From: Edouard Glissant, Faulkner, Mississippi (Paris: Stock, 1996); translation and annotation by HS

At the time when Faulkner began to write, autobiographies of former slaves who had escaped from their condition and won, through education, the right to judge the system and those who had benefited from it, began to appear.[1]

Associations formed in the early twentieth century had sought out and recorded the memories of the last ex-slaves still alive. In the 1930s and 40s appeared Native Son [1940] and Black Boy [1945], two works by Richard Wright which depicted the true condition of the blacks. Naturally, nowhere in these texts is there to be found the slightest communion or solidarity, even hidden or disguised, between former slaves and former masters, despite the recognized fact that many house slaves (but never field slaves) followed their masters and helped them during the Civil War. Richard Wright’s refusal is total. There is no ascesis or sublimation, and not the first sign of forgiveness.

Faulkner must have read these works. It does not appear that he was disturbed or influenced by them. He may have agreed that the call to rebellion by black people was self-evident, but decided at the same time that it was not for him to take it up. And to consider everything, we know his contradictory opinions on the subject, including his declaration in favor of the integration of the schools or in favor of inscribing the names of black soldiers (though on a “distinct” list) on the monuments to the dead of World Wars I and II, which won him an uncomfortable standing in the town of Oxford toward the end of his life.

Faulkner is no civil-rights advocate or social reformer… He is not blind toward the inequities of the South, even if he is unwilling to let an outsider point them out. In this he is characteristically American: while the citizens of the USA can be ferocious in the critical analysis of their own society, a feature that is not found among all peoples, these very same lucid analysts are unable, or at least not very willing, to hear a foreigner expound their misdeeds. 

Faulkner cannot break away from his caste or from his country, the South. He says of Albert Camus: “We shared the same anguish.” What anguish was that? Certainly not the angst that haunts an existentialist thinker, but the anguish of having a vision of justice and yet being unable to speak it out (even at the price of separating justice from truth) since to do so would be to take sides against your own people.

There is another reason for Faulkner’s “suspending judgment” about the South. He needs the ambiguity of unveiling as a spring for the tragedy that he is developing. A certified declaration of the “badness” of the South would have interrupted once and for all the process of unveiling that takes place in his work. It is in and through the mysterious (or at any rate unspoken) articulation of gradual unveiling that the possible first crime reveals itself as damnation, that sin inaugurates tragedy….

For these reasons Faulkner treats his black characters without pity, describing them, as he does with all the people he puts into his work, brutally, with no stylistic understatement, sometimes in a very stereotypical way, with the respect that he thinks they deserve, that is, with merciless impartiality. 

Stereotypes… It is true that here and again Faulkner says (or has one of his characters say) that a white person will never understand the Negro. One never hears the symmetrical opposite… that “Negroes will never be able to understand the whites.” As if only the whites were possessed with the need to understand. “Negroes,” then, whatever you make of it. Stereotypical profiles, and invisible because they sink into a mass. Was this a case of respecting the opacity of the other, or the seed of a system of apartheid? A free depth of identity or a careless lack of interest? It depends on who in the work is talking.

            (pp. 90-93)

[1] Glissant’s chronology is radically foreshortened. A fuller account would include consideration of, e.g.: Frederick Douglass, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, An American Slave (1845), Harriet Jacobs, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl (1861), Booker T. Washington, Up From Slavery (1901), W E. B. DuBois, The Souls of Black Folk (1903). Anyone who read English could learn about the experiences and feelings of enslaved people. The WPA slave narrative project began in 1936.

It’s a repost, but ya know what? Things haven’t changed. They’ve only regressed. So here’s my Fourth of July offering.

Another Yelp for Liberty

Category: Politics

2008-07-01 20:10:09

Haun Saussy

“How is it that we hear the loudest yelps for liberty among the drivers of negroes?”[1] Thus, in 1775, before the founding of the Republic and even before its unilateral declaration of independence, Dr. Samuel Johnson pinched a nerve of American identity—perhaps the nerve of American identity. It is certainly my nerve. 

That nerve has been painfully twisted in me for the last several years, not least by the revelations of systematic, planned torture and degradation in the prisons of Iraq, performed by the army that entered that country in order to “liberate” it. It is hard to look at those pictures, to read the reports, and imagine Iraqis taking seriously our claims to be bringers of freedom. The pictures, the policy they make visible and the cover-up intended to keep them from becoming public knowledge paint us as hypocrites, people who preach large and glorious principles but do selfish and brutal things. Dr. Johnson put his finger on the eternally sensitive question of whether we are who we claim to be. 

What does liberty have to do with the United States in middle 2008? Other values are associated with the United States, to be sure, by Americans and by others. It is the home of military power, of great wealth, of opportunity, of “freedom of choice” (as interpreted for consumerist purposes), of technological progress, of unregulated markets, of expanding frontiers. I don’t think any of these define the United States as having a moral mission; while good things in themselves, perhaps, they are defective as ethical ends. They are interests rather than principles. Which of them would come first, if we had to choose? Now that we are being maintained in a constant state of emergency through threats of terrorist action, amplified by government and media reminders, I think we have to consider the choices we do make, and resist the wrong ones. 

Ever since the morning of September eleventh, 2001, one version of that choice has been circulated and found persuasive by many of my countrymen. I was listening to the radio at around 8:00 on that shocking day (11:00 New York time), and already, as the towers were coming down, you could hear a government expert telling the public that some of the freedoms we had come to take for granted would have to be restricted in the interests of security. Exactly what freedoms this meant was not clear, but I suspected (correctly, as it proved) that the basic civil rights of habeas corpus, due process, the freedom from search without warrant, and protection against self-incrimination would be taken as applying selectively to different groups in the population. Americans in general were extraordinarily restrained in the expression of their anger and horror: a few people who “looked Middle Eastern” (often Sikhs, with their prominent turbans) were beaten or killed in the streets, and though any such violence is scandalous and inexcusable among a civilized and pluralistic people, the restraint of citizens contrasts strongly with the activism of government, which has expanded its powers of investigation and detention well beyond the limits fixed by the Bill of Rights, using the threat of terrorism as a mugger uses a gun to persuade Americans that the erosion of their constitutional freedoms does not matter. While trade-offs between security and freedom were much talked about, freedom was not the only value being put on the block. Prominent center-liberal magazines such as the Atlantic ran articles proposing scenarios in which torture could be justified.[2] The situations scrupulously constructed by ethicists (a ticking time bomb, lives of many civilians at risk, one terrorist captive whose refusal to speak holds up the investigation) may have made literate Americans think twice about their rejection of torture as an information-gathering method, but as we have seen, once taken to the field of operations in Afghanistan, Iraq and Guantí¡namo Bay, the license to make free with the bodies and minds of prisoners, even in the absence of any identifiable intelligence motive, has been interpreted quite broadly. At the same time, the idea of “empire” has been made to sound respectable, with Iraq a test case for an empire of freedom under American tutelage.[3] The contradiction between subjugating people and setting them free is a little too bald for dialectical mediation; in any case, when we say “empire” we are not just talking about taking charge of a chaotic situation in order to create conditions for freedom. Empire means ruling others as subject peoples, not citizens, and doing it in a durable fashion. It means becoming “drivers of negroes.” Does anyone remember “the free world” that we were supposed to be leading? Just as in the case of torture and civil rights, an important piece of the American identity has become negotiable, an option, a mere interest to be downgraded when other interests are paramount. Let us hope the aberration will soon be over. 

