by Roy Scranton
Of course, that’s been Hersh’s mode. He’s a debaser, a desecrator, an enlightener, someone interested in piercing power’s veils of hypocrisy, illusion, and obfuscation to bring hidden truth into the purifying light of rational thought. He’s made a career out of exposing lies, unearthing conspiracies, and uncovering buried crimes. I’ve long admired Hersh’s work and thought of him as a hero, though serious questions have been laid against the credibility of some of his recent work. Hersh is a journalist and freethinker in the best tradition of critical enlightenment thought, one in a long line of muckrakers, whistleblowers, cynics, and gadflies.
The idea in this line is to demystify the sacred, dispel illusion, and increase understanding. Somehow the former two lead to the latter, though it’s not always clear how that happens. Nevertheless, it seems laudable to me, sapere aude and all that, and it forms the motivation for much of my own work, not least the paper I’d be delivering in Moscow on Tuesday, which was part of a longer project offering a critique of post-1945 American war culture. One of the main arguments of my project is that understanding war as trauma is a political act, in that trauma recuperates and glorifies nationalist military sacrifice under a language of psychopathology, elides structural and political realities by focusing on the experience of individuals rather than on social or systemic forces, and effaces enemy and civilian dead by substituting for their bleeding bodies the psychologically wounded soul of the trauma hero.
Understanding war as trauma is a relatively new way of thinking, available only since World War I and dominant in the United States only since the 1970s. The narrative of war as trauma took hold in the US because it helped solve ideological problems that had erupted in the 1960s between the ideal of American liberal democracy and the reality of American imperial power, and ease generational conflicts between those who’d won World War II and their children who’d inherited the postwar liberal order. Understanding war as trauma and focusing on the damaged souls of individual American soldiers allows us to ignore the reality of war as political policy and to ignore the effects our war policies have on those on whom they are imposed. It allows us to reconcile our idea of liberal American virtue, embodied by American soldiers who suffer psychological injury for the violence they are forced to commit, with the industrial violence by which America maintains its global political and economic hegemony. Our soldiers kill for us, and we demand that they suffer the blood guilt—in today’s language, PTSD—so that we don’t have to.
The talk I was to give on Tuesday focused on an earlier moment, before the idea of war as trauma had come to dominate American culture. In my paper for Tuesday, I compared Wallace Stevens’s World War II poetry with James Jones’s Proustian combat novel The Thin Red Line. What Stevens’s poems and Jones’s novel had in common was a serious concern with the problem of the individual nationalist hero in industrial warfare. In the traditional form of the sacrificial narrative, a hero dies for his community. A single name, a singular life, a unique body is sacrificed for an abstract ideal—in modern war, “the nation”—and the power of his sacrifice makes the ideal real. His blood has paid the price to consecrate national identity; the idea of the nation has become physically real in his body. One of the problems that arose with industrialized warfare in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries was that the single hero, the singular life, the unique sacrificial body wasn’t unique at all, but horrifically multiple: industrialized war made a grotesque parody of the idea of sacrifice, sending millions of men to die in great putrescent piles of guts and limbs, over and over and over. Nevertheless, awards were still given, heroes still named, and nations still forged out of bloody bodies. How? And how could you reconcile that grotesque repetition with the idea of human dignity? And further yet, how could you accept that horrific process as the foundation of any kind of legitimate public order? James Jones and Wallace Stevens both made these questions a subject of their art, creating complex, difficult meditations on the problem, meditations that don’t ever quite settle, though they both manage to achieve their own moments of tense equanimity.
I was nervous, preparing my paper, about how my Russian audience would take it. Were my desecrations of the formal structure of nationalist sacrifice coming too soon on the heels of Victory Day? Were my efforts to rend the veil of military honor under even traumatic narratives too pointed a critique to keep from offending sacred Russian memories of their own historical traumas? Millions had just marched in the streets carrying pictures of the dead. On Saturday, the whole nation had turned out to honor the bodies of the fallen. On Tuesday, I was going to say that such honor was nothing more than political propaganda woven over the grotesque truth of the modern state. Would they boo? Would they hiss? Would they shout me down?
