as Human Suffering: An Existentially-Grounded Humanity Consciousness as a Guide to a Fourteenth Amendment Reborn, 13 Temp. Pol. & Civ. Rts. L. Rev. 891 (2004).

CRITICAL LEGAL STUDIES

Posted on by asitoughttobemagazine

KeithHaring_TenCommandments

Detail from an installation, The Ten Commandments, at Deitch Projects in New York City by Keith Haring, 2009 (original panels 1985). Photo by 16 Miles of String.

CRITICAL LEGAL STUDIES AS A SPIRITUAL PRACTICE, PART ONE

by Peter Gabel


I.

I assume that I was asked to speak on a panel entitled “The Higher Law and Its Critics” because the organizers of this conference believed that as a Critical Legal Studies (CLS) founder and writer, I’d debunk the idea that there is any higher law. They likely felt that CLS stands for the idea that law and the interpretations of law are just an expression of social power, and that any claim that there exists a higher law which the existing legal world somehow exists in relation to would just be regarded by CLS as a form of ideology– mystifying, masking, and rationalizing existing power relations in society.

So let me start by saying that while appeals to a Higher Law certainly can be used to rationalize unjust power relations, I do not at all believe that they must do so; and even more, that I believe CLS was always fundamentally a spiritual enterprise that sought to liberate law and legal interpretation from its self-referential, circular, and ideological shackles. The CLS movement, after all, emerged in response to the moral intensity of the broader social movements of the 1960s, and was an attempt to join forces with the civil rights movement, the anti-war movement, the women’s and workers’ movements to challenge the status quo on behalf of a higher moral vision of what human relations could be like–a vision of a world in which people treated each other with true equality and respect and affection and kindness, and in which people saw each other as fully human and beautiful, rather than as cogs in a machine or as self-interested monads out for their own gain or as any of the other ways of characterizing human beings that seemed to be commonplace within the system as it was. In CLS, we were against the inhumanity of the system as it really was and as it really functioned, and we were against the existing legal system to the extent that it sought, consciously or unconsciously, to rationalize the inhumanity of the existing social world and call it something good, the embodiment of liberty and equality.

Thus there was always a spiritual impulse behind the work and the politics of CLS. But it is absolutely the case that CLS–or at least what came to be known as the dominant strain within CLS–refused to embrace this transcendent spiritual impulse, to stand behind it, or to speak about it. We really were motivated by love, but it was a love that dared not speak its name. And in my opinion, that is because our movement was infected with the same fear of the other that underlay the injustices that we criticized in the wider society. We were motivated by a powerful moral transcendent impulse that was an expression of what this conference is calling a Higher Law, but we would not say so, or to be honest, some of us would not say so. On this point, there was a division inside CLS, and in my opinion the wrong side carried the day–but today is another day.

The view that won out inside CLS is what became known as the indeterminacy critique–the idea that legal principles are so abstract and indefinite that they can be used to rationalize virtually any outcome. The literature of CLS has produced hundreds of articles demonstrating this point, [FN1] but an excellent example not cited so far as I know in existing CLS writing is the legal opinions produced during the rise of the Nazi movement in Germany, in which conventional liberal legal doctrines were reinterpreted by the judiciary to be made consistent with the ideology of the ascendant Nazi party. Thus the German equivalent of the doctrine of “good faith” in landlord-tenant contracts was interpreted not to prevent the otherwise illegal eviction of Jews because Jews were threats to the German people. [FN2] Using the indeterminacy critique, CLS writers showed in article after article that just as the eviction of Jews could be made consistent with contractual good faith, virtually any legal argument could be made consistent, via the open-ended nature of legal interpretation, with virtually any legal outcome. That being so, the actual explanation of legal outcomes must come from outside of legal reasoning itself–from the realm of politics or conviction or commitment to particular values on the part of the person or group doing the interpreting. And wonderful CLS writers like Duncan Kennedy, Mark Tushnet, Gary Peller, or Betty Mensch [FN3]–who contributed to this discussion at the Higher Law Symposium–showed that it was no answer to this critique to find some other supposed “anchor” for legal reasoning in the political or moral principles of the wider society that would shape the legal thought-process–for these political and moral principles could always be shown to be just as abstract and indefinite in their concrete meaning in any particular case and therefore just as indeterminate in their application.