For many years, critiques of “the West” have centered on its “universalism”—the unearned privilege Western speakers claim for their own ideals, which they treat as intrinsically superior to the ideals of other peoples. But in the case I am talking about, it is rather the failure of universalism that causes problems. As Confucius put it so long ago, “what you yourself do not want, you must not push upon others”; or as John Rawls put it, “justice as fairness” begins when the members of society “contract into” the laws governing not others, but themselves.[4] A law made by an authority that is not subject to the law does not pass this common-sense test of fairness. Similarly, hypocrisy invalidates ethical claims because it presents as universal a rule that the hypocrite does not apply to himself. So, for example, the American government claims to represent and support “the rule of law,” even international law, while excepting itself and particularly its soldiers from the International Criminal Court. What is in evidence here is not universalism, but fake universalism exploited for the advantage of a few. The difference is worth marking.

Post-September 11, the verdict of hypocrisy can be moderated in at least one respect: if Americans have given up their own civil rights and protections so willingly, their consent to the non-observation of these rights and protections in the case of others can be construed as fair dealing, submission to the same law to govern self and other. But in fact the abandonment of civil rights has not occurred publicly, would be a scandal if applied across the board, and so does not pass the ethical test of fairness. Arrest a “normal” American (white, Christian, prosperous, law-abiding, etc.) at random, hold him without trial for a year or two, and see if he’ll claim to be protected by the Constitution: I think this experiment has a foregone conclusion. But most such “normal” Americans have yet to learn that the laws passed in the wake of September 11 put few limits on the executive branch’s privilege to suspend civil rights, and that this applies to them. “That sort of thing won’t happen to me”: this certainty is where the rot sets in, for it divides the ethical community into rulers and ruled. Freedom without equality is privilege. “Liberty” then becomes a hollow word ready for cynical exploitation: some people have it, and think they can keep it even while denying it to others. In practice, then, there is still a hypocritical mismatch between the law we endorse and the law we endure. Nor do I expect this gap to shrink. Either the standard will continue to dip, as justice is progressively replaced by brute force, or Americans will remember what the Bill of Rights was all about and demand their old protections back. Maybe, if we are not to be “drivers of negroes,” we will demand these rights for all citizens, even all people. 

***
“The loudest yelps for liberty among the drivers of negroes”—though Dr. Johnson’s formulation of the American flaw was no doubt meant as a soundbite, an accusation of absurdity for instant, indignant consumption, it invites a more patient interpretation. Like many of my ancestors, the Continental Congress proclaimed liberty for themselves but did not bestow it on those they controlled; they rejected empire above them but saw no objection to setting up an empire of their own, with power given to a dominant people over a subservient people. Dr. Johnson’s critique amounts to saying: although they yelp for liberty, they are nonetheless drivers of negroes. They demand something for themselves that they deny to others. They were inconsistent; they had no true principles, only a self-interested charade of high-sounding words. Suppose, per absurdum, that the rebels spoke sincerely: “It has been proposed, that the slaves should be set free, an act, which, surely, the lovers of liberty cannot but commend. If they are furnished with firearms for defence, and utensils for husbandry, and settled in some simple form of government within the country, they may be more grateful and honest than their masters.” 

But what if Dr. Johnson was wrong in assuming that a true principle, a universally binding maxim, was at stake? What if the American rebels of 1775, far from proclaiming an intrinsic human right to liberty and self-government (Thomas Jefferson’s Declaration was a year in the future), were pushing a more factual claim, to the effect that their domination over others conferred on them a lordly status incompatible with servitude to the British Crown, or any other external power? In that case, the situation would need to be revised to read: because they have become drivers of negroes, they yelp for liberty. My freedom is not an abstract principle or a rule to be demonstrated in universal practice, but a victory I gain through struggle with another, who must lose if I am to win. This Hegelian-sounding account yields a darker reading of American history, to be sure, in which Southern history gives the truth of which progressive, Unionist history only offers a mythicized variant. Liberty is a zero-sum game in this interpretation. There is only so much liberty to go around, and those who can possess it, do, if possible without ceding any particle of it to outsiders (the British) or inferiors (the slaves). This reading makes the early Americans out to be non-hypocritical, but devoid of any other moral grandeur or persuasiveness. 

The Hegelian reading is buttressed by the awkward use, in American rebel documents, of the imagery of slavery. The colonist, forced to pay taxes to the Crown but deprived of representation in Parliament, represents himself as a slave in order to justify rebellion against that enslaved status. But the metaphorical representation is doubled by actual slaves (on whom colonists had paid taxes!) whose rebellion is not here justified or even envisioned. The rub between the two contexts of “slavery” leads to a Johnsonian sense of the hypocrisy of the colonists’ self-description (if they were really slaves, what status would their slaves hold? If one set of slaves is to be liberated, what of the other set?). The metaphor is denounced as false and empty by its literal meaning. Once you look at the actual slaves, you no longer believe in the metaphorical enslavement. But the same rub, read differently, would also show the emergence of an idea of freedom in the fact of the enslavement of the other: in so far as my slave is not free, I know what it is to be free; insofar as my slave provides a factual basis for my knowledge of unfreedom, I have the imaginative freedom to declare, through metaphor, that I am what I am not: namely, an unwilling slave of the Crown. 

