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Friday, October 15, 2004
There's a nice article on Derrida (who died last week) in the NYT. Although I don't have much direct experience with Derrida (having experienced most of his work second- or third-hand at best), this article is one of the most lucid (and loving) summaries of the meaning of his work I've read.
One passage resonates particularly well with our current presidential race:
"Like Kant, Kierkegaard and Nietzsche, Mr. Derrida does argue that transparent truth and absolute values elude our grasp. This does not mean, however, that we must forsake the cognitive categories and moral principles without which we cannot live: equality and justice, generosity and friendship. Rather, it is necessary to recognize the unavoidable limitations and inherent contradictions in the ideas and norms that guide our actions, and do so in a way that keeps them open to constant questioning and continual revision. There can be no ethical action without critical reflection."
The article goes on to discuss the rise of fundamentalism as a reaction to the growing complexity of the world, and Derrida's assertion (late in life) that religion, rather than a bedrock of certainty, is actually, as it should be, one of the most disturbing and doubt-ridden institutions. "Belief not tempered by doubt poses a mortal danger."
It certainly makes Kerry's reputation as a "flip-flopper" look less like inconsistency and more like a willingness to question and revise, as opposed to Bush's determination to cling steadfastly to being wrong. I'm no political analyst, but rather than fight fundamentalism with yet another absolute system of belief, perhaps it would be better to introduce a little healthy doubt. Rather than bang your stone head against a brick wall, question the terms of the engagement. In the end, I guess that's what "deconstruction" is really all about.
10:34 AM
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Monday, October 11, 2004
photo: Chris Ashley
This weekend, Jen and I went to see "Threshold: Byron Kim" at the Berkeley Art Museum, the first major museum retrospective of the Korean American minimalist painter. Although his recent work continues to expand the bounds of classical minimalism to explore diaristic, landscape, and cultural themes, the work for which he is best known is still Synecdoche (which appeared in the 1993 Whitney Biennial), which consists of hundreds of panels, each a "portrait" of the skin color of a friend or associate.
By tying the conventions of minimalist painting to "real life" referents such as race and the body, Kim makes the typically esoteric and insular world of minimalism relevant and thought-provoking. In Synecdoche, he has created an interesting parallel between the reductive impulse of minimalism and that of racial categorization, in which a person's skin tone and physical features all too often become the sum total of their social identity. At the same time, the work is a study in subtle differences, revealing variation among skin tones that would otherwise be homogenized under such limited categories as "white," "yellow," or "black."
Kim's work walks a fine line between being disturbingly reductive -- one of the works in the show, a large beige rectangle, is titled simply "Mom II" -- and raising insightful questions about the ways in which we perceive, understand, and categorize the world. The most convenient and quotidian comparison is to paint chips -- there are a million shades of what could commonly be called "beige" at Home Depot, but each one has its own name, and choosing one to put on your dining room wall can feel like a life or death decision. Kim's work brings out the psychological aspects of this process: in one piece, he gives an array of pink paint chips to this mother, father, and sister and asks them to identify the color of his childhood home from memory. They each select a different color, which Kim then integrates into the bars of a single painting, synthesizing a collective color memory of a formative experience.
It was with this symbiotic relationship between race, psyche, and reduction in mind that I read Robin Marantz Henig's provocative article, "The Genome in Black and White (and Gray)" in this week's New York Times Magazine. Henig describes recent advances in genetics that suggest that different drugs may work differently on people of different races -- for example that black patients may need different drugs than white patients to treat the same condition. While on the face of it, this seems reasonable -- there are already all kinds of race-based screening tests for bone marrow donors and birth defects -- Henig goes on to explore how contemporary race-based genetic research has similarities to eugenics movements of the past, most notably the skewed science of the Third Reich. While the article doesn't go so far as to dismiss the racial component of the human genome completely -- that 0.1 percent that codes for differences in appearance -- it does raise hairy questions about how we classify and apply scientific findings, and what impact these findings might have on our identities.
Henig describes how a man, raised and self-identified as "black" had his genome analyzed, only to discover that it contained no markers of African genetic heritage. So although he may appear and live as "black" in all social contexts, a medicine prescribed to treat his "African" genome would presumably be ineffective. The danger is of course not only a medical one, but the possiblity that DNA will be used as a new kind of racial profiling, complete with the authority that comes with "hard" scientific evidence.
The article outlines these threats and problems, but really shines in illuminating the problematics at the heart of the concept of race. While there's no doubt that race exists, it's continually caught in the familiar back-and-forth of nature and nurture. While social constructionists, in our idealistic moments, would like to live in a world where all variables are mutable (to the extent that they are socially constructed), it's always much more complicated when we come up against the hard place of biology. I think that's in part what makes Kim's paintings so haunting: while they reduce identity to a ridiculously unified blankness, they also express the impossibility of ever completely capturing it.
1:00 PM
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Just a little bit of horn-tooting -- I've two new essays on PopMatters.com this month, as part of the "These Times/This Place" series:
The City in My Mind is a meditation on geographic and psychic displacement between New York City and San Francisco.
And for those of you still interested in my trip to Shanghai way back in March, there's Shanghai Snapshot, a highly subjective look at rampant development and its parallels to the "old Shanghai" of the 1920s and '30s.
10:33 AM
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