Session 9: Choosing and Chasing Hope

Session 9: Choosing and Chasing Hope
Chair: David Harrison
Hopeful Transcendence: Sublime Hope as aTwenty-First Century Antidote for the Ethos of Pride and Commodity Culture
Beverly Sherringham
John Jay College, City University of New York, New York, USA

Hope and the ethos of pride and commodity fuel a world-view that is as solipsistic as it is transcendent. The subtle underpinnings of commodity culture are entwined within most sociopolitical systems; thus, individuals cannot envisage hope without indicators of cost effectiveness. Although unilateral hope, a false hope that engenders a universal image of power, integrity, and sociopolitical well-being, is dominant in the Twenty-First Century, nineteenth and twentieth century theorists explicate sociopolitical structures that foreshadow modern constructions. A nation’s educational system, government, and media representations, devise a false hope that functions as a false sublime with the propensity to reap capital. Deviation from the construct of unilateral hope elicits consequences that include ostracism, financial reversals, and suspicions of questionable loyalties. At the other end of the spectrum is transcendent, sublime hope, which isolates the individual from the group and enables ascension to unspeakable realms that compromise and thwart the sociopolitical ethos of pride and commodity. Transcendent, sublime hope articulates an ethos of silence and transformation. There is risk involved, for the sublime can invoke the beautiful or the horrid, both of which can inhabit or devastate an ideological power base. This paper delineates the structure that underpins unilateral hope and examines an alternative transcendent, sublime hope, which is not without flaws but has the propensity to elevate an individual above the mechanisms of the ethos of pride and commodity.

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In Judith Butler’s interpretation of Sophocles’ Antigone’s Claim, Butler makes a distinction between two uses of language to critique discourse, oppositional purity and the scandalously impure. Oppositional purity suggests a way of critiquing discourse without harming one’s self, while the scandalously impure implies that the critiquing of discourse might result in a scandal, a radical transfiguration of the law by refusing to operate within it. In this paper, I suggest that challenging pre-existing discourses from within can be equally dangerous as putting one’s self outside of discourses altogether, although there is less hope of reconstructing cultural norms. I use the example of the Free Muslims Coalition Against Terrorism, an organization of American Arabs and Muslims who disassociate themselves from “radical Muslim fundamentalists”, to illustrate the implications of oppositional purity, including its negative implications on individual’s civil liberties. Operating within the confines of the law, the Free Muslims Coalition accepts their position as a racial subject by failing to recognize that the symbol of the terrorist, the word terrorist itself, is related to a predetermined ethnic hierarchy. The theoretical framework of this paper critiques Lacanian thought because although it recognizes the function of language, it causes difficulty in conceiving a past and a future where the roles of terrorists have been or will be defined as inconsistent to the Free Muslims Coalition’s description. In contrast, Butler’s conceptualization of Antigone’s politics as scandalously impure, illustrates that reconstructing cultural norms is possible. Antigone’s reconfiguration of the institutions of kinship and gender provides hope in transcending structuralist universality, which assumes cultural codes can’t be altered. As such, I place kinship and terrorism alongside each other in order to demonstrate that adopting the language of institutions can be used to critique institutions themselves, thus widening the potential for challenging oppressive discourses.

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A theory on culture and cognition is developed by S. Naderi Farsani and M.J.Abolghasemi in 2004. Based on that theory all human beings living in different societies and cultures understand subjective and objective phenomena through five distinct windows; science, philosophy, religion, myth, and mysticism. These windows based on that theory are five different glasses that people depending on some determined variables have been wearing from the very beginning of the human history. Thus, to examine a concept such as “hope” under such theoretical framework, one expects people living in a society dominated with each of the  above meta paradigms or worldviews (philosophical, religious, mystical, scientific, & mythical) to approach a concept such as “hope” differently both in theory and practice. In short, this article emphasizes that a concept such as “hope” is culture bound, since any culture is originated with a particular and dominated worldview &, also, any worldview has its own system of meaning construction. The article responds the following questions:
1. Does hope and the act of hoping/or the predisposition to hope differ from culture to culture?
2. What are those variances and what accounts for them?
3. How is hope differently instantiated among cultures?
4. What are those instantiations?