There was much to be said for the indeterminacy critique as an analytical technique that could help a new generation of legal intellectuals and law students to challenge the authority of received justifications for the status quo, especially the authority of those who claimed that things had to be the way they were in late twentieth century capitalist society because the rule of law required it to be so. Many a law student who had come to law school with a longing to contribute to the creation of a more humane and just world had been subtly talked out of their idealism by sophisticated law professors who were better at manipulating concepts than they were and could use the power relations of the law school classroom to make their instinctive idealism appear naïve or childish or dumb. Armed with the indeterminacy critique and backed by the solidarity of other writers, teachers and students who shared their transformative aspirations, these same students could better stand up for themselves and demonstrate that their professors’ pretensions to superiority of reasoning amounted to no more than a preference for the existing system. Certainly a fifty-page opinion by Justice Scalia in his black robes is far less humbling to the radical spirit if one can show that all of its weighty argumentation and compilation of precedential authority amount to no more than a statement by the writer that “I like capitalism.”

But there was a major problem with the indeterminacy critique–namely, that it was a headless horseman, an analytical method without moral content that could not itself point the practitioner in any moral direction. Like all analytical critiques that rely upon logic to challenge claims to conceptual rationality, the indeterminacy critique is indifferent to the meaning of its object–it employs its scalpel at a distance from whatever may be morally compelling about a claim and satisfies itself with the assertion that a claim purporting to be logically valid is actually not so.

This creates three problems that, in my view, are decisive. First, the logical indeterminacy of abstract concepts, legal or otherwise, does not take account of the power of the moral environment in which such concepts exercise social force. To the extent that human beings are inherently moral beings animated by the longing for meaning and the desire to live in a better, more morally resonant world, the power of law and legal concepts will depend upon the social forces that give weight to a particular moral vision and related moral ideas at particular historical moments. If a particular worldview gains sway by virtue of its socially-anchored moral resonance, then the legal arguments that follow from that worldview will be heard and understood as logical to those who embrace the moral dimension of the worldview whether or not the arguments are logically compelled in the abstract. The Supreme Court’s decision in Bush v. Gore deciding the 2000 presidential election seemed to many scholars to validate the indeterminacy critique [FN4] because the Court’s reasoning to the result it wanted seemed to almost randomly change between its first decision (based on Article II’s reservation of power to the State legislatures to choose electors to the Electoral College), [FN5] and the second final decision terminating the Florida vote-count on the grounds of the Equal Protection Clause. [FN6] In addition, the final decision seemed to contradict the Court’s new-federalist deference in other opinions to a state’s right to manage its own elections within broad parameters that should have included the then-unfolding Florida recount. [FN7] But as I showed in What It Really Means to Say Law is Politics: Political History and Legal Argument in Bush v. Gore, [FN8] the significant fact is that the decision was found acceptable by Gore and his constituencies in spite of all the grumbling because of historical factors–including, the rise of Ronald Reagan, thirty years of conservative ascendancy in political and legal thought, and the collapse of the Soviet Union and parallel collapse of any worldwide public sphere in which morally compelling democratic social movements could challenge conventionally legitimated democratic institutions–that made the Supreme Court’s decision plausible enough to the moral self-understanding of the then-existing national constituency. [FN9]

Reduced to a sentence, this is to say that the indeterminacy critique, because of its very abstraction and disconnection from immanent meaning, cannot reach what is morally compelling about a legal argument and, therefore, cannot negate the argument to a really existing historical listener anchored in a web of real social relations.

The second problem with the amoral nature of the indeterminacy critique is that to the extent that human beings are moral beings decisively animated by the longing for meaning, purpose, and a better world, the indeterminacy critique cannot convey a moral vision of how we are to create such a world and therefore cannot gain any true adherents. In other words, the indeterminacy critique is basically a bummer, leaving the listener in a kind of secular liberal hell of scattered and disconnected individuals with no common passion or direction binding us together. Not only did this erasure of moral purpose disarm the CLS movement of its most compelling spiritual feature–namely its link to a powerful, transformative vision of a socially just world–it also seemed to dismiss as unimportant, and even trivial and misguided, the experience of moral dislocation, social isolation, and meaninglessness that is precisely the most spiritually painful aspect of modern liberal culture. While a few writers tried to justify CLS’s “nihilism” as a bracing affirmation of freedom, emphasizing that the critique was only a critique of the authority of reason and not of strongly held, freely affirmed values, [FN10] this defense simply cast the listener back into the spiritual void of his/her liberal solitude rather than purposefully pointing the listener forward toward the moral world that would finally connect us.

