Random
Choose to Know
In the fall of 1997 I had a lot of raking to do, but my friends dragged me up to the University of Chicago instead. Kurt Vonnegut was there, reading from his new book, Timequake. During an extended discussion with the moderator, the old man made a keen point about what challenges an audience’s sympathies and what placates them. Referring to Schindler’s List, I think, Vonnegut suggested the movie was exploitative, and that a far better goal would be to try showing Hitler from a sympathetic angle. I would go farther and look for an art that makes me empathize.
No one has done either yet, though Downfall does show him in a very human way (as opposed to most other representations of Hitler, which I think are caricatures and, as such, not human). But would a writer be castigated for showing Hitler as a sad, diligent, intelligent and charismatic leader? Would an audience be able to accept the despot portrayed as a hardworking idealist, perhaps kind and grandfatherly — or would we call for censorship? I doubt it would be difficult to put together a story that showed Hitler, truthfully, as someone we can identify with. It would be scary, but would there be value?
I can’t see how there wouldn’t be. Simply exposing a perspective on Hitler that we haven’t seen before would not make me forget that he was, you know, the worst person ever — but imagine all the things we could learn about relationships, insecurities, and the beautiful richness of despair (or, who knows what else?). I think an art that is bold and serious enough to grapple with Hitler’s humanity would uncover a new, unimagined mode of thinking, one that does more to teach us about ourselves than what our arts and sciences currently offer. I have done bad things and I don’t know why.
At the same time, I believe it would be a simple thing to make an (American) audience feel sympathy for Hitler — just cast Daniel Day Lewis and set it to a John Williams score. But in the end, this will do nothing except mine the narratives already familiar to us and regurgitate them. Similarly, I don’t think the “Piss Christ” approach will work, because the thoughtfulness has to be more apparent and the art itself oughtn’t be superficially shocking. The shocks, done right, would hit us below the surface. They would be revelations like, “Oh, huh. I might have ordered those executions, too.”
We commit similar acts all the time, just by blocking any willingness to understand a bad idea or wicked reality. How hard is it to understand Bush’s war policies outside of capitalist gain? When is the last time you tried to honestly evaluate why we are in Iraq? I submit that if the US was half as hawkish we would be twice as dead, yet the leftist chanters call for Bush’s punishment. Send him to the World Court or ICC — he should go — but he will go as Jesus to the cross — he will go in our place. Kierkegaard said the times aren’t wicked, they’re paltry. And it’s our paltry unwillingness to examine our convictions that adds up to this bullshit world we’re stuck in.
I mean it. I breathe Father Zossima’s maxim: We’re all sinners, and I am the worst. This is what Christianity means to me — how it is that I identify as a Christian whether or not I believe in the virgin birth or resurrection at any given moment — because it is this recognition and move toward forgiveness that offers our only motherfucking hope. Justice is a sham. Justice isn’t a thing; it’s a concept. There is a qualitative difference between a thing and a concept, right? A thing can be achieved, a concept is just a thought. It might lead to action — to the gallows — but that action, being a thing, is not justice. Stop looking for justice and figure out the nature of the wrong, as you see it.
The problem with using a method like that in “The Adventueres of Wigger Chick” to show Hitler as a kindred spirit, or something similar, is that what resonates there isn’t that “I, too, would ignore my child in preference of sex,” (which I’m sure I would do) or, “yes, I have also littered” — no, instead those cartoons point a finger at Wigger Chick and highlight her flaws without implicating the reader. They are often endearing flaws, like how shameless she is in recounting her troubles to an administrator, or how innocently self-involved she is in the “Computers are for NARDS” tiles (I mean, come on, “nards” is a funny word/chunk of dialect), but combined with the roughness of the drawings, they are a step too far removed to garner empathy. If “The Adventueres of Wigger Chick” pulled that trick off a little better, I sense that it would be easier to locate the jokes, which are actually rarely about her own flaws, and even less about race.
But that comic does underscore the Hitler problem. As I see it — and I might be wrong — the knee-jerk reaction to view the strip as racist comes largely from not being challenged to see antagonists as likable. An interpretive culture that is based squarely on dualism isn’t prepared to apprehend the angles. It’s uncomfortable to look at the word WIGGER, but it’s wrong to turn away before exploring it. We have been turning away from Hitler for too long. Racism is not a thing; it’s a concept. As a concept it has an ugly history of leading to reprehensible actions, and we should stamp out those actions wherever we find them. But we should turn the concept in our mind freely. Can you find the Hitler in yourself? Can you wiggle your wigger? These are in you, with the flowers.
Eastern Europe is a tumultuous place, and the Croatians don’t like the Serbians and they talk a lot of trash about each other. When I hear my Croatian friend talk about it, I get upset. I mean, they are terribly, violently accepting of the racist concept. Then, from Slovenia, I heard that Slavoj Žižek finds a lot of relief in hatespeech. Maybe it’s because they don’t have the NFL, but his point is that racist jokes, told in a non-racist way, are a cathartic, proper response to our sterile, paltry multiculturalism. To tell a joke in a non-racist way (i.e. to refer to the racist concept without referring to it) is a profound language trick that is born out of post-structuralism, dealing with how the signified is not the real signified, har har — and maybe someone can unpack it in the comments section.
It’s disturbing that so much is taken for granted at HTMLGIANT. There have been too many posts that tend, marginally, to promote hateful values without making an obvious disclaimer or explanation. Among friends, I’m not afraid to speak inappropriately this way, without the ironic nod, but I’m not brave enough to do it “for the edification” of our Internet brothers and sisters. I’m glad that other contributors are, though, because it creates a forum for dealing with vastly important concepts honestly, in the midst of things, and without the pretense of intentionality.
Because, most importantly, if you’re going to make a movie that humanizes Hitler, you can’t announce that this is what you’re doing.
Tags: dostoyevsky, htmlgiant, vonnegut
its an interesting topic adam. i think the flip side of this question is the opposite effect, where people begin romanticizing these historical figures, (creating mythologies in a way i.e. jefferson). you see that sometimes, but truth, i agree, its always the truth of things that gets lost somewhere in the shuffle.
its an interesting topic adam. i think the flip side of this question is the opposite effect, where people begin romanticizing these historical figures, (creating mythologies in a way i.e. jefferson). you see that sometimes, but truth, i agree, its always the truth of things that gets lost somewhere in the shuffle.
Wislawa Szymborska has a poem about little A’s first baby picture. It’s in View with a Grain of Sand (if memory serves).
Wislawa Szymborska has a poem about little A’s first baby picture. It’s in View with a Grain of Sand (if memory serves).
http://history1900s.about.com/gi/o.htm?zi=1/XJ/Ya&zTi=1&sdn=history1900s&cdn=education&tm=7&f=00&tt=14&bt=1&bts=1&zu=http%3A//www.ralphmag.org/hitlerL.html
http://history1900s.about.com/gi/o.htm?zi=1/XJ/Ya&zTi=1&sdn=history1900s&cdn=education&tm=7&f=00&tt=14&bt=1&bts=1&zu=http%3A//www.ralphmag.org/hitlerL.html
Yeah, I see what you mean. I just think it’s wrong to willfully ignore something, or to not be able to entertain an option.
Yeah, I see what you mean. I just think it’s wrong to willfully ignore something, or to not be able to entertain an option.
i’ve always thought eva braun was an strange part of hitler’s story. i picked up ‘hitler’s mistress’ by nerin e. gunn (non-fiction) a few months ago. though it doesn’t try to hide any atrocities, the book’s focus isn’t them. it may be bias in that it hardly hints at braun’s involvement, if any at all, but, with that possibility in mind, it does create a rarely shown side of him as the focus is mostly where their lives met and her devotion to him (and him to her?); it’s interesting to read.
i’ve always thought eva braun was an strange part of hitler’s story. i picked up ‘hitler’s mistress’ by nerin e. gunn (non-fiction) a few months ago. though it doesn’t try to hide any atrocities, the book’s focus isn’t them. it may be bias in that it hardly hints at braun’s involvement, if any at all, but, with that possibility in mind, it does create a rarely shown side of him as the focus is mostly where their lives met and her devotion to him (and him to her?); it’s interesting to read.
then just before the labor his mother’s fateful dream:
a dove seen in dream means joyful news,
if it is caught, a long-awaited guest will come.
Yes.
then just before the labor his mother’s fateful dream:
a dove seen in dream means joyful news,
if it is caught, a long-awaited guest will come.
Yes.
the idea of ‘sin’ as something redemptive makes my skin crawl. other than that, great essay, AR. nicely done.
thank you for posting this, adam. a gorgeous little essay. what you describe here is i think a huge part of aesthetics in general. and it was nice to read while taking a break from writing a paper on kant and levinas, the latter of whom (and maybe the former in “critique of judgment” old age) i think would have a significant to response to all you’ve put forward here.
the idea of ‘sin’ as something redemptive makes my skin crawl. other than that, great essay, AR. nicely done.
thank you for posting this, adam. a gorgeous little essay. what you describe here is i think a huge part of aesthetics in general. and it was nice to read while taking a break from writing a paper on kant and levinas, the latter of whom (and maybe the former in “critique of judgment” old age) i think would have a significant to response to all you’ve put forward here.
Yes, thanks a lot Alec. I deleted the paragraph that tries to explain Wigger Chick through Levinas’s radical otherness because it was too much work. Good luck with those guys. Would love to read the paper.
Yes, thanks a lot Alec. I deleted the paragraph that tries to explain Wigger Chick through Levinas’s radical otherness because it was too much work. Good luck with those guys. Would love to read the paper.
I don’t know how to respond to this but I feel I must. Racism isn’t just a concept. I’m sorry but it isn’t and if you can refer to it as such, you’re speaking from a place of privilege and distance and that has to be part off the conversation, too, doesn’t it?
To call something racist isn’t always knee jerk. I think that’s what bothers me the most in these conversations. Why must it be knee jerk? That statement implies that people who find things like Wigger Chick racist or otherwise objectionable haven’t put a lot of thought into their objections. That attitude is dismissive. It says, you’re not thinking this through because you are unable to see some deeper meaning or likable antagonists or whatever fancy words you want to throw around. Calling something racist isn’t a knee jerk reaction. A knee jerk reaction is to say, “This is fucking stupid.” Speaking for myself, I took like ten hours before I posted any kind of response about Wigger Chick. I went to bed the night I read it and stewed and stewed and put a whole lot of thought into it. My knee didn’t jerk. Tonight when I fall asleep, I’m still going to be thinking, “That shit was racist.”
In conversations like these, I think of the movie American History X, one of the best movies I’ve ever seen. American X is a movie that deals with racism and bigotry nakedly. It is an uncomfortable movie but it doesn’t paint the antagonists as entirely unlikable–the movie is complex and it forces you to really think about race relations and how bigotry is nurtured and what the consequences of bigotry can become. That anyone can watch a movie like American History X and walk away thinking it is a brilliant movie speaks more I think to what you’re trying to get at then trying to deconstruct Wigger Chick as anything but racist.
I don’t know how to respond to this but I feel I must. Racism isn’t just a concept. I’m sorry but it isn’t and if you can refer to it as such, you’re speaking from a place of privilege and distance and that has to be part off the conversation, too, doesn’t it?
To call something racist isn’t always knee jerk. I think that’s what bothers me the most in these conversations. Why must it be knee jerk? That statement implies that people who find things like Wigger Chick racist or otherwise objectionable haven’t put a lot of thought into their objections. That attitude is dismissive. It says, you’re not thinking this through because you are unable to see some deeper meaning or likable antagonists or whatever fancy words you want to throw around. Calling something racist isn’t a knee jerk reaction. A knee jerk reaction is to say, “This is fucking stupid.” Speaking for myself, I took like ten hours before I posted any kind of response about Wigger Chick. I went to bed the night I read it and stewed and stewed and put a whole lot of thought into it. My knee didn’t jerk. Tonight when I fall asleep, I’m still going to be thinking, “That shit was racist.”
In conversations like these, I think of the movie American History X, one of the best movies I’ve ever seen. American X is a movie that deals with racism and bigotry nakedly. It is an uncomfortable movie but it doesn’t paint the antagonists as entirely unlikable–the movie is complex and it forces you to really think about race relations and how bigotry is nurtured and what the consequences of bigotry can become. That anyone can watch a movie like American History X and walk away thinking it is a brilliant movie speaks more I think to what you’re trying to get at then trying to deconstruct Wigger Chick as anything but racist.
absolutely
absolutely
oh man, if you have any scraps of that paragraph i’d love to see it. i think levinas appears way too rarely in aesthetics. if you actually do want to see the paper i’d be glad to send it to you–it’s all about the kantian subject as a location for levinas’s substitution-for-another.
oh man, if you have any scraps of that paragraph i’d love to see it. i think levinas appears way too rarely in aesthetics. if you actually do want to see the paper i’d be glad to send it to you–it’s all about the kantian subject as a location for levinas’s substitution-for-another.
i think whats interesting is how strong the reactions to hitler are. i think you are right roxane, for sure, at the end of the day, no matter how much time i spend trying to intellectualize or humanize hitler, i just cant. and i think that is standard across the board. i mean, fuck, he’s a human being, but in the worlds collective mind, hes something else, inhumane, a monster, the epitimy of the devil on earth. and rightfully so.
but whats interesting is, he certainly isnt the first man to engage in or attempt mass genocide, yet we can humanize them, these other people, people who have spent lifetimes attempting to exterminate civilizations, i can name dozens. jefferson, cortez, king david, lennon, etc.
also “Can you find the Hitler in yourself?” actually no i cant, and im pretty fucking glad.
i think whats interesting is how strong the reactions to hitler are. i think you are right roxane, for sure, at the end of the day, no matter how much time i spend trying to intellectualize or humanize hitler, i just cant. and i think that is standard across the board. i mean, fuck, he’s a human being, but in the worlds collective mind, hes something else, inhumane, a monster, the epitimy of the devil on earth. and rightfully so.
but whats interesting is, he certainly isnt the first man to engage in or attempt mass genocide, yet we can humanize them, these other people, people who have spent lifetimes attempting to exterminate civilizations, i can name dozens. jefferson, cortez, king david, lennon, etc.
also “Can you find the Hitler in yourself?” actually no i cant, and im pretty fucking glad.
I take your point. I didn’t mean to imply that by calling the cartoon racist you hadn’t considered it in depth. I meant that to only look at it as racist, and ignore the other things about it, and to not be able to see it clearly because your considered opinion, and to not consider what else is going on in its relationality, is knee jerk. Like when a doctor hits your knee, you can only have one reaction. Mine was a poor choice of words considering the comment stream to Wigger Chick, but my point is that it’s important to look at things beyond the label.
I also addressed American History X but took it out. I think it’s a great movie, maybe not as relevant here as This Is England, which I also elided, but I know what you’re saying. The reason I didn’t include it is because I haven’t seen it in a while, but I think the movie really reinforces how bad Edward Norton’s character is. I don’t want to reinforce how bad bad things are, I want to look at them and see how they are good things. Sorry I didn’t make my point. Sorry I still didn’t.
Two things:
1. I absolutely recognize and acknowledge my position of privilege. http://htmlgiant.com/?tag=delirious-hem
2. I also recognize that I am a racist. But I don’t have bad faith, so I know I am more than that, too. Like, I am also not a racist. And most importantly, racism isn’t a thing. A tie-clip is a thing. A jug is a thing. How is racism more than a concept? The fact that someone was hurt by an act of racial hatred is different than the word racism.
I take your point. I didn’t mean to imply that by calling the cartoon racist you hadn’t considered it in depth. I meant that to only look at it as racist, and ignore the other things about it, and to not be able to see it clearly because your considered opinion, and to not consider what else is going on in its relationality, is knee jerk. Like when a doctor hits your knee, you can only have one reaction. Mine was a poor choice of words considering the comment stream to Wigger Chick, but my point is that it’s important to look at things beyond the label.
I also addressed American History X but took it out. I think it’s a great movie, maybe not as relevant here as This Is England, which I also elided, but I know what you’re saying. The reason I didn’t include it is because I haven’t seen it in a while, but I think the movie really reinforces how bad Edward Norton’s character is. I don’t want to reinforce how bad bad things are, I want to look at them and see how they are good things. Sorry I didn’t make my point. Sorry I still didn’t.
Two things:
1. I absolutely recognize and acknowledge my position of privilege. http://htmlgiant.com/?tag=delirious-hem
2. I also recognize that I am a racist. But I don’t have bad faith, so I know I am more than that, too. Like, I am also not a racist. And most importantly, racism isn’t a thing. A tie-clip is a thing. A jug is a thing. How is racism more than a concept? The fact that someone was hurt by an act of racial hatred is different than the word racism.
we’re talking about independent literature on a blog on the internet. who here is not privileged?
i liked this post adam. i don’t think you are fully right, though, about needing empathy in a portrayal for it to have effect. have you seen the movie Max? it portrays hitler as a young artist, and nazism as his biggest art project. early on anyway, it moves out from there. it’s also not a very good movie. it tries a little too hard to pull on heartstrings and dance around and humanize, which at the end of the day, only goes so far.
we don’t have to empathize with what something depicts, or even the creator, to be able to gather insight from it, even if that insight comes out of the reaction we get from seeing a viewpoint different than our own (even a gross one) laid out in the light. i think there is a lot to be said for being made to feel revulsion, or uncomfortable, or simply even just irritated. it takes a certain kind of object. i value that object, if not for itself, then for the way it challenges discussion, even if that challenge is childish, rude, or awful.
we’re talking about independent literature on a blog on the internet. who here is not privileged?
i liked this post adam. i don’t think you are fully right, though, about needing empathy in a portrayal for it to have effect. have you seen the movie Max? it portrays hitler as a young artist, and nazism as his biggest art project. early on anyway, it moves out from there. it’s also not a very good movie. it tries a little too hard to pull on heartstrings and dance around and humanize, which at the end of the day, only goes so far.
we don’t have to empathize with what something depicts, or even the creator, to be able to gather insight from it, even if that insight comes out of the reaction we get from seeing a viewpoint different than our own (even a gross one) laid out in the light. i think there is a lot to be said for being made to feel revulsion, or uncomfortable, or simply even just irritated. it takes a certain kind of object. i value that object, if not for itself, then for the way it challenges discussion, even if that challenge is childish, rude, or awful.
Adam, I’m with you halfway, I think. I don’t think race is a concept rather than a thing, or else I don’t really see where you’re going with that distinction. Humanizing Hitler, as Downfall did, is absolutely important, for Hitler was indeed a human. Racism is institutionalized and systemic, but all of that comes from humans, and if we try to say Hitler is inhuman, we’re scapegoating–we’re saying, “that, there, is racism, that’s where it lives–not here.” That is a problem. But simply to throw up our hands and say, “We’re all sinners,” that seems just as unhelpful. I might be misapprehending you somewhat–I don’t catch all your references.
This idea of art helping us confront what is most brutal within ourselves, though, that seems productive. I’m with you on that. I don’t know if empathizing with Hitler is the only vehicle, or even the ideal one, but it’s worth thinking about.
Adam, I’m with you halfway, I think. I don’t think race is a concept rather than a thing, or else I don’t really see where you’re going with that distinction. Humanizing Hitler, as Downfall did, is absolutely important, for Hitler was indeed a human. Racism is institutionalized and systemic, but all of that comes from humans, and if we try to say Hitler is inhuman, we’re scapegoating–we’re saying, “that, there, is racism, that’s where it lives–not here.” That is a problem. But simply to throw up our hands and say, “We’re all sinners,” that seems just as unhelpful. I might be misapprehending you somewhat–I don’t catch all your references.
This idea of art helping us confront what is most brutal within ourselves, though, that seems productive. I’m with you on that. I don’t know if empathizing with Hitler is the only vehicle, or even the ideal one, but it’s worth thinking about.
i think a term like “wigger” is an uncomfortable term. for white people and/or black people. i think people should read norman mailer essays more often.
one of the most intriguing books i’ve read (recently) concerning the mythology and issues of race would have to be “one neither one” by shane mccrae. i’d call it a must-read.
lastly, adam’s post reminded me of an episode of the twilight zone in which a time machine is invented. a woman travels back in time and assumes a role as the nanny who apparently cared for baby hitler. she eventually kidnaps baby hitler and throws him from a footbridge–he drowns in the stream below. she replaces dead baby hitler with another baby she kidnaps from a woman on the street. she returns the baby to the hitler residence and she feels very relieved; she believes she has changed history (for the better). however, the baby still grows up to be the same merciless dictator and the nanny/woman/time traveler has the ultimate WTF moment.
i think a term like “wigger” is an uncomfortable term. for white people and/or black people. i think people should read norman mailer essays more often.
one of the most intriguing books i’ve read (recently) concerning the mythology and issues of race would have to be “one neither one” by shane mccrae. i’d call it a must-read.
lastly, adam’s post reminded me of an episode of the twilight zone in which a time machine is invented. a woman travels back in time and assumes a role as the nanny who apparently cared for baby hitler. she eventually kidnaps baby hitler and throws him from a footbridge–he drowns in the stream below. she replaces dead baby hitler with another baby she kidnaps from a woman on the street. she returns the baby to the hitler residence and she feels very relieved; she believes she has changed history (for the better). however, the baby still grows up to be the same merciless dictator and the nanny/woman/time traveler has the ultimate WTF moment.
I agree. But I’m saying that by choosing not to look at something wretched with empathy, we are missing out on a good way of understanding something else. Being repulsed is good for us, but it’s also good to see that repulsive thing as beautiful, and to accept it for what it is. I think we’re saying the same thing.
I agree. But I’m saying that by choosing not to look at something wretched with empathy, we are missing out on a good way of understanding something else. Being repulsed is good for us, but it’s also good to see that repulsive thing as beautiful, and to accept it for what it is. I think we’re saying the same thing.
ok, i think so too. that’s a complex post. and well said. i like the zizek racist joke example, that’s pretty perfect.
i think the inside joke with friends thing can be played out online still. people will get it or they won’t. a kerfuffle is good in the long run maybe.
ok, i think so too. that’s a complex post. and well said. i like the zizek racist joke example, that’s pretty perfect.
i think the inside joke with friends thing can be played out online still. people will get it or they won’t. a kerfuffle is good in the long run maybe.
