Academic Freedom

So I read a bunch of stuff, took the GRE Subject Test for Literature in English (which was lame), marched in the Veteran's Day parade down 5th Avenue, went into a fairly mild drunk which has taken a surprising three days to recover from (33 is not that old--maybe I have cancer?), and have been generally busy, all of which I'm not going ot talk about now. Instead I want to link to Michael Berube's blog post about Garcetti v. Ceballos, which looks like it might constrain academic freedom for tenured public university professors. The AAUP has this and this to say:

I don't know what to do about any of it, but it looks like trouble.

Happy Halloween

Along with assorted reading, including a bit of Locke’s Essay Concerning Human Understanding and some Emerson, Nietzsche, Marx, Condorcet, Madison, Robespierre, and Hegel, I finally finished St. Augustine’s Confessions, except for the last two chapters, which I had to skip, Daniel Schacter’s workmanlike but lucid and judicious Searching for Memory: the Brain, the Mind, and the Past, and Anatole Broyard’s memoir of postwar intellectual life in Greenwich Village, Kafka Was the Rage.

I’m brain-dead from filling out PhD applications and cajoling the poet to get her manuscript out on a deadline.

Go Phillies.

Looking forward, not backward

Though Obama has said he will not use these anymore, and I believe him... torture in fact has gone from being an anathema, something forbidden and illegal under US law and international conventions, to being a policy choice. --Mark Danner, on Democracy Now!

Just marking a few stories like this, from Salon, talking about the continued suppression of evidence by the Obama administration, this, from the Washington Independent, showing that Obama's DOJ wants to continue Bush's practice of denying prisoners basic judicial rights, this from the AP noting more information restrictions, and this, from the Guardian (from August), talking about force-feeding at Gitmo and other fun ways we no longer torture people.

Also: Nazi gnomes cause outcry in Germany

Thank you, Guardian.

The Empire of Trauma

“My problem is to know how men govern (themselves and others) by means of the production of truth. By ‘the production of truth,’ I do not mean the production of true statements, but the arrangement of domains where the practices of the true and the false can be at once regulated and relevant.” (Michel Foucault, “Table ronde du 20 mai 1978,” in Dits et Écrits 4. Paris: Gallimard, pp. 20-34, qtd. In Empire of Trauma 5.

In The Empire of Trauma, Didier Fassin and Richard Rechtman work to critique the concept of “trauma” by tracing a moral genealogy of the concept in its international development from the late nineteenth century through the twentieth century, then by analyzing three specific case studies “emblematic of the contemporary politics of trauma” (9): the explosion of the AZF chemical factory in Toulouse on 21 Sept. 2001; humanitarian psychiatric intervention in the context of the second Intifada; and the activity of “the main organization providing health care to immigrants in France, the Comité medical pour les exilés.” These three examples illustrate the growth and work of various aspects of what Fassin and Rechtman might call the “trauma industry.” They seek throughout to build a “social history of trauma” that denaturalizes the concept and “repoliticizes victims” (xii).

“From the literal sense in which the term is used by psychiatrists (a psychological shock) to its metaphorical extension disseminated by the media (a tragic event)—and it is worth noting that discourse often shifts from one meaning to the other within the same passage, without particularly marking the distinction—the idea of trauma is thus becoming established as a commonplace of the contemporary world, a shared truth” (2).

Fassin and Rechtman argue that trauma has “created a new language of the event…” produced “by a restructuring of the cognitive and moral foundations of our societies that define our relationship to misfortune, memory, and subjectivity” (7).

Fassin and Rechtman trace the concept of trauma through what they call a dual genealogy—the development of the scientific definition of trauma, and the changing social valuation of the victim. The German psychiatrist Oppenheim first developed the concept of “trauma neurosis” to describe the psychological effects of railway accidents on train passengers (30-31). From the beginning, trauma and hysteria were linked, with Charcot arguing that trauma was a kind of hysteria, then Janet arguing that hysteria originated from childhood trauma. Hysteria was understood widely as a gendered disorder indicating weakness of the psyche, but Charcot, Janet, and Freud argued that it was rather a mechanical psychological reaction having little to do with gender or strength. Freud developed Janet’s ideas, then famously repudiated them, abandoning his “seduction theory” for a “fantasy hypothesis” that argued that “the sexual is already traumatic in the unconscious,” that “Psychological trauma is not only the organism’s reaction to an external event, it is integral to the way the psyche functions” (31-33).

“For the expression ‘traumatic’ has no other than an economic meaning, and the disturbance permanently attacks the management of available energy. The traumatic experience is one which, in a very short space of time, is able to increase the strength of a given stimulus so enormously that its assimilation, or rather its elaboration, can no longer be effected by normal means.” (Freud, “General Theory of the Neuroses,” in A General Introduction to Psychoanalysis. Trans. G. Stanley Hall. New York: Horace Liveright, 1920 (orig. pub. 1916). 237-238. Qtd. In Fassin 33.

Freud “took trauma definitively into the arena of the psyche, and in subsequent psychoanalytic writing the term ‘trauma’ was used to show clearly that what was under discussion was not the external event but rather the internal force which, when it encountered certain events or fantasies, would produce the pathological manifestations described by psychiatric semiology” (34).

The genealogy that Fassin and Rechtman trace argues that after Freud, the use of the concept turned more and more back to Janet’s way of thinking, and changed the locus of trauma from generic traumatic sexuality to specifically traumatized sexuality, that is, from a general condition to a specific event (34).

