Midway Review

The Midway Review

autumn 2011 The Volume 7, Issue 1 Midway Review A Journal of Politics and Culture

Melissa Scott compels us to watch Eurovision

Jon Hartmann captures the geography of Lebanon

David Showalter culminates the Jersey Shore experience

Shruthi Venkatesh complicates black fashion

Jorge Muñiz conjuncts Leo Strauss & the Enlightement

Ardevan Yaghoubi converses with Axel Weber

Rita Koganzon commemorates the life of Herman Sinaiko

Find us, as always, at Harper Café Autumn 2011

midwayreview.uchicago.edu Volume 7, Issue 1 Autumn 2011 THE MIDWAY REVIEW A Journal of Politics and Culture

= this editor-in-chief issue was com- Ardevan Yaghoubi posed in 6-, 10-, and 18-point Quadraat regular managing editor & Sans — a typeface designed Gabriel Valley in 1992 by Fred Smeijers — & printed on thrice-recycled, ac- business manager id-free paper.¶ Redeem your Hamsini Sridharan free cup of coffee from Harper Café at the launch day of promotions editor distributions editor this issue! Isaac Dalke Leland Bybee

editorial board Anita Dutta Erin Dahlgren Johannah King- Justin Garbacz Slutzky

art director Drew Synan

design librarian image consultant Erin Dahlgren Evan Harold

founding editor Rita Koganzon

faculty advisor Theodore O’Neill

The Midway Review is a forum for civil Letters to the editor may be addressed to debate across the political spectrum and [email protected]. We ask that let- among the humanities and social science ters for publication be limited to 350 words. disciplines, and for reflection on current events, culture, politics, religion, and phi- The Midway Review is printed by In-Print losophy. We are accepting submissions to Graphics. Publication is made possible by the be considered for our Winter 2012 issue. Student Government Finance Committee, the Please consult midwayreview.uchicago.edu for College of the University of Chicago, and the submission guidelines. Collegiate Network. the MIDWAY REVIEW Volume 7, Issue 1 — Autumn 2011 These entries are assertions of both uniqueness and conformity, laying claim to a connection with a special past all the while asserting — and demanding — relevancy.

There is something of a fresh wound in southern Lebanon.

The Guido must be located, must place himself within the proper environment, in order to attain a full expression of self.

Creating a line of clothing to fit a specific racial paradigm is problematic because it codifies and promotes an explicit outward difference between races.

The very idea of a Jewish citizen is a contradiction in terms. Once the Jewish individual speaks in terms of his rights as a citizen he has already denied Orthodox Judaism.

For professional economists, the idea of a life untainted by markets is hogwash.

Sinaiko’s death is a tremendous loss for Chicago, and particularly for the College, which has benefitted immeasurably from his erudition and dedication. Contents

Melissa Scott New Europe, Center Stage: 5 Orientalism and Nationalism in the Eurovision Song Contest

Jon Hartmann Sour 13

David Showalter Thinking Jersey Shore 19

Shruthi Venkatesh What Makes Fashion “Black”? 27

Jorge Muñiz Atheism and the Jewish Question: Leo Strauss in Weimar 31

Ardevan Yaghoubi Economic Life: A Conversation with Axel Weber 39

Rita Koganzon Herman Sinaiko: In Memoriam 48 Spring ’93 Review launch, Bucharest. New Europe, Center Stage Orientalism and Nationalism in the Eurovision Song Contest

Melissa Scott

You’ve seen it all before Yes sir we are legal we are, though Lyrics to InCulto’s We’ve got no taste, we’re all a bore we’re not as legal as you “Eastern But you should give us a chance No sir we’re not equal, though we’re European Funk,” which ’Cause we’re all victims of both from the eu. circumstance represented We build your homes, we wash your Lithuania in the We’ve had it pretty tough dishes, Eurovision Song But that’s okay, we like it rough Contest of 2010. We’ll settle the score Keep your hands all squeaky clean, Survived the reds and two world wars. Some day you’ll come to realize Eastern Europe is in your genes! chorus Get up and dance to our Eastern European kind of funk!

The Eurovision Song Contest (esc) is not just a pop song Melissa Scott is a third-year in the competition: often, it is a musical manifestation of political College studying and social issues of great significance. The lyrics to InCulto’s Music. “Eastern European Funk,” as seen above, express a key issue in the recent history of the Contest by pointing to distinct percep- tions of “Western” and “Eastern,” legal and illegal, tasteful and tasteless. This song asserts that, despite Lithuania’s acceptance to the European Union in 2004 and the supposed institutional and ideological unity of Lithuania with the rest of Europe, there remain larger inequalities across an “Eastern” and “Western” divide. This challenges the concept of the “New Europe,” an ideal that relies on multicultural values and the overcoming of

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“Set off the metal detectors with the Swag”

national borders, and instead asserts that old divisions are still too large to ignore. Suffice to say, Lithuania did not make it past the esc semi-finals. Although it is often derided in popular discourse — or as in the United States, completely ignored — Eurovision holds a special place in the history of musical nationalism. Political issues pervade the esc from song choice (“Eastern European Funk”) through the contest’s development and expansion. Originally conceived as a Cold War initiative to culturally unite Western Europe, the Eurovision Song Contest has developed into a mas- sive, popular song competition that, in many ways, challenges European definitions and identities. Nations either “internally” select a song submission or open the decision to popular vote, and all selected artists then gather to perform for a live and tele- vised audience. (An estimated 600 million people watched the 2010 competition held in Oslo, Norway.) Votes are then totaled and both popular and panel-based voting determines point

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distribution: each country votes for 10 other countries, giving the country with the most votes 12 points, the second 10 points, and the next eight 1 – 8 points. As an annual ritual, Eurovision allows members of the European Broadcasting Union (often including countries around the “official” borders of Europe) to submit supposedly representa- tive songs to be performed on an international stage. The first contest was held in 1956 in Lugano, Switzerland, with seven participating countries, and it has since expanded to include as many as 43 countries. The fall of the Soviet Union precipitated an influx of post-Soviet countries, like Lithuania, that sought to assert cultural sovereignty on an international stage, and the countries of the Caucasus region have made more recent entrances in the past few years. The upcoming contest in 2012 will be held in Baku, Azerbaijan — the farthest East the Contest has ever been. Contemporary audiences would barely recognize the Contest in 1956: artists in the early years were predominantly crooners with “light” big band swing and orchestral accompaniment. Audiences sat silently in tuxedos, clapped respectfully between songs, and generally treated the Contest as a kind of “high culture” event. There was a shift in musical style and aesthetic throughout the 1960s and 1970s, but audience energy and size did not drastically change until after the switch from panel-based to popular voting in 1997. Now, Eurovision is a fundamentally staged spectacle in a visual concert style more associated with rock and pop. The 2009 Contest, hosted in Moscow, is an excellent example of this focus on the visual: Russia’s opening sequence (including a presentation by Cirque du Soleil) featured the previous year’s Eurovision winner flying to the stage in order to proceed to strut down a reversely moving walkway, pushing past a horde of beautiful women, only to subsequently burst through a series of fake buildings. After all this, he performs his winning song. A language restriction that required countries to sing in an official national language was lifted in 1999, and this in combination with popular voting paralleled a shift in both musical content and point distribution. Smaller countries of Eastern Europe, the

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Balkans, and the Caucasus region suddenly overshadowed historically successful Western European countries. Estonia won first place in 2001 with the entry “Everybody,” and this was only the first in a series of “non-Western” victories (sung mostly in English) that left Western Europe uneasy. Terry Wogan’s com- mentary for the bbc highlights the anxious sentiments that have been a main theme in popular discourse: Oh there’s a bit of singing as well. You remember when this was a song contest, do you? Back in the days of Katie Boyle? Forget it! The Eastern bloc has taken over. It’s now, ‘Never mind the music, we’ve got the neighbors to think of!’ Who cares? This karaoke of a thing… All spectacle and show and stuff strutting… You remember Ruslana last year? Perhaps you knew her better as Xena, warrior princess. Wogan made these comments in 2005 during the opening sequence in Kiev, Ukraine. Ruslana Lyzhychiko won first place the prior year with “Wild Dances,” and, as is custom in the ESC, performed her winning song for the Contest’s opening sequence the next year in Kiev. (Interestingly, artists need not be nationals of the country they represent; the francophone Canadian Celine Dion, for example, won first place for Switzerland in 1988, an important moment in her career.) Wogan questions whether the Contest is musically or politically motivated and likens Ruslana to a “warrior princess,” but it is difficult to tell whether he is criticizing her essentialist presentation of Ukrainian culture or the fact that she represents Ukraine in the first place. “Wild Dances” is, after all, supposedly based on traditional Hutsul folksongs and culture, but some view her representation as part of a greater commodification of “folk” culture as a means to make claims of “authenticity.” Serdar Erener’s winning entry for Turkey in 2003 has faced similar criticism. Erener mixed elements of Western pop and supposedly Turkish folk, combining instrumentation, song form, and vocal style to create a hybrid, and largely Orientalist, representation of Turkey. The song’s instrumentation features the percussive darbuka, one of many standardized Turkish folk instruments. The main rhythmic theme in the accompaniment has been a standard in Turkish pop for many years,