I needn’t have worried. The soft abstractions I spun fell harmlessly down on my audience like so many flakes of ash. My talk was about America, anyway, American war, American heroes, American empire, and the arc that red, white, and blue flag danced across the seminar room kept them focused on the specifics of the case rather than inviting thoughts about how it might have applied to Putin, Moscow, and Saint George. What’s more, these were scholars, academics, ideologues only when it served them, and what reason would they have had to rebuke me? No, the truth is that my desecrations fell on ears that were if not deaf at least disposed to be kindly, and I troubled no one, offended no one.
5. The Rising of the Dead
Four days after I came home from Russia, the Association of Writers and Writing Programs removed the poet Vanessa Place from their National Conference Los Angeles 2016 Subcommittee, in response to a petition circulated on the internet through Change.org (“Victories every day”) arguing that Place’s work was “at best, startlingly racially insensitive, and, at worst, racist,” and a robust shaming campaign on Twitter by an anonymous internet collective that calls itself the Mongrel Coalition Against Gringpo. On May 13, the Mongrel Coalition launched its campaign by tweeting: “VANESSA PLACE IS RACIST. DEFEND HER AND YOU ARE COMPLICIT. VP WORE BLACKFACE. VP TWEETS GONE WITH THE WIND. GO AHEAD, DEFEND HER.” The petition, which was not written by the Mongrel Coalition, followed a few days later.
The specific offensive work in question was a Twitter feed in which Vanessa Place was tweeting Margaret Mitchell’s Civil War romance, Gone with the Wind, line by line, 140 characters at a time. The AWP, one of the most important institutions in the United States involved in the cultural production of what we call literary fiction and poetry, claimed that they “believed in the freedom of expression,” and offered no judgment about whether they agreed that Place’s work was racist or not, but had decided to remove Place from their subcommittee in order to avoid controversy. In their words: “The group’s work must focus on the adjudication of the 1,800 submitted proposals, not upon the management of a controversy that has stirred strong objections and much ill-will toward AWP and the subcommittee. Perpetuating the controversy would not be fair to the many writers who have submitted the proposals.”10
The petition against Place’s work was written by a white poet named Timothy Volpert, who lives in Topeka, Kansas. The petition reproduces a screenshot of the Twitter feed in question, which features a production still of the actress Hattie McDaniel in her “Mammy” costume from the film Gone With the Wind and a backdrop banner with an archaic caricature of a black-faced woman. You can see from the screenshot that the feed had been running since 2009 and had produced 16,200 tweets. The complete petition reads:
We find it inappropriate that Vanessa Place is among those who will decide which panels will take place at AWP Los Angeles. We acknowledge Place’s right to exercise her creativity, but we find her work to be, at best, startlingly racially insensitive, and, at worst, racist. We do not believe it is right that she have a hand in deciding whether panels having to do with race and identity will be a part of next year’s AWP. Her recent work with “Gone with the Wind” re-inscribes that text’s racism—she does not abate it—in
the flesh of every descendant of slaves. Indeed, she herself claims to be constructing “a slave block” with the work. AWP’s stated desire for inclusivity and diversity in the panel makeup requires an atmosphere of trust on the part of POC, LGBTQIA, and Disabled panel applicants, and Place’s racially insensitive, if not downright racist, projects violate that sense of trust. She furthers her career on the backs of Black ancestors—the hands that filled the master’s pockets now fill hers. We ask that you remove her from her position of authority over writers of color.
