The Use and Abuse of Blindness (6)

This is the sixth in a series of posts.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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. . . 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.

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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.*

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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!