Making Room for Community (2)

This is the second in a series of consecutive posts under the same general title.

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Forgiving, Forgetting, and Amnesty

1.

One way never to forget is always to repeat. What is compulsively repeated again and again, over and over one way or another come what may, is never forgotten. It eternally recurs.

As Jean-Louis Chrétien notes in The Unforgettable and the Unhoped For (Fordham University Press, 2002), it is only what can never be remembered that is truly unforgettable. What is truly never to be forgotten is never to be remembered either. Whatever can be remembered can also be forgotten. Moreover, sooner or later what can be forgotten will be forgotten. If something can be actively remembered, then it is something the keeping in mind of which requires effort. Any effort eventually must tire and flag, including the effort that is required actively to hold something in memory. When that effort does eventually falter, what one until then had been successfully struggling to remember is, despite all one’s efforts, forgotten.

Given such an understanding of what constitutes the genuinely unforgettable, the call of “never forget” applied to some traumatic event such as the Holocaust is always redundant. Trauma cannot be held in memory, not because it is so easy to forget, but because it can never be put there, in memory, in the first place, such that it ever could be forgotten. It will not let itself be forgotten. Instead, the harder we try to forget it, the more compulsively it just keeps on repeating itself over and over and over again in one form or another, as Freud saw and called to our explicit attention a century ago, and as many (including myself) have repeated over and over again after him since then.

2.

There is another way never to forget, however—a way besides compulsively repeating. As paradoxical as it may sound to say so, that other way never to forget is ever to forgive, which at the political-juridical level means to grant amnesty.

To grant amnesty is to let bygones be bygones, as an old cliché has it. To reply with another cliché: That is easy to say, but not so easy to do. It takes resolution—in more than one sense. First, the granting of amnesty takes “resolution” in the sense that it requires being formally announced and committed to.

The resolution of amnesty in that first sense itself requires formally acknowledging the offense for which amnesty is being granted: an amnesty granted for nothing in particular is no amnesty granted for anything at all. One does not let bygones be bygones by pretending nothing ever happened. In fact, pretending that nothing ever really happened is a formula for nursing resentment, rather than granting forgiveness: I may present a friendly face to your face, but really just be waiting for an opportunity to put the proverbial knife in your back when your face is turned. Truly to let a conflict that occurred yesterday go by today requires not only that the conflict be acknowledged, but also that it be honored. That is, truly to grant amnesty or forgiveness requires that the fact of discord not be denied, but recorded and marked, “memorialized.”

3.

At one point in Stasis: Civil War as a Political Paradigm, a short book published just this year both in its Italian original and in an English translation by Nicholas Heron (Stanford University Press, 2015), but which contains revised versions of two lectures first given in 2001, Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben discusses a definitive historical case of the granting of amnesty. Relying on the work of French scholar Nicole Loraux, Agamben writes of how, in Greece in 403 BCE, “following the civil war in Athens which concluded with the defeat of the oligarchy of the Thirty, the victorious democrats, led by Archinus, solemnly pledged ‘not in any instance to remember the past events’ (Ath. Const. 39.6), that is, not to prosecute crimes committed during the civil war.” This, Agamben goes on to say, is “the invention of amnesty.”

According to Agamben, the relevant portion of the Athenian “amnestic oath is usually translated with ‘do not remember’ or even ‘do not be resentful, do not have bad memories (Loraux translates it as je ne rappellerai pas les malheures, I will not recall the misfortunes).” Agamben says that the Greek adjective at issue “thus means ‘rancorous, resentful’ and refers to someone who harbours bad memories.” However, he immediately adds that “it is doubtful” that the Greek verb from which the adjective at issue comes should be taken simply to mean not to cling to one’s unpleasant or painful memories of being harmed. He suggests instead that it “means less ‘to have bad memories’ than ‘to do harm with memory, to make bad use of memories,” then adds: “The Athenian amnestia is not simply a forgetting of a repression of the past; it is an exhortation not to make bad use of memory.”

The issue of amnesty, so framed, is not whether those who grant amnesty retain painful memories of past harms, as though by granting amnesty they have somehow wiped such memories, and the pain that goes with them, away. Rather, it is an issue of the use to be made of those memories: Those granting amnesty are vowing not to use their memories of past harms against the amnestied, that is, against those who perpetrated the harm.

What I take Agamben to be saying is that a vow not to use memories of some harm someone has done me against the individual who did that harm is indeed a vow not to “harbor” (to use the American rather than the British spelling) whatever “bad” memories I may have of what that individual did. It is precisely the vow, to put the same point just a bit differently by using another of Agamben’s own terms, not to nurture any resentment toward that offender, but instead truly to “let bygones be bygones.”   The bad memories involved here, however, are not “bad” in the sense of being unpleasant or painful to the one who has those memories, as memories of a toothache might well be said to be “bad memories.” Rather, they are bad in intention: They intend, at least at the level of wishes, harm to the one who did harm to the one who has the memories.

Whereas resentment is the harboring of such wishes or intentions to harm back those who have done harm, the granting of amnesty or forgiveness is the decision, which when resolved has the status of a vow or promise, not to harbor any such harmful wishes or intentions, but instead to let them go. “To let bygones be bygones” is just that “letting go” of the past, not some erasure of painful memories.

Indeed, in order for the vow or promise of amnesty to be honored, so must the pain of that for involvement in which the amnesty is granted. Thus, in the case of the ancient Athenian granting of amnesty in 403 BCE, Agamben first writes that the Greek amnesty entailed neither “simply” forgetting nor repressing the civil war that had just occurred, as which could be taken to mean that it did involve such forgetting or repressing, just not only that, but also more as well. But against such misunderstanding, Agamben as it were explains himself by adding immediately that, in fact, civil war cannot be forgotten or repressed, and is instead unforgettable. He writes that stasis or civil war “is not something that can ever be forgotten or repressed,” but is, rather, “the unforgettable that must always remain possible in the city, yet which nonetheless must not be remembered through trials and resentments,” that is, through deeds or intentions to use the memories of the harm to punish the perpetrators. The painful memories which are an aftershock of the wound for the inflicting of which amnesty is granted serve, in fact, as reminders of the ever present possibility of further wounding, a possibility which must be acknowledged and to which the city must remain open, if it truly to return to itself as a reunited city.

Such an understanding of civil war as a trauma from which the city can never free itself, but which must always be kept open as a possibility in any genuine community reconciliation, is very different from how civil war—and trauma as such, for that matter—is typically understood today. What civil war was for the ancient Athenians, writes Agamben, continuing the same passage cited above, was “[j]ust the opposite [. . .] of what civil war seems to be for the moderns: namely, something that one must seek to render impossible at every cost, yet that must always be remembered through trials and legal persecutions” (thereby perpetuating the very divisions and conflicts that broke out in civil war in the fist place: politics as the continued pursuit of civil war by other means—a point to which I will eventually return below).

The politics of resentment never forgets precisely because it keeps on compulsively repeating the very thing it is “seek[ing] to render impossible,” that is, seeking to guarantee will “never happen again,” as it is often put. It seeks to close the wound and keep it closed forever. In contrast, the politics of amnesty never forgets because knowing that the possibility of “it” happening again always remains, and that the wound must always, in that sense, be kept open.

4.

Making a vow is one thing, keeping that vow is another. That is the another way in which the granting of amnesty takes resolution. In the sense already explored, the vow must be “resolved” in the sense that it must actually be announced or proclaimed. That is, in one fashion or another it must be performatively uttered. That can take place publicly, as it does when marriage vows are exchanges in a wedding ceremony, for example. Or it can take the private form in which one makes some vow “to oneself,” as a smoker fed up with his habit might vow to himself never to smoke again, without telling anyone else he has done so, or an aspiring musician might silently vow to herself to practice for six hours daily. As those two examples clearly suggest, however, keeping such a resolution takes far greater resolution than just making it. Common experience with “New Year’s resolutions” abundantly confirms that. In truth, the proof of a decision is in the honoring.

Just so must forgiveness, once decided upon and offered, then be maintained. It takes ongoing effort not to lapse back into resentment. In a well-known passage of the Christian Gospel of Matthew (Matt. 18:21-22), Peter comes to Jesus and asks how often he should forgive another member of the church who sins against him, wondering aloud if he should do so “as many as seven times.” Jesus replies that rather he should forgive, at least in one common rendition, “seventy times seven times.”

Surely, the point of that saying is not that one should count the number of times the other person gives offense, and only strike back if that number eventually exceeds 490. Nor does one have to take Jesus’ response to mean solely that one should not put a limit to the number of times one is willing to forgive multiple offenses committed by the same person. That can reasonably be taken to be part of what Jesus means, to be sure. However, there is at least one other possible interpretation, which includes that first one but is more expansive, keeping more open. Jesus’s response can also be taken as pointing to the need to keep one’s forgiveness, once extended, going—to maintain one’s offer once made, keeping it open moment by moment. By either reading, at any rate, forgiveness is not a matter to be counted.

Truly forgiving someone for some offense, even for a single harmful act never repeated, is not just a momentary act. It is a decision that, once made, must then be carried out and kept operative. A vow or promise is not just over and done with once made, requiring nothing further from the one making it after that. Once made, the vow or promise must then be kept. If it is not, the one who once made the vow or promise has committed an offense that itself calls for forgiveness.

5.

At least on the basis of the definitive ancient Athenian amnesty Agamben discusses, the reason for the granting of amnesty was nothing such as trying to be good winners or to look magnanimous in the eyes of the vanquished. Nor was it a matter of trying to follow any such moral precepts as doing to others as you would have them to do unto you. Not that there is anything wrong with such notions of right—or, for that matter, with wanting to appear magnanimous or to be a good winner. It is just that none of that is what is really at stake in the Athenian amnesty. Rather, as Agamben himself emphasizes, it is the very life of the polis itself. At issue was the very establishment—or reestablishment, to be precise, since it had been riven in two by the civil war—of the polis or “city” itself. The issue was to renew and preserve the very “civilization” of the civis, we might say, to use the Latin from which our English word city comes.

Thus, the victorious party to the civil war in Athens in 403 BCE granted amnesty to their defeated opponents in order to preserve Athens itself as a true city, civis, or polis: a true “civic community.” Failure to grant such amnesty would in effect have perpetuated the civil war in another form, as I have already remarked above. Not to grant amnesty would have threatened the very continuation of Athens as such a city. Their overriding motivation was to preserve the city as such.

In the very same way, by their own testimony the victims of the recent shootings at Emanuel A.M.E. Church in Charleston, South Carolina, who extended forgiveness to the shooter without even being asked, did so in order to preserve “Mother Emanuel” as the very church, the very “faith community,” that it was. That was central to their motivation.

Thus, in both cases, that of the ancient city of Athens and that of the contemporary church in Charleston, the motivation of those granting forgiveness was grounded at the level of the community as such. In each case, it was a matter of preserving the community itself, as the very community it was. Forgiveness was not granted just for the sake of those being forgiven. Nor was it granted just for the sake of those extending forgiveness. It was done for everybody’s sake.

6.

By chance, on the very day (October 19, 2015) I put up my immediately preceding post, the first in this series on “Making Room for Community,” a follow-up article about the Charleston shootings, which had occurred four months earlier, appeared on the front page of the New York Times. The article bore the headline of “Open Doors and Lingering Pain At Church Where 9 Were Killed,” and appeared under the byline of Robert Fausset. It opened this way:

CHARLESTON, S.C.—The Rev. Dr. Norvel Goff Sr. was standing on a Wednesday evening in the room where the massacre occurred an Emanuel A.M.E. Church, readying himself to lead Bible study.

A police officer was at the door. But for those who arrived, even the strangers, there were no pat-downs, no metal detectors. They were all as welcome as Dylann Roof had been when he arrived on a Wednesday night in June, concealing his pistol and his intentions.

If the visitors had come looking for a grand statement on racial reconciliation, the open door was it. . . .

Indeed it was. It was also a grand statement on how Emanuel A.M.E. Church had managed to remain a true church, despite the shootings. Mother Emanuel Church did not react to those shootings by closing up, battening down, and doing whatever else she could to secure herself against any such a horrible thing ever happening again. She resisted the temptation to try to protect herself by shutting out the strangers who came to her doors, a temptation the yielding to which would have been at the price of ceasing truly to be a church, that is, a community of faith, in the fullest sense. Yielding to that temptation would have turned Mother Emanuel instead into a community of distrust, fear, and suspicion, not faith. By closing her doors, Mother Emanuel Church would have closed her doors not only on strangers, but also on herself.

By keeping them open, she kept the faith.

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This series of posts will be continued.

Making Room for Community (1)

This is the first of a series of consecutive posts under the same title.

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Forgiveness, Contrition, and Reconciliation

One should never underestimate the resentment of the wealthy towards the insolence of the poor.

—The Invisible Committee, To Our Friends*           

1.

One morning toward the beginning of the summer just recently ended, I was especially struck by the juxtaposition of three different news articles on the front page of the New York Times. It was the morning of Thursday, June 25, 2015. The first of the three articles, in the order I read them, was about the formal sentencing to death, just the day before, of Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, the Boston Marathon bomber. The second article was about the shooting just a week earlier, on June 17, of nine African American church members at “Mother Emanuel” African Methodist Episcopal (A.M.E.) Church in Charleston, South Carolina. The third article was about the far higher incidence in the United States of such homegrown right-wing terrorist attacks as the Charleston church shootings, on the one hand, compared to such Islamic-extremist ones as the Boston marathon bombings, on the other.

The second article I read that morning, addressing the recent shootings at Emanuel AME Church in Charleston, was actually about the responses to the nine shooting deaths, as voiced by the family members of the victims. The piece described how, in the arraignment hearing for Dylann Roof, the accused shooter, one after another various members of the families of those killed spontaneously, with no prior consultation among themselves, offered forgiveness to that shooter.

In contrast, in the first story I read, about the sentencing to death of Tsarnaev, the Boston Marathon shooter, a very different situation was depicted. In that case, as the article presented it, almost all of the Boston victims and victims’ family members who were cited insisted that they did not and would not forgive the bomber. A small number of them, by that and earlier accounts I had read or seen broadcast, did say they were going to forgive, or at least try to. But even in those rare cases, the nature of the forgiveness they offered was very different in foundation and effect from that offered by those involved in the Charleston case—a point to which I will eventually return below.

The third article that caught my special attention that morning was focused on the contrast between the public perception of the source of the greatest “terrorist” threat to America and Americans, and what law-enforcement agents and statistics confirm really to be the case. By the opinion polls, by far the majority of United States citizens identify “Islamic extremism” or the equivalent—such as animated those who flew the planes into the Twin Towers, the Pentagon, and the field in Pennsylvania on September 11, 2001—as being the potential source of “terrorism” most to be feared. However, as recounted in the article, the statistics on which law-enforcement agencies across the county themselves primarily rely demonstrate that, since September 11, 2001, almost twice as many “terrorist” attacks and deaths have been perpetrated by indigenous right-wing, anti-government extremists—such as were Terry Nichols and Timothy McVeigh, the perpetrators of the pre-9/11 Oklahoma City bombings that remain the second most deadly “terrorist” strike ever on U S soil—as by those claiming some sort of Islamic inspiration.

The juxtaposition of those three different news articles in that morning’s New York Times engendered the thoughts I will share in this post concerning the interplay of three factors: forgiveness, contrition, and reconciliation.

2.

In the article about the testimony of the Boston Marathon victims and their families at the Tsarnaev hearing, more than one person cited made remarks to the effect that any forgiveness for Tsarnaev (or his dead brother, the other bomber) would have to be preceded by some show of genuine contrition on his part. In effect, they said that they would not extend any forgiveness to Tsarnaev until after he had first confessed to what he had done, and shown signs of honest regret and desire to atone for it. For them, forgiveness would be extended only after the way had thus been cleared for it by such contrition. Forgiveness was not to be given before such display of honest regret and desire to make amends, but only after it—forgiveness as a sort of after-given, rather than a fore-given, of contrition, as it were.

