Below are some thoughts, whilst still fresh in my mind.
our session
The session I organised, Ethical Tourism, Care and Global Citizenship,
featured Michael Clancy, Pete Smith, Heather Hindman, Cori Jacubiak
and myself. Between us we have backgrounds in sociology, politics, geography,
anthropology and education, and that made for a wide ranging and open
discussion. We were all, in different ways, concerned with how modern notions
of global or cosmopolitan citizenship are formed through travel and articulated
through care and responsibility. We also broached the worth of these reworkings
of the notion of citizenship, away from the membership of the political
community of the nation state towards a citizenship expressed through
consumption and a global civil society of NGOs. An edited book featuring these
and other papers is proposed.
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| downtown Chicago from Lake Michigan |
Ethical travel is associated with having the potential to extend bonds of
care across boundaries to distant lands. It is also associated with the making
of global citizens, able to think and act on contemporary issues of poverty and
climate change that are global in nature. My new book, co-authored with Pete Smith, looks at
volunteer tourism as an expression of ethical lifestyles, and as exemplary of
‘lifestyle politics’. The topic has proved to be a good way to look critically
at the relationship between lifestyle and politics. In an age of
disillusionment with politics (and indeed democracy – one or two contributions
at the AAG were quite sanguine about ‘post-democracy’), lifestyle is now often
theorised in human geography as terrain on which new ethical and political
subjects can emerge.
performativity
The frame of reference for looking at this in a few of the sessions I
attended was that of performativity. Performativity is something of an
orthodoxy in some human geographical circles, following the ‘performative
turn’ of the 1990s. Performativity holds that gestures, speech and bodily
actions constitute identity, i.e. they are not only representations of it.
Judith Butler is often a principal point of reference, especially her 1990 book
Gender Trouble.[i]
Many of the presentations also drew on Michel Foucault to argue that
power is transmitted and people’s lives effectively disciplined through gaze,
communication and gesture.
In the sessions organised by Bryan Grimwood and Kellee Caton titled
Tourism Moralities and Mobilities some papers took the line, to varying
degrees, that lifestyles were performed identities with potential beyond
lifestyle in the realm of moral and even political agency, very much in the
spirit of Butler. An excellent paper on communities of rock climbers by
Jillian Rickly of the University of Nottingham painted an interesting
picture of these communities as expressing solidarities and also as performing
a certain resistance to the rhythms of mainstream society through their chosen
lifestyle. In other papers it was argued that aspects of lifestyle such as
‘couchsurfing’ (Michael O’Regan) had the potential to rupture the pervasive neoliberal
encounters and rhythms of life that turn out neoliberal citizens for a
neoliberal society. The choice, as one participant put it, is between
‘lifestyle conformity and lifestyle radicalism’, the latter with the potential
to forge new thinking and new subjectivities.
I am, and was, highly critical of the performative paradigm thus applied.
I tend to agree with Martha Nussbaum’s critique of Judith Butler’s performative
perspective on feminism in the former’s essay The Professor of Parody.
Here she argues that:
“Butlerian feminism is in many ways easier than the old feminism. It
tells scores of talented young women that they need not work on changing the
law, or feeding the hungry, or assailing power through theory harnessed to
material politics. They can do politics in safety of their campuses, remaining
on the symbolic level, making subversive gestures at power through speech and
gesture. This, the theory says, is pretty much all that is available to us
anyway, by way of political action, and isn't it exciting and sexy?”[ii]
(my italics)
Performativity seems to propose that the performance of alternative
identities has potential where political demands for rights and material betterment
or equality do not. In this respect there are plenty of parallels with today’s
campus politics, where Butler's outlook seems so influential. Nussbaum’s essay,
written in 1990, was prescient. An inward oriented and ultimately narcissistic process
of ‘ethical selving’[iii]
as one recent study refers to it has trumped an outward, socially oriented
impulse.
Yet Butler’s outlook is certainly reflected in the interpersonal,
performed subjectivities of the lifestyle oriented politics of our time. This
was clear in the interesting papers from a session convened by Mark Griffiths
on Hybrid Knowledges and Embodied Experiences in the Spaces of Development.
Ruth Judge’s (UCL) paper on 'gratitude, anger and fun’ in international
volunteering was especially interesting. We intend to pursue debate around and
between the different perspectives on the political and the affective, the
public and the private.
neoliberalism
As is commonplace in human geography, ‘neoliberalism’ was once again in
evidence as the mode of society and thought that, it is assumed, we should all
be opposing. Neoliberalism is most often not simply the extension of the market
into more areas of life, but is also viewed as a profound influence on
personality and subjectivity. People are seen as being shaped profoundly by
lived neoliberal reality. Hence the lifestyles that appear to ‘rupture’ this
process are imbued with transgressive and progressive potential. They can
challenge the ‘neoliberal subject’ and forge new subjects.
