Wishing Away One's Own Existence

Late in the first chapter of Seeing Like a State (discussed in the last post), James Scott has moved on to discussing the pre-revolutionary Russian state and its efforts to make legible the peasantry, in the years after the emancipation of the serfs. While reading this section, I felt uncannily as though I were listening to my old professor of Russian history, George Yaney, talking about "the peasant problem". And then the next thing I know, Scott has mentioned Yaney by name! Much later in the book, he quotes from Yaney’s The Urge to Mobilize thus:

It sometimes seems to me that if I could persuade everyone to say "systematize" each time he wanted to say "liberate" and to say "mobilization" every time he wanted to say "reform" or "progress" I would not have to write long books about government-peasant interaction in Russia.

Well, indeed. And as Scott notes, Yaney could just as easily have been talking about the Leninist USSR .

I previously invoked Professor Yaney, though not by name, in an entry from more than three years ago, in which I touched on the concept of "hauntology", which was then buzzing rather loudly through certain parts of blogville (namely, k-punk & blissblog & others) (by the way, people seem very curious still about hauntology; my two posts—here is the second one—on the topic receive constant hits, more than most anything else I've written here, I think). I wrote that he had one day "said something to the effect that, as horrible as what happened to the Native Americans was, he was nevertheless happy it had happened." And: "To wish otherwise was to wish away his own existence." At the time, I had been reminded of these words by k-punk's observation, viz. Octavia Butler's novel Kindred, that "The deep, unbearable ache in Kindred arises from the horrible realisation that, for contemporary black America, to wish for the erasure of slavery is to call for the erasure of itself." (See here for my own take on Kindred, and, while we're at it, though it's not strictly relevant, here on Butler's Parable of the Sower.)

Aside from wanting to note the excitement at seeing my professor's name, I revisit these ideas now in part because I find I am often at risk of wishing away my own existence. When I read history, my sympathies are always with the resisters. And yet were those resisters to have won, at almost any point, my existence would have been not just unlikely, but impossible. (Hell, for me, the Vietnam War was quite possibly a necessary pre-condition for my existence, given when and how my parents got together and decided to get married.) Yes, our lives are all contingent. What I'm trying to get at isn't something so banal as that (at least I hope it isn't). The point is that we are well beyond being merely complicit in the evil of the system. The point, contra my professor's apparent meaning in his remarks, is not that simply because we value our own lives—the fact that we exist—that we thus blithely accept as in a sense good that which led to our existence. I want to be able to re-capture something good in what was lost, while always being aware of the fact that my life—my existence—has depended on that loss. So when I write about not being automatically given to anti-modernity, it is in part to keep upfront that awareness. Since I have been trying to argue that modernization has been, step-by-step, an illegitimate, unjustifiable violence on real people, the maintaining of awareness is meant to make it clear that in any re-capturing I would have much to learn to even be able to survive on a day-to-day basis, and it is meant to make it clear that I am ultimately arguing not just against that which I hate, but against that which I like, that which I take for granted, that which I love.

Hauntology II

Since my post last month about hauntology, there's been a flurry of blog activity on the topic (Jahsonic provides a mini-roundup here). In my post, I knew that I was more or less talking out of my ass. For one thing, I neglected to mention that the term originates with Derrida (in part this is because I have yet to read any Derrida, let alone Spectres of Marx, from which it comes). The proprietor of the new blog ACADEMITASSE, Mike, posted at length on this last week. Derrida, he writes, was responding in part to the kinds of "end of history" theses being put forth by the likes of Francis Fukuyama in the wake of the collapse of the Soviet Union and the fall of the Berlin Wall. For Derrida,

all this talk of the end of history is really just an attempt to "exorcise the spirit of Marxism" from our collective memory. And then he went on to look at the some of the "spectral" metaphors in Marx, whose description of capitalism is full of vampires and ghosts and the living dead.

Along the way, Derrida coined the term "hauntology" as a pun on "ontology." Ontology is the study of being, of what exists. Derrida wants to say that our ideas of reality are "haunted" by the stuff we exclude—the things we don't want to remember or acknowledge. The Holocaust, for example, or the slave trade. Our sense of Western history as the progressive march of "freedom" and "civilization" is haunted by genocide and enslavement.

Though I came to hauntology by way of attempts to apply it to music--"sonic hauntology"--I'm interested in this idea of history "haunted by the stuff we exclude". Really, I always have been, even if I didn't articulate it as such. I was trying to touch on some of this when I wrote about the common thread I perceived running through old folk music and Blood Meridian and so forth. Then there is the question of who the "we" is that is doing the excluding. And who is or isn't served by certain historical myths.

After quoting part of the same k-punk passage that I did in my earlier post ("It's no accident that hauntology begins in the Black Atlantic, with dub and hip-hop. Time being out of joint is the defining feature of the black Atlantean experience"), Mike says: "This is what's at stake in the term "hauntology" losing its precision: the memory of specific historical experiences that called for specific aesthetic responses." He then proceeds with a short, interesting discussion of Rastafarianism and Dub, of which the following is only a small part:

Like Rastafarianism, Dub is a response to a specific historical situation. Artists like [Lee "Scratch"] Perry rose to that occasion. If Byrne and Eno [with their My Life in the Bush of Ghosts] were inspired by Perry's work and wanted to appropriate it for their own concerns, that's great. But when critics describe B&E as these "nerdy," "cerebral" musicians experimenting with electronic music, they start to construct just another history of the Western Avant-garde that ignores the intellectual contribution of Black artists. Perry was as much a theoretician as B&E.