In contrast, the responses from the victims of the Charleston shootings and their families at the arraignment of Roof, as depicted in the article devoted to them, was strikingly different on just that score. One after another, those who had been made to suffer by the shooter offered forgiveness before it had ever been requested. They made no mention of needing first to have Roof confess to his transgressions and display genuine contrition, before they would offer him forgiveness. They forgave him without him even asking them to.

3.

Another difference between those two cases, the Boston Marathon bombings and the Charleston Emanuel A.M.E. Church shootings, that caught my attention as I read about them in that morning’s Times was a matter of ethnic or “racial” differences. The Charleston victims’ voices all came from African American, or “black,” Christians who were freely offering actual forgiveness to a “white” perpetrator, whereas the voices from Boston, the ones that spoke only of a possible forgiveness under certain conditions, came predominantly from “whites,” and were addressed to a Muslim immigrant from Chechnya.

That contrast brought more than one thought to my mind. The first was that a possible “advantage,” as it were, to being a member of the oppressed part of the population rather than the oppressing part—belonging, in a general sense, among the oppressed, rather than among the oppressors—might be that being one of the oppressed may bring with it a sort of freedom to forgive, whereas being one of the oppressors may tend to enchain one to the defense of one’s entitlements.

The second thought that came to me when I noticed the contrast at issue had to do with the generally overwhelmingly positive reaction of the mass media—and apparently of the public that consumes that media—to what the victims said in both cases, despite the obvious differences between the two sets of victims’ responses. Press and public all but unanimously praised the black victims of the Charleston shootings for spontaneously forgiving the perpetrator of those shootings, without him asking for their forgiveness first, or even admitting he’d done anything for which he might need to be forgiven. Yet the same press and public were equally united in voicing approval of the Boston Marathon bombing victims for refusing to forgive the bomber, at least until he had admitted his guilt and expressed sorrow for what he had done. The thought that came to me from the conjunction of those two equally positive public reactions to those two very different cases was a second possible explanation for that phenomenon, besides the one I just mentioned about the constraints of entitlement and the liberty of the oppressed.

What occurred to me was that the more or less institutionally encouraged view in a society such as ours—namely, one riddled by inequalities and inequities, especially along “racial” lines—is that not only is it a right or even a privilege of the oppressed to forgive their oppressors, but it is also what such a society expects or even demands of the oppressed. On the other hand, in such a society it is never a right of the oppressed to strike back against their oppressors—and it is often taken as nothing but do-gooder “political correctness” to talk about any need to forgive them if they dare to do just that.

4.

It is also worth noting that the very few Boston victims who actually did say they forgave the bomber, made a point of explaining that they were doing so solely for their own sake, not for his. In contrast, none of the Charleston victims was reported as saying something similar (at least in the Times article I read that day, or any other accounts I read later, heard, or saw later, for that matter).

As a matter of fact, none of them said they were offering forgiveness either solely for their own sake, or solely for the shooter’s.   Rather, they emphasized that they felt called to offer forgiveness because of who they were as member of the community to which they belonged. They experienced a call to forgive for the sake of their community as such, in order that it might continue to be fostered.

By how it struck me, at least, they can be taken to have meant not only their own community of the faithful at Emanuel A.M.E. Church, but also—and precisely because of the very nature of their own limited Church community—the broader community beyond. What they said can and most probably should be taken to extend, ultimately, all the way out to that open-ended, all-inclusive, worldwide human community that, inspired by their example, we might call the community of universal reconciliation.

Such radical extension well beyond the limits of their own limited African American faith community is strongly suggested, for one thing, by the fact that the white shooter was himself warmly welcomed into the bible study meeting that was going on at the Church when he entered the building. Once inside, he was embraced by the congregation, until he eventually pulled out his gun and began firing. Such openness to others—to any “neighbor” who happened by, whether already known or a complete stranger—as accorded with their understanding of their own Christian faith, was central to the communal identity of the shooting victims themselves.

5.

What interests me about the difference in victims’ responses in the two cases, the Boston Marathon bombings and the Charleston A.M.E. Church shootings, is not a matter of any differences in moral fiber or strength of character of the victims, either individually or collectively (taken one by one or group by group). No such differences were apparent to me from the reports, nor would they be of any special interest to me even if they were. Rather, what interests me in the contrast between the two cases of victims’ responses is that they suggest two very different understandings and models of how the interplay of forgiveness, contrition, and reconciliation operates in relation to the emergence, institution, and maintenance of community. What interests me can be put most succinctly, perhaps, in the form of two different answers to the following question: Which comes first, forgiveness or contrition, with what effect upon reconciliation, to establish or reestablish community?

By one understanding, contrition must come first. Contrition, by that understanding, is the condition for the possibility of forgiveness: the sincere expression of regret and desire to atone make the offer of forgiveness possible—though never mandatory, it is important to add. Finally, it is the conjunction of those two, contrition and forgiveness, that then makes reconciliation possible—though again not mandatory: the extension of forgiveness always being voluntary, it may not be offered, which means that reconciliation will not be effected.   That, it seems to me, is the model suggested by the Boston response.

On the other hand, the Charleston response suggests a significantly different understanding and corresponding model. By that second understanding and model, what begins the whole process is forgiveness, rather than contrition. That forgiveness is what then effects, all on its own, reconciliation. That already effected reconciliation, in turn, is what makes genuine contrition possible.

6.

As Augustine teaches, and using his terms, the very awareness of sin is of itself proof that God has already extended the grace of forgiveness for that same sin. It is only such grace that first allows one to become truly aware of the fact of one’s sin: finding oneself being freely and fully offered forgiveness for something one has done is what first of all lets one genuinely experience one’s guilt. Save for the prevenient grace of forgiveness already extended before it is even requested, the offender cannot plumb the depths of the offense, and hence cannot come fully and genuinely to regret his or her offending deed. Unless such unearned, gratuitously offered forgiveness first opens the way, contrition cannot come into its own.

Without such libratory anticipation allowing one to experience one’s real guilt, any expressions of sorrow one might make for what one has done are at best a routine conformity to social expectations, done to forestall any possible unpleasantness. So, for example, when I accidentally brush against someone on the subway or in the grocery-store aisle, I will typically say I’m sorry, just to maintain sociality.

In my judgment there is nothing at all to apologize for in making such purely conventional apologies. They are perfectly acceptable, and even to be respected. It would be boorish not to make them. Nevertheless, such apologies display no real contrition; and that, in turn, is primarily because no real offense has been committed in the first place.

Nor is there really any contrition in cases where I say I am sorry just to avoid being punished for something I’ve done. A child caught stealing cookies from a cookie jar who verbalizes sorrow only in order not to be disciplined—and maybe to protect the supply of cookies within reach, fully intending to steal some more as soon as the coast is once again clear. Or a murderer might tell a judge he is sorry to for his deed in hopes of escaping the death sentence, as many of the Boston Marathon victims thought was true of Tsarnaev’s eventual expressions of sorrow for what he had done.

7.

Communities that define themselves through some property that all and only members of that community possess necessarily exclude everyone else, everyone who fails the qualifying test of ownership, of possession, of the property at issue. Unless one can prove such possession to the satisfaction of the group, one has not met the eligibility requirement for belonging to it. Such communities are built by entitlement, the right of title to the property that defines the group. Along their borders such groups always build walls to keep out the un-entitled—and they always make the excluded and un-entitled themselves pay for those walls, we might add. They are gated communities. Closed tightly in upon themselves, such communities remain unforgiving toward all breaches of their security. They can last only so long as such breaches are contained, and their walled borders remain secure.

All walls come crumbling down eventually, however. Therefore, no such communities—proper communities of property, as it were—last forever. Every empire ends sooner or later.

8.

On the other hand, a community built by forgiveness—such a community as the Emanuel A.M.E. Church in Charleston, given the witness of the victims of Roof’s white-supremacist attack—is guaranteed to last. Like love itself, such a community lasts forever, even after all the walls of the building in which it is housed come tumbling down. It is as eschatological–as much a matter of eternity now—as the freely offered, unconditional forgiveness that builds it. That is precisely because it is a community built upon openness and inclusion, and can only be maintained by continually erasing its own borders to admit ever again new members, with no end to that particular endless-ness.

Such an eschatological community, built by unconditional forgiveness, is just the sort of community Étienne Balibar, a contemporary French sociologist and political philosopher, describes at one point in Equaliberty (Duke University Press, 2014), a collection of his essays from over the last twenty years.   Balibar at that point (page 93) envisions “a community that itself has no ‘property,’ and thus no common good (no res publica or common-wealth) to preserve, appropriate, or identify with,” a community that “can only be approached in terms of an injunction to make a place for alterity,” and thus “a community without community that has nothing in common but non-property, the resistance of its own members to identifying with some ‘proper.’”

Communities built and maintained by the sort of forgiveness offered to the Charleston shooter by the members of Emanuel African American Church are just such altogether improper communities.

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The next post will continue this series on “Making Room for Community.”

* Translated by Robert Hurley, South Pasadena: Semiotext(e) 2015, page 133.

Shattering Silence of Peace (4)

      Hereby it is manifest that during the time men live without a common power to keep them all in awe, they are in that condition which is called war; and such a war as is of every man against every man. For war consisteth not in battle only, or the act of fighting, but in a tract of time, wherein the will to contend by battle is sufficiently known: and therefore the notion of time is to be considered in the nature of war, as it is in the nature of weather. For as the nature of foul weather lieth not in a shower or two of rain, but in an inclination thereto of many days together: so the nature of war consisteth not in actual fighting, but in the known disposition thereto during all the time there is no assurance to the contrary. All other time is peace.

— Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan, Part I, Chapter XIII

 

A theory derived instead from Russia’s long history of communal social forms, and from an immediate experience of Russia’s land and natural history, with its sparse population and harsh environment, would foreground, not surprisingly, the struggle that pits organisms against a challenging, often brutal environment and the forms of cooperation they develop for their survival, over the gladiatorial combat of the survival of the fittest.

— Kristin Ross, Communal Luxury: The Political Imaginary of the Paris Commune, in reference to Peter Kropotkin’s theory of “mutual aid”

 

The shrieks ought to be over; but I still hear the silence of the executed.

—Elias Canetti, The Human Province, a note from 1947

 

When people find themselves in a harsh environment, perhaps competing with wolves and other animals over scarce resources, they come together in communities of mutual aid to meet the challenges with which surrounding nature, including all its wolves, confronts them. When men themselves—and my use here of the gendered term men is intentional, for reasons I have already indicated in my previous posts in this present series—become wolves to one another, they naturally draw apart, each suspicious and defensive toward all the others. The first vision, of human beings giving mutual aid to one another in the face of an always-threatening nature, is Kropotkin’s. The second vision, of a standing state of war between all men, is that of Hobbes.

As I put it in an early, short article of my own entitled “The Conversion of Nature and Technology,” published in 1976 (in Analecta Husserliana, Vol. V, pages 281-290), nature was once “the ambiguous dimension of the overwhelming, the inescapable, and the sustaining, all in one.” In such a time—no longer our own—nature, as I put it then,

is both that to which man [and my usage of that gendered term then was just ignorantly sexist] belongs and that which constantly jeopardizes man’s plans and even his very life. As the three-fold dimension of the sustaining, overwhelming, and inescapable, nature, even in its calmest moods, always maintains that tension from which, at any moment, chaos and destruction might suddenly erupt. Here, nature is the unity of that which surrounds, sustains, and yet threatens and endangers man. Nature is cosmos and chaos in one.

In all societies before the modern one, nature was such a “three-fold dimension,” which, “even in its calmest moods,” maintained exactly the sort of threatening “tension,” as I called it in that early discussion, with human communities—the very “disposition” toward “battle,” as Hobbes puts it in my opening epigraph for today’s post, that, as Hobbes saw it, defines the very “nature of war.” In such pre-modern societies, therefore, nature herself was the very place of war, and human communities were pockets of peace established and maintained, always precariously, through what Kropotkin accurately labels “mutual aid.”   In such a world, it was the time of nature that was the time of war, to speak again with Hobbes; and what he calls the “other time,” the time of “peace,” was the time, not of nature, but of human community, a peace built by the mutual aid that Kropotkin envisions.

In modern society, everything changes. War, that inner disposition toward violence or battle, toward disrupting human wishes, wants, plans, and enterprises, is taken away from nature, and put into the hands of “man himself,” as I’ve put it before in this series of posts. Whereas war had been the underlying disposition of nature toward the human being, in the face of which human beings had had to rely upon mutual aid, it now became the disposition of human beings—at least as dominated by men, that is, male human beings—toward one another.

As Hobbes saw and said with brutal clarity at the very start of modern political thought, it was precisely because of that war “of every man against every man,” as he puts it in the lines above, that men established sovereignty, that “Leviathan,” as he aptly named it. In such a condition, men were riddled with suspicion of all their fellows, who were in turn, and altogether properly, no less suspicious of them. In order to allay their radical sense of insecurity, men turned over their right to kill one another to one (or some, the numbers are not what counts) among them, to rule as sovereign over them all, and alone among them vested with the right of decision to kill. Thus arose the State. Thereafter, men no longer had to fear everybody else; they only had to fear the sovereign State, that Leviathan.

*     *     *     *     *     *

Mother bears defending their cubs from perceived threat have no interest in compromise or negotiation. As is typical of “combat in females,” as Walter J. Ong writes in the passage from Fighting for Life that I used for an epigraph to start my second post to this current series, the combativeness of a mother bear among her young “tends to be either perfunctory,” as it is when she huffs and puffs at a cub itself to set it straight when it gets out of line, “or furiously real,” aiming to kill any outsider she perceives as a genuine, non-perfunctory threat to those same cubs. Secure in her own power, the mother bear uses that power whenever necessary to protect her cubs from perceived threat. Otherwise, she rests in peace with her cubs in their nest.

By Ong’s analysis, conflict among males, who are driven by a constitutional feeling of in-security, always tends, in contrast, to become ceremonialized, creating and preserving a distance between the combatants that in fact minimizes the risk of the conflict turning lethal. It therefore is highly conducive to the very processes of avoiding the outbreak of what we call “actual hostilities” through negotiation and compromise, both of which tend themselves to become highly ceremonialized affairs. The price, however, that must be paid for such an outcome is the perpetuation of the condition of underlying, though latent, hostility between the male combatants—the perpetuation, that is, of the “known disposition” of hostility toward one another by which Hobbes defines the very notion of war (though Ong himself does not refer to Hobbes in this context).

Interestingly, in a later passage of Fighting for Life, in a chapter-section called “The New Setting”—namely, the setting of the time in which he was writing, which is still part of our own time—Ong addresses “the conflicts of the 1960s” that erupted on college campuses throughout the United States and beyond during that decade and into the next. What he has to say about those conflicts suggests to me, on that basis of the rest of Ong’s own broader analysis, that they actually involved a return from what he characterizes as predominantly masculine forms of conflict to what he characterizes as more typically feminine ones.

Ong cites six characteristics of the campus-centered conflicts of the 1960s. His remarks are interesting enough to deserve being cited in full. I have added all the emphases, to highlight special pointers to a sort of re-feminization of the conflicts at issue (the ellipses are all mine as well) :

First, the [campus] conflict of the 1960s tended to be between students and administration rather than between students and teachers: in effect, the principal arena for academic ceremonial combat had been vacated. . . .