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and it was made internationally recognizable as “Turkish” (or “German-Turkish”) by artists like Tarkan. The melodies of the accompanying (European) strings are reminiscent of arabesk, an Arabic-influenced style that was particularly popular in Anatolia in the latter half of the 20th century. Her vocal style and form are, however, primarily working within a European tradition (and it is also worth noting the song’s bridge is a rap.) Additionally, the visuals are highly Orientalist: Erener’s backup dancers perform moves reminiscent of a belly dance, and their highly sexual crawling and clinging to Erener recall influential Western images of a sexualized and homoerotic Ottoman harem. This vi- sually plays upon both Turkey and greater Europe’s stereotyped and imagined conception of an exotic Ottoman past. The song was highly popular, and this was actually the first year Cyprus gave points to Turkey despite intense ongoing international conflicts. (One should recall Turkey’s invasion of Cyprus in 1974, which has had a lasting effect on European politics far beyond the esc.) Turkey’s victory is often attributed to many issues, including Turkey’s stance against the Iraq War and the United States at the time, the lure of the exotic through Erener’s use of Orientalist imagery, the rise of what Wogan describes as an “Eastern bloc,” and the fact that this was Turkey’s first song in English and could therefore be understood by more people. This use of English is a particularly important factor. Despite pleas by the Turkish government to perform in Turkish, Erener decided to use English in order to gain votes and increase the song’s appeal. This has since become common practice for Turkey despite the initial hesitation (and, in some cases,

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complete rejection) by officials who saw singing in Turkish as the only appropriate way to properly represent Turkey. Turkey’s more recent success, maNga’s “We Could Be The Same,” which won second place in 2010, also used English in addition to a rock aesthetic. Turkey’s 2011 entry was also a rock song in English, but it was, by all accounts, disastrous. Although Erener was Turkey’s first artist to win first place since its entrance in 1975, two other Turkish entries were successful before 2003. Sebnam Paker’s entry “Dinle” (Turkish for listen) won third place in 1997, receiving full points from Germany, Spain and Bosnia-Herzegovina. Germany proceeded to give full points to Turkey for the next two years, likely due to both the introduction of popular voting and the large Turkish community in Germany. Turkey gave Germany full points in 1999, illuminating the strong diasporic connection as Sürpriz, a group of Turkish musicians representing Germany, performed the song “Reise nach Jerusalem — Kudüs’e Seyahatin,” combining Turkish, English, German and Hebrew. It is also possible to view the United Kingdom’s entry in 2005, “Touch My Fire” by Javine, as Turkish — or, rather, trying to be Turkish. Javine said it herself in an interview with the bbc:

It’s got kind of a Turkish vibe, it has Eastern influences, so we’re trying to reach out to as many people as possible by having that international feel.

This comment shows Javine’s specific emphasis on using a “Turkish” (which is, rather problematically, equated with “Eastern”) style as a way to garner votes. There are obvious sonic and visual similarities between “Touch My Fire” and “Every Way That I Can”: Javine’s piece features the darbuka, both have backgrounds based on the same “Turkish pop” rhythmic theme, and both utilize arabesk-like string accompaniment. Javine’s staging is similar, as she is surrounded by a group of women (but also a few men) in vaguely similar outfits. Javine’s use of these stylistic elements reveals many layers of social and cultural complexity. Thomas Solomon, in his article on Erener’s victory, describes the success of “hybridized songs and performances combining ‘ethnic’ national culture with the

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„Teleologie“

pop song formula” (Solomon, 2007, 143) as a shift in esc voter preference, and Javine subsequently attempts to use “that international feel.” At once we can see an appropriation of cultural symbols used to gain votes by both Erener and Javine. This sense of the international is particularly important when viewing Erener’s and Javine’s entries. This essay has touched upon various esc entries that articulate and reflect a particular moment and ongoing sentiment in recent Eurovision history, one that emphasizes folk roots and Eastern chic. Javine and Erener are actors in this new Eurovision, a Eurovision perhaps reflecting moves towards a “New Europe,” promoting not only a nationalized but hybridized aesthetic, using the international stage to make both nationalist and cosmopolitan claims. Ruslana and Erener’s entries speak to a supposed “folk” history and culture, playing up imagery of an “authentic” past while sonically presenting a mixture of folk sounds with Western pop, creating an easily digestible “ethnic pop” for the esc audience. This reflects a tenuous balance between desires to retain one’s history and culture while moving through and past the homog- enizing modernity of nationalism. In this way these entries are assertions of both uniqueness and conformity, laying claim to a connection with a special past all the while asserting — and demanding — relevancy. Javine then utilizes this imagery in a failed attempt to gain votes, representing one nation with another’s stereotyped symbols, stripping them of any previous sense of

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direct cultural context (which was already dubious enough) in an attempt to reach out to an audience supposedly seeking con- nections with Europe’s “ethnic” past. It is worth ending with a brief look at Russia’s entry this past year in Düsseldorf. A radio channel owned by the Russian government “internally” selected Alexey Vorobyov’s “Get You,” an ambiguously aggressive and militaristic song presented with visuals reminiscent of a 1980s “Greaser” aesthetic. Vorobyov sings “I’m coming to get you” in the historically ironic site of Germany, telling Europe: “I rule my world like brave men do, and I fight, I fight for mine” and “I’m gunning for you.” This moves far beyond the 2009 entry, which celebrated and summarized a supposedly “authentic” Russian past with Soviet- approved imagery and artists. It may be pushing the envelope to view these lyrics as reminiscent of past imperialism, but, especially when viewing this entry in the context of the rise of a widely discussed “Eastern bloc” and a Europe struggling to “realize Eastern Europe is in [their] genes,” it is difficult to not view these messages as troublesome. The implications of this song may never be fully developed in politics, but I will certainly be watching the upcoming Contest very closely.

works cited

Jordan, Paul. “Eurovision in Moscow: Re-imagining Russia On The Global Stage.” eSharp, Issue 14, Winter 2009, 39-61. Retrieved from http://www.gilmorehillg12.co.uk/media/ media_138647_en.pdf. Solomon, Thomas. “Articulating the historical moment: Turkey, Europe, and Eurovision 2003” in A Song for Europe: Popular Music and Politics in the Eurovision Song Contest. Ivan Raykoff and Robert Tobin (Eds.). Burlington, VT: Ashgate Publishing Company.

12 Sour

Jon Hartmann

Suggest Shia’a to a Western academic, and you may hear some Jon Hartmann is a fourth-year in the mention of the Safavis, Qaramatians, Ahmedi Najad — his College studying real media name — or someone’s Pakistani friend. Hussein-u nelc. ya Hussein, wain ghayib, ghayib wain — crackles through a storefront window. Hear this mention of bananas; bananas, pineapples, and oranges. Cola station west Beirut — a kind of tin can heap of garages — nest to a brood of old German vans. The neighborhood looks as though it re-grew in-between the standing rubble left by the civil war. The few new apartment buildings stand beleaguered next to their bullet-rattled neighbors. Cola itself is frenzied, the raa’i, the herder, stands on the curb that is the outer wall of the bay of vans in front of the garages, and calls the names of various destinations, pulls travelers by the arm into vans. An old French vbci stands corroded, encrusted in years of inaction, under the highway, the road from the airport that allows travelers to pass most of west Beirut entirely. Lebanese soldiers play cards on one of its eight dry-rotted wheels in their variously positioned berets. Wain raayih ya khaiy, where-e you going mister, the herder says grabbing me by the arm. ’a-Sour, to Tyre. A kid sitting next to a cooler in one of the garages wants one thousand lira too much

