“An angry dude wielding a shotgun.”
—My 12-year-old son’s response when I asked him what the first image is that comes to mind when I say the words: “private” “property.”
Before we embark on our arrival to Paonia, Colorado, the land of outrageously fertile contradictions, we must unravel my family’s counter hegemonic [2] lifestyle that led to why we left our previous home(s) in the first place.
For decades, I have been writing and performing, teaching, parenting, and living various manifestations of what is socially (in)appropriate (the margins of the margins). Habitually considered “proper,” le propre (in French, meaning clean), status-quo compliance to assimilationist hygiene is implicit in nation-state ideologies. These rules are a taproot of climate crisis. Scrutinizing the labyrinth of the proper/propre, assimilationist hygiene embedded in racial-hygiene dogma, colonialism, and private property can ignite collective paths of resistance to the fascist tendencies of Western industrial civilization.
My compulsion to disentangle these rhizomatic interlocking personal-political/ private-public hegemonies stems from my childhood as an ethnic “other.” Children in my 4th grade class in rural Texas searched through my big curly hair looking for horns; the kids in the school cafeteria would go into vomit-mimicking hysterics because they saw my yaprakas and even bagels as dog food, my colorful clothes and elaborate jewelry as Gypsy-like and gaudy—my voice, gestures, opinions were too big, completely out of place. They encountered my Jewish otherness as dangerous and as a reflection of the abject. My mother and I were clearly displaced, seen as foreigners—trespassing on U.S. territory: “Where are you from?” they would ask, incredulously...And then insist: “No, where are you really from?” This was my first embodied understanding of the relationship between individual experience and greater whole, the vulnerability of my “ethnic” body and the vulnerability of my “natural” environment, the private and the public, microcosmic interactions reflecting macrocosmic interconnections. I quickly learned both the extraordinary danger and vitality of difference–the lived intersection between cultural diversity and biodiversity.
Ten years later as an undergrad in the 1990s, I was required to take the Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory Test. The MMPI, considered the “gold standard” in personality testing in mental health fields, was designed to determine what is “normal” (i.e., proper). The results categorized my personality as INVALID (all caps, theirs).[3] Rather than categorizing the table, stool, and chair as the generalized abstract identifier, furniture, I had seen these objects as things one puts something on; rather than categorizing the orange, banana, and pineapple as the generalized abstract identifier, fruit, I had seen these objects as things one peels in order to eat—(relational verbs rather than static, abstract nouns).[4] Their official diagnosis represented through the dot-matrix scroll of printouts determined that my psyche was socially inappropriate, unclean. The myth of normal (Gabor Maté) has long dictated the justification for settler colonialism reified through compulsory education.
1920s, the Island of Rhodes: my great-grandmother on the foreground donkey, my grandfather, Papoo, between the donkeys. Click on the image to enlarge.
The history of my ancestors [5] mirrors the histories of many Indigenous peoples expelled from their ancestral land. As with ethnocentrism and all myths of racial purity/ racial hygiene,[6] brutal ethnic cleansing continues to be normalized. George Bataille provokes us: “We look down on [primitives] from our sanitary installations, and we give ourselves the impression of an unassailable purity.”[7] Corporeal, aesthetic, and racial purity safeguard the illusion of the stable, the familiar. Similarly, Mary Douglas “demonstrate[s] how symbolic categories such as ‘filth’ and ‘cleanliness’ contribute to a collective sense of order…the repudiated Other.”[8]
I explore the “historical context of my family’s experience” (Lital Levy) in the realm of current eco-political crises. My family, Sephardic Ottoman Empire immigrants, teeters precariously on the line between black and white, East and West, indigeneity and industrialism, the ineffable and the extractable. Our Diaspora reflects a dialectic between cross-cultural indigenous wisdom and industrial, extractive capitalist modernity. Rabbi Daniel Bouskila tells us that the primary center for Sephardic learning is the home, oikos (the Greek root of eco-nomy as it intersects with eco-logy). My family's stories of persecution, invisibility, and celebration are inscribed through my sense of home, my sense of beauty: a tiny-home consciousness—an embodied bioregional watershed body-consciousness rooted in distributive equilibrium (in contrast with hyper consumption: acquiring more than we need).
Living our ecological ethics reflects our commitment to bioregionalism as a daily practice of lived integrity. Bioregionalism, where economics and ecologies can co-evolve rather than be in competition or opposition, reflects beauty as a verb—the relationality that beauty imparts. Collaborating across cultural, economic, and ethnic differences, we offer how the concept of home can become a model for interdependency that increases cultural diversity as it intersects with biodiversity, a model for ethical everyday living rooted in collective creative problem-solving and spiritual intelligence.
Moving beyond nation-state assimilationist hygiene, beyond reductive binaries, my daily life as a writer, artist, activist, and mother attempts to illuminate possibilities of inhabiting the fertility of seemingly contradictory, interstitial terrain. As a minority within a minority (and, yes, the category “minority” is itself problematic—reifying the ostensible majority as an illusory norm), a Sephardic among Ashkenazim, I unequivocally traverse the topography of the uncanny.
Julia Kristeva tells us the uncanny is “the boundary of what is assimilable, thinkable...”[10] Divergent from the norm: faulty, a distortion of le propre (in French, clean), the uncanny is a kind of failure. I highlight “failure” not as deficient, defective, careless, or impotent, but in the context of The Queer Art of Failure: “…failure as a way of refusing to acquiesce to dominant logics of power and discipline…” By productive failure, I am referring to a collective refusal to participate in hyper-normative definitions of mainstream success; a collective, imaginative risk taking that creatively refuses to participate in human exceptionalism and patriarchal authoritarianism precisely by embodying the social anarchist detour, the unknown, the ineffable. Failure is the active resistance to the modes of production that sustain dominant systems offering nonconformist alternatives to hegemonic order. In this context, failure exposes and creates alternatives to disinformation and “the limits of capitalism’s imagination” (Eric Cheyfitz). Failure transcends the logic of capitalism.