On the way to this turn, however, the idea of trauma neurosis was contested, developed, and manipulated in a variety of fields, including labor law, forensic psychiatry, military psychiatry, and colonial psychiatry (34-57).

Just prior to the outbreak of World War I, they argue, “suspicion of malingering, bad faith, and financial motives had already spread through the field of trauma neurosis” because the most prevalent cases of trauma being addressed were claims by industrial workers suffering from “sinistrosis,” which was essentially the same diagnosis as trauma neurosis. Sufferers of sinistrosis not only carried the stigma of being ostensibly financially motivated, but were also considered to have little will to recover—they were weak, lazy, and greedy (34-38). Come World War I, “Military psychiatry, borne along in the patriotic fervor, simply took up and radicalized diagnostic and therapeutic methods that had already been tested by putting workers suffering from neurosis claims back to work. Forensic psychiatry paved the way” (39).

The history of trauma and shell shock (not to be confused with battle rage or “combat madness”) in World War I and the importance of shell shock in the development of the idea of trauma is much discussed and well known. Fassin and Rechtman address the conflicts in psychiatric treatment and diagnosis, most centrally the “weakness” vs. “illness” debate best exemplified in the treatment of Siegfried Sassoon by William Halse Rivers (52-53), and trace how after the war and through World War II, trauma came to be seen less as “dishonorable conditions” and more as illnesses brought on by the event, yet still persisted in carrying a stigma of psychological weakness or financial motive (40-70, see esp. 50-53 and 69-70; see also 46-47 for a concise example of the sort of thinking that “blamed the victim” of trauma for being too sensitive to danger—work by Adam Cygielstrejch that argued from data suggesting that officers suffered combat neurosis at a far higher percentage than the rank-and-file). Despite the work of doctors such as Rivers and Freud, soldiers suffering what we now call PTSD continued to be suspected of psychological weakness and, while treated more humanely, were refused the compensation and treatment that would have signified their status as “victims” (70).

Fassin and Rechtman point to the revelation of the Holocaust as effecting a change in cultural consciousness about the responsibility of the victim with regard to their circumstances: “Things had changed so much since World War II that the average person could readily empathize with the confusion, fear, anxiety, and trauma of the young conscripts, with no discredit to them,” they write about veterans of the Vietnam war. “Since the horrific discovery of the genocide of the Jews, the role of trauma in the moral economy of US society had legitimized compassion for such formerly silent sufferings” (88-89). They particularly identify the work of Bruno Bettelheim as salient in forging a new paradigm of understanding trauma and suffering after World War II, a paradigm later developed by Robert Lifton and Mardi Horowitz, among others, that added to the role of the victim the dimensions of being a survivor and a witness (70-76).

“Thus it was in this dual role, of survivor and trauma victim, that Holocaust survivors were called on to testify to what happened to human beings in the death camps. Even though, as Agamben suggests (and Primo Levi before him), the only true witnesses were those who were no longer there to testify, those for whom the process of the destruction of humanity was completed, survivors remained under the obligation of testifying in their place—often in their name, but always in their memory. There is nothing here that compares to the experience of the traumatized soldier, whose testimony to shell shock was as unwelcome as his illness was suspect. With the survivors of the camps, testimony to trauma—more even than the testimony of the trauma victim—was gradually recognized as offering ultimate truth about the human condition” (75-76).

The epochal shift, according to Fassin and Rechtman, occurred in the 1960s and the 1970s, with the advent of feminist social agitation and the struggle of American veterans of the Vietnam War to redeem their status after both causing and suffering atrocious violence in a lost war (77-95). They point to the convergence of the needs of feminist advocacy and of clinical psychiatry in the 1970s as “sealing the fate of the traumatic event.” “From now on,” they write, “the event would be recognized as the exclusive etiological agent of post-traumatic disorders” (84). “Bearing no relation to the trauma narrative, removed from an individual’s history, without reference to previous personality structures, trauma thus appears as solely attributable to an unfortunate encounter between an ordinary person and an extraordinary event” (87).

In 1980, with the publication of DSM-III and the clinical birth of PTSD, trauma achieved the categorical social truth it carries today. “The task force that designed the new diagnostic category in DSM-III was comprised of psychiatrists who were particularly sensitive to the problems affecting Vietnam veterans”, including Robert Lifton, Mardi Horowitz, Chaim Shatan, and Jack Smith, a former marine involved with the VVAW (88, 88ff). Importantly, Fassin and Rechtman point out, the inclusion of PTSD in DSM-III opened up a difficult problem: “What should be done about the suffering of soldiers who were guilty of war crimes?” (89). The prevailing logic of trauma, they argue, determined that “These men should… be considered war victims, broken by what they had witnessed and by what they themselves had done—men traumatized by what the war had made of them” (91). This solution, Fassin and Rechtman argue, allowed Vietnam veterans to take up the role of traumatic witness and at the same time allowed military authorities to mitigate “some of the horror” in the widespread American atrocities by “showing men now destroyed by what they had done” (92). In effect, “the definition of the disorder did not call for any analysis of the moral circumstances,” and helped reinforce the developing idea of trauma as “the locus of incontrovertible fact” and “the proof of an unbearable experience” (93). “While the new concept of trauma eschewed any valuation of the individual act, it revealed the unbearable character of the event in general,” shifting moral responsibility away from individual actors to historical, structural, or institutional forces (95). “By applying the same psychological classification to the person who suffers violence, the person who commits it, and the person who witnesses it, the concept of trauma profoundly transforms the moral framework of what constitutes humanity” (21).

