by Jennifer Cody Epstein

Last April I received a somewhat stunning email from the Brooklyn Museum. In December, Gloria Steinem—the Gloria Steinem; the original Ms., G.L.O.R.I.A.—would be moderating a panel at Elizabeth Sackler’s Center for Feminist Art. The topic was global sex trafficking. Dr. Sackler had read my novel based on the life of prostitute-turned-post-Impressionist Pan Yuliang. She wanted to include me, in some capacity, in the discussion.

My first reaction was euphoria. For for me, as for millions of women worldwide, Steinem is a hero of uber-rockstar proportions. The idea of speaking with—or even speaking near—her was like being asked to back up the Beatles. Or perhaps a more sober Janice Joplin.

My second reaction was panic: for while it’s true that The Painter from Shanghai spends time in an early 20^th-century Chinese brothel, it’s actually a relatively small portion of the storyline–a fact with which I’ve tried (though almost invariably in vain) to combat endless Memoirs of a Geisha comparisons. I’d read up on the sex trade, of course, in books like Gail Hershatter’s Dangerous Pleasures (about Shanghai prostitutes of the last century) and Alexa Albert’s Brothel (about the women of Nevada’s famed Mustang Ranch). I’d followed with rapt horror Nicholas Kristof’s New York Times columns on the global sex trade and its victims—some younger than my own 5-year-old daughter. I even did a story on this subject myself once, on girls in Chiang Rai, Thailand who were desperately fighting prostitution’s pull.

But I’m the first to admit I’m no sex-trade expert. I’m a novelist. And for all the thrill of the invitation, I didn’t really feel qualified for Gloria’s gig. Happily, Dr. Sackler had already come to this conclusion; in her next email she clarified that I would be speaking and reading, not with the panelists, but in a separate event the following day. But, she added, if I attended Saturday’s panel there was a good chance that I could meet my icon in person. “Yesyesyes!” I wrote back; and tattooed it into my calendar: “Sex Trafficking and the New Abolitionists. December 13^th.

Eight months later there I was, lined up enthusiastically with scores of other Steinem fans, outside the Brooklyn Museum’s auditorium. The doors opened to a small stampede for good seats. I’m sure that, like me, all of these attendees were very interested in learning about sex trafficking. But I’m equally sure that many (if not most) were primarily there to see Gloria. About five minutes into Steinem’s articulate and self-effacing introduction, however, something interesting happened: I found myself paying less attention the woman than to her words. Quite simply, some of the things she and her fellow panelists Tania Ben-aime, of Equality Now and Rachel Lloyd of Girls Educational and Mentoring Services were relating were, to me, utterly astounding:

–FACT: The United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime describes the trafficking of sex as the world’s fastest-growing criminal enterprise, and it now rivals the drug and the arms trades.

-FACT: There are today more slaves worldwide than there were in the 1800s.

-FACT: The average age of entry into the sex trade in the U.S. is between 11 and 12 years old.

–FACT: You can actually buy such a child’s sexual “services” online, and collect them in a house in New Jersey.

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This text, which will appear on 3QD as a four-part post, was begun as a musing on the theme of series and repetitions in modern and contemporary art inspired by a challenge issued by an art historian colleague of mine. This post includes the intro and a consideration of the first of three artists who dealt with this theme.

Repetition and Remains: Three Centuries of Art’s Multiform and Manifold re-

Introduction: Reintroduction?

In dealing with serial work in the visual arts, it is nearly impossible to know where to start: while some series have a clear linear progression, be it narrative or strictly formal, others do not, and still others seem to vacillate depending upon how one chooses to delimit any given group of works. I would therefore like to take my cue from Ferdinand de Saussure’s arbitrarity principle and, shifting it from the linguistic realm to the visual realm, begin with three (ostensibly unrelated) works I’m particularly intrigued by. My interest in them stems from the questions each work raises—questions that deal with the very nature of seriality and repetition as it appeared and has proliferated in the visual arts from the late nineteenth century up to the present day.

Simply put, a series may be defined as an evolving sequence consisting of a number of parts. Such a structure invariably implies a progression, movement or narrative—although such ideas seem much stronger in representational work, and decline as one moves through the increasing abstraction of the twentieth century and beyond. Even this most simple definition introduces several problematics: first, quantity—are just two works enough to constitute a series? Or, instead of a pair, is a trio the minimum requirement? And just how does one define a single work? What about diptychs, triptychs, and poliptychs? What about modular works? And if, “synecdochally,” a part reflects the whole, just how is such a relationship best dissected for meaning as it applies to both formal and conceptual content (if the two can even be cleaved from one another)?

