Violence

My partner wants to show me something. It's late, we're on the couch, cozy. He loads up the game, and we're looking at aerial footage of some kind of village, black and white. An SUV pulls up, little figures emerge, swarm the screen. A voice tells him to fire (but not to damage the church), and the room fills with the thick thud of high caliber ammunition (where are we again? Russia?). "Look!" he says. "Do you see how the bodies go flying?"

This is old news, a well-worn debate, maybe not that interesting, even if the resolution is higher. Although maybe it is significant that this newest iteration "is a lot more violent," as he tells me.

***

On the radio they are discussing Charlottesville, one year later. A caller insists that Antifa are the ones responsible for the violence; one of the commentators is "disgusted", says that the white supremacists show up with their fists taped up, ready to fight, kicking and punching their way down the street, and Heather Heyer was not an isolated incident, and she was not just harmed, she was killed. I think again of the various debates I saw on facebook at the time about whether or not it is ok to punch a Nazi, and I think about every time I have taught Kant, and how Nazis are somehow too literal, but also strangely unspecific.

***

I wonder if this is the newest version of the Nazi punching debate, but I actually haven't seen anyone debating it, just a lot of delighted laughter. Humor is community, and humor is a coping mechanism, and it is also social critique and enforcement mechanism. When is violence funny?

***

We know it is hypocritical to revere Martin Luther King Jr. and advocate violence: this too, is old news. Or maybe the reverence provides cover; non-violence as the impossible meal for the anointed, knuckle sandwiches for the rest of us. And maybe his philosophy of non-violence is more nuanced than radical -- we are told he owned a gun. When I teach "Letter from Birmingham Jail," I always pause over the veiled threat in this paragraph:

I have tried to stand between these two forces, saying that we need emulate neither the "do nothingism" of the complacent nor the hatred and despair of the black nationalist. For there is the more excellent way of love and nonviolent protest. I am grateful to God that, through the influence of the Negro church, the way of nonviolence became an integral part of our struggle. If this philosophy had not emerged, by now many streets of the South would, I am convinced, be flowing with blood. And I am further convinced that if our white brothers dismiss as "rabble rousers" and "outside agitators" those of us who employ nonviolent direct action, and if they refuse to support our nonviolent efforts, millions of Negroes will, out of frustration and despair, seek solace and security in black nationalist ideologies--a development that would inevitably lead to a frightening racial nightmare.

(It's a freshman comp class. How did it get so heavy all of a sudden? Arguments are serious business, my friends.)

***

Violence: a Syllabus. Wouldn't it be wonderful to spend a semester thinking about this with a bunch of smart students? We could read Benjamin and Arendt and Fanon and everyone would have a research project on some specific topic and they would curate the readings for a given week. And then we'd all have the space to think about it a little more.

all about love, by bell hooks

This is a challenging book for me, precisely because it does not seem challenging. It is written in extremely straightforward language, draws freely on personal experience as evidence, and makes extremely broad and sweeping claims about how the world works. All of this makes it feel very un-theoretical (even the last one, oddly enough) and un-rigorous. And yet - what is theory, really? What (or who) is it for? What is it meant to do?

Awhile back I watched a documentary called The Feminist on Cellblock Y, about an educational program at Soledad Prison that had the inmates reading feminist literature. I teach at a local prison myself, and I cover some stuff related to feminism and masculinity. My approach is to avoid any jargon, and use extremely straightforward, concrete examples and scenarios (my main text is the NYTimes article, "How to Raise a Feminist Son"). So I was impressed, in the documentary, to hear the guys bandying about terms like "patriarchy" and "toxic masculinity," and cite bell hooks. Maybe these things weren't as inaccessible as I had feared, I thought. And that was in the back on my mind, too, as I read this (though I was reading it in preparation for teaching college freshmen) -- how would the guys at the prison respond to it?

So of course, the straightforward language is a big component of what makes it so immensely teachable. As are the many moments where the text is openly, frankly personal. But those personal moments aren't just there to make the text relatable, or approachable -- they're an integral part of the argument. As it happens, I'm also working my way through Sara Ahmed's Living a Feminist Life at the moment, and she discusses this issue in the Intro:

This book is personal. The personal is theoretical. Theory itself is often assumed to be abstract: something is more theoretical the more abstract it is, the more it is abstracted from everyday life. To abstract is to drag away, detach, pull away, or divert. We might then have to drag theory back, to bring theory back to life. (10)

hooks is writing about love, and how difficult it is to talk about the desire for love. The point is neatly illustrated by how frankly shocking it seems when she says that she yearns for love, how pathetic, how embarassingly vulnerable. She confronts this head on:

whenever a single woman over forty brings up the topic of love, again and again the assumption, rooted in sexist thinking, is that she is "desperate" for a man. No one thinks she is simply passionately intellectually interested in the subject matter. No one thinks she is rigorously engaged in a philosophical undertaking wherein she is endeavoring to understand the metaphysical meaning of love in everyday life. No, she is just seen as on the road to "fatal attraction." (xx)

 The examples from her life - of failed relationships, of the kind of relationship she had with her family, are a core part of the argument (as part of her project of offering a more circumscribed definition, for instance, she argues that many families have relationships of care, but not love).

The sweeping claims are sometimes more persuasive ("There can be no love without justice" (19)) and sometimes less ("Truly, there would be no unemployment problem in our nation if our taxes subsidized schools where everyone could learn to love." (162)) -- but they are certainly generative, in the sense of opening up a conversation. Yes, the book is essentially a polemic, but you also don't _have_ to agree with all of it. If instead we see theory as a springboard, a tool that invites you to think, and think better, by proposing some ideas and questions to chew on -- this book certainly does that.

What is ultimately most alienating in it, for me, is the way it both explicitly references, and often draws on a language that stems from, self-help literature. But this is also where the vast majority of people engage these kinds of ideas! This is the conversation she's joining, and if she weren't including those kinds of texts, she wouldn't actually be participating in the dialogue. And while I do think that academia is often a conversation among a small number of people, and that that's ok! I think it's also important to have bigger conversations, and to recognize that they will be different (without being elitist pricks about it, or assuming that they'll be oversimplified). So while I found myself impatient with this book, or frustrated that it seemed to hover at a basic level, I also considered that it actually made me work harder, think harder, to build the connections and think through the intricacies. The discussions of forgiveness are probably the hardest, because at moments it seems like a blanket policy of forgiving all wrongs via compassion -- and that seems both very difficult (a la the radicalism of non-violence or turning the other cheek) and in some ways simplistic (but isn't that naively idealistic? Easier said than done?).

Actually, one of the most interesting things about the book is that it occasionally seems noticeably dated. It was published in 2001, and it shows. It's interesting to consider how cultural shifts, especially in relation to LGBTQ communities and the #MeToo movement, have shifted some of these terms and ideas (the references to Monica Lewinsky, for instance, seem surprisingly sexist). But others -- such as the discussion of a case where a white homeowner shot a young Asian man who came to his house by mistake, looking for a party -- remain sadly current (and thus seem prescient). 

It'll be interesting to see how my freshmen respond to it...