The third and final problem with the valorization of the indeterminacy critique and its preeminence within the CLS movement is that it could be and was used against the movement’s own spiritual commitments. Although conservatives were fond of caricaturing CLS writers as a group of radical cynics who didn’t believe in anything, [FN11] most were just the opposite–wonderful, loving, caring people committed to helping others and changing the world in accordance with a moral devotion to mutual affirmation and social equality. But the indeterminacy critique prohibited them from saying so in a universal, visionary language because any such discourse was itself indeterminate, and could be stolen away by the Other and used to rationalize domination. Backed up by Derrida’s in-fashion critique of “phallologocentrism” [FN12]–the historical tendency of abstract male-dominated ideologies to marginalize and dismiss the insights of minority cultures–some CLS writers would just make fun of those of us whose critique of law and legal culture was rooted in a substantive, moral vision of community and equality, as if we failed to grasp that the same critique we ourselves had embraced–the use of abstract universals to legitimize the injustices of liberal society–could be used against ourselves. Did we not see that the Devil can cite scripture for his/her purpose and that any universal ideal with which we purported to ground our critique of law could be used to justify the opposite of the meaning we sought to give it? How did we think that an ideal of spiritual community could be the “basis” of anything at all, since it could as easily entail a society of crystal-gazers or religious fundamentalists as it could the loving and egalitarian world to which we aspired?

It is worth pausing for a moment on this last point because it contains an epistemological confusion–or at least a difference of opinion and orienting attitude toward knowledge–that establishes the groundwork for my turn to a discussion of the existence of a Higher Law and a turn to what could give meaning to a rebirth of Critical Legal Studies as the spiritual practice that I am claiming it always was.

When the practitioner of the indeterminacy critique rejects the idea that an abstraction, like “spiritual community,” can be the “basis” of a critique of the status quo, citing the indeterminacy of the meaning of the abstraction, he or she is thinking within the analytical epistemology embedded in the indeterminacy critique itself–as if the relationship of the abstraction to the concrete manifestation, or the universal to the particular, is a relationship of logical entailment of a concept. Thus from this point of view, the critique of the liberal ideals of freedom and equality that are embedded in all of American law is that their very abstract and universal nature can be manipulated in a way that allows the concrete meaning of these ideals to legitimize the unfreedom and inequality of free market capitalism. The critique is that in liberal society, freedom equals free competition and equality means equality to compete in a universal marketplace that actually reproduces, in real life, the inequalities of class society and the unfreedom of servitude to hierarchy. From this truth (and other analogous ones that can be drawn from the concrete histories of pre-liberal societies, from socialism as actualized in socialist societies, and so on across and throughout history), the indeterminacy practitioner concludes that all abstract universals are similarly manipulable and subject to the same logical abuses in the service of legitimation. Because the indeterminacy critique begins and ends in an attitude of moral detachment from its object and analyzes the unfolding of the object through its merely possible logical expressions, the critique rejects a priori (in other words, as a matter of “belief” and not on the basis of its own critique!) that there could be moral “essence” to the object that gives moral direction to the critique of, say, the liberal conceptions of freedom and equality.

The paradox here is evident and refers back to my initial comments: for CLS is and was animated by a vision of overcoming the inhumanity and injustice of the world, and not by mere analytical cleverness or skill at deconstructing concepts. Caught in the epistemological straight-jacket of their own making, the proponents of the indeterminacy critique managed to make themselves unable to offer any “basis” for their own passionately held moral starting point, declaring that these motivating convictions were “irrational” and outside the realm of rational knowledge, like the relationship of chaos theory to normal science. [FN13] Far from being a bad thing, these CLSers believed that this irrationalism would protect the critical aspect of critical legal studies from absorption into falsifying rationalistic ideologies and maintain a liberated free-space for political action in support of their irrationalist convictions. The politics of this position was then that there should and could be a public, democratic debate among competing convictions–left, right, and center–about what kind of social world and what kind of legal culture we humans should be aspiring to create, a debate unburdened by any transcendent moral claims which appeal to a non-existent, or at least unknowable, transcendent moral authority whose very investiture with social power would reproduce our subordination to some Other that would not be ourselves.