Barry, I think you’re right, and I think you’ve nailed why I think Hitler is not a good starting place for Adam’s otherwise very thoughtful essay. Almost everyone can be emphathized with, has people that loved them, had a kind side, a weak side, a compassionate side…but Hitler is HITLER precisely because he was such an A-1 nutboy. He was compelling, sure, and a strong speaker, and he was able to project a vision of strength for Germany and inspire passion in others to follow his vision–and some, like Eva Braun, mistook or perhaps took that passion as or in place of love. He was not a kind man, and in all the reading I’ve done on him, I have never seen evidence that he loved anyone but his dogs. He was strange and cold and paranoid and twisted and often insecure to the point of hysteria. He’s just one of those few people, I think, that no one could honestly identify with or sympathize with.
Funny thing is, Adam mentions the failings of Schindler’s List–and while I do think the movie has its flaws, and that there are many, many superior films about the Holocaust out there, I do think that movie (SL) has one of the most brutally difficult and complex sympathetic monsters in all cinema history in it: Ralph Fiennes’ character.
Hitler, though…for me, Downfall seems about as far as you could go with that. Instead, I’d encourage people to look at it maybe from another perspective: to examine the damage a nurtured hatred of someone who deserves to be hated can do. A Bright Room Called Day by Tony Kushner is an excellent example of this, and a nice contrast between a hatred eating someone up and the complicity and complacency that allowed the Nazi part to flourish in the first place.
Barry, I think you’re right, and I think you’ve nailed why I think Hitler is not a good starting place for Adam’s otherwise very thoughtful essay. Almost everyone can be emphathized with, has people that loved them, had a kind side, a weak side, a compassionate side…but Hitler is HITLER precisely because he was such an A-1 nutboy. He was compelling, sure, and a strong speaker, and he was able to project a vision of strength for Germany and inspire passion in others to follow his vision–and some, like Eva Braun, mistook or perhaps took that passion as or in place of love. He was not a kind man, and in all the reading I’ve done on him, I have never seen evidence that he loved anyone but his dogs. He was strange and cold and paranoid and twisted and often insecure to the point of hysteria. He’s just one of those few people, I think, that no one could honestly identify with or sympathize with.
Funny thing is, Adam mentions the failings of Schindler’s List–and while I do think the movie has its flaws, and that there are many, many superior films about the Holocaust out there, I do think that movie (SL) has one of the most brutally difficult and complex sympathetic monsters in all cinema history in it: Ralph Fiennes’ character.
Hitler, though…for me, Downfall seems about as far as you could go with that. Instead, I’d encourage people to look at it maybe from another perspective: to examine the damage a nurtured hatred of someone who deserves to be hated can do. A Bright Room Called Day by Tony Kushner is an excellent example of this, and a nice contrast between a hatred eating someone up and the complicity and complacency that allowed the Nazi part to flourish in the first place.
what i’m getting out of adam’s essay is less “i relate to hitler in the way i would relate to a character in a romantic comedy” than “i am opening myself up to the conditions of possibility and impossibility for having been hitler in hitler’s historical moment” or something
what i’m getting out of adam’s essay is less “i relate to hitler in the way i would relate to a character in a romantic comedy” than “i am opening myself up to the conditions of possibility and impossibility for having been hitler in hitler’s historical moment” or something
I’m with Barry.
The intellectual thrust of this essay is fine, but I’m not sure we need to empathize with Hitler or that even trying to serves a good purpose. If we agree that he is an a-hole to end all a-holes, then what’s the benefit of even humanizing his viewpoint in the slightest bit? Perhaps it’s simplistic to put all genocide-wreaking monsters in a box labeled “despicable” and leave them there, but personally I think the blanket rejection is healthy.
I’m with Barry.
The intellectual thrust of this essay is fine, but I’m not sure we need to empathize with Hitler or that even trying to serves a good purpose. If we agree that he is an a-hole to end all a-holes, then what’s the benefit of even humanizing his viewpoint in the slightest bit? Perhaps it’s simplistic to put all genocide-wreaking monsters in a box labeled “despicable” and leave them there, but personally I think the blanket rejection is healthy.
I see what you’re saying but I just don’t think these sorts of issues can be intellectual exercises in seeing repulsive things as beautiful. If we want to use the Hitler example, which at some point, we (generally speaking ) need to stop doing–how can you separate the legacy from the man?
This is a very sophisticated essay and I do recognize and respect that but I feel that what you’re suggesting here requires people to rise above themselves, to rise above history, and to rise above experience and I think that’s rather impossible.
I see what you’re saying but I just don’t think these sorts of issues can be intellectual exercises in seeing repulsive things as beautiful. If we want to use the Hitler example, which at some point, we (generally speaking ) need to stop doing–how can you separate the legacy from the man?
This is a very sophisticated essay and I do recognize and respect that but I feel that what you’re suggesting here requires people to rise above themselves, to rise above history, and to rise above experience and I think that’s rather impossible.
“Perhaps it’s simplistic to put all genocide-wreaking monsters in a box labeled “despicable” and leave them there, but personally I think the blanket rejection is healthy.”
amen
“Perhaps it’s simplistic to put all genocide-wreaking monsters in a box labeled “despicable” and leave them there, but personally I think the blanket rejection is healthy.”
amen
that part i’m down with for sure. there’s a tendency to mythologize hitler when in fact he existed historically, as a part of, perhaps the worst part of but still a part of, a history of deep and terrifying anti-semitism in europe (and abroad–witness the reluctance of most countries to take in jewish refugees).
that part i’m down with for sure. there’s a tendency to mythologize hitler when in fact he existed historically, as a part of, perhaps the worst part of but still a part of, a history of deep and terrifying anti-semitism in europe (and abroad–witness the reluctance of most countries to take in jewish refugees).
but the problem is that one monster acting alone cannot carry out a genocide, not even a little. genocide keeps happening. what does it even mean to “reject” its perpetrators, if they keep at it?
but the problem is that one monster acting alone cannot carry out a genocide, not even a little. genocide keeps happening. what does it even mean to “reject” its perpetrators, if they keep at it?
Amber, the Ralph Fiennes character in SL is a really good example. I cannot fathom sympathizing with Hitler–it’s too extreme but when I watched SL, I felt a certain sadness for the Fiennes character and I tried (not sure how successfully) to understand how so many people were able to be complicit in the Holocaust and yet demonstrate evidence of humanity. Downfall was an interesting movie but I agree, even in that movie, there was very little to find sympathetic about Hitler. Whether we’re talking about Hitler or Slobodan Milosevic or Idi Amin, I think it’s (nearly?) impossible to see anything human in people who could perpetuate genocide. These are matters of scale and I think that’s being forgotten in this discussion.
What a very strange essay.
Adam, I’m afraid you might be complicating a question that is really pretty simple. There exist a great number of works that try to make a horrible, despicable person seem more sympathetic to the audience. I could name a lot of them, but since you discuss Hitler, I’ll start with a book and movie called “the Pianist.”
In this story, we are asked to empathize with a Nazi woman who works as a guard for one of Hitler’s concentration camps. Through the course of the story, we see her attain some kind of redemption and humanity through her love for a younger man, as well as learning to read great literature. As if reading Goethe made anyone a better person.
The problem is not that we cannot sympathize with the humanity of people who do monstrous things to other people. The problem is a lack of moral clarity. Reading Goethe, or any literature, is a great accomplishment, but it doesn’t buy you much (let alone forgiveness). But in works like “the Pianist” and many others, we are consistently begged to forgive and forget the terrible things villains do, because after all, they’re just like us.
Just one more example: the Motorcycle Diaries — in which Che Guevara is an idealistic youth who really cares about the plight of the poor and downtrodden. As played by the brilliant Gael Garcia Bernal, the hero of this film is eminently sympathetic, even loveable. We almost forget we’re watching the butcher of El Moro. That’s because the filmakers elegantly left out the part where he runs a torture prison in Cuba.
You ask whether we can find the Hitler in ourselves. Of course we can, if only we’re willing to look. Hitler and his cronies were ordinary people, neither super- nor subhuman. The only difference between them and us is that they slaughtered over six million people, and you and I haven’t (so far). The only question is, How do we keep ourselves from doing it again? And a big part of the answer, I believe, is to call brutality by its rightful name, and to look evil in the eye.
Amber, the Ralph Fiennes character in SL is a really good example. I cannot fathom sympathizing with Hitler–it’s too extreme but when I watched SL, I felt a certain sadness for the Fiennes character and I tried (not sure how successfully) to understand how so many people were able to be complicit in the Holocaust and yet demonstrate evidence of humanity. Downfall was an interesting movie but I agree, even in that movie, there was very little to find sympathetic about Hitler. Whether we’re talking about Hitler or Slobodan Milosevic or Idi Amin, I think it’s (nearly?) impossible to see anything human in people who could perpetuate genocide. These are matters of scale and I think that’s being forgotten in this discussion.
What a very strange essay.
Adam, I’m afraid you might be complicating a question that is really pretty simple. There exist a great number of works that try to make a horrible, despicable person seem more sympathetic to the audience. I could name a lot of them, but since you discuss Hitler, I’ll start with a book and movie called “the Pianist.”
In this story, we are asked to empathize with a Nazi woman who works as a guard for one of Hitler’s concentration camps. Through the course of the story, we see her attain some kind of redemption and humanity through her love for a younger man, as well as learning to read great literature. As if reading Goethe made anyone a better person.
The problem is not that we cannot sympathize with the humanity of people who do monstrous things to other people. The problem is a lack of moral clarity. Reading Goethe, or any literature, is a great accomplishment, but it doesn’t buy you much (let alone forgiveness). But in works like “the Pianist” and many others, we are consistently begged to forgive and forget the terrible things villains do, because after all, they’re just like us.
Just one more example: the Motorcycle Diaries — in which Che Guevara is an idealistic youth who really cares about the plight of the poor and downtrodden. As played by the brilliant Gael Garcia Bernal, the hero of this film is eminently sympathetic, even loveable. We almost forget we’re watching the butcher of El Moro. That’s because the filmakers elegantly left out the part where he runs a torture prison in Cuba.
You ask whether we can find the Hitler in ourselves. Of course we can, if only we’re willing to look. Hitler and his cronies were ordinary people, neither super- nor subhuman. The only difference between them and us is that they slaughtered over six million people, and you and I haven’t (so far). The only question is, How do we keep ourselves from doing it again? And a big part of the answer, I believe, is to call brutality by its rightful name, and to look evil in the eye.
i love levinas and all things levinas.. there was a great essay on levinas and poetry in a weird little obscure review that i found this summer.. will try to find it and get it to you.. also, as you probably know, you have to read martin buber’s i and thou, which is the precursor of so much stuff, including much of levinas
i love levinas and all things levinas.. there was a great essay on levinas and poetry in a weird little obscure review that i found this summer.. will try to find it and get it to you.. also, as you probably know, you have to read martin buber’s i and thou, which is the precursor of so much stuff, including much of levinas
i agree with roxane. zizek’s point about racist jokes, told non-racistly, is directed toward something like sarah silverman or curb your enthusiasm, not the idiocy of the wigger chick stuff the other day, which, in terms of humour, is about a hair’s breadth above the anti-Islamic ‘Muhammed’ cartoons. the difference between a show like curb and those cartoons should be absolutely clear, and if it’s not, then this is exactly the problem. zizek’s argument about the non-racist racist joke is that it is a way of venting about the absurdity of the stereotype-as-explanatory-causes we are fed by the very same multicultural consensus that holds itself haughtily above the possibility that it could ever be tainted by the explicit racist racist joke. this gap between the mannered nature of today’s racism and the reality of it is exactly the nerve that shows like curb and sarah silverman touch on and what makes them both so hilarious and so trenchant. the cartoons from the other day are NOT trenchant, not even in the fucking slightest. the worst thing about them is how cynical they are: they’re written as a kind of lame funnybone wankery to white people who think they’re so zenly clued into culture and in control of their libidinal racist investments that these cartoons in a sense cannot touch them. this is what infuriates me about our cultural conduct right now. this kind of humour is what passes for edgy and consensus breaking when, in actual fact, it is just the multicultural consensus at its most pernicious and glib: black stereotypes co-mingle with white in a supposedly ‘democracy’ of prejudice that ostensibly levels racism to no-more than post-racial jokey association. this is bullshit, plain and simple. and it is bullshit that is entirely orientated and designed for an audience that feels free before the fact of any personal investment in the stakes of this: the middle-class white ‘non-racist’ jokester.
here’s my basic principle: joke-racist humour is not everyone’s fucking natural entitlement. this obsession with humour today, with jokes at all costs and in all contexts irregardless of anything, almost as a right, is perverse. and in this case, it revolves on a certain unwillingness to engage with race any more broadly than through the joke you’re telling. when zizek talks about racist humour, he is able to speak candidly about the catharsis it brings him because he strives in his work so profoundly and commitedly to fight against racism. his persona secures his insight here, is indeed a large part of the ‘non-racist’ element of the jokes he makes, as it is with larry david and sarah silverman. in actual fact, the very reason he even points out his fondness for racist jokes at all is precisely the ethical orientation his hatred of racism has instilled in him. but what he also points out is that the actual racism of such jokes is legitimate insofar as it is told without any desire to legitimise it as non-racist. forget going ‘beyond’ racism: zizek is saying he finds racist jokes cathartic precisely for> their racism, because they vent the social muck that accrues in his brain despite the fact he knows better and strives to create a world in which more and more of us know better. in saying he finds relief in racism, he means that the proper role of the racist joke is as some dirty thing said between friends – or sub-socially, as an open secret of culture – not because it confirms a ‘true’ belief in him about others but as a confirmation that the real of racism (denied everywhere by multiculturalism) is a shared thing that still exists, that there is a field in this ugly thing inside me is situated that makes it make sense and outside shape. it is NOT mean to be an object of chin-stroking cultured consideration, or endless ‘debate’ as to ‘whether’ it is actually racist, or an act of aesthetic cool, and this is the disaster of multiculturalism today that thinks we’re so ‘absolved’ of racism that we can elevate the subterranean racist joke to the very height of the social symbolic, where everyone is directed to accept the racist joke as ‘not really’ racist when the act of its installment at that height is the worst manifestation of racism.
what i love from the other day was how every defender of the cartoon’s anti-consensus attitude also had to rush to assure us that it wasn’t really racist. if you want to like a racist joke, then like it as racist. that’s zizek’s point. and then also understand that racism has no proper place in the social symbolic if you count yourself an anti-racist. keep your racist joke in the zone to which it belongs. don’t try and pull this totally cynical fuckplay where you try and dispel the racism that is so patently palpable in the joke and upon which the laughter thrives. or, if you wish to introduce racism into the symbolic anti-racistly, you need to situate it in terms of its conveyance and mechanics, not just for ‘laughs’. it is exactly this unwillingness to see the racism in our laughter – to think of humour as ethically wrong sometimes, rather than just always ‘good fun’, a thing with a ‘message’ behind it – that is the square center of the multi-culti consensus – and what upholds very distinct sets of privilege within it. if i were to laugh at a racist joke as racist, what it would mean is that – to accord with my proper values, my identified ones, which wish for me to be against racism – i would have to keep such things subterranean, personal, as such jokes should be, as the private, ‘shameful’ (when exposed to the eye of the public) aspect of my life. something like wiping my ass with a towel when i’m out of toilet. indeed, in such a context, one can be free to even genuinely like such jokes, not because one has to justify them but precisely because one is free not to. trying to carry that liberty into the social is today’s method of making racism common-sense.
adam’s post above is interesting as one of the first serious engagements with the practice of this place. i disagree with it in many ways not worth rehearsing here but it’s thoughtful and well-meant. still, it irritates me so much that the best thinking that a place like HTMLG can come up with on racism is largely what we saw here the other day. really disgraceful.
i agree with roxane. zizek’s point about racist jokes, told non-racistly, is directed toward something like sarah silverman or curb your enthusiasm, not the idiocy of the wigger chick stuff the other day, which, in terms of humour, is about a hair’s breadth above the anti-Islamic ‘Muhammed’ cartoons. the difference between a show like curb and those cartoons should be absolutely clear, and if it’s not, then this is exactly the problem. zizek’s argument about the non-racist racist joke is that it is a way of venting about the absurdity of the stereotype-as-explanatory-causes we are fed by the very same multicultural consensus that holds itself haughtily above the possibility that it could ever be tainted by the explicit racist racist joke. this gap between the mannered nature of today’s racism and the reality of it is exactly the nerve that shows like curb and sarah silverman touch on and what makes them both so hilarious and so trenchant. the cartoons from the other day are NOT trenchant, not even in the fucking slightest. the worst thing about them is how cynical they are: they’re written as a kind of lame funnybone wankery to white people who think they’re so zenly clued into culture and in control of their libidinal racist investments that these cartoons in a sense cannot touch them. this is what infuriates me about our cultural conduct right now. this kind of humour is what passes for edgy and consensus breaking when, in actual fact, it is just the multicultural consensus at its most pernicious and glib: black stereotypes co-mingle with white in a supposedly ‘democracy’ of prejudice that ostensibly levels racism to no-more than post-racial jokey association. this is bullshit, plain and simple. and it is bullshit that is entirely orientated and designed for an audience that feels free before the fact of any personal investment in the stakes of this: the middle-class white ‘non-racist’ jokester.
here’s my basic principle: joke-racist humour is not everyone’s fucking natural entitlement. this obsession with humour today, with jokes at all costs and in all contexts irregardless of anything, almost as a right, is perverse. and in this case, it revolves on a certain unwillingness to engage with race any more broadly than through the joke you’re telling. when zizek talks about racist humour, he is able to speak candidly about the catharsis it brings him because he strives in his work so profoundly and commitedly to fight against racism. his persona secures his insight here, is indeed a large part of the ‘non-racist’ element of the jokes he makes, as it is with larry david and sarah silverman. in actual fact, the very reason he even points out his fondness for racist jokes at all is precisely the ethical orientation his hatred of racism has instilled in him. but what he also points out is that the actual racism of such jokes is legitimate insofar as it is told without any desire to legitimise it as non-racist. forget going ‘beyond’ racism: zizek is saying he finds racist jokes cathartic precisely for> their racism, because they vent the social muck that accrues in his brain despite the fact he knows better and strives to create a world in which more and more of us know better. in saying he finds relief in racism, he means that the proper role of the racist joke is as some dirty thing said between friends – or sub-socially, as an open secret of culture – not because it confirms a ‘true’ belief in him about others but as a confirmation that the real of racism (denied everywhere by multiculturalism) is a shared thing that still exists, that there is a field in this ugly thing inside me is situated that makes it make sense and outside shape. it is NOT mean to be an object of chin-stroking cultured consideration, or endless ‘debate’ as to ‘whether’ it is actually racist, or an act of aesthetic cool, and this is the disaster of multiculturalism today that thinks we’re so ‘absolved’ of racism that we can elevate the subterranean racist joke to the very height of the social symbolic, where everyone is directed to accept the racist joke as ‘not really’ racist when the act of its installment at that height is the worst manifestation of racism.
what i love from the other day was how every defender of the cartoon’s anti-consensus attitude also had to rush to assure us that it wasn’t really racist. if you want to like a racist joke, then like it as racist. that’s zizek’s point. and then also understand that racism has no proper place in the social symbolic if you count yourself an anti-racist. keep your racist joke in the zone to which it belongs. don’t try and pull this totally cynical fuckplay where you try and dispel the racism that is so patently palpable in the joke and upon which the laughter thrives. or, if you wish to introduce racism into the symbolic anti-racistly, you need to situate it in terms of its conveyance and mechanics, not just for ‘laughs’. it is exactly this unwillingness to see the racism in our laughter – to think of humour as ethically wrong sometimes, rather than just always ‘good fun’, a thing with a ‘message’ behind it – that is the square center of the multi-culti consensus – and what upholds very distinct sets of privilege within it. if i were to laugh at a racist joke as racist, what it would mean is that – to accord with my proper values, my identified ones, which wish for me to be against racism – i would have to keep such things subterranean, personal, as such jokes should be, as the private, ‘shameful’ (when exposed to the eye of the public) aspect of my life. something like wiping my ass with a towel when i’m out of toilet. indeed, in such a context, one can be free to even genuinely like such jokes, not because one has to justify them but precisely because one is free not to. trying to carry that liberty into the social is today’s method of making racism common-sense.
adam’s post above is interesting as one of the first serious engagements with the practice of this place. i disagree with it in many ways not worth rehearsing here but it’s thoughtful and well-meant. still, it irritates me so much that the best thinking that a place like HTMLG can come up with on racism is largely what we saw here the other day. really disgraceful.
Yes, impossible. Offensive, even, and along the way there will be a lot of hurt and ugliness — which there will be anyway.
Perfectly said.
Yes, impossible. Offensive, even, and along the way there will be a lot of hurt and ugliness — which there will be anyway.
Perfectly said.
When they asked Mother Teresa what inspired her work, she said it’s because when she was little she looked inside herself and saw a little Hitler. I heard that.
When they asked Mother Teresa what inspired her work, she said it’s because when she was little she looked inside herself and saw a little Hitler. I heard that.
The reason I think he’s ideal, or maybe why Vonnegut did, is because the desire not to is so strong.
The reason I think he’s ideal, or maybe why Vonnegut did, is because the desire not to is so strong.
Racism is not a concept, it is a system of power that shapes and pervades everything… all of our experiences, relationships, language, creations, etc. It cannot be transcended. It has ideological and cultural dimensions, but that is different than a concept.
I may be misinterpreting you, but I feel like when you accuse folks of not engaging the comic’s other elements, there’s this implication that the discussion re: racism is somehow flat and one-dimensional, when in reality that conversation can be complex and nuanced and involve a lot of different shit. And I think where antiracist critics get frustrated is when that conversation never gets past these really reactive places where they’re/we’re getting accused of being somehow racist for bringing up race and racism in the first place …The common, defensive reaction against folks who bring up racism (I don’t think you necessarily reacted this way) strikes me as being a great deal more knee-jerk than someone saying they experience something as racist.
…I never saw anyone who critiqued the cartoon as racist saying they could not discuss or notice its other/various elements. I saw the folks who responded negatively to their critique accusing them of this and of somehow shutting down a conversation that never began in the first place rather than engaging in a discussion about the substance of their critique.
Racism is not a concept, it is a system of power that shapes and pervades everything… all of our experiences, relationships, language, creations, etc. It cannot be transcended. It has ideological and cultural dimensions, but that is different than a concept.