13 sour

The seaward bound

for water. I can see the hesitation in his brow as he leans on a stack of repaired mufflers. Everyone is sweating. As in the rest of Beirut, there are soldiers everywhere — carrying a mixture of predominantly American and Russian equipment. Some soldiers get into the van; they have sweated through their camo, sleeves rolled up to their armpits. The humidity only increases as we drive further south in the minibus. Everyone is carrying something, cardboard boxes and thighs stick to the cracked vinyl seats. The driver drops his cigarette through a hole in the floor of the van, that is the end of that, khara, shit. It is still Ramadan and there is a silent sense of fate in his lost cigarette, evident in his reluctance to light another. After my time in Palestine I became anxious about what people were carrying. I sat behind a man carrying a few hundred hypodermic needles in his family’s luggage on a minibus ride to Nablus. Here, fruit, imaginary ak cartridges, or pants, it is all anxiety, packed neatly away in cardboard boxes. It is a particular anxiety that is ridiculous, unwarranted, and the kind of sensation that the traveler is in fact travelling for. The nail-biting suspicion of Lebanese checkpoints, our frail imagined explanations for distant gunshots, all are partly born of a desire to exoticize. Micro-orientalization. Old news. Indeed the traveler creates this anxiety for his own entertainment. But there must first be something there for elaboration, a kernel of truth, a real pearl wedged somewhere into those layers of structure. Calm down look around. Tawakil a’allah, count on God, ya khuwi, dude. A mana’eesh stall on the side of the road is barraged by the dust cloud surrounding our bus. Mana’eesh is a Lebanese icon, essentially a small pizza topped with any kind of Mediterranean staple; thyme and sesame, ground lamb and paprika, cheese. It is an eternal working-class and late-night east-Beirut-set drunk- en favorite — one of Lebanon’s ambassadors to surrounding

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Levantine countries. You might not realize that the road from Beirut to Tyre, via Sidon, is only a few hundred yards from the ocean at its furthest. The ocean is so infrequently visible as the road lies in a sea of banana and pineapple plants between the shoreline and hills to the east. The pineapple plants closest to the road are always the sickliest, covered in a layer of dust and garbage thrown from the street; they are a kind of necessary buffer between the road and the fields. It is a sight strangely truth reminiscent of the olive fields in Jordan or Palestine, the trees closest to the road for the most part forsaken to inevitable stran- gulation. Except here, if it were not for the road and its small strings of mana’eesh stands and crumbling housing blocks you might forget you were in the Levant at all, it is humid, lush, Mediterranean, and Shia’a. Every handful of kilometers a small Shia’a mosque squats in a nest of electrical wires while and reconciliation Hezbollah or Amal martyrs’ posters constrict the sidewalks in a silent gravity that is easily ignored by anyone who has been living there long enough to remember their faces. There is a tangibly different sentiment on the road to southern Lebanon than there is in the north. Gone are the mountain shabab in their floppy camo hats, tank tops, and chopped-up half-century-old Volkswagen beetles, their humor in the make- shift. There is something of a fresh wound in southern Lebanon. The sprinkle of bullet holes over Tyre are not yet pock marks on the face of a conflict forgotten by a new generation like the shelled-out buildings in Tarablus. There is none of the humor that exists around a partially healed wound. Take Hebron — everything is shit? Of course it is! Where did you think you were going? Beirut? Settlers steal my cable television! Hah, says a Khalili in a fake Burberry polo. Hebronites are always telling jokes, people tell jokes about them. Three Hebronites in a pond are arguing over who will pay for dinner, they decide that who- ever stays underwater the longest will not have to pay for dinner. All of the Khalilis drown. In Hebron, when you pass through a traffic light, there is a sign afterwards that says, “caution traffic light behind you.” A Khalili says to his friend, should we take the bus? His friend: no let’s run alongside the bus and save a lira. The Khalili: ‘I have a better idea, let’s run alongside the taxi and

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save five lira.’ But here, outside of Tyre, white dishdash-wearing farmers wheel cartloads of bananas down the street and the shabab, the youth, sit aimlessly around cassette stores in track pants and greasy long hair — picking their noses with the grown-out pinky nail that is so popular among Levantine youth. We arrive in Tyre, Sour in Arabic. I walk between a few bus stations. New Sour is all concrete, five stories — a several-block- deep front to one of the Levant’s larger series of Palestinian refugee camps. The characteristic red and white Lebanese army checkpoints act as corks to the camps that leak out from in between these concrete attempts at reclaiming the street front. The Lebanese cedar is spray-painted via stencil all over these alcoves, as a kind of totemic seal. The camps are known as government-free zones in the Lebanese media, ever since the War of the Camps in the 1980s they have retained some degree of au- tonomy. There are the familiar signs of all Palestinian ghettos, Arafat posters either faded or ripped off of old concrete walls, passive graffiti wars between Hamas and Fatah, and barbed wire. Barbed wire is everywhere, rusted apart, or cast aside, half-removed strings sit at the corners on top of concrete walls. The Bas camp in Sour has an old Lebanese fortress shrouded in gille nets diagonal from its cedar-festooned entrance. There is a machine gun pointed at the ground in front of the entrance to the camp. The Bas camp, like the others, sits inside an incon- sistent concrete wall and an outer layer of one- or two-story bare

Messrs. Lauwers and Faggione, disclosed.

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concrete housing buildings. One can just glimpse some of the tin roofs used to complete the unfinished concrete shelters and damaged houses inside. From the top of the seating mound to the hippodrome you can see small Palestinian flags lying alongside laundry, and a McDonald’s in the valley opposite the camp. My classmate from Amman, whom I had been travelling with throughout Lebanon, decided that we should buy two of the Russian camo utility vests in any one of the surplus stores scattered around Sour, famously worn by bin Laden and other Jihadis, as a kind of reward for having travelled the rest of the Lebanese countryside successfully. We walked back past the minibus station, the crowd of drivers in tank tops shouting uncouthly, attracting the attention of a un guard on patrol in his white van. Green and red Amal flags fluttered contentiously about the sidewalks just past the ghettos — one of the plo and Fatah’s oldest enemies in Lebanon. It is still Ramadan, and we have become as accustomed as possible to only drinking in private to avoid offending anyone, but seeing a pack of young men puffing cigarettes in front of us we seize the chance to sip a bit of water to stifle the asphyxiating sensation of dehydration that hovers just above all travelers during Ramadan. When you take a bus during Ramadan, about thirty miles after beginning the journey someone will inevitably begin to sneak sips of water as there is a rule that stipulates you may drink after travelling so far from your home. The same applies for cigarettes it seems,

Messrs. Lauwers and Faggione, disguised.

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30, 100, 500, feet from home, who knows? We arrive at the door to a military surplus store and see Hezbollah scarves and shell cases sitting about the patio. A look inside the door reveals a countertop displaying pistols, and rifle racks about the walls. A few young men sit grimly about the counter in their floppy camo hats and sweat-stained tank tops. We immediately loose our gall and float silently away from the stacks of shirts patched with old Lebanese platoon insignias. We continue back towards the minibus station, attempting to shake off an extraordinary feeling of shame, kicking a rock down the sidewalk, whistling, encouraging the sweat and dehydration compounded by our confoundedness. Travelers are masochists. Amal, Hezbollah, Fatah, Hamas are here, to the for- eigner, the political faces of an individually indiscriminate mass. We see the Nasrallah brothers every other moment, the famous rivalry, Sheikh Hassan heading Hezbollah, his nearly identical brother a prominent figure in Amal. They stare determinedly out towards the ocean in their own discreet strings of posters about streetlights, building tops, and storefronts. We come to a particular storefront where a group of shabab has gathered. They are staring at a cage of monkeys, some languishing in the corner of the enclosure, others sucking at the nipple of the water dispenser, others looking negatively at the faces of the youth. We could smell the cage before seeing it. “Look at those fucking monkeys,” says my friend. One of the kids picks his teeth with a grown-out pinky nail, another tosses a cigarette butt to the curb. I felt as though I had seen our driver before, bearded, tank top. The simultaneous exhaustion of having walked all day and the cloud of cigarette smoke growing inside the van lulled me into a sleep interrupted only by our circumnavigating the Dahiya — The Southern Sacrifice — the Shia’a neighborhood to the south of Beirut destroyed during the 2005 conflict. Amal, Amal, Amal flags. There are people everywhere in the streets. We change minibuses on the edge of the Dahiya, it is a sobering moment. Curtains flutter in the windows of bullet-speckled apartment high rises while houseplants droop out of open windows.