Fassin and Rechtman argue that this most contemporary development of the idea of trauma, as “the locus of an essential truth about humanity that [stands] stood apart from the moral qualities of the victim” (95), has profound implications. “The fact that trauma has become so pervasive a factor in our world is not the result of the successful dissemination of a concept elaborated in the scientific world of psychiatrists, and then exported into the social space of afflictions. It is rather the product of a new relationship to time and memory, to mourning and obligations, to misfortune and the misfortunate” (276). They argue that trauma, considered anthropologically, indicates how contemporary western cultures view misfortune and violence (“the tragic”), as “phenomena that leave traces of the past in the present, and that may even require immediate treatment in order to ensure they do not burden the future” (277). They argue that survivors of calamitous events “adopt the only persona that allows them to be heard—that of victim. In doing so, they tell us less of what they are than of the moral economies of our era in which they find their place” (279).

In considering the moral economy of trauma, Fassin and Rechtman argue that “trauma obliterates experience,” that is, that it categorizes, abstracts, and obscures historical and personal reality in favor of a universal, “objective,” “scientific” designation (281-282). Adopting either the “humanist” or “radical” point of view about trauma, they assert, “which are today the largely dominant viewpoints whether or not they are explicitly formulated, the universalization of trauma results in its trivialization. In these models, every society and every individual suffers the traumatic experience of their past. Not only do scales of violence disappear, but their history is erased. There is no difference between the survivor of genocide and the survivor of rape; this is in any case the clinical view” (19).

They also argue that “trauma chooses its victims,” that is, that pace trauma’s ostensible universality, it is applied, treated, compensated, and heard only in accordance with all the expected contingencies of social, political, and economic power (282-283). “Thus, even though the concept of trauma asserts the equal humanity of all suffering people, even though it proclaims that collective memory is now a product of the fate of each individual and that it necessarily implies reparation, testimony, and proof, the use of the concept in fact makes it the basis for a new division between human beings” (283). Some categories of people—western tsunami survivors vs. native Sri Lankans, American soldiers vs. Iraqi civilians, Israeli settlers vs. Palestinian refugees, white New Orleaneans vs. the black residents of the 9th ward—are more traumatized than others. They argue, finally and with finality, that “trauma today is a moral judgment” (284).

Trauma and Recovery

Judith Herman’s book Trauma and Recovery comes wearing its problems on its face: “One of the most important psychiatric works to be published since Freud,” exclaims the New York Times in a blurb on the cover, a cover which presents us with three vivid strips, red, white and blue, and a variety of fonts (seven) designed to grab our attention and assure us of the book’s authority, while on the back cover we are told that the book is “universally recognized as a classic,” is a “landmark,” a “triumph,” and a “stunning achievement,” by such luminaries in the field of psychology as Gloria Steinem and Sophie Freud, a professor of social work who happens to be Sigmund Freud’s grand-daughter. The subtitle offers the finishing touch, promising that the book will explore “The aftermath of violence—from domestic abuse to political terror.”

The book begins by avowing its polemical and political orientation: “This book owes its existence to the women’s liberation movement. Its intellectual mainspring is a collective feminist project of reinventing the basic concepts of normal development and abnormal psychology, in both men and women” (ix). She makes clear early on her argument that diagnosis is inseparable from progressive political change, that in order to understand something (specifically “trauma”) we must be actively working to eliminate the causes of the thing we’re trying to understand, that in order to develop worthwhile knowledge we must adhere to a political teleology of democratic, individualistic utopianism where the end goal is the final freedom of the self to achieve full expression without any kind of violence or repression:

“To hold traumatic reality in consciousness requires a social context that affirms and protects the victim and that joins victim and witness in a common alliance…. For the larger society, the social context is created by political movements that give voice to the disempowered.

“The systematic study of psychological trauma therefore depends on the support of a political movement. Indeed, whether such study can be pursued or discussed in public is itself a political question. The study of war trauma becomes legitimate only in a context that challenges the sacrifice of young men in war. The study of trauma in sexual and domestic life becomes legitimate only in a context that challenges the subordination of women and children. Advances in the field occur only when they are supported by a political movement…” (9)

Now, certainly, the relation between knowledge and power is a complex one. I don’t need Judith Herman—or Foucault—to tell me this. Yet to argue that advances in empirical knowledge are only possible after they have been politically affirmed, that we must be morally right before we can seek empirical knowledge, is anathema to objective ideals of scientific research. Relativist anti-scientific post-Kuhnian social constructionists can argue with a great deal of validity that how science is in fact practiced is corrupted by all kinds of subjective human and social determinants, without detracting in the least from power, necessity, and validity of empirical science and the scientific method as ideals of objective knowledge. Herman betrays these ideals by arguing that we must have “Progressive Psychology” as much as does the fundamentalist Christian arguing for “Intelligent Design,” or the caricature Soviet-era scientist doing “Communist Physics.”