Unfortunately, the validity of this view rested on a “belief” about the very nature of social reality that is, with all due respect to my long-time comrades who hold it, wrong. For the world, as it really is, is suffused with moral longing that pulls upon the conscience of humanity to elevate ourselves from the limitations of what is, toward the realization of what ought to be, and the evocation of precisely that longing has been the decisive force behind every social movement that has advanced the development of humanity toward a loving and humane common existence since the beginning of time. It is equally true that the appeal to this moral longing has been the basis for terrible injustice and suffering. But this struggle over the way forward is a moral struggle anchored in the capacity of every one of us to manifest ourselves to each other in a way that points us in the right direction. A successful critical approach to the present–or in the case of law, to a successful critical legal studies–requires the illumination of the injustice of what is, that is anchored in a transcendent intuition of the just world that ought to be.

–Peter Gabel

Peter Gabel is former President and Professor of Law at New College of California and is Associate Editor of Tikkun magazine. He is also Co-Director with Nanette Schorr of the Project for Integrating Spirituality, Law, and Politics.

Peter Gabel thanks Duncan Kennedy, Michael Lerner, Michael McAvoy, Gary Peller, and Matthew Wilkes for helpful comments and criticisms.

This piece was originally published in a special issue of the Pepperdine Law Review, Vol. 36 (2009).

Footnotes:

1. See, e.g., Duncan Kennedy, A Critique of Adjudication (fin de siecle) 84 n.16, 348 n.5 (Harvard Univ. Press 1997). For a sophisticated recent statement of the indeterminacy position emphasizing that legal materials are always mediated by the strategic work of interpretation and therefore have no determinate existence “in themselves,” see Duncan Kennedy, A Left Phenomenological Alternative to the Hart/Kelsen Theory of Legal Interpretation, in Legal Reasoning: Collected Essays 153 (Davies Group 2008).

2. See Die Justiz im Dritten Reich, May 30, 2006, http:// www.123recht.net/printarticle.asp?a=16764 (citing a 1936 Berlin civil court case justifying eviction on grounds that being Jewish “undermined the strength of the tenant-house community”).

3. Elizabeth Mensch, Cain’s Law, 36 Pepp. L. Rev. 541 (2009).

4. See Sanford Levinson, Bush v. Gore and The French Revolution: A Tentative List of Some Early Lessons, 65 Law & Contemp. Probs. 7 (2002).

5. Bush v. Palm Beach County Canvassing Bd. (Bush v. Gore I), 531 U.S. 70, 71 (2000).

6. Bush v. Gore (Bush v. Gore II), 531 U.S. 98, 98 (2000).

7. See, e.g., id. at 135-44 (Ginsberg, J., dissenting).

8. 67 Brook. L. Rev. 1141 (2002).

9. Id.

10. See generally Joseph William Singer, The Player and the Cards: Nihilism and Legal Theory, 94 Yale L.J. 1 (1984).

11. See Richard A. Posner, The Problems of Jurisprudence 83 (2007); Paul D. Carrington, Of Law and the River, 34 J. Legal Educ. 222 (1984); Louis B. Schwartz, With Gun and Camera Through Darkest CLS-Land, 36 Stan. L. Rev. 413, 433-34 (1984).

12. See Jacques Derrida, Dissemination 75-84 (Barbara Johnson trans., University of Chicago Press 1983).

13. See, e.g., Clare Dalton, The Politics of Law, 6 Harv. Women’s L.J. 229, 234-48 (1983) (book review).

EVE TOLIMAN

Posted on by asitoughttobemagazine

FeedingFrenzy_geneArk

Photograph by Gene Ark

JUST NOW

by Eve Toliman

“Nothing gets easier with the passage of time, not even the passing of time.”  Joyce Carol Oates

The scent of orange blossoms, the long autumn shadows across the floor, the cracked plaster, my Tante Dora, always kind, always strong, snoring lightly on the couch — and that ache, that tough sinew through time slicing my heart with as much determination and vitality now as on that day almost forty years ago.

There was nothing significant about that day; there is nothing significant about this one.  These moments are vivid and acute because life wills it for reasons I will never grasp.  These are the times life grabs my face between her paws and frightens me alive.

