Dr. Cara Judea Alhadeff’s transdisciplinary critical philosophy book, Viscous Expectations: Justice, Vulnerability, The Ob-scene, covers a vast spectrum of socio-political subjects interwoven through her ninety-two color photographs and video stills, 522 pages of theoretical text and extensive footnotes that present parallel, overlapping narratives. This fusion of imagery and theory explores the social and material body as a membrane that integrates the private and public—illuminating a recognition of difference, the familiar within the unfamiliar—a visceral, socio-political connection with the other, all increasingly urgent issues for classroom discussion in our age. Alhadeff investigates this complex web as a process of multilayered storytelling in which the concept of ambiguity offers a multiplicity of clarities.

In her review of Alhadeff’s book, Lucy Lippard states: “In Viscous Expectations, Cara Judea Alhadeff offers an innovative hybrid of complex theoretical discourse, performative photography, and timely political analysis. Her treatment of vulnerability is particularly provocative, as are her analyses of the collision of the hyperphysical with the hyper virtual. Alhadeff opens up new ways of thinking about contemporary life and sexuality, while delving deep into myriad subjects. Everything is embodied, endowed with a sensual visual or verbal presence—from dreams, to pregnancy and motherhood, to Occupy Wall Street. Alhadeff’s work is a fascinating fusion of art and scholarship. Intricate theoretical text is paralleled by unexpected photographic imagery—sensuous, enigmatic, and layered. …Intellectually rigorous and esthetically daring, the book is hard work, and worth it.” Lucy R. Lippard, art writer, curator, and activist. Author of twenty-two books on cultural criticism.

Alhadeff’s pedagogical strategy employs a social ecology that reflects the web of embodied energy—defined as local and global industrial and digital production (extractive mining, agribusiness, industrial dams, physical and economic wage slavery, data mining), consumption (advertising and the construction of desire), and disposal (greenhouse gases, toxicity in our water and soil, and electronic-waste). Rather than reiterating a critique of our society’s current state-of-emergency, her commitment to revealing socio-political relationships expands possibilities for citizenship-with-consciousness. Her argument offers a rationale for comprehending not only why but how U.S. society can become the democracy it purports to be. Relational thinking, uncertainty, and the fluidity of perception generate a pedagogy of reciprocity and dialogue. Her book addresses the potential of dialogic, coalitional thinking, and decision-making. Collective consciousness, not as a unifying discourse, but as an awareness of embodied energy, becomes a paragon of radical democracy.

What are the implications of boundaries no longer being distinct and measurable? When we learn the necessity (both personal and political) of strategically expanding and contracting these boundaries—knowing when to hold on and when to let go—we can experiment with vulnerability to develop a critical, collaborative, and sustainable culture. By examining the lived intersections of technology, aesthetics, eroticism, and ethnicity through the lens of psychological and physical vulnerability, her position offers readers an opportunity to recognize their potential for transformative resistance. Although vulnerability is conventionally understood to mean being susceptible to harm, the foundation of this practice is rooted in encountering vulnerability and difference as physical and emotional strength.

Alhadeff’s book is a particularly essential book for readers to investigate because of its far reaching cross disciplinary research and the insightful connections she makes across academic fields and the arts. Viscous Expectations explores how these hybridities and intellectual convergences potentially lead to a more humane and just society. “…With enormous energy and theoretical appetite, her thought exposes itself to the most difficult and most radical contemporary thinkers, contesting them with her own experience and insights…[Alhadeff’s] thought is unlimitedly ambitious and vulnerable. It issues in putting vulnerability central, rather than individual autonomy or collective enterprise, rather than the subject of rights or the construction of institutions; and, opens a new perspective on justice and democracy.” Alphonso Lingis, Professor Emeritus of Philosophy, Penn State University, author of Violence and Splendor, Dangerous Emotions, Trust.

Her book offers readers contradictory cartographies not as a catalogue of answers, but as opportunities for them to recognize the value of re-“discovering” their innate capacities to think beyond the habitual. Through readings and discussion, readers will have the opportunity to exercise their potential for what Paulo Freire referred to as “becoming the practice of freedom, the means by which men and women deal critically and creatively with reality and discover how to participate in the transformation of their world.” (Pedagogy of the Heart 53). Addressing dialogic, coalitional thinking and decision-making, my readers and I will investigate the following questions:

1) How do we reanimate an aesthetic and ethical life, and how can we foster a sociological imagination in the face of corporatized education, disinformation, mass consumption, and the problematics of contradictory technologies?

2) How can we cultivate eco-kinesthetic/eco-poetic inquiry?

3) How does the intersection of the commercialization of education, the arts-as-entertainment, and the neutralization and medicalization of our bodies and minds perpetuate our voracious cyber-society by misaligning our imaginations?

4) Is it possible for a just society to exist in the midst of our increasingly post-human socio-political teleologies? (Theodor Adorno: “To write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric.”)

5) Within a post-human subjectivity, what does it mean to live and create in a democracy as a culture-of-critique rather than a commercial-culture that is focused on institutionalized body-phobic practices, entertainment, and market fundamentalism?

6) How can we engender a social infrastructure that supports participatory education as a crucible for creative risk-taking?

7) How can we generate and sustain non-commodified values, systems for decolonized dialogic forms of a public commons in which a socio-aesthetic ethic guides our public policy?

8) How can we shift institutionalized, habitual ways of seeing to include all of our senses as intellectual resources; and, learn to see as a relational act of becoming?

Even the all-powerful Pointing has no control about the blind texts it is an almost unorthographic life One day however a small line of blind text by the name of Lorem Ipsum decided to leave for the far World of Grammar. The Big Oxmox advised her not to do so, because there were thousands of bad Commas, wild Question Marks and devious Semikoli.