The American understanding of sovereignty, likewise, saws back and forth between these two understandings of freedom. To be a sovereign people, as the colonists desired to be, is to admit no higher authority than “Nature and Nature’s God” over oneself. In the days of the frontier, this absence of higher authority was literal enough: it was possible to move out into areas where one made the law by hand, knife and rifle. The Hobbesian conditions of the frontier gradually yielded to societies ordered by law, compacts freely entered into by those who had the power of entering into such agreements (of course, these societies never encompassed the entire human population of the frontier areas). Authority, in this version of frontier history, could always emerge from below, rather than being imposed from above or enforced by rivalrous neighbors. That is an American exception, however imaginary. A set of rebel populations in Europe or Asia, for example, would have had to contend with the surrounding monarchies on all sides: the liberty of each would have to be won at the cost of another person or state, there was no moving out into the “empty” territory (of course never empty in reality). 

In a more closely-knit world, American sovereignty bumps up against that of its neighbors. International compacts, the law of the sea, United Nations resolutions, arms control agreements, environmental conditions, and so on show that the program of unrestrained self-government is an impossible ideal. And yet Americans seem unprepared to view this reality realistically. American troops can never be put under foreign command, we hear; agreements that cramp our freedom to act are ipso facto null and void; treaties last only so long as the underlying interests that prompted their signing do; allies are welcome so long as they agree with all our plans and don’t get in the way. This impatience with international law and cooperation takes quasi-religious form. To give up that precious sovereign right of absolute freedom of action would amount to forsaking the American soul. In a strange way, what is supposed to be true of each American as an individual—that he or she is always in principle free —is also claimed for the United States as a collectivity. Moreover, it is simply not done to imagine or speak of an end to American world dominance. Former President Bill Clinton raised a storm of criticism in 2003 by alluding to a future time when the United States might be unable to tell the rest of the world what to do, when we might need allies, when we might even have to listen to their wishes. This sort of talk is virtually precluded in the United States today (though I know that in China, where the idea of a coming “Asian century” is an immense blank check on which many interests draw, it is a topic of lively speculation). But American sovereignty cannot be an absolute value, at least for the international ethicist, because it does not translate into a universal, the recognition of a parallel sovereignty for every non-American citizen or state. Rather than try to handle this practical and logical difficulty, Americans, since the age of Wilson, have opted for isolationism or unilateralism. Those choices do not put before our eyes the incompatibility between our sovereignty and that of others. They allow us to yelp for our own liberty and forget about our slave-driving behavior.

The issue about freedom is whether it is the sort of thing that can be extended indefinitely, or is a finite quantity such that if I have more of it, others have less. Dr. Johnson’s denunciation of American rebels as hypocrites assumes that liberty ought to be the sort of thing that can be multiplied without loss: if they want liberty for themselves, they ought to want it for others. Liberty is not the same sort of thing as oil, say: it would be absurd to say, if they want oil for themselves, they ought to want it for others. Americans would be vicious, but not logically self-contradictory, in wanting all the oil in the world for themselves and seeing no benefit in sharing it around. A Hegelian understanding of freedom as something that is taken or conquered from the other makes freedom out to be like oil, and frees the selfish American from taint of hypocrisy: it would be, rather, self-contradictory to want oil or freedom for both you and me. 

Policies like those the United States has pursued in recent years, seeking to cast off any restrictions on American freedom of action; the denial of Geneva Convention assurances to captured “combatants” (both soldiers and civilians); even more vividly, the photographs of torture and abuse: all these make freedom a finite substance like oil. They confirm that the American is free because—insofar as—the person he or she is torturing is not free. The American is wealthy because—insofar as—the person he or she is exploiting is not rich. The American is healthy because—insofar as—there are other people not benefiting from new medicines but serving as trial subjects in medical experiments. And so forth. At the end of the road: the American has rights because others do not. This account of freedom, fortune, health and security is utterly damaging to the American moral mission. In fact it deprives the United States of any semblance of a moral mission, for it only invites non-Americans to collaborate in their own enslavement, perhaps with the incentive of milder treatment for good behavior. This is not a message that will win us any friends worth having. It is the message of empire. And it is worth while trying to prove, through action and discourse, that it is wrong (in the sense of “erroneous”), that freedom given to one is not taken away from another. Let us sneer with Dr. Johnson at American hypocrisy, only let us, as we do so, hold Americans up to a standard of fairness and consistency that preserves a distinction between what exists and what is right, between selfish interests and universal obligations. Concretely, let us hope in the near future for an American administration that sees the difference. 

***
Having thought at length about Dr. Johnson’s sharp remark, I then went to see the context in which he made it (a pamphlet called Taxation No Tyranny). I found it enveloped in an argument that I had not been expecting. Given a common-sense understanding of the ways in which terms like “freedom,” “slavery,” “ought,” “right” and so forth are used, the bite of the remark is self-evident, and that is why it is usually quoted all alone. But the detailed context relates also to the problem that concerns me, the problem of empire and autonomy. 

Johnson is particularly irritated by the language of unlimited sovereignty, spoken in the name of individuals or of collectivities that suddenly aspire to be self-governing. “The Americans are telling one another, what, if we may judge from their noisy triumph, they have but lately discovered, and what yet is a very important truth: ‘That they are entitled to life, liberty, and property; and that they have never ceded to any sovereign power whatever a right to dispose of either without their consent.’” Recognizing no limits to their own entitlements, the colonists, inspired by “principles… wild, indefinite, and obscure,” have spread “the madness of independence… from colony to colony, till order is lost, and government despised; and all is filled with misrule, uproar, violence, and confusion.” But if they only stopped to think about it, they would know that this claim of pre-existing, unrestricted freedom is “false. We virtually and implicitly allow the institutions of any government, of which we enjoy the benefit, and solicit the protection.” So, Johnson holds, the Americans benefit from English laws and English arms, and should see themselves as under an obligation to England. They are wrong to want liberty for themselves. “He who goes voluntarily to America, cannot complain of losing what he leaves in Europe. He, perhaps, had a right to vote for a knight or a burgess; by crossing the Atlantick, he has not nullified his right; but… by his own choice he has left a country, where he had a vote and little property, for another, where he has great property, but no vote.” Those sacred and immemorial rights of Englishmen obtained only for those who stayed in England: why? What but the dead hand of custom allows members of Parliament to be elected for Birmingham, but none for Boston?