Thank you for the work you do. We trust you will make the right decision in this instance.11
It will be noticed at once that Volpert’s claim that Vanessa Place’s body of work is racist is based on one piece of evidence, “Gone with the Wind.” Volpert argues that Place’s whole oeuvre is “at best, startlingly racially insensitive,” and that her judgment as a professional artist is compromised. Volpert strongly implies that Place is herself “racially insensitive,” and also implies that if she were given the power to decide who should be on AWP panels, she would discriminate against writers of color and possibly even take advantage of them. These are heavy charges, and they have been made on the basis of one work of art, a work of art that Volpert interprets literally, ungenerously, mistakenly, hyperbolically, and out of context. Volpert describes Place’s Twitter feed as a “recent work of art,” but anyone can see from the image of the feed used in the petition itself that the work had been going on since 2009. Volpert says that the work “re-inscribes [Gone With the Wind’s] racism,” when it would be more accurate to say that the work reframes or remediates it, since Place is tweeting Margaret Mitchell’s novel, not “inscribing” it, but that’s beside the point because Volpert goes further to say that the work “re-inscribes [Gone With the Wind’s] racism . . . in the flesh of every descendent of slaves.” This is hyperbole, of course, a metaphoric expression. Vanessa Place has not written a single word “in the flesh” of anyone. What Volpert seems to want to say is that Vanessa Place’s repetition of Gone With the Wind is harmful, and he presents that idea of harm as a metaphor of physical violence that explicitly invokes the lash. Volpert’s broad stroke makes it impossible to judge whether Place’s work is really harmful or not, since he’s not making a serious claim about the world but a rhetorical gesture expressing a certain emotion. Volpert conflates Place’s Twitter feed with a similar work of the same title published in the poetry journal Drunken Boat in 2010 by quoting out of context a phrase from Place’s artist’s statement explaining that piece saying that she is “constructing ‘a slave block’ with the work,” which statement Volpert lets stand as a literalized metaphor that is expected, apparently, to speak for itself. He goes on to assert that Place “furthers her career on the backs of Black ancestors,” an assertion made without explanation or evidence.
Volpert doesn’t make a case building on a long trend in Vanessa Place’s work over her career. He doesn’t provide evidence of specific acts of racist discrimination that Place herself has committed. He doesn’t bother to try to understand what Place’s intent was with the Twitter feed he calls “racially insensitive.” He offers no sustained engagement with conceptual poetry, the problems of representing and reframing race in terms of intellectual property rights, or even what it means to remediate a historical text in a new context.
To take Volpert’s stance as he presents it, replicating any act of racism is itself racist (and moreover an act of physical violence). To take his tack, every text or image that represents slavery is as racist as slavery itself, and all representations of racism are equal, since all of it “re-inscribes . . . racism . . . in the flesh of every descendant of slaves.” If Volpert had his way, there would be no representations of slavery at all, ever, not literary, not historical, not factual, nothing, because for Volpert mimesis is repetition, and repetition is reenactment. By this logic, Volpert himself is as guilty of being “racially insensitive” as Place is: if the Twitter feed is as racist as the novel being tweeted, then Volpert’s “re-inscription” of Place’s Twitter feed is as racist as the feed. “Remove Vanessa Place from the AWP Los Angeles conference committee” is as racist as “Gone With the Wind” is as racist as Gone With the Wind is as racist as actual plantation slavery. It’s all the same.
Despite the patent absurdity of this position, the lack of real evidence for his claim, the manifest shoddiness of his argument, and its reliance on a strikingly ungenerous reading of a single work of art, Volpert’s petition was signed by more than 2,100 people, including well-known and respected poets. Volpert’s petition and the AWP’s decision to remove Place from its committee set off a firestorm of controversy within the teacup of American poetry, including flame wars between poets, bitter arguments on Facebook, and yet more hyperbole in response to Volpert’s, including Language poet Ron Silliman comparing the signers of Volpert’s petition to Spanish fascists, Nazis, and Saïd and Chérif Kouachi. He went so far as to call them an “online lynch mob.”