Of course, Herman doesn’t argue that her truth is contingent on social power, but rather that she must speak truth to power, that the political battle is what makes it possible for her to do research at all. To finish the quote above:

“Advances in the field occur only when they are supported by a political movement powerful enough to legitimate an alliance between investigators and patients and to counteract the ordinary social processes of silencing and denial. In the absence of strong political movements for human rights, the active process of bearing witness inevitably gives way to the active process of forgetting. Repression, dissociation, and denial are phenomena of social as well as individual consciousness.” (9)

This is not only simplistic, but frankly stupid. The “ordinary social process of silencing and denial”? “Repression, dissociation, and denial are phenomena of social as well as individual consciousness”? Leaving aside the difficult question of what “social consciousness” would look like and whether the idea is even possible, and ignoring the slippery slide from individual psychological phenomena to social practices, I want to focus mainly here on the childish “Big Other” straw man that Herman sets up, against which she must struggle. How are “silencing and denial” “ordinary social practices” tout court? Of course, in any culture, some things are not spoken of. But other things are. Culture is full of people talking about things. Sometimes quite nasty and difficult things. Often, it seems, people try to put some kind of positive spin on things, whether that be historical tragedies in the past or personal traumas suffered at home, but the allegation of the “silence and denial” of “trauma” as a widespread social phenomenon is at best a crude simplification of complex social dynamics where some things are remembered and commemorated and addressed in certain ways and others are not. At best. What it seems like to me, frankly, is deliberate misrepresentation.

War is the great example, and since this is my interest in reading the book—and generally the topic on which Herman is weakest and shows her most glaring faults—this is what I will focus on. The memory of war and its “traumas” are not necessarily, always, essentially displaced by “silence and denial.” In fact, not only are wars often celebrated, and rituals often established in order to help veterans return home and “process” their “traumas,” but a great deal of the literature of western civilization has to do with the memory of war and its “traumas.” Somehow we must read The Deer Hunter, The Naked and the Dead, the poetry of Wilfrid Owen, Guernica, the paintings of Goya, the Renaissance military memoir, the medieval romance, Henry V, and the Iliad as examples of “the ordinary social processes of silence and denial” and “the active process of forgetting.” Her very examples on this point, from Elie Wiesel to Tim O’Brien, highlight the fatuity of her argument. It is as if she stood invited by the most respected committees before a crowded theater, wearing her visible credentials as a medical doctor and applauded by all and sundry, and shouted into her microphone about how marginalized she is and how she must fight to be heard.

My point, however, is not about the validity of her progressivist ideology. My issue is that her ideology infects her research. Her politics infects her diagnosis, and her tendentious, polemical approach detracts from and weakens her otherwise worthwhile, valuable, and important work. Herman has much to say on “trauma” and “recovery,” and her research and work with victims of child abuse, her summaries of research with Vietnam vets, and her thinking through the idea of trauma have much to offer. Too often, however, her simplifications, sloppiness, and tendentiousness fatally weaken what could have been substantial points, and engender a skepticism in her scholarship that casts doubt on her whole work. One of my favorite examples of her shoddy and misleading work is her repeated citations of Tim O’Brien’s novel The Things They Carried. She turns to him again and again, citing passages from his fiction as quotations from “a Vietnam veteran” describing his feelings (53, 66, 70). Once she identifies the “Vietnam veteran” as Tim O’Brien, twice she neglects to identify him, and while in her endnotes, of course, she cites her source, nowhere does she discuss the fact that these quotations are from a work of fiction. I wonder if O’Brien’s memoir of his time in Vietnam, If I Die in a Combat Zone, simply did not provide the pithy anecdotes she desired? What this sloppiness suggests to me is that Herman is far more interest in pushing her point than in proving it.

The book is full of bald assertions unsupported by evidence or even argument, crass simplifications, rhetorical obfuscations, and unexamined presuppositions. Throughout, victims are exclusively referred to as female (except with combat vets), perpetrators exclusively as male. The book begins with a thunderous solecism: “The ordinary response to atrocities is to banish them from consciousness. Certain violations of the social compact are too terrible to utter aloud: this is the meaning of the word unspeakable” (1). In fact, “violations of the social compact too terrible to utter aloud” is not the meaning of the word “unspeakable,” which can refer merely to coarse language too bawdy for certain social groups or even to some ontological incommunicability. Yet perhaps she is right, despite the idiocy of her flourish, that “the ordinary response to atrocities is to banish them from consciousness.” Certainly, when we think of atrocities today, we think of real horrors, mass graves, genocidal butchery, etc. Herman plays on this later when she asserts “that rape is an atrocity” (30). Yet checking up on what “atrocity” means outside of a vague sense of nasty events informs us that its primary meaning is a cruel and frightful act. Well, since rape is sexual assault, as well as any “act of plunder, violent seizure, or abuse; despoliation; violation,” as in “the rape of the countryside,” it certainly seems that rape is atrocious. Yes, Virginia, bad things are bad. Thank you, Dr. Herman, for pointing that out.

Yet, we still haven’t addressed the real boner here, which is the blind assertion that “the ordinary response to atrocities is to banish them from consciousness.” How, then, can we explain a cultural history full of not only atrocities of rape and war, but every kind of human cruelty—from Dracula and Hannibal Lecter to the butchery in Grimm’s fairy tales, from boxing matches to bear baiting, from the sufferings of the Jews in the Holocaust to the sufferings of Christ? We remember, celebrate, commit, and commemorate atrocity in a thousand ways—both as perpetrators and as victims. No doubt, certain societies have taboos on the discussion of certain kinds of atrocities—or certain kinds of acts in general—that make discussing them profoundly difficult. Yet we must admit of a variety of responses, both personal and social, to trauma and atrocity that are not included in Herman’s simple-minded progressivist narrative.

