Saba Mahmood over at The Immanent Frame:

The series of posts at The Immanent Frame that have responded to the question “Is critique secular?” were initially inspired by an event that I, along with Judith Butler and Chris Nealon, organized last year at The Townsend Center for the Humanities at UC Berkeley. Given the SSRC’s current focus on religion and secularism, Jonathan VanAntwerpen invited the conference organizers and participants, and a range of others, to post their reflections on this event and the question that framed it (see posts by Talal Asad, Chris Nealon, and Colin Jager—all of whom participated in the symposium). Here I would like to give a sense of the ongoing stakes some of us have in this conversation and why I think it is important to think about secularism in relation to critique given the political bent of our times.

The symposium “Is Critique Secular?” was the inaugural event for a new teaching and research unit in critical theory at UC Berkeley, plans for which had been in gestation for over a year. While the motivations for the establishment of this program were diverse, there is a group of us who are interested in opening up traditional ways of thinking about critique to recent problematizations of notions of the secular, secularity, and secularism.

Martha Nussbaum on prostitution in ajc.com:

Many types of bodily wage labor used to be socially stigmatized. In the Middle Ages it was widely thought base to take money for the use of one’s scholarly services. Adam Smith, in “The Wealth of Nations,” tells us there are “some very agreeable and beautiful talents” that are admirable so long as no pay is taken for them, “but of which the exercise for the sake of gain is considered, whether from reason or prejudice, as a sort of publick prostitution.” For this reason, he continues, opera singers, actors and dancers must be paid an “exorbitant” wage, to compensate them for the stigma involved in using their talents “as the means of subsistence.” His discussion is revealing for what it shows us about stigma. Today few professions are more honored than that of opera singer; and yet only 200 years ago, that public use of one’s body for pay was taken to be a kind of prostitution.

Some of the stigma attached to opera singers was a general stigma about wage labor. Wealthy elites have always preferred genteel amateurism. But the fact that passion was being expressed publicly with the body — particularly the female body — made singers, dancers and actors nonrespectable in polite society until very recently. Now they are respectable, but women who take money for sexual services are still thought to be doing something that is not only nonrespectable but so bad that it should remain illegal.

What should really trouble us about sex work? That it is sex that these women do, with many customers, should not in and of itself trouble us, from the point of view of legality, even if we personally don’t share the woman’s values. Nonetheless, it is this one fact that still-Puritan America finds utterly intolerable.

[H/t: Ruchira Paul]

My late friend Eqbal Ahmad used to collect Gandharan Art. It was beautiful. Pre-Islamic culture was denigrated in Pakistan, and he felt the need to do his bit to preserve it.  But perhaps most important, it was for Eqbal, who was shaped in the struggle against colonialism, a reminder that the first major conquest of what would become the East by what would become the West was also productive and syncretic. Now a new exhibit looks at the influence of Western modernism on Islamic art. Holland Cotter reviews an exhibition of Islamic art at Hunter College, co-curated by 3QD contributer Alta Price.

The show is notable for several reasons. First, it tackles a little-studied subject. We’ve had major exhibitions on the influence of Islamic culture on Europe. We’ve had relatively few that trace influence the other way, Occident to Orient. (“Royal Persian Painting: the Qajar Epoch, 1785-1925” at the Brooklyn Museum a decade ago was a stellar exception.)

Possibly because “Occidentalized” sounds unexotic, 18th- and 19th-century Islamic art has been largely ignored. Few of the 30 small decorative objects at Hunter have been exhibited before, though all are from the collection of a major museum.

Which brings us to another — some might say the primary — attraction of the show. The owning institution is the Metropolitan Museum, where the Islamic galleries are closed for renovation. This Hunter show, unassuming as it is, is by default the largest display of the Met’s Islamic collection in the city.

“Re-Orientations” is actually the offshoot of a larger project: a yearlong seminar led by Ulku U. Bates, professor of Islamic art at Hunter, using material in the Met holdings to examine the early effects of Western modernism on Islamic cultures, its impact kicking in at different times in different places.

