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Seventy-five years after the taking of power by the National Socialists in Germany the phenomena of the party led by Hitler and the enormous destruction wrought by his movement in the space of just over a decade still remain a source of mystery for many commentators.
In its special edition to mark the anniversary of the Nazi takeover (14 January 2008), the prominent German news magazine Der Spiegel headlined its main article “The Triumph of Madness.” Writing in the January 24 edition of the London Book Review the veteran Stalinist historian Eric Hobsbawm struck a similar note: “The fact is that no one, right, left or centre, got the true measure of Hitler’s National Socialism, a movement of a kind that had not been seen before and whose aims were rationally unimaginable ...”
There can be no doubt that Hitler fascism was responsible for a degree of human depravation and brutality which quite rightly continues to shock and horrify today, but that does not mean his movement was incomprehensible. In fact, there has been a great deal of scholarship in recent years that has thrown important new light on the emergence and rise to prominence of National Socialism.
Utilising new sources, including important archives opened up by the fall of Stalinism in the former USSR and Eastern Europe, the British historians Ian Kershaw and Richard Evans have both published multi-volume works which considerably broaden our understanding of the social and political background to Hitler’s own rise to power—Kershaw’s two-volume biography of the dictator (Hitler: 1889-1936: Hubris, and Hitler: 1936-1945: Nemesis) and the three volumes by Richard J. Evans on the Third Reich (the third volume of the series is still to be completed).
A third very valuable contribution to the current wave of research into National Socialism is the volume by a British historian based at Cambridge University, Adam Tooze—The Wages Of Destruction, which is now available in German translation. In his book Tooze sets out to identify and examine the economic driving forces behind the National Socialist project and in so doing presents the first extensive investigation of this type for many decades. (From : Hitler’s “intelligible response” to the contradictions of global capitalism The Wages of Destruction by Adam Tooze a Review by Stefan Steinberg.)
There are ideological reasons to insist on the incomprehensibility of the rise of Nazism. But first let me state some of my assumptions about the intelligibility of history.
I assume, that as much as human actions are comprehensible to everyday reason, so are the actions of the Nazis and their minions. I also assume that as much as human history is comsprehensible, if not knowable in every detail, that the historical period of the rise of fasicsm and its consequences is also comprehensible. I do not assume that there can be scientific theories of human choice or of human history. Intelligibility does not necessarily imply a high level of certainty. But the limit of scientific theories, and the declining scale of certitude, does not imply some mystical "unknowability" about human actions. Human historical actions are comprehensible in "everyday ways" through rational thought, empathy, collective historical work, and hard work. I will not argue these assumptions here, but simply move on to what interests me, the ideological reasons for arguing that Nazism and its consequenses are "incomprehensible" and "exceptional."
There are many non-historians, "philosophers," and even a few historians who basically propound the idea that the rise of Nazism, and the atrocities committed by the Naziis, are in essence exceptional and fundamentally unknowable. The ideological point of such notions is that fundamentally unknowable and essentially exceptional phenomena cannot be compared with what is happening in the world made by our actions. Thus we can distance great atrocities from ourselves.
Another effect of such notions is that the very act of comparison between the rise of Nazism, along with the atrocities committed in its name, and current events becomes "empty" and without significance. The act of comparison between Nazisim and anything else becomes something either "unserious," "disgusting", or an indication that you are referring to the irresolveable "problem of evil." Such comparisons then end up denoting nothing, only connoting anger. A comparison with Nazi atrocities becomes like yelling curse words at the top of your lungs. Such yelling will have the connotation of anger but will have little, if any, denotation that you can relate to others
The so-called "problem of evil" is a problem mostly because we refuse to look at ourselves (our own actions and responsibilities) in analogous situations. If we make "evil" something mystical and supernatural it is much easier to avoid responsibility for how we, as citizens, contribute to situations where atrocities occur. I don't mean in this case atrocities committed by "them" or be "bad apples," I mean the atrocities that we commit in the world simply by doing what our nation-state does. There are direct atrocities, such as those that have occurred in Central America where the U.S. and its clients murdered hundreds of thousands, many simply dumped in mass graves. These atrocities, which were committed through our government in our name we have never attempted to rectify. There are also more "indirect" atrocities that are consequences of the actions of the business institutions that mostly rule our foreign policy. I am not here writing about the obvious fact of wars and invasions that by any interpretation of international law should be prosecuted as war crimes. I have in mind everyday consequences of economic decisions. For instance, it is the policy of the U.S. that small countries in South and Central America should focus on export of commodities to the U.S. In practice this often means the shift of population from subsistence farming, where most resources are directed to feeding the family and neighborhood, to farming for export. (An unintended consequence of this policy is that the best export crops are often those that are refined into legal or illegal drugs, cocoa for cocaine, poppies for opium, grapes for wine, coffee beans for coffee, etc.) This also leads to a greater consolidation of land into the hands of the few who are often connected to foreign corporations. Another consequence is a loss of open access to local resources such as water for drinking. But the biggest consequence is the fluctuation of the availability of food. With subsistence farming, the farming family is usually guaranteed a bare minimum of food for survival. With the switch to export commodities the small farmer must have money to obtain food and this means he is at the mercy of the price of commodities. Decisions made in the markets in Chicago can cause the deprivation of food for thousands across the world. A corporation that does not make as great of a profit off of coffee this year can wait to next year to improve its situation. But a farmer cannot tell his or her children; "The price of coffee has fallen at the town market therefore we can't eat this winter." My point here is not to make a one-to-one comparison between Nazism and this kind of economic imperialism. But it is to point out that one of the consequences of making "evil" an unsolvable "problem," and then pointing to areas of human history where evil reached "incomprehensible" proportions, is to allow ourselves not to see the consequences of our own decisions in the here and now as "evil". The reasoning goes something like this: "Our" decisions, whether good or bad, are comprehensible and normal, and since "evil" is incomprehensible and abnormal, our decisions cannot be "evil" by definition. Such reasoning allows us not to judge the decisions made in our system of society by their consequences, but only by their subjective "normality". We allow ourselves not to see the system of decisions that leads to atrocities. We don't have to see and we don't have to know about the atrocious consequences of the decisions made here as long as such atrocious things are not happening to us or do not come back to hurt us. Jerry Monaco
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There has been a recent spate of books to add to the atheist's library. They all speak out against religion and the belief in God. This is not a new battle and in many ways the battle has already been won.
