Category: Protest tactics

The Perplexities of Violence

I have been gnawing at this issue for some forty years now and am no nearer to a formulation that satisfies me. I think it’s because there are no generalizations about violence and its effects that stand up to even the most cursory encounter with historical examples. I would love to believe that violence is always (in the long run) counter-productive. Certainly in any utilitarian calculus that measures whether people (in the aggregate) are better off as a result of violence, the answer most usually will be a clear-cut NO. Apart from its immediate (in the moment) victims, violence breeds violence. The definition of violence from which I work is “physical harm done to a person by another person.” To perpetuate violence is to insure that physical harm will be done—either to others or to oneself.

But before I even try to consider how violence leads to more violence, let me dwell a moment on my definition. I do not intend to deny the extended use of the term “violence” to denote psychological or material (destruction of a person’s goods or livelihood) harm done to people. And destruction of non-human entities (whether human built, like cities, or non-human built, like forests) could also be covered by the word violence. It is also the case that physical harm is done by earthquakes and the like. But, for simplicity’s sake, I want to stick with direct physical harm done by some human to another human in trying to come to grips with how violence is deployed in various cases, and what that violence causes or does not cause to happen. In other words, what motivates the action of inflicting physical harm on others? What benefits does the perpetrator of violence believe the violence will give him? What are the actual consequences of acts of violence? (This question indicates my belief that perpetrators of violence are routinely mistaken about violence’s effects.) And, finally, how does violence either underwrite or undermine power? (The relation of violence to power is an ongoing puzzle.)

Again, let’s be simple about it for starters. People deploy violence either 1) to force others to do things they would, if left to themselves, not do and 2) to eliminate people who are actual (or are perceived to be) obstacles to what the agent of violence desires. Violence as intimidation and/or coercion (1) or violence as the means to winning a competition that is understood as either/or (2). Either I win or you do—therefore, I will use whatever means necessary to assure that I win. And violence appears the most compelling strategy to assure victory. There can be no compromise. It is, as we say, a fight to the death. As long as you still are present in the field, I am threatened. You must be eliminated for me to be at peace (the term “peace” used ironically here to indicate a sense of security that is impossible as long as my opponent lives).

In short, violence is, one, the great persuader (in the coercion case) or, two, the surest means for victory in a competition. The argument against claiming violence is always counter-productive is that it can secure submissive obedience and the absence of competitors over very long stretches of time. Terror deployed by either state or non-state actors can subdue whole populations. (Definition of terror: the use of sporadic violence against one’s opponents. Many opponents can be left unharmed, but the key is that they know themselves subject to violence at all times and that acts of violence are unpredictable. When and where violence will be inflicted cannot be calculated; thus, violence is ever present as a threat that is then actuated sometimes.) Historical examples abound, including the killing and corralling of native American populations as an instance of the “elimination” path, with the reign of Jim Crow in the American South offers a case of terror’s effectiveness when deployed over a one hundred year span.

The reductionist view of the relation of violence to power is that power is, at bottom, just violence. Or, to put it differently, power’s ultimate recourse is always violence (the ability of the state—or of other actors—to physically harm with impunity). The knowledge that the powerful can harm you is what keeps those who would resist power in line. Power can inflict harms short of physical destruction to keep resistors in line (including economic destitution and incarceration), but it remains the fact that harm done to bodies is the ultimate threat—and power remains dependent on that threat. Inevitably, power will act upon that threat at times.

The problem is that the reductionist view does not work—or, at least, not in all cases. When power resorts to violence to secure obedience is precisely when it is weakest, Arendt argued. Her generalization is as false as the reductionist generalization. But she was on to something. Any law (or other device to govern behavior) is only effective if the vast majority obey it voluntarily. The power of the law resides (in this analysis) in the governed’s acceptance that the law as binding. One classic case is the American experiment with prohibition of alcohol. And history offers many examples of seemingly powerful regimes that simply collapsed without much in the way of a battle. The French and Russian revolutions are cases in point; the governments in both instances were “taken over” very quickly and with very little bloodshed. It was only after the revolution had occurred that reactionary forces gathered themselves together and instigated civil wars.

So, it would seem, power based solely on violence follows the Hemingway description of bankruptcy: the power seeps away slowly until it suddenly collapses. Again, to be clear: the seeping away period can be very long indeed, and collapse (if we take the very long view) in inevitable and multi-caused since nothing human lasts forever.

