Refocusing

In a time like this in the next few blog posts, I want to occupy the blog with short, focused, timely treatments of major issues in the campus community, on pedagogy, and on the public discourse of religion.

These are all connected, if each piece I'm writing doesn't touch on all at once.

However, I do have a common agenda in mind for all of them: to reflect on the assumptions underlying major conflicts in these areas and to reconsider them, reemphasize them, and productively challenge them. Sometimes arguments can go on so long and so intensely that the formative terms of their significance are lost or neglected.

It's time to be timely. Stay focused here.

Trying the Unextraordinary

I said I'd limit the Trump series to two posts- who wants any more than that? This post isn't breaking that promise, but in it I will take up some of the themes played and overplayed since his election.

With varying degrees of self-seriousness, people are talking about normalizing Trump, assessing what it means, and how not to fall into it.

Masha Gessen has provided considerable insight in this. As she says, when we talk about normalization, about letting the extraordinary become routine, we are referring to Arendt and her canonical critique of the banality of evil. 

Gessen isn't saying Trump- or Putin, etc- are genocidal, however, I would suggest another disjunction of Arendt's thought from the present moment.

In this post, I'm asking: what should we think about the banality of evil when the evil is not limited to participating in the extraordinary, when it is, in a historical sense, normal?

Arendt wrote Eichmann in Jerusalem from her report on a trial for war crimes. The first ingredient in such a trial is a war with a loser. The rest came together with the energy of prosecuting aberration. By even troubled colonial consciences of the war victors, Nazi Germany had done extraordinary evil. Its genocide lacked the complex legal and sovereign-rights discourses others' had had. 

Its crimes also existed within a kind of extraordinary political status: fascism's short, aberrant course could be said to be confined to a single generation, a stain on a history of enlightenment and nonaggression- I mean here Germany never had a proper European overseas empire- that even nationals could unite in condemning.

Here I want to think about discourses of collaboration and the banality of evil that evade the conventional scope of a trial or inquiry. So often the examples of banality or humanity of evil are shaped by the neat boundaries that can be affected.

The chaotic mass violence of imperial Japan, Stalin's purges, and Mao's Cultural Revolution existed within such a defined timeframe that the regimes that positively evoke the legacies of the great leaders can clarify that it is not this part they mean to make legacy.

In the West, the scandal of the Belgian king's private colony in the Congo was a sufficient fig leaf of international condemnation, and being so brief and destructive, it made the past century of imperialism in Africa seem moderated. 

These extraordinary acts of violence did build on intellectual frameworks and political catastrophes, but accounting for them, in war-crimes trials, parliaments, or civic erasures, have kept a sense of temporary deviation from the normal.

What would a trial of what is normal look like? How could collaboration or normalization be reckoned over expanses of history that include Atlantic slavery, Native dispossession, segregation, and mass incarceration?

These histories involve violent actors: traders, overseers, treaty-falsifiers, sheriffs, and politicians, but also claimants to moderation and neutrality, and countless failed progressivisms, good faith and not.

Trying to apply Europe-centered discourses of the problem of evil to the racism that shaped the New World is not a novel prospect, though Arendt didn't get at it productively.

Perhaps what's lacking in trial format that would assess guilt, accessory, or complicity is the concrete idea of order being restored. Trials are about such restorations, and they have many different meanings, from the narratives of Socrates and Christ.

While Eichmann's trial typified retributive justice, South Africa's post-Apartheid Truth and Reconciliation Commission was meant to model restorative justice, binding a community together in a different way.

But both models evoke not just a sense of "back" to normal, but also forward, in a way that the future can be meaningfully informed by the past. There must be order of both ends of the trial, within which, comprehensive accounts of the disruption of order can be made and judged.

That is to say that our frameworks for understanding the problems out of which Trump arises requires those problems to be over and crimes indicted. We are demanding a sense of the trial's boundedness, out of which enlightened norms can be restored after a trying experience, by whatever understanding.

But in reality, our vision of the normal future is obscure. Our enlightened norms aren't being so neatly torn by Trump, the National Front, or UKIP; they're bound together with them, and hoping they'll go away in the future is imagining this future will be dramatically different than anything we have reason to expect given what is already normalized.

Reinscribing Obscenity: Thoughts on Trump's World 2

This post will try to put thoughts on the new world together into a coherent framework based on discourses of the moment and some older ideas.

I went to a performance of Electra the other night, and thinking about how that show was done, I think that a productive response to Trump's election can lie in a reinscription of the idea of obscenity.

I'm not advocating censoring much of anything or anybody, but I do want to think about how theater structures visible and obscured actions, and how we can observe it critically and respond to it productively.

The show I saw set Sophocles' play in the South after the Civil War, with all the bloodshed taking place behind the doors of a dilapidated mansion. Though Greek theater often dealt extensively with sex and violence, the most explicit acts customarily took place offstage. I've heard of a lexical connection of the modern English "obscenity" to Greek words meaning "off stage", but OED has a simpler explanation, and the etymology isn't necessary to the idea.

Electra centers around two revenge-killings and dwells on the suffering of all its characters until they are achieved. In that, it's not a tragedy in Shakespeare's sense: not flaws and misperceptions bringing everybody down. The play is set up to an action; it demands resolution, but obscures it at the same time. Aside from the esthetic question of how to convey ancient-world violence to an audience without modern special effects, the convention doesn't want to turn a high-brow religious exercise into something defined by shock or pathos.

The tension here between the demand for violence and an intolerance of confronting it seemed to set so many terms for liberal democratic theater, especially this year. The discourses of justice and retribution that license violence that incidentally falls on so many people who are just in the way, and the reckoning and scope of it is always obscure. This seems so descriptive of a democratic security state defined by the tension of not being able to look at what it insists on: on pervasive suspicion of others, on secret justice, on wars and casualties we don't want to reckon with.

The difference effected by Trump, as in so many other ways, seems only to be dropping the backdrop. Now everyone sees what's really going on. Liberals don't have their niceties about human dignity and human rights to disguise what their designs work out to.

However, this can't be all. Liberals are reacting dramatically to Trump. They are showing real pain and fear, very often to excesses- see "white tears", that break boundaries that can constitute obscenity in a way. Playing the part of the good liberal is an exercise in ally theater, especially if played as a tragedy for oneself. 

Perhaps all this is truly and meaningfully needed for many of us to realize and respond to the violence necessitated in the nice liberal democratic state form and whatever Trump is bringing out. But there are real boundaries to be considered, and for many of us, putting our anger and anxiety at the front of the stage obscures real resolution.

Obscenity, I want to suggest, can be reinscribed to label self-collapsing despair or self-importance on the part of people who have no place burdening others with it. There needs to be a normative sense of an appropriate reaction to Trump on the part of those of us who aren't targeted and who are differently protected by being abled, straight, white, by being inscribed as what the country has always protected.

Real, critical engagement can take different forms with different emotive registers for different people. Furthermore, the esthetic sensibilities of one tradition, or any tradition, aren't enough to tell us what or how to be. 

But responding to boundaries within contexts, and thinking critically about how those contexts are structured can give us some sense of order to work with when we need something to grasp onto.