18 Thinking Jersey Shore

David Showalter

“As soon as you flush the toilet, you are right in the middle of ideology.” 1. Slavoj Zˇizˇek –Slavoj Zˇizˇek1 on toilets and ideology [Video]. “I shit like a bear.” (2007). http:// –Ronnie www.youtube. com/watch?v= AwTJXHNP0bg. pregaming: same shit, different toilet. By the time David Showalter is a fourth-year JWoww finally calls the plumber in season 3, episode 10 ofJersey in the College Shore, the toilets have been clogged for two weeks. All of them. majoring in Shit is literally piling up everywhere, and the Guidos2 are at Tutorial Studies. a loss. In the early days of the clog, Vinny reported the pres- ence of corn in the bowl as he gamely wrestled a coat hanger into the S-bend. By the end of the crisis, algae and maggots are the principal concerns. The camera lingers on the putrid 2. For simplicity’s sake, “Guidos” bowl, its contents artificially blurred into an indistinct brown refers to both pool that threatens to overtop the brim and invade the bath- male and female members of room proper, while the men of the house huddle in fear of what the cohort, they have created. Everyone is in an apocalyptic mood — Vinny self-identifying “Guidettes” pleads for deliverance in the confessional booth, close-up, Blair notwithstanding. Witch-style. Masculine pronouns are What are we to make of the fact that one of the principal narratives similarly intended of one of the most popular television shows of the past decade to refer to the- concerns a struggle against fecal matter? Zˇizˇek suggests that Guido-as-such.

19 thinking jersey shore

variations in European toilet architecture, and by extension the entire host of means by which Western humans relate to their excrement, are in a very tangible sense the product of national ideologies, particularly attitudes of disgust and valuations of that which has been made external to the body. Schematically: the French are revolutionary, and thus their shit is swept away rapidly and efficiently, guillotine-like; the English are pragmat- ic, allowing their fecal matter to float passively in water; and the Germans are contemplative, taking the time to inspect their bowel movements in a form of deep introspection. But all three acknowledge that what is inside must come out, and when it does we must have in place some mechanism to manage it. And yet what is astonishing about the three-episode long scato- logical saga on Jersey Shore is the cast’s apparent ambivalence to 3. Indeed, in a this managerial imperative. Every toilet in the house is clogged, grammatical nuance that and has been for days; Vinny attempts a resolution only under has seemingly the most immediate kind of compulsion: he has to defecate. And escaped all other commentators, yet even this failure, and the further metastasization of the clog, Pauly D describes does not prevent one anonymous member of the house from the Guido thusly: “It’s just “tak[ing] an extra shit in it,” as Ronnie says, visibly shaken. The a lifestyle. It’s cast is wallowing in shit — each person’s own shit and the shit being Italian, it’s representing, of others — and yet their disgust and distress find expression in family, friends, only the most theatrical of forms: exaggerated sniffs and wide- tanning, gel, everything” eyed, open-mouthed horror. One gets the feeling that they are (emphasis just trying to get a better whiff. added). Guido identity arises Jersey Shore, more than any show of the recent past, has been de- through a process fined by its critics as “trashtv ,” stuck firmly “in the gutter,” and of stylization and re-presentation of scatology is perhaps the mode in which Jersey Shore attains its full invisible relations thematic density. The movement from interior to exterior lies (being Italian, family, friends) at the very heart of Guido identity: a transformation of genetic, as visual cues biological Italian ancestry into a constellation of visual signi- (tanning, gel, and the evocative fiers: tanned skin, gelled hair, toned muscles; the reduction “everything”). of psychologically embedded values of family and communal life to the performative ritual of ‘Sunday night dinner’; and the substitution of inculcated cultural heritage for the perfunctory sightseeing of the cast’s recent trip to Italy.3 For the Guido, all of this shit is coming out, continuously, and though he must eventually do something about it, he hesitates to simply dispose of

20 david showalter

it, because he cannot forget how dependent he is on these very remainders. And so we are forced to watch poor Vinny, the one true Italian in the bunch, for whom these transformations present the most dramatic crises of self, locked in an interminable agonism with the shit. What was once inside has come inexo- rably out, and it is no longer a problem merely for the Guidos, but for us all. boardwalking. In Chapter 25 of Snooki’s first novel,A Shore Thing,4 Giovanna “Gia” Spumanti —“a.k.a. Snooki,” as irl 4. All citations in 5 this section are to Snooki informs us in her canonical Matt Lauer interview — fi- Polizzi, Nicole. nally gets to go on a date with Frank Rossi, a daring and hunky 2011. A Shore Thing. New York: firefighter. For the Guidette, such an occasion demands extrava- Gallery Books, gance: “lacy, silky sexy things” underneath a “stretchy, tight, pp. 165-179. silver sequined dress,” accented with “two rows of lashes, black liquid eyeliner, and heavy mascara…three layers of foundation 5. Available at http://www. and gloss,” and “a dark stroke of blush on her cleavage to make msnbc. her boobies look even bigger.” Gia “had never felt sexier.” To msn.com/id/ 26184891/ the Guidette, this is a sartorial display of the highest magnitude, vp/41017987# a showing fit for the glitziest balls or the most exclusive of clubs. 41017987 This is what one wears when one wants to be noticed, an outfit that bespeaks one’s membership in the uppermost echelon of Guido society. And yet Gia is not preparing for a night out with other Guidos and Guidettes of her rank; nor is she headed to the vip section of Karma, the Guidos’ club of choice — Gia has gotten all gussied up for a simple walk on the boardwalk, the most pedestrian of destinations. The boardwalk is literally a tourist trap: a winding liminal space between beach and town, a threshold that all vacationers must cross, and that therefore bristles with commercial diversions, gaudy trinkets, cheap burger joints, and an unbroken rampart of drinking establishments. It is designed for the extraction of capital. And yet it is also classless and somewhat democratic: no one walking on the boardwalk can make a claim to be above the rest, physically or otherwise, and if the boardwalk is designed to exploit our desire for gimcrack prizes and evanescent entertainment, well, at least we’re all being exploited. The boardwalk channels the tourists, drunks, libertines, drifters, and Guidos

21 thinking jersey shore

into one carnivalesque parade, a swarm of undifferentiated hu- manity, a pageant in the middle of the most overpowering sort of pageantry. And yet this is a place in which Gia must look her absolute best. Certainly she is on a hot date — Frankie the fireman is quite “yummy,” as Gia puts it — but isn’t this all the more reason to spend the evening at a locale more befitting their Guidosity? Clearly the boardwalk exerts an irresistible pull on the Gui- dos — they are drawn to it “like monkeys to the jungle,” as Vinny says, or “like flies come to shit,” as Ronnie says in a different context. The boardwalk holds the promise of comfort and con- tentedness for the Guido, as though it were, in an ecological sense, the habitat in which they belong. This attraction is the result of the structure of Guido identity. As has been said, the Guido constructs his identity through a self-conscious and con- tinual process of externalization and stylization, and yet such a process would clearly exhaust itself were it not also supplied with fresh material from the outside. The boardwalk, in what I will call its metaphoric plenitude, provides the onslaught of sensory data that the Guido in turn can repurpose in service of his own self-creation. This nutritive relation between boardwalk and Guido becomes clear from the moment Gia and Frank step outside. The early evening sky was “pinky orangey,” just like Gia’s skin tone; “When I get home,” she decides on the spot, “I’m painting my room that color.” They stroll past the stores, talking about Gia’s uncle’s deli (where she was forever screwing up), her college career (aborted), before discussing, as was inevitable from the

Healing from the wounds of outsourcing, Mr. Claus decides to set up shop online.

22 david showalter

moment they stepped into the bronze(d) glow of the evening, Gia’s summer job at Tantastic, the local tanning salon. They agree that this is truly the job for Gia, her “place,” the linkage between her habitat and her habitus, between the summer sun and her summer skin. Frank buys Gia some saltwater taffy as the walk continues, and the aroma reminds her of her childhood spent on the Shore. This confirms for Frank that she is a true “Jersey girl.” They stop to play a carnival game — tossing softballs into an inclined basket — and Frank proves himself a champion by winning Gia her choice of the largest prizes. And here Gia faces a choice: which animal should she pick? We can imagine the choices she faced from scouring video evidence from Jersey Shore itself: alligators, bears, giraffes, and gorillas. She is drawn “immediately to the After the funeral giant gorilla doll,” and yet the sight of the toy evokes far more than the triumph of victory or the thrill of material acquisition. As anyone who has seen Jersey Shore can attest, the “gorilla” is the highest masculine Guido ideal; a “gorilla” is a man whom any Guidette would be proud to bed, and especially to be seen with. And Frank Rossi is just such a man. “I don’t need a stuffed gorilla,” Gia thinks, “[I’ve got] the real thing right here” (emphasis in original). She chooses a giraffe instead. The conversation turns serious. Gia feels as though she has no direction in life; she wants to start a family, but doesn’t think she’s ready. Her parents, she reveals, went through a nasty di- vorce when she was young, from which she may not yet have recovered. She just discovered, she continues, that her father’s second wife is pregnant. “That’s rough,” Frank responds. Gia suddenly realizes that she has opened herself to Frank, this random Guido whom she barely knows, even more than to her best friend. And what compelled her to place such trust in this man? “Gia felt like the bouncing softballs, popping out of one basket after another. Frankie didn’t bounce, though. He could stick.” It is Frank’s metaphoric resonance with a carnival game that convinces Gia of his integrity. Indeed, what recurs over and over again throughout this chapter is the web of associations between the scenery of the boardwalk and the most essential