I may be misinterpreting you, but I feel like when you accuse folks of not engaging the comic’s other elements, there’s this implication that the discussion re: racism is somehow flat and one-dimensional, when in reality that conversation can be complex and nuanced and involve a lot of different shit. And I think where antiracist critics get frustrated is when that conversation never gets past these really reactive places where they’re/we’re getting accused of being somehow racist for bringing up race and racism in the first place …The common, defensive reaction against folks who bring up racism (I don’t think you necessarily reacted this way) strikes me as being a great deal more knee-jerk than someone saying they experience something as racist.
…I never saw anyone who critiqued the cartoon as racist saying they could not discuss or notice its other/various elements. I saw the folks who responded negatively to their critique accusing them of this and of somehow shutting down a conversation that never began in the first place rather than engaging in a discussion about the substance of their critique.
thanks mike, please get that essay my way if you can find it, i’d love to give it a read. and yeah, i’ve got to get my hands on i and thou, there are such beautiful ideas in there from what i can tell
thanks mike, please get that essay my way if you can find it, i’d love to give it a read. and yeah, i’ve got to get my hands on i and thou, there are such beautiful ideas in there from what i can tell
Not empathizing with Hitler is how you become Hitler. The fallacy of believing he’s any different from us is what makes him possible. He is not different.
Thanks for the clarifications on Zizek — but I want to point out that I wasn’t applying his perspective as a rationalization for the wigger chick jokes, but as a way to understand how my Croatian friend, who is otherwise responsible and lucid, could be so horribly prejudiced against Serbs. Understanding her attitude in terms of a release valve, as Zizek characterizes it, made me accept that she is less of a racist than I thought. That’s a valid kind of sympathizing act.
You are wrong to suggest, though, that he only discusses racist jokes in reference to the shows you named. I am no authority on the subject, but I know he has also said that these jokes have a cathartic value in the streets of these Eastern European countries that keep people from committing Actual Racist Acts. In these terms I understand him to be referring to very stupid Polack-type jokes that are probably worse, less trenchant (as if this is the high water mark) than the wigger chick stuff. However, to that point, I understand you’re saying that the people in these towns that make these racist jokes are making them privately, AS racist jokes, intentionally. The difference, and offense, is that we’ve published it here, unentitled, without explanation, in a public forum. I agree that this is dicey, and I wasn’t happy that it was done, so I wrote this.
Do you feel like your comment was in response to this post?
Not empathizing with Hitler is how you become Hitler. The fallacy of believing he’s any different from us is what makes him possible. He is not different.
Thanks for the clarifications on Zizek — but I want to point out that I wasn’t applying his perspective as a rationalization for the wigger chick jokes, but as a way to understand how my Croatian friend, who is otherwise responsible and lucid, could be so horribly prejudiced against Serbs. Understanding her attitude in terms of a release valve, as Zizek characterizes it, made me accept that she is less of a racist than I thought. That’s a valid kind of sympathizing act.
You are wrong to suggest, though, that he only discusses racist jokes in reference to the shows you named. I am no authority on the subject, but I know he has also said that these jokes have a cathartic value in the streets of these Eastern European countries that keep people from committing Actual Racist Acts. In these terms I understand him to be referring to very stupid Polack-type jokes that are probably worse, less trenchant (as if this is the high water mark) than the wigger chick stuff. However, to that point, I understand you’re saying that the people in these towns that make these racist jokes are making them privately, AS racist jokes, intentionally. The difference, and offense, is that we’ve published it here, unentitled, without explanation, in a public forum. I agree that this is dicey, and I wasn’t happy that it was done, so I wrote this.
Do you feel like your comment was in response to this post?
Oh no it was understood about the use of Zizek. Yes, sorry Adam, I should have been clearer on that. I meant to point out two varieties of joke that Zizek discuses when it comes to race: the “non-racist” racist joke which falls in line with shows like curb, or in daily life, the jokes we make where we reference cultural stereotype in a way where it is understood we’re referencing it as stereotype, and the other actual racist joke, like that your Croatian friend voices and the cathartic jokes expressed on the streets of eastern europe, which fall under the category of racist jokes that refuse to alleviate their actual racism. This post wasn’t a response to your post directly at all: I would have posted it below in relation to the cartoon day directly but by the time I came to post it, had figured out the exact content of what I wanted to say, the conversation had ‘moved on’ to here as it were. But I read you clearly as being against rationalizing the wigger chick jokes, not being “for” them, as it were. So, uh, no, this wasn’t meant to castigate you personally or anything or be the counter-argument to your post above. You’re actually the first person here to take this issue seriously as an issue for which I thank you seriously, man. I was very tempted to never visit or post here again after the other day, not for the post per se and its untitled, unflagged nature (though that wasn’t too crash hot either) but for what followed it in the comments. It strikes me as the highwater mark of a bad undercurrent that has lulled in this place for a while now. The problem for people like me (and, if I’m not overstepping myself, Roxane) is precisely the tendency to think that accusations of racism (or sexism or homophobia or classism) are a kind of blind policing based on ‘sensitivities’, false squeamishness and a failure of imagination rather than based on a genuine insight connected with a felt distress at racism being crowned as a ‘joke’ we all have to ‘get’, a democracy of prejudice as I said above, a kind of enlightened gathering ground built around the ‘non-racist’ thinker who, of course, is white, posited at the centre and who has to have the racist joke be not ‘really’ racist to boot. If we want to think more carefully about racism, let’s stop trying to make it disappear.
Oh no it was understood about the use of Zizek. Yes, sorry Adam, I should have been clearer on that. I meant to point out two varieties of joke that Zizek discuses when it comes to race: the “non-racist” racist joke which falls in line with shows like curb, or in daily life, the jokes we make where we reference cultural stereotype in a way where it is understood we’re referencing it as stereotype, and the other actual racist joke, like that your Croatian friend voices and the cathartic jokes expressed on the streets of eastern europe, which fall under the category of racist jokes that refuse to alleviate their actual racism. This post wasn’t a response to your post directly at all: I would have posted it below in relation to the cartoon day directly but by the time I came to post it, had figured out the exact content of what I wanted to say, the conversation had ‘moved on’ to here as it were. But I read you clearly as being against rationalizing the wigger chick jokes, not being “for” them, as it were. So, uh, no, this wasn’t meant to castigate you personally or anything or be the counter-argument to your post above. You’re actually the first person here to take this issue seriously as an issue for which I thank you seriously, man. I was very tempted to never visit or post here again after the other day, not for the post per se and its untitled, unflagged nature (though that wasn’t too crash hot either) but for what followed it in the comments. It strikes me as the highwater mark of a bad undercurrent that has lulled in this place for a while now. The problem for people like me (and, if I’m not overstepping myself, Roxane) is precisely the tendency to think that accusations of racism (or sexism or homophobia or classism) are a kind of blind policing based on ‘sensitivities’, false squeamishness and a failure of imagination rather than based on a genuine insight connected with a felt distress at racism being crowned as a ‘joke’ we all have to ‘get’, a democracy of prejudice as I said above, a kind of enlightened gathering ground built around the ‘non-racist’ thinker who, of course, is white, posited at the centre and who has to have the racist joke be not ‘really’ racist to boot. If we want to think more carefully about racism, let’s stop trying to make it disappear.
this was a very thoughtful and well written post adam
this was a very thoughtful and well written post adam
OK, I don’t want to belabor the point about racism not being a thing or whatever. I concede the point about the principalities of the power of the air. But I wonder why no one is interested in my point about justice not being an actuality. Why is everyone so happy to accept that?
Anti-gay activists have the same problem that you’re describing here. It’s the fate of anyone making a socially complicated point — right or wrong — to have their opposition fight them back with labels.
In a discussion about art, it’s better to discuss the work than the critical approach to the work. Comments like, “The comic is racist because . . .” are helpful. I didn’t see a lot of those, but I didn’t do a careful study. My post here was, in part, meant to be a thought experiment (yes, Roxane, I heard you that we can’t, for some reason, make race an intellectual exercise [?]) about whether it would be possible to defend those comics based on their virtues. I didn’t set out to show they aren’t racist, in the many layered meanings of the word, but that they aren’t about race, per se. They may in fact be racist as they go about making the point, but they are about something else. The first one is about predatory lending, for instance. There’s one about working for the man. Racism is multidimensional, I don’t dispute that, you can certainly point out a lot of ways those comics are racist, and that is probably even better than pointing out all the ways they aren’t racist.
I don’t know anymore. I’m wiped.
OK, I don’t want to belabor the point about racism not being a thing or whatever. I concede the point about the principalities of the power of the air. But I wonder why no one is interested in my point about justice not being an actuality. Why is everyone so happy to accept that?
Anti-gay activists have the same problem that you’re describing here. It’s the fate of anyone making a socially complicated point — right or wrong — to have their opposition fight them back with labels.
In a discussion about art, it’s better to discuss the work than the critical approach to the work. Comments like, “The comic is racist because . . .” are helpful. I didn’t see a lot of those, but I didn’t do a careful study. My post here was, in part, meant to be a thought experiment (yes, Roxane, I heard you that we can’t, for some reason, make race an intellectual exercise [?]) about whether it would be possible to defend those comics based on their virtues. I didn’t set out to show they aren’t racist, in the many layered meanings of the word, but that they aren’t about race, per se. They may in fact be racist as they go about making the point, but they are about something else. The first one is about predatory lending, for instance. There’s one about working for the man. Racism is multidimensional, I don’t dispute that, you can certainly point out a lot of ways those comics are racist, and that is probably even better than pointing out all the ways they aren’t racist.
I don’t know anymore. I’m wiped.
“Responsibility cannot be stated in terms of presence.” Levinas
“Responsibility cannot be stated in terms of presence.” Levinas
“The ‘ethical stage’ is not universal; rather, it is the stage in which the ‘me’ forgets its concept and no longer knows the limits of its obligation.” Levinas
“The ‘ethical stage’ is not universal; rather, it is the stage in which the ‘me’ forgets its concept and no longer knows the limits of its obligation.” Levinas
“The order of responsibility, where the gravity of ineluctable being freezes all laughter, is also the order where freedom is ineluctably invoked. It is thus the irremissible weight of being that gives rise to my freedom. The ineluctable has no longer the inhumanity of the fateful, but the severe seriousness of goodness.” Levinas
“The order of responsibility, where the gravity of ineluctable being freezes all laughter, is also the order where freedom is ineluctably invoked. It is thus the irremissible weight of being that gives rise to my freedom. The ineluctable has no longer the inhumanity of the fateful, but the severe seriousness of goodness.” Levinas
“Ethics requires a subject bearing everything, subjected to everything, obedient with an obedience that precedes all understanding and all listening to the command. Therein lies a reversal of heteronomy into autonomy, and this is the way in which the Infinite comes to pass.” Levinas
“Ethics requires a subject bearing everything, subjected to everything, obedient with an obedience that precedes all understanding and all listening to the command. Therein lies a reversal of heteronomy into autonomy, and this is the way in which the Infinite comes to pass.” Levinas
“Multiplicity in being, which refuses totalization but takes form as fraternity and discourse, is situated in a ‘space’ essentially asymmetrical.” Levinas
“Multiplicity in being, which refuses totalization but takes form as fraternity and discourse, is situated in a ‘space’ essentially asymmetrical.” Levinas
amy:
“what does it even mean to “reject” its perpetrators” it means to dismiss them as piece of shit garbage, which i am 100 percent comfortable doing.
amy:
“what does it even mean to “reject” its perpetrators” it means to dismiss them as piece of shit garbage, which i am 100 percent comfortable doing.
“The problem is not that we cannot sympathize with the humanity of people who do monstrous things to other people”
thats not the problem. the problem is that so many people think we have to. why? why do attempt to sympathize or emathize with complete pieces of shit. i think everyone here is comfortable having this discussion because these people are historical that do not exist now.
try your empathy/sympathy bullshit with the piece of shit who just raped and killed your 6 year old little girl. do then, then talk shit. i gaurantee your dumb fucking mouths will be shut then.
“The problem is not that we cannot sympathize with the humanity of people who do monstrous things to other people”
thats not the problem. the problem is that so many people think we have to. why? why do attempt to sympathize or emathize with complete pieces of shit. i think everyone here is comfortable having this discussion because these people are historical that do not exist now.
try your empathy/sympathy bullshit with the piece of shit who just raped and killed your 6 year old little girl. do then, then talk shit. i gaurantee your dumb fucking mouths will be shut then.
David, you’re definitely not overstepping.
David, you’re definitely not overstepping.
Precisely. Hitler did not kill the Jews. Germany killed the Jews. The world killed the Jews. Etc.
Precisely. Hitler did not kill the Jews. Germany killed the Jews. The world killed the Jews. Etc.
That’s why we don’t generally leave the job of empathy to immediate victims. The fact that I won’t naturally do something under extreme circumstances in no way suggests that I *shouldn’t* do so.
That’s why we don’t generally leave the job of empathy to immediate victims. The fact that I won’t naturally do something under extreme circumstances in no way suggests that I *shouldn’t* do so.
can i play?
“To be a ‘self’ is to be responsible before having done anything.” Levinas
can i play?
“To be a ‘self’ is to be responsible before having done anything.” Levinas
Blake: i was going to leave this alone but i think i’d like to ask for a clearer explanation, if you’re willing to give it. i mainly pursue this because i really do respect you as an artist and thinker and maybe even some weird net-enhanced way as a kind of comrade and so, for some reason, the divergence we have matters to me. i’ve read all you’ve said today and yesterday but i’m still confused. how is it exactly you can connect any of the citations you’ve drawn from levinas above with the values you’re standing for? how is it that the reversal of ‘heteronomy into autonomy’ levinas evokes here as “the way in which the Infinite comes to pass” would involve the kind of forgetting of ‘me’ you mean (forgetting of gender, race, sexuality etc.) when levinas says that we are implicated in the “asymmetrical” ‘space’ he sees as precisely characteristic of the subject’s autonomy, the constitutedness and aslantness relative to all other things, not just its ‘uniqueness’ but its burdensome freedom, that is the “irremissible weight” of the subject that gives it the responsibility before everything alex notes, the beholdenness to the world? in other words, the move from hetronomy to autonomy is that which grants it the sense of ‘is-ness’ that places it “otherwise than being”, not synonymous with ALL being but this being trying to make notion of that infinity. this is why the obligation has no known limits. obviously, being a subject in this way hardly curtails the imaginative power for levinas; rather, it sets said power frighteningly and dangerously free. for instance, nicholson baker is not “wrong” or in “bad faith” for writing from the perspective of a little girl in The Everlasting Story of Nory but he would be to turn and say that it was just an act of symmetrical transfer, rather than a decision, an act of research, a perplexing (and perhaps not wholly successful) attempt, a gift, a fear, a desire. levinas sees the subject as that which is stuck in the totality wondering. but the possibility of this wonder derives from its stationing as it is. for levinas, aligning one’s self mentally as coterminous with the totality is what makes for bad ethics. this is the danger in imagination’s freedom.
in your case, what vexes me is not that you don’t “see” the cartoons as racist enough – a matter i could honestly care less about, really, and not what i’m out to prove – but rather that you see your “let’s look at the object as an object” attitude as being a whole level above the accusations of racism about the cartoon rather than an objection that those accusations have already taken into account. take your comment from the thread above: “i think there is a lot to be said for being made to feel revulsion, or uncomfortable, or simply even just irritated. it takes a certain kind of object. i value that object, if not for itself, then for the way it challenges discussion, even if that challenge is childish, rude, or awful.” yes, I agree that revulsion, discomfort, irritation are important aesthetic/emotional affects and take a certain kind of object to make them happen but there are two further points that spring from this. First of all, to respond to objects of revulsion, discomfort or irritation with emotions of revulsion, discomfort or irritation DOES NOT mean that one has shut off their critical apprehension or that the object has ‘succeeded’ in its ‘intention’; rather, what is also possible is to be irritation or revolted or discomforted at the way that these objects have tried to elicit my irritation, revulsion or discomfort. i might turn and say this doesn’t vex me as it wants to but vexes me as i see through it, meaning, seeing it as the object i see it as against the object it pretends to be. second of all, i agree that childish, rude or awful challenges to conversation have value. glenn beck’s absolutely stupid but intriguing claim that ‘obama’ is a racist is an example of that for me, as it speaks to anxieties on the right at the moment. but those cartoons wish to eschew any sense that they are childish, rude or awful in any ‘meaningful’ sense. this cartoon is for the viewer who “knows” better, the one who doesn’t really buy into those racist stereotypes. what is it exactly then that is childish, rude or awful about them. even we who have responded to the racist operation they perform dont see them as childish, rude, or awful. rather, there is nothing at all about this which is not a calculated attitude toward childishness, rudeness and awfulness. it isn’t a sincere venting of beliefs but the kind of behind-the-hand snickering of the cultured at the hilarious ‘non-racist’ times that we live in. and it frustrates me immensely that smart, well-meaning people like yourself and chelsea want to defend its shitty provocations as provocative when they aren’t even that: they’re like a stranger flicking a stone at you in the street and then telling you it’s ‘a provocation’. that stranger’s ‘provocation’ is not about challenging discussion: it’s a cheshire cat act designed for self-satisfaction. and if you punch him, you’re the aggressor.
the other day you also said on the hostile response to the cartoons: “it’s not a matter of taking it seriously, as much as it is just not responding to it with the same level of social blank that you project into its presence.” i find this to be the core of why you get such heated responses to your position on matters like this as it implies (and, may i say, in what is just about the MOST political argument you can make) that the hostile response to the cartoons is all our own preoccupations ‘projected’ in upon this instance. like we can’t think about what is to hand. why is this a reasonable assumption? doesn’t this pre-politicise your own perspective? why should objects be praised ineluctably for simply being objects? this ‘less politics, more object’ argument is political because it posits itself as a complete principle that refuses to look at objects beyond their abstraction as “objects”, like they exist all in this potential similarity of “other” discussions we aren’t having rather than stand or fall on axes of worth, value and attention the objects themselves raise, the most important of which in this case happens to be not political but racial. why would these cartoons have even been brought in as worth a post if they didn’t summon up some idea about the racial? the racial is not the same as politics even if it isnt absent of politics either. racism IS NOT always political: it is a fact. this reduction of racism to “values” is also problematic.
the other day you agreed with gene morgan’s argument. this is what he said: “‘While this guy may, in fact, be racist, I do think the existence of these cartoons is something interesting in terms of American views on class and cultural integration, which is a much more interesting and thoughtful conversation than “this dude is racist.”’ To concretely highlight my points above: Why exactly is it that this “much more interesting” class and cultural integration discussion precludes the value-orientation that would place such a discussion in the clear ‘racial” vector from which it emerges in the instant of the cartoons? Even were we to accept that conversation as more “interesting”, why is it thought that the flat statement ‘this dude is racist’ is not itself a part of that conversation on class and cultural integration? Finally, why is this discussion more acceptable politics – and class and cultural integration is politics – while the argument that this is cheap, flip racist work unworthy of a place in such experimentalist circles, especially one endlessly carrying on about their freedom to judge aesthetic worth, is considered to be establishment? Insisting that “politics” in this sense is a stunted, boring, facile thing, a limitation on thinking, the unimaginative, almost strikes me as a liberal attitude in the CNN sense, where we can only discuss “issues” in the already consensus-instilling framework of what this means for an ‘us’ of some sort – whether this ‘us’ be Americans or this ‘us’ be the sage thinkers who ‘care’ about issues of class and cultural integration or ‘us’ the curious commentators who wish to get to the ‘bottom’ of a cultural object. Discussions which fragment the discussability are out a priori. All the shitty objects of today bank on this false ‘democracy’ of the viewer which enables said objects to steal our attention away from other better objects we could be pondering.
I really would like your thoughts in response to all this.