Why do I say that the battle against religion has been won? Because religious institutions are not the dominant institutions even in places that we think of as dominated by religion -- Iran, the United States, or Pakistan. The nation-state is the dominant institution. Multinational business entities, which nation-states serve in the great industrialized nations, follow closely behind. I current societies religious institutions are a distant third in their ability to control and dominate. The grounds on which religious bigotry could be a powerful force-of-itself have been transformed by the European powers and the creation of the nation state. If we look across the world today religious bigotry may be a motivating or aggravating factor in many areas, but religion only exists as a powerful force in relation to nationalism and the nation-state. Often religion as an institution tries to influence the nation state as a reactionary way to control the cultural side-effects of the dominance of multinational business entities in the state domanin. On the other hand, nationalist movements, whether covered by a velvet glove or masked by religious bigotry are always iron fisted and bold-faced, when seen clearly. The nation-state has been the superstition of the two of ages of reason and industrialized war, and though at times multinational corporations have attempted supplant corporate patriotism for nation-state jingoism, nationalism still remains the most dangerous ideology the world has ever known. The nationalist superstition is more dangerous than religion has ever been or ever will be, killing millions and millions of people in the great Europeans civil wars of the 20th century and motivating the European peoples to spread the nation-state form to all parts of the globe. If Richard Dawkins wishes to fight the most dangerous superstition he will entitle his next book, The Nationalist Delusion.
So we come to the death of Philip Agee. Agee was stationed in Latin America by the Central Intelligence Agency where he witnessed U.S. approved assassination, torture, and coups d'etat. He decided that he could no longer accept what he considered the secret betrayals of the U.S. government of the peoples of the Americas. He quit the CI A and instead of aiding and abetting the "official" enemies of the U.S. (Russia) he decided to give aid to the real enemy of the U.S. Government, the peoples of the Americas. He gave his information to reporters he aided in starting magazines that would expose CIA treachery, and he wrote a book in which he recorded what he saw. I was a subscriber and avid reader of Covert Action Information Bulletin through the 1980s and consider it a great contribution to exposing the institutional anti-republican forces that exist in our own government. In all of Agee's activities I think he did more to fight the most dangerous superstition than the good Richard Dawkins could ever do.
At least that was my personal experience.
When I was in high school I was the kind of kid who read spy novels, along with private eye novels, and some science fiction. I loved the tenebrous ambiguity of the best spy stuff. The labyrinth of mirrors was a place where I could wander freely in my mind. I always felt like a bit of a spy in my own house, so spy novels were the perfect metaphor for the thirteen year old boy who was asked to play the double-agent between between divorcing parents.
The spies of my imagination made me curious about the real world of spies. I already considered myself a socialist at 16, but I was still too much of a patriot to be a fully fledged anti-imperialist.
In 1975 I picked up Agee's book "Inside the Company: A CIA Diary" because it was about spying, not for its anti-imperialist content. What I read gave a face to imperial skulduggery as it was practiced in Latin America in the 1960s. Agee's book certainly did its job with me. I saw that secret intelligence agencies were not compatible with the basic principles of a (bourgeois) republic.
During the Valerie Plame affair Agee was much on my mind, since the underlying law that may or may not have been violated of exposing a CIA agent to public view could have been called "Lex Anti-Agee." (See, "The Rule of Law" and Secrecy: CIA Prisons and the Plame Affair, Chomsky on the Plame Affair and the posts here.) For me the Plame Affair provided two opportunities: exposing the hypocrisy of the Bush-Chaney clique, but more importantly exposing the anti-democratic nature of a law that essentially protects a secret society of brutal murderers and their support bureaus of intellectual clerks. As far as I am concerned the name of every CIA agent should be published and posted in the squares, markets, and forums of every town and city in the world.
Phillip Agee deserves credit for bringing light to one small part of a dark world.
Jerry Monaco
10 January 2008
New York City
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I highly recommend Class Struggle In Hollywood, 1930 – 1950: Moguls, Mobsters, Stars, Reds, & Trade Unionists by Gerald Horne for anyone who wishes to gain an historical perspective on the current situation that led to the WGA strike and in union movements in general.
This book has been on my reading list for a long time, combining as it does my interest in labor history and in the history of Hollywood. The occasion of the WGA strike has brought me to finally pick up the book. What I am most interested in is to read about the origins of disunion between the Hollywood unions, and the role of the WGA and IATSE in this history. As Gerald Horne says in the preface of his book:
This is a book about labor-management conflict in Hollywood. It concerns the attempt of the Conference of Studio Unions (CSU), a federation of craft unions led by painters and carpenters, to confront not only the major studios but also a competing union, International Alliance of Theatrical and Stage Employees (IATSE) and its allies in organized crime. CSU went on strike in 1945 and was locked out in 1946. However, it fought its antagonists to a standstill in 1945. They were routed in 1946. The vanquishing of CSU erased progressive trade unionism for generations to come in one of this nation's most significant industries. (vii)
I hope to offer a complete review of Class Struggle In Hollywood, 1930 – 1950 in a future post. For now, I would like to write about something more personal -- the circuitous route of how I came to know about the events detailed in Gerald Horne's book.