Second, attacks on faculty members in the 1960s tended to be made because of their personal beliefs, not because of their behavior as teachers or disciplinarians: again, combat had moved from the ceremonial arena and had become an ad hominem attack, in which the attackers pursued their opponents anywhere and everywhere. (In male-with-male ceremonial combat, one male never pursues another beyond a given territorial limit; for infrahuman conspecific males, flight is normally an inhibiting mechanism for the victor—in human ludic terms, the football player who steps outside the gridiron cannot be tackled.)
Third, there was a feeling that if one argued with a teacher about the teacher’s own subject, one risked losing. . . .

Fourth, the academic world itself was often attacked not on academic grounds, but on grounds of social injustice as such: the academic arena was bypassed again.

Fifth, whereas agonistic educational methods had prepared for the subsequent extra-academic give-and-take of politics and diplomacy—here the classic example was the exquisitely agonistic British Latin public school—the new agonistic proposed in the
1960s (by some, not by all) was revolutionary guerilla combat, a different sort of thing, perhaps highly intellectualized, but designedly lethal, not argumentative and ceremonial.

Sixth, the advancing of “nonnegotiable” demands was, superficially at least, an attack on formal negotiation, with its rules of give-and-take . . .

When what is at issue is truly worth fighting for, then fighting is not playing some game, regulated by rules of fair-play and confined to a clearly delimited playing field, and played for ceremonial prizes, honors, recognitions, and applause. It is deadly serious. However, for that very reason, fights truly worth fighting also come to definite ends. When they’re over, they’re over. All the noisy bluster, boasting, cheering, and back-slapping ceases, and silence is restored. Peace returns to the nest.

*     *     *     *     *     *

There are mutual aid societies, and then there are mutual aid societies. Sheep graze together in herds for protection, but wolves also hunt together in packs for predation. At least wolves in nature pack together. With human wolves it is different—at least with Hobbesian human wolves.

Among Hobbesian wolves, mutual aid is replaced by mutual hostility. Such non-natural, which is to say artificial, wolves no long naturally band together in packs to aid one another in the hunt, which is an active process. The “bands of brothers” that they form are instead always and only re-active, designed to protect one another from having to face up each one’s radical sense of weakness and insecurity. All the bluster and brio of such brotherly bands—of buddies all back-slapping and bad-mouthing one another in some “man cave,” for example—goes along with that reactive character, which belongs to all the artificial “packs” into which such artificial wolves enter.

So, too, does it belong to all the pacts into which they enter—“pacts” being always matters of artifice, not things that grow of themselves in nature. Above all, that same reactive character belongs to that pact of all pacts, the original pact whereby, out of terror of one another, their wolfish self-interest leads each man-wolf-man to agree to subject himself to some sovereign one of them, if only all the other man-wolves also so agree. Better to be terrified of only one sovereign man-wolf on his throne, or the equivalent, than to live in constant terror of all one’s brother man-wolves wherever they may be lurking!   So all the frightened man-wolves enter into a pact with one another to set up one of them—or three or three hundred, or maybe even just any available representative of “the people”: It’s not the number that matters, just the sovereignty—to lord it over all the rest of them, in order to buffer themselves against the fear of one another. The pattern here is still the same one of ceremonialization and distancing to which Ong calls attention. In principle, sovereignty is a purely ceremonial thing.

Any “peace” that such sovereignty may be able to establish is also no more than such a distancing, ceremonial sort of peace. It is at most the mere absence of “active” war—which is to say the breaking out above the surface of the always underlying hostile “disposition,” to use Hobbes’s term again, that sovereignty tries to bury beneath that surface: the becoming manifest of what was latent all along, defining the whole process. The peace established by sovereignty is merely the repression of the underlying reality of war.

The repressed, however, will return. Indeed, the more it is repressed the more compulsively it insists on returning. It keeps on returning, every more insistently, until and unless the resistance against it finally completely collapses, letting what has been so long repressed flood the entire system. Then everything changes at last.

After that, a different sort of peace, one which is no longer just the repression of war, may finally have a chance to settle over the ruins.

*     *     *     *     *     *

Peace between men comes with the establishment of the sovereign State, which is to say the nation, which takes from its subjects the right to make war, claiming for itself alone a monopoly over such violence. Infra-national peace, peace within the nation—which is to say inter-human peace (at least so long as the humans are men)—is thus accomplished by the self-subordination, to the nation, of those who henceforth count as that nation’s “subjects,” since they have indeed subjected themselves to the will of whoever or whatever gets counted as the the mouthpiece of the nation’s “sovereign,” “supreme,” or “ruling” power. That mouthpiece is a king or queen in a “monarchy,” for example. It is whatever is set up to count as expressive of the will of “the people” in a “democracy.” And so forth. The nation, exercising its sovereign power through its mouthpiece, thenceforth takes charge of enforcing infra-national, inter-human peace, detecting and punishing anyone whom it perceives as actually or potentially violating such peace—and thereby challenging the nation’s claim to a monopoly over acts of war.

Under such sovereignty, accordingly, war ceases to be between individual men—Hobbes’s “war of every man against every man”—and comes instead to be between nations. In contrast to the peace between men, or infra-national peace, which is imposed upon men by the nation in its sovereignty, peace between nations, or inter-national peace, can only be attained through a “balance of power” between those nations (which in the days of the “Cold War,” to give a good example, was a MAD matter, a matter of “Mutually Assured Destruction” between all the nations with nuclear capacity, should any one of them be tempted to push the button unleashing “the bomb”). Or else it must come through the establishing of some no longer national but international sovereign who can take war from the hands of the nations, just as they took it from the hands of individual men, and claim its own monopoly over war. So far, however, the nations have not been quick to ape men by ceding their individual war powers to any inter-national sovereign, whether in the form of one among them (the U.S. being the only plausibly available candidate today, since the collapse of the Soviet Union, with China not yet positioned to provide a viable alternative), or in the form of some deliberative representative assembly of them all (such as the United Nations, that bug-a-boo of all right-minded nationalists today, at least in the U.S., the sole “superpower” left around today).

Both sorts of peace, infra– and inter-national, are really no more than illusions of peace. Both are built on, and can only be maintained by continuing, the repression of the underlying hostility, the “disposition” toward aggression whereby Hobbes defines the reality of war itself, whether that hostility be of each man toward every other man, or of each nation toward every other nation. Regardless of whether the peace is imposed between men or between nations, it remains just that—an imposed peace. The peace of sovereignty is always an imposed peace.

However, an imposed peace is really no peace at all. It is just the continuation of war by other means. The silence it imposes upon the clamor of war is a false silence: Those who do not speak because their mouths have been wired shut are not maintaining silence; they are merely being silenced.

The coming super-catastrophe of the collapse of global system of catastrophe-generating equivalence will shatter both sorts of illusory peace. It will shatter the silence that sovereignty has for so long imposed upon peace.

*     *     *     *     *     *

Nature may kill, but it never executes. Only men, or their equivalent, can do that. In turn, once any sort of sovereign State is established among men or their equivalent, that State is granted exclusive claim to all right to execute. Indeed, sovereignty has often enough been defined in terms of that very right—as the individual or group or institution vested with the right of decision over life and death, over who will be allowed to live, and who will be executed instead.

The peace of sovereignty is built over the graves of the executed, the shrieks of whom always soon die out, leaving only their silence. That silence, however, is deafening. It breaks to pieces that other silence, the one sovereignty imposes on those it executes—those countless ones.

Once the screaming stops, the silence of peace settles over the graves the executed. That silence alone is the shattering silence of peace itself.

Shattering Wholes: Creatively Subverting the University and Other Mobs–Another Fragment

“You see, it’s easy for the musicians to feel as if they were serving the conductor. They even call their rehearsals and performances ‘services.’ The very physical structure of the organization—with the orchestra radiating out from a central raised platform and the conductor standing over them—promotes that dynamic. In this kind of an environment, many orchestral musicians feel disconnected.”

“Yes,” I said, nodding. “It’s a perfect setup for ‘Shut up, and do what you’re told.’”

“Exactly. The very context of an orchestra fosters a culture in which the players don’t own the work; the conductor does.”

–Roger Nierenberg

 

There is a difference between trusting someone as a leader, and being dependent on someone. Leadership depends upon trust. What depends upon dependency is something else, however. It is tyranny. Leaders build trust in those they lead. Tyrants build insecurity.

The approach to conducting that Roger Nierenberg models in his Music Paradigm program—as embodied in his novel Maestro: A Surprising Story About Leading by Listening (Portfolio, 2009), from early in which (page 20) the citation above is taken—provides a fine example of genuine leadership. As the citation suggests, the exercise of such leadership may well require working against the grain of the very organizational or institutional setting within which it takes place. That is especially the case whenever that setting is both built upon and designed to foster dependency rather than trust.

Nierenberg makes the connection between leadership—at least the sort he models—and trust explicit in an even earlier passage, near the very start of the novel (page 5). The fictional narrator, a business executive facing a downturn in company business, comes home from work one day and overhears a conversation between his daughter and Robert, her music teacher, about the new conductor in the orchestra to which he belongs. His interest perked by what he hears, the narrator asks Robert what is so special about the new conductor. Robert replies: “When he’s on the podium it’s as if the differences between us [various musicians in the orchestra] somehow magically disappear, which in turn promotes trust and confidence.” “Trust in him?” the narrator asks. After hesitation, Robert replies: “I guess so. But I think we get the feeling that he trusts us. Somehow that makes us work together so much better. It never seems as if he’s dictating. You always feel like you’re contributing toward something bigger than yourself.”

As Nierenberg depicts his sorts of conductors, they, too, are guided by a vision of something bigger than themselves. In the later parts of the brief novel, the maestro of the title repeatedly points to how the good conductor must always be guided by such a vision. In the case of conductors, it is an auditory vision, as it were. That is: a vision of how the score being played here and now by this given orchestra, with all of its diverse parts with diverse talents and degrees of accomplishment, can sound, if all the diverse musician that make up the orchestra can indeed be brought fully to trust themselves and one another, and give themselves over to the piece.

The “eyes” that can see such visions—regardless of whether they be eyes or ears or whatever other organs—are the eyes of love. Leadership guided by such visions, and in turn guiding others to share them, is a loving leadership.   It is creative: it brings into being.

Such leadership is magical.

*     *     *     *     *     *

Mentioning magic, at one point in his book-length analysis of the Harry Potter films, published just this last spring (Harry Potter: À l’école des sciences morales et politique, PUF, 2014, page 51), Jean-Claude Milner remarks that “one might define magic as an integrally anti-capitalist enterprise. Because it can transform objects without labor and without machines, it makes the material base of capitalism, which is to say surplus value and the power of labor, disappear.”

So conceived, magic—as celebrated not only in the Harry Potter novels and films, which might, because their lack of significant Christian references, be accused of blasphemy by those defensive about their Christianity,* but also in Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings and other “hobbit” narratives, and even in C. S. Lewis’s blatantly Christian Chronicles of Narnia—is inherently subversive of the ruling power of our endless day. Yet magic, of course, has a power of its own, one that can all too easily be made to undergo a completely non-magical transformation into the snakiest imaginable servant of what the better angels of its nature would have it subvert.

There is a scene towards the beginning of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part I—which came out in 2010, the first of the two-part finale to the Harry Potter films—that serves well as a counter-model to the leadership exemplified by Nierenberg’s “maestro.” Voldemort, the Dark Lord of the films, has returned, literally from the other side of the grave, to grasp a second time for unchallenged power over wizards, witches, and “Muggles” (i.e., ordinary mortals) alike. He has called all the heads of the old sorcerer families that supported his return together at one of their castles, and at one point during the proceedings he subjects the entire assembly to a demonstration of his power, and of what awaits any of them who may for whatever reason run afoul of it. Voldemort floats the paralyzed but very much still living and conscious body of Charity Burbage, Professor of Muggle Studies at the Hogwarts school of sorcery who has made the mistake of teaching the equality of Muggles and sorcerers and the legitimacy of marriage between them, above the table where they are all seated. “Dinner!” says Voldemort after speaking a few apt words, therewith unleashing Nagini, the magical snake who is his irreplaceable supporting companion, to devour her as they watch.

The lesson is clear, as Milner notes in his book on the Harry Potter films when he discusses the scene. By his act, writes Milner (pages 107-108), Voldemort lets those who have thought to serve themselves by serving him “see a close-up of what they had chosen to ignore: the power they have worked to put in place accepts no limits to its own exercise.” Such a power will exercise itself, regardless of consequences. By its very nature, it is cruel, such that “even if a cruelty shows itself to have no utility [on its own], that will be no reason not to pursue it to the extreme.” Indeed, “to the contrary,” since the whole point of such egregious acts of cruelty is precisely to display the unlimited nature of the claim to power so exercised. What those who are made to witness such displays have thrust upon their attention is their own impotence in the face of such power. “In a general way,” what Voldemort’s act of wanton cruelty makes clear is that, under such a sovereign power as his, “rational politics will never have the last word, because the last word comes back to Voldemort’s pleasure.”

Milner calls attention to the parallels between the fictional character of Voldemort and the historical one of Hitler. In the case at hand, the parallel is between the “old families” of wizards and witches who help Voldemort rise to power in the story of Harry Potter, on the one hand, and the rich industrialists and other “conservative” elements of German society who did the same for Hitler in the 1930s, on the other. The “old families” in the Potter narratives are enamored of themselves because of what they perceive as the “superiority” their magic powers give them over the Muggles, and protective of the privileges that accrues to them through those magic powers. Just like the rich under the Weimar Republic, merely replacing “magic” with “money” and “Muggles” with “hoi polloi.”

Unfortunately, a sense of superiority easily follows upon the recognition that one has been given special powers, whether those powers be magical, mental, or musical. In turn, that sense of superiority brings in its own train defensiveness against anything perceived as challenging it. Thus, as Milner is quick to point out, the sense of superiority that goes with the recognition that one has unusual talents or gifts is nearly always accompanied by the fear of inferiority—of somehow not being worthy of having the very powers one finds oneself to have.

That is especially so when the special powers at issue are dispensed randomly, without their recipients having done or been anything special to deserve them.   However, that is exactly how it is with most talents, gifts, and powers, of course. They come to those to whom they come by accident, not as a reward for merit.

For instance, in the Harry Potter story Harry’s basic magical capacities—what makes him different from the Muggles who raise him after his parents have been killed during his infancy—are nothing he sought and acquired through his own efforts. He is born with them, inheriting them from his parents. Similarly, physical beauty, musical or other artistic talent, physical prowess, and the intelligence measured by IQ tests, are all based on natural gifts dispensed without regard to antecedent individual merit.

For that matter, so are most of the conditions that account for some individuals becoming aware of their special talents and capacities, whereas others never even come to know they have such talents.   Furthermore, even if circumstances conspire to let one become aware that one has some special gift, they must also conspire to grant one the opportunity to develop that gift. By accident, for instance, a child may learn she has a talent and taste for playing the cello, as our own daughter learned when she was 11. But then it is no less by accident that the same child may be provided with the resources needed to develop that talent and taste—as was, once again, our own daughter, who, when she found she had both a desire and a gift for playing the cello, also found herself living in a reasonably well-funded school system and with a set of reasonably well-paid parents, so that she could be provided the material and educational means to pursue that desire and develop that gift.

Having special powers does not make one somebody special. They do not make those who have them superior to those who don’t. Nevertheless, those so endowed are subject to the temptation to become, as Milner puts it (page 112), “bearers of an ideology of superiority.” The specially gifted “can be seduced, not despite their exceptional talents, but by reason of those talents. Especially if they are ignored or mistreated by their entourage,” as those with special talents often are—again, not despite, but because of, those same talents, we might add, since any gift that makes someone “different” can easily evoke such defensive reactions from those around them, those not so gifted.