Blake: i was going to leave this alone but i think i’d like to ask for a clearer explanation, if you’re willing to give it. i mainly pursue this because i really do respect you as an artist and thinker and maybe even some weird net-enhanced way as a kind of comrade and so, for some reason, the divergence we have matters to me. i’ve read all you’ve said today and yesterday but i’m still confused. how is it exactly you can connect any of the citations you’ve drawn from levinas above with the values you’re standing for? how is it that the reversal of ‘heteronomy into autonomy’ levinas evokes here as “the way in which the Infinite comes to pass” would involve the kind of forgetting of ‘me’ you mean (forgetting of gender, race, sexuality etc.) when levinas says that we are implicated in the “asymmetrical” ‘space’ he sees as precisely characteristic of the subject’s autonomy, the constitutedness and aslantness relative to all other things, not just its ‘uniqueness’ but its burdensome freedom, that is the “irremissible weight” of the subject that gives it the responsibility before everything alex notes, the beholdenness to the world? in other words, the move from hetronomy to autonomy is that which grants it the sense of ‘is-ness’ that places it “otherwise than being”, not synonymous with ALL being but this being trying to make notion of that infinity. this is why the obligation has no known limits. obviously, being a subject in this way hardly curtails the imaginative power for levinas; rather, it sets said power frighteningly and dangerously free. for instance, nicholson baker is not “wrong” or in “bad faith” for writing from the perspective of a little girl in The Everlasting Story of Nory but he would be to turn and say that it was just an act of symmetrical transfer, rather than a decision, an act of research, a perplexing (and perhaps not wholly successful) attempt, a gift, a fear, a desire. levinas sees the subject as that which is stuck in the totality wondering. but the possibility of this wonder derives from its stationing as it is. for levinas, aligning one’s self mentally as coterminous with the totality is what makes for bad ethics. this is the danger in imagination’s freedom.
in your case, what vexes me is not that you don’t “see” the cartoons as racist enough – a matter i could honestly care less about, really, and not what i’m out to prove – but rather that you see your “let’s look at the object as an object” attitude as being a whole level above the accusations of racism about the cartoon rather than an objection that those accusations have already taken into account. take your comment from the thread above: “i think there is a lot to be said for being made to feel revulsion, or uncomfortable, or simply even just irritated. it takes a certain kind of object. i value that object, if not for itself, then for the way it challenges discussion, even if that challenge is childish, rude, or awful.” yes, I agree that revulsion, discomfort, irritation are important aesthetic/emotional affects and take a certain kind of object to make them happen but there are two further points that spring from this. First of all, to respond to objects of revulsion, discomfort or irritation with emotions of revulsion, discomfort or irritation DOES NOT mean that one has shut off their critical apprehension or that the object has ‘succeeded’ in its ‘intention’; rather, what is also possible is to be irritation or revolted or discomforted at the way that these objects have tried to elicit my irritation, revulsion or discomfort. i might turn and say this doesn’t vex me as it wants to but vexes me as i see through it, meaning, seeing it as the object i see it as against the object it pretends to be. second of all, i agree that childish, rude or awful challenges to conversation have value. glenn beck’s absolutely stupid but intriguing claim that ‘obama’ is a racist is an example of that for me, as it speaks to anxieties on the right at the moment. but those cartoons wish to eschew any sense that they are childish, rude or awful in any ‘meaningful’ sense. this cartoon is for the viewer who “knows” better, the one who doesn’t really buy into those racist stereotypes. what is it exactly then that is childish, rude or awful about them. even we who have responded to the racist operation they perform dont see them as childish, rude, or awful. rather, there is nothing at all about this which is not a calculated attitude toward childishness, rudeness and awfulness. it isn’t a sincere venting of beliefs but the kind of behind-the-hand snickering of the cultured at the hilarious ‘non-racist’ times that we live in. and it frustrates me immensely that smart, well-meaning people like yourself and chelsea want to defend its shitty provocations as provocative when they aren’t even that: they’re like a stranger flicking a stone at you in the street and then telling you it’s ‘a provocation’. that stranger’s ‘provocation’ is not about challenging discussion: it’s a cheshire cat act designed for self-satisfaction. and if you punch him, you’re the aggressor.
the other day you also said on the hostile response to the cartoons: “it’s not a matter of taking it seriously, as much as it is just not responding to it with the same level of social blank that you project into its presence.” i find this to be the core of why you get such heated responses to your position on matters like this as it implies (and, may i say, in what is just about the MOST political argument you can make) that the hostile response to the cartoons is all our own preoccupations ‘projected’ in upon this instance. like we can’t think about what is to hand. why is this a reasonable assumption? doesn’t this pre-politicise your own perspective? why should objects be praised ineluctably for simply being objects? this ‘less politics, more object’ argument is political because it posits itself as a complete principle that refuses to look at objects beyond their abstraction as “objects”, like they exist all in this potential similarity of “other” discussions we aren’t having rather than stand or fall on axes of worth, value and attention the objects themselves raise, the most important of which in this case happens to be not political but racial. why would these cartoons have even been brought in as worth a post if they didn’t summon up some idea about the racial? the racial is not the same as politics even if it isnt absent of politics either. racism IS NOT always political: it is a fact. this reduction of racism to “values” is also problematic.
the other day you agreed with gene morgan’s argument. this is what he said: “‘While this guy may, in fact, be racist, I do think the existence of these cartoons is something interesting in terms of American views on class and cultural integration, which is a much more interesting and thoughtful conversation than “this dude is racist.”’ To concretely highlight my points above: Why exactly is it that this “much more interesting” class and cultural integration discussion precludes the value-orientation that would place such a discussion in the clear ‘racial” vector from which it emerges in the instant of the cartoons? Even were we to accept that conversation as more “interesting”, why is it thought that the flat statement ‘this dude is racist’ is not itself a part of that conversation on class and cultural integration? Finally, why is this discussion more acceptable politics – and class and cultural integration is politics – while the argument that this is cheap, flip racist work unworthy of a place in such experimentalist circles, especially one endlessly carrying on about their freedom to judge aesthetic worth, is considered to be establishment? Insisting that “politics” in this sense is a stunted, boring, facile thing, a limitation on thinking, the unimaginative, almost strikes me as a liberal attitude in the CNN sense, where we can only discuss “issues” in the already consensus-instilling framework of what this means for an ‘us’ of some sort – whether this ‘us’ be Americans or this ‘us’ be the sage thinkers who ‘care’ about issues of class and cultural integration or ‘us’ the curious commentators who wish to get to the ‘bottom’ of a cultural object. Discussions which fragment the discussability are out a priori. All the shitty objects of today bank on this false ‘democracy’ of the viewer which enables said objects to steal our attention away from other better objects we could be pondering.
I really would like your thoughts in response to all this.
oh alec, apologies, i just noticed i misspelt your name as “alex” in the rush of writing my long comment to blake above (among a heap of other mistakes). i just wanted to say sorry to you for that as it was a typo, not ignorance of your proper name. cheers, man.
oh alec, apologies, i just noticed i misspelt your name as “alex” in the rush of writing my long comment to blake above (among a heap of other mistakes). i just wanted to say sorry to you for that as it was a typo, not ignorance of your proper name. cheers, man.
thanks roxane, i really am with you on this and was reading your comments the other day which were all kinds of wise and passionate. i also wanted to shout out to justin too, who’s been very insightful on this as well, and who i forgot to mention above.
this is just a general side note on zizek and racist jokes, not addressed to any one in particular, but something i felt i needed to add. the point he also is making about the cathartic racism of eastern europe is that the dirty racism of everyday life is a transaction proper to everyday life. he never glorifies it; he says he finds relief in it. the subject subjected to racism for zizek – and more broadly the subjects of prejudice – are fantasy figures that screen out the actual inconsistency or ‘void’ of the Other. what is ‘relieving’ about racism then is that it momentarily fills this void in or frees the Other of inconsistency. this is naturally experienced as relief as it supplies logic that stoppers the void of the Other: it’s a game we all play sometimes, even we who desire to be anti-racists, a vacation from the complex of Otherness. and insofar as it is a subsocial phenomenon, it is not such a concern for it is precisely a manifestation of powerlessness, of the impotence of such sentiments. this is precisely why zizek sees its proper home as being the sub-social: let it be expressed here, in intimate circles, when it dares, let it have the thrill of stealing illicit pleasure from the social, because this is precisely what keeps it disorganized and dissipated. for if it funnels itself into legitimacy, if it gains the endorsement of the social symbolic, it will be promulgated into the policy of the big Other: in this case, the state. naturally, we live in two worlds where racism is promulgated by the big Other even as it lives this illicit life in the off-colour joke. for zizek, they may be connected, of course, but the point is one of the left’s orientation: it is not a matter of pillorying the individual who accidentally lets slip a private racist joke in public (the police work of everyday ‘anti-racists’ who end up endorsing the most reactionary policies at the political level) but, rather, calling bullshit on the public expressions of racism that aim to install racism as official common-sense even as they disavow any racist intent. this is why im not ‘attacking’ chelsea martin but i am disgusted at the cartoon and the – quite frankly – reactionary attempts to defend it as a lot of fuss over nothing.
thanks roxane, i really am with you on this and was reading your comments the other day which were all kinds of wise and passionate. i also wanted to shout out to justin too, who’s been very insightful on this as well, and who i forgot to mention above.
this is just a general side note on zizek and racist jokes, not addressed to any one in particular, but something i felt i needed to add. the point he also is making about the cathartic racism of eastern europe is that the dirty racism of everyday life is a transaction proper to everyday life. he never glorifies it; he says he finds relief in it. the subject subjected to racism for zizek – and more broadly the subjects of prejudice – are fantasy figures that screen out the actual inconsistency or ‘void’ of the Other. what is ‘relieving’ about racism then is that it momentarily fills this void in or frees the Other of inconsistency. this is naturally experienced as relief as it supplies logic that stoppers the void of the Other: it’s a game we all play sometimes, even we who desire to be anti-racists, a vacation from the complex of Otherness. and insofar as it is a subsocial phenomenon, it is not such a concern for it is precisely a manifestation of powerlessness, of the impotence of such sentiments. this is precisely why zizek sees its proper home as being the sub-social: let it be expressed here, in intimate circles, when it dares, let it have the thrill of stealing illicit pleasure from the social, because this is precisely what keeps it disorganized and dissipated. for if it funnels itself into legitimacy, if it gains the endorsement of the social symbolic, it will be promulgated into the policy of the big Other: in this case, the state. naturally, we live in two worlds where racism is promulgated by the big Other even as it lives this illicit life in the off-colour joke. for zizek, they may be connected, of course, but the point is one of the left’s orientation: it is not a matter of pillorying the individual who accidentally lets slip a private racist joke in public (the police work of everyday ‘anti-racists’ who end up endorsing the most reactionary policies at the political level) but, rather, calling bullshit on the public expressions of racism that aim to install racism as official common-sense even as they disavow any racist intent. this is why im not ‘attacking’ chelsea martin but i am disgusted at the cartoon and the – quite frankly – reactionary attempts to defend it as a lot of fuss over nothing.
i also just want to clarify a point i made above. i wrote: “why would these cartoons have even been brought in as worth a post if they didn’t summon up some idea about the racial? the racial is not the same as politics even if it isnt absent of politics either. racism IS NOT always political: it is a fact. this reduction of racism to “values” is also problematic.” i mean here that racism is not always a political ‘construction’ with no basis in reality and an offense does not only exist in the moment of being offended, as though it weren’t actual and in play before that moment of instantiation. even if no one blinked an eye at that cartoon sequence, it would still be racist. when i asked why the cartoons would have been brought in as worth a post unless they summoned up some idea about the racial, i meant that – for all the efforts to say they touch on a ‘number’ of issues, that they signify ‘many’ things – the point is the ‘freaky friday’ transfer of traits from black to white is their ‘haw-haw’ hook and the reason they were posted, not for all these curious sociological subtleties that are now being conjured up as a belated justification for their presentation in this forum. trying to talk over that fact is to talk over the object, not to talk to it as ‘more object’ than it is. and the object wishes to be talked over in precisely this way because its whole message is race is to be taken lightly as a collection of amusing dysfunctions (sad but true) we can ‘all’ chuckle over. that was what I was meaning to say at that point but I moved through it too quickly.
i also just want to clarify a point i made above. i wrote: “why would these cartoons have even been brought in as worth a post if they didn’t summon up some idea about the racial? the racial is not the same as politics even if it isnt absent of politics either. racism IS NOT always political: it is a fact. this reduction of racism to “values” is also problematic.” i mean here that racism is not always a political ‘construction’ with no basis in reality and an offense does not only exist in the moment of being offended, as though it weren’t actual and in play before that moment of instantiation. even if no one blinked an eye at that cartoon sequence, it would still be racist. when i asked why the cartoons would have been brought in as worth a post unless they summoned up some idea about the racial, i meant that – for all the efforts to say they touch on a ‘number’ of issues, that they signify ‘many’ things – the point is the ‘freaky friday’ transfer of traits from black to white is their ‘haw-haw’ hook and the reason they were posted, not for all these curious sociological subtleties that are now being conjured up as a belated justification for their presentation in this forum. trying to talk over that fact is to talk over the object, not to talk to it as ‘more object’ than it is. and the object wishes to be talked over in precisely this way because its whole message is race is to be taken lightly as a collection of amusing dysfunctions (sad but true) we can ‘all’ chuckle over. that was what I was meaning to say at that point but I moved through it too quickly.
Amy and Mike– you’re right, and this is, I think what I was partly and inarticulately trying to say above. There are not too many Hitlers, so while itmay be valuable to try and understand them–empathy is a bridge too far for me–it’s of far greater value to understand how ordinary human beings can participate in or even just ignore genocide and horror. Like you say, this is what ultimately makes genocide possible.
If you buy something like Tolstoy’s great man of history theory, then you know that people that like Hitler come along rarely, rarely, rarely. But the people that follow them…thousands are born every day. And even with no one to lead them, they perpetuate smaller brutalities, injustice, racism, sexism, etc all the time. It seems more useful, to me, to understand how easily we could be them–or maybe even are them. If that makes any sense.
I think it’s important, ethically, and to understand our own history, that we see Hitler as human (and not inhuman) and understand how or why we may all have the capacity to become him (what —I think it was Hannah Arendt? called the ‘banality of evil’ actually, her “eichmann in jerusalem” would I think have interesting things to add to this conversation), and also that we understand the society that enabled and emboldened him. …I think this involves empathy, but I don’t know whether this is the same as the kind of empathy you are talking about. It seems like with “beauty in ugliness” you are maybe talking about some kind of aesthetic quality that transcends social and historical context (unless I’m totally misunderstanding), which I’m not sure I believe is possible or desirable.
Amy and Mike– you’re right, and this is, I think what I was partly and inarticulately trying to say above. There are not too many Hitlers, so while itmay be valuable to try and understand them–empathy is a bridge too far for me–it’s of far greater value to understand how ordinary human beings can participate in or even just ignore genocide and horror. Like you say, this is what ultimately makes genocide possible.
If you buy something like Tolstoy’s great man of history theory, then you know that people that like Hitler come along rarely, rarely, rarely. But the people that follow them…thousands are born every day. And even with no one to lead them, they perpetuate smaller brutalities, injustice, racism, sexism, etc all the time. It seems more useful, to me, to understand how easily we could be them–or maybe even are them. If that makes any sense.
I think it’s important, ethically, and to understand our own history, that we see Hitler as human (and not inhuman) and understand how or why we may all have the capacity to become him (what —I think it was Hannah Arendt? called the ‘banality of evil’ actually, her “eichmann in jerusalem” would I think have interesting things to add to this conversation), and also that we understand the society that enabled and emboldened him. …I think this involves empathy, but I don’t know whether this is the same as the kind of empathy you are talking about. It seems like with “beauty in ugliness” you are maybe talking about some kind of aesthetic quality that transcends social and historical context (unless I’m totally misunderstanding), which I’m not sure I believe is possible or desirable.
I totally agree with you, Roxane. Mike, Adam, I understand what you mean, but all historical record and evidence shows that Hitler was cold, cruel, and a meglomaniac. And Mike, I don’t know you, but you seem like a good guy and I’m guessing that you would not come close to becoming Hitler. I don’t think anyone on this site could, or in fact anyone you know. It’s about scale, like Roxane said. Can you really see yourself deciding to wipe out an entire race of people and making cold calculations to do so? I won’t speak for anyone else, but I can say with absolute certainty that no matter how much I can or can’t empathize with Hitler, I will never become Hitler. Never. Not even close. Not even close to even close.
Maybe this isn’t intellectually fashionable to say, but to me there’s a real morality–and I’m not talking religion–but an inner moral compass that most people are born with that keeps them from becoming like Hitler, or Pol Pot, or Stalin, etc. Most people are born moral and sane, and while they may be willing to bend that morality here and there, they could never break it and suddenly start invading Poland or staging a Beer Hall Putsch.
I totally agree with you, Roxane. Mike, Adam, I understand what you mean, but all historical record and evidence shows that Hitler was cold, cruel, and a meglomaniac. And Mike, I don’t know you, but you seem like a good guy and I’m guessing that you would not come close to becoming Hitler. I don’t think anyone on this site could, or in fact anyone you know. It’s about scale, like Roxane said. Can you really see yourself deciding to wipe out an entire race of people and making cold calculations to do so? I won’t speak for anyone else, but I can say with absolute certainty that no matter how much I can or can’t empathize with Hitler, I will never become Hitler. Never. Not even close. Not even close to even close.
Maybe this isn’t intellectually fashionable to say, but to me there’s a real morality–and I’m not talking religion–but an inner moral compass that most people are born with that keeps them from becoming like Hitler, or Pol Pot, or Stalin, etc. Most people are born moral and sane, and while they may be willing to bend that morality here and there, they could never break it and suddenly start invading Poland or staging a Beer Hall Putsch.
David,
Brilliant analysis, obviously, but I think you’re giving the people defending (and sometimes claiming they weren’t “defending”) the comics post too much credit.
The let’s-have-a-discussion pose was never anything other than a way to avoid a discussion at all costs.
People condemning the post were mostly thoughtful and willing to engage. Those on the other side were consistently obscurantist, evasive, dismissive, TRULY knee-jerk, and disrespectful to readers–and even contributors–alienated by the original post.
David,
Brilliant analysis, obviously, but I think you’re giving the people defending (and sometimes claiming they weren’t “defending”) the comics post too much credit.
The let’s-have-a-discussion pose was never anything other than a way to avoid a discussion at all costs.
People condemning the post were mostly thoughtful and willing to engage. Those on the other side were consistently obscurantist, evasive, dismissive, TRULY knee-jerk, and disrespectful to readers–and even contributors–alienated by the original post.
Adam, this is a really marvelous essay. It seems like here, if nowhere else, something of true value has been salvaged from the wreck of that miserable post the other day.
re your Hitler example- as others have already noted, there is a long and rich history of art that humanizes controversial or monstrous historical figures. But it comes down to a question of intent–why Hitler? Why Stalin? What is your aim in the production of this art? Typically, the aim of such art is either to portray the monstrous figure in human terms, thereby to suggest–as Mother Teresa so aptly put it–that there is some of that in each of us, and so to be vigilant against our own worst instincts, as well as rigorous in pursuing what is best in ourselves. This chalks absolutely with your Christianity as you’ve explained it, and indeed, gets at or close to the heart of what I think is most beautiful and compelling about that faith. The second approach seeks to humanize the monstrous figure and evoke sympathy WITHOUT regard to those things that made him monstrous–where I come from we call this a whitewash, or propaganda, or revisionist history. Right now, for example, in Putin’s Russia, there is a massive rehabilitation of Stalin’s reputation underway. I imagine you would have no trouble finding people who fully sympathize with some fully humanized conception of Stalin. You would probably be wise not to engage those people on the topic of the value of a free press in a democracy. Or about Jews.
The fact of the matter is, you don’t get to have your racist cake and eat it too. When you engage figures, tropes and politics from the really-existing world in your art, you invite the full bevvy of readings and responses and symbolic weights and political ramifications of your choice. The “art is just art” crowd will argue that this is unfair of me, but this is a way of shirking the responsibility of their own choices as artists. Why would you write Stalin into your story if you didn’t want to talk about him? Why would you create an ultimately sympathetic portrait of Hitler–scrubbed of that which made him monstrous–if you weren’t trying to redeem him for some larger aim? The answer is, you wouldn’t. And it’s that larger aim that I am concerned about.
What has bothered me for the past two days in the other thread is this constant attempt to establish what is a legitimate reaction, and what is not. I have been told in no uncertain terms that I should feel those comics are absurd, or enacting some sort of double-reverse-irony (perhaps triple, since they also work on that most ironic level of all, which is that of being really shitty art), but that whatever I do, I am not to take them at face value and treat them as if Howard Dinkel simply said what he meant, because he meant what he said.
If absolutely nothing else, what I get out of those comics is “this is what Howard Dinkel thinks is funny.” Okay, well that is enough for me to know I don’t want anything else to do with him. To re-engage with your hypothetical, I would feel much the same way about someone who created an ultimately and exclusively sympathetic portrait of Hitler. To humanize is one thing, but The Life of Hitler scrubbed of everything that made him “Hitler” is the life of Christ. Well, when I meet people who are interested in making the latter out of the former, I get a little worried.
It comes down, in the end, to a question of responsibility. Vonnegut was nothing if not a moralist, and morality–or even the possibility of the ethical–is precisely what is being neglected here, and this is the heart of my concern. If we have to have a 48-hour brawl in order to establish whether or not something with the word “nigger” in its title is or is not broaching the subject of race, and whether or not a blog post with instructions for purchase is or is not in fact “promoting” the work it is advertising, then we are a long, long way from Vonnegut’s notion of what a sympathetic portrait of Hitler might look like or be used for. We, collectively, have not earned the right to play at that level.
Adam, this is a really marvelous essay. It seems like here, if nowhere else, something of true value has been salvaged from the wreck of that miserable post the other day.
re your Hitler example- as others have already noted, there is a long and rich history of art that humanizes controversial or monstrous historical figures. But it comes down to a question of intent–why Hitler? Why Stalin? What is your aim in the production of this art? Typically, the aim of such art is either to portray the monstrous figure in human terms, thereby to suggest–as Mother Teresa so aptly put it–that there is some of that in each of us, and so to be vigilant against our own worst instincts, as well as rigorous in pursuing what is best in ourselves. This chalks absolutely with your Christianity as you’ve explained it, and indeed, gets at or close to the heart of what I think is most beautiful and compelling about that faith. The second approach seeks to humanize the monstrous figure and evoke sympathy WITHOUT regard to those things that made him monstrous–where I come from we call this a whitewash, or propaganda, or revisionist history. Right now, for example, in Putin’s Russia, there is a massive rehabilitation of Stalin’s reputation underway. I imagine you would have no trouble finding people who fully sympathize with some fully humanized conception of Stalin. You would probably be wise not to engage those people on the topic of the value of a free press in a democracy. Or about Jews.
The fact of the matter is, you don’t get to have your racist cake and eat it too. When you engage figures, tropes and politics from the really-existing world in your art, you invite the full bevvy of readings and responses and symbolic weights and political ramifications of your choice. The “art is just art” crowd will argue that this is unfair of me, but this is a way of shirking the responsibility of their own choices as artists. Why would you write Stalin into your story if you didn’t want to talk about him? Why would you create an ultimately sympathetic portrait of Hitler–scrubbed of that which made him monstrous–if you weren’t trying to redeem him for some larger aim? The answer is, you wouldn’t. And it’s that larger aim that I am concerned about.
What has bothered me for the past two days in the other thread is this constant attempt to establish what is a legitimate reaction, and what is not. I have been told in no uncertain terms that I should feel those comics are absurd, or enacting some sort of double-reverse-irony (perhaps triple, since they also work on that most ironic level of all, which is that of being really shitty art), but that whatever I do, I am not to take them at face value and treat them as if Howard Dinkel simply said what he meant, because he meant what he said.
If absolutely nothing else, what I get out of those comics is “this is what Howard Dinkel thinks is funny.” Okay, well that is enough for me to know I don’t want anything else to do with him. To re-engage with your hypothetical, I would feel much the same way about someone who created an ultimately and exclusively sympathetic portrait of Hitler. To humanize is one thing, but The Life of Hitler scrubbed of everything that made him “Hitler” is the life of Christ. Well, when I meet people who are interested in making the latter out of the former, I get a little worried.
It comes down, in the end, to a question of responsibility. Vonnegut was nothing if not a moralist, and morality–or even the possibility of the ethical–is precisely what is being neglected here, and this is the heart of my concern. If we have to have a 48-hour brawl in order to establish whether or not something with the word “nigger” in its title is or is not broaching the subject of race, and whether or not a blog post with instructions for purchase is or is not in fact “promoting” the work it is advertising, then we are a long, long way from Vonnegut’s notion of what a sympathetic portrait of Hitler might look like or be used for. We, collectively, have not earned the right to play at that level.