The answer is that colonies, for Johnson, are not political but legal-commercial entities. “An English colony is a number of persons, to whom the king grants a charter, permitting them to settle in some distant country, and enabling them to constitute a corporation enjoying such powers as the charter grants…. To their charters the colonies owe, like other corporations, their political existence.”[5] When the colonists came to America they abandoned their rights as subjects of the Crown and became servants of the Massachusetts Bay Company, the East India Company, and the like. Perhaps today we would say that they became “civilian contractors.” They no longer existed in direct relation to King and Parliament and for that very reason lacked some part of the legal status of subject, for example the right of parliamentary representation. “Great property, but no vote.” The colonial enterprises prefigure the privatization of public space which we are now experiencing in our cities, in our communication technologies, in the shrinking “public domain.” If Parliament levied taxes on the colonists, and the colonists took that badly, they had only to cease being colonists, by breaking their relation to the corporations by which they were governed and seeking return passage to England. To follow Johnson’s larger story of the history of colonization in the Americas, the answer to those transatlantic yelps for liberty is most accurately put thus: They shouldn’t want it for themselves and they shouldn’t want it for others. The true and proper understanding of affairs is this: the colonists are not free, but live under contract. The terms of their contract permit them to own slaves. Only a misunderstanding of the contract between the colony and the mother country creates the rub between the American yelps for liberty and the suppression of the liberty of other persons existing in the Americas. If Americans would only forgo their ambitious dreams of sovereignty, the logical flaw in their self-description would vanish: they would see themselves correctly as contracted personnel employing other personnel, and stop objecting to their own status. That too is the voice of empire, of commercial empire. 

A strange menace uttered by the Pennsylvania legislature provokes Johnson’s most memorable remark. 

The Philadelphian congress has taken care to inform us, that they are resisting the demands of parliament, as well for our sakes as their own…. “Our ministers,” they say, “are our enemies, and if they should carry the point of taxation, may, with the same army [paid for by American taxes], enslave us. It may be said, we will not pay them; but remember,” say the western sages, “the taxes from America, and we may add, the men, and particularly the Roman catholicks of this vast continent [debarred from voting or standing in parliamentary elections], will then be in the power of your enemies. Nor have you any reason to expect, that, after making slaves of us, many of us will refuse to assist in reducing you to the same abject state…. Do not treat this as chimerical. Know, that in less than half a century, the quitrents reserved to the crown, from the numberless grants of this vast continent, will pour large streams of wealth into the royal coffers. If to this be added the power of taxing America, at pleasure, the crown will possess more treasure than may be necessary to purchase the remains of liberty in your island.” 

In this Philadelphian nightmare, the history of English liberty from Magna Charta to circa 1825 will be a mere six-hundred-year interlude in a long-term strategy of royal power-grabbing. The rents of America, levied on a people without political representation (the many Roman Catholics being, as far as anyone could see, a permanently disenfranchised group of passive taxpayers), will serve to consolidate a royal power irresponsible to parliament and able to “purchase” (with mercenary troops, presumably) “the remains of liberty” in England. It is to scoff at this prospect that Johnson lets fly his most memorable arrow: “We are told, that the subjection of Americans may tend to the diminution of our own liberties; an event, which none but very perspicacious politicians are able to foresee. If slavery be thus fatally contagious, how is it that we hear the loudest yelps for liberty among the drivers of negroes?” 

My dear British readers, how do you feel today about the diminution of your own liberties? In 2008, many British subjects no doubt feel that a government they had no part in electing, heedless of parliament and ready to “purchase… liberty” wherever it can, indeed overwhelmed the traditional structures of protest, advice and consent housed in their Parliament. (Blair’s cabinet with its “sexed-up dossiers” was just an instrument of the ex-colonials’ will.) This is what empires do. Johnson was wrong to scoff at the Philadelphian menace, however accurately he laid bare the nerve that links the idealism and the baseness of American practices of freedom. In the bargain, he discovered the Special Relationship,—though he thought it was a long way from reality.

—-

[1] Samuel Johnson, Taxation no Tyranny: An Answer to the Resolutions and Address of the American Congress (1775), in The Works of Samuel Johnson (Troy, New York: Pafraets, 1913), 14:93-144, also available at http://www.samueljohnson.com/tnt.html. 
[2] Mark Bowden, “The Dark Art of Interrogation,” Atlantic Monthly 292:3 (October 2003), 51-76.
[3] Michael Ignatieff, “The American Empire (Get Used To It),” The New York Times Magazine, January 5, 2003. 
[4] For 自所不欲, see Analects 12.2, 15.24; on “contracting in,” see John Rawls, A Theory of Justice (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1971), p. 13. 
[5] Johnson, Taxation no Tyranny. “Corporation” is not to be taken entirely in its modern sense. Guilds, university colleges, certain cities, and charitable foundations were “corporations” just as were the East India Company and other corporations founded for profit. See William Blackstone, Commentaries on the Laws of England (1765-69; reprinted, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1979), 1:455-473. “Of Corporations” is there the last chapter in Book I, “Of the Rights of Persons.” 

The other day my friend Mel Chin asked me: how do you say ‘Black Lives Matter” in Chinese? It was late, I had had a drink, and just did what comes naturally to me: I consulted my inner sense of the Chinese language, and wrote him back:

重視黑人生命

see as important / black people’s / lives

which you could abbreviate, and still have it be recognizable, as 重黑命 (~BLM). I thought to myself that it wasn’t a translation that would automatically make sense to any Chinese speaker, since the primary meaning of hei/黑/black in political discourse is “dark, suspicious, corrupt”; but Chinese-speakers in the U.S. who saw that formula, on a T-shirt for example, would quickly understand what it was meant to say. 黑命 might, in some possible world, mean “ill-gotten lives,” but what would that be? 黑金, however, “black cash,” is instantly recognizable as a big political problem: payoffs, kickbacks, graft, the usual stuff. Giving a positive sense to “Black” in Chinese will take some work. There aren’t all that many people of African descent in the Chinese-speaking world, so getting people to notice the meaning of blackness in the U.S. sense is still a work in progress there. I liked that my Chinese version came out as an imperative: that seemed to me an integral part of the “matter” in the English, as when we say that something “matters” we are saying “this must matter, you must take it as something that matters.”