What interests me in thinking about the relation between power and violence is the extent to which power’s resorting to violence is delegitimizing. When and where power relies on violence, it admits that its edicts are not acceptable to those who can only be compelled by violence. On the one hand, that admission necessitates the creation of the category “criminal.” Power must insist that there are deviants who simply (for whatever perverse or self-interested reasons) will not obey the law. On the other hand, extensive reliance on violence will indicate the law’s unreasonableness, its inability to win voluntary consent. Violence may cow many, but it will not win their respect. (Exceptions to this assertion, of course. There will always be those who are impressed by violence, who aspire to be enlisted in the ranks of its foot soldiers. I will get back to my thoughts on this sub-section of any population.)

The “on the one hand and on the other hand” of the previous paragraph reveals how completely acts of violence are entangled in speech acts. The act of violence itself is a speech act. It can only have its effect if the act is publicly known and the message it is meant to convey is somewhat unambiguous. Thus, a Mafia killing must clearly indicate this is the result of encroaching on our territory. Revenge killings must make the fact that this “was for revenge” obvious. State violence must say “this kind of behavior/disobedience” will not be tolerated. And, in a secondary speech act, the state creates the category “criminal” to justify its violence against those who disobey. An exception to violence being public (as it must be if it is to send a message) are private murders where the perpetrator hopes to get away with the act never being ascribed to him. Such murders only make sense if there is one victim, without any future intention to deploy violence—and hence no audience to whom a message needs to be sent. Even serial killers, it seems to me, are message senders. They get off on the terror they inspire among a certain population.

Because violence is embedded in message sending, the meaning of any act of violence inevitably becomes a contested field. Violence is rhetoric. Acts of violence are intended to persuade. The regime (Romans against Christians; South Africa against black dissenters) that creates martyrs aims to dissuade others from acting as the martyr did; the martyr’s peers hold up his death as an inspiration to further acts of resistance. War aims to persuade another country to bend to my country’s will just as violence against the “criminal” aims to persuade others to follow the law. But just as violence often inspires violent resistance, the meanings attached to any act of violence will also generate resistance. There will be competing interpretations.

I think that all of this means that acts of violence always need to be justified. That is, every act of violence will be accompanied by a set of speech acts that strive to justify that act. This is hardly to say that such justifications are equally plausible. Some will be downright risible, but I daresay few acts of violence go unspoken. This, admittedly, is tricky. There are black holes, and people who are simply “disappeared.” And regimes (or the Mafia) are rarely explicit about the kinds of torture they deploy. Similarly, the Nazi concentration camps were (sort of) secret, while what was going on in those camps was even more secret. Still, in all these cases it was generally known that “enemies” (of the state, of the people, of our clan) were targets, even if the details were left to the imagination or only whispered in various quarters. And leaving things to the imagination might even be a more effective way to instigate terror.

If I am right that all acts of violence need to be justified, that suggests there is a prima facie assumption that violence is wrong. It can only be justifiable if compelling reasons as to its necessity are offered. Violence is “moralized” (made moral) when it is claimed that only its deployment can insure the health of morality against the threats posed by the immoral. Wherever an attempt to justify violence is made, the term “necessary” will almost invariably appear. The perpetrator of violence will almost always express regret that violence had to be resorted to. But his victim left him no choice. It was a species of self-defense; without the recourse to violence, some horrible consequence would have unfolded.

To appeal to self-defense is always an attractive option because self-defense is almost universally accepted as the one obvious, incontrovertible, justification for violence. No one currently thinks the Ukrainians are engaging in unjustified violence against the Russian invaders—unless they buy Russian propaganda in all its absurdity. But even here matters are not simple. Firstly, because self-defense gets entangled with questions of revenge, which may explain why the desire for revenge is so powerful. But revenge notoriously generates cycles of violence and, thus, is not (in many cases) a successful remedy to inflicted violence. It just keeps violence going.

Secondly, self-defense gets tangled up in notions of “proportionate violence.” There is some sense that violence inflicted as a response to a prior act of violence should be proportionate. To escalate the scale of violence, even in cases of self-defense, is usually seen as morally dubious. The obvious current example is Israel’s response to the attacks by Hamas on October 7, 2023. The whole notion of “proportionate violence” is bizarre. Who is doing the measuring? Yet the moral intuition underlying the notion is real and strongly felt. Even in a no holds barred war (such as World War II) some limitations on violence are still respected. The Germans did not kill downed Allied airmen wholesale, or non-Russian prisoners of war. How to understand where and how some limitations are imposed on possible acts of violence is extremely difficult. There is no formula; there is a tendency toward escalation; and yet since 1945 no belligerent with nuclear arms has used them. Whether that restraint is solely a result of a rational fear of retaliation is an open question. In any case, whether with the notion of proportion in violent responses to acts of violence or in self-imposed limitations on the means of violence deployed in conflicts, there is a shaky, unenforceable, yet real set of constraints. When those constraints are ignored, the violent actors lose any plausible grounds for justification. And it proves both difficult and rare for any person or any regime to say “fuck it” to all attempts at justification. The rule does seem to apply even in the most egregious cases: those engaged in violence will attempt to justify their actions. Violent actors will try to win the rhetorical battle in the court of public opinion. (In international affairs currently, that court is often the United Nations. Its lack of enforcement powers make it seem absurd in many cases, yet state actors still care about its verdicts.)