We speak about being present as if it is a good and lovely way to be; it is not.  To be present means to fall into the black hole singularity where time loops around itself and everything and nothing collapse into each other.  It is not lovely to see what-is and what-is-not superimpose over the people we love.  It is not good to see the past and future eclipsed by this moment, to watch the penumbra of hope fade as the dark now becomes all there is.  We exist forever.  We don’t exist at all.  The truth lies here, in the horrible marriage of these impossibilities.

My love spans time and being.  I know because I love the dead and I feel their love for me.  I feel their love pulsing through me, undeterred by time, unaffected by my experiences.  How strange.  There is no door to close.  Once love has touched us, we are caught in each other’s hearts – hearts that survive even death.  I want to warn my children, “Be careful who you love; they never leave,” but I know they won’t understand – and even if they do, their stout, brave youth will deny it, as it must in order to carry on.

Of course the devil runs the show down here.  We inhabit a world built on lies, fueled by our insistent subterfuge.  We made him king of our pretense.  We have to lie to ourselves, over and over, in some fashion or another, in order to live the lives we do.  What if we surrendered to the annihilating reality that who we think we are is actually impossible?  What if we allowed ourselves to be flayed by truth?  Gasping in the air of another reality, a fleeting bliss before the gills we formed to extract sustenance from a sea of untruth, flap, useless, one last time and fail.  No more happy darting, no more fearful dashing, just this stillness.  What would we be after that?

We would be free.

–Eve Toliman

Further Reading:

U.S. CENSUS

Posted on by asitoughttobemagazine

ImmigrantRightsMarchLosAngels3_25_06

Immigrant Rights March, Los Angeles, March 25, 2006. Photograph by Bob Chamberlin, Los Angeles Times.

U.S. CENSUS — WHY I WON’T COOPERATE

by Nativo Vigil Lopez

After thirty years of dutifully cooperating with the census count, and even enthusiastically promoting and organizing for a successful enumeration in 1990 and 2000, I have decided this year to sit it out and not comply with the federal law. I do so very conscious of the implications of such noncooperation and noncompliance, but this is more than just a statement of protest; not a whim nor a lark.

I am driven to this conclusion by the immorality of our federal government, and too many state and local jurisdictions, in relation to its treatment of my brethen – family members, both immediate and extended into a community of millions, whose immigration status has yet to be resolved favorably for them by way of a fair and humane immigration reform. The promise and prospect of such legislation has been put off once again – justice delayed – by President Barack Obama and the Democratic Party leadership. And in the interim an enforcement-only policy and practice has been implemented by the Department of Homeland Security Secretary, Janet Napolitano. This is certainly not the HOPE that was held out to us, nor the CHANGE that was promised by candidate Obama during the tough fought presidential campaign wherein the Latino electorate played a pivotal role in locking down important swing states for the young U.S. Senator.

I suppose the first bad omen came with the cabinet- level appointment of Secretary Napolitano, the former Democratic governor of Arizona who signed into law the toughest state-sponsored employer sanctions law; repeatedly coveted Maricopa County Sheriff, Joe Arpaio, nationally infamous for both his anti-immigrant antics and practices (currently under investigation by the U.S. Justice Department for alleged racial profiling); and her numerous calls for the deployment of national troops along the U.S.-Mexico border. This is the same person that Obama named as his personal liasion directing the “dialogue” between the White House and the congressional leadership for the purpose of fashioning immigration legislation. It sounds like the fox has been let loose in the chicken coop. There is now absolutely no pretense to expect an immigration bill that could come close to being fair or humane. The current enforcement-only approach augurs poorly for any such illusion.

In reality, enforcement of the onerous side of the immigration laws by Obama and Napolitano has been more efficient, sweeping, effective, and pervasive than even under George W. and all the previous presidents combined since the passage of the 1986 Immigration Reform and Control Act, which legalized three million undocumented persons, and also enacted into law employer sanctions.

During the month of September the largest clothing manufacturing company in the U.S. based in Los Angeles, California, American Apparel, will be forced to terminate 1,800 employees as a result of an I-9 audit of its personnel, a function of employer sanctions. The social impact of the Obama approach to demonstrate to the general electorate that he is “serious” about enforcement touches 10,000 souls alone in the Los Angeles region. And, this is only the beginning. In July, Napolitano reported that DHS would target 650 profiled companies throughout the nation with I-9 audits in the succeeding twelve months. The immediate impact will be devastating on hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of immigrant families.