Read the rest here.

I expect I'll return to these themes in the future. For now, the upshot, for me, is that Spectres of Marx is yet another book that I feel like I have to read and that, again, I need to get myself acquainted with Dub.

Hauntology

I am not well acquainted with the concept of "hauntology". But after reading the many posts on the topic by Mark at k-punk, I feel I have glimpse into the nature of the idea. Mark's brilliant most recent post opens it up even further for me:

It is this sense of temporal disjuncture that is crucial to hauntology. Hauntology isn't about the return of the past, but about the fact that the origin was already spectral. We live in a time when the past is present, and the present is saturated with the past. Hauntology emerges as a crucial - cultural and political - alternative both to linear history and to postmodernism's permanent revival.

Ten years ago, we would have looked to SF and cyberpunk for this alternative. But hauntology and cyberpunk can now emerge as twins; travelling back in time in Butler's Kindred is the complement of the violent irruption of the past in Morrison's Beloved. It's no accident that hauntology begins in the Black Atlantic, with dub and hip-hop. Time being out of joint is the defining feature of the black Atlantean experience. As Mark Sinker wrote, the 'central fact in Black Science Fiction - self-consciously so named or not - is an acknowledgement that Apocalypse already happened: that (in [Public Enemy's] phrase) Armageddon been in effect.' In this disjunctive time, it makes perfect sense for Terminator X to juxtapose samples of helicopters with discussions about the slave trade, as he does on Apocalypse...91. There is no way in which a trauma on the scale of slavery - 'the holocaust that's still going on' as Chuck D had it - can be incorporated into history, American or otherwise. * It must remain a series of gaps, lost names, screen memories, a hauntology. X marks the spot... The deep, unbearable ache in Kindred arises from the horrible realisation that, for contemporary black America, to wish for the erasure of slavery is to call for the erasure of itself. What to do if the precondition for your being is the abduction, murder and rape of your ancestors?

This last specifically reminds me of a professor of Russian history I had back in college. One day, while railing that Russians, in the approaching dissolution of the Soviet Union, had nothing to learn from "Jeffersonian nonsense about natural law", he said something to the effect that, as horrible as what happened to the Native Americans was, he was nevertheless happy it had happened. To wish otherwise was to wish away his own existence.

Before getting to the end of Mark's post, I was also immediately reminded of Greil Marcus and his thesis of the "Old Weird America"--a much derided idea now, I suppose, but one which made some sort of sense to me. When I read Invisible Republic, I was bored by the chapters specifically about Dylan and the Band and the recording of the The Basement Tapes--I love Dylan, but I'm no Dylanologist, I was then discovering. But the stuff on the old folk songs, on Dock Boggs, on "The Coo-Coo Bird"--this stuff fascinated me. It seemed to speak to a history of America beneath the surface, away from the standard narrative we've had forced down our throats, to acknowledge the strange religious practices, the violent upheavals, the anxiety about technological change... At the time I also listened to an interview with Marcus in support of his book. When he wasn't droning on about who played what on The Basement Tapes, but was talking about Sister Rosetta Tharpe and Clarence Ashley, and Dylan's songs that seemed repond to other currents in pop culture (like Dylan's take on the teenage murder song), I felt that I was on the cusp of understanding something, something that tied in with Faulkner's imagined South, and Cormac McCarthy's highly stylized violence of the Old West in Blood Meridian, and this something was just beyond my reach, something I could not articulate intelligibly.

Mark does mention Marcus, in a footnote. He notes that Marcus invariably avoids talking about production techniques and that, indeed, in his discussion of the Sex Pistols, for example, Marcus talks about their live performance... Mark admits: "I haven't read any of Marcus' Old Weird America material, so correct me if I'm wrong - isn't it about Dylan? - but couldn't all this return to field recordings be fitted, all-too-comfortably, into a quest for presence?" Yes, yes it could. Also, it strikes me that, in his recent work, Marcus appears to be positing something essential about America, locating some kind of authenticity in the musicians and writers he chooses to focus on, in the particular narrative strain he choses to highlight. His focus on David Thomas, for instance, is interesting in this regard, given how inauthentic Thomas' musical persona is. In his music, in and out of Pere Ubu, Thomas is saying something about America, too. As if there is something authentic in the very inauthenticity of the projected persona, in the music, and as if this reveals something essential about America.

One of the important things to remember about the Anthology of American Folk Music, emphasized by Harry Smith but often overlooked, is that these were intended to be commercial recordings. The musicians may have been playing songs that had been around seemingly forever, but these were not field recordings, these were performances recorded for release by record labels. That it's been well over 50 years since the Anthology first appeared, and another 20-30 years since the recordings first appeared, means it's easy to listen to these songs as if they are ancient, but the recordings have locked in place a certain time, and the technological artifice of the records--their scratchiness equals for us "old-time"--allows us to continue to believe in the illusion of folk tradition transmitted via the recordings. Not that there is no folk tradition, but that the tradition we think we know about is necessarily altered by the technological artifact.

I'm just sort of riffing here, but I'm interested in pursuing this line of thought further. I look forward to reading Simon Reynolds' piece (referenced by k-punk) in the new issue of The Wire, which I haven't received yet, among other things....