Once seduced to such an ideology of superiority, those with special powers can, like Voldemort, also easily succumb to the temptation to exercise those powers over others. They can, like him, come to take pleasure in imposing their will upon others, in the process convincing themselves of their right so to enslave those to whom they have come to consider themselves superior.

However, the underlying, ever-present doubt of their own superiority and their defensiveness about it, grounded in their awareness of having been and done nothing special to deserve their special gifts, continues to carry “a germ of vulnerability” even in the midst of wanton displays of “brutality and terror.” That sense of continuing, inescapable vulnerability sets up such self-styled masters, who delight in subjecting others to their will, to subject themselves in turn to yet others claiming mastery, and indeed to find relief and solace in such submission. For example, Milner writes (p. 113): “Let us suppose that an admired thinker, taken as the greatest of his generation, rallies to an ignorant, belching, hysterical tribune. [Think Heidegger and Hitler, of course!**] Simple folks are astonished; but on the contrary nothing is more normal: this thinker is doubtful of the admiration he knows surrounds him, until it confirms itself in the admiration of which he discovers himself capable.” Thus, imagined superiority doesn’t just lead one to enslave those one takes to be inferior to oneself, it also leads one to let oneself be enslaved in turn.

Against such temptations and perversions of gifts, talents, and powers, Milner suggests, only humility offers any real, final defense. Humility alone would accept gifts as just that—gifts: things for which thanks are be offered.

Humility is not that easy a thing to come by, however.  It is itself a gift, in fact.

What is more, if that gift of humility itself is given, it is also no easy thing truly to give thanks for such a gift. There is a strong, constant tendency to turn thanks for the gift of humility into its very opposite, making of it no more than an exercise in even greater arrogance—the arrogance of thinking oneself humble, like the righteous man at the back of the temple thanking God for making him so superior to the disgusting tax collector beating his chest and weeping in the profession of his guilt down at the altar.

Above all, the way that one properly gives thanks for a gift by accepting and using it. However, just what are the uses of humility? Perhaps Harry Potter can show us something of that, as well. At least it may be worth briefly reflecting upon what Milner calls “the Potterian narrative” with that in mind.

Although that is a direction of reflection that Milner himself does not explicitly pursue, what he says provides good clues. That is especially true of a line in the Potter films to which Milner calls his reader’s attention, one that occurs in more than one of the films and is spoken by more than one of the character, about Harry and to him: “You have your mother’s eyes.”   In explanation of that remark, Milner cites (on page 33) what one of the characters in the narrative says about Harry’s mother Lily Potter’s eyes, which is that they had the power to see the beauty in others, most especially when they weren’t able to see any themselves.

The use of humility is to open eyes like Harry’s mother’s, eyes that in turn open others, calling forth—which is to say creating—the beauty that is in them. The gift of humility is given not for the good of the humble themselves, at least not directly. It is given for the good of others. To give proper thanks for such a gift is to use it by practicing seeing through eyes like Lily Potter’s.***

Such eyes are simply the eyes of love—which brings me back to where I started this fragment, and which is also a good place to end it.

* On page 28 of his Harry Potter book, Milner says that so far he is unaware of any such charges being leveled against the Harry Potter stories, but then adds sarcastically that he “does not despair of learning one day that the Potterian narrative has been banned in part for blasphemy.” In these benighted United States, of course, at least a few such charges and such efforts have indeed been made.

** And appropriately so, at least by one reading of Heidegger’s relationship to Hitler and the Nazis—though not the only reading possible, nor necessarily the one finally to be preferred.

*** Lest one think that is an easy thing to do, one might want to go back and watch the Harry Potter films again. Or read Roger Nierenberg’s Maestro.

 

Pulling Out of the Traffic: The Après-Coups After The Coup (3)

This is the third and final post of a series.

*     *     *     *     *     *

Third After-Shock: Flashes of Imagination

I do not, in the conventional sense, know many of these things. I am not making them up, however. I am imagining them. Memory, intuition, interrogation and reflection have given me a vision, and it is this vision that I am telling here. . . . There are kinds of information, sometimes bare scraps and bits, that instantly arrange themselves into coherent, easily perceived patterns, and one either acknowledges those patterns, or one does not. For most of my adult life, I chose not to recognize those patterns, although they were patterns of my own life as much as Wade’s. Once I chose to acknowledge them, however, they came rushing toward me, one after the other, until at last the story I am telling here presented itself to me in its entirety.

For a time, it lived inside me, displacing all other stories until finally I could stand the displacement no longer and determined to open my mouth and speak, to let the secrets emerge, regardless of the cost to me or anyone else. I have done this for no particular social good but simply to be free.

— Russell Banks, Affliction

 

What a great distinction! Making up vs. imagining! To “make up” is to confabulate, to cover, to lie. So, for example, do those who claim power over others make up all sorts of ways in which the usurpation of such power is necessary “for the common good” or the like. In contrast, to imagine is to make without making up. It is to create, which is to say to open out and draw forth sense and meaning. Making up is telling stories in the sense of fibs and prevarications. Imagining is telling stories in the sense of writing fiction. The former is a matter of machinations and manipulations; the latter is a matter of truth and art.

The passage above comes early in Affliction (on pages 47-48). The words are spoken in the voice of the fictional—which means the imagined—narrator of the novel, Rolfe Whitehouse. Rolfe is telling the story of his brother Wade’s life, and therewith of his own life, too, as he remarks in the passage itself.

*     *     *     *     *     *

A mere symmetry, a small observed order, placed like a black box in a corner of one’s turbulent or afflicted life, can make one’s accustomed high tolerance of chaos no longer possible.

— Russell Banks, Affliction (page 246)

 

Imagine, for example, a big black cube, surrounded by a neon glow, appearing in the sky over Oakland, setting off car horns and causing dogs to bark throughout the city in what soon ceases to sound like sheer cacophony, and becomes a new, hitherto unheard of harmony, in the sounding of which everyone is invited to join, each in each’s own way. Such a thing might all of a sudden make those who witnessed it no longer suited to tolerate the chaos in which, they now suddenly see, they had been living till then, without even knowing it.

*     *     *     *     *     *

. . . facts do not make history; facts do not even make events. Without meaning attached, and without understanding causes and connections, a fact is an isolate particle of experience, is reflected light without a source, planet with no sun, star without constellation, constellation beyond galaxy, galaxy outside the universe—fact is nothing. Nonetheless, the facts of a life, even one as lonely and alienated as Wade’s, surely have meaning. But only if that life is portrayed, only if it can be viewed, in terms of its connections to other lives: only if one regard it as having a soul, as the body has a soul—remembering that without a soul, the human body, too, is a mere fact, a pile of minerals, a bag of waters: body is nothing.

— Russell Banks, Affliction (page 339)

 

Ever since my mid-teens I have kept a sort of philosophical journal. That is, I’ve kept notebooks in which I’ve jotted down passages from what I was reading at the time that made me think, along with some of the thoughts they brought to me, or brought me to. For various periods of varied lengths I’ve let that practice lapse since then, but I always pick it up again eventually. For the last few years, there have been no lapses of any duration; and, in fact, my blog posts almost always arise from things I’ve already written more briefly about in my philosophical journals.

On our recent trip to San Francisco to watch our daughter work with The Coup, I carried my current philosophical journal along. Here’s what I wrote one morning while we were still out in the Bay area.

“The Essence of Accident, the Accident of Essence.”

That came to me this morning as the title for a possible blog post in which I’d explore the idea that the essential—or, more strictly speaking, the necessary—is itself essentially accident. That “accident,” the “accidental,” is precisely “essence,” the “essential.”

That goes with the idea of truth as event (and not, as Milner would say, as possible predicate of an event, a pro-position—to give an accidental connection, via my current reading and other experiences, its essential due). It was itself suggested to me by the accidental conjunction of a variety of factors, coming together with/in our trip out here to see [our daughter] perform with “Classical Revolution” (the name of the “group” from which the quartet with her on cello came) at/in conjunction with/as part of The Coup’s performance on Saturday, two days ago. Among those diverse but accidentally/essentially (i.e., as insight-bringing) connected factors are: (1) my reading in Heidegger’s Überlegungen [Reflections: from Heidegger’s so called “Black Notebooks,” which only began to be published this past spring in the Gesamtausgabe, or Complete Edition, of his works] this morning; (2) my ongoing reflection and talk (with [my daughter] and/or [my wife]) about Saturday’s “Coup” event; (3) my noticing yesterday one of the stickers on [my daughter’s] carbon-cello case, which sticker has a quote from Neal Cassady: “Art is good when it springs from necessity. This kind of origin is the guarantee of its value; there is no other.” That third factor was the catalytic one: the “necessity” Cassady is talking about has nothing to do with formal rules or mechanisms, but is precisely a matter of the “accidental,” which is to say be-falling (like a robber on the road), coalescence into a single work/flash/insight of all the diversity of factors that otherwise are chaotically just thrown together as a simultaneous series, as it were. . . . There’s another major factor so far not recorded as such: (4) attending The Coup’s performance at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts in San Francisco on Saturday. That is the real arch-piece/factor here.

Which brings me to another possible blog post, which [my wife and daughter] yesterday suggested I should do, before the one on accidental essence and essential accidentality suggested itself to me this morning. That is a post about the impact of Saturday night’s event [that is, The Coup’s Shadowbox].

 

As readers of this current series of three posts to my blog already know, of course, I took my wife’s and daughter’s suggestion. But I expanded upon it, doing three posts about my experience of The Coup, rather than just one. And I was also able to incorporate it with my idea for a post on accident and essence, which became my preceding post, the second of the three of this series.

Whether there is any necessity to all that will have to speak for itself. (I can confidently say, at any rate, that it is not art.) All I know for sure is that my journal entry, and this subsequent series of three posts, came about from the accidental conjunction of the four facts I mention in the passage above, taken from my philosophical journal. That entry tells the tale of that conjunction, from which tale alone derives whatever significance or meaning those otherwise isolated particles of my experience may have.

*     *    *     *     *     *

I’ve just recently begun reading Wendy Doniger’s The Hindus: An Alternative History (New York: Penguin Press, 2009), a book that has been on my list to read ever since it first appeared, and that I’m finally getting around to. So far, I’m still in the first chapter, which is an introductory discussion. One of the lines that already especially struck me is this (on page 8): “This is a history, not the history of the Hindus.”

One reason that struck me when I read it was that earlier the same day I’d noted a remark Heidegger makes in his Überlegungen (on page 420 of Gesamtausgabe 94) about the “idols” we worship today (which is still the same day, really, as when Heidegger wrote his remark, back in the Nazi period). Today, among the idols we are most tempted to fall prey to worshipping are, by his partial listing: Science (with a capital ‘S’: “ ‘die’ Wissenschaft”), Technology (with a capital ‘T’: “‘die’ Technik”), “the” common good, (“‘die’ Gemeinnutzen), “the” people (“ ‘das’ Volk”), Culture (with a capital ‘C’: “ ‘die’ Kultur”). In all those cases, idolatry happens when we turn what are themselves really ways or paths of our life in the world with one another—including knowledges (“sciences”), know-hows (“technologies”), shared benefits (“common goods”), and cultivations (“cultures”)—into “ ‘purposes’ and ‘causes’ and ‘agents,’ all the forms and ‘goals’ of wheeling and dealing.”

When we restrict the term knowledge only to what can be con-formed to the one form we have come to call “science”—the paradigm of which is taken to be physics and the other so called “natural sciences”—and confine all other forms of knowledge to mere “opinion” (to which, of course, everyone has a right, this being America and all), then we become idolators. In the same way we fall into idolatry when we try to make the rich multiplicity of varied ways of doing things conform to our idea of some unitary, all embracing thing we call techonology—especially insofar as the idea of technology is connected for us with that of science, to create one great, Janus-faced über-idol. No less do we fall into idolatry when we buy into thinking that there is any such thing as “the” one and only one universal “common good,” which itself goes with the idea that there is some one universal “people” to which we all belong, as opposed to a rich diversity of distinct peoples, in the plural, with no “universal” to rule over them all. In turn, the idea of “culture” as itself some sort of goal or purpose that one might strive to attain—such that some folks might come to have “more” of it than others, for example—turns culture itself, which includes all those made things (made, but not made up: so we might even name them “fictions”) we call science, and technology, and common goods, and the like, into idols. No longer cherished as what builds up and opens out, what unfolds worlds, opening them out and holding them open, such matters gets perverted into service to the opposite sort of building, which closes everything down and shuts it away safe.

A few pages later in the same volume of his Überlegungen (on page 423), Heidegger mentions, in passing, “the working of an actual work.” That sounds better in the German: “die Wirkung eines wirklichen Werkes.” To preserve something of the resonance of the line in translation, we might paraphrase: “the effectiveness of an effective work”—keeping in mind that “to work” in English sometimes means “to bring about an effect” (as in the saying, “That works wonders!”). Or, to push the paraphrase even a bit further, we might even say: “the acting of an actual act.”

At any rate, in the remark at issue Heidegger says that “the working of an actual work” is that “the work be-works [or “effects”: the German is “das Werk erwirkt”]—when it works—the transposition [namely, of those upon whom it works] into the wholly other space that first ground itself through it [namely, grounds itself through the very work itself, an artwork, for instance].”

What I have translated as “transposition” is the German tern Versetzung, which comes from the verb setzen, “to place, put, or set.” Heidegger says that the work of the working work—the work of the work insofar as the work works, and doesn’t go bust—is to grab those upon whom it works and to set them down suddenly elsewhere. That is the shock of the work, as he calls it in “The Origin of the Work of Art,” from the same general period. It is the blow or strike, that is, the coup, that the work delivers to us, and in the delivery of which the work delivers us somewhere else. In the face of the work, at least when the working of that works strikes us in the face, then, as Dorothy said to Toto, we are not in Kansas anymore.

Such transposition is indeed shocking. It can be terrifying, in fact; and it is worth remarking that in German one word that can be translated as “to terrify” is Entsetzen, from the same root as Versetzen, “to transpose.” It is challenging to keep ourselves open to such terrifying transposition, such suddenly indisposing re-disposition of ourselves. We tend to close down toward it, trying to bar ourselves against it, withdrawing into safe places. Idolatry is no less than the endeavor so to enclose ourselves within safe places, rather than keeping ourselves open to such transpositions.*

*   *     *     *     *     *

From the beginning of my interest in them, I have known that the politics of The Coup is communist, at least in one good definition of that term (the definition Boots Riley, cofounder of the group, uses). As I have said before in this blog series, I am not certain about the complexion either of The Coup’s erotics or of their scientificity. However, I have now come to have it on good authority that The Coup are culinary anarchists.

The conjunction of the communist slant of their politics with the anarchist bent of their culinary persuasions gives me nothing but esteem for The Coup. On the other hand, that esteem would have been lessened not one bit if I had learned that they were, in reverse, culinary communists and political anarchists. The point is that neither in their politics nor in their food choices are The Coup into following the dictates of who or what lays claim to authority and power.

Adolf Hitler, who was no slouch when it came to claiming authority and power (all in the name of the common good of “das Volk,” of course), is just one of many claimers to authority from Aristotle on down to today who have cited for their own purposes this line from Homer’s Illiad: “The rule of many is not good, one ruler let there be.” Hitler was into that sort of thing. The Coup are into something different.