Because self-defense is almost always accepted as a justification, those who initiate violence have a much harder row to hoe. For that reason, peremptory violence is most often justified in the name of preventing an even greater harm than the violence itself. The speech acts here are counter-factual; if I don’t act violently, these things will happen.

Presumably, violence could be deployed to bring a better world into existence (Soviet violence was perhaps an instance), but much more usually violence is justified as overcoming the threat certain others pose to the current state of affairs. Still, preventive violence can morph into (or be merged with) creative violence. The Nazis offer an example of such intertwining. They preached (and practiced) violence against the threat posed by Jews and communists, but they also used the violence to create a whole new political order, one they claimed would be strong enough to combat those threats. In its own way, the current Trump administration is following that path. It has designated a set of enemies (including the “deep state”) fit to be punished while also attempting to create a whole new form of government (rule by executive) justified as the only means to overcome the enemies.

Since the revulsion against violence, the prima facie assumption of its being morally wrong, is so prevalent, the demonization of enemies is required. Such enemies must be deemed outside the moral pale. This gets complicated, of course, in the modern state system, with its distinction between citizens and non-citizens. Even the Nazis felt compelled to strip people of citizenship first before making them the victims of violence. It remains to be seen how much the Trump administration will refrain from violence against citizens. Or if it will begin to strip citizenship from current citizens. For now, Trump has declared open season on non-citizens, while only (?) depriving citizens of employment while not sending them off to prison. (But his “lock ’em up” fantasies might lead to that next step.)

But what about those for whom violence is not wrong, but actually to be celebrated as a sign of strength. Easy enough for Arendt to make fun of such losers for mistaking a capacity for violence with real power. Those losers still can cause severe havoc in the world. And it’s also easy to pathologize these incels, spending hours and hours “gaming,” and frustrated by their lack of access to good jobs, sexual partners, or social respect. It remains the fact that for some people (mostly men) violence is the means to self-esteem, to showing that they are here and can make a difference in (an impact on) the world. The recruits for para-military and state thuggery are standing by. And, as Christopher Browning’s work has shown, just the need to go along, to be accepted as a member of a group, can facilitate violence once someone else instigates it. Fear of ostracism from the only group that is offering one membership can be sufficient motive to participate in acts of violence in good conscience. The point: any attempt to come to grips with violence that appeals only to its rationality or to the justifications offered to render it compatible with morality will miss the non-rational and non-moral motivations that enable much violence. From sadism and crimes of unreflective passion to conformism and ecstatic participation in group actions, the sources of violence are multiple and defy calculation along cost/benefit lines, or in terms of what can be morally justified.

To be continued. These musings are, in large part, only the preliminaries to considering the use of violence as a tactic of resistance to established regimes. I will take up that question of strategy in subsequent posts.

Anticolonial Aesthetics and a Politics of the Impossible

I want to register some reactions to J. Daniel Elam’s compelling World Literature for the Wretched of the Earth: Anticolonial Aesthetics, Postcolonial Politics (Fordham University Press, 2021).

Elam begins form a position almost exactly identical to that of Christina Sharpe—the position of those whose lives are not only not protected by the state, but marked by the state for wretchedness unto death.

“Politics can only be ‘the art of the possible’ for those whose lives are secured by the state, or, in other words, only for those who can confidently know that they will live to see the ‘possible’ attained. Those whose lives are not guaranteed by the state, or those whose lives the state actively expects to end, cannot afford the luxury of such politics. The ‘wretched of the earth’ require, instead, a politics of the impossible. This politics requires imagining and foregrounding, in the face of imminent or certain death, a politics not accountable to regimes of ‘success,’ ‘sustainability,’ or ‘attainability,’ but rather to ‘the meantime’: the time being, the passing moment, and the present” (2-3).