The Obama “hard-line” enforcement-only pursuit of immigrants must be met with a counter-vailing response that brings to the fore the political character of the policy, but also demonstrates its immorality and objectionable nature to millions of immigrant families and their U.S. citizen and permanent resident relatives, and Americans generally who find favor with immigration reform in poll after poll.

Refusing to cooperate with the U.S. census count is a political act of noncooperation and noncompliance in the best of Gandhian tradition conducted for the purpose of pressuring the political regime that pursues the persecution of immigrants on a daily basis at all nexus of social connection. This action seeks to dissociate ourselves from this repugnant and immoral policy, which strikes at the heart of the immigrant family.

The immediate objective of this tactic is to secure a moratorium of the current policy. Second, the medium- range objective is to win a fair and humane immigration reform, which results in legalizing the estimated 12-15 million persons without authorized status, but also overhauls other areas of the law – including the repeal of employer sanctions and mothballing the e-verify program. Third, and most importantly, the campaign is designed to raise the civic awareness and political consiousness of the immigrant community and its family members – irrespective of status – with regard to their own inherent power as contributing members of society in all its dimensions, and express the same in an organized concerted way to send a message of disfavor with the president and the leadership in the U.S. Congress.

At a time when the federal government is spending millions of dollars to insure a “full count” and especially reach into the cracks and shadows of social life to enumerate the hardest to reach individuals, noncooperation and noncompliance appears as the greatest leverage available to immigrants in their own pursuit of fairness and justice. It is the equivalent of a vote abstention for those who do not have the right to vote – their vote of no-confidence. Immigrants will send a clear message to Mr. Obama that they will not step out of the shadow only to be counted by the census enumerators and then be told to step back in the shadow when it comes to benefits, services, and rights. Their resounding demand is – before you count you must legalize us! This will be their clearest expression of political power.

Nativo Vigil Lopez is the President of the Mexican American Political Association.

This piece was first disseminated as part of the Mexican American Political Association (MAPA) newsletter, 9/23/09.

Further Reading:

Obama’s Immigration Enforcement More Efficient Than Bush’s by Nativo Vigil Lopez, 8/2/09

IN MEMORIAM D.F.S.

Posted on by asitoughttobemagazine

dfs

DON FUCKING STEELE (1971-2009)

by Charles Gonzalez

San Francisco lost a giant in the cultural and music scene this weekend when Don Steele tragically passed away. Things will not be the same without this man’s awesome presence and incredible vibe.

Not only was he the glue that held so many people together in what is often a transitory cultural and social scene, but he was an extraordinarily talented musician, songwriter, and DJ whose performances were both spectacular and historical and who perfected the constant celebration of life.

Don was a graduate of Chico State where he was part of the music scene around the Mother Hips (whom he lived with) and during which time he led the band Pitchfork Tuning. He was a veteran of countless gigs and gatherings. In San Francisco he played in bands including Local Stars and De Vez En Quando.


His energy and love inspired many and Don epitomized “cool” like no other. Words cannot describe the loss.

Don Steele will be remembered.

A memorial gathering to celebrate his life takes place tonight, Wednesday, September 23, 2009 at 7 p.m. at The Verdi Club located at 2424 Mariposa Street, San Francisco, CA 94110-1423.

If you can, please come out and pay your respects.

–Charles Gonzalez

THE ART OF FAILURE: POETRY IN TRANSLATION

Posted on by asitoughttobemagazine

[This piece previously appeared in Poet’s Market 2010 and Poet’s Market 2011.]

THE ART OF FAILURE: POETRY IN TRANSLATION

by Okla Elliott

“Translators are the shadow heroes of literature, the often forgotten instruments that make it possible for different cultures to talk to one another.”—Paul Auster

Introduction

The historical importance of translation for English language poetry is undeniable. Henry Howard, the Earl of Surrey, invented blank verse in order to translate Virgil’s Æneid in 1554, because the Latin original was unrhymed yet metered, and no equivalent existed in English. Blank verse, brought to us by a translator’s ingenuity, allowed for Shakespeare’s plays to be written as we know them. The sonnet (sonetto or “little song” in Italian) was created by Giacomo da Lentini and enjoyed a boom among Italian poets such as Calvalcanti, Dante, and Petrarch in the mid-13th and early 14th centuries. It was not until the 16th century that sonnets began appearing in English, in translations from Italian and from French. And the list of gifts translators have brought English poetry goes on—couplets, villanelles, sestinas, and, some have argued, even free verse via attempts to translate Chinese poetry. The question now is: What is the cultural and artistic place of translation in the age of globalization?