Herman’s basic fault is in not thinking of humans as animals, but as creatures with souls, beings of good and evil, who start out unblemished and wonderful and are corrupted by a fallen society:

“The sense of safety in the world, or basic trust, is acquired in earliest life in the relationship with the first caretaker. Originating with life itself, this sense of trust sustains a person throughout the lifecycle. It forms the basis of all systems of relationship and faith. The original experience of care makes it possible for human beings to envisage a world in which they belong, a world hospitable to human life. Basic trust is the foundation of belief in the continuity of life, the order of nature, and the transcendent order of the divine” (51-52).

Now we’re getting somewhere—Nietzsche, the Holocaust, Communism, sweatshops, war, the crisis of Modernity, the Reformation, and the Fall of the Roman Empire can all be blamed on child abuse. Ahah!

See, this is Herman’s problem again and again. It’s not enough for her to argue that traumatic events “destroy the victim’s fundamental assumptions about the safety of the world, the positive value of the self, and the meaningful order of creation” (51). She has to take it one step further and suggest that trauma corrupts our otherwise good and innocent souls. If it wasn’t for trauma, she suggests in the passage quoted previously, we’d all be living happily ever after.

Three final points. First, Herman has many interesting and valuable things to say. Second, her work is a fair place to begin, but it seems to me our understanding of trauma must become both more inclusive and more subtle. Car accidents are traumatic, as are many initiation rites. Sometimes we willingly undergo trauma in training or initiation in order to help us deal with expected trauma later. Sometimes undergoing trauma is a point of pride, and seen as a successful accomplishment. Sometimes—as with, for example, war, intiation rites, hazing, etc.—it doesn’t ostracize one from society but initiates one into society (or at least certain circles). To really understand what trauma is and how it works, it is essential to divorce it from socially progressive (or regressive) political ends—from all political ends whatsoever. “Trauma” must be understood in at least two distinct ways: one, as a psychological and physiological kind of stress on the body and mind, and two, as a social phenomenon. While they are related, they are not the same and should not be confused, either accidentally or deliberately (as Herman adverts must be done). Third, memory, mind, and body must be brought into the discussion in much more critical and empirical ways. We cannot rely on the hokum of hypnosis therapy or the rich but troublesome data provided by personal testimonies. The mind and memory are unreliable, prone to slippages small and great, and profoundly susceptible to social pressure. If Herman is serious about “trauma and recovery,” she needs to work harder to separate out the hard data from the bunkum, and quit putting the conclusion before the proof.

Sublimity and Fictions

I recently watched Down By Law again, b/c a friend of mine hadn’t ever seen it. Nothing to say about it except I love it, its deadpan flats and its melancholy swamps, its beautiful camera work, the unrelenting miserableness of Jack and Zack and New Orleans and Bob reciting Frost in Italian… I’m a sucker for anything Jarmusch does.

I also saw Memento again, for class. I have much less interest in talking about film than about books, in part because of my ignorance on the subject, in part because everybody talks about film and thinks they’re fucking Martin Scorsese. Memento remains a crisp, smart thriller—I’d thought the first time I saw it that it was a gimmick film, good for one viewing, much like The Usual Suspects, but in fact the performances are so tight, the details so rich and considered, and the final story so obscure and unsure that it has gotten better every time I’ve seen it. Leonard grows to become a sort of Jekyll-and-Hyde figure, a piteous hero in the clutches of an insane, malevolent intelligence that is nothing other than himself, an amnesiac serial killer. Teddy too grows more fascinating, for while in the end he does seem a cop, his motives are never clear. Of course, maybe all this is cleared up in all the business that goes along with DVDs these days, the interviews and extras and documentary bullshit. I hope not.

Reading-wise, I’m nearly (thank god) done with Judith Herman’s tendentious but useful Trauma and Recovery, which I’ll address at some length once I’ve finished, and locked into a variety of things right now including the very interesting monograph by Yuval Harari titled The Ultimate Experience: Battlefield Revelations and the Modern of Modern War Culture, 1450-2000, which argues that the modern understanding of war as a site of “revelatory truth” is in fact historical, specifically a product of the Enlightenment. Also working on Augustine’s Confessions and Proust’s Swann’s Way, among others.

I finished a book by Tom McCarthy, who I judged crossly because of his unsavory friendship with bullshitter extraordinaire Simon Critchley (they are in some “Necronautical Society” together—it sounds, smells, and looks like what it is…). I had to change my mind about McCarthy, however, because his novel Remainder was really quite interesting, brilliantly written, and provocative. Since I had to read it for this course I’m taking on memory, I read the book in those terms, and was puzzling out some sort of trauma, repetition-compulsion sort of angle, taking the whole thing at face value, when on the prof’s recommendation I read this review by Zadie Smith which made me reconsider the whole thing. I’d already been confounded by some things in the novel which didn’t fit my repetition-compulsion explanation, but once I considered Smith’s take and rethought through the book as a novel-about-writing, the scales fell away and my soul was flooded with the brilliance of Tom McCarthy. Aha! Of course, the clumsy relearning everything, the transcendent ecstasy in the moment of recreation, the insatiable desire for more and more truth…

