Let Me Show You Some of My History

"What Lies Beneath" (Image: The Crimson)

Haunts

In my college cooperative, posters, some of which are blatantly decaying, watch over us in each corner. Little objects are scattered around the common spaces. The forty-years old and the last-week exist beside each other eliding—and questioning the basis of—any sharp distinction. No one would dare to remove them nor any of the photographs of old co-opers now long after their subjects can be identified, or to blot out names written on the walls.

Caring for these objects, co-opers take account of (or perhaps even are accountable to) those who have come before. Practices of remembering take care of those who have moved on, as college students typically do. I see this as one small model of the way Jacques Rancière describes Jacques Derrida’s corpus:

"[The corpse and the ghost] are left to our guard, entrusted to our care. As they can no longer answer, we have to answer for them.... Far from any iconoclastic view, deconstruction is an act of piety toward the dead, a way of being faithful to the life of the dead, or the life of Death.... Derrida indeed remains faithful to a certain nineteenth-century French tradition that sees humanity as a great being made of more dead people than living people" (p. 285).

Remaining faithful to those who have gone is a way to remain faithful to ourselves. We may care for the projects of those who have come before us (G.A. Cohen defends something like this in more straightforwardly-philosophical terms).

Lost in the world, knowing our histories also opens up routes of intelligibility and meaning for us in the present, and those who will come after us, as Sidra wrote recently for this series. More enigmatically, Derrida writes that

To be, this word in which we earlier saw the word of the spirit, means, for the same reason, to inherit. All the questions on the subject of being or of what is to be (or not to be) are questions of inheritance. There is no backward-looking fervor in this reminder, no traditionalist flavor. Reaction, reactionary, or reactive are but interpretations of the structure of inheritance. That we are heirs does not mean that we have or that we receive this or that, some inheritance that enriches us one day with this or that, but that the being of what we are is first of all inheritance, whether we like it or know it or not. And that, as Hölderlin said so well, we can only bear witness to it. To bear witness would be to bear witness to what we are insofar as we inherit, and that—here is the circle, here is the chance, or the finitude—we inherit the very thing that allows us to bear witness to it. As for Hölderlin, he calls this language, “the most dangerous of goods,” given to man “so that he bears witness to having inherited/what he is" (pp. 67-68).

We do not get to choose our histories, or make whatever we want out of them. We inherit them.

We don’t get to selectively remember. We shouldn’t celebrate only the positive characteristics of someone’s life while demanding complicity from others who might alter that image to be true to a fuller historical picture. We also cannot plunder the past, haphazardly combining relics and pulling them out of context in pursuit of a new aesthetic, as postmodern architecture does (ch. 3-4).

The past demands context, specificity, and an honest rendering. Like our dead, it is not a general category (“A Letter to John Berger”).

Let me know show you some of my history.

Sensibilities (Lament)

Earlier in this series, I spoke about political involvement on campus, that our responsibility is to change things. This responsibility is greatly emphasized today. For instance, my generation is critical of politicians who offer their “thoughts and prayers” in response to gun violence (I even have a shirt with “thoughts and prayers” crossed out and below is the statement “policy and change”). Part of the criticism comes from a suspicion that the politicians’ concern is disingenuous. But even if the politicians are being sincere, their concern alone doesn’t solve our pressing problems. It doesn’t do anything, so it is of no use to us.

I took this view until very recently. I even figured I should portion my own care to however much I can change something and keep all else out of mind (this was my own variation on David Hume’s famous statement that “A wise man portions his belief to the evidence”). In this view, the best that emotions can do is to motivate us to take the action.

But this is deeply alienated from being a person. To demand that even our emotions serve some pragmatic purpose relies on a conception of the person in which the question to ask is What is the most good that can be made of her? To make a person into a tool, even for the noble aim of social progress, is wrong.

If we don’t mourn that which we cannot fix, then we wouldn’t mourn most violence to which we don’t yet see an end. The most pervasive and perhaps the worst forms of social violence! The deaths of others become naturalized and inevitable.

I think of my teacher Teju Cole’s ethical sense that our responsibility is to bear witness—as opposed to raise awareness—and to seek direct, sense-engaging knowledge of another’s pain. He describes an experience in Pozallo, Sicily:

I unexpectedly encountered a fenced-in parking lot on which migrant boats had been stored. I received and understood the sad reality of those boats with my intellect, but it was when I smelled them that I burst into tears….The news asserts itself as a neutral report on the state of things, and elicits predictable responses. In fact, it is an elaborate enterprise driven by the predictability of the response. “A boat sank,” a news report might say, “and 700 people died.” The reader’s response might be, “What a pity.” “Thousands of people have died crossing the US-Mexico border.” “So sad.” What is inaudible in all this, and in almost all news, is any sense that the events are not simply unfortunate, that they are folded in with our actions, with the actions of our government, and bear on our personal responsibilities to each other.

(p. 201)

Teju’s writing is elegiac. He mourns and helps his readers and students to mourn seemingly irreversible and unfixable deaths. He mourns violence that could end, if only we knew how, and if only everyone else could feel with the same force.

What if we also had a responsibility not only to fix what is wrong but to remember others as viscerally and as sensuously as Teju describes encountering this boat? In that passage, Teju seems to find feeling something prior to action. But I suspect he also thinks that we should feel even if we have no idea what to do, even if there is nothing at all that can be done.

Times I come close to this way of remembering and feeling sensuously: at small, awkward protests. Even if they had an official demand, that never was the point. The violence that drew us was too great. It wasn’t clear to whom we could turn to make things good anyway.

Collective

During my first months in Cambridge, I questioned the point of colleges that drew students away from that to which they were already tied. Was I abandoning my responsibilities to home? I took issue with idealized abandonments.