When I first moved to New York in the early 80s, I met some veterans of some of the incidents that led to one of the first post-war strikes. It was the 1945 strike by the CSU and the 1946 lockout by the moguls of the CSU in Hollywood. Vince, who was in that strike, had been a carpenter and was living in Hoboken when I met him. He and his friends were black-listed for their participation in the strike. In fact they were black-listed not for being communists – the Communist Party had actually opposed the first post-war strike – but for being militant union leaders. What is little known, and generally suppressed by all parties as an inconvenient fact, is that the blacklist was not primarily used against Communists but against union organizers and militants. Further, the blacklist was not primarily used against writers, actors, and directors, the people we usually read about, but against set-designers, carpenters, painters, lighting-designers, etc. It is convenient for us at this late date to think of Hollywood blacklisting as mainly an activity of the past, and an activity that occurred during a limited period of time during the height of the cold war. This is indeed the case when we talk about stars and other well-known creative talent. The best way to discipline "troublesome" creative talent was to accuse them of being a communist, a homosexual. or a drug addict. Essentially, this was a form of blackmail by the bosses. But carpenters like Vince were not blackmailed in this way. If they were union militants of any type they were simply blacklisted. After the passage of the National Labor Relations Act in 1935 this kind of blacklisting of pro-unon employees was illegal, but it was still maintained, and especially advocated by extreme right-wing bosses like those who ran Disney. The blacklist of Hollywood union militants began long before the well-known Hollywood anti-Communist blacklist and lasted for a long time after. I would argue that it is still maintained to this day. For example, I think there is evidence that animation writers who try to organize with the WGA, instead of with IATSE, are still blacklisted in the industry. The current labor laws are so toothless that there is not much that can be done about this legally.
But even before Vince told me about the Hollywood strike and lockout of 1945-46, I had known about some of the incidents in this strike because of my love of film noir. The first time I heard of this strike was when researching a movie I was obsessed with since about age 13, "The Strange Loves of Martha Ivers." It is a strange title for a strange movie. It existed at the cusp of the collapse of the studio system. The movie was a very operatic film noir. In fact the fact that nobody has made an opera of it is either an indication of copyright problems or of the lack of a modern Donizetti to write the piece.
"Strange Loves" starred Barbara Stanwyck, who is also an obsession of mine, and was written by Robert Rossen, and directed by Lewis Milestone. Barbara Stanwyck, was one of those great self-trained actors, and one of the few to make her own way through the Hollywood star-system. She was also a right-winger and one of the first to jump on the anti-communist band wagon. Curiously, her politics never stopped her from working with left-wing talent. What she most desired for herself and other people was hard work, morning and night, and a little political hypocrisy went a long way in allowing her to work with people that she would otherwise want blacklisted. Milestone was a director who got around. He had been in Hollywood since the silent days. He was a good director but not someone I consider spectacular. Robert Rossen is probably best known now days for writing and directing "The Hustler," but he also directed "Body and Soul" and wrote and directed the 1949 version of "All the Kings Men." He was one of those screenwriters who got fed up with having his scripts gutted by producers and directors, and decided that he might as well trying directing his own work. The movie also has the distinction of being one of Kirk Douglas's first starring roles.
What I mainly knew about these Rosen and Milestone at the time I started my research on "Strange Loves" was that, later in their careers, they had both been called before House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) to testify. Both Milestone and Rossen were members of the original Hollywood Nineteen, which later became the Hollywood Ten, when ten of the 19 were indicted. They were both suspected left-wingers but both avoided indictment each in a different way. Milestone took the 5th Amendment and somehow, I don’t know how, avoided blacklisting. Yet in the aftermath of his refusal to testify his movie-making abilities went downhill. My guess is that after his refusal to testify he did not look for controversial subjects, nor did he take chances in his movie-making. He certainly sought out controversial subjects previous to his testifying, and "The Strange Loves of Martha Ivers", was the kind of loopy movie making that no one would expect from an old-time director like Milestone. The whole thing feels like some strange combination of a modern dress western (lone gambler-gunman comes to town to confront his past) and haunted house tale, completely with dark old mansions that mysteriously carry memories of past murders.
At first, in 1951, Robert Rossen also took the 5th Amendment in front of HUAC, but in 1953 he testified. His testimony was classic self-justification and makes a wonderful read. In Victor Navasky's Naming Names one can find the following account of Rossen's testimony.
Certainly many of those who named names resisted the informer label. Consider the exchange between the Committee and the writer-director Robert Rossen (BODY AND SOUL [1947], ALL THE KINGS MEN [1949], etc.), who in 1951 refused to name names but appeared again in 1953 ready to go through the name-naming ritual. "I don't think," he told the congressmen, "after two years of thinking, that any one individual can even indulge himself in the luxury of individual morality or pit it against what I feel today very strongly is the security and safety of this nation." Congressman Clyde Doyle of California tried to paraphrase Rossen's position: "In other words, you put yourself, then, in a position as a result of your patriotism or patriotic attitude toward your nation, which you came to subsequent to January 25, 1951, where you were willing to be labeled a stool pigeon and an informer, but you felt that was perhaps the privilege rather than a disgrace?"
MR. ROSSEN: I don't feel that I'm being a stool pigeon or an informer. I refuse--I just won't accept that characterization.
CONGRESSMAN KIT CLARDY: Well, Mr. Doyle means--
MR. ROSSEN: No; no. I am not . . . disagreeing with Mr. Doyle, but I think that is a rather romantic--that is like children playing at cops and robbers. They are just kidding themselves, and I don't care what the characterizations in terms of--people can take whatever positions they want. I know what I feel like within myself. Characterization or no characterization, I don't feel that way.'
Navasky, Victor S. NAMING NAMES. New York: The Viking Press, 1980, "A Note on Vocabulary"
Rossen not only named names but gave as many details on his political life as possible. He dramatized himself in world-historical terms. He was a good writer I think, because the coil of his thought could be seen through every bit of what he said, and often what he wrote.