When I woke up the next day I realized that I had been over-hasty. In doing literary translation I can just consult my inner sense of the language and if necessary ask others what they think, but something like a political slogan depends very much on what people out there are saying and how they fill in the implicit blanks. So I went to some Chinese newspapers (I’m sorry to admit this, but if it’s about Chinese I am a lot more likely to be reading stories of shape-shifting monks from the Taiping yulan than the daily news), noticed that reporters were discussing 黑命貴 (hei ming gui, or “Black Lives Are Precious”), copied, pasted, and sent. I also liked the echo of the name of a certain guy who liked to bullfight, drink rum, and write about his adventures — a not totally inappropriate connotation for those brave enough to march against heavily-armed police, as was happening just then in my neighborhood.

So I’d replaced my inner Sprachgefühl with the vox pop., or so I thought, until I asked a few friends and learned that the way the slogan has been spun in certain Chinese media is repellent to my understanding of the movement. “Hei ming gui,” while unobjectionable on its face, has the effect of trivializing the claim. “Gui,” of course, also connotes expensive (like handbags and stuff). Worse yet, the slogan is spun as meaning that non-black lives are not precious, which is exactly the way the folks nostalgic for problem-free white supremacy take it: if one group’s lives are valued, so goes their attitude, then another group’s lives are devalued.

That was definitely not the point Mel was trying to make in circulating a Chinese version of the slogan. So back to consulting a range of better-informed friends. The translations they suggested (some their own, some repeated from others) had a range of tone and implication as well. 黑命攸關 (hei ming you guan) was one: “It’s a matter of black lives.” Or: “It comes down to black lives.” But this you guan is just a touch literary, less so than the homophonous 黑命有關 (“it’s about black lives”). Either way leaves the relation between “black” and “lifespan” (ming meaning the duration of a life as opposed to sheng, which connotes the life force) unclear, something the reader has to work out; and wherever there is such suspense, there’s a possibility of misunderstanding, which I didn’t want. The suggestion that one friend made, 黑人的命也是命 (heiren de ming ye shi ming, “black people’s lives are lives too”), guards against the accusation of “privileging” one group’s suffering, but has the disadvantage of being a bit long for T-shirts, bumper-stickers, or marching shouts.

In the end, Mel went with the alternative that combined recognizability with brevity, as best suits the medium.

What this shows about translation is stuff I always-already knew, but didn’t have in mind: that when you frame your thoughts in any language you are addressing somebody who has their own ideas about what you are likely to say, and you may need to guard against a pre-existing meaning or challenge a stereotype in order to get said what you need said. A relational model of meaning, as we say in the trade, means that you’re always answering a question you didn’t expect.

Eh bien, regardez-moi ça:

Yes, of course there’s cultural appropriation going on. (And his pink jacket looks silly.) But Claude Nougaro isn’t pulling the wool over anyone’s eyes. “Je suis blanc de peau,” he confesses (“I have a white skin”). That doesn’t stop him from putting new French words on the melody of the classic spiritual “Go Down Moses,” with its refrain, “Let my people go,” long since made recognizable to practically everybody in Europe through the mighty singing of Paul Robeson. Is this okay?

The idea that enslaved people in the Southern U.S. could quote the Moses represented in their King James Bibles (Exodus 9:1) as analogizing their situation– well, that too was a cultural appropriation.

Most of the good things in any culture are appropriated, more or less creatively repurposed. Sometimes it’s the powerless taking hold of the culture of the powerful; sometimes it’s the other way around; it’s not always good in the one situation and bad in the other. You just have to hang around and wait to see what happens.

Identity is a deliberate simplification (a simplifiction, if I may sin against the dictionary) of things that are terribly, intriguingly, complicated. And so be it.

I hear that activists pulled down the statue of U. S. Grant in a San Francisco park because they found him insufficiently decisive in condemning slavery. Well, very few have done the unglamorous work of eradicating slavery to the degree that Grant did. If we can offer public recognition only to perfect people, then recognition will go to nobody– or only to the loudest liars out there, who of course love to praise themselves (and their phone calls) as “perfect.” The logic of moral absolutism plays into the hands of amoral opportunism. That’s why complexity is preferable to clarity when we are dealing with the past. When dealing with the future, by all means seek that clarity. But try to live up to it yourself rather than denouncing others.

This situation actually just gives me the hook to tell my favorite Lincoln story. Somebody from the War Department came in with the important information that General Grant drank. Shouldn’t such a man be relieved of his command? “Find out what Grant drinks,” said Lincoln, “and send a case of it to every other general I have.”

Here’s to the end of racism (harder to abolish than slavery). Cin-cin! (Or is that somehow racist?)

“Ce n’est pas que comme ils ne parlent que dans la nécessité, et qu’autant qu’il le faut, la modestie du silence ne paraisse même dans leurs discours; et ils se gardent si exactement dans tous les temps qu’ils sont obligés de parler, qu’on peut bien voir quand ils parlent que ce n’est pas par impuissance de se taire, mais par la crainte de manquer à leur devoir. Ce n’est pas comme ceux qui ayant quelque obligation de parler, le font avec une telle effusion et se répandent au dehors avec si peu de réserve, que leur volonté paraît jusque dans leur nécessité, outre que ne pouvant se taire quand ils ne sont point obligés de parler, ils nous font assez paraître leur inclination qui est si opposée au silence, dans le temps même qu’ils croient ne nous parler que par obligation.”

Jean Hamon, De la solitude (Amsterdam, 1734)

I don’t know how the whole herd immunity thing is going, and a vaccine against covid-19 is far in the future, but I note a robust degree of herd immunity to the inroads of rationality. (From Facebook.)

I’ve been thinking about the response to the anti-quarantine protestors. I thought at first that it would be good if their actions had some consequences — that it would be fitting if they died of the disease, that there would be a “Darwinian” logic to that outcome. But then I remembered a verse from last year’s High Holidays. “Do you think God exults in the death of the wicked, and would not prefer that the wicked turn from their evil way and live?” (Ezekiel 18:23). What gets to me, and probably more than just me, is that we cannot convince the protestors, and Trump followers in general, that we are right. Maybe a great orator, a great trial lawyer, a great preacher could do it, but not me, not most of us. And we have to watch as they recklessly harm themselves and harm everyone whose space, within 5’11”, they invade. This great impotence, stemming from our compassion, is what angers us most of all. If we can do nothing, we turn to God, and what are His priorities? To let them live in the hope they will figure things out, a higher priority than immediate, visible punishment. We are left with that vexing reality. We can protect everyone we can, but it is not God’s priority to make a moral lesson out of those who ignore us.