So is the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts in San Francisco, where my wife and I attended the world premier of The Coup’s Shadowbox. Making good on the promise I delivered toward the start of my second post of this three-post series on the after-shocks of that attendance, I want to come back to the “Note from the Curators” that opens the brochure I also mentioned there, the one about the Shadowbox premier. In it, the curators at issue write that YBCA “is in process of coalescing more consistently” with what they call “the energetic and aesthetic trajectories” of “local [aristic] ecologies,” especially the “local dance and music ecologies” of the Bay Area. By engaging in such a process, they write, YBCA, while “identifying itself as a physical place,” is also “aspiring to define itself as something more than brick and mortar.” YBCA is, of course, a physical place, and an imposing one at that, right in the heart of downtown San Francisco. More importantly, however, it “aspires,” as I read the curators’ note, to be a place that gives place to the taking place of works of art. As the two YBCA curators go on to write on behalf of the Center: “We aspire to hold firmly onto our institutional status while softening our institutional walls, locating the joy of less formal performance structure within our particularly austere architecture.” Pursuing that worthy—and, I would say, wonderfully anarchical, chaos-empowering—goal, they go on to write at the end of their note: “We plan to have hella fun** in this enterprise, to reposition participatory sweat as currency, to build momentum through the mechanism of witness, to celebrate the too often unseen, to make serious work of taking ourselves not too seriously while fixing our gaze on the exemplary unsung.”

Given that curators’ note, it strikes me that The Coup is right at home in such a venue as YBCA. So, for that matter, is Classical Revolution, which is the outfit (to use a word that seems to me to be appropriate to the case) from which came the quartet in which our daughter played one of her cellos as part of the world premier of The Coup’s Shadowbox at YBCA recently—and whose website (http://classicalrevolution.org/about/) I encourage my readers to consult, to check my just expressed judgment.

Nor is YBCA the only place-opening place where the performances of place-makers such as The Coup—and Classical Revolution and the other groups with whom The Coup shared their Shadowbox spotlight at the recent premier performance—are given a place to take place. Another such place in the Bay Area, one my wife and I also discovered thanks to our daughter during our recent trip to the West Coast, is The Revolution Café in San Francisco’s Mission District (http://www.revolutioncafesf.com/). That, it turns out, is the place where Classical Revolution was founded back in November 2006 by violist Charith Premawardhana, and where performances by Classical Revolution musicians take place every Monday night. There are many more such places, too, not only throughout the rest of the Bay Area, but also throughout the rest of the United States—and, I dare say, the whole, wide world.

To which I can only say: Amen! Which is to say: So be it!

 

 

*In reading Doniger’s words shortly after reading Heidegger’s, one thought that struck me was the question of whether Heidegger himself might not have succumbed to a sort of idolatry regarding “history,” Geschichte in German. Just as it is idolatry to think that there is any such thing as “the” common good or “the” people, isn’t it idolatrous to think that there is any such thing as “the” human story—“History,” with the capital ‘H’—as opposed to multiple, indeed innumerable, human stories, in the plural—“histories,” we might say, following Doniger’s lead? Yet Heidegger throughout his works talks about “ ‘die’ Geschichte” (which, by the way, also means “story” in German, in addition to “history,” the latter in the sense of “what happened,” was geschiet), not just multiple Geschichten (“histories” or “stories,” in the plural). Perhaps that was at play in his involvement with the Nazis, despite the fact that, as the passage I’ve cited shows, he knew full well that it was mere idolatry to think in terms of “the” people, “das” Volk, as the Nazis so notoriously and definitively did. That, at least, was the question that came to my mind when I read Doniger’s line so soon after reading Heidegger’s. Even to begin to address that question adequately would take a great deal of careful thought, at least one upshot of which would surely be, in fact, that it is necessary to keep the matter open as a true question—rather than seeking the safety of some neatly enclosed, dismissive answer.

** As out of such things as I am, I don’t know if that is a mistake, or a way currently fashionable in some circles (or “ecologies,” if one prefers) of saying “have a hell of a lot of fun.” Whatever!

 

Pulling Out of the Traffic: The Après-Coups After The Coup (2)

Second After-Shock*: Accidental Strokes of Necessity

Art is good when it springs from necessity. This kind of origin is the guarantee of its value; there is no other.

— Neal Cassady

Our daughter has two cellos. To go with them, she has two cello-cases. Both cases are pretty well covered with various stickers and posts-ups that have struck her fancy from time to time. When we went to San Francisco recently to watch her play the cello in a quartet representing Classical Revolution, as part of The Coup’s Shadowbox premier, I noticed a new sticker on one of her cello cases. It had the lines above, from Neal Cassady.

That’s the same Neal Cassady who inhabited the heart of the Beat movement. Later he was not only “on the bus,” but even drove it. He drove the bus—namely, the psychedelic bus filled with Ken Kesey and his Merry Pranksters, the same bus Tom Wolfe eventually rode to fame in 1968 with the publication of TheElectric Kool-Aid Acid Test, that foundational text of the “New Journalism” that already long ago became old hat.

I didn’t notice our daughter’s new (to me at least) Neal Cassady sticker till a day or two after we’d attended Shadowbox, and when I read Cassady’s remark it resonated for me with my experience of the concert. That resonance was deepened when, even later, I noticed a brochure our daughter had lying on a bookshelf—an advertisement for the concert we had just attended. Put out by the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts and by Bay Area Now, the brochure started with “A Note from the Curators”—Marc Bamuthi Joseph, YBCA Director of Performing Arts, and Isabel Yrigoyen, Associate Director of Performing Arts—to which I’ll eventually return. That was followed by “A Note from the Artist,” in which an explanation, of a certain sort, was given for titling the concert Shadowbox. It read:

Late one night in the skies over Oakland, a strange object appeared. A cube. Perfectly still, 200 feet in the air. A reflective black box, with a neon glow surrounding it. Thousands of people hurriedly got out of bed, or filed out of bars and house parties, or left the cash register unattended—to stand on the street and gaze at the sight. Dogs barked and howled, louder and louder, in various pitches and timbres until it was clear that there was a consistent melody and harmony to their vocalizations. The cube started trembling, sending out a low vibration that made the asphalt shake, windows rattle, and car alarms across the city go off. Thousands of car alarms went off in a tidal wave of honks, beeps, and bleeps until they formed a percussive rhythm that accompanied the dogs’ beautiful howling. From the cube, a kick drum was heard that tied it together. A spiral staircase descended from the box. Only a few dared enter. What those few experienced has been the subject of several poorly made documentaries, an article in US Weekly, and three half-assed anthropology dissertations. What you will see tonight is a re-enactment of that experience.

I suggest that the “re-enactment” at issue be taken in the sense of an enacting again, as legislators are said to re-enact a law that will otherwise expire, rather than in the more ordinary sense of a miming, an acting out, as a community theatre group might re-enact Tennessee Williams’ A Streetcar Named Desire or Walt Disney’s Dumbo, or as bunch of court stooges might re-enact a crime in a courtroom at the behest of a prosecuting attorney, let’s say.   The Coup’s Shadowbox doesn’t just represent or mime the enactment of community that seems to have proven necessary following the sudden, unaccountable appearance—“fictitiously,” of course (and I’ll eventually return to that, too)—of a strange, black cube suddenly hovering in the sky over Oakland one night.

After all, The Coup—although it may be erotically capitalist and even, for all I know, scientifically fascist—is “politically communist,” as Wikipedia has it; and what The Coup is trying to do in Shadowbox, at least if we are to believe (as I do) Coup front-man and co-founder Boots Riley, is to get everybody moving. And although the movement at issue may be a dance, it is a dance that even such dance-dysfunctional still-standers as myself can join into, as I also wrote about last time. It is a political dance.

Which brings me to Jean-Claude Milner.

*     *     *     *     *     *

According to Jean-Claude Milner, ever since the ancient Greeks, politics—which term is itself derived from a Greek word, of course: polis, “city”—has been a hostage of mimesis, which is to say of just the sort of acting-out, of play-acting, that “represents” the action it mimes without re-presenting it, that is, without committing that action again. The mimetic re-enactment of a murder as part of a courtroom trial does not culminate in a second murder. In the same way, politics as the mimetic re-enactment of whatever acts mimetic politics re-enacts does not result in any new enactments of those original acts.

The acts that mimetic politics re-enacts are acts whereby the polis or “city” itself–which for the Greeks meant, in effect, the place where all real, truly human be-ing took place, to use again a way of speaking I favor—is first opened and set up, then kept open and going after that. From the days of the ancient Greeks until relatively recently, in one way or another such decisive political acts were taken not by everyone together, but only by a few.

Of course, those few invariably found it useful to represent themselves as making their decisions for the good of “all.” As Milner points out, however (3^rd treatise, page 58**): “It is always in the name of all that each is mistreated.”

For the few who did make the decisions, and then impose them on everybody else, to keep their claim to be acting for the good of all even remotely plausible it always also helped to get “the people”—as we’ve grown long used to calling those the rulers rule over, though the term is supposedly inclusive of both—to believe that they were somehow actually participants in the decision-making itself. Those who were being decided over needed to be kept down on the farm, as it were, regardless of whether they ever got a chance to see Paree or not. The decided-over needed to be given the impression that somehow they were themselves deciders—as President George W. Bush once in/famously called himself.

Milner argues that classically, among the ancient Athenians, the theatre, specifically as staged in the great public performances of tragedies, was the crucial device that permitted the governors to govern those they governed—that is, permitted those who exercised power over others to keep those others in line. It did so by regularly bringing together all those who counted as “the people”*** to witness re-enactments, by actors behind masks, of the heroic deeds that were taken originally to have defined the people as the very people they were (with running commentaries provided by choruses that took over the job of being mouth-pieces for “the people,” who were thereby relieved of any need to speak for themselves). By so convening to witness such re-enactments, the citizenry—the public, the people—actually constituted itself as such.

Furthermore, in being brought openly together as an audience to witness the re-enactments of the original, originating tragic acts of the great heroes of Greek tradition, religion, and mythology, the people were also brought, through empathy, to vicarious identification with those people-defining heroes themselves, and their suffering for the people’s sake. Through such identification the people as audience were allowed to process the terror and pity with which the mimetic re-enactments of tragedy filled them, achieving catharsis, as Aristotle observed. That also helped keep them down on the farm.

Precisely because they were assembled as such an otherwise passive audience for the spectacle of decisive acts re-enacted or mimed in front of them, the people were effectively distanced from the underlying definitive decisions and actions being so mimed. They were allowed to feel a part of what was being re-enacted before them, in the sense of being mimed or “acted out,” while they were simultaneously being distanced from all the underlying genuine action itself. They could marvel and weep as “destiny” unfolded itself in the actions being mimed before them, while being dispensed from the need to undergo that destiny themselves.

As Milner puts it (2^nd treatise, page 59):) “That distanced object, which in the crucial tradition of tragedy was called destiny, carries in politics, of course, the names: power, state, liberty, justice, or quite simply government.” What is more, he says, in our times the role that used to be played by tragic theatre is now played by—political discussion: the endless expression of opinions compulsively formed about political matters. Such discussion permits the discussants to think that they are really part of the political action, when in fact they are distanced effectively from it by the endless palaver about it. They are merely playing at politics, the way children play at being adults. They are “actors” only it that mimetic sense, not in the sense of decisive agents.

The difference, however, is that today, unlike in ancient Athens, everybody is reduced to the status of such a mere play-actor. That even includes the few who presumably, in the days of the ancient Greeks and for a long while thereafter, used actually to govern—to be genuine agents or “deciders.”

The reality today is simply this: No one decides, decisions just get made. Things of themselves get decided, as though things themselves are dictating the decisions—hence the name of Milner’s first short political treatise, which translates as The Politics of Things—but without anyone doing the actual deciding.

Accordingly, as I already indicated in my previous series of posts on “The Future of Culture,” no possibility of clearly assigning responsibility for decisions remains. Even more importantly, there are therefore no identifiable political pressure points, points where political pressure might be exerted in order to effect significant change. Everything just keeps on chugging along, with no one directing anything, despite how deluded some may still be into thinking they have some impact (for example, the President of the United States, whoever that may happen to be at any given time). The whole thing is no more than a dumb-show. Nobody is in charge of anything.

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Sometimes, though, lightning strikes. Or suddenly a huge black cube with a neon glow appears in the sky. The Coup comes, and folks get moving.

*     *     *     *     *     *

Necessity is not causality. For necessity to emerge, in fact, the causal chain must actually be broken. Causality brings inevitability, Nietzsche’s “eternal recurrence of the same”—always the same old same old, never anything truly new under the sun (or the moon and stars at night). The necessity that Neal Cassidy says is the only guarantee of real worth in art is not causal inevitability. It is the necessity, the need, of creativity—the need of a pregnancy brought full term finally to burst and bring forth new life.

Any child born of such necessity always comes unexpected. The child always comes as an unexpected, un-expectable surprise, even for parents long filled with the knowledge that they are “expecting.” What can be expected is at most a child, one or another of the innumerably substitutable instances of the class of children, but never this child, the very one who so suddenly, so urgently, so imperiously, insistently comes into the world, and who, once come into it, simply demands, by its very being there, to be named.

Giving a name in the sense of what we call a “proper” name—which is to say “insofar as it is not just another name” (as, for example, dog, Hund, or chien are just three names for the same thing), that is, a name “insofar as it [names] not just anyone,” as Milner writes at one point (3^rd treatise, page 75)—always “appears as an obstacle” to whatever or whomever claims to act in the name of “all.” What Milner means in that context is “all” taken in the sense of a closed totality, such as what is ordinarily called a “nation,” for example, the “borders” of which must be secured and protected. The singular, the radically unique, what escapes number, substitutability, and, therewith, any capacity to be “represented” by another, always constitutes a threat to all claims to special authority in the name of any such totalizing “all.”

However, universal quatification, as logicians call it, over “us” or over “human being”—as in “all of us,” or “all human beings”—need not be the move to any such totality as a “nation.” The “all” need not be taken in any such collective sense. Instead, the “all” can be taken in the distributive sense of “each and every single one,” so that “all of us” means each and every one of us as someone who has been given, or at least cries out to be given, a proper name, a name by which that singular one, and that one alone, no other, can be called.

The name by which the singular individual is called, however, calls that one as just that very one, and not as no more than an instance of what that one has in common with a bunch of other ones—for example, being black, white, brown, or yellow, young or old, educated or uneducated, employed or unemployed, American, Mexican, Honduran, Syrian, Iranian, or Indian. The bearer of a proper name—by which I would like above all to mean a name that is truly just that, a genuine name, and not a mere place-holder for a description—is no mere instance of a type, replaceable with any other. The bearer of a proper name is, rather, irreplaceable. (Regular readers of my blog might think of Fluffy, my daughter’s childhood pet guinea pig, for instance.)

*     *     *     *     *     *

As cacophonous as it may initially sound—like the sound of multiple dogs howling and multiple horns blowing in the night—to say so, it is only such an irreplaceable singularity that can be “necessary” in the way Neal Cassady says the authentic work of art is necessary. The necessity of artistic work is the same as the necessity of seizing one’s one and only opportunity to become who one is, when that opportunity suddenly presents itself. It is the same as the necessity of joining the fight against injustice into the reality of which one is suddenly given clear insight, or the necessity of giving oneself over completely to a suddenly awakened love. In short, it is the necessity of selling everything one owns for the sake of pursing what one is given to see is priceless.

Necessity is order, to be sure. However, it is the order that comes from the unexpected emergence of connection between what theretofore seemed to be no more than a randomly thrown together bunch of discreet, isolated facts. Necessity gives birth to the cosmos. That word is from the Greek word for “ordered whole,” but which originally meant “ornament,” which is why we also get cosmetic from the same word.  Cosmos is the “all” of everything insofar as everything has been brought together into one coherent whole, like an ornament. Cosmos is the ornamental whole of everything emerging out of chaos itself, which also a Greek word, which originally meant something like “yawning gap.” Necessity is the origin of that genuine cosmos which is the coming into an ordered whole of chaos itself. Necessity is the origin of that order that is not imposed upon chaos from without, as though by some ruler, but that arises, instead, of necessity, from chaos itself.