I am trying not to be judgmental, because even though I believe that the committee and all of the red-baiters were scoundrels, I don’t believe that we can judge every individual who named names on a predetermined moral scale. None of us know what we would do in a similar situation. I don’t believe in heroes and it seems to me that the demand that people act as heroes is a demand for a special elite of humans who sacrifice themselves for the future. I would like to get as far away from the ideology of heroism as possible. As Bertolt Brecht wrote in his play Galileo, "Pity the nation that needs heroes."
What does all of this have to do with "Class Struggle in Hollywood" or with "The Strange Loves of Martha Ivers"?
During the filming of "Strange Loves" the painters and carpenters from the Conference of Studio Unions went on strike. Milestone refused to cross the picket line and briefly filming stopped. One day in October 1945, Barbara Stanwyck and some of the other actors went up to the roof of the studio and what they saw was cops and IATSE thugs beating up the CSU pickets. There was a battle raging outside of the studio. Kirk Douglas, who was in his first big role with a starring actress, agonized over the fact that he had crossed a picket line. Milestone and Rossen both did not know whose side to take. The CSU was a truly militant union that wanted to organize everybody in the industry on an equal basis. This strike could have been a beginning of true industry-wide union solidarity in Hollywood. And there Milestone was, a sympathetic leftist sitting the battle out. And there was the cast and crew of "Strange Loves" standing on the roof watching the battle between police and strikers, watching the barricades set up in front of the studios, the burning police cars, cars tipped on their sides and dragged to the middle of the street to serve as barricades against the high-pressure fire-hoses and the club-wielding thugs. Hundreds of CSU picketers, but none of the strike-breaking thugs, were arrested. Eventually the CSU was defeated and I would argue that the Hollywood union movement never completely recovered. The reverberations of this defeat can still be felt today in the lack of solidarity between the IATSE leadership and the WGA, and IATSE's traditional pro-company stance.
One reason why Rossen and Milestone did not know what position to take in relation to the CSU strike was because the Communist Party, had opposed the strike as a break of the World War II no-strike pledge. This is ironic because the CSU was accused of being a "Communist" union. It was not a Communist union, far from it. In fact there were no communists leading this particular union. But the union was red-baited and the leadership was jailed. The studios launched a media campaign against the union. The studios also made sure that IATSE got preferential treatment. IATSE at this time was very close to the mob, and it was in fact the Los Angeles gangsters who supplied the anti-CSU IATSE goon-squad. This was the story I was told by some of the veterans of the strike.
The historical lesson here is something that every unionist should know. In the post-war period government and management all opposed the threat of militant unions. At this time there were more militant unions than corrupt unions. One way that management opposed militant unions was by red-baiting them. In many cases the unionists who were being red-baited were not communist or even "leftists". They were simply good union leaders. This was the case with the CSU. Another strategy that management used in opposing militant unions was to find unions that were friendly with management and to promote the interest of those unions over and above the militant unions. A related strategy, and one of the most important, was for management to call in the mobsters and the unions allied with the mobsters. In every case across the U.S. in the post-World War II years – among electrical workers opposing General Electric and Westinghouse, among dock-workers in the east, among Midwestern Teamsters – management and government promoted unions allied with mobsters in order to defeat unions that actually had the worker’s interest as part of their program. The story of Gerald Horne’s "Class Struggle in Hollywood" is the story of how this happened in Los Angeles.
As I read this book I will provide significant quotations. I am enjoying the book immensely, and I would highly recommend it as winter reading for all writers who are on strike, and all their supporters.
"The strife of the mid-1940s was also important for other reasons. At stake was nothing less than control over an industry that was essential in forging people’s consciousness. The titans of Hollywood had invested mightily in creating a "star system" that had captivated the imaginations of millions worldwide who followed the doings of actors – on and off the screen. Hollywood was surely a ‘dream factory.’ And these iconic actors lived lives that were the stuff of dreams as they instructed and mesmerized. But how would the multitudes respond to the sight of their favorite stars on picket lines, embroiled in a class struggle? How would the masses react when the Oz-like curtain of illusion was ripped away, revealing that the issues in Hollywood were not that different from those in Detroit, Pittsburgh, and other labor-management battlefronts? Yet there was at least one significant difference: class struggle in Hollywood could grab attention and provide lessons in ways unmatched by other labor-capital conflicts.
"Other factors help explain the ferocity of the onslaught on Hollywood labor [in the post-war years]. The screenwriters, which did include a complement of Communists, were indispensable to the production process. Though the moguls sought to show otherwise, making a decent movie without a competent screenplay based on a sound idea was tough. Even in the digital era of the twenty-first century, dispensing with writers – unlike other guilds and unions – will be difficult. Moreover, screenwriters, who were genuinely interested in intellectual exchange and foreign film were countered by moguls who were desperately interested in constructing firm protectionist walls to keep international cinema out of the U.S. market. When the screenwriters – who actively fought against tariff walls that kept foreign films from U.S. audiences – were denuded of Communist influence, it became easier for the moguls to bar foreign films while conquering markets abroad. This protectionism provided a comfortable cushion of profitability that proved critical to the industry in the post-World War II era in the face of a stiff challenge from television, independent film producers, and a successful antitrust lawsuit that disrupted the vertical integration of Hollywood. In fact, labor unrest in Hollywood erupted at an unpropitious moment for the moguls, confronted as they were by all manner of challenges – not least of which was anti-Semitism. Bulldozing CSU seemed all the more important in a context where nettlesome problems seemed to be proliferating and metastasizing."