Speaking of truth, as well, among the many other essays and articles I’m reading, I got through Bruce Robbins “The Sweatshop Sublime,” which was very interesting for its positing and theorizing this term, “the sweatshop sublime,” describing the moment of paralyzed sensual-conceptual overload when one apprehends for a moment something of the massive global structure of political-economic networks, sweatshops, transportation systems, money exchanges, tyrannies, and oppressed lives that keep food on Western tables and lovely cotton shirts on Western backs. It is far less interesting in its tedious progressivist hand-wringing about what English professors and literary scholars ought to be doing about global injustice, and whether or not pointing out that the wretched of the world are wretched is in any way efficacious… Why is it that university professors take upon themselves so often this burden of the spirit of activism, which is so poorly suited to their chosen métier? Perhaps because they believe ideas matter, that “thoughts” can “change things,” or perhaps it because they’re infected with a sort of knee-jerk Deweyan idea of pedagogy-as-democracy, which to be fair to Dewey has its nasty roots in Rousseau, Kant, Plato… Education doesn’t make us better people, or more democratic, or more just. It just makes us more educated. Yet so many scholars like Robbins seem to believe that the keys to our progressive future can be found in the proper footnotes—Dear English Professor, if you are reading this and really do want to “change the world,” stop writing Marxist criticism and go volunteer in a homeless shelter.

As for me, I look forward to whatever shelter that the walls of academe can provide from the storms of “progress”… leave me to my aesthetics and my centuries… the world will be as nasty when I die as it was when I was born, and my having passed will matter little to the princes and principalities and their flows of capital. Still, “the sweatshop sublime” is a very useful term, it seems.

Transcendence in Brooklyn or War

Brooklyn

differs from most cities in this: that though it has perhaps a “center,” and hands, and eyes, and feet, it is chiefly no whole or recognizable animal but an exorbitant pulsing mass of scarcely discriminable cellular jellies and tissues; a place where people merely “live.” A few American cities, Manhattan chief among them, have some mad magnetic energy which sucks all others into “provincialism”; and Brooklyn of all great cities is nearest the magnet, and is indeed “provincial”: it is provincial as a land of rich earth and of this earth is an enormous farm, whose crop is far less “industrial” or “financial” or “notable” or in any way “distinguished” or “definable” than it is of human flesh and being. And this fact alone, which of itself makes Brooklyn so featureless, so little known, to many so laughable, or so ripe for patronage, this fact, that two million human beings are alive and living there, invests the city in an extraordinarily high, piteous and inviolable dignity, well beyond touch of laughter, defense, or need of notice.

So says James Agee, in his splendid, lyrical essay Brooklyn Is: Southeast of the Island: Travel Notes. While running in a Whitmanesque sprawl of language that refuses to coalesce into any kind of narrative or coherent “point,” Agee’s paean to Brooklyn opens through this selfsame lyrical efflorescence moments of truth and beauty about the city that would otherwise remain inaccessible. As Whitman or Apollinaire knew, perhaps, there’s an order of truth about Modernity and the City that can only be accessed by replicating in language the overflowing concatenations and abundances of life, streets, buildings, trade, cargoes, passions, and disappointments that by their very multitudinousness surpass our understanding. Only through our reach exceeding our grasp could we begin to achieve the breadth and depth of being that comes out in passages like this, which end Agee’s essay:

Or late in the day, in the zoo, the black bears with the muzzles of vaudeville tramps, and those who affectionately watch them: the empty pit: the desperate bawlings of the single polar bear, his eyes half crazy with loneliness, his whole focus on the pit of blacks: the quieting and softening of all light and the wonder this performs upon some animals: the sexy teasings and huggings of the round masked brighteyed coons and the delight there must be in the wrestlings of fat furred bodies: the deep moat where Hilda the elephant was pushed by her playful husband, to die in bewilderment of sacroiliac pain, and where he too recently fell: that cage in which three black metal eagles, hunchbacked with heartcracking melancholia, fall clumsy as grounded buzzards from limb to limb of their small skinned tree, “Presented to the Children of New York by the Brooklyn Daily Eagle”: and through the dusk the agonies of the bear; Baw; Baww; Bawwww!: and the bumpings and kiddings of the gay coons: and the kangaroos, some orange, some fawn, whose eyes are lovely as those of giraffes or of Victorian heroines who move like wheelchairs: and the deer:

It is late dusk now, with the lamps on; the sky is one clean pearl. There are almost no people left. Those kingly anarchists who have become symbols of journalism sit quite without motion. The bear is still crying: he has the sound of a baby who has been forgotten in the attic of an abandoned house. In their run the young among the deer are altered. They are no longer being watched and it is not only that: they are caught also at the heart and throughout their bodies with that breath-depriving mystical ecstasy which dusk excites in them and in young goats. Their eyes are sainted, innocent, as those of goats daemonic. They move tenderly, with a look of minnows about the head and body: then a sudden break, a strong-sprung sharphooved bouncing run in the soft dirt, the precisions of chisels and of Mozart: and in the midst of this one of them will suddenly leap high into the air, wrists high, tail waggling, wriggling his whole body upon itself in a blind spasm of self-delight (while the kangaroos amble and squat): and now, even; it is rapidly darkening: in a child’s angry joy in life and furious reluctance in the death even of one day, a fawn tears out again on the empty run and three times over climbs the air and congratulates himself: and out of the fallen brightness of the air, low a long while then steadily rising, hammered and beaten mad hell with ceremonial bells, drawn in a whole periphery of this green park and this world, such a wild inexhaustible wailing as to freeze the root of the heart.