“This is an unsustainable and inconsequential politics. It is a radical politics of the present. . . . Despair and nihilism are insufficient for an anticolonial politics, but they guard against the equally unsatisfactory politics of optimism and hope. Anticolonialism is, in this final instance, a project of locating fleeting moments of egalitarian politics in the relative opacity of an unguaranteed future” (3).

In a memorable phrase, Elam writes of recuperating “an anti-nihilist non-futurity”(5)—connected to the attempt “to create a language sufficient to imagine political collectivities motivated by the fact of their current impossibility. They [anticolonial writers] invented aesthetic forms necessary to imagine a worldwide egalitarianism rooted in the unlikelihood of any future at all” (4).

My first response is to note how closely this tracks Walter Pater’s aestheticism. Many of the key themes of the conclusion to The Renaissance are reprised here: the focus on fleeting moments, the insistence on the present since the future only brings death, the rejection of the utilitarian calculi that measure the worth of the present in terms of its “fruits,” in the things that effort in the present will make possible, will bring into existence. Pater’s radical atomism moves toward severing any connection between one moment and another—a dissolution that also unravels the self (which is revealed as an essentially temporal construct, built upon a constructed continuity between past and present, thus creating an entity, an identity, that can be carried into the future.) Elam follows a similar path when he considers Gandhi’s attempts “to abandon both mastery and self”(73), and recommends “the disavowal of the self-knowing self,” in favor of “the tentative assertion ‘that the something that [one is] should be openly expressed as provisional, revocable, insignificant, inessential, in a word, irrelevant’”(125; italics and brackets in original; the quote is, I think, from Roland Barthes, although Elam’s footnote doesn’t make that absolutely clear.)

To note the similarities to Pater is not to belittle Elam’s project. My intent, rather, is to clarify the stakes. The echo here, I think, is the Adorno and Horkheimer of The Dialectic of Enlightenment. The target is the madness of productivity. Everything must be turned to account. Everything we do is in order to achieve something else. Nothing is done for its own sake. Elam’s experiment is to ponder—with the help of a series of anticolonial writers—what it would mean to embrace the “inconsequential,” to step aside from the pressure, the demand, to produce a future out of the miseries of the present. The claim—and here the similarities are to the contemporary work of Fred Moten, David Graeber, and Jack Halberstam among others—is that the effort to produce that better future only guarantees making the present miserable. It is the very logics of mastery and productivity that render life in the here and now unbearable. In his most expansive moments, it is that logic of exploiting the present for the future profits it can secure that is the hallmark of colonialism. To be anticolonial is not simply to oust the European colonial power; the fully anticolonial must overthrow the extractive processes that strip-mine life right now. It is regimes of accumulation, laying up stores for the future, that must be overcome.

Except that it can’t be overcome—or, at least, won’t be overcome in your lifetime or mine. Faced with that impossibility, what kind of politics makes sense? Elam proposes an inconsequential politics, one that aims (only) for “fleeting moments” of egalitarian commonality. Even putting it that way makes it too utilitarian. Elam speaks of a non-teleological politics, which starts to look something like Foucault’s “care of the self,” except with a more collective resonance. Certainly in Graeber and Moten, the call is for something like “being the change you want to see in the world” (the famous charge that Gandhi lays on us). Elam ponders the possibility (which he derives from Fanon) of “stopping and leaving” (pp. 117-125), of refusing to play the utilitarian game. Why accept the madness and despair the colonial regime inflicts? Refuse participation in its mad push for ever more productivity—a push that destroys life in all its forms, human and non-human.

I want, today, to register all my worries about an inconsequential politics. But I will in my next post concentrate on the strengths of Elam’s case—and on the specifics of the practices he thinks embody the politics of the impossible, of the meantime, that he advocates.

Elam is way too smart to believe that many people have the option of stopping and leaving. There is “no escape” (124-125) for the vast majority. That’s why his is a politics of the impossible. Which is a nice intellectual legerdemain, but of no consolation (dare I say of “no use”) to those suffering in the present. To be (most likely) over romantic about it, I am surprised that Elam doesn’t turn to what Hannah Arendt called “the lost treasure of revolution.” Arendt was referring to the ways in which participation in collective struggle is, itself, a heady and deeply satisfying experience. And it is so satisfying in large part because it gives individuals the kind of immersion in a collective project that is seldom afforded to us. In short, revolutionary struggle does not have to succeed to prove meaningful. But it does have to be oriented to a continual protest against and articulation of the injustices of the existing socio-political structures. For Elam’s purposes, it provides that experience of egalitarian collectivity that he treasures