I was disgusted at the cartooon, too. It gave me a sick feeling and I wanted to disassociate myself from the G. I wasn’t repulsed because I thought the cartoon was racist, though, but because it was posted without any critical justification. It, at least, I will say “at least,” is almost racist, practically racist (perhaps not for all intents and purposes racist), and therefore would seem to require some acknowledgment of that, at least to set a tone for discussion.
Anyway, your breakdown of Zizek’s thoughts here is elegant, and I appreciate it. This is what I was looking for when I asked someone to use the comments to explain it, and you handled it nicely. Specifically I’m interested in the tendency to replace the Other with racist thinking as the way racism happens. I wonder, though, if by making the point so strongly that Zizek isn’t glorifies racism, you are actually depowering his point that there does exist a place for racist jokes? I’m not saying he does glorify it, just that by coming down so strongly against that idea, you’re revoking the space that he is trying to create for it.
I was disgusted at the cartooon, too. It gave me a sick feeling and I wanted to disassociate myself from the G. I wasn’t repulsed because I thought the cartoon was racist, though, but because it was posted without any critical justification. It, at least, I will say “at least,” is almost racist, practically racist (perhaps not for all intents and purposes racist), and therefore would seem to require some acknowledgment of that, at least to set a tone for discussion.
Anyway, your breakdown of Zizek’s thoughts here is elegant, and I appreciate it. This is what I was looking for when I asked someone to use the comments to explain it, and you handled it nicely. Specifically I’m interested in the tendency to replace the Other with racist thinking as the way racism happens. I wonder, though, if by making the point so strongly that Zizek isn’t glorifies racism, you are actually depowering his point that there does exist a place for racist jokes? I’m not saying he does glorify it, just that by coming down so strongly against that idea, you’re revoking the space that he is trying to create for it.
why, what is the value in making the attempt. what would the father of the victim have to gain?
why, what is the value in making the attempt. what would the father of the victim have to gain?
Tim, y-e-s, Arendt yes
I do think that’s what Adam was trying to get at, after reading his follow-up comments. And I think the aesthetic point Adam is making is that, while for some people reading an Arendt essay gets them to this place of understanding, for others it will be art that gets them there, which is necessarily aesthetic. It sounds ugly to talk about the beauty of Hitler, but for some people the only way they/we will see the Hitler in society, in history, in themselves, etc, is if they first see some of their/our own beauty reflected in him. But if it gets them/us to the same place–to understand the banality of evil–then the social and historical context will not be irresponsibly transcended.
Adam, if I’m misstated your ideas, my apologies.
Tim, y-e-s, Arendt yes
I do think that’s what Adam was trying to get at, after reading his follow-up comments. And I think the aesthetic point Adam is making is that, while for some people reading an Arendt essay gets them to this place of understanding, for others it will be art that gets them there, which is necessarily aesthetic. It sounds ugly to talk about the beauty of Hitler, but for some people the only way they/we will see the Hitler in society, in history, in themselves, etc, is if they first see some of their/our own beauty reflected in him. But if it gets them/us to the same place–to understand the banality of evil–then the social and historical context will not be irresponsibly transcended.
Adam, if I’m misstated your ideas, my apologies.
For what it’s worth, this essay and comment thread has reminded me of something that happened in my class this semester. I teach an essay about the Stanley Milgram experiments, wherein most ordinary people willingly (so they thought) electrocuted strangers just because an experimenter told them to. Milgram set out to show that Germans were more obedient by nature than Americans, but instead he found unbelievable levels of obedience among Americans.
Most of my undergraduates can’t see themselves as at all implicated in this. Many of them believe that the randomly selected participants just happened to be randomly more evil than most, and that they themselves wouldn’t go through with it. This semester, the only student who said he was sure he would go through with it also said that his grandparents were Nazis, so he knew that otherwise good people could do terrible things. Maybe this is what Adam is getting at when he suggests painting Hitler as a “grandfatherly” figure. Most of us can empathize with our grandparents, and perhaps art playing on that would give endow us with the kind of wisdom my student has.
For what it’s worth, this essay and comment thread has reminded me of something that happened in my class this semester. I teach an essay about the Stanley Milgram experiments, wherein most ordinary people willingly (so they thought) electrocuted strangers just because an experimenter told them to. Milgram set out to show that Germans were more obedient by nature than Americans, but instead he found unbelievable levels of obedience among Americans.
Most of my undergraduates can’t see themselves as at all implicated in this. Many of them believe that the randomly selected participants just happened to be randomly more evil than most, and that they themselves wouldn’t go through with it. This semester, the only student who said he was sure he would go through with it also said that his grandparents were Nazis, so he knew that otherwise good people could do terrible things. Maybe this is what Adam is getting at when he suggests painting Hitler as a “grandfatherly” figure. Most of us can empathize with our grandparents, and perhaps art playing on that would give endow us with the kind of wisdom my student has.
thanks adam. i really don’t know what to make of the argument that it is practically racist rather than not racist for all intents and purposes. i suppose, for instance, that i could use a Nazi anti-Semitic propaganda pamphlet in my research on 1930s pamphleteer culture and learn more from it than that it was anti-Semitic (there could be matters of design, distribution, production, word length etc.) but those intents and purposes are not its intents and purposes per se; they’re implicit content. i don’t mean to conflate the cartoons with nazi propaganda, of course, but they operate the same, as racist for all its own intents and purposes (especially so in the intents and purposes of being somehow slickly ‘non-racist’).
On Zizek, I think the point I was making is precisely that Zizek does see a space for racist jokes: that space is not emancipatory, though: it’s a necessity. that space of informal, illicit raced humour is meant to be one that is semi-cultural and partially occluded; the empowerment is actual (a person makes the racist joke and the Other becomes less inconsistent, is devoided) but is largely illusory in any concrete social sense where that racism would be translated into discriminatory policies and measures in the state apparatus or at the level of the socially symbolic. mind you, the reason zizek doesn’t express any more than a sort of neutrality toward this everyday racism is precisely because it has real, pernicious racist effects too. he knows that. but he also knows racial hatreds do not simply disappear in the prohibition against them. the point he makes is that left anti-racists should be more concerned with resisting the sunny “non-racism” of those who impose openly racist policies under banners of equality and fairness and necessity and not so worried about the individuals who make the mistake occasionally of stating their low culture racism too loudly or openly in the public realm. why i don’t think that the cartoons from the other day constitute a case of this kind of racism is precisely that they were introduced as racism that ‘isn’t’. and we still can’t get past that obvious point without attempts to mitigate the racism, only proving how shockingly effective those cartoons have already been. so, in terms of ‘revoking’ the space zizek creates, i guess i have to disagree. i feel like im attending to in good faith to how he, as an anti-racist, has spoken of it in books and lectures and would view it if able to be asked directly now.
thanks adam. i really don’t know what to make of the argument that it is practically racist rather than not racist for all intents and purposes. i suppose, for instance, that i could use a Nazi anti-Semitic propaganda pamphlet in my research on 1930s pamphleteer culture and learn more from it than that it was anti-Semitic (there could be matters of design, distribution, production, word length etc.) but those intents and purposes are not its intents and purposes per se; they’re implicit content. i don’t mean to conflate the cartoons with nazi propaganda, of course, but they operate the same, as racist for all its own intents and purposes (especially so in the intents and purposes of being somehow slickly ‘non-racist’).
On Zizek, I think the point I was making is precisely that Zizek does see a space for racist jokes: that space is not emancipatory, though: it’s a necessity. that space of informal, illicit raced humour is meant to be one that is semi-cultural and partially occluded; the empowerment is actual (a person makes the racist joke and the Other becomes less inconsistent, is devoided) but is largely illusory in any concrete social sense where that racism would be translated into discriminatory policies and measures in the state apparatus or at the level of the socially symbolic. mind you, the reason zizek doesn’t express any more than a sort of neutrality toward this everyday racism is precisely because it has real, pernicious racist effects too. he knows that. but he also knows racial hatreds do not simply disappear in the prohibition against them. the point he makes is that left anti-racists should be more concerned with resisting the sunny “non-racism” of those who impose openly racist policies under banners of equality and fairness and necessity and not so worried about the individuals who make the mistake occasionally of stating their low culture racism too loudly or openly in the public realm. why i don’t think that the cartoons from the other day constitute a case of this kind of racism is precisely that they were introduced as racism that ‘isn’t’. and we still can’t get past that obvious point without attempts to mitigate the racism, only proving how shockingly effective those cartoons have already been. so, in terms of ‘revoking’ the space zizek creates, i guess i have to disagree. i feel like im attending to in good faith to how he, as an anti-racist, has spoken of it in books and lectures and would view it if able to be asked directly now.
Thank you, Justin, for this level-headed response to the content of the post. I see what you’re saying regarding an empathetic portrayal as whitewash and propaganda. I meant to account for that by saying, as I did, that a new perspective on Hitler wouldn’t make me forget who he was, or even what he symbolizes. I don’t want to dethrone him as the symbol of evil. I want to use that position he has to explore what else there is to know about it. Not about Hitler, but about the way the tendencies of evil interact with the other pistons of life.
Regarding responsibility, I absolutely agree with you and you put it well. It’s sad to think that, culturally, we are not ready to consider Hitler sympathetically. Especially when dealing with issues as loaded as racism, we need to be responsible and thoughtful. It doesn’t hurt to be considerate and delicate, in my opinion, but I think perhaps Chelsea and Blake wouldn’t agree.
Speaking to you as a fellow employee, my (admittedly presumptuous) intention with this post was to raise the level of discourse a bit, remove it as much as possible from that cartoon, and most importantly, to suggest that this blog may not be as racist as it seems. If by doing that it I have defended racism unwittingly, then I feel really bad and did the opposite of what I wanted to do.
Thank you, Justin, for this level-headed response to the content of the post. I see what you’re saying regarding an empathetic portrayal as whitewash and propaganda. I meant to account for that by saying, as I did, that a new perspective on Hitler wouldn’t make me forget who he was, or even what he symbolizes. I don’t want to dethrone him as the symbol of evil. I want to use that position he has to explore what else there is to know about it. Not about Hitler, but about the way the tendencies of evil interact with the other pistons of life.
Regarding responsibility, I absolutely agree with you and you put it well. It’s sad to think that, culturally, we are not ready to consider Hitler sympathetically. Especially when dealing with issues as loaded as racism, we need to be responsible and thoughtful. It doesn’t hurt to be considerate and delicate, in my opinion, but I think perhaps Chelsea and Blake wouldn’t agree.
Speaking to you as a fellow employee, my (admittedly presumptuous) intention with this post was to raise the level of discourse a bit, remove it as much as possible from that cartoon, and most importantly, to suggest that this blog may not be as racist as it seems. If by doing that it I have defended racism unwittingly, then I feel really bad and did the opposite of what I wanted to do.
hi alan. thanks for the words. yeah, i guess i don’t see the defenses of the cartoon as being not interested at all in engagement and discussion. but even if that were so, there are more people to ‘talk’ to here than those who don’t want to talk: i think there’s whatever quotient of readers has been following this silently and also, of course, those of us who have found the attitudes to the post to be really poor, our interaction with one another. so, hm, yeah. internet has many eyes.
hi alan. thanks for the words. yeah, i guess i don’t see the defenses of the cartoon as being not interested at all in engagement and discussion. but even if that were so, there are more people to ‘talk’ to here than those who don’t want to talk: i think there’s whatever quotient of readers has been following this silently and also, of course, those of us who have found the attitudes to the post to be really poor, our interaction with one another. so, hm, yeah. internet has many eyes.
For the record, I’m not saying that Hitler was an ordinary person. Clearly not. But I’m coming around to Adam’s idea that Hitler is the way to do this because he is so difficult to sympathize with. Hitler didn’t seem that extraordinary at first, as a leader. Roxane mentions a problem of scale, and I appreciate that, but the Holocaust is only large scale in memory. At the time, it was a day-by-day, moment-by-moment, accrual of small actions by individuals. Foot in the door, etc. If we are to resist the next Hitler, and so on, we have to recognize that he didn’t come out of the gate talking extermination. He talked about restoring Germany’s reputation after the embarrassing losses of WWI. The victors of WWI humiliated Germany beyond any necessity after it surrendered, and that, too, aided in creating an opportunity for Hitler. We’re still doing a pretty good job humiliating other countries right now, too.
No one side of American politics is responsible for this kind of thing, either. It was the left that was afraid to take any kind of stand in Pol Pot’s Cambodia because it was so close on the heels of Vietnam. Even after the Cambodian people managed to oust the Khmer Rouge, the US STILL recognized the Khmer Rouge as the legitimate government. And it was under Clinton that, in Rwanda, the Americans could have simply shut off the radio, where instructions on murdering the Tutsis were broadcast, without any risk to Americans. But, oh, gosh, that would be censorship, wouldn’t it?
For the record, I’m not saying that Hitler was an ordinary person. Clearly not. But I’m coming around to Adam’s idea that Hitler is the way to do this because he is so difficult to sympathize with. Hitler didn’t seem that extraordinary at first, as a leader. Roxane mentions a problem of scale, and I appreciate that, but the Holocaust is only large scale in memory. At the time, it was a day-by-day, moment-by-moment, accrual of small actions by individuals. Foot in the door, etc. If we are to resist the next Hitler, and so on, we have to recognize that he didn’t come out of the gate talking extermination. He talked about restoring Germany’s reputation after the embarrassing losses of WWI. The victors of WWI humiliated Germany beyond any necessity after it surrendered, and that, too, aided in creating an opportunity for Hitler. We’re still doing a pretty good job humiliating other countries right now, too.
No one side of American politics is responsible for this kind of thing, either. It was the left that was afraid to take any kind of stand in Pol Pot’s Cambodia because it was so close on the heels of Vietnam. Even after the Cambodian people managed to oust the Khmer Rouge, the US STILL recognized the Khmer Rouge as the legitimate government. And it was under Clinton that, in Rwanda, the Americans could have simply shut off the radio, where instructions on murdering the Tutsis were broadcast, without any risk to Americans. But, oh, gosh, that would be censorship, wouldn’t it?
Justin, couldn’t agree more or have expressed it more eloquently. Thanks again, dude.
Adam, I just want to say for my own part that I think you have absolutely raised the level of discourse and again I thank you. The blog isn’t racist in the capital R sense – promulgating a racist program whether manifestly or implicitly – but it is lazy as all hell about seriously thinking about its poor, glib attitudes to race – and all issues it deems ‘political’ generally. What follows from that is a periodic, but chronic and ongoing, flippancy toward this as an issue that actually matters followed by a stinging hostility toward the group of us who don’t wish to give up on this place but do not want to have to be the silent, grinning and bearing it party to this kind of ‘art is exempt of all things’ cover for what amounts to shooting spitballs through straws at the backs of certain heads.
The discussions of Hitler on this post are a whole other fascinating and powerful thing that have made my brain gears turn but there’s more than enough of me on this thread already. Cheers, man.
Justin, couldn’t agree more or have expressed it more eloquently. Thanks again, dude.
Adam, I just want to say for my own part that I think you have absolutely raised the level of discourse and again I thank you. The blog isn’t racist in the capital R sense – promulgating a racist program whether manifestly or implicitly – but it is lazy as all hell about seriously thinking about its poor, glib attitudes to race – and all issues it deems ‘political’ generally. What follows from that is a periodic, but chronic and ongoing, flippancy toward this as an issue that actually matters followed by a stinging hostility toward the group of us who don’t wish to give up on this place but do not want to have to be the silent, grinning and bearing it party to this kind of ‘art is exempt of all things’ cover for what amounts to shooting spitballs through straws at the backs of certain heads.
The discussions of Hitler on this post are a whole other fascinating and powerful thing that have made my brain gears turn but there’s more than enough of me on this thread already. Cheers, man.
David, that was really fun to read, well-thought out. just about all your points i agree with. especially the point about the comic being a “calculated attitude,” which makes the entire cartoon, to me, not only ring false, but feel inauthentic, childish, and i don’t know, boring, posing. and, and: the point about why a comment like “this dude is racist” is somehow less valuable than the strips themselves. this sort of thing kept happening in that original post/thread. very strange hierarchies were posited/implied in that discussion, mainly by those seemingly ‘defending’ the strip.
i’m also with alan here. when i first saw these strips, and i rarely comment on giant, but read it all the time, i just thought: wow, this is probably going to suck for someone and make someone else really pissed. then i went and played a bunch of ping pong. then i came back and saw that people i respect a lot as internet-beings were saying things like “the only offense is being offended.” which blake said (hi blake, i don’t know you, but hello) and which felt odd to me, because now it is not only not okay to say ‘this dude is racist’ it’s also not okay to be “offended.” as though being offended is somehow a “worthless” reaction, which of course it’s not. and i have to agree with alan that many of the people who disliked the strip seemed to want to discuss “why” it was racist or whatever, or at the very least why they were offended, etc, while those who defended it seemed to take some strange, aesthetic highground, while at the same time being dismissive.
adam, i enjoyed this essay. i had a few thoughts about hitler, mainly what Justin says below, like, “why hitler?” a bigger problem is the history surrounding hitler and hitler’s germany. i think it would be difficult for americans to really understand the germany of that time, all the shit it had been through after wwi. hitler gave them a way out of that bad time, a way to get away from feeling degraded and humiliated, feeling like less than people. but without really feeling those things, it would be difficult for an audience to really connect with hitler or hitler’s ideas the way the people of germany did. the difficult part for a screenwriter or whomever, it would seem, is allowing/making the audience take hitler’s ideas very seriously, as legitimate, thoughtful, philosophical ideas – like the comic strip, we can too easily see through those ideas to the muck below.
David, that was really fun to read, well-thought out. just about all your points i agree with. especially the point about the comic being a “calculated attitude,” which makes the entire cartoon, to me, not only ring false, but feel inauthentic, childish, and i don’t know, boring, posing. and, and: the point about why a comment like “this dude is racist” is somehow less valuable than the strips themselves. this sort of thing kept happening in that original post/thread. very strange hierarchies were posited/implied in that discussion, mainly by those seemingly ‘defending’ the strip.
i’m also with alan here. when i first saw these strips, and i rarely comment on giant, but read it all the time, i just thought: wow, this is probably going to suck for someone and make someone else really pissed. then i went and played a bunch of ping pong. then i came back and saw that people i respect a lot as internet-beings were saying things like “the only offense is being offended.” which blake said (hi blake, i don’t know you, but hello) and which felt odd to me, because now it is not only not okay to say ‘this dude is racist’ it’s also not okay to be “offended.” as though being offended is somehow a “worthless” reaction, which of course it’s not. and i have to agree with alan that many of the people who disliked the strip seemed to want to discuss “why” it was racist or whatever, or at the very least why they were offended, etc, while those who defended it seemed to take some strange, aesthetic highground, while at the same time being dismissive.
adam, i enjoyed this essay. i had a few thoughts about hitler, mainly what Justin says below, like, “why hitler?” a bigger problem is the history surrounding hitler and hitler’s germany. i think it would be difficult for americans to really understand the germany of that time, all the shit it had been through after wwi. hitler gave them a way out of that bad time, a way to get away from feeling degraded and humiliated, feeling like less than people. but without really feeling those things, it would be difficult for an audience to really connect with hitler or hitler’s ideas the way the people of germany did. the difficult part for a screenwriter or whomever, it would seem, is allowing/making the audience take hitler’s ideas very seriously, as legitimate, thoughtful, philosophical ideas – like the comic strip, we can too easily see through those ideas to the muck below.
I should note that, as any good Christian/deconstructionist, I love the notion of the impossible, especially as laid out in John Caputo’s little book, Religion Without Religion.
Whether or not it’s desirable is like the point Justin made that we don’t want to whitewash the matter. I agree that we should not put out of mind the horror, and further think that if we do that, we are not being empathic in the first place.
idea for novel: famous author is increasingly fascinated by the notion of an empathetic portrayal of hitler — it becomes, for him, a key to understanding not only the antagonisms that underpinned the 20th century, but human nature itself, this in spite of the fact that his friends and colleagues level numerous arguments against such a portrayal (e.g., hitler is neither hero-monster richard III nor the underground man (or if he is, these are points that have been made, and could be again, without hitler)); as the writer accumulates notes and chapters, he is driven mad — but in the most petty, small-minded fashion, and the act of semi-self-conscious “ironic” anti-semitic violence that caps the book’s second third barely rises above the irritating for the jewish victim (who narrates the final section, and does indeed form something of an empathetic relationship with the writer, “closing the emotional loop” of the book (or appearing to, until [tk] kills [tk])). (n.b.: the writer is wealthy, handsome and hyper-articulate, the jew is poor, ugly, dull, a nobody.)
I should note that, as any good Christian/deconstructionist, I love the notion of the impossible, especially as laid out in John Caputo’s little book, Religion Without Religion.
Whether or not it’s desirable is like the point Justin made that we don’t want to whitewash the matter. I agree that we should not put out of mind the horror, and further think that if we do that, we are not being empathic in the first place.
idea for novel: famous author is increasingly fascinated by the notion of an empathetic portrayal of hitler — it becomes, for him, a key to understanding not only the antagonisms that underpinned the 20th century, but human nature itself, this in spite of the fact that his friends and colleagues level numerous arguments against such a portrayal (e.g., hitler is neither hero-monster richard III nor the underground man (or if he is, these are points that have been made, and could be again, without hitler)); as the writer accumulates notes and chapters, he is driven mad — but in the most petty, small-minded fashion, and the act of semi-self-conscious “ironic” anti-semitic violence that caps the book’s second third barely rises above the irritating for the jewish victim (who narrates the final section, and does indeed form something of an empathetic relationship with the writer, “closing the emotional loop” of the book (or appearing to, until [tk] kills [tk])). (n.b.: the writer is wealthy, handsome and hyper-articulate, the jew is poor, ugly, dull, a nobody.)
Adam, that really sounds like my kind of book, but I can’t find it online under that title…is it maybe called “On Religion?”
Adam, that really sounds like my kind of book, but I can’t find it online under that title…is it maybe called “On Religion?”
Thank you, David. A lot.
Thank you, David. A lot.
