The Use and Abuse of Blindness (6)

This is the sixth in a series of posts.

*    *     *

Enforced Blindness

The answers will not come from the top, people who make millions have little interest in changing a system that is enriching them. They manufacture dissension to keep us perpetually divided, as long as we are focused on the symptoms and don’t understand our fates are intertwined, we will continue to shrivel apart.

—Theodrose Fikre, “Nosotrous Tambíen: Seek Justice and Disavow ‘Just Us’ ” (The Ghion Journal6/24/18)

“How You Gonna Keep ‘em Down on the Farm (After They’ve Seen Paree)?" The song of that title was first released in 1919. It came out just after the First World War had ended.

That particular war was fought back when the United States was still a predominantly rural country. 

President Woodrow Wilson did not convince the Congress of the United States to declare formal entry into the war until April 1917,  the final year of the four-year European conflagration. The truce that ended the slaughter on the battlefields of Western Europe was finally declared a year and one-half later, in November 1918.

After the United States did declare war, many young men—including some who would go on to perform deeds of great valor, as did the young Tennessee farmboy Alvin York, who won the Congressional Medal of Honor and became the most famous American hero of that war—were torn from their rural communities and involuntarily inducted into the United States’ military forces. The inductees were quickly subjected to basic military training, then sent away to fight on the battlefields “Over There,” to use the catch-phrase from George M. Cohan’s so-entitled song.

Cohan’s “Over There” was itself first released in June of 1917, just two months after Wilson led the nation into the war. The song was good for whipping up enthusiasm for “Johnny” to “get your gun” (the first line of the lyrics of Cohan’s song), and go off to wage what Wilson promoted as a holy crusade, “the war to end all wars” and “to make the world safe for democracy.” That promised end of all wars and assuring of democracy was to be purchased at the cost of killing off as many as possible of “the Hun,” to use the then-common derogatory term for Germans, a term Cohan helped populatize in his jingoist song. 

 The “Huns” of that First World War were assigned the same role that would fall to the “Japs” of the next one. When war’s the end that justifies all means, any old dehumanized, animalized enemy will do: “Huns” in one war, “Japs” in another, “Gooks” and “Slopes” or “Slope-heads” a couple of wars later, “Ragheads” yet a few wars further on, maybe “Chinks” in the next one up. The point is to whip up hatred and nationalistic fervor to the point that those sent off to kill “the enemy” will not hesitate to commit homicide against that enemy, any more than they would hesitate to kill off noxious vermin such as rats, or the lice and fleas rats so often carry. 

Blinding troops to the humanity of those against whom they are being sent to kill serves well the purposes of those so sending them. It is accordingly encouraged and facilitated through the promulgation of such demeaning epithets as "Huns" and such rah-rah nationalist songs as “Over There,” or catoon-posters such as the one  from WW I that depicted Germans as King-Kong-sized gorillas, or jingoist slogans and any other other available means for stirring up vengeful and resentment-ladened hatred against the appointed "enemy."

When World War I ended and United States troops were done doing their duty by butchering Huns, those troops were brought back  home. Once they were home again, propagandizing them to go “over there” to kill for the powers in power in their country was no longer necessary. 

What above all motivated the returning troops in their post-war status was, in fact, the desire to find a job. Now, after their use as slayers of the vile Hun had ended, the returning troops found themselves uprooted by their wartime experience from all the old familiar ways of their previous lives, predominantly in small rural communities. Hence, the jobs they needed had to be provided elsewhere, by some other means. The Wilson administration encouraged employers to create such jobs for the returning veterans, in a process that fed the industrial and financial boom of the 1920s—which in turn set up the bust of the Great Depression beginning in 1929.

In accordance with the new, urban need for jobs and the workers to fill them, popular propaganda shifted accordingly. That shift found it first iconic expression precisely in the popular song, “How You Gonna Keep ‘em Down on the Farm (After They’ve Seen Paree)?” 