April 17: The city of Chicago and the campus have been closed down for about a month. The library, most businesses and restaurants, and the building where I have my office are inaccessible. The parks are off limits. Summer travel is canceled. I stay at home. It’s not the end of the world, but it is an interruption of many of the things in the world that I rely on to make my life interesting, pleasant and meaningful: I mean meeting my classes, holding office hours, going to talks and conferences, traveling, having coffee with people, cooking for friends. It will be months before I can do any of those things again. With all those things suspended, and the word “social” now locked into partnership with its near-antonym “distancing” (not to mention the symptoms of unstopping decline into Caligula-like government by caprice), this house is my refuge. 

I am grateful to have a house in which to be confined for the duration with four people particularly dear to me. But all five of us have, or should have, lives and connections outside the narrow family circle: we thrive on the friendships, rivalries, news, contacts, that each brings back at the end of the day like ants returning to the nest. Email and videoconferencing don’t substitute for this shuttling away and back—not least because whatever pseudo-sociality we can now enjoy with the outside world is done in the presence of the whole family. 

It would be worse without the telephone and the internet, but now, like those who lived through disasters of the past, we are finding out what we are made of. We are thrown back on our own resources. Our resources fortunately include, along with sacks of rice, cans of beans, and boxes of ramen, a few thousand books, to say nothing of other paper goods, and if the electricity fails and the Internet goes off, I can always light a candle and read Boethius, Montaigne, Li Qingzhao and Ring Lardner.

The moment I have said this, someone will complain that I’m speaking from a position of privilege. But books are cheap: most of mine were picked up used for a few dollars. The skill to choose them and the desire to read them weren’t acquired all in one place: some of that came to me for free, as a family heirloom, and some of it was handed on by teachers salaried on my behalf by non-profit institutions, public and private. I’m grateful for those lessons, for the shaping of the reading self that I underwent in those pre-social-isolation days. They were preparing me for this.

But let’s suppose the basement floods or the house burns, and the reader is left with nothing to read. If anyone asks what the humanities are good for, here’s my answer: the humanities are the arts that teach you how to have a meeting with yourself when even Zoom stops working.

Suspension: the Stoics, echoed by the phenomenologists, called it “epokhē.” It’s what happens when the object of your intention is taken away and you’re left with the pure structure of intending. Life feels more like that every day.

and woe befall whoever questions it.

I just learned about this compilation, haven’t had time to read it, but it easily wins the prize for most unfortunate title and cover design of the year. (Called to my attention by Flair Donglai Shi.)

A friend sent me this. Messaien wouldn’t have liked it, but I did, and so have all members of my test kitchen of 4.

I understand from the media that the coronavirus lockdown has been a heyday for porn sites, so much so that they’re opening access to all and sundry. Well, hooray for them and hooray for their users. I might as well admit to my perversion and see if there’s a site that caters to it.

I like watching sweaty girls go up against 100 or so men and women armed with devices of wood, string and brass. I like it when they gasp. I like it when they strain. Their expressions of satisfaction when something goes right transport me. They don’t have to be wearing particularly revealing clothing, but they usually are dressed in something a bit showy, not that you see much of that when they’re in action. As for the action, well, they are attacking a toothy, long-tailed, black monster with their slender arms and fingers. I cheer for them and expect them to triumph.

And they do! Those girls, dear reader, or women to be more accurate, are female ninja scholars trained in the toughest dojos of Asia, Europe, and America. They go up against the Grieg Concerto, the many Beethovens, the Schumanns, the Brahmses and other Rachmaninoffs, they grind their teeth, sweat, nearly collapse, and at the end someone brings them flowers.

I used to see this spectacle two or three times a year from the fourteenth or twentieth row, having paid handsomely for the privilege. Now Youtube gives my scopophilia nearly endless license, if I’m willing to be interrupted every ten minutes by an ad for some grammar correction app that I, having learned Latin by the sweat of my brow, don’t need. Comely maidens in the spring time of their lives bang out piano concertos, encores, and encores of encores. The camera follows their every move. Mais O, ces doigts d’enfants, tapant au Gewandhaus!

However, there are figures and examples (yes, we fallen subjects need figures and examples) to show us what engagement with music, yes, music, not soft porn, by an uncompromising and straight-faced yet admirable executant would be. The red dresses, high heels and sequins of the others fall away. Let Hélène Grimaud receive my imaginary bouquets, not that she requires them in any sense. She’s photographed, not by chance I assume, in a non-voyeuristic way that shuffles all that heaving-bodice stuff out of sight. When I wake up at four in the morning with music ringing in my ears, it is with a thought of her nimble action, end-to-end memorization of the score, and oh-so-rare smile.

Our kids’ school started remote learning today. It’s mediated by a platform called Seesaw which, despite having early notice of the likely surge in demand, hadn’t prepared the necessary servers and so crashed repeatedly (does this remind you of anything else?). We thus had three computers running different grades’ version of Seesaw remote learning, all timing out and crashing at once. The kids were already unhappy at the unexpected transformation of their parents into teachers. We know they can behave themselves at school, but they shed all those manners and pretenses of citizenship at the door, and now they had angry and impatient teachers who were beside them tapping at virtual buttons that were frozen, watching the precious fruits of twenty minutes’ coaxing suddenly vanish without a trace, and losing the point of the lesson (as well as any pedagogical authority). It was, in short, a rout, a fiasco, a débâcle, a hot mess, made worse by the thought in this parent’s mind that the graduate seminar due to be taught in a few days on an analogous platform will probably turn into a similar plate of slimy entrails.

It gave me a headache that is still going strong as of 8:13 pm.