Neoliberalism has largely replaced capitalism as the enemy for many
radical geographers. Whereas capitalism referred to a form of social
organisation that restricts freedom and holds back material liberation,
neoliberalism tends to refer more to a culture of greed and narrow
self-interested individualism engendered
by the market. For neoliberalism’s opponents progress comes through challenging
neoliberal consumption with ‘alternative’ or ‘ethical’ consumption or
lifestyle.
Yet opposition to neoliberalism is not only opposed to the liberal free
market, but is also hostile to liberal values generally. The rational subject,
able to act in its best interests, is regarded as a naive myth. The impulse is
to morally regulate choice through, for example, ‘behaviour change’ to lead to
more 'sustainable' outcomes. In the advocacy of ethical consumption, these
outcomes are almost invariably localism, anti-modernity, pro-organic ….
This was the tenor of a session titled ‘Consuming the Anthropocene’ which
amongst other things looked at the potential for digital prompts to change
behaviour in the direction of more ‘ethical’ consumption of food. University of
West Virginia scholar Bradley Wilson’s excellent paper, subtitled Peasant
Politics in an Age of Uncertainty, took a different line, asking the
question ‘who curates the museum of ethical consumption?’ and arguing for an
authentic voice from the rural producer rather than those claiming to speak on
their behalf from business and civil society (in this case the Rainforest
Alliance).
Wilson is right. We are often presented with a moralisation of
consumption (as in moralising rather than morality) which has undercut
politics by presenting a particular ethical outlook as a gold standard for all
ethical people to follow. Perhaps, as we briefly discussed in the session, it
is time to exit the museum of ethical consumption.
The claim, implicit and explicit in a number of the sessions, that
societies’ ills, however conceived, can be challenged through the performance
of neoliberal-critical lifestyles and consumption is misplaced. The
moralisation of consumption and the politicisation of behaviour and affect tend
to limit the political debate necessary for any revival of a healthy public
sphere of political reckoning.
author meets critics?
A gripe: I attended a couple of ‘author meets critics’ sessions: David
Harvey on his latest book Seventeen Contradictions and the End of Capitalism [iv]
and also Glen Sean Coultard discussing his work Red Skin, White Masks:
Rejecting the Colonial Politics of Recognition.[v]
The main limit of these session is that the ‘critics’ almost invariably turn
out to be substantially in agreement with the authors - the sessions
feature levels of agreement rather than substantial questioning of assumptions.
This is surprising. Outside of radical geography there is little sign of the
end of capitalism. In the latter case the author’s laudable argument that
struggles of minority nations in Canada should eschew the politics of
recognition went on to also reject the concepts of sovereignty and citizenship
as, effectively, impositions from the oppressors. Again, any debate that
happened was not prompted by the critics.
Chicago highlights
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| 'the El' |
A highlight of the week was the field trip to the
University of Chicago, a truly inspirational place. From what I gleaned,
President Obama’s alma mater manages to retain a respect for the pursuit of
knowledge in the face of so much instrumental thinking in education. All
undergraduates follow a broad liberal syllabus featuring humanities, science and
philosophy. All professors research and also teach undergraduates, most often
in small groups. You really do join a community of scholars when you attend
UoC. The university has many proud achievements to its name: the first
sustained nuclear reaction took place here, the Chicago Schools of economics
and sociology respectively were conceived here and the institution has a
tradition of producing thinkers, leaders and scientists.
The other highlight was the architectural boat tour up the Chicago river
which runs from Lake Michigan and forks through downtown Chicago. Chicago is
famous for its architecture, and is full of inspiring symbols of human ingenuity and
achievement. Of course like any big city, it is not hard to find evidence
that humanity has a long way still to go. The city is pretty divided, socially
and racially. Some of the infrastructure, especially the ‘El’ elevated rail in
the city, is in need of investment.
Finally a thank you for the people who made the week an enjoyable
occasion, too many to mention of course, but including: Pete Smith, Heather
Hindman, Cori Jacubiak, Harng Lui Sin, Mary Conran, Michael O'Regan, Mark
Brouder, Jarkko Saarinen and of course the bar tender in Hanrahan’s.
[iii] Barnett C, Cloke P, Clarke N, Malpass A (2011). Globalizing
Responsibility: the Political Rationalities of Ethical Consumption Oxford,
Wiley-Blackwell.
[v] Coulthard,
G.S. Red Skin, White Masks: Rejecting the Colonial Politics of Recognition.
Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press