Among the same ancient Greeks to whom we owe tragic drama, the emergence of cosmos from chaos was attributed to Zeus. However, Zeus, the god of thunder and the thunder-bolt, was not himself without genesis. King of the gods he might have been, but Zeus himself came from the chaos; and if he came to order the latter, he still came at its bidding, and from within. He came of necessity, which origin demonstrates the authenticity of his glory.

*     *     *     *     *     *

Coming from out of the Greek chaos, Zeus also came from out of the Greek imagination, that same imagination from which sprang all the gods of Greek mythology. The order that the Greek imagination attributed to Zeus was itself anything but an imaginary order. Nevertheless, its origin—and its guarantee of worth, which is also to say its real necessity—lay in the Greek imagination.

Imagine that!

*     *     *    *     *     *

I will try to imagine something of it, in my next post, which will continue—and, I think, end—this present series on the after-coups of The Coup.

* Only while writing this post did it occur to me to call the separate posts of this series not “Parts,” as I had it when I put up the series’ first post a few days ago, but “After-Shocks,” which is much more appropriate. So I went back and edited my first post a couple of days ago. First, I slightly changed the title. Originally, I had used après-coup, French for “after-shock,” in the singular. I turned that into the plural, après-coups. Then I changed the title of the first series’ post itself from “Part One” to “First After-Shock.” Thus, it was only by one of the smaller après-coups of the coup delivered to me by attending The Coup concert that I was coincidentally struck by the need to change my titles a bit. Appropriate indeed!

** Milner has published three “short political treatises,” all brought out in France by Verdier: La Politique des Choses is his Court traité politique 1 (20011), followed by Pour une politique des êtres parlant as treatise 2 (2011) and L’Universal en éclats as treatise 3 (2014). I will give references in the text of this post, when needed, by the number of Milner’s treatise, followed by the page number at issue.

*** That is, the “citizens,” which means literally the habitants of the “city” as such, the polis, the place where human being took place. So, of course, that left out slaves, women, and all the other others who simply didn’t count—including counting as fully human, since they were not “citizens,” not full-fledged inhabitants of the place human beings as such inhabit. As non-citizens, those other others didn’t need to be brought on board the city boat because they were simply subject to force, with no need to rely on subterfuge—conscious and deliberate or not, who cares?—to make them think they were free even while they were being coerced.

Pulling Out of the Traffic: The Future of Culture (2)

This is the second in a series of posts under the same general title.

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In the New York Times for Thursday, June 26 of this year—which was also the day I put up the post to which this one is the sequel—there was a news-piece by Mark Mazzetti under the headline “Use of Drones for Killings Risks a War Without End, Panel Concludes in Report.” The report at issue was one set to be released later that same morning by the Stimson Center, “a nonpartisan Washington think tank.” According to Mr. Mazzetti’s opening line the gist of the report was that “[t]he Obama administration’s embrace of targeted killings using armed drones risks putting the United States on a ‘slippery slope’ into perpetual war and sets a dangerous precedent for lethal operations that other countries might adopt in the future.” Later in the article, Mr. Mazzetti writes that the bipartisan panel producing the report “reserves the bulk of its criticism for how two successive American presidents have conducted a ‘long-term killing program based on secret rationales,’ and on how too little thought has been given to what consequences might be spawned by this new way of waging war.”     For example, the panel asked, suppose that Russia were to unleash armed drones in the Ukraine to kill those they claimed to have identified as “anti-Russian terrorists” on the basis of intelligence they refused to disclose for what they asserted to be issues of national security. “In such circumstances,” the panel asks in the citation with which Mr. Mazzetti ends his piece, “how could the United States credibly condemn Russian targeted killings?”

Neither Mr. Mazzetti nor—by his account at least—the panel responsible for the Stimson Center report bothers to ask why, “in such circumstances,” the United States would want to “condemn” Russia for such “targeted killings” on such “secret rationales.” It is just taken for granted that the United States would indeed want to condemn any such action on the Russians’ part.

That is because, after all, the Russians are among the enemies the United States must defend itself against today to maintain what, under the first President Bush, used to be called “the New World Order”—the order that descended by American grace over the whole globe after the “Cold War,” which itself characterized the post-war period following the end of World War II. Today is still just another day in the current “post post-war” period that set in after the end of the Cold War—as Alain Badiou nicely put it in 2002-2003, during the second year of his three-year monthly seminar on Images of the Present Times, just recently published in France as Le Seminaire: Images du temps present: 2001-2004 (Librarie Arthème Fayard, 2014).

It is really far too late on such a post post-war day as today to begin worrying, as the Stimson panel penning the report at issue appears to have begun worrying, about entering upon the “slippery slope” that panel espies, the one that slides so easily into “perpetual war.” For one thing, what’s called the Cold War was itself, after all, still war, as the name says. It was still war, just “in another form,” to twist a bit a famous line from Clausewitz. Cold as that war may have been, it was still but a slice of the same slope down which the whole world had been sliding in the heat of World War II, which was itself just a continuation of the slide into which the world had first swiftly slipped at the beginning of World War I.

Let us even go so far as to assume that the great, long, European “peace” that ran from the end of the Franco-Prussian War in 1870 all the way down to 1914, one hundred year ago this summer, when it was suddenly interrupted by a shot from a Serbian “terrorist” in Sarajevo, was peace of a genuine sort, and not just the calm of the proverbial gathering storm. Even under that assumption, peace has never really been restored to the world again since the guns began firing in August or that same year, 1914, if the truth is to be told. Instead, the most that has happened is that, since then, from time to time and in one place or another there has occurred a temporary, local absence of “hot” war, in the sense of a clash of armed forces or the like. The guns have just stopped firing for a while sometimes in some places—in some times and places for a longer while than in others.

So, for example, even today, a quarter of a century after the end of the post-war period and the beginning of the post post-war one, the western and west-central European nations have remained places where “peace,” in the minimal, minimizing sense of the mere absence of “active hostilities,” has prevailed. Of course, elsewhere, even elsewhere in Europe—for example, in that part of Europe that during part of the time-span at issue was Yugoslavia—plenty of active hostilities have broken out. In many such cases (including the case of what once had been Yugoslavia) those episodes have often and popularly been called “wars,” of course.

Then, too, there have been, as there still are, such varied, apparently interminable enterprises as what Lyndon Johnson labeled America’s “war on poverty,” or what Richard Nixon labeled the American “war on drugs.” In cases of that sort, it would seem to be clear that we must take talk of “war” to be no more than metaphorical, in contrast to cases such as that of, say, America’s still ongoing “war in Afghanistan,” where the word would still seem to carry its supposedly literal meaning.

Another of the wars of the latter, “literal” sort is the one that began with the American invasion of Iraq on March 20, 2003. As it turned out, that particular war broke out right in the middle of the second year of Badiou’s seminar on “images of the present times.”  In fact, the hostilities in Iraq started right in the middle of some sessions of his seminar in which Badiou happened to be addressing the whole issue of “war” today, during our “post post-war” period—as though tailor-made for his purposes.

In his session of February 26, 2003, less than a month before the start of hostilities in Iraq, Badiou had begun discussing what war has become today, in these present times. He resumed his discussion at the session of March 26—following a special session on March 12, 2003, that consisted of a public conversation between Badiou and the French theatre director, Lacanian psychoanalyst, and philosopher François Regnault. President George W. Bush had meanwhile unleashed the American invasion of Iraq.

In his session of February 26, 2003, Badiou had maintained that in the times before these present times—that is, in the post-war period, the period of the Cold War—the very distinction between war and peace had become completely blurred. Up until the end of World War II, he writes, the term war was used to mark an “exceptional” experience. War was an “exception” in three interconnected dimensions at once: “ a spatial exception, a temporal exception and also a new form of community, a singular sharing, which is the sharing of the present,” that present defined as that of “the war” itself.

We might capture what Badiou is pointing to by saying that, up till the end of World War II and the start of the Cold War, war was truly a punctuating experience. That is, it was indeed an experience in relation to which it did make clear and immediate sense to all those who had in any way shared in that experience to talk of “before” and “after.” It also made sense to distinguish between “the front” and “back home.” Some things happened “at the front,” and some “back home”; some things happened “before the war,” and some only “after the war.” And war itself, whether at the front or back home, and despite the vast difference between the two, was a shared experience that brought those who shared it together in a new way.

During the Cold War, however, all that changed, and the very boundaries of war—where it was, when it was, and who shared in it—became blurred. Badiou himself uses the example of the “war on terror” (as George W. Bush, who declared that war, was wont to call it, soon accustoming us all to doing so) that is still ongoing, with no end in sight. The war on terror is no one, single war at all, Badiou points out. Instead, the term is used as a cover-all for a variety of military “interventions” of one sort or another on the part of America and—when it can muster some support from others—its allies of the occasion. Indeed, the term can be and often is easily stretched to cover not only the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq under the second President Bush but also the Gulf War unleashed against the same Iraq under the first President Bush, even before the war on terror was officially declared—and so on, up to and including the ever-growing use of armed drones to kill America’s enemies wherever they may be lurking (even if they are Americans themselves, though so far—at least so far as we, “the people,” know—only if those targeted Americans could be caught outside the homeland).

So in our post post-war times there is an erasure of the boundary between war and peace, a sort of becoming temporally, spatially, and communally all-encompassing—we might well say a “ going global”—of the general condition of war. Coupled with that globalization of the state of war there also occurs, as it were, the multiplication of wars, in the plural: a sort of dissemination of war into ever new locations involving ever new aspects of communal life. Wars just keep on popping up in more and more places, both geographically and socially: the war in Afghanistan, the war in Iraq (just recently brought back again—assuming it went away for a while—by popular demand, thanks to ISIS), the war in Syria, the wars in Sudan, Nigerian, Myanmar, Kosovo, the Ukraine, or wherever, as well as the wars against poverty, drugs, cancer, “undocumented”/“illegal” immigration, illiteracy, intolerance, or whatever.

At the same time, this globalization of war and proliferation of wars is also inseparable from what we might call war’s confinement, or even its quarantine. By that I mean the drive to insure that wars, wherever and against whatever or whomever they may be waged, not be allowed to disrupt, damage, or affect in any significant negative way, the ongoing pursuit of business as usual among those who do the war-waging. (The most egregious example is probably President George W. Bush in effect declaring it unpatriotic for American consumers not to keep on consuming liberally—including taking their vacations and driving all over lickety-split—in order to keep the American economy humming along properly while American military might was shocking and awing the world in Baghdad and the rest of Iraq.)

Thus—as Badiou puts it in his session of March 26, 2003—in league with the expansion of war into global presence and the random proliferation of wars goes a movement whereby simultaneously, among the wagers of war, “[e]verything is subordinated to a sort of essential introversion.” That is a reference above all, of course, to America, the only superpower that remained once one could no longer go back to the USSR. On the one hand, as both Badiou and the Stimson report with which I began this post indicate, the American government does not hesitate to claim the right to “intervene” anywhere in the world that it perceives its “national interests” to be at stake, no matter where that may be. It claims for itself the right to make such interventions whenever, against whomever, and by whatever means it judges to be best, and irrespective of other nations’ claims to sovereignty—even, if need be, against the wishes of the entire “international community” as a whole (assuming there really is any such thing). Yet at the same time such interventionism is coupled essentially with a growing American tendency toward “isolationism.”

This counter-intuitive but very real American conjunction of interventionism and isolationism is closely connected, as Badiou also points out, to the ongoing American attempt to come as close as possible to the ultimate goal of “zero mortality” on the American side, whenever, wherever, against whomever, and however it does conduct military interventions under the umbrella of the claimed defense of its national interests, as it perceives them, on whatever evidence it judges adequate. That is best represented, no doubt, by the aforementioned increasing American reliance on using unmanned, armed drones to strike at its enemies, a reliance that began under the Bush administration and has grown exponentially under the Obama administration.

Furthermore, the drive toward zero war-wager mortality is coupled, in turn, with another phenomenon Badiou addresses—namely, what we might call the steady escalation of sensitivity to offense. The more American power approaches what Badiou nicely calls “incommensurability,” and the nearer it comes to achieving the zero American mortality that goes with it, the less it is able to tolerate even the slightest slight, as it were. Rather, in such an affair—as he says in the session of March 26, shortly after the American attack on Iraq under the second President Bush—“where what is at stake is the representation of an unlimited power, the slightest obstacle creates a problem.” Any American deaths at all, or any remaining resistance, even “the most feeble, the worst armed, . . . the most disorganized,” is “in position to inflict damage to the imperious power that it faces.” As there is to be zero American mortality, so is there to be zero resistance (or whatever origin, including on the part of Americans themselves).

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All these interlocked features belong to what we have come to call “war” today. Or rather, the situation today is really one in which the very notion of war has come to be entirely flattened out, as I would put it. War itself has ceased to be any distinctive event—anything “momentous,” properly speaking: marking out a clear division between a “before” and an “after,” such that we might even speak of the “pre-war” world and the “post-war” one. That is what Badiou means by saying that we live today in the “post post-war” period. It is a strange “period” indeed, since there is, in truth, no “point” at all to it—either in the sense of any clearly defined limit, or in the sense of any clearly defined goal, I might add—which is what I had in mind in my earlier remark that war today has ceased to be any truly “punctuating” experience.

In one of my posts quite a while ago, I wrote that, in line with contemporary Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben’s thought about sovereignty and subjectivity, an insightful hyperbole might be to say that it had been necessary to defeat the Nazis in World War II in order that the camp-system the Nazis perfected not be confined to Nazi-occupied territory, but could go global—so the whole world could become a camp, in effect, and everyone everywhere made a camp inmate subject to being blown away by the winds of sovereignty gusting wherever they list.

Well, in the same way it might be suggested that the whole of the long period of preparation for, and then eventual outbreak and fighting of, the (“two”) World War(s), as well as the whole post-war period of Cold War that followed, was just the long ramp-up necessary for the true going global of war in our post post-war period.  That is, the whole of the unbelievably bloody 20^th century, ushered in by the whole of the 19^th, back at least to the French Revolution of the end of the 18^th, can be seen as nothing but the dawning of the new, ever-recurring day of our present post post-war, unpunctuated period.

Indeed, war today has become so enveloping spatially, temporally, and communally, all three, that it is no longer even perceivable as such, except and unless it breaks out in some ripple of resistance somewhere, by some inexplicable means. Whenever and wherever and from whomever, if anywhere any-when by anyone, the power into whose hands the waging of war has been delivered suffers such an offense against it, no matter how slight the slight, then the only conceivably appropriate response is, as the old, post-war saying had it, to “nuke ‘em.”

Furthermore, since offenses are in the feelings of the offended, none of us, “the people,” has any assurance at any time that we will not, even altogether without our knowingly having had any such intent, be found to have done something, God knows what, to offend. If we do, then we may also come to be among those getting nuked (or at least deserving to be)—probably by an armed drone (maybe one pretending to be delivering us our latest Amazon.com order).

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By now, even the most patient among my readers may be wondering what this whole post, devoted as it is to discussion of the meaning of “war” today, has to do with “the future of culture,” which is supposed to be the unifying topic in the entire current series of posts of which this one is supposed to be the second. That will only become evident as I proceed with the series—though perhaps it will not become fully evident until the whole series draws together at its close. At any rate, I will be continuing the series in my next post.

The Traffic in Trauma: Commodifying Cultural Products (1)

(This is the first of what will be a series of posts under the same title.)

Culture is traumatic.  It is not that some cultures are traumatic, and others not.  Culture as such is traumatic.  Thus, in the way I want to use it here, the phrase ‘culture of trauma’ is redundant, like ‘caninity of dogs.’  There are not some cultures that are cultures of trauma, and other cultures that are not—even “ideally.”  Rather, there is either culture, which is always as such traumatic, or else there is no culture at all, but rather at most the cultivation of trauma for the sake of someone’s profit, what I call the traffic in trauma.