Elam’s book notably never uses the terms “justice” or “power.” Maybe that’s because “justice” and “power” are consequentialist in their focus on outcomes. But I suspect—and here is where I really ground my reservations about a politics of the impossible—it is because politics is always disappointing. No political effort ever achieves it goals in a perfect, non-compromised fashion. When full-scaled utopia (the overthrow of all productivity, all sacrifice of the present in order to achieve something in the future) is your stated desire, then it follows inevitably that you will see the goal is impossible and opt for a politics of the impossible instead of the messy politics of the possible. Your refusal to settle for half a loaf (social democracy instead of a complete dismantling of capitalism, to take one example) means you dream of an (impossible) escape from politics altogether. Because justice can never be won once and for all, because it can only be secured imperfectly and temporarily by the endless fight against the forces that would withhold it, you want to walk away. The continual mixture of defeat with (compromised and partial) victories is just too exhausting. Better to go off (and here I am being really unfair to Elam as tomorrow’s post will show) and read a book instead.

All of this connects to the (only implied in Elam’s book) alignment of power with oppression. But power can also refer to the capacity to get something done—and point us toward the things that individual could never accomplish on their own, but can accomplish when part of a collective. We are back to the “lost treasure.” Feeling powerless in the face of established institutions, routines, and socio-economic demands is the common lot in today’s world (and, undoubtedly, in every society throughout human time). That’s why experiences of power, of being able to participate in doing something that moves (however imperfectly) toward its goal, are so exhilarating. The imagined and virtual collectivities that Elam celebrates, even as he acknowledges they are “ephemeral and fleeting” (14), look like a simulacrum of what the heart really desires.

In short, this is a politics of despair, a politics that pursues a “diminished thing” (the Robert Frost poem I keep coming back to) because it cannot see a path to what it truly desires. Of course, Elam explicitly acknowledges that he is describing a politics of despair. The question on the table is how to live under terrible conditions, ones that make it impossible to live an affirmable life. That’s the strength of his book—and of Moten’s work (to take one other example). And that’s the question—how to live—that I will take up tomorrow.

But, first, let me summarize my objections. There are two main planks, both of which might be seen as protests against the all-or-nothing position associated with the dream of revolutionary transformation. First, capitalism, utilitarianism, colonialism, racism are all configured as monolithic totalities, not only entirely evil, but also viewed as coherent overarching wholes that must be felled tout court or not at all. I am deeply influenced by Gibson-Graham’s The End of Capitalism as We Know It on this score. We need analyses that abandon totalized characterizations of large abstractions in favor of examination of varied practices on the ground. To paint all utilitarian thinking and effort as oppressive means, presumably, that the writing of books is as soul-destroying as working in a coal mine.

Admittedly, when it comes to racism and colonialism, I am not inclined to parse out certain practices that are acceptable or (even) less pernicious. But do we really have to align colonialism with utilitarian thinking—and then say we have only eradicated colonialism when we have rendered the world free of the tyranny of consequentialism? When it comes to racism, once we posit that racism is constitutive of American society—and that racism in the US will only be overcome when the whole social order is dissolved—we not only should expect a fight to the death (who is going to acquiesce in the complete collapse of society?), but also (and more much importantly in my view) ignore and fail to recognize as resources the vocabulary of rights and equality built into the American political order—a vocabulary that blacks (and others) have been able to mobilize to their benefit. In short, American racism exists alongside other components of “Americanism” in ways that belie seeing American society as monolithically racist–or as lacking any internal resources, traditions, or institutions that can be used to fight racism.

Working the seams is, I am arguing, a more realistic politics than constructing (theoretically) an undifferentiated, non-contradictory, monolith which can then only be dislodged (or even changed) by its complete dismantling. I have also already said that this alternative politics is frustrating, endless, replete with partial victories, stinging defeats, and soul-wrenching compromises. But it also offers joys of participation to those engaged in its multiple struggles. The politics of despair, I am suggesting, comes from a demand for all or nothing—combined with the response that “I’ll take nothing” because I know that getting all is impossible.

Second, the problem with all or nothing thinking in that it locates the problem in “the system.” The focus is on institutional fixes. If we just get the design right, then all that messy political stuff will disappear. Justice, equality, freedom will just flow automatically from the perfect machinery we have established. (Marx offers a prime example of this kind of thinking.) But what I am saying is that there is no escape from politics, from the endless need to negotiate among competing interests, competing visions of what is desirable, and also (crucially) between necessary trade-offs among goods. There are always going to be people trying to game the system (no matter what the system is), but there is also the intractable fact that securing one good must in many cases require sacrificing another good—and there have to be political processes to handle disputes over what sacrifices to make. The left is all too prone to an unrealistic faith in mechanisms, in design.