Not at all, not at all, Adam. I’m thoroughly impressed by and interested in what you wrote. If I still seem vituperative, it’s because my attention is still stuck on grinding yesterday’s axe, and at this point I’d certainly do better to follow your lead and have done with it, especially inasmuch as that’s what I myself have been calling for. Anyway, thanks again.
Not at all, not at all, Adam. I’m thoroughly impressed by and interested in what you wrote. If I still seem vituperative, it’s because my attention is still stuck on grinding yesterday’s axe, and at this point I’d certainly do better to follow your lead and have done with it, especially inasmuch as that’s what I myself have been calling for. Anyway, thanks again.
It does — but I would argue that you can’t understand a person without empathizing with them. That’s sort of the basis of (character-driven) fiction, right?
It does — but I would argue that you can’t understand a person without empathizing with them. That’s sort of the basis of (character-driven) fiction, right?
i guess my biggest argument against vonneguts notion is, what value is there for me as an individual to, waste my time, energy, insight, passion, love, analysis, empathy, sympathy, soul, on a piece of shit like hitler. he doesnt deserve my time. why dedicate time to someone who doesnt deserve it. i mean ok he’s a human being, i get it, but that doesnt mean anything. that isnt enough. sure an evaluation of his life, his motivations, his mind, sure, thats interesting, but to use it as a means to justify it by gaining sympathy is fucking disgusting and nauseating.
i think its ridiculious for people to attempt to use “intellect” as a means to justify or sympathize with racism and mass genocide. your argument isnt intellectual or insightful no matter how pretty you talk. and if your children spent even a moment in a fucking gas chamber or a concentration camp you wouldnt even be having this talk. so really… save it.
i guess my biggest argument against vonneguts notion is, what value is there for me as an individual to, waste my time, energy, insight, passion, love, analysis, empathy, sympathy, soul, on a piece of shit like hitler. he doesnt deserve my time. why dedicate time to someone who doesnt deserve it. i mean ok he’s a human being, i get it, but that doesnt mean anything. that isnt enough. sure an evaluation of his life, his motivations, his mind, sure, thats interesting, but to use it as a means to justify it by gaining sympathy is fucking disgusting and nauseating.
i think its ridiculious for people to attempt to use “intellect” as a means to justify or sympathize with racism and mass genocide. your argument isnt intellectual or insightful no matter how pretty you talk. and if your children spent even a moment in a fucking gas chamber or a concentration camp you wouldnt even be having this talk. so really… save it.
Thanks for this post, Adam. Like David, I am often frustrated by the glibness here, and equally frustrated when counterattacking articulateness gussies itself up with self-righteousness (something I should say, if only because he’s in the beginning of this sentence, that David always avoids), both of which I believe are maladies that have a lot to do with the forum of the internet itself, and with the style of communication that derives from online facelessness. Speaking of Levinas, what happens to the face-to-face encounter and its attendant obligations when we’re all staring at LEDs?
The privilege of online forum allows us, in theory, to summon the better angels of our articulation and, at the same time, admit to and root out the ugly ideologies we’re too embarrassed to talk about in fleshspace. If we looked at those cartoons in person, would we all react the way we did on here? Would we laugh more or act more indignant depending on who we’re with? Obviously, the privacy of our interaction with the internet, and that privacy’s relation to everybody else’s private interaction, affects what we say in a big way. (Caveat: not for everybody, obviously. Some people are as obnoxious in real life as they are online, which is terrific in its consistency, at least. And some people are, amazingly, just as kind and thoughtful).
Adam, what I think your post does is use the forum for its slow and thoughtful capacities more than either its “nobody-can-see-my-spitball” or “nobody-can-see-how-puffed-up-my-chest-is” capacities. And likewise with the discussion that’s resulting here in the comments thread, which is what I would point to as something people involved with HTMLGIANT can be proud of. I would equally point to Chelsea’s original post as irrevocably part of this discussion’s origin, for better or worse, and I think it’s part of HTMLGIANT’s identity that offensive stuff usually spawns really great gab—unlike a lot of the rest of the internet, where muck begets muck, which is true even if you love muck, which I often do. Which is to answer Darby Laron’s question about why we’re talking about all this when we’re supposed to be talking about literature, because literature (sorry, Saussure, sorry words) is undeniably stirred up with the molasses of being human. And, as we struggle with this stuff, we become more attentive and thoughtful, more careful thinkers and more careful writers.
Anyway, yeah. It makes me sad and embarrassed that people would associate HTMLGIANT with either craven ugliness or posturing “shrillness” (which I know is a loaded and misogynistic term; it’s unfortunately the best I can think of), but I think this post and everybody in this comment thread prove that such associations would be themselves kneejerk, and ignorant of all the significant thought (and I’d disagree that Blake’s and Chelsea’s defenses don’t constitute “significant thought,” even if they are annoying) that happens here.
Anyway, this is what I mean: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y8aQJAJ2VS8
Thanks for this post, Adam. Like David, I am often frustrated by the glibness here, and equally frustrated when counterattacking articulateness gussies itself up with self-righteousness (something I should say, if only because he’s in the beginning of this sentence, that David always avoids), both of which I believe are maladies that have a lot to do with the forum of the internet itself, and with the style of communication that derives from online facelessness. Speaking of Levinas, what happens to the face-to-face encounter and its attendant obligations when we’re all staring at LEDs?
The privilege of online forum allows us, in theory, to summon the better angels of our articulation and, at the same time, admit to and root out the ugly ideologies we’re too embarrassed to talk about in fleshspace. If we looked at those cartoons in person, would we all react the way we did on here? Would we laugh more or act more indignant depending on who we’re with? Obviously, the privacy of our interaction with the internet, and that privacy’s relation to everybody else’s private interaction, affects what we say in a big way. (Caveat: not for everybody, obviously. Some people are as obnoxious in real life as they are online, which is terrific in its consistency, at least. And some people are, amazingly, just as kind and thoughtful).
Adam, what I think your post does is use the forum for its slow and thoughtful capacities more than either its “nobody-can-see-my-spitball” or “nobody-can-see-how-puffed-up-my-chest-is” capacities. And likewise with the discussion that’s resulting here in the comments thread, which is what I would point to as something people involved with HTMLGIANT can be proud of. I would equally point to Chelsea’s original post as irrevocably part of this discussion’s origin, for better or worse, and I think it’s part of HTMLGIANT’s identity that offensive stuff usually spawns really great gab—unlike a lot of the rest of the internet, where muck begets muck, which is true even if you love muck, which I often do. Which is to answer Darby Laron’s question about why we’re talking about all this when we’re supposed to be talking about literature, because literature (sorry, Saussure, sorry words) is undeniably stirred up with the molasses of being human. And, as we struggle with this stuff, we become more attentive and thoughtful, more careful thinkers and more careful writers.
Anyway, yeah. It makes me sad and embarrassed that people would associate HTMLGIANT with either craven ugliness or posturing “shrillness” (which I know is a loaded and misogynistic term; it’s unfortunately the best I can think of), but I think this post and everybody in this comment thread prove that such associations would be themselves kneejerk, and ignorant of all the significant thought (and I’d disagree that Blake’s and Chelsea’s defenses don’t constitute “significant thought,” even if they are annoying) that happens here.
Anyway, this is what I mean: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y8aQJAJ2VS8
Yes, this is a problem we consistently have. It’s the classic problem of too much freedom. One of the prime dictums of this site is Hassan i Sabbah’s “nothing is true, everything is permitted,” a quote probably best known as it was used by Burroughs. But as Burroughs’ own work proves, the declaration of everyone’s freedom to do everything, is usually made on account of one person’s desire to do one particular thing. That’s not an indictment of Burroughs, per se, but it is a designation of the limits of his thinking, and of the thinking that informed his. As someone who has in the past identified as an anarchist, and is no longer willing to identify as such, but for whom the principles of anarchism still hold signal and lasting intellectual and moral (if not necessarily political) value, this problem of freedom is no small matter of concern.
The problem of absolute freedom from the law is that at a certain point it re-inscribes itself as a kind of law. You can think of this in term’s of Zizek’s notion of consumer culture as a brutal enforcer of the superego injunction to “Enjoy!” It is not enough that you behave as commanded (consume), you must go further still and declare that your obeying of the command is in fact an expression of your own desire, and not the obeying of a command at all.
I think the articulation of a position that defies all standards becomes a kind of strange attractor, and creates a tendency to gravitate toward those areas which you believe *would be* out of bounds, if bounds still existed. The death of the law leaves us with the ghost of the law, and the natural tendency is to head on down to the graveyard and try to raise the ghost up.
This entire discussion of transgression and offense is predicated not on different values, but on shared ones. We all know more or less where the line is, and when it has been crossed, and in what way. The transgressors are arguing that the fact that the line is there to be crossed demands our crossing it. But they are also trying to claim that there is no line. This is where things get sticky. Returning to Zizek again, we’re in the space of “The Borrowed Kettle,” where the truth lies not in any individual reasoning, but in the paradoxical relationship between the excess of reasons provided.
It’s amazing to me to read back over what I have written, because it is really and truly a conservative argument, in a lot of ways. So what, then, ought the standard be? The temptation here is to formulate a universal code, but of course this is pointless. All ideas have limits of function and use, and if concepts are to be applied, they can’t come be applied in the same Platonic way in which they are conceived. Not for nothing does Christianity believe that when God came to earth He took the form of a man–that is, a specific individual who really existed in historical time, in a place and for a duration, what Kierkegaard calls The Pattern, as in “example.” Justice and democracy are values; jury trials and voting booths are existential facts.
For me, as for any sane person, censorship is a real philosophical concern, but in the particular space of this website, it’s not a pragmatic worry. I’m more concerned with some of the issues you raised, such as intellectual laziness and flippancy toward real social and political issues, which are systematically dismissed or ridiculed. For this site, specifically, I think we should have some sort of guiding principles and specific rules– if for no other reason than it would give us a sense of what our standards actually are, so we’d know for sure when we were transgressing them, and be required to think through the purpose of our actions. I think that not enough attention has been paid to the kind of censorship that racist, sexist, and other forms of exclusionary, intentionally offensive language perpetrate by making people feel excluded from and degraded in this space.
Yes, this is a problem we consistently have. It’s the classic problem of too much freedom. One of the prime dictums of this site is Hassan i Sabbah’s “nothing is true, everything is permitted,” a quote probably best known as it was used by Burroughs. But as Burroughs’ own work proves, the declaration of everyone’s freedom to do everything, is usually made on account of one person’s desire to do one particular thing. That’s not an indictment of Burroughs, per se, but it is a designation of the limits of his thinking, and of the thinking that informed his. As someone who has in the past identified as an anarchist, and is no longer willing to identify as such, but for whom the principles of anarchism still hold signal and lasting intellectual and moral (if not necessarily political) value, this problem of freedom is no small matter of concern.
The problem of absolute freedom from the law is that at a certain point it re-inscribes itself as a kind of law. You can think of this in term’s of Zizek’s notion of consumer culture as a brutal enforcer of the superego injunction to “Enjoy!” It is not enough that you behave as commanded (consume), you must go further still and declare that your obeying of the command is in fact an expression of your own desire, and not the obeying of a command at all.
I think the articulation of a position that defies all standards becomes a kind of strange attractor, and creates a tendency to gravitate toward those areas which you believe *would be* out of bounds, if bounds still existed. The death of the law leaves us with the ghost of the law, and the natural tendency is to head on down to the graveyard and try to raise the ghost up.
This entire discussion of transgression and offense is predicated not on different values, but on shared ones. We all know more or less where the line is, and when it has been crossed, and in what way. The transgressors are arguing that the fact that the line is there to be crossed demands our crossing it. But they are also trying to claim that there is no line. This is where things get sticky. Returning to Zizek again, we’re in the space of “The Borrowed Kettle,” where the truth lies not in any individual reasoning, but in the paradoxical relationship between the excess of reasons provided.
It’s amazing to me to read back over what I have written, because it is really and truly a conservative argument, in a lot of ways. So what, then, ought the standard be? The temptation here is to formulate a universal code, but of course this is pointless. All ideas have limits of function and use, and if concepts are to be applied, they can’t come be applied in the same Platonic way in which they are conceived. Not for nothing does Christianity believe that when God came to earth He took the form of a man–that is, a specific individual who really existed in historical time, in a place and for a duration, what Kierkegaard calls The Pattern, as in “example.” Justice and democracy are values; jury trials and voting booths are existential facts.
For me, as for any sane person, censorship is a real philosophical concern, but in the particular space of this website, it’s not a pragmatic worry. I’m more concerned with some of the issues you raised, such as intellectual laziness and flippancy toward real social and political issues, which are systematically dismissed or ridiculed. For this site, specifically, I think we should have some sort of guiding principles and specific rules– if for no other reason than it would give us a sense of what our standards actually are, so we’d know for sure when we were transgressing them, and be required to think through the purpose of our actions. I think that not enough attention has been paid to the kind of censorship that racist, sexist, and other forms of exclusionary, intentionally offensive language perpetrate by making people feel excluded from and degraded in this space.
The worst Giant post ever inspired one of the best. Good work Adam. Many of my thoughts have already been said in a better way than I would have put them.. Particulary by David. Discussing race here has been particularly frustrating and it seems we need the ability to step into each others’ points of view. It’s what we ask readers to do with our stories and what we attempt to do when creating characters. Why is it so hard when debating a real life issue with real consequences? I’m sorry, I have nothing coherent to add and feel that by the time I do this thread will have been long forgotten.
The worst Giant post ever inspired one of the best. Good work Adam. Many of my thoughts have already been said in a better way than I would have put them.. Particulary by David. Discussing race here has been particularly frustrating and it seems we need the ability to step into each others’ points of view. It’s what we ask readers to do with our stories and what we attempt to do when creating characters. Why is it so hard when debating a real life issue with real consequences? I’m sorry, I have nothing coherent to add and feel that by the time I do this thread will have been long forgotten.
For what it’s worth — and I’ve mostly kept quiet during this, as I do here in general, so apologies if this seems like an intrusion — I agree with a lot of your critique, Justin, but I don’t think that formal rules are the solution (though I understand your point). I think the bomb-throwers should be free and encouraged, because sometimes I want to be a bomb-thrower. The trouble comes when, having thrown the bomb, writers want to distance themselves from the explosion; there’s nothing wrong with rolling in the muck, so long as you don’t take offense it when people passing by point out that it is, indeed, muck.
That is to say that I agree with Blake’s contention that being offended is generally a selfish, lazy response to anything; but the exhortations by some to “get over it” have the same exact problem, the same laziness at their heart. They, too, are about protecting the self.
For what it’s worth — and I’ve mostly kept quiet during this, as I do here in general, so apologies if this seems like an intrusion — I agree with a lot of your critique, Justin, but I don’t think that formal rules are the solution (though I understand your point). I think the bomb-throwers should be free and encouraged, because sometimes I want to be a bomb-thrower. The trouble comes when, having thrown the bomb, writers want to distance themselves from the explosion; there’s nothing wrong with rolling in the muck, so long as you don’t take offense it when people passing by point out that it is, indeed, muck.
That is to say that I agree with Blake’s contention that being offended is generally a selfish, lazy response to anything; but the exhortations by some to “get over it” have the same exact problem, the same laziness at their heart. They, too, are about protecting the self.
If I could edit this comment, I would change the word “offensive,” which is kind of a cliche that doesn’t treat the feelings of “offended” or “not offended” people in an honest or clear way.
If I could edit this comment, I would change the word “offensive,” which is kind of a cliche that doesn’t treat the feelings of “offended” or “not offended” people in an honest or clear way.
[…] over at Jezebel, they’re having a discussion nearly as contentious as our recent ones on racism, over some people in the audience at an Ariana Reines reading who laughed in the wrong […]
[…] Over at HTML Giant, Adam Robinson says this: Kierkegaard said the times aren’t wicked, they’re paltry. And it’s our paltry unwillingness to… […]
[I’d disagree that Blake’s and Chelsea’s defenses don’t constitute “significant thought,”]
Really? To me, Butler and Martin’s responses show exactly that — an absolute refusal to think.
Instead we got (on the one hand) bizarre contortionist-like attempts to ‘justify’ posting the strip and (on the other) a cowardly retreat into over-intellectualizing/aestheticizing.
As a reader and infrequent commenter, this whole thing is shameful and sad to me. While it is nice to see that there are at least a few smart, decent and sincere people here, I don’t think subsequent discussion has ‘redeemed’ the original post or given the site anything to be proud of.
[I’d disagree that Blake’s and Chelsea’s defenses don’t constitute “significant thought,”]
Really? To me, Butler and Martin’s responses show exactly that — an absolute refusal to think.
Instead we got (on the one hand) bizarre contortionist-like attempts to ‘justify’ posting the strip and (on the other) a cowardly retreat into over-intellectualizing/aestheticizing.
As a reader and infrequent commenter, this whole thing is shameful and sad to me. While it is nice to see that there are at least a few smart, decent and sincere people here, I don’t think subsequent discussion has ‘redeemed’ the original post or given the site anything to be proud of.
i’m really tired of this back and forth at this point but i guess i need to speak on it one last time. i hope that you will read my comment, if you do, in a light that i am not beating a drum that you should be just happy OK! with these comics, or that because to me they are obviously more complex for discussion purposes (and thus in their existence) than simply a racist token, that you should think so too. objects that employ racist jargon, especially in the way it was done with “Wigger Chick,” is a tough hill regardless of context, since there is automatic baggage that will be brought by almost any viewer, and while i don’t think an object has to attune to its viewer’s predilections (and probably shouldn’t, or why would it be an object and not a critique of an object), there is in the light of its presentation to a forum of tone-removed discussion such as occurs by its nature online, some need, if you are going to provide context, to do so perhaps differently than was done with wigger chick.
if i were to have it over to do again, that is to say, if i were standing over chelsea’s shoulder when she posted the cartoons, which i wasn’t, because we at this time employ a ‘you are a contributor, i trust you are a good person and that what you say comes from a place i trust’ stance, the same stance that led me to ask each of the contributors here, so that we could develop a community not of my ‘editorial eye’ but of a group of people who give a shit about the business of language, art, whatever, i would tell her that i think she should frame it a little better. that maybe she should point out, even if she thinks the comics are funny despite their obvious flagrant elements,some of the context for those who are going to turn to the flagrant elements above all (which would be most, for sure) perhaps, if she is going to include context at all, which she did. i might have also suggested she posted the comics without that context, and let the reader intuit his or her own reason for them being there, which may have caused the exact same ranging of discussion as her saying “these are funny” did, but it still would have been more easily defensible from a stepped back perspective.
in the discussion that followed i did my best (and albeit, i’m not in the best of brains this month, or this year for that matter, and often in general i am heavy handed and loud regardless, but this comes with my territory of body, alas) to not simply handslap chelsea, who i know did not post the comics out of a “oh fuck i love racist jokes let’s spill racist humor all over everybody” but did so more out of an almost if not fully naive way of expecting that people would respond to them as if she were showing them in private circles, to friends who understand she is not a bigot, that she is a good person. i have this context of her. not everyone does, being the internet. adam mentioned some of this way in his post where he talks about being ok with saying certain things among friends because that’s just the way they talk, and this is the same way i don’t mind saying the word ‘nigga’ aloud when rapping rap lyrics that have the word ‘nigga’ in them, because, well, those are the lyrics, and i am not employing them as propaganda or as a social assault, but as, well, a song, and to me it would be more offensive to edit, to be so self-conscious in the meaning that i can’t say them myself, making the whole fact of listening kind of embarrassing in the first place, even in front of my mother, who always slaps at me for the reiteration. etc.
anyhow, beyond all of this context i have, the place i disagree with adam, or that i part with him, is that i don’t mind allowing that kind of personal relation to be publicly espoused. this happens a lot on here: justin posts about his friends’ birthdays and things they are up to, jimmy waxes poetic in very potentially charged ways about everything from minimalist art to douchey author photos, etc. for certain, when it comes to an object like Wigger Chick, this kind of interpersonal relation takes on a much different way, but i don’t mind it. i don’t mind there being a forum online where people can speak as if they are speaking to friends, even of the most raucous objects, of which i’m not sure Wigger Chick is, despite how it seems on its surface. i don’t know the full trajectory of what the artist meant to invoke in its relation, but i kind of have to imagine, especially given the context of his other comics all also being taboo subjects, that he gets kicks out of stirring up shit, and using that as inherent power (if admittedly dumbass power, such as when Sid Vicious would walk around wearing a swastika t-shirt to get a gag, and therein become an icon in its own way, loaded in its own way, even accidentally; or perhaps in the way R. Crumb’s comics produced a lot of the exact same kind of reactions in his viewers, perhaps using the exact same kind of tactics (and yet not out of an evil place, i think most now would agree, but being honest): and this is a context we don’t have about these Wigger strips, and may not even be at play in them, etc.) in his work. whether that is okay or not, or moral or not, or responsible or not, that’s up to the viewer, and i like the idea of being able to discuss that publicly without jumping on the imagery as the imagery itself and beating the author to death then without fully considering possibilities. that is part of the ideology this site was founded on, and though there are more new people from different areas reading now than ever, it seems ridiculous to think it should be changed, or muffled, or what have you, in the name of making things easier to go down, even in contexts as ridiculous and admittedly inciting as this one. if my open position to thinking of anything in a potential light as something more than needing to be snuffed out makes me a racist, i’ll be called a racist. or i’ll be accused of having not thought, that in my backlash there is nothing but me being an overlord, a glib fuck (perhaps often true), that’s fine. words are words. (personally, i’d hope for a little more credit or even faith from people who know me, or even those who see what goes down here everyday, or etc., but likely that is a small percentage of people who read the site now anyway. still.)
i guess then my responses in responding to those people who, without chelsea’s context, or thinking the object was so disgusting that it didn’t matter anyway, immediately became more concerned with not ending the discussion at ‘this is racist,’ over considering feelings, histories, etc. my own personal tendency to not care so much about these things, because those old arguments, for me, are so tired (to be honest, that the term ‘wigger’ turned so many heads i found surprising, but that’s me) then got ramped up in discussion, and turned into a back and forth where everybody had their decision and things went that way, and things just kind of jumped out of the box. which is maybe part of the value of these kind of objects in the first place, as public objects (as personal objects, it might do something entirely different), but part of the reason i was interested in doing a site like this is in the want of a forum where we could talk about things as people, as friends, and not take everything with the serious, often very stylized and whitewashed manner that a lot of other sites that could be grouped herein do. if that ends up with some flagrant arguments, some namecalling, some feelings hurt, well, we’re all adults here. we can all get up tomorrow. and this is nothing new, etc.