Twentieth century French psychoanalyst Jean Laplanche, whom I also cited in my recent series of three posts, “Traumatic Selfhood:  Becoming Who We Are,” gives us insight into the traumatic nature of culture itself.  According to Laplanche, not just some but every cultural product gives itself to its recipients as “intrusive, stimulating, and sexual”—which is to say traumatic.

That remark comes at the very end of a passage I already quoted in the same earlier series of posts on selfhood,* a passage Laplanche begins by saying that “in the cultural domain” it is “a constant” that “[i]t is the offer which creates the demand.”  Before continuing to cite the rest of the passage, it is worthwhile for my purposes in this post to call attention to something in Laplanche’s statement of that “cultural constant.”  Notice that he does not say that it is the supply of what he calls “cultural products” that creates the demand for them.  Rather, he says that it is the offer.

Nor does he say, in this particular passage or anywhere else that I am aware of, that to create demand the offer that is the cultural product needs to be advertised.

It is a jaded cliché of our economic system and the global market in which we all live today to talk about “supply” and “demand,” as well as about how important it is for a sound economy to maintain a proper balance between the two, and how advertising can—and, effectively used, does—generate new demands that can then be met with proper supplies, either already extant (such as unsold overstock) or yet to be produced (like the yet to be generated next generation of I-phones).   Even the most cliché-ridden among us knows that supply alone does not create demand.  It may still be that the world will beat a path to my door if I build a better mousetrap (I confess that I have not really kept up on such matters), but even it that is still so, I first have to let the world know that I have built such a mousetrap before the path to my door will get any new traffic.  Merely building the mousetrap does not trap the particular sort of “mice” that I, the builder, am really most interested in trapping—namely, customers to buy my new invention.  I need different sorts of traps for that.

Not so with “cultural products,” says Laplanche.  Here, it is indeed the offer itself, we have already heard him say, that creates the demand in the first place.  The cultural product is not offered to fill an already pre-existing demand, as mousetraps are manufactured to fill the already well-established demand for ways to get rid of mice (or, perhaps, for the sheer sport of it, if “catch-and-release” has by now become de rigueur among mouse-trappers—as I said, I haven’t really kept up on such matters).  Nor does the cultural product need to do any advertising to call attention to itself, in order to attract or manufacture demand for it.  The offering itself, which is to say the cultural production as such, creates the very demand for what is offered.

That is clear enough from the rest of the passage from Laplanche, most of which I already cited in the earlier posts I’ve mentioned.  Having called attention to the just-discussed “constant” of “cultural production,” Laplanche continues:  “The dominance of human needs, undeniable but truly minimal in the domain of biological life, is completely covered over by culture.  The biological individual, the living human, is saturated from head to foot by the invasion of the cultural, which is by definition intrusive, stimulating, and sexual.”**

That applies, for one, to the addressee of the cultural offer, the one to whom the offer is made, eliciting—by the “cultural constant” mentioned above—its own demand.  Laplanche calls that addressee the “recipient” of the cultural product, in pointed opposition to calling that addressee the “consumer” of that product, I will add, and to which I will shortly return.  “It is of the essence of the cultural product,” Laplanche writes, “that it reaches [the recipient] with no pedigree, and that it is received by him without having been addressed to him” (the exclusive language is in the original).  It reaches its recipient as sent by an unknown other.  Even if the creator of the cultural offer is known by name and personally to a given recipient, then the latter still receives it as though it were written by someone unknown, since it arrives as something that speaks or itself, and not in the context of any personal connections.

The cultural offer thus comes to the recipient as an “enigma.”  By its nature, that enigma is also there for the one who makes the offer, the creator of the cultural product, though it is there in a different way, reflecting the different positions of the sender and receiver of the offer.  Cultural products—such as Goethe’s Faust, to use an example pertinent to Laplanche’s own essay, itself a discussion of Freud’s “Der Dichter und das Phantasieren” (“The Poet and Fantasying”), which focuses on Goethe—are addressed to recipients who remain “essentially enigmatic” for those who create cultural offerings in the first place.  They are addressed, to borrow Nietzsche’s subtitle to Thus Spoke Zarathustra, to “everyone and no-one.”  Laplanche compares the cultural product to the proverbial “message in a bottle,” a message sent to no one in particular, but to whomever it happens to reach (if anyone), whenever it may arrive (if ever), and even if it doesn’t arrive till well after the sender of the message has died.

Just as the cultural message comes to the recipient as from an unknown sender, even if that sender happens to be known personally and by name to a given recipient, so (as already discussed a bit more fully in my earlier posts referring to Laplanche’s essay on “transference”) the essential anonymity of the recipient of the cultural message is preserved even if the recipient “sometimes takes on individual traits,” and is known by name to the sender, as Vincent Van Gogh famously sent letters to his brother Theo.

As befits the anonymity of the recipient, the cultural message in the bottle is also sent without any particular motive, any expectations of doing anything special to the recipient, once received.  As discussed in my earlier series of posts on becoming ourselves, Laplanche points out that the cultural product is “beyond all pragmatics, beyond any adequation of means to a determinate effect.”    As it is only incidental if the intended recipient of the cultural message has a face and name known to the sender, as Theo was known to Vincent, so is it only incidental if the sender of the message has ulterior intentions toward the recipient, such as impressing, seducing, or enslaving*** that recipient.

Thus, as Laplanche explicitly observes himself, although “[t]he recipient’s relation to the enigma is . . . different from the author’s, [constituting] a partial inversion of it,” nevertheless “the relation is essential”—the relation, namely, to “the enigma” that the cultural product as such is.

As I read it, Laplanche’s notion of the “cultural” is defined by being any sort of “communication” insofar as that communication is not subject to any “pragmatics,” but is instead—to use a way of speaking I already began to use in my preceding series of posts on “Traumatic Selfhood”—a sharing that builds, and a building that shares, world.  By ‘world,’ in turn, I mean, following Heidegger’s usage, the “wherein” of our being ourselves with one another.  We might say that cultural communication communicates, first, last, and above and beyond whatever else it may incidentally “do” of any “pragmatic” sort, such as seduce, reduce, induce, or exploit:  It actively brings together into and as community, in the same way that in Christian liturgy the sharing of the Eucharistic meal makes all those who so share be of one body and blood.

The cultural profits no one.  That’s what makes it culture.

When cultural products are turned to making some profit for someone, they are turned against themselves.  They are perverted, in the strictest sense of that word, whereby what is perverted is turned inside out, made to be its own very opposite.  The commodification of culture, which is to say the turning of cultural production into a means for the production of profit, rather than for the production of our common world, is perverse—and perverts in turn whatever touches it, as in ancient Judaism touching the unclean made unclean themselves whoever touched it.

Today, people everywhere live no longer in any true “world” at all, insofar as the human being today has become homo economicus, “economic man,” denizen of the vast “global market.”  Indeed, for economic man,**** the world itself has been perverted into no more than the “globe,” over all of which the vast and still growing wasteland of “the market” continues to grow.

What in the bygone days of the 1960s Marshall McLuhan touted as the “global village” long ago morphed into what French philosopher Dany-Robert Dufour aptly dubbed “the perverse city” in a book of that name (La Cité perverse) published in French a few years ago (Éditions Danoël, 2009).  That city is everywhere today, even when its citizens are allowed to stay in their country homes rather than being bodily removed from them and moved into sprawling urban blights of high-rises, as is currently happening in China.  It doesn’t matter in the slightest whether the force is exerted by a state that joking continues to call itself “communist” (or to use the now not often heard phrase ‘communism with market elements’ to describe the thing they have been forcing into being since getting rid of Mao), or solely by “market factors” themselves (that is, going where the “jobs” are being “created” by the rich, to their further enrichment in their own wildly successful but never-to-be-spoken-of program of “income redistribution”), regulated or not.  The result is the same:  the demolition of the world in the erecting of the global city of perversity.

Whenever what should only be done for love must be done instead for money, there is perversion.  Whoever is forced to make a living by doing for money what should only be done for love is made to be a whore.  In what globally passes for the “world” today, we are all being pimped by “the market.”

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Just last weekend I came across a wonderfully amusing/disgusting (tastes differ, I suppose) instance of just the perversion I’m trying to point to in this post.  I came across it last Sunday in the paper, which is regularly a good source for finding amusing/disgusting things with which to while away one’s time between johns.  It was an op-ed piece by the conservative hack George F. Will for The Washington Post, with the cutesy headline, “Lessons from the Abbey.”  The Abbey at issue was the fictional “Downton Abbey” of the popular BBC-TV series of that name, and Mr. Will was parading his credentials as a good, egalitarian, freely enterprising American, as opposed to the class-dominated, tradition-bound British folks depicted in the TV series.  The lesson that Mr. Will would have us take from “Downton Abbey” is one that he formulates so seductively himself that I would not dream of trying to improve upon his own words, which themselves also include others’ words, as will be seen.

Mr. Will begins the end of his piece by remarking how strange he thinks it is that “a normally wise and lucid conservative such as Peter Augustine Lawler, professor of government at Berry College,” would “celebrate the ‘astute nostalgia’ of ‘Downton Abbey’” and hold it up as “a welfare state conservatives can revere,” namely, one in which, as Mr. Will quotes Professor Lawyer writing, we are shown “[w]hat aristocracy offers at its best.”  That, in turn, is “a proud but measured acceptance of the unchangeable relationship between privileges and responsibilities in the service of those whom we know and love.”

To that Mr. Will—who is surely no less “a normally wise and lucid conservative” than Professor Lawler—replies as follows:

Good grief.  Americans do not call the freedom to figure out one’s place in the world a burden; they call it the pursuit of happiness.  And to be “given” a “secure” place amid “unchangeable” relationships is not dignified, it is servitude.

“Downton Abbey” viewers should remember the following rhapsodic hymn to capitalism’s unceasing social churning:  “Constant revolutionizing of production, uninterrupted disturbance of all social conditions.  …All fixed, fast-frozen relations, with their train of ancient and venerable prejudices and opinions, are swept away, all new-formed ones becoming antiquated before they can ossify.  All that is solid melts into air.”

This (from “The Communist Manifesto”) explains why capitalism liberates.  And why American conservatives should understand that some people smitten by “Downton Abbey” hope to live upstairs during a future reign of gentry progressivism.*****

One thing that amused me in reading that last Sunday was recalling that Dufour cites the very same text, as part of a larger citation, from the very same source.  Dufour, however, does not take the passage out of context, the context in which the authors of “The Communist Manifesto” use the very remarks Mr. Will cites as part of a broad call to the “workers of the world” to “unite,” since by so uniting, according to those authors, those workers “have nothing to lose but their chains”—and in the process of losing which those same workers can and will liberate not just themselves but everyone, rich and poor, male and female, Jew and Greek, whatever and whatever else, all alike, without exception.

Whoever reads “The Communist Manifesto” as the cultural product it is, can only marvel at how deftly Mr. Will can take even that ringing call to arms to construct a true world for human beings to call home, and turn it into no more than another cheap commodity, available to all alike at no more cost than their souls, to be put to whatever perverse use each pleases.

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* The passage at issue is from Jean Laplanche, “Transference:  Its Provocation by the Analyst,” in Essays in Otherness (London:  Routledge, 1999).

** In a way, that last remark is redundant, since the intrusive, the stimulating, and the sexual, though distinct in concept, are identical in the occurrence, just as according to Aristotle form and matter are distinct in the mind but not in the thing itself.  One can’t have one without the other/s.  What intrudes stimulates those upon whom it intrudes, whatever stimulates intrudes upon whomever it stimulates, and that interplay of intrusion and stimulation defines the sexual as Laplanche articulates it.

*** As in pre-Civil War America free African-American citizens such as Sam Northup, author of 12 Years a Slave, were forced into slavery after responding to cultural messages that of themselves had nothing to do with such self-serving, immoral, economic purposes (please excuse my own redundancy, insofar as ‘self-serving,’ ‘immoral,’ and ‘economic’ say pretty much the same thing).

**** Here, the exclusionary usage of the masculine term ‘man’ as what Mary Daly labeled a “pseudo-universal,” supposedly being as “gender-free” as dominant segments of American society today would like to have Americans believe America is “color-blind,” is wholly appropriate.

***** By which, of course, Mr. Will would have all his “wise and lucid” readers understand him to mean the sort of thing that will come about if we follow the siren song of such as President Obama, who call for such aristocratic things as increasing the minimum wage or regulating big banks and other “job creators.”

 

The Traffic in Trauma: Learning Whom to Hate

Jean-Paul Sartre once wrote in recommendation of a book* that it had the great merit of teaching the young whom to  hate.  That is a lesson still well worth learning, not only for the young but for all ages.

Just the other day I read a passage in newly published book by a well-known author that, under the guise of teaching that same lesson, actually teaches anything but.

Out in Colorado where I live, we were just recently treated to the news of the retirement of Grayson Robinson, the Sheriff of Arapahoe County, who not long before retiring presided over the various press hearings concerning the shootings just this last December at Arapahoe High School.  Sheriff Robinson refused throughout all such proceedings to use the name of the shooter, whose final shot took his own life, lest by using his name he be granted a celebrity that, even posthumously, Sheriff Robinson wanted no part in granting.  (Although he restrained himself from using the young man’s name, the Sheriff did not refrain from labeling the shooter “evil”—a point I will not pursue further, though it certainly deserves careful reflection, above all about who is served by such talk, and who is not.)  I will take at least one page from Sheriff Robinson’s own book.  I will not name the work in which I read the passage I want to discuss, the one I just read recently, the one that fails to teach the lesson that Sartre praised Nissan’s novel for teaching.  Nor will I name the author.  I see no good reason, either humanitarian or selfish, for doing so.

At any rate, the passage at issue comes at the end of a discussion—itself to the point and worthwhile, in my judgment—of how offensive, indeed how truly obscene, the normalization of torture in the relatively recent, for the dominant part positively received film, Zero Dark Thirty, which tells the back-story to the long trail of sleuthing that eventually culminated in the American killing of Osama bin Laden, really is.  The author then goes on to mention the linguistic sleight-of-hand wherein the Bush administration, long before that actual killing, replaced the term ‘torture’ with the expression ‘enhanced interrogation techniques,’ to classify and talk about such then (at least) standard American practices as water-boarding those from whom the American government hoped to extract information thought to be of possible use in pursuit of what that government defined to be America’s own self-interest.

So far, so good:  To that point I have no objections.  However, I do object to what the author at issue goes on to do, which is to posit an analogy—in fact, not just an analogy, but also an identity.  He compares the verbal substitution of ‘enhanced interrogation techniques’ for ‘torture,’ on the one had, with the substitution of ‘physically challenged’ for ‘disabled,’ on the other.  Then he asserts that both substitutions are, in fact, just two different instances of one and the same underlying malady, which he characterizes, following what has become an almost universally dominant current linguistic fashion, as being the malady of “Political Correctness,” to adopt the author’s own device of capitalizing the two words of that expression in his usage of it.

Nothing could be more politically correct today than such usage of the buzz-word “Political Correctness.”

Communication is not coercion.  Communication is co-mund-ication, as I wrote in my preceding post—from the Latin mundus, “world.”  That is, it builds, in sharing, a shared world.  In contrast, coercion calls a halt to sharing.  It imposes limits, barriers, and blockages to communication, stopping it, or at least trying to.  It breaks apart the world.  Words, phrases, or in general expressions have what is deserving of being called “meaning” or “sense” only in the stream of communication, to paraphrase a line from Wittgenstein.  Taken out of that stream and pressed into forced service as implements of coercion, they lose all meaning and cease to make any sense, properly speaking (and by “proper” here, I mean “appropriate to ongoing communication,” since what expressions as such are for is just that).