From Science:

It’s been a truism since Darwin’s day: Female peahens prefer a male peacock with a gorgeous train–the fancy feathered fan he unfurls to wow the gals. But a new 7-year study questions this long-held notion, reporting that females in a feral population of Indian peafowl (Pavo cristatus) showed no such preference. The controversial paper contradicts previous, lauded studies that did reveal a link and that are part of the canon of evolutionary biology. Because natural selection cannot explain the evolution of seemingly useless male ornaments, such as elaborate feathers, Charles Darwin proposed that they arise through sexual selection. In most species, females choose the male they want to mate with, presumably by evaluating traits that give clues to genetic health. For example, the peacock’s train is longer than his body and decorated with gaudy eyespots. The number of eyespots may correlate with the quality of the male’s genes, so a female peahen should pick the fellow with the highest count. In the most cited study of the peacock’s train, evolutionary biologist Marion Petrie of Newcastle University in the U. K. snipped off the eyespot portion of some males’ tail feathers; the females snubbed these males. Furthermore, chicks fathered by more ornamented males had higher long-term survival than other chicks.

Mariko Takahashi’s team planned to confirm these results. But despite observing 268 matings, the team was unable to pinpoint any single male trait that females preferred, they report in April’s issue of Animal Behaviour.

More here.

Natalie Angier in The New York Times:

Leave it to a vision researcher to make you feel like Mr. Magoo. When Jeremy Wolfe of Harvard Medical School, speaking last week at a symposium devoted to the crossover theme of Art and Neuroscience, wanted to illustrate how the brain sees the world and how often it fumbles the job, he naturally turned to a great work of art. He flashed a slide of Ellsworth Kelly’s “Study for Colors for a Large Wall” on the screen, and the audience couldn’t help but perk to attention. The checkerboard painting of 64 black, white and colored squares was so whimsically subtle, so poised and propulsive. We drank it in greedily, we scanned every part of it, we loved it, we owned it, and, whoops, time for a test. Dr. Wolfe flashed another slide of the image, this time with one of the squares highlighted. Was the highlighted square the same color as the original, he asked the audience, or had he altered it? Um, different. No, wait, the same, definitely the same. That square could not now be nor ever have been anything but swimming-pool blue … could it? The slides flashed by. How about this mustard square here, or that denim one there, or this pink, or that black? We in the audience were at sea and flailed for a strategy. By the end of the series only one thing was clear: We had gazed on Ellsworth Kelly’s masterpiece, but we hadn’t really seen it at all.

The phenomenon that Dr. Wolfe’s Pop Art quiz exemplified is known as change blindness: the frequent inability of our visual system to detect alterations to something staring us straight in the face. The changes needn’t be as modest as a switching of paint chips. At the same meeting, held at the Italian Academy for Advanced Studies in America at Columbia University, the audience failed to notice entire stories disappearing from buildings, or the fact that one poor chicken in a field of dancing cartoon hens had suddenly exploded. In an interview, Dr. Wolfe also recalled a series of experiments in which pedestrians giving directions to a Cornell researcher posing as a lost tourist didn’t notice when, midway through the exchange, the sham tourist was replaced by another person altogether.

More here.

…

The Bean Eaters
Gwendolyn Brooks

They eat beans mostly, this old yellow pair.
Dinner is a casual affair.
Plain chipware on a plain and creaking wood,
Tin flatware.

Two who are Mostly Good.
Two who have lived their day,
But keep on putting on their clothes
And putting things away.

And remembering . . .
Remembering, with twinklings and twinges,
As they lean over the beans in their rented back room that
is full of beads and receipts and dolls and clothes,
tobacco crumbs, vases and fringes.

…

Tracey Emin. Our Angels. 2007.

Neon.

More on this UK artist here and here.

Courtney C. Radsch at ResetDOC:

Until recently, journalism in the Arab world suffered under the heavy hand of authoritarian rulers who sought to control the symbolic power of the media, the major arbiter of public opinion. With the increasing importance of citizen journalism on the Internet, which has burgeoned since blogging started to gain popularity in 2003, the new media are not only impacting mainstream journalism but the political process itself. With the force of the blogosphere coming on the heals of the explosion of Arabic satellite news media over the past decade, the public has more diverse, credible, and culturally relevant information source to choose from than ever before. Online citizen journalism in the form of web logs (blogs) video blogs (vlogs) is emerging as a powerful force in the Arab world, where it is challenging the ability of the state to control the information environment and forcing mainstream journalists to compete with online citizen journalists.