what i guess i’m saying here is that i didn’t mean to imply that people shouldn’t have their own personal reaction to the comic, or to the discussion of it, or etc. i got caught up in my own ideology (or my simple frustration with the same old routine of social conversation that tends to pop out whenever ‘race’ is mentioned), as did others in theirs, and that’s part of the game. that’s part of what things are for. if all posts were like this one i couldn’t take it, but in the context of all the other kinds of posts that are here on the site, i think even this kind of toneless, insular, sometimes petty turnaround can produce good. as it has, thanks to adam, and david, and everyone else who put their mind into thinking about it. i don’t turn against anyone’s interpretation or willingness to consider the light of any light, when it is presented, and even when i’m caught up in the fervor of beating my own ideas, sometimes insularly, sometimes as devil’s advocate, sometimes, yes, purposefully glib, sometimes just honest, etc., i hope that we can all step back and accept that from minute one we’re all here for a reason, and that reason is valuable, maybe even good. faith.
now that i’ve typed all that, i’m going to get back to the business of the day.
i’m really tired of this back and forth at this point but i guess i need to speak on it one last time. i hope that you will read my comment, if you do, in a light that i am not beating a drum that you should be just happy OK! with these comics, or that because to me they are obviously more complex for discussion purposes (and thus in their existence) than simply a racist token, that you should think so too. objects that employ racist jargon, especially in the way it was done with “Wigger Chick,” is a tough hill regardless of context, since there is automatic baggage that will be brought by almost any viewer, and while i don’t think an object has to attune to its viewer’s predilections (and probably shouldn’t, or why would it be an object and not a critique of an object), there is in the light of its presentation to a forum of tone-removed discussion such as occurs by its nature online, some need, if you are going to provide context, to do so perhaps differently than was done with wigger chick.
if i were to have it over to do again, that is to say, if i were standing over chelsea’s shoulder when she posted the cartoons, which i wasn’t, because we at this time employ a ‘you are a contributor, i trust you are a good person and that what you say comes from a place i trust’ stance, the same stance that led me to ask each of the contributors here, so that we could develop a community not of my ‘editorial eye’ but of a group of people who give a shit about the business of language, art, whatever, i would tell her that i think she should frame it a little better. that maybe she should point out, even if she thinks the comics are funny despite their obvious flagrant elements,some of the context for those who are going to turn to the flagrant elements above all (which would be most, for sure) perhaps, if she is going to include context at all, which she did. i might have also suggested she posted the comics without that context, and let the reader intuit his or her own reason for them being there, which may have caused the exact same ranging of discussion as her saying “these are funny” did, but it still would have been more easily defensible from a stepped back perspective.
in the discussion that followed i did my best (and albeit, i’m not in the best of brains this month, or this year for that matter, and often in general i am heavy handed and loud regardless, but this comes with my territory of body, alas) to not simply handslap chelsea, who i know did not post the comics out of a “oh fuck i love racist jokes let’s spill racist humor all over everybody” but did so more out of an almost if not fully naive way of expecting that people would respond to them as if she were showing them in private circles, to friends who understand she is not a bigot, that she is a good person. i have this context of her. not everyone does, being the internet. adam mentioned some of this way in his post where he talks about being ok with saying certain things among friends because that’s just the way they talk, and this is the same way i don’t mind saying the word ‘nigga’ aloud when rapping rap lyrics that have the word ‘nigga’ in them, because, well, those are the lyrics, and i am not employing them as propaganda or as a social assault, but as, well, a song, and to me it would be more offensive to edit, to be so self-conscious in the meaning that i can’t say them myself, making the whole fact of listening kind of embarrassing in the first place, even in front of my mother, who always slaps at me for the reiteration. etc.
anyhow, beyond all of this context i have, the place i disagree with adam, or that i part with him, is that i don’t mind allowing that kind of personal relation to be publicly espoused. this happens a lot on here: justin posts about his friends’ birthdays and things they are up to, jimmy waxes poetic in very potentially charged ways about everything from minimalist art to douchey author photos, etc. for certain, when it comes to an object like Wigger Chick, this kind of interpersonal relation takes on a much different way, but i don’t mind it. i don’t mind there being a forum online where people can speak as if they are speaking to friends, even of the most raucous objects, of which i’m not sure Wigger Chick is, despite how it seems on its surface. i don’t know the full trajectory of what the artist meant to invoke in its relation, but i kind of have to imagine, especially given the context of his other comics all also being taboo subjects, that he gets kicks out of stirring up shit, and using that as inherent power (if admittedly dumbass power, such as when Sid Vicious would walk around wearing a swastika t-shirt to get a gag, and therein become an icon in its own way, loaded in its own way, even accidentally; or perhaps in the way R. Crumb’s comics produced a lot of the exact same kind of reactions in his viewers, perhaps using the exact same kind of tactics (and yet not out of an evil place, i think most now would agree, but being honest): and this is a context we don’t have about these Wigger strips, and may not even be at play in them, etc.) in his work. whether that is okay or not, or moral or not, or responsible or not, that’s up to the viewer, and i like the idea of being able to discuss that publicly without jumping on the imagery as the imagery itself and beating the author to death then without fully considering possibilities. that is part of the ideology this site was founded on, and though there are more new people from different areas reading now than ever, it seems ridiculous to think it should be changed, or muffled, or what have you, in the name of making things easier to go down, even in contexts as ridiculous and admittedly inciting as this one. if my open position to thinking of anything in a potential light as something more than needing to be snuffed out makes me a racist, i’ll be called a racist. or i’ll be accused of having not thought, that in my backlash there is nothing but me being an overlord, a glib fuck (perhaps often true), that’s fine. words are words. (personally, i’d hope for a little more credit or even faith from people who know me, or even those who see what goes down here everyday, or etc., but likely that is a small percentage of people who read the site now anyway. still.)
i guess then my responses in responding to those people who, without chelsea’s context, or thinking the object was so disgusting that it didn’t matter anyway, immediately became more concerned with not ending the discussion at ‘this is racist,’ over considering feelings, histories, etc. my own personal tendency to not care so much about these things, because those old arguments, for me, are so tired (to be honest, that the term ‘wigger’ turned so many heads i found surprising, but that’s me) then got ramped up in discussion, and turned into a back and forth where everybody had their decision and things went that way, and things just kind of jumped out of the box. which is maybe part of the value of these kind of objects in the first place, as public objects (as personal objects, it might do something entirely different), but part of the reason i was interested in doing a site like this is in the want of a forum where we could talk about things as people, as friends, and not take everything with the serious, often very stylized and whitewashed manner that a lot of other sites that could be grouped herein do. if that ends up with some flagrant arguments, some namecalling, some feelings hurt, well, we’re all adults here. we can all get up tomorrow. and this is nothing new, etc.
what i guess i’m saying here is that i didn’t mean to imply that people shouldn’t have their own personal reaction to the comic, or to the discussion of it, or etc. i got caught up in my own ideology (or my simple frustration with the same old routine of social conversation that tends to pop out whenever ‘race’ is mentioned), as did others in theirs, and that’s part of the game. that’s part of what things are for. if all posts were like this one i couldn’t take it, but in the context of all the other kinds of posts that are here on the site, i think even this kind of toneless, insular, sometimes petty turnaround can produce good. as it has, thanks to adam, and david, and everyone else who put their mind into thinking about it. i don’t turn against anyone’s interpretation or willingness to consider the light of any light, when it is presented, and even when i’m caught up in the fervor of beating my own ideas, sometimes insularly, sometimes as devil’s advocate, sometimes, yes, purposefully glib, sometimes just honest, etc., i hope that we can all step back and accept that from minute one we’re all here for a reason, and that reason is valuable, maybe even good. faith.
now that i’ve typed all that, i’m going to get back to the business of the day.
hi mike, im curious. could you explain more as to how their comments show a refusal to think?
hi mike, im curious. could you explain more as to how their comments show a refusal to think?
Oh yeah, that’s the one. It’s from a series, a real quick read. If you want I can mail it to you.
Oh yeah, that’s the one. It’s from a series, a real quick read. If you want I can mail it to you.
Blake,
I read that as an acknowledgment that you might not have been 100% right on this, which doesn’t seem to be an easy thing for you to muster, and I appreciate it.
Blake,
I read that as an acknowledgment that you might not have been 100% right on this, which doesn’t seem to be an easy thing for you to muster, and I appreciate it.
hi Alan. thanks. no one is 100% right on this. it is impossible to be so. sometimes i go too far in my speaking in assuming this, and that we’re all just negotiating out own mouths in the same air. regardless, this one is particularly hairy. thanks for listening.
hi Alan. thanks. no one is 100% right on this. it is impossible to be so. sometimes i go too far in my speaking in assuming this, and that we’re all just negotiating out own mouths in the same air. regardless, this one is particularly hairy. thanks for listening.
wow, Adam, i would love that, yeah!
wow, Adam, i would love that, yeah!
also, I hope you write more about Christianity, which seems almost verboten as a subject as racism in some circles. I can’t muster any defined supernatural beliefs at least not right now, but culturally and philosophically, and–if there’s a meaning of the word that isn’t supernatural–spiritually, I consider myself a Christian, and I’d be interested in hearing more about how you define/think about your Christian identity.
also, I hope you write more about Christianity, which seems almost verboten as a subject as racism in some circles. I can’t muster any defined supernatural beliefs at least not right now, but culturally and philosophically, and–if there’s a meaning of the word that isn’t supernatural–spiritually, I consider myself a Christian, and I’d be interested in hearing more about how you define/think about your Christian identity.
hey david, no problem re: name. absolutely beautiful post. one question: you write that “for levinas, aligning one’s self mentally as coterminous with the totality is what makes for bad ethics.” don’t the conditions of possibility for ethics arise from my freeing my-self from being and, as unconditioned and absolute, partnering with the Enigma? isn’t this how i escape a master-slave relation and make possible my-self-for-another?
hey david, no problem re: name. absolutely beautiful post. one question: you write that “for levinas, aligning one’s self mentally as coterminous with the totality is what makes for bad ethics.” don’t the conditions of possibility for ethics arise from my freeing my-self from being and, as unconditioned and absolute, partnering with the Enigma? isn’t this how i escape a master-slave relation and make possible my-self-for-another?
yes adam, i’d love to see more essays from you on “postmodern christianity.” please.
yes adam, i’d love to see more essays from you on “postmodern christianity.” please.
someone should do a statistical analysis of HTMLgiant comment word count increase in the last week. Shit is getting ridiculous.
someone should do a statistical analysis of HTMLgiant comment word count increase in the last week. Shit is getting ridiculous.
Cool, yeah, I think about Christianity too much as a solution to all of the world’s problems. I would like to write about it. Thanks.
Amy, will you send me your address? adam at publishinggenius dot com
Cool, yeah, I think about Christianity too much as a solution to all of the world’s problems. I would like to write about it. Thanks.
Amy, will you send me your address? adam at publishinggenius dot com
perhaps we could get a book share going with that book once you’re finished with it Amy?
perhaps we could get a book share going with that book once you’re finished with it Amy?
This thread, coupled with the prior one that it is partly in response to, certainly wound up informing me. I have little-to-no familiarity with Zizek and haven’t thought about Levinas in a number of years and glad to see these two thinkers commissioned to bring perspective to the topic. Through Adam’s ruminative post we are able to pan out from the paltry offerings of “Wigger Chick” as fodder for discussion (like trying to scrape residue off scrawny chicken bones when there just isn’t much there) to the larger questions of the ethics of otherness, the potential and limits of human empathy when confronted with what we most want to condemn or what we find repugnant, and so forth. I am glad, though, that this discussion and the outrage that it provoked kept “Wigger Chick” in my headlights for so long, because I think part of the problem lies in our largely unconscious responses to phenomena, and bringing the short-lived to conscious attention is all the more essential. Humor is the great test case because we don’t really understand it all that well, in spite of the theories that have been advanced over the centuries for it (the superiority theory, the tension-release of repressed desires theory, and so forth, all having their shortcomings). A comic strip like “WC” is designed, it seems to me, to circumvent our reflective capacities, to catch us off guard, and subsequently to get us to move on without dwelling on it. All humor does this to some degree, not just that which plays off racial and ethnic stereotypes, in other cases we don’t mind–we like being tripped up momentarily, the momentary zero g of critical faculties in suspension, the sense of transgression. All the more reason to stop and scrutinize.
As I said above, I can’t claim to be familiar with Zizek, so I’m going to fumble around a bit, but I’m missing something in David’s eloquent outlining of Zizek’s distinction between the sphere in which racist humor could serve as venting of what’s admittedly in the brain and that in which it has any role in the “social symbolic” as well as concrete institutional effects. This is to say that I just don’t see how one can maintain a viable distinction between these realms–it is the concrete institutional effects which are filtering down into the mindset that is prone toward such humor, and the cumulative effect of all of the offhand thoughts is bound to impact the social symbolic, no? It seems like something akin to a Cartesian mind-body kind of dualism that I just don’t see holding up, and thus Zizek’s “neutrality” here sounds troubling, again without having read the original. I was led to think about some studies at Harvard on our implicit biases (https://implicit.harvard.edu/implicit/demo/selectatest.html) which suggest that even those who consider themselves progressive and liberal with respect to race harbor unconscious prejudices. Assuming these tests reveal anything of note (or give some sort of psychological credence to something that we already suspected), it doesn’t take a belief in the old chaos theory cliche about butterfly wings causing distant hurricanes to imagine that those biases are informing in innumerable ways the larger institutions which are established discursively and concretely by the people that hold them.
This thread, coupled with the prior one that it is partly in response to, certainly wound up informing me. I have little-to-no familiarity with Zizek and haven’t thought about Levinas in a number of years and glad to see these two thinkers commissioned to bring perspective to the topic. Through Adam’s ruminative post we are able to pan out from the paltry offerings of “Wigger Chick” as fodder for discussion (like trying to scrape residue off scrawny chicken bones when there just isn’t much there) to the larger questions of the ethics of otherness, the potential and limits of human empathy when confronted with what we most want to condemn or what we find repugnant, and so forth. I am glad, though, that this discussion and the outrage that it provoked kept “Wigger Chick” in my headlights for so long, because I think part of the problem lies in our largely unconscious responses to phenomena, and bringing the short-lived to conscious attention is all the more essential. Humor is the great test case because we don’t really understand it all that well, in spite of the theories that have been advanced over the centuries for it (the superiority theory, the tension-release of repressed desires theory, and so forth, all having their shortcomings). A comic strip like “WC” is designed, it seems to me, to circumvent our reflective capacities, to catch us off guard, and subsequently to get us to move on without dwelling on it. All humor does this to some degree, not just that which plays off racial and ethnic stereotypes, in other cases we don’t mind–we like being tripped up momentarily, the momentary zero g of critical faculties in suspension, the sense of transgression. All the more reason to stop and scrutinize.
As I said above, I can’t claim to be familiar with Zizek, so I’m going to fumble around a bit, but I’m missing something in David’s eloquent outlining of Zizek’s distinction between the sphere in which racist humor could serve as venting of what’s admittedly in the brain and that in which it has any role in the “social symbolic” as well as concrete institutional effects. This is to say that I just don’t see how one can maintain a viable distinction between these realms–it is the concrete institutional effects which are filtering down into the mindset that is prone toward such humor, and the cumulative effect of all of the offhand thoughts is bound to impact the social symbolic, no? It seems like something akin to a Cartesian mind-body kind of dualism that I just don’t see holding up, and thus Zizek’s “neutrality” here sounds troubling, again without having read the original. I was led to think about some studies at Harvard on our implicit biases (https://implicit.harvard.edu/implicit/demo/selectatest.html) which suggest that even those who consider themselves progressive and liberal with respect to race harbor unconscious prejudices. Assuming these tests reveal anything of note (or give some sort of psychological credence to something that we already suspected), it doesn’t take a belief in the old chaos theory cliche about butterfly wings causing distant hurricanes to imagine that those biases are informing in innumerable ways the larger institutions which are established discursively and concretely by the people that hold them.
alec, my brother robert (a prof at illinois wesleyan univ) has written extensively about levinas. you two should get in touch. let me know if you want me to hook that up
alec, my brother robert (a prof at illinois wesleyan univ) has written extensively about levinas. you two should get in touch. let me know if you want me to hook that up
please, david!
please, david!
i’m constantly amazed how few people learn about the milgram experiments only to forget about them. milgram just kept saying “go on please” to these ordinary citizens and they kept on “shocking” the person until he “died.” milgram’s experiments are some of the most fascinating non-fiction accounts i’ve ever read. i know very few people who i would trust not to go all the way in such an experiment.
i’m constantly amazed how few people learn about the milgram experiments only to forget about them. milgram just kept saying “go on please” to these ordinary citizens and they kept on “shocking” the person until he “died.” milgram’s experiments are some of the most fascinating non-fiction accounts i’ve ever read. i know very few people who i would trust not to go all the way in such an experiment.
Hi Tim. I actually agree with you that the porousness between racisms is a kind of hole in Zizek’s argument. As far as I know, the argument about categories of racist joke that he outlines is not a sustained theory he’s developed but something of a digression he returns over again to in a few of his works and it hasn’t exactly ever been explored comprehensively in one discrete place that I can recall – unless, of course, it’s in some of the work I haven’t read (guy’s prolific). So it’s hard for me to reference or draw on any direct response to this from the work I’ve read. Here’s my general sense based on his philosophy. The stuff you mention about unconscious prejudices (by the way, Harvard is so lame: why does that implicit bias thing even need a study?) would be exactly the kind of racism Zizek would want us to target. This is the racism that worries him the most: the racism of the progressives or (because conservatives also disavow racism too) the ‘multicultural’. For Zizek, the racist epithet is less a problem than the racist system. To put it in concrete terms, the enemy of African-Americans today is not so much the Klan member as it is the American prison system. Or the American party system. Or the American electoral system. In Eastern Europe, the racism of the street seems like it is a seething problem (which is a orientalist view, mind you, we have of Eastern Europe, part of what Zizek is addressing, that they are especially racist) but said racism is also governed by the multicultural regime we too are governed by, especially after Milosevic’s deposition, in some parts of Eastern Europe, like Slovenia, right since 1989. Manifest expressions of racism are unacceptable expressions in the times that we live in, under the sway of the multicultural regime, which present itself as celebratory of racial difference, and so explicit racist incidents are ‘less’ of a serious problem when they appear on the social scene. Few will be able to gather around such expressions systematically, as with the Nazis in the 1920s, because they will be rightly apprehended as racist to do so: it would require a deep and open commitment to that politics. The reason for this lack of systematic opportunity is that “plain” racism is not societal common-sense, or, at least, not yet (see my stuff above about importing racism into the social). Also, too, these manifest expressions can be convincingly attacked as the racism that they are by anti-racists precisely because the big Other of multiculturalism is on our side in that instant. Society has to listen to maintain its facade to itself. This is why charges of racism ‘stick’ in these encounters. But if we were to talk about the current relationship between Serbia and Kosovo, say, the race issue in politics is always disavowed as questions of ‘security’ and ‘territory’ and rights to determination, even though it’s entirely obvious that such bigger debates are ringed with the very alive history of Yugoslavia’s racial break-up and the atrocities of the Balkan war. Ditto the war on terror.
So. Racist bile on a local level can still have quite violent impacts. Zizek would call a racial bashing (or a gay bashing etc.) an instant of subjective violence, not because it’s relative (i.e. ‘it’s all subjective’) but because it takes place in a context where the horizon of the act is located in between a discrete set of subjects, while the institutional racism, the unconscious racism, the racism that always says it ‘isn’t’ but it is, forms an example of what Zizek would call ‘objective violence’, violence architectured socially as system and external procedure that ‘involves’ numerous subjects, groups, populations. The butterfly wing metaphor does have some meaning in regards to that because sometimes subjective violence strays into objective violence, or objective violence is exposed as the everyday reality of subjective violence. The incident with the police officer and Henry Gates Jr. was an example of that: a racist act of policing which made a ruckus because it made the mistake of profiling the wrong guy. (Notice, however, to ‘ameliorate’ that Obama could only call it ‘stupid’, not racist (and even that was controversial!) even though the racism was obvious, hence the anxiety, the hand-ringing, the meeting over a beer with Obama: we can’t have the police be seen to serve one of the most critical functions it actually does serves, namely, act as a defacto racial bodyguard).
The other thing is that the racism of the street can be also take refuge in claims that it isn’t ‘real’ racism. I may make some remark about the Goldman Jews to a person on the street, that person may find itracist and I may say, oh, it’s all in good fun. Part of the ideological act here is precisely my freedom to withdraw the racism of my racism at any moment, even though the person who was in earshot of it knows perfectly well that its racism was quite deliberate and meant and, in the joke form, was testing the water of real opinion. That freedom to retract – that dependence on our good will to one another as deserving ‘more credit’ – is what increasingly happens with racist humour in everyday life, not just in the social domains of public opinion, and is a major problem too. A question I always ask is: are there racists anymore? When did racism ‘die’ exactly that whole societies now only can find ‘real’ racism in the margins of themselves? Part of why Eastern Europe is so strange to us on this count is that it is precisely still quite unabashed in its associational, street-level racism. I think Zizek may mean this is part of what he finds relieving too. None of these hall of mirror games where a racist remark turns into a kick in the ass followed by nonchalant whistling. In Eastern Europe, they talk turkey in the street.