This last way of thinking, I should add, is not offered in any form in Elam’s work. Instead, his politics of the impossible is addressed to a different critique of revolutionary practice and theory. Namely, he is concerned that the means of revolution (violence justified by its ends, for one example) or its aims (to gain power in state form, to achieve sovereignty) will doom any successful revolution to merely replicate (even if in somewhat different forms) the oppressions of the prior regime. If colonialism is characterized by a logic of mastery, of consequential action, then colonialism is not overcome when the European occupier leaves. The post-colonial nation state, all too often (and inevitably it would seem in this despairing politics), offers new versions of the assaults on life that characterized the colonial period. Postcolonialism is a social and political condition that has not yet been achieved, no matter who sits in the halls of government.

A good place to end for today because it points to one of the many strengths in Elam’s book. He is addressing real dilemmas: how to live in an unjust present? How to move us from that present to a future that will not merely reproduce the oppressions of today? There is a good case to be made—and he makes it—that the traditional politics of struggle and revolution has been unable to deliver on its promises—and so a new kind of politics must be imagined and practiced. And there is surely a case to be made that sacrificing lives in the present in the name of a better future that is not going to be achieved (that is impossible to achieve?) is madness and unjustifiable. (We just need to think of Stalin and Mao to see just how mad—and how evil—such sacrifices are.) So how to live “in the meantime” is an urgent question. That part of me hates ceding power to the bad actors, hates what looks like the quietism of letting the other side win, doesn’t mean that Elam is wrong. I just can’t stop asking why the other side’s world (despite its self-destructive insanity, measured in the toll it takes on human and non-human life) is “possible” while our (the left’s) utopian visions are “impossible.”

Ben Lerner (2)

Floating beneath the surface in Lerner’s 10:24 is a longing for connection, for art’s communicative possibilities to open up a pathway to community.

“[I] felt the small thrill I always felt to a lesser or greater degree when I look at Manhattan’s skyline and the innumerable illuminated windows and the liquid sapphire and ruby of traffic on the FDR Drive and the present absence of the towers. It was a thrill that only built space produced in me, never the natural world, and only when there was an incommensurablity of scale—the human dimension of the windows tiny from such distance combining but not dissolving into the larger architecture of the skyline that was the expression, the material signature, of a collective person who didn’t yet exist, a still-uninhabited second person plural to whom all the arts, even in their most intimate register, were nevertheless addressed. Only an urban experience of the sublime was available to me because only then was the greatness beyond calculation the intuition of community. . . . [W]henever I looked at lower Manhattan from Whitman’s side of the river I resolved to become one of the artists who momentarily made bad forms of collectivity figures of this possibility, a proprioceptive flicker in advance of the communal body. What I felt when I tried to take in the skyline—and instead was taken in by it—was a fullness indistinguishable from being emptied, my personality dissolving into a personhood so abstract that every atom belonging to me as good belonged to Noor, the fiction of the world rearranging itself around her. If there had been a way to say it without it sounding like presumptuous co-op nonsense, I would have wanted to tell her that discovering you are not identical with yourself even in the most disturbing and painful way still contains the glimmer, however refracted, of the world to come, where everything is the same but a little different because the past will be citable in all of its moments, including those that from our present present happened but never occurred. You might have seen me sitting there on the bench that midnight, my hair matted down by the bandanna, eating an irresponsible quantity of unsulfured mango, and having, as I projected myself into the future, a mild lacrimal event” (108-109).

The theme returns in a short lecture given by the narrator at a round-table featuring three writers. He has explained how the Challenger disaster and its aftermath (a poetic speech by Ronal Reagan, the rash of anonymously generated jokes about the event that circulate through the culture) set him on the road to becoming a writer.

“If I had to trace my origins as a poet to a specific moment, I’d locate it there, in those modes of recycling. I make no claims for ‘High Flight’ [a poem Reagan quotes in his speech] as a poem—in fact, I think it’s a terrible poem—and Ronald Reagan I consider a mass murderer. I don’t see anything formally interesting in the Challenger jokes, I can’t find anything to celebrate there; they weren’t even funny at the time. But I wonder if we can think of them as bad forms of collectivity that can serve as figures of its real possibility: prosody and grammars the stuff out of which we build a social world, a way of organizing meaning and time that belongs to nobody in particular but courses through us all” (115-116).