The question asked in that 1919 song’s title is, of course, a purely rhetorical question: The song-title doesn’t really ask any question at all; it just uses a sentence worded as a question to do something else. In this case, the question form is being used to assert emphatically that, once you have “let ‘em see Paree,” you are not going to “keep them down on the farm” any longer. 

At the same time, that same rhetorical question also functions to implant, or reinforce an already implanted, desire to avoid returning to how things used to be “back home,” "on the farm," and instead to go somewhere else and do something different. The song’s rhetorical question thus helps imbed the suggestion that, if you are one of those who has now in fact “seen Paree,” then surely you don’t want to go back to old Hicksville and its old hick ways!  Rather, you surely want to go to such a busy, bustling, live, and lively place as New York City, or Chicago, or Detroit, or some other ever-active thrilling and thriving modern metropolis that, as another, slightly later song puts it about Chicago, “never shuts down"—places where, as they self-advertise, you can also get a lucrative job, and thereby bootstrap yourself out of the hick ranks of Hicksville from which you came, and of which you have now been made to feel ashamed.

*    *     *

Unless you’re Black. Then things are a bit different. As the description by The The National World War I Museum and Memorial in Kansas City, Missouri, for their graphic exhibit, “Coming Home” puts it:

While government programs and benefits applied to all veterans, civil rights were not so equal in America’s segregated post-war society. African-American veterans returned to communities that often did not welcome them home with cheering crowds and inclusive celebrations [as they did for "White" vets]. These veterans joined the American Legion and other similar organizations but encountered the reality of segregation even in the ranks of former comrades-in-arms.*

On the other hand, driving masses of people out of rural communities and into cities with the promise of the riches and opportunities appearing to lie there carries great risk for the powers that be, and whose interests are to be served by such mass population movement. The risk is that once those populations move into those cities, they will in fact discover the paucity of decent, well paying jobs that are really there, and the cutthroat competition for those that are. 

The greatest risk of all for coercive power is that under such literally proletarianizing conditions, the diverse members of the new and ever-growing mass urban industrial working class may actually begin to see that they all have one common long-term real interest, despite all the differences among their various individual short-term apparent interests. The risk, that is, is that the new urban working masses  may actually come to see the wisdom of heeding the advice—to use Marx and Engels’s way of putting it—that they  “unite,” since by doing so “they have nothing to lose but their chains.” 

The powers that be certainly can’t have that! Those powers have a vested interest in keeping the growing urban masses blind to working people’s real underlying unity of interest with one another. Instead, those powers for their own selfish sake do whatever they can to accentuate the differences that separate those they exploit from one another, differences such as place of origin, skin complexion, language, tradition, or culture. By highlighting such differences, coercive power does indeed secure and enlarge itself, heeding the advice of  the old proverb to “divide and conquer!” 

Thus, to give a prime example of the mechanism at issue, once the First World War was over and the troops did come back from “over there,” the longstanding racism “back home,” and the segregation that institutionalized it, proved to be of great value in  blinding the returning troops to their genuine community of interest. Wilson had already fostered racism and segegation before the war, most famously in his enthusiastic endorsement and promotion of D. W. Griffith’s film The Birth of a Nation, which came out a bit more than a year before the United States declared war, and was itself of great help as a midwife to the rebirth of the Ku Klux Klan. Wilson was certainly not hesitant about fostering racism and segregation after the war, either.

To keep the exploited blind to their own common interest by promoting division, stereotyping, and hatred among them, is of inestimable value to the exploiters.

*    *     *

To be continued.

*Available online at https://www.theworldwar.org/explore/exhibitions/past-exhibitions/coming-home.

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

This is the third and final post of a series first published in 2014.

*     *     *     *     *     *

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 pathsof 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)

This is the second in a series of posts first published in 2014

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 placewhere 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 (3rd 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 distancedfrom 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 (2nd 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.

*     *     *     *     *     *

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 (3rd 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.