At one point Horne comments: "By the time the unions went on strike in 1945… the studios were the ones exhibiting ‘class consciousness,’ standing shoulder-to-shoulder to confront a common foe, while the unions were busily knifing one another. The conflict in Hollywood illustrated an age-old lesson: class consciousness does exist in abundance in the United States; it is just painfully deficient among the working class."
Here I would like to point out that the owners of the multinational corporations are the most class-conscious of groups in history. They are constantly engaged in, often deadly, class struggle against those who challenge any bit of their power and dominance.
Jerry Monaco
24 December 2007
New York City
[Caveat: I am not a member of the WGA, nor do I speak for any of the officers or members of that union or any other union. I have been a member of other unions in the past and I am a supporter of a stronger union movement in the United States. J.M.]
This work is licensed under a Creative
Commons License.
28 December 2007
P.S. Ms. R. Kafrissen has a wonderful post on the mechanics of the blacklist at Rootless Cosmopolitan Mechanics of the Blacklist, Part 1. I highly recommend it.
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A Reader Without Words
for Catulus
All day I live without human
Voice -- No words but those
Petrified in print, from tongues
And terrors abstracted, brought
To life by my sight alone.
All day I am buried in dead
Language twenty centuries
More old -- My eyes burn
For sense --- My brain turns in fear
And no more do I wish
To speak or hear -- There are
No tongues -- There are no ears
And I am only this eye
And that bag of bones
Banned by the sun, thinking
through Virgil, Ovid, Homer,
of the ship wreck of my life
I adore the monsters...
I too might as well be dead...
My tongue made of wood
An insane sacrifice in the sacred grove
My lovers Cybele, the Furies, and Bacchus.
I am kin to Cacus and Cyclops, creatures
Of the Great Mother. But who are those
Sons of men who must make monsters
Only to destroy them? And who speaks
For the monsters they deign to murder?
Medusa herself once was beautiful
Destroyed by the jealousy of her lover's lover.
Who can look into the Gorgon's peaceful face
See the head swinging from Perseus's
Upheld arm and not think,
"The severed head is dreaming?"
A last thought before turning to stone.
Jerry Monaco
New York City
26 June 2007
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons License.
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"Pity the monsters" ...
those we destroy without loving
those we fear without knowing
the dead gods of other epochs
now made evil... "Pity
the monsters" for soon
the slayers of vengeance
the unyielding ministers
of pain, the furies of fear, will
be monsters for us
to slay in self-righteous
joy... swinging the head of
the Medusa to show our enemies
and turn them
like our hearts
to stone
... Medusa through Athena...
to the hegemony of Zeus...
Prometheus or Lucifer... for those
Christian enough to choose
Perseus to Brutus ... or shall we take
Caesar? but who prefers tyrants
to tyrant slayers.... then
Louis or Lenin? Saint Thomas
More or Saint Just?
Marat the Monster
and Corday the modern Judith?
Or Marat the martyr
and Charlotte the Vampire?-- How many monsters turned
to saints and back again? Yes
Monster's deserve pity
and all the ironies of history should not
negate the simple request
"Don't forget to show
my head to the people. It's well
worth seeing..."
for the crowd
it's the simple confirmation of death
the satisfaction of desire
for the new tyrant
(or is he our liberator?)
or the mere after thought of the condemned
that this head of mine
separated from that body
lying at your feet
will still
retain the power to turn those people
in the square
faces turned upward
hungry to see
to stone.
Benvenuto Cellini, 1545-1554. Loggia dei Lanzi, Florence
Notice that blood gushes from the head of the Gorgon. Imagine holding up the head of Louis Capet or of Danton to the revolutionary crowd standing before the guillotine. Why did Mark Antony have the decapitated head of Cicero nailed to the Rostrum in the Roman Formum? It was proof that the man had gone, and that he had not gone to ground or to the under world. This was truly propaganda of the deed, as the old anarchist phrase used to term it. The crowd saw the decapitated head and some monster was exorcised. But Perseus is showing his head for other reasons. The decapitated head of the Gorgon, Medusa, still had power, but it was a different kind of power than the decapitated head of a Cicero or a Robespierre. The head of Medusa was put into Perseus's pouch then brought forth to turn his enemies to stone... a very useful decapitation in this case. Similarly, the statue that you see here was a very useful piece of political propaganda. It was commissioned by the Medici after they returned from brief exile. While in exile they had been excoriated as tyrants, but now they were to make sure that their dominance would last. Cellini's Perseus is holding up the head, displaying it to the potentially Republican crowd, not to confirm the death of the monster, but to turn the crowd itself into stone. The message was that all enemies of the Medici will be destroyed with the seeming ease that Perseus turned his enemies to stone. Of course the Republican's had other ideas. See Judith below...
Detail of Benvenuto Cellini's Perseus Holding up the bloody head is a political act, meant to inspire fear, a lesson well learned by both tyrants and revolutionaries! (See the note immediately above and also the last note for Donatello's Judith and Holofernes below.)
Benvenuto Cellini's Perseus Beheading Medusa (from the perspective of sight standing below the statue at Florence (Firenza) the Loggia). Notice that from this angle you can see the body of the Medusa lying at Perseus's feet. Thus you can see that Cellini conflates two actions of the Perseus story -- cutting off the Medusa's head and showing the head to Perseus's enemies to turn them to stone.
Another angle, showing the statue, oxidation and all.
Antonio Canova, 1804-1808. Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. A very modest Perseus -- fig leaf and no blood and gore. Mario Praz once described the art of Canova as that of an "erotic frigidaire" I suppose the turned sword is another delicacy, which unlike Cellini's does not draw attention to the penis by paralleling it. One suspects that Canova was worried that Cellini's Perseus might reveal too much human reality -- sex and blood, revenge and rape -- for the eyes of his middle class patrons. We must dismiss our desires and designs from before our eyes when we commit our atrocities at a distance, as the fine nineteenth century folk were learning to do. The Medici and Cellini were not in favor of such delicacies.