Blogging in Egypt is taking off, although it is still relatively unknown and certainly not popular among the general public. However, among journalists and the professional, globalized class, it is an emergent phenomeneon. The Egyptian blog ring claims more than 1500 blogs, with slightly less than half of those published in English (http://www.egybloggers.com). The Egyptian Blog Review’s motto “from citizens to watchdogs” proclaims the potential for new forms of citizen media to bypass state control and self-censorship, evidence of the impact changes in global communications systems are having. These changes favor narrowcasting and transnational, sub-state media that provide a more realistic view of the world than the traditional state-run media.

In the Guardian, Robert McCrum profiles Naipaul:

Everyone agrees that VS Naipaul is fully alive to his own importance. A mirror to his work, his life is emblematic of an extraordinary half century, the postwar years. Let it not be said that he does not know this. ‘My story is a kind of cultural history,’ he remarks, in part of an overture to a long conversation. Nevertheless, he will not be reading Patrick French’s forthcoming authorised biography, The World Is What it Is. ‘I asked Patrick to do it, but I haven’t read a word,’ he emphasises, brushing past rumours of discord over the manuscript. ‘I don’t intend to read the book.’

This volatile mixture of pride and insecurity illuminates everything about him. ‘I am the kind of writer,’ he once said, ‘that people think other people are reading.’ That’s a characteristic Naipaul formulation, ironically self-deprecating (my audience is small, but select) while at the same time breathtakingly self-confident (I am a great writer whose work deserves to be generally admired).

The light cast by this strange combustion of arrogance and modesty has often exposed the world in new and unexpected ways. At its best, Naipaul’s prose is as sharp and lucid as splinters of glass. But there’s a paradox here. The man himself is anything but straightforward – an enigma, wrapped in a riddle, inside a mystery: possibly, he is a bit of a puzzle even to himself.

Ed Rybicki over at Scientific American:

Tracing the origins of viruses is difficult because they don’t leave fossils and because of the tricks they use to make copies of themselves within the cells they’ve invaded. Some viruses even have the ability to stitch their own genes into those of the cells they infect, which means studying their ancestry requires untangling it from the history of their hosts and other organisms. What makes the process even more complicated is that viruses don’t just infect humans; they can infect basically any organism—from bacteria to horses; seaweed to people.

Still, scientists have been able to piece together some viral histories, based on the fact that the genes of many viruses—such as those that cause herpes and mono—seem to share some properties with cells’ own genes. This could suggest that they started as big bits of cellular DNA and then became independent—or that these viruses came along very early in evolution, and some of their DNA stuck around in cells’ genomes. The fact that some viruses that infect humans share structural features with viruses that infect bacteria could mean that all of these viruses have a common origin, dating back several billion years. This highlights another problem with tracing virus origins: most modern viruses seem to be a patchwork of bits that come from different sources—a sort of “mix and match” approach to building an organism.

Over at the Discover magazine blog Better Planet:

In a candid conversation with an audience here at the Aspen Environment Forum, eminent biologist/naturalist EO Wilson said soccer moms are killing off bio-education because they don’t let their children experience nature.

In what he calls the ”soccer mom syndrome” Wilson said the worst thing a parent can do for a child is to take him or her to a botanical garden where all the trees are marked and labeled. Instead, “Go to the seashore and give them a pale and bucket. Let them experience nature…and then come back and ask questions,” Wilson said, admittedly paraphrasing Rachel Carson’s advice. Carson famously wrote the book “Silent Spring.”

Wilson, who is compiling an encyclopedia of life (www.eol.org), which will describe every species known to man, didn’t back down when a woman from the audience said that she would “forgive him” for the soccer mom comment.

“Don’t,” he responded. “Think on it.”

Pamela Paul reviews Mary Roach’s Bonk: The Curious Coupling of Science and Sex.