23 thinking jersey shore

parts of the Guido’s self. Gia decides to remodel her bedroom, her sanctum, based on the glint of the Jersey sun on her skin; she finds her home at the tanning salon for much the same reason; the experience of taffy consumption demonstrates the truth of her New Jerseyan identity; and likewise the toys at the game booth corroborate Frank’s status as a Guido gorilla. And after this intoxicating glut of sensation, Gia and Frank, positively vibrating with allusive energy, planted on the physical stage of their mental lives, finally become enveloped in a “pink, shiny bubble” of love (or maybe gum). two thematics of the shore. Gia’s relationship with Frank, her only love interest for the rest of the summer, her object of total devotion, “the ultimate future husband,” is built entirely on a foundation of metaphors and metonyms drawn from the boardwalk. The boardwalk is a fount of imagery so powerful that one might wish to say that for the Guido, in this environment, seeing is only barely distinguishable from know- ing; thoughts arise and the truth of those thoughts are verified on the basis of their correspondence with the material world in which the Guido finds himself: an almost complete articulation of mind onto world.

24 david showalter

Guido identity, therefore, could be said to rest ultimately upon a habitation among — or at least proximity to — the material sig- nifiers of ‘the Shore.’ The Guido must be located, must place himself within the proper environment, in order to attain a full expression of self. In contrast, what Vinny has called a “genera- tional Italian” derives his identity from membership in a genetic community that, through diaspora, has eliminated the need to localize that identity through residence in a motherland. It could even be that geographic and mnemonic distance from the motherland serves to define it as the legitimating origin of an identity, legitimate precisely because of its absence, its mythic status. The obscure remove of the individual from its origin authenticates the depth of a true, inner self. The Guido reverses this relation of identity to place: rather than founding a community through a relation of absence and therefore of inscrutable interiority, the Guido forms himself as a pastiche of ready-to-hand symbols. This reliance on external stimulus for self-creation requires a localization that is accessible in actuality. Gia’s stroll on the boardwalk is thus just one instantiation of a much more general problematic on Jersey Shore. Boundaries between interior and exterior — between body and world, self and surroundings, innards and excrement — perpetually trouble the Guido, and deserve more attention from scholars of the show. In the Guido’s tribulations we witness a tumultuous attempt to establish a novel mode of being, and we should take the op- portunity to thereby call into question the foundations of our own identities. Jersey Shore is the most important sociological experiment of our time, as Brian Moylan has compellingly described it, not merely for its exposition of Guido culture and its extreme experiments in surveillance and isolation, but for its profound reflexive utility for scholars and thinkers of all stripes. The Guidos are not alien or profoundly Other. Rather, they are up to many of the same things that we all are: making our way in the world, and making ourselves in the process. The shit that they produce (in all of the meanings of that word) challenges us not only to think Jersey Shore more deeply, but to think ourselves as well.

What Makes Fashion “Black”?

Shruthi Venkatesh

Black dandyism is on the rise. Blogs like Street Etiquette target Shruthi Venkatesh is a African-Americans, attempting to widen the cultural prototypes third-year in the typically promoted to young black men and to “show people of College stuyding 1 Economics and African descent in a good light”. Outfitter-boutiques like the Sociology. Chicago-based Sir & Madame and Philadelphia’s Armstrong & Wilson, along with several other designers, have similar mo- tives: These entrepreneurs strive to shape what it means to look “black,” and therefore to give the world a “different perception of the young black man”.1 1. Caramanica, Jon. “Pushing Increasingly, fashion sections monitor and praise these revolu- the Boundaries tions in “black style.” For example, The New York Times Fashion of Black Style.” Fashion & Style. section commented on revolutionizing brands, fits, colors, pat- The New York terns, and so forth that characterize the way African-American Times, 17 Aug. 1 2011. Web. 1 Sept. people present themselves . The article claims that this new era 2011. of “black fashion” re-invigorates traditional “black” ways of representing oneself by identifying with an earlier, pre-hip-hop aesthetic: it replaces baggy pants, shirts, and bling with ties, tweed, and cardigans. At first glance, this sort of media coverage, along with the very concept of “black fashion” appears innocuous: we’re told that African-American fashion designers are creating looks intended for African-American people, and the media is only mirroring

27 what makes fashion “black”?

Fig. 1 Courtesy F.E. Castleberry, photographer.

the trend in “black fashion.” But a quick glance at nearly any advertisement, from college pamphlets to clothing catalogs, reveals that race-specific marketing techniques are already widely prevalent; there is not so much a ‘mirroring’ process as there is one of fluid creation and appropriation between media and marketplace. “Black fashion,” as any racially targeted fashion line, uses style as a vehicle to celebrate the “source of digni- ty” in black heritage, and is then prima facie unproblematic. However, behind the concept of “black fashion” and its promotion lies a potentially dangerous essentialism, and a culture of ‘us’ versus ‘them’. Traditionally, every fashion and style of clothing is marketed to a specific cultural, social, or ethnic demographic. Tightly fitted bodices and corsets were marketed for wealthy socialites in the past centuries; the 19th century metal-hoop skirt in particular was designed for the upper class women. Such practices remain at work today. For example, the preppy look is marketed to the wealthy (think Burberry) or those who would aspire to be among them (think J.Crew); affordable, bright prints and miniskirts are often marketed to young, working women (Ann Taylor); geometrical prints, unconventional stitching, and un- usual fits are many times marketed to college students (Urban Outfitters). Yet, creating a line of clothing to fit a specific racial

28 shruthi venkatesh

paradigm is problematic because it codifies and promotes an explicit outward difference between races. Fashion — compos- ing, by its very nature, the canvas of sociality — thus functions to perpetuate inequality between the demographic it represents and those it rejects. Hence, a promotion of the ‘us’ versus ‘them’ mindset: Fashion lines are created for a race and are inextricably connected to that particular group. Those who subscribe to a specific style are subsequently linked with the race, too, blurring the lines of individuality and differences within a given race. Those who buy from “black fashion” designers are inevitably associated with the African-American race; those who do not buy from these designers are not associated with this race. In this way, the creation of a “black fashion” line for African-Americans formalizes the idea that there are profound differences in the preferences and choices of individual black and white people. It allows those who subscribe to the fashion to identify as ‘us’, ne- glected by the dominant social group, ‘them’, through style. The us-them dichotomy deepens as a result of fashion that markets itself and responds to only one group or the other. Tailoring to a racial group is therefore dangerous — by representing only the specified race, it excludes Others and empowers the mindset that there are deep-seated, inherent differences between people of the different races. Certainly, pretending that there are no cultural differences between races is problematic. In his classic Black Skin, White Masks, for example, Fanon details how black men, when deprived of their own sense of racial identity, live a confused existence by abandoning their own culture and adopting that of the white man, perpetuating a white-centric society. Yet, racially-targeted fashion lines, recognizing disparities between races and cul- tures, neither celebrate these differences nor foster a sense of harmony amongst races, much less recognize those who the line declines to represent. In fact, such fashion lines facilitate the categorization of humans into marginalized and isolated groups. Hence, the idea of “black fashion” is just as dangerous as the notion of “white fashion,” or any other racially-designat- ed labeling.

29 what makes fashion “black”?

