Do The Least Harm

It’s funny how things come back to you. The last of my graduate English seminars was one called American Studies Colloquium; it featured guest lecturers from UB’s English, History, Modern Languages, and Comparative Literature departments. In theory this course might have been a good place to begin one’s graduate study, but learning to navigate one’s own chosen course of study is difficult enough, and intelligent participation in discussions outside one’s own area of expertise is only more so. It was, therefore, a nice note to end on.

One of those guest speakers was Professor David Johnson from UB’s Comp Lit department. He was not our most popular speaker no doubt in part because he openly critiqued our collective dearth of knowledge about Derrida’s philosophies. Ah, the Lilliputian world of the ivory tower, how funny in retrospect. But, I digress. This particular lecture was brought to the forefront of my memory while reading about how government subsidies brought an end to the famine in the tiny African nation of Malawi. The perversity of this situation is that in order to successfully combat the massive food shortages that lead to widespread starvation, the Malawi’s president, Bingu wa Mutharika, had to ignore the advice (and therefore aid) from the United States and the World Bank. In an article published in The New York Times, reporter Celia Dugger explains,

Malawi’s leaders have long favored fertilizer subsidies, but they reluctantly acceded to donor prescriptions, often shaped by foreign-aid fashions in Washington, that featured a faith in private markets and an antipathy to government intervention.

In the 1980s and again in the 1990s, the World Bank pushed Malawi to eliminate fertilizer subsidies entirely. Its theory both times was that Malawi’s farmers should shift to growing cash crops for export and use the foreign exchange earnings to import food, according to Jane Harrigan, an economist at the University of London.

As Dugger explains, by making this recommendation, the U.S. was preaching a do as I say, not as I do policy. This was ironic because much of our own agriculture is heavily subsidized by our own federal government. This brings me to Derrida.

Derrida is often referred to as the father of deconstruction, but as my Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism informs me, he revived, but did not invent the term. For Derrida, deconstruction is a method of analysis that calls into question the structures that are used to explain what something is. Derrida’s analyses do not attempt to choose between two incompatible readings, but rather explore what the Norton editors call the “double blinds and tensions” present within the contradictory text. In other words, Derrida looks specifically for those linguistic markers that indicate a text has contradicted itself (1815-19).

The situation in Malawi brought Derrida to mind because deconstructive thought argues that it is impossible to ever escape the opposite of what one says. Ironically, this worked to Malawi’s benefit, though the United States surely did not have this (the opposite) outcome in mind. I’ll try to explain. Doris Sommer’s Bilingual Aesthetics* provided the background for our seminar discussion led by David Johnson. According to Sommer or Johnson, my notes fail to denote which, the best democracy is always the worst democracy because the factions that the best democratic society permits to exist will ultimately destroy the society that created them. If our society were perfect, it would be a dead society; the best democracy is one that limits freedom. This manner of thinking lends itself to Malawi’s current fiscal situation.

The United States and other donors recommended to Malawi a solution that relied heavily on free market economics. As Dugger explains, rather than support the seed and fertilizer subsidies that would permit the Malawi farmers to grow their own food, they recommended that Malawi shift its focus to growing cash crops in exchange for food to eat. Such a free-market system would permit the farmers the greatest autonomy, but the failure of this system meant they had nothing to sell or trade and no food to eat. A less pure market strategy, such as the one put into place by Malawi’s current president meant that farmers have less control over their own crops (only certain crops are subsidized), but these restrictions brought an end to starvation and even resulted in a surplus in food grown,

So, the course of action recommended by the United States inadvertently resulted in worsening the crisis in Malawi. Maybe down the road, Malawi’s farmers will be less well off because they must rely on governmental subsidies to survive, but then again, they will be alive. Derrida’s line of thinking can be absolutely maddening to one who wishes to take the right course of action. One assumes that the United States meant no harm when they recommended Malawi follow a free market strategy, but in doing so the U.S. and the World Bank failed to acknowledge the failure of such a pure system in many successful nations, including the United States. On the other hand, Malawi’s president correctly identified the contradiction inherent in such a strategy and took a risk in foregoing the aid offered by the U.S. and the World Bank to implement such a system in his own country. One assumes President Mutharika was not thinking of Derrida when he chose the course of action that lifted his country out of starvation, but neither was the United States when we chose to align ourselves with the financially motivated recommendations of the world’s largest lender. However, as our own crop surpluses demonstrate, doing the least harm may mean thinking of Derrida and taking a somewhat less idealistic course of action in such instances.