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My Doorstep

Welcome to my space. Come in, take off your boots, and make yourself at home: especially if you haven't got one any more. Warm yourself by my fire. It's going to be a long, cold winter. You know it and I know it. It's 7 degrees in the South Bronx this morning, as I write, but for about a quarter of an hour the rising sun comes romping westward down the street into my window, casting everything in gold, shining out the trash-strewn streets and sparse-shelved bodegas and vacant lots and abandoned baby carriages. For a moment.

Wall Street sure laid us one ginormous goose-egg. (I guess now we know what the inverse of that image on the Right looks like.) But tomorrow it'll all crack wide open. Hope you like your Humpty-Dumptys sunny-side up. I know I do. I used to take them scrambled, but now I know on which side my bread is buttered.

You're probably scrambling, hunting down that endangered species known as a job, scientific name JobIS bonUS. I feel your pain. Someone recently wrote that the Internet, as advanced as it seems, is still in the hunter-gatherer stage. Well, I've been a-huntin', and a-gatherin', and I've got laid in these weeds all kinds of Easter eggs for you to enjoy. It's better than a game of Boggle.

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In November of 1970, a thirteen-year-old girl arrived, accompanied by her mother, at a California family aid office. The girl, who is known publicly by the name “Genie,” walked hunched with her hands raised in front of her like paws. According to Susan Curtiss, author of Genie: a Psycholinguistic Study of a Modern-Day Wild Child, she weighed only 59 pounds and spat incessantly. In addition to her decrepit physical appearance and bizarre social habits, Genie seemed incapable of producing normal language – only ever uttering a few isolated words.

For the ten years leading up to that day in November, Genie had been confined to a single room – strapped, by day, to a “potty chair,” and, by night, to the inside of a sleeping bag. During that time, Genie had very limited human contact, and – of particular interest to the psychologists who studied her for the eight years to follow – almost no exposure to language. This fact – the occasion of Genie’s tragic abuse – gave scientists the opportunity investigate a question that could never have been probed through direct experimentation: does one lose the ability to acquire a first language?

Cases like Genie’s suggest that the answer is yes. While children who were deprived of linguistic stimuli up until age six have gone on to possess normal language, others, like Genie, whose deprivation continued past this point, have not had the same success. Genie did learn the meanings of many words, but she was never able to piece them together into sentences with normal syntax. Instead, she formed statements like “Applesauce buy store” and “I like elephant eat peanut.” Although controversies remain regarding Genie’s case (for instance, allegations of inconsistency in the documentation of Genie’s progress), the apparent linguistic limitations of so-called “feral children” offer strong evidence for a “critical period” after which it is impossible to acquire normal language.

The critical period hypothesis, which refers exclusively to first language acquisition, in turn suggests that children possess certain innate faculties which are crucial for (and, perhaps, specific to) the acquisition of language. This notion, which was brought to mainstream attention by Steven Pinker in his 1994 bestseller, The Language Instinct, is accepted in some form by most psycholinguists. However, a related question – one with even greater practical relevance – remains a point of controversy: does one lose the ability to acquire a second language?

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1. Casino Capitalism — making money from money with other people's money

What financial toilet is our government trying to flush us out of? Here's the best explanation I've read of the cause of our trouble — toxic mortgage-backed derivatives — by independent trader Jeffrey Carter:

“The collateralized debt obligation that is talked about is like you selling your car to Joe, but not getting any money today for it. Joe is going to pay you next year. As soon as Joe gets your car, he rents it to Jim. Jim doesn’t pay him, but offers to pay him monthly for the use of the car. Jim sells the car to a chop shop. The chop shop pays Jim a commission, and sells pieces of the car at a profit to Tim, Tom, Dick, and Harry. Harry buys Dick’s pieces, and puts together a new car — but has an accident. How is Joe going to collect? Who really owns the car? Of course it’s more complicated than that, but you get the idea. The government is going to bail out everyone, or pick a person in the chain.”

Sounds like quite the merry malodorous mess, doesn't it? In fact, it's so stinky that Goldman Sachs, while they were selling these derivatives, were also shorting them — i.e. betting their own money that the poopscoops they were selling to trusting pension funds were bound to lose their value.

And they call Bernie Madoff a crook. “Casino capitalists” is the kindest, gentlest name for what Wall Street people have become. They don't produce anything, they don't back entrepreneurs, they don't start factories, they don't create useful products, they don't build stuff, they're not actual dinkum kosher capitalists. They just use other people's money to make more money out of money. In other words, they borrow-and-bet. The bottom-feeders of capitalism. Parasites. People who have decided that the best use of their entire lives is to make money off money with borrowed money.

And boy, have they coined it. The financial companies' share of corporate profits in 2007 was 40%. Think of that — 40% of profits came not from doing anything except play around with money. And now we know that what they bet on — and with — is mostly crap. How much ca-ca? In 2006, Wall Street earned $62 billion in bonuses. To earn that much, they parlayed derivatives or debt or crap all over the world to a degree that people say now starts at $85 trillion. The Iraq War will cost us around $1 trillion, so we're talking 85 Iraq Wars of debt here. (The derivatives market itself is supposed to be $500 trillion.) Poor Barack Obama: he thinks he's going to save us from $85 trillion of crap by printing an extra one trillion.