This for your amusement is a "still living statue." Yes , it is a human actor posing as a statue. Fortunately realism is not extended to the head which this Perseus hold's in his hand.
A limestone metope from a temple at Selinas (on Sicily), 530-510 BCE.
It shows Perseus in the act of cutting off Medusa's head. Athena stands to Perseus's right, and Medusa holds Pegasus in her lap. The background shows traces of paint, as does Perseus' sword.
When looking at the composition of this relief compare it to some of the representations of Judith and Holofernes below. Ancient representations of Perseus and the Medusa, like Renaissance representations of Judith and Holofernes, often represented Perseus in the act of decapitation. It is good to think of the significance here. The ancient represented a Perseus who was in the act of slaying the monster, thus telling us that this act must be completed, must be continued. The implication is that these monsters must be killed in the present of the viewers of the work. The Renaissance representation's of Perseus do not depict Perseus in the act of slaying the monster, but in the act of displaying the monster's head to Perseus's enemies. The political significance for the use of this section of the myth was made explicit by the battle of artistic propaganda between the Medici and their enemies, between Perseus and Judith the Tyrant Slayer, in Florence at the end of the fifteenth century and the beginning of the sixteenth century. Capturing Judith in the act of assassination shows the viewer a representative act of tyrant slaying, an act by implication that must continue in the present (see below). But if you show Perseus beyond the act of slaying the monster, and in the act of displaying the monster's head to his enemies, the artist has shifted the story from the necessity of destroying a monster to the necessity of inspiring terror in the enemies of the monster-slayer. This is the first step on the road of the monster-slayer becoming a monster.
As "realistic" representation Cellini is my favorite, and when seeing his statue in situ on the square in Florence it is impossible (for me, at least) not to feel the chill of history. But this is by far my favorite Perseus,. It shows that in its time this monster "needed" to be murdered, and that Perseus was the monster-slayer, preferred by those who lived by these myths.... The sense of ritual, the necessity to have a hero to protect the city from monsters, is inscribed in the stones of this old Greek town in Sicily.
The Head of the Medusa - Detail of a Caravaggio.
It took Caravaggio to imagine the Gorgon's decapitated head in "modern" terms. Here the decapitation is "real"; the head still alive and the eyes and mouth register shock, as if Caravaggio were anticipating all of those decapitated monsters during the French Revolution. Or perhaps the Revolution borrowed some legends from representations of renaissance painters.
The Medusa's Head - Bernini. The Medusa is still alive here, but Bernini forgot to include the rest of her body, perhaps the body is at the feet of the Perseus in the Loggia dei Lanzi.
The Gorgon at Corfu Museum
She is in her prime as a monster... but we miss her beauty, before Poseidon raped her.
Medusa by Arnold Böcklin, circa 1878 One of the few head's of the Medusa where we actually see that before she was cursed for being a wanton slut, she was a beautiful woman. Curses is what you get for being free and more beautiful than the ever-so benevolent current gods.
Danton - the great leader of the French Revolution: Perhaps his head could serve as a model for the modern Medusa. He said to his executioner as he stepped up to the scaffold to be tied to the plank and slid under the guillotine's blade, "Don't forget to show my head to the people. It's well worth seeing."
The Assassination of Jean-Paul Marat by David. A little more "fangy" than "knifefy" as Buffy Summers said... The implication that Marat was killed by a vampire is probably not out of David's ken. Nevertheless, Corday no doubt thought of herself as a modern tyrant slayer, a Judith, for our times. But this did not stop the revolutionaries from seeing her as a vampire or a monster.
Judith with the Head of Halophernes, by Christophano Allori, 1613. Judith can show the head to the viewer of the painting. Is there regret here or satisfaction? This beautiful slayer of tyrants was of course a wonderful whore also. So it is perhaps she who is reversing the role of Perseus, and finding revenge for her spiritual mother the monster or goddess Medusa, the raped and scorned, and beautiful Medusa.
Judith Beheading Holofernes by Artemisia Gentileschi (1612-21) Oil on canvas, 199 x 162 cm Galleria degli Uffizi, Florence. When I saw this painting in the Uffizi, I thought to myself that this truly must be a self-portrait of Artemisia. If anyone can represent the revenge for the slaying of the wrong monsters surely she can.
Judith by Jan Massys, Koninklijk Museum voor Schone Kunsten, Antwerp.
This Judith is fresh from the act of seduction which allowed her to gain entry to the tent of the General and allowed her to approach the carnal body of Holofernes. But such a portrait as provided by Massys is too intimate for the political act that the Donatello's statue represents (see below). We cannot help but see the details of desire that led to the act of bloody decapitation. Such a representation of triumph over tyranny by the personification of justice would frighten a burgher republican aristocracy more than any possible tyrant. Any woman in your bed - wife, concubine, slave - could perform such an act of decapitation-castration. This Judith is too much the sister of the Gorgon already. Her beauty is as much an aspect of the monster as the snakes in Medusa's hair. And as we know from Buffy the Vampire Slayer, in order to fight the forces of darkness, it is necessary to interiorise some powers of the demon, even if such powers find their origins in a primal rape. (Is Judith a Vampire Slayer?)
Judith Beheading Holofernes by Caravaggio (c. 1598; Oil on canvas, 56 3/4 x 76 3/4 in; Galleria Nazionale dell'Arte Antica, Rome). One of my favorite paintings. The prissy-ness of Judith is not a distraction in this case. Her servant, the old witch eagerly standing by, is just letting her apprentice get used to the blood before graduating to the proper vampire status of Charlotte Corday.
Judith and Holofernes -- Donatello, 1460, Florence, Palazzo Vecchio.