Intended as much for amusement as for enlightenment, “Bonk” is Roach’s foray into the world of sex research, mostly from Alfred Kinsey onward, but occasionally harking back to the ancient Greeks and medievals (equally unenlightened). Roach belongs to a particular strain of science writer; she’s interested less in scientific subjects than in the ways scientists study their subjects — less, in this case, in sex per se than in the laboratory dissection of sex. She delights in medical euphemism and scholarly jargon; you can hear her titter as she rolls out terms like “vaginal photoplethysmograph probe,” “nocturnal penile tumescence monitoring” and “vaginocavernosus reflex.” Writing about a 1950s-era study of vaginal response in which female subjects copulated with a penis camera, Roach wants to know how exactly the “dildo-camera” operated, who volunteered to make use of it in a laboratory setting and, above all, where the device is now. This is “as good as science gets,” she writes, “a mildly outrageous, terrifically courageous, seemingly efficacious display of creative problem-solving, fueled by a bullheaded dedication to amassing facts and dispelling myths in a long-neglected area of human physiology.”

In the Guardian:

Nobel laureate Kenzaburo Oe has won a major court battle over a book he wrote more than 30 years ago detailing how Japanese soldiers persuaded and sometimes forced Okinawan civilians to commit suicide rather than give themselves up in the closing days of the second world war.

The topic is a hugely sensitive issue on the southern Japan islands, where battles raged from late March through to June 1945, leaving more than 200,000 civilians and soldiers dead, and speeding the collapse of Japan’s defences. The US occupied Okinawa until 1972.

The ruling was also a high-profile setback for a vocal lobby among Japanese conservatives who have long sought to discredit or censure material documenting Japanese excesses during the war, including government-supported prostitution, the rape of the Chinese city of Nanking and other incidents.

In his book, Okinawa Notes, Oe chronicled accounts of group suicides on Okinawa, and alleged that Japanese soldiers persuaded, and at times coerced, civilians to kill themselves rather than face what they were told would be horrible atrocities if they gave themselves up to the invading US troops. Historians generally agree that hundreds of Okinawan civilians killed themselves under such circumstances, and there is a wealth of testimony from survivors and their relatives to back that up.

From The Guardian:

Women are in a bad way. We are still made scapegoats and traduced and our true natures denied. Two female polemicists have published books explaining why, although they have come to very different, arguably opposing, conclusions. One is also very much better than the other. Susan Pinker is a Canadian developmental psychologist and newspaper columnist perplexed that, after decades of feminism, there’s still a pay gap and so few women run major corporations. Girls do better at school and, at least in North America, which is where The Sexual Paradox is really concerned with, enter university in greater numbers. The conclusion she reaches, never mind Simone de Beauvoir’s liberating message all those years ago, is that biology is destiny. ‘People are programmed,’ she writes at one point. Women are ‘built for comfort, not speed’. Testosterone makes the male of the species more vulnerable, but also more risk-taking. Oxytocin makes women more empathetic. The trouble with this evolutionary Pinker first sets up what is probably a false opposition (public success and empathy are not in fact mutually exclusive) and then wholly fails to account for high-profile women such as Condoleezza Rice, Hillary Clinton or all the women who are running companies and law firms.

Neither, I suspect, could she explain the pioneer-era women profiled in Susan Faludi’s The Terror Dream, who bravely and often viciously fought Native Americans after their menfolk had failed them, usually by running away. These women, Faludi argues, have been airbrushed out of the founding-of-America myth, just as a similar airbrushing is now distorting our accounts of 9/11. The attacks on the Twin Towers left America feeling exposed, Faludi says; by the time it was clear exactly what was happening, there was absolutely nothing that could be done. psychobabble is that while it may get us a little way along the road to understanding, it strands us miles from any useful destination. How far was neatly summed up by Louis Menand in a review of a book by Pinker’s more famous brother Steven, a leader in the evolutionary psychology field, when he observed that Wagner may well have been trying to impress future mates – we all are – but it’s a long way from there to Parsifal.

More here.

Sehba Sarwar in The New York Times:

I’ve been living in Houston for some time, but I often return to Pakistan to visit my parents. In December, when I arrived in Karachi with my 3-year-old daughter, Minal, the city was spinning with more than the usual winter weddings, parties and reunions. President Musharraf had issued emergency rule to hold back a possible Supreme Court ruling against him, and Benazir Bhutto had returned to Pakistan at her own risk. There had been suicide bombings, the lawyers were battling for restoration of an independent judiciary and parliamentary elections were a few weeks away. My husband, René, wanted me to postpone our trip, but my father wasn’t well, and it was important to go. I assured René I’d do my best to stay away from the political action.