What’s unique about the former, though, is the enthusiasm with which it has been received. This so-called “expanse” of “black fashion” claims to distinguish itself from the “old-school” era of black style by employing “a return to the basics”: “great fabrics, aggressive tailoring, thoughtful accessorizing”.1 These qualities aren’t unique to clothing marketed specifically to a certain cultural or racial paradigm — every good clothing line owns these qualities. There’s nothing particularly “black” or “white” about them. In fact, the only distinctive quality of these “black fashions” is that they seem to be almost exclusively modeled by African-American people (the foremost example being the blog Street Etiquette). The accompanying image (fig. 1) depicts some of the problems around the concept of racially targeted fashion. Taken from the blog Street Etiquette, the picture is provocatively titled “Black Ivy”. The photograph has an old-school, retro-cool aesthetic: it shows a group of only black men wearing sharp vintage styles in front of a school — perhaps an Ivy League university. Though subtle, the underlying themes of this picture are clear: this image is a challenge to the traditional notions of an Ivy League, wealthy, white, and well-dressed societal in-group. Via the fashions, pro- jected economic status, and racial backgrounds of the people in it, the photograph implies a sort of exclusivity: only the people in this particular group are “cool”, in-style, noticeable. Creating fashions solely to suit a “white” or “black” race recog- nizes and perpetuates the idea that there is, in fact, a noticeable difference between the races. The claim of new advances in “black fashion” is ultimately a paradoxical one: by attempting to return to a supposedly pre-hip-hop aesthetic, it promotes the very kinds of isolation signified by baggy pants and loud jewelry. In this way, a decidedly essentialist attitude underlies racially targeted fashion lines such as those under the self-affirmed “black fashion,” as they facilitate customers to divide the world into “us” and “them” groups, infiltrating a market to questions of race and individuality.

30 Atheism and the Jewish Question Leo Strauss in Weimar

Jorge Muñiz

Today it is almost impossible to raise the Jewish question — the Jorge Muñiz is a fourth-year in the seemingly inexplicable discrimination and persecution faced by College studying the Jewish community in nearly all modern states — without its Philosophy. significance being transformed into either a much more general problem for liberal democracies, or into a problem peculiar to the Jewish people. If the Jewish question is raised, it is often thought of along these lines: as an unavoidable antagonism between religious minorities and liberalism, a failure of the state to end discrimination in the private sphere, or as a problem rooted in a more pervasive and global anti-Semitism. There’s an element of truth in all these opinions, but the core of the problem is missed. To recapture some of what is lost in these perspectives, I’d like to reconsider the writings of someone who lived and wrote through the experience underlying the ‘Jewish question’: Leo Strauss. Retracing his thought will reveal that the ‘Jewish question’ points to a much more general predicament for the Western tradition, the necessary tension between reason and revelation. the jewish question in weimar. Words like persecution and oppression attempt to capture in ordinary language what in concrete reality is the extra-ordinary, or an exceptional situation

31 atheism and the jewish question

that lies outside the shared and common human experience picked out by everyday language. We would then not only do an injustice to the Jewish question if we were to discuss it in general terms, but we would fail to understand it as a lived experience. For this reason, the Jewish question can only be de- tailed by reference to how it actually appeared to Leo Strauss and the German-Jewish community during the Weimar Republic. Context here is key: Strauss wrote and came of age between 1919 and 1930, that is, between the end of wwi and the rise Hitler’s Third Reich, when Germany was a liberal democracy and — for the first time in its history — granted full political rights to German-Jews. For Strauss, the German Jew existed in a “precarious” position confronted initially with two alternatives. On the one hand, the Weimar Republic ostensibly offered the German-Jew an op- portunity to assimilate, to become a full member of an “open society” based on the supposedly universal “rights of man”, that were said to be tolerant of the differences between Christians and Jews. Alongside this, there was a powerful movement within the Jewish community calling for a “return” to the traditional and orthodox “Jewish heritage.” The most obvious reason for the precariousness of the first alternative (assimilation) originates in the very same Weimar Republic which gave the German Jews “full political rights”, which was the same regime that would soon give way to Hitler’s Germany, a regime which “had no other clear principle than murderous hatred of the Jews, for ‘Aryan’ had no other clear meaning other than ‘non-Jewish.’” Put very crudely, the same

32 jorge muñiz

country that granted them formal equality would soon decide to annihilate them. However, Strauss emphasizes that even before the collapse of Weimar there were evident problems with this solution, namely, that liberalism which proclaimed at one level to be absolutely tolerant, could do nothing to prevent the social discrimination that occurred in the private sphere. In other words, any German-Jewish individual who took the promise held out by liberal democracy seriously — the promise of inclu- sion and recognition by a universal principle of morality (the rights of man) — immediately felt how specious this promise was if he ever chose to act on it. Legal equality was rendered meaningless by overwhelming private discrimination.1 1. Leo Strauss, “Preface” in We turn now to the second alternative: the possibility of a return Spinoza’s Critique to orthodoxy. For Strauss, this was an equally problematic of Religion. University of route for the German-Jew in Weimar. Nowadays, we often talk Chicago Press, of a Judeo-Christian tradition but, to Strauss, this idea was 1997. incomprehensible and he reminds us of a fact which, today, many would have difficulty accepting: Judaism qua Judaism is inherently at odds with Christian, Protestantism and the liberal Enlightenment “principles of 1789.” These difficulties are not only mere theoretical difficulties (i.e. an abstract conflict of ideas); they become a concrete problem for any community that might seek to synthesize the two and — in Strauss’s eyes — the German-Jews in Weimar were such a community. With Strauss as our guide we can think through the exact features of this incompatibility. Foremost, any German-Jew who seeks to return to orthodoxy needs to keep in mind the radically different meaning that “political existence” has for Orthodox Judaism as compared to the liberal “principles of 1789.” Strauss might have put it like this: A real commitment to Orthodox Judaism necessitates the idea of “galut”, i.e. the idea that the incredible suffering and scattering of the Jewish people across the globe is not a human problem meant to be solved, but a meaningful divine punishment paid by the Jewish people for their rebellion against the divine law. As such, it has no human solution but only a divine solution. If we are at all permitted to speak of a “national existence,” then we must remember that the political existence of the Jewish people

33 atheism and the jewish question

As they sheltered, damp to the haunches, a flood passed them by.

is essentially an act of faith in “the ideas of Choseness and of the Messiah.” It is an act of faith in the sense that we believe fully in our hearts that the Jewish people are indeed the chosen people who will be redeemed by the coming of the Messiah, who will at last provide “the ground beneath our feet” in the form of the Promised Land. This vision of national existence is necessarily incompatible with the liberal-enlightenment view of political existence. These latter principles demand a kind of reality which Judaism must deny. These principles demand a “normal historical reality” in which national-political existence is based on “land and soil, power and arms, peasantry and aristocracy”, in short a political reality which is fundamentally to be “prepared for rationally” by human effort. Let us then not deny the un- deniable! For an orthodox Jew, the very idea of a Jewish citizen is a contradiction in terms. Once the Jewish individual speaks 2. Leo Strauss, The in terms of his rights as a citizen he already denied Orthodox Early Writings ed. 2 Michael Zank, p. Judaism. 58, 79 – 80, 85. If we follow Strauss further we will also see why, in his view, New York: SUNY Press, 2002 orthodoxy is compelled to reject the dominant German religious traditions: Christian-Protestant conceptions of religion

34 jorge muñiz

and specifically the humanistic theology that lies at the bottom of it. At its most extreme, the difference comes down to this: “Then, the primary fact was God; now it is world, man, religious experience.” In other words, German theology places man at the center of the religious experience whereas Judaism must reject this as blasphemy and insist that the origin of the religious experience begins in a supra-human divine origin. Orthodox Judaism requires that “religion is the attitude toward something finished, rigid and objective…theexact opposite of evangelical piety and German inwardness.” The writings of Martin Buber highlight the most excellent example of the kind of humanistic German theology that Strauss has in mind 3: 3. Ibid., p. 77, 93

Take, for example, Buber’s thoroughly immanentist interpreta- tion of religion. If God is “later” than the religious experience of the individual or of the people…then the trajectory towards absolutizing “the human” is already determined.4 4. Ibid., p. 67

Orthodox Judaism begins essentially and inseparably with the “existence of a God, an existence that is entirely indifferent to human existence and human need.” The humanized theology of Buber sees in God nothing “but an expression for needs of the soul.” For Strauss, this German theology which takes as its primary fact the human and his subjective experiences is irrec- oncilable with the Orthodox Judaism which takes as its primary and objective fact God.5 5. Ibid., p. 70 Strauss’s reflections on the difficulties a return to orthodoxy will impose on the German-Jew in Weimar boil down to this observation: The German-Jew, by his existence in the Republic, has internalized Christian, Protestantism, and the “principles of 1789” such that the kind of belief necessary for a return to orthodoxy is impossible for the German-Jew. The German-Jew living in the Weimar Republic is someone who, in the deepest sense, lives at odds with himself; his very existence is a contradiction. He is someone who exists in the space between two fundamentally incompatible traditions. One might very well challenge Strauss at this point and question whether the Weimar Jews have internalized the German tradition to the extent that he claims they have. What proof is there

35 atheism and the jewish question

Ein vertrocknetes Harfenistin.