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A quiet, global community of researchers want to change how psychologists think about the mind and culture — or to put it a bit more precisely, they want to call attention to some almost forgotten ones. They publish their research in Culture & Psychology, whose founding editor is Jaan Valsiner. Professor Valsiner was kind enough to furnish us an interview via email. The text has been edited for style.

Jonathan Pfeiffer, 3quarksdaily: How does cultural developmental psychology help us to understand changes in human life, either from moment to moment or over the course of one's lifetime?

Jaan Valsiner: The idea of cultural developmental psychology is best captured in this photo. What do you see in it? Of course it is very ordinary; this is a toy gadget for children (but note the inscriptions we call “graffiti” on the sideboards — an arena for public art?). In it you can see the world of adults, who invent such objects, build them, and take their children to the neighborhood park “to play” and deeply believe they are doing their best for their children, as the latter now can learn the “right ways” of behaving. But, of course, what they create in actuality are opportunities to act in new ways that are more challenging than the “right ways.” You can observe that when children play with this kind of slide and do many other things with many other toys, thus experimenting with the “contrarian movement.” They climb up the part of the structure where they are “supposed” to slide down. Any object of furniture is a culturally designed object that suggests to its users — children or adults alike — some socially preferred courses of action. Yet by that suggestion, these objects call forth counter-action to the opposite, resistance to suggestions, and in one word, creativity. If there were no people — children or adults — who would constructively “disobey” the socially suggested ways of being, then no new technologies or social changes could be possible.

Cultural developmental psychology is a basic science of human development from birth to death, covering the whole life course, that investigates the construction, use, and abandonment of the whole range of cultural tools in the dynamic life course of human beings: language, physical objects of everyday life, symbolic objects in public and private settings, and social roles people assume (mother, father, policeman, tax accountant, beggar, president, criminal, etc.).

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On somehow failing to rent
my apartment for Inauguration.

Little boys crave taking sides for battles and banding together into little gangs, yet whenever I begged my father to tell me which side we wanted to win in football games on television (about as far as my notion of being a warrior extended then), he would shrug his shoulders. “I just want to see a good game,” he’d announce.

He served as a black-robed judge for a quarter century, and seemed to think that professional ethics bound him to maintain a strict judicial neutrality even on the Minnesota Vikings versus the Chicago Bears. “No, dad, come on! Who should win?” Who do we want to inspire us? Who should we give ourselves to?

“As long as it’s a good game, that’s all I want.” He’d eat some peanuts.

I hated that he left my brother and I so unmoored about our loyalties. We could have cheered for the local team and found solidarity with everyone else, or picked a division rival and defined ourselves as iconoclasts. We sat out.

Because I never had practice either immersing myself inside a crowd or fighting upstream against a crowd, I never understood crowd dynamics as a child, especially what makes people band together and willingly commit to someone or something. What inspires them? Why do they cheer? Willing commitment became an oasis for me, but like most oases it had qualities of a mirage. After undergoing such torture with my father, I never could judge if people were genuinely passionate about “their” team or just posing.

And this shouldn’t be dismissed as a trivial case. Trivial cases are practice for real life.

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Krzysztof Kotarski

“I have a thing with airports…”

“Be more specific, Kris.”

“Ok, let me start again.

“I first began to think about this after I saw the video of Robert Dziekanski getting killed in Vancouver… remember? He was the Polish guy who got Tasered by the police because he was acting all ‘agitated’ after hours and hours of being stuck in the international arrivals area where no one could tell him what to do.

“He was moving to Canada to be with his mother… he got on the plane, landed, but something went wrong. He got stuck in the no-man’s land between luggage and immigration, or immigration and luggage… you know how it goes. He did not speak enough English to get himself sorted out, so he was left to his own devices, he got frustrated, and eventually he got killed.”

“What did they shock him for?”

“Oh, who knows… they probably didn’t know any better… you have to understand, Canadian police… well, let’s just say that the best and brightest probably aren’t the ones patrolling airports at 1:30 in the morning. Someone gave them Tasers and they use them like toys. There were four of them, one of him, and rather than figuring out a way to talk to him or to put him down another way, they got their Tasers out and zapped the poor guy instead. I think they told him to put his hands down on a table, but he put his hands up instead. He didn’t speak a word of English, so… you know…

“I remember watching the news the next morning… the police were giving their own version of the story…. ‘he was agitated… public safety… officers acted as they were trained… will review…’ you know how they talk. I don’t think that this is different in any country—I remember watching the Brits try to explain themselves after they shot that poor Brazilian on the tube. Cops always say the same things after they screw up…

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