by Roy Scranton
The reference to Mark Twain—a great American desecrator if ever there was one—is pointed. In emulation of Twain’s novel The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Place is positioning her work in terms of a critique not just of slavery but of the connections between private property and racism, with an awareness of its being trapped in the very system it’s trying to critique. In Twain’s novel, Huck Finn’s moral options with regard to Jim are circumscribed by the ridiculous horror of slave society, in which Jim is property. Huck can return Jim or he can steal him, but he cannot free him. Furthermore, stealing Jim means not only breaking the law for Huck, but accepting social ostracism and his soul’s damnation. Place positions herself in a similar double bind as Huck by stealing Margaret Mitchell’s racist language. Place can choose to ignore Mitchell’s racist novel, or she can steal it, but she cannot erase it. In effect, Place is dramatizing the intolerable position we’re all trapped in, the horrific idea of order we impose upon ourselves through the concept of racial discrimination. We can try to ignore it or we can claim our complicity, but we don’t know how to get outside of it. We cannot simply erase our own history.
Pointing out painful double binds has long been part of Place’s project. I suspect this is part of what makes her a figure of contention and fixation. For some time she took to appropriating Facebook posts by poets announcing publications or readings; recontextualized, the posts made a mockery of the writers’ adroitly performed “humblebrags” and exposed the self-promotion so fundamental to social media. For this, Place was rebuked and criticized. I am convinced as well that Place’s stark, intense, serious poetic persona grates on many poets today. Vanessa Place does not play nice, and the whole point of poetry today is that you play nice: you listen to other poets so they’ll listen to you, and around and around it goes. The problem is that while everybody can read and write poems, not everybody gets a job doing it. Poetry pretends to operate like a gift economy, but in fact it’s an industry, an industry whose product is poets—or, more precisely, paying MFA students.
Yet all this—the emotional, aesthetic, and moral complexity of Place’s work, her theoretical rigor and conceptual brilliance, her explicit and laudable efforts to desecrate shambolic notions of poetic identity, poetic voice, and poetic community, the affective reaction her persona provokes, even her being lumped in with Kenneth Goldsmith—none of this explains the explosive emotions ignited by Volpert’s petition, nor does it finally weigh in quite enough to make “Gone With the Wind” okay. I think only someone who deliberately ignored Vanessa Place’s exhaustive theoretical work could charge her with being “racially insensitive,” for she is nothing if not sensitive to the language used to construct race. Nevertheless, her work is also deliberately offensive. Even if the work shows a deep sensitivity to the language of race, “Gone With the Wind” is still racist.
So there’s that. What’s more, while I was disturbed by the AWP’s fear of scandal and angry at fellow writers for supporting a half-baked petition rebuking a poet for doing challenging work, I was also confused, because a few weeks earlier I had found myself supporting the other side of a similar issue. When Deborah Eisenberg and other writers at PEN America publicly disavowed their support for the PEN Gala at which the French satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo would be awarded the Toni and James C. Goodale Freedom of Expression Courage Award, I thought their position was clear and unimpeachable. Never mind the disgust engendered by the opportunistic waving of je suis charlie placards, never mind the magazine’s own complex relationship to satire and French Catholicism, and never mind the fact that Charlie Hebdo were desecrators, critics, cynics, debasers committed to puncturing facile credences and upsetting conventions. There were serious problems with the idea of PEN American giving an award for courage in freedom of expression to Charlie Hebdo.
First, allowing desecrators to do their cynical work, which work is not only a cornerstone of democratic and egalitarian thought but also essential to fostering intellectual maturity and social enlightenment, is not the same as rewarding them for it. One can support extreme examples of free speech, satire, and even hate speech, without rewarding and honoring their speakers simply because they persist in being offensive. Second, all this shit happens in a context. The context for Place’s “Gone With the Wind” happens to be systemic oppression and racialized murder. The context for PEN America’s award to Charlie Hebdo was fourteen years of aggressive American military action against Islamic countries and peoples. Keith Gessen wrote what seemed to me one of the best explanations of how this worked in his piece in N+1 describing why he signed the letter protesting the PEN Gala:
When twelve staff members and friends of the satirical cartoon newspaper Charlie Hebdo were killed at their offices by Saïd and Chérif Kouachi this past January, several things happened. First, there was an outpouring of grief for the victims. There had been many other attacks on editors and writers in recent memory, but not at this scale and not with such brazenness. The brothers came in, announced that they were from al Qaeda, and started killing.
But in addition to the grief, in America at least there was something else: I would call it an attempt to assimilate the shootings to the ongoing American “war on terror.” My friend George Packer, writing at the New Yorker website, immediately warned against ascribing the killings by two second-generation Algerian Muslims to the failure of France to integrate people like them, or to the ongoing Western participation in wars in the Middle East. The culprit, Packer wrote, was none of these things, but rather militant modern Islam: “an ideology that has sought to achieve power through terror for decades.” It’s the same ideology, Packer wrote, “that murdered three thousand people in the U.S. on September 11, 2001.” And it was: the brothers had even pledged allegiance to al Qaeda. Packer’s language took one back to the days after the September 11 attacks, when Western politicians and intellectuals began gearing up for a long protracted war with “Islamic terror.” That war, obviously, continues.