for what seems, at least at face value, to be an intensely personal question? What are the grounds for the incredible claim that the “ancient Jewish world” implied by [orthodox] belief is now 6. Ibid., p. 69 closed, [and] “destroyed.”6 The ultimate justification for this claim is found in the observation that the Biblical miracle no longer holds any sway over the Jewish heart. Strauss’s observations of the spiritual state of the Jewish community in Weimar can be sketched as follows: The “power of religion has been broken” and it is “only because of this reason” that one can even raise the Jewish question. The Jewish heritage can be authoritative and binding only if it is paired with the kind of faith assumed by the Torah. What does that belief look like? It is the belief in a God who created the world, man, and nature; this God is omnipotent and has full command over nature such that the Biblical miracles were not just a mere possibility but did indeed occur. For this God who created the world ex nihilo, no intervention in the natural order is impossible. Do we German-Jews have this faith? Or has the influence of science and historical criticism of the Bible weakened our faith? If we search within ourselves we cannot help but assert the latter. Let us then admit that the belief in the divine miracle is no longer possible for German-Jews. Let us admit that “The power of God

36 jorge muñiz

over nature has lost its credibility: the claim of [the existence of] God now holds true merely for the inner world, for the world of the heart.” radical atheism as an answer to the jewish qustion. If the ancient Jewish world is closed and assimilation is not an option, is there then no solution to the German-Jewish predicament? Strauss, reflecting on this situation, proclaims that there is only one honest answer to these facts: political Zionism grounded in a radical unbelief.

[I]n the age of atheism, the Jewish people can no longer base its existence on God but only on itself alone, on its labor, on its land, and on its state. It must even as a people break with the traditions that so many individuals have already long since broken with….

Strauss realizes that if the German-Jewish community no longer has any heritage on which to fall back on, then to not act would be tantamount to allowing themselves to perish as a people. If they are to preserve themselves as a people and if neither orthodoxy nor assimilation is an option then the only road left is the formation of their own state — Israel — built on purely atheistic grounds. Strauss, at least in his early works, pushes us to this extreme conclusion and we might, on very good grounds, reject his pro- posal: In what recognizable sense would this new atheistic state be Jewish? This is not an easy question to answer but it might be worth keeping in mind a feature of the Jewish heritage which Strauss constantly references in his later work: “suffering, indeed, heroic suffering stemming from the heroic act of self- dedication of a whole nation to something which it regarded as 7. Leo Strauss, 7 “Why We Remain infinitely higher than itself….” Leaving this question aside, even Jews” p. 323, in if we reject his ultimate conclusion, it’s hard to overlook the very Jewish Philosophy and the Crisis of powerful case he has made for an unresolvable tension between Modernity ed. the Enlightenment and the Jewish tradition, or, as he will later Kenneth Hard Green. New York: formulate it, between Athens and Jerusalem. SUNY Press, 1993.

Economic Life A Conversation with Axel Weber

Ardevan Yaghoubi

The twin phenomena of the deregulation of the American finan- Ardevan Yaghoubi is a fourth-year cial sector and the development of a global marketplace have in the College resulted in our present “life boat” predicament. I say “life boat” studying because the recent financial crisis has demonstrated how frag- Philosophy. ile our individual fates — as students, homeowners, consultants, miners, painters, citizens — are against a volatile backdrop of economic sociality. Yet, for neoclassical and many professional economists, markets are the defining architecture of our worldly experience. Even our most banal decisions and attitudes can be traced to an ultimately commercial root. This fact is transpar- ent only to the behavioral freakonomic, who breathlessly tries to demonstrate just how far the field’s colonial program has gone: anything that isn’t already exchanged in a market could be, and perhaps ought to be. If the ontological candidates for human essence have, at various times, been divided between the divine, the political, and the “trucking-and-bartering” man of the Scottish Enlightenment, today’s worldview nudges us, silently, towards the last.

39 economic life

William Wright- Murray.

How are individual lives grasped by the invisible hand? My conversation with Dr. Axel Weber represents one attempt to untangle recent history and interpret the current state of affairs. From 2004 to 2011, Weber was the Chairman of Germany’s Bundesbank, holding the equivalent office to his American coun- terpart, Federal Reserve chairman Benjamin Bernanke. During Weber’s tenure, Germany emerged from the crisis as the most robust economy in the Western hemisphere. In 2011, with a vacancy atop the International Monetary Fund and Chancellor Angela Merkel’s public desire for a German president of the European Central Bank, Weber pulled off an encore: he departed the continent and arrived at the Booth School of Business for a two year visiting professorship. But his arrival at Chicago was both a new venture and a return to his home, the academy. I spoke with Dr. Weber about the crisis, the status of the field, and his life in economics.

40 ardevan yaghoubi

Let’s start with your personal background. Did you always plan on = entering into government or becoming a central banker? I was from the very beginning on a path to academia. My father was the head of a primary school as well as the mayor, so education was stressed in my family — my brother is a professor of Geology and my sister is a practicing psychologist — and I always had an interest in politics.

University life seemed attractive to me, since it is self-determined in what you do. It’s a nice environment for a career. I never planned on being a central banker; I studied the social sciences — sociology, politics, and economics with some legal studies, but I focused on economics in the final year and a half of my undergraduate education.

What drew you to economics as a discipline? I was drawn to the mathematical aspect of economics: statistics, econometrics, and so on.

This was in the ’70s, correct? Yes, I finished my high school in 1976, at the University of Konstanz.

It’s a very interesting time right now to be studying economics and the social sciences, as I’m sure it was during the ’70s as well. What was the environment like? I originally liked the business cycle and monetary economics. Konstanz had two faculty members — Karl Brunner & Meltzer — who were monetary economists, and once a year had a big conference with all the big people in macroeconomic policy. I asked if I could sit in on the conference and that really got me into monetary economics more seriously. Studying really depends on the place and what it is known for.

41 economic life

So let’s move further into this. What exactly do you see as the distinc- tion between monetary policy and fiscal policy? Fiscal policy is about balancing the two sides of the budget. It’s about taxes. And because of this, it is deeply political. Fiscal policy and taxation affects everyone, and it needs to be legiti- mized through democratic and legislative procedures.

Monetary policy has some key differences. At the beginning, central banks were sub-departments of the Treasury. What we know from the history of monetary policy is that the central banks became independent with the singular mission to guaran- tee low inflation. Low inflation, 2% or 3%, is crucial to avoiding a loss in purchasing power and future income

[The central bank’s mission] is not to monetize debt. If it deliberately steps over the line, then the bank is no longer independent and unbiased. Central Banks must be independent in order to focus on their primary mandate — inflation — not be drawn to other policies.

But certainly monetary policy isn’t immune from the reality of political pressure and social groups. Of course not. The European consensus is that monetary policy must provide a framework, a set of rules, that is made trans- parently. That is ultimately what the electorate wants to see. People take economic policies into account — in order to plan ahead, I have to have an idea of taxation, purchasing power of my income, and what kinds of returns I can expect on financial investments. But there must be a socially agreed-upon framework to ensure the long term.

That is not easy, but mere discretionary decisions make it much harder to plan ahead. And what all the research tells us is that expectations are the key drivers—expectations of income, consumption — and discretionary policy can’t do that.

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You have mentioned in other contexts that Germany took steps well ahead of the financial crisis of 2008 that made it well positioned when things hit the fan. I was wondering if you could expand on those. Yes, under Chancellor Schroeder, Germany passed some very important reforms, known as the “Agenda 2010”, which were aimed at reducing and realigning social security, pension pay- ments, and unemployment to fit the demography of Germany, which as you may know is aging and shrinking. The reforms also had the effect of making the labor market more flexible-- earlier, union wage bargaining was done as an industry-wide level, which meant that people in different firms were getting more or less the same benefits. But of course when a recession hits, some firms do better than others. The reforms changed the industry-wide bargaining to a firm-specific level, which gave employers a high degree of flexibility. This really helped when the crisis hit. So before the crisis, unemployment was at 8%, then went to 9% and now it is actually at 7%, which is lower

43 economic life

than before the crisis. It was really the flexibility for firms that was the positive aspect that let the German economy rebound.

I think there is a deep skepticism, in leftist and libertarian thought — one thinks of the Vienna economists, for instance — about the possibility for government to make these proactive decisions. Perhaps that has been born out in the US. Well I don’t want to comment on the American system, I have experience with the European model. I would agree with the skeptics about the government of omnipotence—I prefer to think about it in terms of the framework I mentioned earlier. If you have a bargaining process that is not flexible, for instance, that is something that the government must settle. The government is not a better bank, investor, or entrepreneur; I think day to day decisions must be left to firms and individuals. What it can do is provide the framework, and it is powerful in this regard.