The wistfulness here reminds me of John Lennon’s Imagine—and seems tied to the author’s (and our?) inability to access Whitmanian mysticism with any conviction. The skyline is a monument to collectivity. It could never have been built except by many human hands working in concert. And even if the various activities encompassed by city life—“bundled debt, trace amounts of antidepressants in the municipal water, the vast arterial network of traffic, changing weather patterns of increasing severity” (108)—are “bad forms of collectivity” they are “figures” of the possibility of collectivity. Selves share the “meanings” by which “we build a social world.” The boundaries between selves are utterly porous; we dissolve into one another—and into the stories that we share, the images that guide us. If only we could tweak those facts, shift them slightly on their axes—then the world and each one of us would be “the same but a little bit different” (a formula for utopia that comes from Benjamin or Brecht or someone of that ilk; I can’t find the exact source).

We always already exist in collectivities; the struggle is to make them better, to make them serve our deepest longings rather than to stifle and frustrate them. We fight collectivity (cling to selfishness in all its senses) even as we long for it. Art is connected to that longing; think of how movies and plays move us to tears, even those of us who almost never cry in “real life.” We only indulge our longings in the safe space of art, while living our prudent, advantage-seeking, lives in the everyday world. We know—as Adorno says—what our better selves and a better world look like, and we live out the shame (no matter how deeply we manage to bury it) of the gap between that vision of the good and the sordid realities we inhabit and reproduce.

The web of shared meanings is what we might call “myth”—and what is frightening about the current moment in American history is that the prevailing “myth” is no longer shared. (Probably it never was; more likely is that those who held alternative visions were more ruthlessly silenced in the past.) There are two (at least) utterly incompatible set of meanings circulating through the culture—and they appear so incompatible that the proponents of each find it close to unimaginable to share the national space with the other side.

In a sense, the power of art has never been so dramatically on display. The left/liberal vision occupies the lion’s share of official culture, from the high art bastions of museums and universities to the culture industry’s popular music, film, and TV. But the unofficial, unsanctioned world of the internet has spawned the alternative vision of the populist right, which now has its spokesperson in the White House. Fed by a not inaccurate understanding of its exclusion from “respectable” opinion, populism has developed its alternative modes of communication alongside its refusal to credit anything the official world has to say.

Communication, “spin,” how and to whom facts and meanings are articulated, command the field. Only catastrophic natural events—the virus, hurricanes, wildfires—seem capable of breaking through the morass of words and images, and not in any definitive, unequivocal way. That supposed objective barometer of facts on the ground—the market—has proved as fictitious (if not more) than other “social indicators.” Printing money and piling up debt have become disconnected from any actual consequences. Inflation remains low, faith in government bonds remains unshaken, the stock market indices remain high. We do appear to have left a reality-based world far behind.

And yet. There is so much real and remediable suffering out there. How did we, the human race, manage to turn all our possibilities, all our astounding capacities, into shit? Collectively, we have built an amazing world. But it amazes far more often by its byzantine dysfunctions than its praise-worthy accomplishments. We can work wonders in medicine, but have developed a bureaucracy for delivering medical care that creates massive amounts of spiritually deadening labor and places obstacles in the way of getting treatment to those in need of it. We can feed seven billion people through our farming practices, but have built a system with perverse incentives that lead to the destruction of food while people go hungry and encourages the depletion of the natural sources of agricultural productivity. We spend billions of dollars on military hardware, but claim we can’t afford to help the 20% of children who live in poverty.

I have always disliked Lennon’s Imagine. It seems so removed from actual engagement, so enchanted with its own melancholy. I find Lerner’s wistfulness more substantial. He more fully articulates the sense of being both outside and inside of the collective failure. Outside of it because seemingly unable to effect its unfolding disasters in any way—and outside of it because viewing it from a perspective that makes one unable to take its madness for granted or as inevitable or as immune from harsh judgment. Inside because one is fully engorged by this whale; one can’t pretend not to be a participant, day in and day out, as one struggles to construct a life, a way of negotiating through this minefield. Coming to terms with the devil is what we do even if we dream of living otherwise. Driving one’s car, paying one’s insurance and tax bills to underwrite inhumane systems, consuming then throwing away plastic. The list of contributions we make toward perpetuating the world as currently constituted is endless.

Stop the world, I want to get off. Whitman’s optimism is no longer available, even if his dreams are. Lerner returns to Whitman later in the book and wonders about the “ecstasy” that runs through Whitman’s encounters with wounded Union soldiers in the hospitals in Washington DC. There is something inhuman, deeply disturbing, in how Whitman gets off on the sight of these suffering bodies. Optimism in such circumstances is reprehensible—and seems linked to an ideology of “glorious sacrifice” that was, I would hope, finally put to rest by World War I.