When people in France, in their mourning, declared “Je suis Charlie,” they were expressing grief, an identification with the victims of horrific violence. But what were people expressing when they said “Je suis Charlie” in the US? It was a tragedy. But what did it mean to identify with those particular victims, at this particular time? I could be wrong, but it seemed to me that “Je suis Charlie” was a way for people to re-pledge their commitment to the War on Terror that had been announced by the United States in 2001.14
The Charlie Hebdo award scandal was a story about bodies, because the Charlie Hebdo shooting was a story about bodies. Whose bodies? Arabic bodies or French bodies? Arabic bodies or American bodies? Gone With the Wind is a story about bodies, because the Civil War is a story about bodies. Whose bodies? Black bodies or white bodies? Southern bodies or Yankee bodies? The story of the Baltimore riots is a story about bodies, because the stories of Freddie Gray, Eric Garner, Michael Brown, and Trayvon Martin are stories about bodies. Whose bodies? Desecrated bodies or sacred bodies? Bodies that matter or bodies that don’t?
The angry, mournful cry echoing out from the protests last winter was simple: Black lives matter. Black lives matter.
Black and white protestors came together over the dead bodies of Michael Brown and Eric Garner, doing what communities do over dead bodies, which is to make meaning. These bodies are sacred, they said, every time they chanted “Hands up! Don’t shoot!” or “I can’t breathe.” These bodies are sacred.
Formally, the act is homologous to other acts of sacrificial understanding and communion. The dead editors at Charlie Hebdo became the sacred embodiment of French nationalism or, as Keith Gessen suggested, the American war on terror: “Je suis Charlie.” The twenty-six million Russians killed in World War II became the sacred embodiment of the Russian state, a Saint George’s ribbon tying a country together. The three thousand people killed in the attacks on the World Trade Center became the sacred embodiment of the American nation: Remember
9/11. The anonymous soldier killed on the battlefield becomes the sacred embodiment of his nation’s spirit: the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier.
Structurally, the difference between a heroic sacrifice and a scapegoating is merely a matter of identification. In both cases it’s a story about a body, a ritual, a sacrifice: a tragōidia. In both cases a group of people come together in bloody communion. In both cases the murdered body becomes sacred, either totem or taboo, lifted up or cast out. The community says, “We are the same as the dead,” or the community says, “We are different from the dead.” Either way, the community becomes real in its relationship to the dead: this is a story about a body. “We” cheer the death of Osama bin Laden. “We” stand over Eric Garner as our brothers in blue choke him to death. “We” say, “Je Suis Charlie.” “We” lynch a nigger. “We” burn a witch. We decide who’s in, who’s out, who’s right, who’s wrong, who’s good, who’s evil, who lives, who dies. Typically, too, one follows hard upon the other, first the sacrifice, then the scapegoat, first the “Us,” then the “Them.”
I am constitutionally repelled by such acts of consecration. They make me want to be a debaser. I cannot believe in a nation or a peace that’s founded in blood. I refuse to believe that violence brings us together. I cannot accept that death justifies death, war justifies war, and hatred justifies hatred. I refuse to pick sides. I don’t want to eat the dead, wash myself in their blood, or claim their names. If I could, I would desecrate all these altars, tear down every veil, piss on every christ.
I admire the desecrators and cynics in history because they strike at idols of dogma and irrationality, because they strive to pierce through to reason and truth, because so often they stand alone and embattled against institutions, mobs, and blind adherence to tradition. But there’s something else at work, too, because every act of desecration—like every act of consecration—happens in a context. We reason and criticize in social contexts, and I don’t get to refuse mine. I don’t get to refuse to pick sides. All too often, however alone they might think they are, it turns out that the desecrators, debasers, and cynics stand not against but alongside the mighty. And it turns out that sometimes when they thought they were spitting on a false idol, they were desecrating the faith and hope of those who have been told again and again that their lives and dreams don’t matter.
When we think about Charlie Hebdo and Vanessa Place, we need to think about Saïd and Chérif Kouachi, Hattie McDaniel, and Michael Brown. When we think about 9/11, we need to think about Osama bin Laden and a hundred years of Western military and political intervention in the Middle East. When we think about the avant-garde’s critique of the Self, we need to think about the dead bodies dumped over the side of the Zong. And as we think, we might begin to realize that the sides we get to choose between are not enlightened desecrators and unenlightened mobs, but those with the power to name the sacred and those whose lives are spent fighting for that dignity.
Some lives matter more than others: that’s why protestors have to form a group called Black Lives Matter. Some lives matter more than others: that’s why French satirists desecrating Christianity is different from French satirists desecrating Islam. Some lives matter more than others: that’s why Russian propaganda valorizes the Russian dead and American propaganda, the American dead. Some lives matter more than others: that’s why US audiences flocked to watch American Sniper but have forgotten Abu Ghraib.