I was disturbed by the AWP’s decision to remove Place based on Volpert’s petition and angry with people I knew for supporting what looked to me like scapegoating. Vanessa Place’s Twitter feed was offensive and dull, certainly, but her work in general has been thoughtful and intelligent, even if often discomfiting and difficult. I’d been following her work for years with admiration. I had invited her to be part of a symposium on conceptual poetry and poetic freedom I had organized at Princeton University in 2013, where she sat on a panel with Timothy Donnelly, Kent Johnson, Jena Osman, and Mónica de la Torre. Place’s work is often emotionally difficult to read, because so much of it focuses on racial injustice and sexual violence; the challenge her work presents is substantial. Part of her gambit, as a conceptual poet who uses mainly found or appropriated texts, seems to be to turn the act of reframing into a painfully lucid steel mirror.
Her work had been, since before I had been following it, always presented within a clear theoretical and political approach. Place uses her work to attack the idea of the self, especially the lyric self, in part because, so she argues, behind the idea of the modern self lies the idea of property. She is a profoundly insightful critic of the role contemporary poetry plays in capitalism, and has made her work that of critiquing and, yes, desecrating what remains holy, sacrosanct, or metaphysically privileged around the idea of poetic production, poetic identity, and the voice.
As Place said in the address she delivered at Princeton:
It has become apparent to me that poetry is fundamental to capital, just as the humanities are desperately needed, though there is an obfuscation of the need through a stupid insistence on functionality. What is poetry/art for, et cetera, and while there is an easy answer about the utility of critique and interrogation, for plodding logic and pedantic insistency that science rewards less often than the humanities, there is a better, more transcendental, more obvious, response . . .
Poetry is what poetry is, and what poetry is has everything to do with the packaging of the imaginary libratory subject. It has to do with other soft-eyed dreams—that clouds mean, that representations are, that language matters, that at any moment there can be a pivot-point at which a terrible beauty may be born. Beauty, it could be noted, being the beast that is absolutely indifferent to the corpse before it. And that these things are as true as anything else. Or, more precisely, as tragically true as everything else.
The poetic subject is us, here, now, the point at which the false may be beautifully, horribly, real.
Or, to misquote Eric Hoffer, “Every great cause begins as a movement, becomes a business, and eventually degenerates into a racket.”
Put another way, “I” is not a subject.
I is a racket.12
Place’s work with Gone With the Wind is also about property, as she explained after the AWP removed her from its committee: part of the point of the Twitter feed was to draw legal action from the notoriously litigious Margaret Mitchell
estate, in the hopes of provoking a legal battle about who “owns” the racist language in Mitchell’s novel. Her work with Gone With the Wind is also about desecration. For, as a white author from Virginia, Place recognized that Mitchell’s novel was considered by many to be a sacred object. As she wrote in the artist’s statement that Volpert quoted from, describing a work of text published in Drunken Boat:
In May 2009, I was in Berlin, where the multifarious reminders of Nazism seemed more properly to be Germany’s historical focus, rather than the Holocaust. For the Holocaust was an event, a singular horror, whereas Nazism was the formal manifestation of anti-Semitism as sociopolitical philosophy and ethical/aesthetic modus operandi. Similarly, slavery is not the issue for the United States today as much as racism is as ever was and ever will be, at least historically. This piece—the gleaning of all passages in Gone With the Wind in which “nigger” features prominently (omitted are other racial epithets or denigrating enactments), then set in a block of text, a slave block—aims to remind white folks of their goings-on and ongoings. Self included, for there is personal guilt there as well, given my family is not just Caucasian American, but Southern, Virginian, as they say, “by the grace of God.” And God’s grace carries with it a certain responsibility for the error of blind loyalty (see, Abraham & Isaac). Too, GWTW is still a very much beloved bit of Americana (Molly Haskell recently published a book on Scarlett O’Hara as feminist icon, and last year’s Best Actress Oscar was announced to the soaring strains of “Tara’s Theme”), with very little attention paid to its blackface, or that its blackface is blackface. Or that, in such texts, characters are to people as people may be to property. So I have stolen Margaret Mitchell’s “niggers” and claim them as my own. In a funny way, I am replicating Huck Finn’s dilemma/conversion: to understand that keeping (not turning in runaway) Nigger Jim is stealing, for which one may well go to hell, and to do it anyway.13