There’s a form of learning that humans have engaged in for millennia: a bunch of learners, willing or unwilling, gather under a tree or in a room with a Subject Supposed to Know, who tells them stuff and maybe elicits questions better than the pre-planned palaver. Since remote learning is a skeuomorphic derivative of that, it is most effective when the game is played among people who have already developed the skills and instincts that go with sitting in a room with a bunch of other learners, giving side-eye to the loudmouths, locking eyes with the smartest or most attractive fellow seminarians, thinking (or not) before speaking one’s piece– it is therefore a foreign idiom to kids who are still learning to sit still and take turns. All the more when those kids are used to screens tempting and cajoling them with ready entertainment all the time: now, in an abrupt betrayal, it’s a dead video of their kindergarten teacher sitting on a sofa and trying to be cheery. To hell with that, they think, and behave accordingly. The parent, who has a million and two other things to do but is pushing them out of mind for the duration of the lesson time, gets stricter and stricter as discipline fails, and before long even a friendly inquiry (“is that how your teacher tells you to write an N?”) makes Child Two cut loose with a screaming tantrum and existential denunciations of all possible being and beings. I’d rather be on the golf course, and I hate golf.

Tomorrow, episode 2, and I wish I had a stash of happy pills.

Our correspondent in Pagliara (district of Messina), where the virus has not made itself known but the lockdown is strict as everywhere else in Italy, writes with a few reflections about the state of emergency.

If I think about the world in movement, excluding all physical definitions of “movement,” the one definition that comes to my mind is: production. A world in motion is a world that produces, whatever it may be that gets produced. From childhood on we are trained to produce, encouraged to do so and rewarded when we’ve made something, even a poop. Praise, candy, toys, pocket money—how many rewards do we receive from life? Action and reward. This pairing creates on one hand a condition of permanent immobility (society is stuck in childhood), on the other a persistent enslavement. At this point, to say that the world has stopped because of coronavirus seems to me no more than the recognition of a long-established fact: we haven’t stopped, we stopped a long time ago. The illusion of movement is given us as a “gift” by those in a position to manipulate the levers of government and production, those who are so good at manipulating them that we too carry them out in relation to ourselves and others, in the belief that no other worthy form of life is possible. To stop is frightening, because a world that stops its supply chains is, paradoxically, a world that breaks its chains and opens its cages, that reveals empty spaces that we no longer know how to fill, because we are trained to fill the gaps and we aren’t able to live in them, we have no idea how to do that. In saying this I do not intend in any way to express gratitude for circumstances that, like the current virus, attack life; I merely want to use this event as a pretext for shedding some light, for understanding the immensity of our error in binding our existences to the market, to business, to finance, and in making our lives depend on choices that are imposed on us together with the illusion that it is we who make those choices.

The adventurous history of the School of Chartres comes to mind, though I don’t know what prompted it: a School that tried to reread Aristotle in light of Christian thought. What sorts of ideas would have been active in the world if that School had not been censured? The same could be said of our system: was there no alternative? At that point there was some movement, but today our system no longer generates movement, and so, exactly as a virus does, it agitates below the surface to block movement, to forbid any human reaching toward abstraction, freedom, toward a form of growth concerning not only the economy but rather our consciousness of the self and of restraint. We have lost our own center, it has been hidden from us, our distraction from it has lost us our relation to the world. The illness begins here. After that come viruses, influenzas, downfalls. 

(Original text follows.)

Se penso al mondo in movimento, escludendo tutte le definizioni fisiche di qualsiasi “movimento”, l’unica definizione che mi viene in mente è: produzione. Un mondo che si muove è un mondo che produce, non importa che cosa. Fin da piccoli siamo educati a produrre qualcosa, incoraggiati a farlo e gratificati quando facciamo qualcosa, anche la cacca. La lode, la caramella, il giocattolo, lo stipendio, etc., quanti premi riceviamo nella vita? Azione e premio. Binomio che ha generato da un lato una immobilità permanente della nostra condizione (la società è ferma all’infanzia), dall’altro una perenne schiavitù. A questo punto, dire che il mondo, a causa del coronavirus, si è fermato, mi sembra soltanto la constatazione di un dato di fatto già in essere: non ci siamo fermati, siamo già fermi e da tanto tempo. L’illusione del movimento ci viene “regalata” da chi sa dosare gli strumenti del governo e della produzione, da chi sa dosarli così bene che anche noi li mettiamo in atto nei confronti di noi stessi o di altri, pensando che sia l’unico modo possibile per una vita dignitosa. Fermarsi però fa paura, perché un mondo che ferma la sua catena di produzione è, paradossalmente, un mondo che spezza le catene, che apre le gabbie, che mostra spazi vuoti che non sappiamo più come riempire, perché siamo educati a riempire i vuoti, non riusciamo a vivere in essi, non lo sappiamo più fare. Queste mie parole non vogliono certamente esprimere gratitudine verso gli incidenti che, come l’attuale virus, intaccano la vita, ma prendono spunto dall’incidente per cercare di fare luce, di comprendere quanto sia grande l’errore di legare la nostra esistenza al mercato, agli affari, alla finanza, di farla dipendere da scelte imposte con l’illusione di essere noi a farle quelle scelte.

Mi viene in mente, non so richiamata da cosa, l’avventurosa storia della Scuola di Chartres, dove si cercava di rileggere Aristotele alla luce di un pensiero cristiano. Quali idee avrebbero agito sul mondo se quella Scuola non fosse stata censurata? Lo stesso si potrebbe dire del nostro sistema: non c’era un’alternativa? Lì c’era del movimento, invece adesso il nostro sistema non genera movimento, anzi, proprio come un virus, agisce in profondità per impedirlo, per fermare ogni tensione umana verso l’astrazione, la libertà, verso una crescita che non può riguardare soltanto l’economia, ma riguarda esclusivamente la consapevolezza del sé e del limite. Abbiamo perduto il centro di noi stessi, ci è stato nascosto, ne siamo distratti e con esso abbiamo perduto la relazione col mondo. La malattia nasce da qui. Poi ci sono i virus, le influenze, le cadute.

I am not a hoarder of anything but books and CDs, and I have enough for the current purpose. It’s therefore been a shock to go to a cleaned-out Costco and see the work of real hoarders — whole sections cleaned out of paper goods, bottled water, alcohol, and other disinfectants, and baklava. I must confess that I took the last box of baklava but only after seeing an entire pallet of baklava higher up on the shelves. I do wonder how Minnesotans are doing; they are loath to take the last piece of pie, the last spoonful of Tater Tots, or the last Ole and Lena jokebook. They would probably wait for a sad person to come along, buy him the last Ole and Lena book, and walk out of the store.

The other sad thing about Costco unter militärischer Verwaltung is the amount of shouting and ordering that goes on. I suppose it’s needed to herd people and curb them from hoarding, but it feels to me like being in a detention center, admittedly a gentle one. I am obedient, I smile, I make little jokes, but there is a space between the TV aisles from which no one returns, and I note the endless line of people headed there. Perhaps they climb inside the giant screens and are suddenly in a better world.