This I give to continue the propaganda battle of the sculpture (see above). One monster slayer kills a tyrant and then another monster slayer kills the liberator who is now a new tyrant. The statue was commissioned by Cosimo de' Medici, but when the self-appointed monster slayer Girolamo Savonarola expelled the Medici and set up an austere republic the statue was moved to the he side of main door the Palazzo Vecchio to represent the Repubics desire to slay such monsters and tyrants that may present themselves before the wrath of the single and purest God. Savonarola was of course overthrown himself and slowly roasted alive, not simply burned at the stake as it is usually said. The Medici regained control of Florence and moved the statue of Judith and Holofernes to the courtyard inside the Palazzo Vecchio, to repress the memory of the bad years of Savonarola. But the memory of the monster slayer Savonarola did not die in the hearts of all. The Piagnoni kept his memory alive and briefly expelled the Medici again, restoring the statue once again to public view. This Republic lasted even a shorter time than Savonarola's Republic. When the Medici once again returned they had enough of the sympathetic magic of Donatello's Judith and Holofernes and decided to get some sympathetic magic of their own. They commissioned the statue of Perseus by Cellini (see above) to show that all future monsters, like Savonarola and his mob in the square will surely be turned to stone. So which monsters do you prefer?
Περσεύς
Jerry Monaco
New York City
26 May 2007
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons License.
music: Upside Down and Halfway to Happy Land Episode #7 |
| » Irony and Pity: the Hopeful Monsters of Interpretation in Robert Lowell's "Florence" |
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![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif) thesilentline wrote a little note to my Utopian essay Pity the Monsters! - The Monstrous in the Law and the Severed Head of Justice.
Perseus, David, and Judith,
lords and ladies of the Blood,
Greek demi-gods of the Cross,
rise sword in hand
above the unshaven,
formless decapitation
of the monsters, tubs of guts,
mortifying chunks for the pack.
Pity the monsters!
Pity the monsters!
Perhaps, one always took the wrong side -
Ah, to have known, to have loved
too many Davids and Judiths!
My heart bleeds black blood for the monster.
Robert Lowell, "Florence" in For the Union Dead
In no way does the author pity the monster. He bleeds black blood! Ill will! He is content with the monster's death and mocks those who pity the thing. It represents the anti-humanity in all, and the author is playing the roll of the heroic human.
Irony and Pity: the Hopeful Monsters of Interpretation in Robert Lowell's "Florence"
My point was not poetic interpretation! My original project was to sketch a utopian essay showing the confluence of monsters and justice. But if poetic interpretation is necessary then I am willing to oblige.
Narcissism, egoistic ambition, the study of the will to revenge, pride in their own sexual capacities are the primary characteristics of Judith, David and Perseus. Combine this with their absolute belief that the gods have sanctioned their murder because they themselves are displaced Kings and Queens (or so the spirits have whispered in their ears) and we have reached the psychological starting point of the heros the author selects as representative monster-slayers. Given Lowell's choice of such heros and the personal-political context of that selection your interpretation is a bit more "heroic" than Roert Lowell would have tolerated. But of course we always pick the wrong side. You have certainly picked the wrong side here.
Readers who confuse "Robert Lowell the author" with the narrator of the poem cannot conceive of the irony in the poem. The irony exists in the gap between the near perfect authorial control of oedipal themes and the narrator's ignorance of the the origins of his own sexual confusion. The narrator's ambivalence to the murder of monsters, his erotic attraction to the Gorgon, his obsession with black ink, black blood, etc. should be seen from the point of view of what the author expects his readers to know, what the poem shows the reader about the narrator of the poem.
I long for the black ink,
cuttlefish,..
So the narrator opens the poem with black ink. Why? ... Notice that the black blood that will later bleed from the narrator's heart, first appears as the black ink that the narrator longs for when he thinks of Florence. The black ink (FN1), made in Florence, is also associated with the black ink that squirts from the back of the cuttlefish, and the blackbone tails of the hosrseshoe crabs.
The black ink sold in Florence was also known as 'black gall.' Florence was known for its ink during the fourteenth and fifteenth century. This came about largely as an historical accident - both accounting and manuscript copying became very important to the Florentines during the same period. These two facts along with the confluence of the lust for classical manuscripts, the already existing textile industry, the many alchemists willing to experiment with dangerous substances, made Florence the center of manuscript production and ink production. (In fact the production of ink as an industry was revived by the Florentines after a hiatus of many years in Western Europe.) The kind of ink known as 'black ink' was also called 'gall ink' and the color was called 'black gall'. The parallel between 'gall ink' and the black gall that flows to the heart of the narrator is not an accident in Robert Lowell's poem. Lowell was familiar with the history of the black ink of Florence from his study of old illuminated manuscripts, many of them housed in the library of Florence before the 1966 flood. The black ink was originally made from 'gall nuts' (excretions from certain insects when laying eggs) and from vitrol or vitriol. To the medieval alchemist these names were significant. The names 'black gall' and 'black blood' were part of an association between the natural world and the human body. Emotions and the humors of the body could be discovered in what were in effect living metaphors. The gall nuts, the vitriol, the black-ink, and the black blood all had the same alchemical, (almost poetic) associations. The black blood flowed from the liver, gall bladder and kidneys and was supposed to attack the genitals and then flow to the heart. The black blood was associated with plague and when it flowed to the heart it usually caused death - a death that was associated with the 'blocked' erotic anger of 'gall.'
The narrator's "black blood" is a painful excretion but it connects him with Florence. It turns his body into an allegory of Florence. It is what he longs for and what by the end of the poem it is what he has become, producing 'black ink' of the City of Florence at his very heart. This is also part of the light/dark dichotomies of the poem. These dichotomies cannot be interpreted in any simplistic way because the 'heros' are in love with the dark and the monsters seem to bring a kind of murderous light. The decadent secretions from the gall bladder will flow to the genitals and follow the circuit to the heart. And what will the black blood produce? Will the gall ink be used to write a poem or will the narrator use the poison to motivate his murder of a monster-mother? The unseen author seems to know what the narrator does not know, namely that the associative patterns of the poem draw a connection between the black ink in the first line and the black blood that flows through the narrators heart.