What if we were to embrace failure as a radical approach to beauty? A beauty that deracinates assimilationist hygiene and its concomitant profoundly body-phobic, ecocidal misinformation? A beauty that integrates ancestral technologies with contemporary crises? A beauty that inspires and incites justice?
And so, for next month’s Mother Pelican installation we must investigate why alternatives to consumer convenience culture/ taken-for-granted living standards are demeaned as unclean and without beauty. This investigation is rooted in the practice of how to embody social anarchism—collectively decolonizing our local and global economy through individually living our ecological ethics as an ever-unfolding practice of equilibrium.
[2] Referring to Judith Halberstam’s The Queer Art of Failure: countering hegemony, “a multilayered system by which a dominant group achieves power not through coercion but through the production of an interlocking system of ideas which persuades people of the rightness of any given set of often contradictory ideas and perspectives. Common sense is the term Gramsci uses for this set of beliefs that are persuasive precisely because they do not present themselves as ideology or try to win consent. …’common sense’ depends heavily on the production of norms. Heteronormative common sense leads to the equation of success with advancement, capital accumulation, family, ethical conduct, and hope.” Those of us committed to counterhegemonic practices cannot abide socionormativity's “common sense,” we can only fail. See my investigation of John Cage and Henry Giroux’s politics of clarity in my Viscous Expectations: Justice, Vulnerability, The Ob-scene, Pennsylvania State University Press, State College: 2013: 8, 11, 197, 453.
[4] Indigenous communities across the globe tend to use verbs rather than nouns.
[5] Spain’s nation-state edict of sangre de puro, limpieza de sangre, purity of blood, had horrific consequences—it meant that Moors/Muslims and Jews (aljamas) were systematically categorized: morisoc (a term for descendants of Muslims forcibly converted to Christianity), anusim (the forced ones), Marranos (swine), and chuetas (pig eaters), and then eradicated: tortured, burned at the
stake, and exiled because of the so-called contamination of our blood. The Spanish Inquisition's fear of the other-within reflected the “totalitarian tendency underlying universalism.” Irwin Hall cited in Benay Blend's "Because I Am in All Cultures at the Same Time" 1: Intersections of Gloria Anzaldüa's Concept of Mestizaje in the Writings of Latin-American Jewish Women.
[6] See my discussion of racial purity in the context of private property in my Viscous Expectations..
[7]The Accursed Share: An Essay on General Economy, Vol. I. 1976, trans. Robert Hurley, New York: zone Books, 1991: 66.
[8]Purity and Danger: An Analysis of Concepts of Pollution and Taboo, New York: Routledge, 1993. [1966], New York, 2002. Cited in Paula Young Lee, “The Slaughterhouse and the City”, Food & History, vol. 3 n 2, 2006: 7-25, 10. See Footnote 320 in Viscous Expectations.
[9] See our philosophy-photography collaboration: Julia Kristeva, Keynote Speaker, La Pensée Féconde: The Fertility of Thought in Julia Kristeva, University of Humboldt, Berlin, 2009.
[10] Julia Kristeva, Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection. New York: Columbia University, 1982: 18.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Dr. Cara Judea Alhadeff, Professor of Transdisciplinary Ecological
Leadership, has published dozens of interdisciplinary books and
articles on critical philosophy, climate justice, art, epigenetics,
gender, sexuality, and ethnic studies, including
the critically-acclaimed Zazu
Dreams: Between the Scarab and the Dung Beetle, A Cautionary Fable
for the Anthropocene Eraand
Viscous
Expectations: Justice, Vulnerability, The Ob-scene.
Alhadeff's
theoretical and visual work is the subject of documentaries for
international films and public television. She has been interviewed
by
The
New York Times, San Francisco Chronicle, Pacifica
Radio, NPR, and the
New Art Examiner.
Alongside
Archbishop Desmond Tutu and Vandana Shiva, Alhadeff received the
Random Kindness Community Resilience Leadership Award, 2020. Her
work has been endorsed by Noam Chomsky, Bill McKibben, James E.
Hansen, Paul Hawken, SHK-G, Eve Ensler, Alphonso Lingus, Avital
Ronell, and Lucy Lippard among other activists, scholars, and
artists.
Alhadeff's
photographs/performance-videos
have been defended by Freedom-of-Speech organizations (Electronic
Freedom Foundation, artsave/People for the AmericanWay, and the
ACLU), and are
in private and public collections including and San Francisco MoMA,
MoMA
Salzburg, Austria,
the
Kinsey
Institute for Research in Sex, Gender, and reproduction, and include
collaborations with international choreographers, composers, poets,
sculptors, architects, scientists. Her art-based and pedagogical
practices, parenting, and commitment to solidarity economics and
lived social-ecological ethics are intimately bound. Former
professor of
Philosophy, Performance, and Pedagogy at
UC Santa Cruz and Program Director for Jews Of The Earth, Alhadeff
and
her family
live in their eco-art
installation repurposed schoolbus where
they perform and teach creative-zero-waste
living, social
permaculture, and cultural diversity.
She is always eager to collaborate with other activists, scholars,
and artists from other disciplines. If you are interested please
contact Cara via email at photo@carajudea.com
or
via her websites, Cara
Judea
and
Zazu
Dreams.
See also this article: Social
ecology pioneers return to Nederland.
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