Long ago now, the term ‘politically correct’ was simply gutted of all meaning.  It was hollowed out completely.  All that was left was the mere verbal shell, which could then be filled with something other than sense or meaning—filled, namely, with coercive force, used to accomplish a no longer communicative but now anti-communicative, purely coercive purpose.  In short, ‘political correctness’ was replaced by  ‘Political Correctness,’ to adopt my passage’s author’s convention.

Before it underwent evisceration of sense, of saying power, and was stamped into ‘Political Correctness,’ a mere tool of coercive power, the term ‘politically correct’ would have meant that which was required to maintain political viability in the concrete circumstances under discussion. Accordingly, just what sort of talk or action might have been politically correct at any given time and setting would have been a function of the political conditions and circumstances of that time and setting.  The term would not have named any one, single style of speech and action, whether of the left, of the right, or of the middle.  In one case—for example, America during the McCarthy era—espousing left-wing political causes might be tantamount to committing political suicide, whereas the same speech and action in another case—perhaps in the Soviet Union during the same era—would have been required to exert any political effectiveness.  What would have been “politically correct” would have varied according to the specifics of the given situations to which the term was applied.

The moment came, however, when the term ‘politically correct’ ceased to have any meaning within the stream of conversation, and instead was shanghaied by the American right-wing for use as a quick and handy label by which to dismiss and ridicule one specific sort of communication.  The sort of communication at issue is any that tries to address instances in which our everyday ways of talking themselves embody extra-communicative—indeed, anti-communicative, which is to say world-destroying, rather than world-building through world-sharing—elements that function coercively, and do so at the greatest price to those who can least afford to pay for it.  That is, the term was co-opted by the American right wing and made to apply exclusively to what my dictionary, as its sole entry for the expression ‘political correctness,’ characterizes this way:  “the avoidance, often considered as taken to extremes, of forms of expression or action that are perceived to exclude, marginalize, or insult groups of people who are socially disadvantaged or discriminated against.”

Thus does even The New Oxford American Dictionary itself succumb to the reigning linguistic coercion, not even bothering to mention the meaning that the same expression would once have had, prior to its capture and torture precisely by those who “consider” the “avoidance” at issue “often” to be “taken to extremes”!  Just how “often,” a thoughtful reader might ask?  Well, for those who abducted the expression and pressed it into slavery to serve their own interests in the first place the answer is:  Always!  Whenever such avoidance—any such avoidance—manifests itself at all!

As for me, I must admit that in my own judgment it is “often” (please read:  “always and in every instance”) the case that those who use the terms ‘political correctness’ or ‘politically correct’ in the way my dictionary defines them are abusing those terms.  They are, as some readers may already have caught me remarking, torturing those terms.

Of course, as “often” fits the interests of torturers, they would prefer not to call it that.  They would prefer to call it, perhaps, the employment of “enhanced meaning-clarification techniques.”  So it goes.

Such torture of language would perhaps not matter much—unless, perhaps, to someone who is “going to extremes” in order to be Politically Correct—if all it concerned was language itself (pace language lovers, wimps that they may be).  But such language abuse abuses more than language, unfortunately.  It abuses those who, through such linguistic sleights-of-hand, are effectively robbed of the very possibility of voicing objection to being abused, or finding such voice through those who speak on their behalf.  The abuse against them is thereby, as others have often pointed out before me, compounded—indeed, exponentially so, especially when coupled with the further abuse, as it often is, of being blamed for their own being abused.

As is common to abusers, those who abuse language like to blame their abuse on those they abuse and whom they are using their language-abuse to abuse even further.   The substitution of ‘enhanced interrogation techniques’ for ‘torture’ is anything but “exactly the same” as the substitution of ‘physically challenged’ for ‘disabled,’ despite the author of the passage with which I began this post saying so.  In truth, the two operations operate in exactly opposite ways.  The first substitution is one in the service of the torturers, whereas the second is—or is at least intends to be—in the service of the tortured.  The conflation of those two opposed operations of verbal substitution, the washing out of the crucial, defining difference between them, can itself only serve the interests of the torturers, and not of the tortured.

What the author of the passage at issue goes on to say right after first equating those two utterly divergent operations of verbal substitution is that they both also operate the same way yet another imagined substitution would operate.  The two substitutions already considered, according to that author, both operate as would the substitution—patently absurd and offensive, as the author intends readers to hear—of ‘enhanced seduction technique’ for ‘rape.’

But if one asks oneself just who would ever suggest such a substitution as that third one, of ‘enhanced seduction technique’ for ‘rape’—that is, if one asks just whose interests would possibly be served by it—the answer would, I think, be obvious:  Only rapists themselves and their accomplices would be served by such a substitution, hardly the raped.

There are three sets of terms involved in the passage at issue.  The first set is ‘enhanced interrogation technique’ and ‘torture.’  The second is ‘physically challenged’ and ‘disabled.’  The third is ‘enhanced seduction technique’ and ‘rape.’  The author of the passage at issue is apparently so intent on verbally abusing those who would seek to avoid “forms of expression or action that are perceived to exclude, marginalize, or insult groups of people who are socially disadvantaged or discriminated against,” as my dictionary puts it, that he ends up (whether deliberately or not I will leave up to readers to decide) using the obvious analogy between substituting ‘enhanced interrogation technique’ for ‘torture,’ on the one hand, and substituting ‘enhanced seduction technique’ for ‘rape,’ on the other—to hide the dis-analogy between either of those two, on the one hand, and substituting ‘physically challenged’ for ‘disabled,’ on the other.  As I have already argued, that substitution is in not at all analogous to the other two.  The attempt to equate all three simply does not at all hold, since the substitution of ‘physically challenged’ for ‘disabled’ is, at least in its intention, done in the service of the abused, whereas the substitution of ‘enhanced interrogation technique’ for ‘torture,’ like that of ‘enhanced seduction technique’ for ‘rape,’ cannot, regardless of anyone’s intention, serve anyone but the abusers.

In fact, if one is looking for a genuine analogy to the substitution of ‘enhanced interrogation technique’ for ‘torture’ (or of ‘enhanced seduction technique’ for ‘rape’) then here is one:  As the substitution of ‘enhanced interrogation technique’ for ‘torture’ (or ‘enhanced seduction technique’ for ‘rape’) is in the service of the torturers (or the rapists), so is the use of the term ‘political correctness’ to stigmatize, ridicule, and silence anyone who dares to advocate avoidance of “forms of expression or action that are perceived to exclude, marginalize, or insult groups of people who are socially disadvantaged or discriminated against,” as my dictionary puts it, in the service of those who practice exclusion, marginalization, and insulting of the socially disadvantaged or discriminated against.   Both the substitution of ‘enhanced interrogation techniques’ for ‘torture,’ and the dominant contemporary usage of the term ‘political correctness,’ are designed to obfuscate, confuse, and hinder, if not altogether halt, serious, ethically and morally informed, genuine discussion.  They are designed to do the opposite of keeping the conversation going, to borrow a favorite phrase from Richard Rorty.

The replacement of the expression ‘torture’ by the expression ‘enhanced interrogation’ operates in exactly the same way as would the replacement of the expression ‘rape’ by the expression ‘enhanced seduction technique.’  Both in turn operate in exactly the same way as does the regnant usage of the expression ‘political correctness.’  All three cut off communication rather than fostering it.  They block off the stream of life in which alone expressions have meaning, as Wittgenstein said, and deal death instead.

All three are in the service of the traffic in trauma.

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*His friend Paul Nissan’s novel Aden Araby, if I remember correctly.

Traumatic Selfhood: Becoming Who We Are (1)

This is the first of what I plan to be two consecutive posts under the same title.

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Become who you are!                                                                                                                                     — Nietzsche

Jean-Paul Sartre, that great champion of the idea of freedom, always insisted that, free as we are, we do not have the freedom to choose the communities into which we are born.  Nowhere does he tell any tale of a reincarnation in which souls between embodiments get to choose where and in what form they’ll next come back.  Our freedom, Sartre says, is a matter of our always having to choose just how we are going to take up the facts of our birth, what we are going to make of those facts.  Those facts themselves, however, are given to us at birth, by birth, whether we like them or not.  Thus, for example, one person will take up the fact of having been born an American by becoming a flag-waiving, government-devouring member of the Tea Party, whereas another will take up the same fact by flying away to join Al-Qaeda and become a suicide-bomber.  We are free to make of the facts of our birth what we will, says Sartre.  Indeed, he says in a famous line that we are “condemned” to such freedom.  In the choices we do make, we have no choice but to make of the facts of our birth one thing or another.  We are never free of having to make such choices—and we are never free of those facts themselves.  We are no less condemned to them than to our freedom itself.

Such freedom, my own freedom, never free of itself or of the conditions of its birth, is traumatic.  I can never catch up to it.  It always comes “belatedly” (nachträglich), as Freud says of the coming of trauma.  In that regard, my freedom is like PTSD, Post-Traumatic Shock Disorder—indeed, more than just “like” it.

The un-chosen, un-choose-able conditions of my birth make demands and place expectations on me.  But just what it is that they demand and expect of me is, as Locke says of the idea of substance, “something, I know not what.”    The facts of my birth, delivered to me by others as part and parcel of my own delivery—delivered over to me and with me by others, well before I even come to know that there are such things as “others,” or that there is some “I” who is other than those others—always come to me as preceding me, and defining just who I am before and beyond myself, in such a way that I can never overtake them.

As so delivered to me as me at my own delivery, the conditions of my own birth actually come to me as what, using the terminology of Jean Laplanche, an important 20^th century French psychoanalyst, we could call “enigmatic signifiers.”  In introducing the idea of such “enigmatic signifiers,” Laplanche makes the crucially important point that what is so very “enigmatic” about such signifiers is that they are enigmatic not only to those of us who receive them, experiencing them as somehow addressed to us, and asking something, we know not what, from us.  “Enigmatic signifiers,” teaches Laplanche, are enigmatic not just to those who receive them, but also and above all to those who send them in the first place.  Hegel remarks that the Egyptians were not just an enigma to those who came after them in history, but that the Egyptians were already an enigma to themselves.    In the same way, what is so enigmatic about Laplanche’s “enigmatic signifiers” is that they are enigmatic even to those who send them, not just to those who receive them.  Enigmatic signifiers are so enigmatic to their very senders that those senders themselves are utterly clueless about what they “mean.”

In fact, enigmatic signifiers are so enigmatic that their senders themselves don’t really even know they are sending any signifiers in the first place, let alone what they may signify, once sent.  The senders of such enigmatic signs don’t even know they’re making signs, no matter that those signs’ receivers are so utterly convinced they are as to be beyond all convincing.

Like it or lump it, for example, I was myself born American—of Americans, in America.  As an American, furthermore, one thing I know—I literally cannot ever remember not having known it—is that Uncle Sam “wants” me, as the famous and ubiquitously reproduced old World War I poster graphically depicted.  However, the question that has always remained for me—one that remains to this day and will continue to remain for however many days I have left—is just what Uncle Sam wants me for.  What does he want to do with and to me?  How?  To what end?  And what response does he expect from me in turn, in answer to his so forcefully expressed wanting of me?

What Laplanche teaches me is that Uncle Sam himself has never really known.  Uncle Sam has always been thoroughly befuddled about the matter himself, even to the point of never even realizing he’d ever let his wanting me to be known—or even that he ever had such a want.

To that lesson from Laplanche, however, I cannot resist adding in my own voice that Uncle Sam all too often and all too arrogantly presumes he does know all that.  All too often he presumes to know it “to a ‘t,’ ” as the saying goes.

Saying that is not quite fair though, really.  It is not good old Uncle Sam himself, as it were, who has so often been so arrogantly presumptuous.  It has been those arrogant enough to arrogate to themselves the claim to be able to speak for Uncle Sam, and to tell me in detail just what is expected of me as an American, whether that be to go kill and/or be killed in Europe, the Pacific, Korea, Vietnam, Grenada, Iraq, or Afghanistan, or to stay at home and consume consumptively in support of other, younger and abler folk going off to do the killing and/or the dying.

And so it goes, as Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.,  used to like to say.

But it should not go so, as Vonnegut, for one, also knew very well—and said repeatedly in every way he could think of, in fact.

Actually, by saying that so often in so many ways Vonnegut, I would myself say, was doing his own best to answer the very call “Uncle Sam” made upon him—and always makes upon anyone like him, anyone that old, goateed gentleman has a call upon.  That is, I would myself say that Vonnegut, by writing what he wrote to say what he said, answered in his own way, which is how it always has to be answered, the call that being born American makes upon anyone so born.  Uncle Sam wanted Kurt Vonnegut, Jr., no less than he wants any other such “you,” which means any other American.   And if asked for what Uncle Sam wanted Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.,  for, even if Uncle Sam himself never really knew it, I’d answer that it was to be just the Kurt Vonnegut, Jr., he became.

Now, Uncle Sam also no more knew just who that, Kurt Vonnegut, Jr., might turn out, all said and done, to be, than Kurt Vonnegut, Jr., himself ever knew. Nor do we, who have survived him.

What made Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.,  such a good Kurt Vonnegut, Jr., was precisely that he himself always left open the question of just who Kurt Vonnegut, Jr., was.  Even for himself, he remained an open question.

So are we all—though for the most part we’d rather not know it.  For the most part, in fact, we make great efforts to convince ourselves that the question we all always remain to ourselves is somehow already closed.  We try to convince everyone, most especially ourselves, that the question of who we are is already closed, if not for us ourselves, then at least for someone or something we presume to know the answer to that question—to borrow an idea from Jacques Lacan, Laplanche’s teacher in psychoanalysis.  We presume that somehow, somewhere there is some such “master,” as Lacan puts it, that is, someone “presumed to know.”  However, that presumption—the presumption that there is somehow, somewhere someone who can be presumed to know who we are, even if we don’t know that ourselves—is presumptuous of us.

There is, in truth, no one at all who can make good on the claim to know who we are.  Whomever we may presume to know, does not.  There is no master who has mastered who we are.  Nor will there ever be.

That includes us:  We will never be such masters of ourselves, either.  And another important lesson Laplanche, for one, can teach us is that the goal—specifically, for him, the goal of therapeutic practice, for psychoanalysts such as himself, but also, underlying that, the goal of being human, for human beings—is not to close the circle of our self-knowledge, somehow allowing us to come to a complete coincidence with ourselves at last.  Rather, to use a favored metaphor of my own, it is to help us learn how to keep limping on in our broken gaits with ourselves once, like Jacob in the Book of Genesis, we have been lamed by the touch of the angel.  That is, the purpose of therapy, or of being human, is not (to use yet another, even more favored metaphor of my own), to close the wounds that have come to define us, but to teach us how to leave them open—and share them with one another, like Christ inviting the disciple Thomas to resolve his doubt by putting his hand in the still open gash in the side of Christ’s now resurrected body.

My favorite, most favored definition of walking is that it is “continuous, controlled, forward stumbling.”  Well, being ourselves is like walking:  It’s not a matter of first attaining and then maintaining some final state of balance, but a matter of constantly coming back upright from losing one’s balance.  I am never in step with myself completely, but am always a stutter-step off.  In that sense, we might say that we never simply are who we, but are always instead becoming it—always becoming what we will never be.

That is so both for us each individually, and for us all together:  Who “we” are is no less problematic for all of “us,” than who “I” am is for every “me.”  Selfhood itself is traumatic, whether the self be taken all alone to itself (in Latin: solus ipse, from which comes our word solipsism) or taken as one of a bunch all alone together.

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I will return to this line of though in my next post.  Meanwhile, happy holidays to us all—whoever we are (if anyone) and whatever special days (including none especially) we may hold holy!