Some lives matter more than others because that’s how humans do politics, but can you, cynical reader, mon semblable, ma sœur, begrudge a people their right to insist on their dignity? Can you deny your own need for the sacred, your own deep thirst for an existence that’s more than mere matter? Can you truly tell me that you have not, in haunted moments, called upon the names of the dead?
Everything happens in a context. The context we live in now is one in which carbon waste from the richest countries is rapidly warming the planet, threatening infrastructure and agriculture around the world, destabilizing weather patterns, and raising sea levels to inundate coastal cities. As a species, we face our greatest collective threat. For decades, the only hope for humanity has been for all the peoples of the world to unite in common cause and limit our carbon emissions. The wealthiest need to give up their cheap energy, the poorest needs to give up their dreams of wealth, and our collective fate needs to be grounded in economic and environmental justice. That has not happened, and most likely never will. We remain as divided today as ever, and as environmental disaster endangers food and water resources, economic precarity narrows opportunities, and war spreads, each group insists on its exceptional difference: Sunni, Shiia, French, Algerian, Western, Islamic, American, Russian, the 99 percent, the 1 percent, White, Black . . .
Some lives matter more than others. That’s how we make collectives—identities—peoples—nations—wars. The bloody ritual of sacrifice and communion through which we manifest what “we” means won’t end until we learn to sacrifice ourselves first, in every case, for every brother and sister, every other Other. Those with wealth and power must scatter it. Those with privilege must dismantle it. Those caught in the complicity of repression must lay down their own bodies to end it. Those who suffer violence must turn the other cheek. The impossible demand for infinite compassion is our only hope, the only way we might be saved.
And when that bright day comes it will be the last day, and all the dead of every race, creed, gender, and nation will rise from their graves together as one, finally equal. [2015]
War of Choice
By the time the English Civil War had ended, after nine years of brutal fighting, well over half a million people had been killed throughout the three kingdoms of England, Scotland, and Ireland. England alone suffered approximately 190,000 war-related deaths out of a population of five million, a death rate of nearly 4 percent—making the English Civil War almost twice as deadly, per capita, as the American one two centuries later.
Across the Channel in Paris, Thomas Hobbes watched the war end with grim relief. He had fled England in 1640, and reports of the war’s devastations spurred him to deepen his reflections on sovereignty and power. In 1651, he published Leviathan, almost instantly recognized as a major work of political philosophy. One of the most influential ideas in the book was Hobbes’s new story of the “State of Nature”: whereas the Bible described humanity’s exile from an innocent Eden, Hobbes told a tale of humanity’s escape from an constant, anarchic war for resources, where “the life of man [was] solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.”
In joining “Nature,” “War,” and primitive man, Hobbes’s story of the “state of Nature” as a war of all against all implicitly justifies any amount of violence committed by a sovereign power, since the sovereign is by definition working against violence and toward civilization and peace. War, for Hobbes, is not a specific kind of social action that groups of people undertake against each other but is defined by its very distinction from social life.
This was a powerful idea, especially if you happened to be a white European during the age of colonial expansion. It still often determines how we think and talk about war today. It shapes the stories we tell about going to war and coming home, it undergirds what we mean when we talk about “trauma,” and it provides the conceptual basis for universalist claims to be waging a “war on terror.” Looked at through the Hobbesian frame, wars waged by one group of people against another are transformed, as if by magic, into metaphysical struggles against our own primitive nature.
Hobbes doesn’t come up much in Georgetown University philosopher Nancy Sherman’s book Afterwar: Healing the Moral Wounds of Our Soldiers, but his definition of War as Nature implicitly informs everything she says. Like Hobbes, Sherman would have her readers forget that war is a thing humans do to each other. Like Hobbes, Sherman would like to believe that war is somehow separate from civilization.
Sherman is primarily a moral philosopher, with a background in Kan
t and Aristotle, and her research focuses on military ethics, the “battlefield mind of the soldier,” and “the moral weight of war.” According to Sherman, Afterwar is “a manifesto for how to engage in moral repair, one on one, with individual service members and veterans so that we can begin to build a new kind of integrated community.” This call raises as many questions as it answers, one of the most important of which is about the relationship between this unidentified “we” and American soldiers.
Sherman’s best chapter, “Don’t Just Tell Me ‘Thank You,’” explores precisely this question. It begins with a familiar scene: A civilian tells a veteran “Thank you for your service.” The veteran says, “No problem” or “You’re welcome.” After an awkward pause, the conversation resumes, nobody feeling satisfied with the exchange, the civilian vaguely guilty, the veteran resentful. Sherman carefully unpacks the many complexities at work within this interaction, elucidating how the actors involved are performing ritualistic observances of social norms and committing themselves to shared values, but from different perspectives and with radically different senses of investment and sacrifice. For civilians to say “Thank you for your service” is for them to say “Thank you for doing what I did not, or would not, do for our community.”