There seems to be a worry that after government has dipped its fingers into the private realm, there is no going back; the mantra became, ‘The US federal government owns Lehman’. Do you foresee things going back to normal in terms of the relationship between state and market? The cataclysmic event was Lehman Brothers’ collapse. We in Europe could not really influence that, although we participated in the conversation. I think Lehman can be seen as an exogenous event.

How, as director of the Bundesbank, did you prepare or approach such a circumstance? From day one, it was crisis management. We made a few decisions that I think helped stabilize things in Germany. The first was the rescue fund for banks, which had 500 billion. Only a small percentage of that was used, but it was for any potential problems. This immediately convinced the market that the fall out would be limited, that we would use our economic resources to recover what we could.

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In a very concrete way, what was the experience like? Meetings all weekend, with all the ceos and bankers in a room, all of whom had individual interests. Of course, everyone would pursue their own solution, and not a cooperative one. You as central banker must assume role of everyone’s joint interest, and not let individual interests get in the way. This meant the job was twisting the arms of the banks into accepting rescue packages to support competitors.

The banking crises of the last 20 years has shown us that markets come back, assets come back. But here all the losses came at a single time. What we tried to do was ride out the losses, not to avoid them completely but to minimize them beyond what they would otherwise have been. We moved the bad assets outside the banks, but it was important to realize that there will be losses and to deal with them. So we saved ikb bank in July 2007, along with Saxon lb bank and Ast lb Bank, and stopped the problem in our own constituency.

Lehman was worldwide in its impact. The lesson is that large financial institutions need more global supervision. There must be sharing of information of those in charge with the rest of the world; we are more globalized and harmonized, and there are repercussions. The industry has led regulation, but regulation must be aligned, in the g20 for instance.

Do you envision the G20 — not, say, the United Nations, or the World Bank — as the location for that process? Yes, you must have 80% of gdp in coordinating fashion. Input is important, but too many participants means decision making is slowed down and susceptible to single country interests. The g20 is the right group.

45 economic life

People today are still very worried about the Euro, and every day in the media there is a seesaw; today the Eurozone is optimistic, the next day, pessimistic. Where do you see this process ending? There is a misconception at play here, that it is a problem of the Euro. This is a debt problem, not a euro problem, and it requires some tough medicine. It can be a tedious process, but I am 100% certain that the political will is there. It is not an easy prescrip- tion for the rich countries either, but ultimately the historical project of the Euro will not be derailed by Germany, which has benefitted a lot from it.

I must ask about your decision to step away from politics. Policy became politics. Politics is about making the right decision, and I must remain true to myself and my convictions. My opinion on the bonds is public and well-known and I won’t go into that here. I never intended to be a lifetime central banker, so I don’t see this as stepping away from politics as much as return- ing to academia. I have been a professor at three universities for over 10 years, and my time at the central bank was an interesting way of going from advising policy (which I had always been involved with) to making policy. I am open to something else. I’m not now actively looking to return to politics.

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What advice would you have for students today, who are academi- cally inclined but still want to make a social impact? Perhaps this is an impossible question! No it is actually a very easy question. I wanted to become a professor and so had to study hard, publish, and so on, but I wanted to apply the academic side to policy world. I had broader interests and couldn’t envision 40 years of just giving annual or semi-annual lectures. The Bank was an interesting challenge and I wouldn’t rule out further experiences. I know the academic side and the government side and so perhaps the market side remains to be seen.

I would advise students to do the following: don’t tie yourself down to a single path of life when you are still young. You must be flexible when considering your career — if you feel there are other interesting challenges to take. Changing from one job to another is not a failure! In general, I think peoples’ mindsets are too much focused on a single track or career. I typically do not like to take the obvious next step — sometimes I take a side step that is less obvious but more interesting at the end of the day.

Photo courtesy of the Core/Carrie Golus.

48 Herman Sinaiko In Memoriam

Rita Koganzon

There aren’t many people like Herman Sinaiko around at Rita Koganzon (ab ’07) is universities: people who spend their entire lives, more than a doctoral half a century, at the same institution. Sinaiko taught in the candidate at Harvard Humanities Core and in eccentric programs like Fundamentals University, and and Big Problems and ishum, but he wasn’t limited to the the founding editor of The Humanities Core or Interdisciplinary Studies in the Humanities Midway Review. or any of those things — he was, in some sense, the whole university. He had been so involved in Chicago’s workings for so long that, as far as I could see when I studied with him, he con- tained the whole thing. I once took a reading course with him on the history of American education, for which I read people like Robert Hutchins and Wayne Booth, while he simply nar- rated the history of the College — the original curricular debates and the late ’60s unrest and the later Core reform debates of the ’90s. There also aren’t many people who do what Sinaiko did — dedicate themselves to teaching undergraduates. He was a great supporter of student organizations, among them, this journal, for which he served as faculty advisor since its incep- tion in 2006. Sinaiko started his classes with Plato, and sometimes also with Homer. Greek Thought and Lit. opened with the Iliad rather than the Apology, but Sinaiko’s argument was no less Platonic.

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Consider the rage of Achilles, the class began. (And began, and began again. Sinaiko once explained his tendency to get so caught up in the openings of books that he rarely made it through the whole work in one quarter: “You’ll have to forgive me. I have a passion for beginnings.”) Achilles is angry that Agamemnon stole his concubine. What’s the import of such a little slight? Just look at Zeus and Hera — he insults her and they go to bed together that very night. The immortal gods don’t understand insults. They get irritated, and they cut down a few dozen men, and then they make love. But they don’t understand rage, and what it means to have your own — your family, your honor, your life — threatened. Sinaiko told a story about someone breaking into his house one night while his children were sleeping, and how, thinking of his children, he understood what it really meant to “see red”— the closest thing to Achilles’ rage he had experienced. The gods don’t understand that you can’t get these things back once they’re gone. They have all this power, but no understanding — their lives are wanton and meaningless, and in this respect, hardly better than those of beasts. We understand, and we long for things — material things and other people, but also justice and beauty and truth — precisely because we know we will die. The wrath of Achilles costs the Greek army the lives of hundreds of men. It nearly costs them the war. The Iliad is full of dozens of deaths, each described individually. Each death matters. Our deaths matter to us; they spur us to live consciously and make living well a matter of mortal importance. These were — loosely, of course — the lectures on the Iliad. He would pound on the table and yell, “You will all die! And what kind of life will you live in light of that?” A week or two later, reading the scene in book xxiii which Sinaiko loved particularly for its dramatic recognition of this demand — the one in which Achilles comes to Priam’s tent to hand over Hector’s body — I found myself unaccountably crying over it, to the consternation of the other patrons on the second floor of the library. But to be reduced to tears by Priam’s appalling tragedy in the university library is not, after all, a final recognition of one’s mortality. It’s a hint,

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a moment of poetic clarity that may move one to probe further, read more, work later, sacrifice small pleasures for more sub- stantial goods. Valuing liberal education at Chicago meant valuing the Core, and the possibility of being told by other people who know something you don’t what is important — necessary, even — to learn. This kind of authority is rare and rarely accepted, perhaps for good reason, but perhaps not; some people might deserve such deference. Sinaiko was the first teacher I’d ever encountered who seemed to know more than the contents of a textbook. He took literature and philosophy seriously, he took his students seriously, and he remained unfazed by the demands for practical application and the accusations of irrelevance leveled at the humanities from outside the university. It may be objected that this is an education founded on prejudice, since none of us can actually know the value of a liberal education before we receive one, but all education — even one that claims to offer infinite choice but really relies on whatever ill-founded ideas have chanced into the nearly vacant mind of an 18-year-old — begins from prejudice. Starting with the Greeks is not, I think, the worst way of dealing with the difficulties of foundational prejudices. Sinaiko’s death is a tremendous loss for Chicago, and particularly for the College, which has benefitted immeasurably from his erudition and dedication. The highest life in Aristotle’s Ethics, which Sinaiko taught in the third quarter of Greek Thought and Lit, is the contemplative life, and Sinaiko served as an ex- emplar of such a life for thousands of college, graduate, and even high school students. Aristotle says of such meetings that, “it would seem that payment ought to be made to those who have shared in philosophy; for the value of their service is not measurable in money, and no honor paid them could be an equivalent, but no doubt all that can be expected is that…we should make such return to them as is in our power.” Because teachers like Sinaiko are rare, their students are correspond- ingly numerous — Sinaiko’s reputation ensured that his hum courses always required a pink-slip — and so, one hopes, will be the returns they make for his teaching.

51 Notes & Queries