*Ironically, Johnson dismissed Sommer’s book as an inaccurate application of Derrida’s theory. Heaven only knows what he would think of my musings.

Sources:

Leitch, Vincent B., ed. The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2001.

 

Finding truth in drama

This past weekend, I attended two performances at the Shaw Festival, A Month In the Country by Brian Friel (based on Turgenev) and Saint Joan by Bernard Shaw. As I reflected back on the experience, it struck me that I try to understand myself through linguistic art forms–typically novels, but also poetry, film and music. Obviously, given what I do for a living, I’m fascinated by language in its many guises, but my need runs more deeply than fascination–it’s almost a primal urge to understand myself, to understand others, to understand each of us as we relate to one another. Language just happens to be the most natural way for me to explore these questions.

But to return to the topic at hand, I find theater both exhilarating and terrifying for its immediacy and truthfulness. A good performance draws the audience into the emotions being acted out (or actually felt) on stage. The immediacy comes from the live performance, there is no escaping whatever is being put forth for the audience’s consumption. It is there and if you are in the audience, it is virtually impossible to avoid the impact. As much as I love literature, it is possible to put the book down should my emotions become unbearable. Likewise with film, there always exists a certain distance between the audience and story, because the action has already occurred, the audience simply views a recording of those events. Not that I wish to diminish the value of a good film, since I too love being lost in the images, action and dialogue skillfully woven together by a good director, but it is a different experience. The truthfulness of a dramatic performance emerges when you recognize yourself in a character on stage. The realness of the experience makes the association (positive or painful) inescapable. Literature (dramatic or other) for me will always be of paramount importance because it demonstrates what we all have in common, and while I might not like what I see reflected in the words and actions of a character on stage, I know that if nothing else, I am not alone.

The Court House Theater on Main St. in Niagara-on-the-Lake

The picture of Shaw’s statue and the Court House Theater are from Galen Frysinger’s web page, accessible here.

 

Telling Stories

This evening I attended a lecture given by UB Professor Bruce Jackson titled, “The Story Is True.” The lecture was hosted by the University and is part of their free summer lecture series. I also went to hear Professor David Schmidt in July. Jackson is a consummate storyteller himself and so the experience is more along the lines of having dinner with a really learned and interesting friend than attending a lecture. Stating first that stories are the glue that holds society together, from the familial to the cultural level, he further explained that the stories families have in common are what make them families, rather than common ancestors or blood ties. The telling and retelling of shared stories reinforces those bonds. This goes a long way towards explaining the meaningless prattle that pervades some of the meals I share with my family, but doesn’t necessarily explain what I’ll call the Soprano effect, a value placed upon one’s relations simply because they are part of the family–though that may not be its intent.

The second aspect of Jackson’s lecture focused on the “truth” of stories, and here it got more interesting. Jackson argued the truth in stories comes not from the story that is told, but rather how the story is told. This reminded me of the historical adage, that the history of the past is the politics of the present. There’s truth in every story, just not where you might expect to find it. I love this, but also find it a little scary since it makes it very difficult to put pen to page without incriminating oneself in some way.

 

Morris on Photography

I read a thought-provoking blog on photography this morning over coffee. Errol Morris, writing in a blog for The New York Times, began what promises to be an interesting series on photography. His first post examined the veracity, their truthfulness or falseness, of photographs arguing that a picture alone cannot be true or false, rather the meaning we assign to a photograph resides in the information surrounding the photograph–typically the caption, but also the context in which the photograph is placed. Of course as a student of language I find this fascinating but also because when one considers the meaning typically given to pictures, Morris’ argument casts the subject in an entirely different light. What are we to make of the statement, “a picture is worth a thousand words,” if in fact it is the words that make meaning, not the picture? Or perhaps the truth of that statement lies not in the supposed authenticity that pictures provide, but instead in the fact that one needs literally thousands of (different and contradictory) words to describe them.

I’m afraid that without a subscription to The Times‘ Select service, you will be unable to read Morris’ blog–a subject for another post–but I’ve included the picture he discusses to the left. It is, as he explains, a rather mundane image of a passenger ship that only acquires meaning after it has been identified through a caption as the Lusitania. The picture is taken from the following site: www.maritimequest.com.