Where to find that optimism today? Clearly, some people find in the collectivities created by the demonstrations that have become a recurrent feature of American civil life in 2020. Insofar as the demonstrations attempt to construct—and make stick—a counter-narrative, a vision of American society antithetical to the racism and division Trump wants to amplify, the battle is on. It is a war of meanings, and a war between an inclusive vision of collectivity against a divisive one. Lerner articulates for us the forlorn, but still deeply felt, longing for that inclusive collectivity (the beloved community) even as he reminds us that art (if understood in the widest possible sense) is where articulation takes place, where the meanings we hope to share are first presented. We can never quite believe that Shelley was right about poets being the unacknowledged legislators, but it is less incredible to recognize how the arts are powerful creators of community—and of the shared meanings that hold communities together.

R.I.P.: American Democracy

The flags should all be flying at half-mast today. American democracy died last night.

I know many will say it has been on life-support for many a day now. Others will say, “you fool, it never existed in the first place.”

But it did exist so long as the path forward, the way to bring about the changes and reforms one desired, was electoral politics. If you could swing, through all the devices of persuasion, a majority to your side, you could take over the government and pass the legislation you deemed necessary.

Yes, that is simplistic and ignores all the veto points, all the obstacles put in the pathway of change. And it ignores how the system always excluded certain people—people who had to resort to extra-electoral tactics (civil disobedience and its various forms of protest) to make their needs and desires felt.

But the great social movements of American history, the women’s movement and the civil rights movement, aimed for the vote. They put so much emphasis on gaining the vote precisely because they associated the vote with power, the power to effect change. They believed that we had enough of a democracy, no matter how imperfect, that it made sense to engage in electoral politics—and that electoral politics was the road to reform.

Perhaps that belief was a delusion, but 2006 and 2008 seemed to bear it out. The country rose up against the lies and incompetence of the Bush administration—and grabbed the government back.

Now, however, we have a Republican Party in power that is determined to never let another 2006 or 2008 occur. Their simple plan is to render “free and fair” (that old cliché) elections impossible. Emboldened by the nation’s acceptance of Bush v. Gore, they have deployed every means at their disposal; they keep people from voting or nullify electoral results: voter suppression, gerrymandering, judicial or legislative over-rides of election results (taking away powers of elected officials if they are Democrats, as has happened in both Wisconsin and North Carolina).

Still, I will admit to having thought there was a limit to their willingness to turn elections into farces worthy of the so-called “people’s republics” of yore. Surely, even the Republicans needed the cover of “legitimacy” that elections provide in a democracy. Various pundits kept claiming that John Roberts was the bulwark against complete Republican destruction of our democracy. He cared, they said, about the integrity of the Supreme Court, about its standing above partisan politics.

Quite evidently not. The Supreme Court last night authorized a Wisconsin election in which thousands will not have their votes counted. The situation is Kafkaesque: in order to be counted ballots must be returned before they have been received. But the court’s decision is as straightforward as could be: we will validate election results even though thousands are prevented from voting.

I am heartsick. If electoral politics are a sham, are rigged from the outset, the only way forward is non-electoral politics. As Martin Luther King saw very clearly, that means either a “persistent and unyielding” non-violent mass movement or a resort (always, necessarily by a much smaller number) to violence. King insisted that violence could not succeed; not only were the odds against it too great because you will never get large numbers to join your violent movement, but also because violence breeds more violence as it creates bitterness and the desire (almost impossible to ignore) for revenge. It also turns off those sympathetic to your cause, but opposed to violent means. (I am channeling MLK’s essay, “The Social Organization of Nonviolence” here.)

The Republicans have learned (it would seem) over the past few years that they pay no price for their destruction of democracy. I venture to guess that life for most people in this country is just comfortable enough to keep them from endangering what they have by devoting themselves to a long, persistent struggle. Endangering their leisure time, their peace of mind, their jobs and livelihood. The reasons may range from petty to dangers to economic and physical well-being.

It seems that the death of democracy will occur amidst various howls of protest, but little more than that. The officials elected in today’s Wisconsin election will take office—and continue to wreak the damage that has been the platform of Wisconsin’s Republicans for the past ten years.

Unless a strong and effective dissent is lodged—and such a dissent will require sacrifices of time, comfort, and well-being—democracy will not return. Or, if you prefer, democracy will not be seen for the first time in this land. I do not see where that dissent will come from, where that movement will arise.