Nice. I also finished If I Die in a Combat Zone, Tim O’Brien’s celebrated memoir of the Vietnam War. The book as a whole seems unfinished, like an unvarnished, plain wood frame in which are mounted several episodes like photographs, vivid and often telling in themselves but failing, taken together, to cohere into something meaningful. Perhaps this is O’Brien’s intent. Early on, describing a patrol, he writes “Things happened, things came to an end. There was no sense of developing drama.” This sense of war as a succession of events, almost absurd in their meaninglessness, I can relate to, yet this begs too easily the question of what it does to a man, how it changes someone, what it “means.” Even if the war seems meaningless, that somehow has to be factored into the changes it wreaks on soul, and those changes have to be worked somehow into the structure of a memoir. O’Brien anticipates my complaint early on, but with an unconvincing dodge:

Now, war ended, all I am left with are simple, unprofound scraps of truth. Men die. Fear hurts and humiliates. It is hard to be brave. It is hard to know what bravery is. Dead human beings are heavy and awkward to carry, things smell different in Vietnam, soldiers are dreamers, drill sergeants are boors, some men thought the war was proper and others didn’t and most didn’t care. Is that the stuff for a morality lesson, even for a theme?

Do dreams offer lessons? Do nightmares have themes, do we awaken and analyze them and live our lives and advise others as a result? Can the foot soldier teach anything important about war, merely for having been there? I think not. He can tell war stories.

All this is true, but the mistake here is in thinking war has a “lesson,” like one of Aesop’s fables, and the hypocrisy is in O’Brien’s presenting the “lesson” that life doesn’t have “lessons.” O’Brien isn’t just telling war stories—nobody just tells stories—but telling the stories that say he came through war disillusioned and possessed of a deeper, more “real,” material truth. Reality is “simple” and “unprofound.” Things happen. Things have weight. Things smell. The hard work of thinking about how we value things, how they are connected together, why we might be “disillusioned” by war, or what this change means for a naïve, Midwestern college boy raised on protestant ethics is left aside by O’Brien. Near the end of the book he recapitulates his lesson that he claims isn’t a lesson:

You add things up. You lost a friend to the war, and you gained a friend. You compromised one principle and fulfilled another. You learned, as old men tell it in front of the courthouse, that war is not all bad; it may not make a man of you, but it teaches you that manhood is not something to scoff; some stories of valor are true; dead bodies are heavy, and it’s better not to touch them; fear is paralysis, but it is better to be afraid than to move out to die, all limbs functioning and heart thumping and charging and having your chest torn open for all the work; you have to pick the times not to be afraid, but when you are afraid you must hide it to save respect and reputation. You learned that the old men had lives of their own and that they valued them enough to try not to lose them; anyone can die in a war if he tries.

Again, we have the “lesson” of no lesson. We have a refusal to think. War is like any experience in life, more intense than what most of us are used to, more varied, more “existential,” yet in the end we face the same question with war that we face with any other episode of being: what meaning do we make out of this? Saying that there is no “inherent” or “essential” meaning to things is a good first step, and rejecting the meanings offered by tradition and society a knee-jerk reaction for adolescents, malcontents, dreamers, and idealists the world over. What then? Inevitably, we make meaning or our hearts and minds die of madness. What kind of meaning? Why? How? O’Brien, through If I Die in a Combat Zone, shows us the corrupt fallenness of the material world, and in The Things They Carried gestures toward redemptive transcendence. This is what his war means. This is the lesson it taught him. I wish he’d thought a little deeper about why this was the lesson he learned, and how much it sounds like the Protestant theology his young Minnesotan mind was shaped by.

Dreams do offer lessons. So do nightmares. You have to learn how to hear them.

Behemoth vs. Leviathan

Have finished nothing new, but have started a fascinating book by the military historian Yuval Harari, basically historicizing the idea of war as revelation, pointing to its origins in the Enlightenment.

Yesterday, heard some interesting work by Stephen Graham, Jessica Stern, and Les Roberts at a conference on ”Cities and the New Wars” at Columbia. Also, went to see the luminous, beautiful Blake paintings at the Morgan Library. The subtlety of his line and color, and the power of his mystic vision, were really only available in person. No reproduction I’ve seen of his stuff captures the striking almost-psychedelic intricacy of his best works.

Update

Read or re-read The Oresteia, Oedipus Rex, Oedipus at Colonus, Antigone, and Philoctetes; several papers on memory and various essays and book excerpts on tragedy; a bit of William James; “Funes the Memorious,” by Borges; The Sorrows of Young Werther; and The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano, or Gustavus Vassa, the African.

Saw some art (Vermeers at Met are lovely, just like Vermeers should be). Switched classes from Tragedy to Memory. Still ill. Flailing with my statement of purpose in preparing to apply to PhD programs. Studying for GRE subject test: the cavalier poets and the metaphysical poets were contemporaneous, early seventeenth century, Herbert, Herrick, Donne.

More later.