According to a Center for Book Culture study on the number of books translated into English between 2000-2006, it’s a pretty dismal place. Most countries had fewer than one book per year translated into English, and literary heavyweights such as France, Italy, and Germany had fewer than ten books per year translated into English—and this includes novels and nonfiction as well as poetry. The percentage of books in translation tends to be estimated, by such organizations as the NEA and PEN, at about three percent of the total published in America. (Incidentally, there is an excellent blog about translation, out of the University of Rochester, called Three Percent.) Does this mean the effort of translation is hopeless or unimportant? Not necessarily.

Translation is very complex; the process, the need, and the market for it are not so easily summed up. To understand the landscape, we have to look at the differences between publishing translation as books or in journals, translating contemporary or older work, working alone or collaboratively. Likewise, the politics and ethics of translation play a role. And perhaps most importantly, the process and joys of translation need to be understood.

The Process of Translation

The primary goal of translation is to recreate the effect of the original poem in the target language (the language into which you are translating). The problem, of course, is that if the poet did her work properly in the original (or source) language, then she made use of every available trick and tactic, thus making the job of recreating the poem almost impossible. This is why Umberto Eco calls translation “the art of failure.” But while perfection is perhaps not possible, there are thousands of excellent translations in existence. So, how were they done?

You have to determine whether you want to transport the source text into the target language or transport the reader of your translation to the source culture. If you are translating, for example, a contemporary Mexican poet, and the word buñuelo appears, you have to decide whether to replace this very specific Mexican sweet bun made with orange juice with some American equivalent (a honeybun perhaps) or to simply leave the Spanish word in the English translation and hope the reader knows what a buñuelo is. A third option is to retain the Spanish word and footnote it, though footnotes can ruin the effect of a poem if there are too many of them. The general rule is to avoid them when possible. Of course, the problem with replacing a Mexican pastry with a traditional American pastry is that—forgive the pun—you damage the original flavor of the poem, though you do not run the risk of losing or confusing your reader. But both tactics lead to problems, as nearly everything in translation does. I don’t mean to suggest that a translation can’t do both. In fact, most good translations do, but each successful translation, in order to have its singular effect as the original had its singular effect, ought to privilege one effort over the other.

Depending on the source text, your level of mastery of the source language, and whether there are pre-existing translations, the first stages of working on a new translation of a poem will differ wildly. When translating Latin and Greek literature, David Slavitt uses pre-existing literal prose translations of the poems as well as his personal knowledge of Latin and Greek “to turn the prose translations back into poems.” Slavitt says, “When you translate prose, you are the original author’s clerk, but when you translate poetry, you are his partner.”

Frequently, translation is also done collaboratively. Likely the most famous contemporary duo is Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky, who have redone many of the Russian prose masterpieces. A notable team in poetry translation is Peter Burian and Alan Shapiro, who collaborate on translations of ancient literature. The make-up of the team is frequently a scholar of the source language/text and a poet who knows the tricks of English verse and who might have some knowledge of the source language.

But no matter your tactics or whether you work alone or with a collaborator, tough choices will have to be made. My translation of Jürgen Becker’s poem “Oderbruch,” which appeared in the Indiana Review, offers a simple example of the issues a translator runs into in nearly every line. I had translated “[g]elb graue Dämmerung” as “[g]old gray twilight” which caused the faculty member consulted about the accuracy of my translation to suggest that I change it to the more literal “[y]ellow gray twilight.” In one sense, he was right—“gelb” means “yellow.” But I felt that “gold” was close enough to the literal meaning, but it had the added poetic benefit of retaining the consonance and the number of syllables in the original. Ultimately, the poetry editors at the Indiana Review agreed with me, but not because I was unquestionably right. We were both right about how to translate the line. It was simply that I was willing to make a small sacrifice in literalness to retain the music, whereas he was willing to make a small sacrifice of the music to retain a more exact meaning. Every poem will present a dozen or more moments where the translator must sacrifice one thing for another. Only rarely does a poem submit easily to transfer into a new language/culture. That, however, is also part of the joy. Nearly every translator speaks of the joy of finding an elegant solution to a seemingly insoluble problem.