This vicari­ous responsibility for things we have not done, this taking upon ourselves the consequences for things we are entirely innocent of, is the price we pay for the fact that we live our lives not by our­ selves but among our fellow men, and that the faculty of action, which, after all, is the political faculty par excellence, can be actu­alized only in one of the many and manifold forms of human community.

Hannah Arendt, Responsibility and Judgement, pp. 157-158

But I found my own communities where my actions had some meaning and intelligibility given that their horizon was beyond myself and was woven in a fabric of responsibility and care: the shelters I worked in, my cooperative, and my group of friends. I also thought of myself as part of the city of Cambridge, especially when I lived there after school let out for the year and which I came to consider a home.

I was slow and late to see Harvard as a place to which I was tied. But I became more honest about my position within it through my work in social services. That brought to the surface my privileged access to resources and spaces. And I came to value the school more as I took difficult classes second semester, met new friends, deepened my relationships with the old ones, and reflected on this all as I left.

What the university did wrongly was no longer a reason to pull away from it and merely denounce it. I wanted to dig in. Going away to school wasn’t only leaving responsibilities. It was also finding new ones.

If you find as I did that there is nothing you can rightly call a “community” on campus, that doesn’t mean there is no responsibility. When a collection of people remains unable to respond to something urgent, even if they aren’t yet capable of acting together, something has still gone morally wrong (Utopophobia, ch. 11-12). Creating the conditions for our being a public in potentia and being able to respond when something happens is part of our work (and perhaps the work of architects and planners, see Political Theory and Architecture, ch. 4).

Signs

Last year, Harvard College students voted overwhelmingly to dissolve the forty-year-old student government in favor of a new one. The problem? Those in student government weren’t actually interested in carrying out the responsibilities of their positions, but instead what it would look like to have held them, especially for future employers. What?!

For college students, I think that the focus is far too often on the production of images of ourselves. It’s not only students’ fault. College staff and faculty are under pressure to put students under pressure to prepare for careers, as Zena Hitz told me. The cost of our education must justify itself, and in our neoliberal world, the main terms by which anything can be justified are economic.

Today, this transpires through images. David Harvey writes that,

Advertising, moreover, is no longer built around the idea of informing or promoting in the ordinary sense, but is increasingly geared toward manipulating desires and tastes through images that may or may not have anything to do with the product to be sold… Furthermore, images have, in a sense, themselves become commodities.This phenomenon has led Baudrillard… to argue that Marx’s analysis of commodity production is outdated because capitalism is now predominantly concerned with the production of signs, images, and sign systems rather than [with – sic.] commodities themselves.

(p. 287)

I would add one more development to Harvey’s description—at least as it applies to my generation. I see the production of images playing out through the making of images of ourselves. We market and brand ourselves. This is not only the case for “influencers,” but it is also true of the hiring criteria and job expectations of financial workers: “intelligence” is lauded yet measured by the eliteness of one’s schooling, working hours are spent perfecting the appearance of slide decks to make one seem more credible, and business is done on the basis of personal connections, often achieved through bonding over, again, the eliteness of one’s education.

On campus, political involvement on campus was not about ethics, but instead was one way to make a point about the kind of person we are. My own relation to my schoolwork changed, where I began to take the standpoint of an outside observer judging the pace of my own reading and the quality of my behavior in class, since even “participation” is given marks.

A year ago, I wrote about doing chores. Repetitive, mundane, and simple, they are a movement (or a moment) away from the eruption of the new, the marketable, and the ephemeral. Chores are thus similar to “study”—an anti-academics that is truly educational like time spent working together outside of institutional settings through conversations with friends at parties. Chores and what I was calling “study” got beyond appearances, marketability, and neoliberal value. They aren’t fake.

The problem with being preoccupied with appearances is that there is work to be done necessitating a commitment exceeding the ephemeral. Like what? For instance: becoming a person, which does not exclusively happen at university, though that seems a good time for it. Or this: work to be done on the university.

*

Philo

For a semester in high school, I experienced an education that felt immediately relevant to my life so much so that I had a sense of urgency about my learning. I always felt that I was close to making some massive discovery about myself and the world.

I went to college with this experience in mind as well as with some vague ideas about the liberal arts I had from reading some books and from watching Cornel West’s talks on YouTube. I wanted my study of philosophy to feel as necessary as breathing. I thought it would quickly throw who I was into doubt and reshape me many times over. I was expecting it to be painful and, more than anything else, dramatic.

But classes never touched on what I thought was most pressing: What I should do with my life? How I should protest? What ARE my obligations toward the city of Cambridge? Why the hell do we focus so much on developing context for a tradition if it no longer has much to say about how we should live right here and right now?

I began to doubt that a liberal arts education and an education in philosophy in particular can truly help in my world.

In my time off, I have grown and changed as a result of non-academic things, including a semi-monastic rhythm of prayer and work. I have attempted to be a loving and steady friend in difficult interpersonal contexts—among the most trying and meaningful of lessons.

Yet in these things, I’ve returned to what I had learned in my first year of college, odd as that sounds. I think about Alyosha’s trust of others in The Brothers Karamazov or Johannes de Silentio’s (Kierkegaard’s) bizarre “knight of faith.” These characters now help me to think through my memories and new experiences. I didn’t care about them before; they seemed irrelevant.

Maybe I demand to be changed too quickly. The process is subtler, an acquiring of capabilities and references that may in time prove useful. These are the opposite of signs.

~

This is an installment of Into Philosophy.

With gratitude to the Blog of the APA, for hosting this unconventional series, my co-editors, Jeremy Bendik-Keymer and Sidra Shahid, and interviewees so far and still coming. 

Simone Weil House, Portland, Oregon, February 2023.