The Pain

School started last week, and as if in outright rebellion, my body caught a nasty strep throat infection that laid me flat on my ass for two whole days. Which is particularly awesome since I volunteered to present on Aeschylus next week in this philosophy seminar I’m taking on Tragedy in Modernity.

While, of course, the great tragedies of Western Lit are some of the most powerful and rewarding works available to us, and will always bear further elucidation, elaboration, reinvention, and reinterpretation, I’m profoundly understimulated by most discussions of “Tragedy” as a concept or genre. Trying to correlate the Attic “goat-songs” with Shakespearean murder-romances and Beckett’s anti-plays seems almost absurd, the typical heavy reliance on Aristotle, who wrote the Poetics more than a hundred years after the death of Aeschylus and the golden age of Attic theater, is frustratingly unsophisticated, and almost always what gets lost in the theorizing is how beautiful and powerful these great works are. Also how strange.

In any case, I may vent my spleen here some this semester, in attempting to corral my thoughts on this subject.

In the meantime, I have finally finished Milton’s Paradise Lost and Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit. Simply put, these were the worst ideas for summer reading ever. Of profound sweep and power, at times dizzyingly majestic, and shot through with real beauty and insight yet often turgid, nearly incomprehensible (especially the Hegel), and almost never “fun,” this great books are not great for lazy August weekends.

I have little to say about either, except to brag that I’ve finished them. The sections of Paradise Lost that had the biggest impact on me were Satan’s fall and journey to earth. After we got to Adam and Eve, I found myself much less excited. Milton’s wrenched Latinisms should be shown to pretentious students as a model of how not to write, yet still there were moments of real music, somehow, among all the Roman cacophony. Here’s a passage I marked—one among many—that shows the sort of brain-bending you’re in for with Milton. Note that it consists of one single sentence:

A Grove hard by, sprung up with this their change,
His will who reigns above, to aggravate
Their penance, laden with fair Fruit, like that
Which grew in Paradise, the bait of Eve
Us’d by the Tempter: on that prospect strange
Their earnest eyes they fix’d, imagining
For one forbidden Tree a multitude
Now ris’n, to work them further woe or shame;
Yet parcht with scaling thirst and hunger fierce,
Though to delude them sent, could not abstain,
But on they roll’d in heaps, and up the Trees
Cllimbing, sat thicker than the snaky locks
That curl’d Megaera: greedily they pluck’d
The Fruitage fair to sight, like that which grew
Near that bituminous Lake where Sodom flam’d;
This more delusive, not the touch, but taste
Deceived; they fondly thinking to allay
Their appetite with gust, instead of Fruit
Chew’d bitter Ashes, which the’offended tatste
With spattering noise rejected: oft they assay’d,
Hunger and thirst constraining, drugg’d as oft,
With hatefullest disrelish writh’d their jaws
With soot and cinders fill’d; so oft they fell
Into the same illusion, not as Man
Whom they triumph’d once lapst.

My favorite bits there are “Fruitage” and “disrelish.” WTF? I need to use these words in my day to day existence… I’ll spare you (and myself) the excerpt from Hegel.

About Hegel, I don’t know what to say. Having grown up a stark-raving postmodernist, whether I will or no, it’s hard to get around the ways that Hegel’s ideas, especially social-discourse concerns, his turn from epistemology to ethics, and the mediated nature of not only truth but existence itself, seem sort of obvious. It’s difficult but necessary to really make the effort to see his massive thinking project in context, and remember it was written just more than two centuries ago. There is much that is provocative, interesting, puzzling, incomprehensible, and dark in these pages, and I hope some more study might illuminate it, but I also think much of it is just poorly written. There is no excuse. I also have to wonder why he had to keep things on such a consistently abstract level, with few if any real concrete examples or references. Perhaps this is part of his strategy. If so, it’s a particularly fuckerous strategy. Finally, while his ideas of Christianity seem manageable, his idea of progress does not to me, and since the whole book is about the process of Spirit coming to know itself in History, i.e., socio-cultural progress, this really sticks in my craw. I believe in Hegel’s Spirit, sure. But I don’t believe it “learns.”

That’s all for my piddling comments now.

Slow Down

Still slogging through Hegel and Milton. The semester has officially begun, so I’m already behind. Also started The Good Soldier, just for fun.

I did, however, take two days to read Thomas Pynchon’s newest, Inherent Vice. While in my heart of hearts I wish it was just The Crying of Lot 49, TP’s newest was fun, sometimes though-provoking, and even moving novel. If I’d just picked it up in a state of ignorance, I’d think it was Elmore Leonard crossed with Ken Kesey, but coming as it does when it does, it seems almost painfully elegiac about the sixties. There are moments of gorgeous lyricism, the half-baked conspiracies are especially half-baked, and what I come away thinking most about is the strange friendship between the PI protagonist (whose name escapes me now) and the LAPD cop Bjornson. Hm.

Also saw Inglourious Basterds, which was exquisitely put together, at times quite beautiful, always unique—and also fatuous, empty, and stupid. Tarantino is truly Godard’s American bastard-child, but without ideas, politics, patience, or any intelligence beyond that of the cinema. I had expected much more violence, but what I got was a lot of the usual Tarantino blather passing for banter. Ick.

Finally, I won an award. I’m very honored to have won the Theresa A. White Literary Award for my short short “Never Closer.” It’ll be in the journal Quiddity next year, and featured on their radio program/podcast this week.

Back to Hegel.