But after I got to Karachi, it didn’t take long for me to change my mind. I simply felt that too much was at stake. I joined my journalist sister, Beena, who is based there temporarily, and other friends at several marches in support of a free press and the lawyers’ movement.

More here.

Benjamin Anastas in the New York Times:

Every traveler has a landscape that, for him, contains the wonder and mystery behind all travel. It could be the beach, or a cathedral square, or the rain forest, or a volcanic island — for me, it is the mountain pass. The mountain pass, roughly defined, is that point on the map where the winding road up is transformed into the winding road down. It marks the border where valleys meet, and often is where provinces divide, where one nation becomes another, with a corresponding change in language and road signs. To get to the mountain pass, you begin on a fertile plain, often crossed by a river, and drive through terraced fields and sleepy villages until the road gets steeper, the switchbacks get scarier and signs of human settlement fall away behind you.

If you are in Tyrol — the proud region straddling northern Italy and western Austria — and you ascend through the Val Passiria to the mountain pass known in German as the Timmelsjoch, small vineyards and neatly tended orchards give way to a desolate moonscape fringed with ice, and the tractors from the lower altitudes, carrying bins of apples, are replaced by swarms of motorcycles. (You will later see the same bikers that passed you like movie villains in black leather warming up over plates of sausages and fries at the restaurant just beyond the pass, crowded into booths and chatting amiably with one another.)

More here.  [St. Lorenzen, the village in this photo, is a few miles from where I live.]

Robert Skidelsky in the New York Review of Books:

Making Globalization Work is the third of Joseph Stiglitz’s popular, and populist, books. Like Jeffrey Sachs, Stiglitz is an economist turned preacher, one of a new breed of secular evangelists produced by the fall of communism. Stiglitz wants to stop rich countries from exploiting poor countries without damaging the springs of wealth-creation. In that sense he is a classic social democrat. His missionary fervor, though, is very American. “Saving the Planet,” one of this new book’s chapter headings, could have been its title.

Stiglitz is in favor of globalization—which he defines as “the closer economic integration of the countries of the world.” He criticizes the ways it has been done. The “rules of the game,” he writes, have been largely set by US corporate interests. Trade agreements have made the poorest worse off and condemned thousands to death through AIDS. Multinational corporations have stripped poor countries of their natural resources and left environmental devastation. Western banks have burdened poor countries with unsustainable debt.

More here.  [Photo shows Stiglitz.]

Carl Zimmer in Slate:

An outbreak of E. coli isn’t usually the stuff of feel-good stories. Feel-bad is more like it—or even feel-organ-failure. But recent E. coli outbreaks can offer us a bit of solace. We live in the anxious age of synthetic biology, when scientists can reconstruct entire genomes from raw chemicals, and when we all fret that someone is going to use this new technology to create a monster bug and unleash a man-made plague. According to one government report, “The effects of some of these engineered biological agents could be worse than any disease known to man.” But a close look at recent outbreaks of E. coli—and a closer look at the bacteria themselves—may help us to put aside our fears for the moment. Engineering plagues is harder than it looks.

More here.

Howard Jacobson in Prospect:

Two conflicting but equally sentimental narratives of the lives of prostitutes—and by implication the men who pay for their services—confront each other at the moment. The first describes the prostitute as abused victim, incidentally of global capitalism and the free market, but essentially of the violence of men. In this narrative, the idea that the prostitute might choose of her own free will to sell her body for profit or for pleasure, or for both, is derided. A battery of statistics proves her miserable condition: her low self-esteem and life expectancy, the dangers to which she is exposed, the rape, contumely and criminality which form the consistent scenery of her abbreviated existence. Therefore—no ifs or buts—we must criminalise the man who uses her. (I italicise the word to show that I mean to be more careful with it than are the criminalisers.)

The second narrative tells of snazzy, Sex in the City hookerdom, fucking and shopping exactly in the spirit and prose of women’s blockbusters of 20 years ago, only now the fucking pays for the shopping. Tracy Quan’s Manhattan whore is into Prada and Bulgari talk even before the fucking starts. Belle de Jour will tell you what she’s been buying at the chemist’s—”tampons, vaginal pessary (for irritation), condoms, sugarless breath mints, lubricant, individual post-waxing wipes, self-tanning liquid, razor blades, potassium citrate granules (for cystitis).” Too much information, as they say.

More here.