Only one person spoke to me, about the circuitous lines to the checkout: “Why do they make it like Disneyland?” “Because there’s going to be a ride at the end.” I did not tell her that The Happiest Place On Earth had been shut down earlier that day.

It took me a while to shed the feeling of ruin: the titan of American consumer capitalism slain by its own shoppers. Its guardians will preside over less and less until finally, they are guarding perhaps one bottle of commodity Rosé and a box of Godiva Hollow Chocolates — perfect for that one post-apocalyptic romantic interlude between two chairs in a decorator-grey apartment. Then they will be at the end of their labors. They will run the End of Day Report, reconcile the tills, shut the lights, and pack up. “As it was for our fathers, so let it be with us,” they pray, and perhaps from there, outside of the big concrete box, their words will take flight.

I was dismayed to see the quasi-automatic reply to the coronavirus situation registered by Giorgio Agamben, author of Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life. For him, coronavirus has replaced terrorism as the Big Threat that legitimates totalitarian control– the new excuse for prolonging the “state of exception.” In his defense, I’d point out that it was posted on February 25, when there were only 219 cases reported in Italy and 11 deaths. But simple math would have permitted the distinguished philosopher to predict scenarios of transmission rate (in a range from worst-case to best-case) and consider whether measures to slow the spread were warranted. I think the reflex of likening every act of state power to the death camps of the Second World War has the disadvantage of blocking the question, where are the death camps we want to avoid? Are they visible in the empty streets of Rome and Palermo, or are they visible in the overcrowded ICUs of Bergamo and Milan where, lacking an adequate number of respirators, doctors have to decide which patients get a second chance at life?

It’s even more dismaying to see that, at that same moment, the kind of people whom Carl Schmitt would be cheering on to seize power and destroy the opposition in the name of the Ausnahmezustand were saying exactly the same thing as Agamben about pandemic hysteria advancing state encroachment. I put it down to coincidence rather than conspiracy. Schmitt happens. But good people find ways to keep Schmitt from happening. Flatten the curve, friends, even if the curve was a back-of-the-envelope schematic.

Geneviève Azam 

(Le Monde, March 13, 2020)

The world seems to be in a state of instability. Warnings pile up: unbearable inequalities, dependence on uncontrolled technical systems, the accelerating rate of climate chaos and of the extinction of living things, the uprooting of millions of people with no land to welcome them, pollution, a financial system on the verge of exploding, and now an epidemic: a long list of threats that undermine one’s confidence in the future, even the immediate future. We are not experiencing some momentary crisis, to be dealt with by means of a few corrective measures that will bring us back to “normal.” We face irreversible changes and outsize accelerations, exemplified in particular by ecological catastrophes. We are living in a time of collapse.

It is a political collapse as well. For decades now, states have sacrificed the public sphere, the commons, and have turned their societies into “appendices” of the market and the economy, following the expression of Karl Polanyi in his The Great Transformation (1944)—an economist who saw the vast “self-regulating” market as a “Satanic mill” and one of the causes of the fascisms of the 1930s. Since the coming of neoliberalism, the mill has expanded and overheated. As a result of adapting steadily to the laws of competition, life, in all its forms, human and non-human, is threatened—not just on a geological scale but on a historical one. History, which modernity conceived as the product of sovereign human action, no longer wholly answers to us. The earth and life forms strike back. We have triggered uncontrollable events that trigger one another. The neoliberal narrative of growing quality of life and health collapses as well.

Global capitalism responds to these events by a biopolitics like that already announced by Michel Foucault: the adaptation of populations takes the form of data collection, tracking, selection, confinement, walls, refugee camps, surveillance and repression. With the addition of artificial “intelligence” and algorithms, it is now carried out in more “rational” and industrial fashion.

But human creativity will not be controlled. Imagining collapse is also a shock that, far from paralyzing thought and action, seems on the contrary to liberate them from the progress-minded expectation of a future that sweeps us away from our presence in the world. It reveals the stakes and causes us to take leave of our illusions of a gradual transition, of an “end to the crisis” in linear and reversible time. It awakens the coming generations, whose concrete presence and whose commitments restore the meaning of world-making and shield us from apocalyptic fantasies that depend on the loss of meaning. To live in the world, to live on the earth, to reclaim lost territory, emptied, destroyed or defaced territory, is the common ground of many kinds of experience—concrete experiences of conviviality born from earthbound communities that include humans and non-humans and confront predatory, deterritorialized oligarchies.  

It is by refusing the techniques of catastrophe management, otherwise known as “reforms,” that a broken society can re-form itself, that other ways of life can take shape. The roundabout communities where “yellow vests” gather, those non-places of a life condemned to circulation without attachment, emerge from disaster. Conviviality rediscovered amid living things: it can come through ageoecology, agroforestry, permaculture, shortened production and consumption chains, workplace cooperation, social solidarity, simplicity and sharing, a welcome to migrants, occupation of territory, convivial, low-tech technologies. Society re-forms itself by abandoning the institutions of consumerism and the Uber-ized life, in such experiences of “pure, unalloyed joy” as were described by Simone Weil, observing the steelworkers’ strike of 1936. In place of the acceleration that shears off all attachments, rediscovered time takes its pace from living matter despoiled by the cadences of the industrial world. Conviviality becomes meaningful when lawyers on strike come together to secure law and justice, when teachers refuse to participate in algorithmic pedagogy, when railroad workers contest the dehumanization of closing ticket-windows, when over a thousand researchers call for disobedience, when the scale of local government becomes a political sticking-point of resistance to expanding urbanization. In a world this brutal, conviviality has to be fought for. 

Geneviève Azam (economist, essayist, member of the advisory board of ATTAC, www.attac.org) is also the author of Le Second Manifeste convivialiste, Actes Sud, 144 pages, 9.80 euros.

(Unauthorized, volunteer translation from the French by Haun Saussy. I welcome comments from the author, even grumpy ones.)

Parents of small children have written en masse to protest my latest song suggestion, so here’s something a little more uplifting. May it buoy you through the present crisis and obligation to perform “social distancing.”

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SsvSaLgPnQk

P.S. Here’s a clip of R. Stevie not staying home:

In case you’re bored in quarantine or forced idleness, here’s something to do.