Slavitt says, “I didn’t take a Hippocratic Oath when I signed on to be a writer. I feel no obligation to the literal meaning of the text whatsoever.” It’s the pleasure of the original he is after. Does that mean Twinkies show up in Ovid? Well, fine, let it be so. Or so Slavitt says. But the business of translation is a highly contentious one, and one where opinions are unusually strong and criticisms often bitter.

One of the joys of translation is what you can learn by doing it. Slavitt went to the Eclogues and Georgics of Virgil in order to learn how to make a paragraph work in verse. Matthew Zapruder, author of The Pajamaist and translator of the Romanian poet Eugen Jebeleanu, reports, “I also had a sense right away that it would be a good thing for me, a poet just starting to find his way, to be inside the seriousness of the voice and the directness and implacable structure of the poems.”

Publishing Translations

The report on the market for poetry in translation is mixed. A recent New York Review of Books article points out that Iran publishes more literature in translation than the United States does—as do all European countries and most Latin American ones. That said, however, it has been my experience that original poetry and fiction are comparably hard to place in journals, whereas translation and nonfiction are much easier to place. This has, predictably, to do with the volume and quality of submissions in each genre, as well as current demand. Brett Fletcher Lauer, a poetry editor at A Public Space and an advisory editor at Columbia University’s Circumference, a journal dedicated largely to poetry in translation, offers the following theory on why translations tend to be better and therefore more likely to be accepted: “A Public Space receives a relatively small number of submissions of poetry in translation compared with the thousands of submissions of English-language poetry. That being said, the overall quality of translations submitted is very high. I’m not sure how to account for this fact.” He goes on to speculate, “The process of translating and the dedication it requires makes it so that it cannot be casual work, but, instead, a sort of over-time, and what we receive reflects this.”

“Generally journals were happy to publish the poems,” says Zapruder of his translations of Jebeleanu. “I had more difficulty publishing the book; in fact, I finished the translations in 1998, and it took almost ten years for the book to eventually come out with Coffee House Press.”

Slavitt says, “If you translate a standard classic and are lucky enough to get it adopted as a text in enough courses, it will do much better than original poetry.” But he adds, “If you translate someone who needs translating—Ausonius for instance—it’s about even [with sales of original collections of poetry].” Given the generally poor sales of poetry collections, this might not be very heartening, but it ought to be. Either a book of translation will sell about the same as an original collection or considerably better, especially if you can recast a classic poet in a new translation.

Some of the journals most supportive of poetry in translation are Absinthe, The Bitter Oleander, Circumference, Indiana Review, International Poetry Review, The Literary Review, Natural Bridge, New Letters, Poetry International, and A Public Space. There are others, of course, but these are journals that are dedicated to translation solely or that publish some translation in nearly every issue. And presses that publish translation regularly include Dalkey Archive Press, Northwestern University Press, Red Hen Press, Sheep Meadow Press, and Ugly Duckling Presse. If a new translator wants to discover what is happening in translation today, she would do well to peruse these publications.

Advice for Getting Started

If you’re a first-time translator, it is unlikely that you’ll get the rights to translate and publish the work of a major author whose work is still under copyright—e.g., Günter Grass or Pablo Neruda. Mark Smith-Soto, the editor of International Poetry Review and a poet/translator in his own right, advises that a new translator find an author who enjoys a good reputation in his/her home country but who hasn’t yet been translated into English. “If you ask a poet whether he’d like to be translated, the answer is generally going to be yes,” Smith-Soto says. And here is where the unfortunate state of literature in translation can actually be a plus. Since there is so much excellent literature that has yet to be translated, you’ll have plenty to choose from. But since you’ll be spending many hours living in the poet’s work, it’s important to find work you admire. Otherwise, what should be a joy will become a chore. Once you’ve established yourself, then the larger gigs will come.

It’s also worthwhile to have a working knowledge of translation theory, which sounds daunting but which in fact can be attained by reading two excellent books out from University of Chicago Press, The Craft of Translation and Theories of Translation, both edited by John Biguenet and Rainer Schulte. These two reasonably sized volumes will bring you from Dryden’s thinking on translation through Goethe’s and up to Gregory Rabassa’s with excellent stops at Nietzsche’s, Benjamin’s, and others’.

So, read the journals that publish translations, read these two seminal texts on the theory and craft of translation, find poetry you admire, and get to work. It’s rewarding for both the translator and for the literary culture as a whole.