Hi Tim. I actually agree with you that the porousness between racisms is a kind of hole in Zizek’s argument. As far as I know, the argument about categories of racist joke that he outlines is not a sustained theory he’s developed but something of a digression he returns over again to in a few of his works and it hasn’t exactly ever been explored comprehensively in one discrete place that I can recall – unless, of course, it’s in some of the work I haven’t read (guy’s prolific). So it’s hard for me to reference or draw on any direct response to this from the work I’ve read. Here’s my general sense based on his philosophy. The stuff you mention about unconscious prejudices (by the way, Harvard is so lame: why does that implicit bias thing even need a study?) would be exactly the kind of racism Zizek would want us to target. This is the racism that worries him the most: the racism of the progressives or (because conservatives also disavow racism too) the ‘multicultural’. For Zizek, the racist epithet is less a problem than the racist system. To put it in concrete terms, the enemy of African-Americans today is not so much the Klan member as it is the American prison system. Or the American party system. Or the American electoral system. In Eastern Europe, the racism of the street seems like it is a seething problem (which is a orientalist view, mind you, we have of Eastern Europe, part of what Zizek is addressing, that they are especially racist) but said racism is also governed by the multicultural regime we too are governed by, especially after Milosevic’s deposition, in some parts of Eastern Europe, like Slovenia, right since 1989. Manifest expressions of racism are unacceptable expressions in the times that we live in, under the sway of the multicultural regime, which present itself as celebratory of racial difference, and so explicit racist incidents are ‘less’ of a serious problem when they appear on the social scene. Few will be able to gather around such expressions systematically, as with the Nazis in the 1920s, because they will be rightly apprehended as racist to do so: it would require a deep and open commitment to that politics. The reason for this lack of systematic opportunity is that “plain” racism is not societal common-sense, or, at least, not yet (see my stuff above about importing racism into the social). Also, too, these manifest expressions can be convincingly attacked as the racism that they are by anti-racists precisely because the big Other of multiculturalism is on our side in that instant. Society has to listen to maintain its facade to itself. This is why charges of racism ‘stick’ in these encounters. But if we were to talk about the current relationship between Serbia and Kosovo, say, the race issue in politics is always disavowed as questions of ‘security’ and ‘territory’ and rights to determination, even though it’s entirely obvious that such bigger debates are ringed with the very alive history of Yugoslavia’s racial break-up and the atrocities of the Balkan war. Ditto the war on terror.
So. Racist bile on a local level can still have quite violent impacts. Zizek would call a racial bashing (or a gay bashing etc.) an instant of subjective violence, not because it’s relative (i.e. ‘it’s all subjective’) but because it takes place in a context where the horizon of the act is located in between a discrete set of subjects, while the institutional racism, the unconscious racism, the racism that always says it ‘isn’t’ but it is, forms an example of what Zizek would call ‘objective violence’, violence architectured socially as system and external procedure that ‘involves’ numerous subjects, groups, populations. The butterfly wing metaphor does have some meaning in regards to that because sometimes subjective violence strays into objective violence, or objective violence is exposed as the everyday reality of subjective violence. The incident with the police officer and Henry Gates Jr. was an example of that: a racist act of policing which made a ruckus because it made the mistake of profiling the wrong guy. (Notice, however, to ‘ameliorate’ that Obama could only call it ‘stupid’, not racist (and even that was controversial!) even though the racism was obvious, hence the anxiety, the hand-ringing, the meeting over a beer with Obama: we can’t have the police be seen to serve one of the most critical functions it actually does serves, namely, act as a defacto racial bodyguard).
The other thing is that the racism of the street can be also take refuge in claims that it isn’t ‘real’ racism. I may make some remark about the Goldman Jews to a person on the street, that person may find itracist and I may say, oh, it’s all in good fun. Part of the ideological act here is precisely my freedom to withdraw the racism of my racism at any moment, even though the person who was in earshot of it knows perfectly well that its racism was quite deliberate and meant and, in the joke form, was testing the water of real opinion. That freedom to retract – that dependence on our good will to one another as deserving ‘more credit’ – is what increasingly happens with racist humour in everyday life, not just in the social domains of public opinion, and is a major problem too. A question I always ask is: are there racists anymore? When did racism ‘die’ exactly that whole societies now only can find ‘real’ racism in the margins of themselves? Part of why Eastern Europe is so strange to us on this count is that it is precisely still quite unabashed in its associational, street-level racism. I think Zizek may mean this is part of what he finds relieving too. None of these hall of mirror games where a racist remark turns into a kick in the ass followed by nonchalant whistling. In Eastern Europe, they talk turkey in the street.
hi alec. just briefly on levinas: as far as i understand, ethics comes about for levinas exactly as you say; from freeing my-self from being. but being is, for levinas, the infinity in its totality. so literally, by removing myself from Being, i free my-self ‘from’ the totality, i de-totalize, in an act of extreme retraction to my finitude, and in so doing, i become a being in that freedom from Being. no longer turned toward assigning my-self as synonymous with the totality, free of ‘my-self’ in that sense, the constitutedness of my being as the discrete assymetrical manifestation that it is before me, i now enter into wonder, which is, indeed, the unconditioned and absolute pattering with the Enigma. i no longer “know” what Being is; i only know myself as this being. in doing this, i am able to begin to make my-self-for-another because the existence of the Other has now become a mystery to me that ethics demands I humble myself before, that I treat with utmost care, not an analogue of my-self in which we are all the same Beings (beings based on the self-posited model of my-self). If I read it right, this is why ethics for Levinas demands autonomy but finds its social expression in multiplicity. To recite the quote from above: “Multiplicity in being, which refuses totalization but takes form as fraternity and discourse, is situated in a ’space’ essentially asymmetrical.” That asymmetrical space is asymmetrical because it is composed of ‘autonomous’ beings in the way I described above – beings that have looked to their being as beings “otherwise than being” (otherwise than the totality) – and are united in fraternity and discourse toward infinity. I think!
hi alec. just briefly on levinas: as far as i understand, ethics comes about for levinas exactly as you say; from freeing my-self from being. but being is, for levinas, the infinity in its totality. so literally, by removing myself from Being, i free my-self ‘from’ the totality, i de-totalize, in an act of extreme retraction to my finitude, and in so doing, i become a being in that freedom from Being. no longer turned toward assigning my-self as synonymous with the totality, free of ‘my-self’ in that sense, the constitutedness of my being as the discrete assymetrical manifestation that it is before me, i now enter into wonder, which is, indeed, the unconditioned and absolute pattering with the Enigma. i no longer “know” what Being is; i only know myself as this being. in doing this, i am able to begin to make my-self-for-another because the existence of the Other has now become a mystery to me that ethics demands I humble myself before, that I treat with utmost care, not an analogue of my-self in which we are all the same Beings (beings based on the self-posited model of my-self). If I read it right, this is why ethics for Levinas demands autonomy but finds its social expression in multiplicity. To recite the quote from above: “Multiplicity in being, which refuses totalization but takes form as fraternity and discourse, is situated in a ’space’ essentially asymmetrical.” That asymmetrical space is asymmetrical because it is composed of ‘autonomous’ beings in the way I described above – beings that have looked to their being as beings “otherwise than being” (otherwise than the totality) – and are united in fraternity and discourse toward infinity. I think!
i don’t see anything wrong with refusing to think about any particular piece of art or literature. I wasn’t offended by the comic but i don’t look at art through any kind of morality lens. that’s nonfic/documentary territory. Art and lit is where i go to get away from that, to not think.
i haven’t commented much on all this because i work for a living but i like that the comic happened here. it fulfills my want of htmlgiant to exist as a kind of amoral stomping ground for new stuff. that there’s no filter. that there are interesting people with totally contrasting points of view allowed to put whatever they feel like up here. i read it everyday still. its my second favorite website.
i don’t see anything wrong with refusing to think about any particular piece of art or literature. I wasn’t offended by the comic but i don’t look at art through any kind of morality lens. that’s nonfic/documentary territory. Art and lit is where i go to get away from that, to not think.
i haven’t commented much on all this because i work for a living but i like that the comic happened here. it fulfills my want of htmlgiant to exist as a kind of amoral stomping ground for new stuff. that there’s no filter. that there are interesting people with totally contrasting points of view allowed to put whatever they feel like up here. i read it everyday still. its my second favorite website.
thank you, david. that helps clarify a lot.
thank you, david. that helps clarify a lot.
Thanks Blake. I appreciate you laying out your thinking on this. I feel like this is maybe the first time I’ve really read a comprehensive statement from you on this, rather than remarks angled at certain comments, at certain moments, that have made trying to get a broader picture difficult and, yes, have sometimes seemed like they have been more interested in trying to score intellectual points. I do feel you on your desire for this to be a place that was not all about the sober discussions of the day, that could have fun, that was not as stylized and whitewashed, that was about discussions between people, friends. But I also would like to point out that we live in a culture that is saturated and obsessed with funny shit, that cannot breathe for five damn seconds without more funny shit shovelled into its gaping, blubbery, spitting mouth. I love a lot of the humour on here – for instance, your great ‘truck nuts’ nachos post – but can we perhaps agree that the obsessiveness with okaying all humour is perhaps an indication of something amiss in itself? I’ve very deliberately avoided making any claims about Chelsea. I honestly do think she got caught out laughing at racist material, actually, to be more precise, that she got caught out by the material itself which confused her as to its racism, but I would be the last person to throw stones on that count as I have had many moments of inappropriate laughter that, on reflection, I’ve realised was either a succumbing to racial ideas or a manifestation of racist ideas I already (shamefully) had, even when I thought I ‘knew’ better. So, when you talk about doing it over, I would not have ‘advised’ you to do differently, like exercise editorial power and strip the post from the site. But I suppose I would ask you if your ongoing defense of every example of the thing we saw the other day isn’t becoming a problem in itself: not because you’re racist but because every instant of shitty humour here is given a kind of editorial protection in the sense of being evanesced into arguments where they are absolved by this same stock argument that they are “obviously more complex for discussion purposes (and thus in their existence) than simply a racist token” (even if – and I take your point on this – you don’t expect us to agree with you on that point). See, part of the problem is – as you say – you desire this site to be a thing were friends or people can talk as friends or people but when there is a legitimate expression of discontent, then all of a sudden it becomes a matter of ‘complexity for discussion purposes’, as if this place demanded a certain baseline seriousness as the price of admission. Moreover, we don’t just see the cartoons as a racist ‘token’ but we see them as the post conveys them to us and as the cartoons convey themselves to us. These cartoons do not do justice to this site is the clear argument we’ve been making. We’re not saying take the post down (truly, a tokenistic gesture) but rather, in future, can we have less of this same recurring spitball-through-straws posts which are really only designed to cause the very dramas they supposedly hold themselves so haughtily above? This is a general request (and plea). Two other things. It wasn’t the word ‘wigger’ that bothered us (or me at least) but the entire look, bent and ideas of the cartoons. One of my favourite books ever is called ‘Wigger’: the word in itself means nothing to me as a word in itself. This was always about context and I think avoiding that is why it’s been so hard to get a level discussion on this issue. Finally, if this place is indeed a place for friends, then it really should be a private blog between friends. This place speaks to an audience and it invokes that audience as comrades. I like that about this place. But it has a public function that it wants all the glory and good times of but seems to me it’s almost too immature to take on in tough times. One thing that especially bothers me is the reliance on the comment section to smooth out the creases. Obviously, my passion about this issue (as well as my chronic inability to write anything minimally) has decided that I should post at length on this issue, as with Justin and Roxane and others who have spoken up, but this was not wanted I ideally wanted to do with my last 48 hours. This has been a kind of work for me. Now, I’m happy as part of a community I visit and get many things from to do the job of ‘contributing’ opinion (and I only hope I do it well and relevantly) but I don’t appreciate the general assumption that laziness at the level of the post will be sorted out for the general betterment in the comments. That’s okay for oversights and genuine, surprising, unforeseen debates but honestly, you and Chelsea must have known what her post would bring down before the fact, it was designed to be ‘provocative’ in that sense, as was the WILLA stuff, and this is my point: this has become an artificial stoking up of a problem and the ‘non-offenders’ are the ones to always bring it up even though they really do not wish to discuss it with any degree of seriousness anymore. It’s become about the spitballs, as I said. It is passively-aggressive. If HTMLG has decided that this kind of material is the stuff it wishes to promote officially, that changes the community for me. Maybe for others too. I don’t think that’s an overreaction at all. Life is too short for me to spend it arguing forever on a place I want to feel a part of about how obvious the racism of something like that cartoon is nor fielding counterarguments that there’s more to the object, as though all of these incidents were equivalent by natural right to the Sid Vicious swastika, when the Sid Vicious swastika was not a thing like the cartoons from the other day, precisely because it means not a thing in relation to its original context: that, indeed, was what was so ‘controversial’ about it; it was perfectly McLuhanesque. Anyhow, thank you again for your words and I just want to repeat that I respect and admire you and love your writing. Peace out.
Thanks Blake. I appreciate you laying out your thinking on this. I feel like this is maybe the first time I’ve really read a comprehensive statement from you on this, rather than remarks angled at certain comments, at certain moments, that have made trying to get a broader picture difficult and, yes, have sometimes seemed like they have been more interested in trying to score intellectual points. I do feel you on your desire for this to be a place that was not all about the sober discussions of the day, that could have fun, that was not as stylized and whitewashed, that was about discussions between people, friends. But I also would like to point out that we live in a culture that is saturated and obsessed with funny shit, that cannot breathe for five damn seconds without more funny shit shovelled into its gaping, blubbery, spitting mouth. I love a lot of the humour on here – for instance, your great ‘truck nuts’ nachos post – but can we perhaps agree that the obsessiveness with okaying all humour is perhaps an indication of something amiss in itself? I’ve very deliberately avoided making any claims about Chelsea. I honestly do think she got caught out laughing at racist material, actually, to be more precise, that she got caught out by the material itself which confused her as to its racism, but I would be the last person to throw stones on that count as I have had many moments of inappropriate laughter that, on reflection, I’ve realised was either a succumbing to racial ideas or a manifestation of racist ideas I already (shamefully) had, even when I thought I ‘knew’ better. So, when you talk about doing it over, I would not have ‘advised’ you to do differently, like exercise editorial power and strip the post from the site. But I suppose I would ask you if your ongoing defense of every example of the thing we saw the other day isn’t becoming a problem in itself: not because you’re racist but because every instant of shitty humour here is given a kind of editorial protection in the sense of being evanesced into arguments where they are absolved by this same stock argument that they are “obviously more complex for discussion purposes (and thus in their existence) than simply a racist token” (even if – and I take your point on this – you don’t expect us to agree with you on that point). See, part of the problem is – as you say – you desire this site to be a thing were friends or people can talk as friends or people but when there is a legitimate expression of discontent, then all of a sudden it becomes a matter of ‘complexity for discussion purposes’, as if this place demanded a certain baseline seriousness as the price of admission. Moreover, we don’t just see the cartoons as a racist ‘token’ but we see them as the post conveys them to us and as the cartoons convey themselves to us. These cartoons do not do justice to this site is the clear argument we’ve been making. We’re not saying take the post down (truly, a tokenistic gesture) but rather, in future, can we have less of this same recurring spitball-through-straws posts which are really only designed to cause the very dramas they supposedly hold themselves so haughtily above? This is a general request (and plea). Two other things. It wasn’t the word ‘wigger’ that bothered us (or me at least) but the entire look, bent and ideas of the cartoons. One of my favourite books ever is called ‘Wigger’: the word in itself means nothing to me as a word in itself. This was always about context and I think avoiding that is why it’s been so hard to get a level discussion on this issue. Finally, if this place is indeed a place for friends, then it really should be a private blog between friends. This place speaks to an audience and it invokes that audience as comrades. I like that about this place. But it has a public function that it wants all the glory and good times of but seems to me it’s almost too immature to take on in tough times. One thing that especially bothers me is the reliance on the comment section to smooth out the creases. Obviously, my passion about this issue (as well as my chronic inability to write anything minimally) has decided that I should post at length on this issue, as with Justin and Roxane and others who have spoken up, but this was not wanted I ideally wanted to do with my last 48 hours. This has been a kind of work for me. Now, I’m happy as part of a community I visit and get many things from to do the job of ‘contributing’ opinion (and I only hope I do it well and relevantly) but I don’t appreciate the general assumption that laziness at the level of the post will be sorted out for the general betterment in the comments. That’s okay for oversights and genuine, surprising, unforeseen debates but honestly, you and Chelsea must have known what her post would bring down before the fact, it was designed to be ‘provocative’ in that sense, as was the WILLA stuff, and this is my point: this has become an artificial stoking up of a problem and the ‘non-offenders’ are the ones to always bring it up even though they really do not wish to discuss it with any degree of seriousness anymore. It’s become about the spitballs, as I said. It is passively-aggressive. If HTMLG has decided that this kind of material is the stuff it wishes to promote officially, that changes the community for me. Maybe for others too. I don’t think that’s an overreaction at all. Life is too short for me to spend it arguing forever on a place I want to feel a part of about how obvious the racism of something like that cartoon is nor fielding counterarguments that there’s more to the object, as though all of these incidents were equivalent by natural right to the Sid Vicious swastika, when the Sid Vicious swastika was not a thing like the cartoons from the other day, precisely because it means not a thing in relation to its original context: that, indeed, was what was so ‘controversial’ about it; it was perfectly McLuhanesque. Anyhow, thank you again for your words and I just want to repeat that I respect and admire you and love your writing. Peace out.
[…] HTML Giant – Choose to Know: On the Representation of Evil […]
What do you mean about justice not being an actuality? I think I missed or did not understand that part and it sounds very interesting.
…I too thought about the predatory lending angle. Also, in the computer one… the sort-of self-created digital divide is kind-of telling. I don’t think this was the author’s intent at all (and because of my political commitments I would support and take seriously the folks who think it operates to reinforce a negative stereotype abt the black underclass), but I don’t think it’s totally impossible to do an antiracist “reading” of these cartoons wherein the humor is derived from Wigger Chick’s ignorance re: her own privilege, and the way she adopts as lifestyle choices things that aren’t exactly choices for less privileged folks… ie lack of access to a computer. …Likewise, when that Toni Morrison conversation happened here last year, I initially thought Blake’s post abt “Who is the Asian Toni Morrison” could be “read” as potentially subversive, as an antiracist critique of the fetishization of so-called “ethnic lit.” Both then and now, I only entered the fray when I grew uncomfortable with the responses by some here (not you) to folks bringing up racism, b/c I felt like those responses exhibited a lot what I understand as classic patterns for derailing and/or shutting down conversations abt racism (most of them are in the link my friend mandolin shared yesterday). …But I also think b/c I understand racism in terms of systemic power structures (that are primarily white supremacist) and their material effects in people’s lives in terms of both privilege and oppression, and not so much in terms of individual prejudices, I operate out of a very different framework than some of the other folks who comment here.
I’m not sure all of what I just said was really supposed to be addressed to you specifically. My response to the predatory lending thing prompted it.
…Anyway… I hope you get this response, because I really am interested in this justice actuality thing. But this thread is kind-of dying down, yeah?
What do you mean about justice not being an actuality? I think I missed or did not understand that part and it sounds very interesting.
…I too thought about the predatory lending angle. Also, in the computer one… the sort-of self-created digital divide is kind-of telling. I don’t think this was the author’s intent at all (and because of my political commitments I would support and take seriously the folks who think it operates to reinforce a negative stereotype abt the black underclass), but I don’t think it’s totally impossible to do an antiracist “reading” of these cartoons wherein the humor is derived from Wigger Chick’s ignorance re: her own privilege, and the way she adopts as lifestyle choices things that aren’t exactly choices for less privileged folks… ie lack of access to a computer. …Likewise, when that Toni Morrison conversation happened here last year, I initially thought Blake’s post abt “Who is the Asian Toni Morrison” could be “read” as potentially subversive, as an antiracist critique of the fetishization of so-called “ethnic lit.” Both then and now, I only entered the fray when I grew uncomfortable with the responses by some here (not you) to folks bringing up racism, b/c I felt like those responses exhibited a lot what I understand as classic patterns for derailing and/or shutting down conversations abt racism (most of them are in the link my friend mandolin shared yesterday). …But I also think b/c I understand racism in terms of systemic power structures (that are primarily white supremacist) and their material effects in people’s lives in terms of both privilege and oppression, and not so much in terms of individual prejudices, I operate out of a very different framework than some of the other folks who comment here.
I’m not sure all of what I just said was really supposed to be addressed to you specifically. My response to the predatory lending thing prompted it.
…Anyway… I hope you get this response, because I really am interested in this justice actuality thing. But this thread is kind-of dying down, yeah?
Okay, that makes sense to me, I think. Certainly in writing, I am an admirer of the unsettling effect that is produced when beautiful language is used to describe something horrific… which is maybe not exactly the same as what you are describing, but is perhaps related.
Okay, that makes sense to me, I think. Certainly in writing, I am an admirer of the unsettling effect that is produced when beautiful language is used to describe something horrific… which is maybe not exactly the same as what you are describing, but is perhaps related.
I would also like to see you write abt christianity
I would also like to see you write abt christianity
thanks David, i appreciate the thought. and short of writing another long response, i’m going to just be cut and dry, basic. please don’t think that doesn’t mean i haven’t listened, because i have, and i respect your thoughts on this.
1. there was no predetermined effect for the site, as i saw the post when everybody else did. and i honestly don’t think chelsea was posting for the reasons you mention. again, context. but point taken.
2. i don’t care about evenness. i like a mix. i’m not sure who the ‘we’ is you are talking about, but i don’t like ‘we’s. i don’t mean that in a reckless way. gene and i started this blog so there would be a place for people to talk about and spread language and art they love, with new people. that is always, at the heart, the goal, regardless of messes that get made along the way. hopefully the positive tones that exude through the majority it are enough to keep people coming back, and the things that seem raucous for raucousness’s sake (which i have never intended here) aren’t that. again, context. let’s play.
thanks David, i appreciate the thought. and short of writing another long response, i’m going to just be cut and dry, basic. please don’t think that doesn’t mean i haven’t listened, because i have, and i respect your thoughts on this.
1. there was no predetermined effect for the site, as i saw the post when everybody else did. and i honestly don’t think chelsea was posting for the reasons you mention. again, context. but point taken.
2. i don’t care about evenness. i like a mix. i’m not sure who the ‘we’ is you are talking about, but i don’t like ‘we’s. i don’t mean that in a reckless way. gene and i started this blog so there would be a place for people to talk about and spread language and art they love, with new people. that is always, at the heart, the goal, regardless of messes that get made along the way. hopefully the positive tones that exude through the majority it are enough to keep people coming back, and the things that seem raucous for raucousness’s sake (which i have never intended here) aren’t that. again, context. let’s play.
the comic is about poverty you morons. not race.
LOL.
the comic is about poverty you morons. not race.
LOL.
thanks again, too, David, for making probably the most reasonable and well planned thinking in what was for the most part, a weird and frustrating discussion of a difficult and intentionally gross object.
thanks again, too, David, for making probably the most reasonable and well planned thinking in what was for the most part, a weird and frustrating discussion of a difficult and intentionally gross object.