Let me remind you of the history. The Donatello Judith was dragged out into the Piazza della Signoria to celebrate the expulsion of the Medicis.. The Cellini Perseus was at first put opposite Judith as if the Gorgon's head could turn Judith into stone. Lowell knew this history and he knew that "Florence, patroness / of the lovely tyranicides!" rarely freed itself from one form of tyranny or another. Each tyanicide followed the other proclaiming the previous tyranny to be monstrous on his own terms. There is a moral a choice to make, there is always the side of morality that we must choose, but caught in the feverishness of history and the erotic ambivalence of murder the author shows that the 'heros' are not who we think we are. One always takes the wrong side, when one chooses the side of the righteous heros and, like the narrator, is unable to trace the origin of the erotic longing for black blood of death. The reader who imitates the narrator will cheer when the 'hero' kills the "monster" and throws the chunks to the populous and hopes that by satisfying a bit of bloodlust he/she can make the rest forget the psychosexual origins of the 'tyranicide,' the new tyrant.
And how childish these "tyranicides" turn out to be. The Davids, the Judiths are always so young, as are the Greek demi-gods. But they are not only young they are children who do not even realize their role in the little (ever-so slightly Oedipal/Electra) drama. Lowell (though, again, the narrator of the poem is unconscious of the parallel) consciously compares their cruelty in killing the monsters to the kind of cruelty of children who enjoy their own cruelty toward the horseshoe crabs.
How vulnerable the horseshoe crabs
dredging the botton like flat-irons
in their antique armor,
with their swordgrass blackbone tails,
made for a child to grab
and throw strangling ashore!
These are monster-like horseshoe crabs who come equipped with their own armor but are vulnerable to children who might otherwise be picking wings off of flies. And these children throw the horseshoe crabs ashore in a way that cannot help but recall the swinging of the severed head of the Gorgon. This is a necessary cruelty, no doubt. The horseshoe crabs will be sold to restaurants so that the children can bring home bread to their families. And yet the sympathy of the Poet is not denied to the horseshoe crab, just as the pity of the poet is not denied to the monster. The narrator as usual is another matter. The narrator of the poem is enmeshed in his own web and does not seem to see the parallels between the children and the very young 'heros" and the crabs and "the monsters".
But what of the monster?
The Medusa is not only monster it is also Mother! This is self-consciously so in Lowell's writing but not in the narrator's telling. The Medusa, in the narrator's telling, fills him with sexual desire, which is indistinguishable from disgust. The narrator does not know the origins of his moral attraction/revulsion to the acts of tyranicide, but Lowell allows the good reader to understand what is happening in the words of the poem. (If we remember that Lowell himself went to Italy to collect his mother's dead body - "When I embarked from Italy with my Mother's body…." Sailing Home from Rapallo) The maternal reference to the "big bosomed body" of the Medusa and its "erotic terror" takes on more monstrous meanings if one fully comprehends the Oedipal sexuality of the poem.. Whose erotic terror is it anyway? The narrator's? Perseus's? It is the narrator's heart that "bleeds black blood for the monster" and though your interpretation of this blood seems to me to be how the child-heroes of the poem would interpret the act, the narrator of the poem is very confused by it all. Lowell leaves it to the reader to realize that the narrator of the poem has now become like Florence making black-ink and like the cuttlefish that squirts black-ink, and like the blood that exudes from the necks of the victims of the tyranicides.
The myths of Perseus, David, and Judith are overflowing with thanatos and eros, of the wish to displace the father or the mother, the desire to seduce the murder victim. Lowell puts the narrator in the same position as the populace of Florence, both do not understand all of the deeper implications of their symbolic actions, - the Ghibellines, the Guelphs, the Medicis, the Savaranola's, the intervening Popes, all used the symbols contained in art to proclaim their victories and to triumph the defeat of their enemies. They used the symbols without ever conceiving of the deeper irony that the symbols represented, perhaps sowing the seeds in thought of their own downfall. The narrator is slightly ignorant of these themes, and remains as confused as the crowd in Florence. Lowell was not so ignorant.
Remember that it was not in self-defense that Perseus killed Medusa. Perseus sought the Gorgon in order to further his own ends. The Medusa herself was only a means to those ends as she was always only a means to someone else's ends, alive or dead. Yes! "Pity the Monsters!", but who are the monsters here? The Gorgon who is used for the initiation rite of Perseus. Or Perseus who shows the severed head of the Gorgon to his oppressors – his grandfather, Acrisius who usurped the throne, his mother's suitor and lover Polydectes of Seriphos; Phineus, the uncle-fiance-lover of Andromeda. In order to avenge the father one must of course kill the father. And in order to fornicate with the mother one must make sure to cut off her head so that she is a faceless body. The world is not as simple as a Freudian fairy tale and neither is the meaning of Robert Lowell's poem. Perseus hopes to deny the possibility of his own petrification by turning others to stone. Not so strangely, the Medusa is both light and darkness. Perseus holds her severed head like a lantern to light his way.
The heros are always the hopeful monsters, killing the monsters and claiming the justification of law and the gods, but in fact seeking vengeance and profit. May our murders never bring the black-light of blood-bile to show our way.
Pity the nation that needs heros!
Jerry Monaco
New York City
30 December 2005
This post is included in the Carnival of Vanities at Harshly Mellow.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons License.
--
Jerry Monaco's Philosophy, Politics, Culture Weblog is
Shandean Postscripts to Politics, Philosophy, and Culture
http://www.livejournal.com/users/monacojerry/
His fiction, poetry, weblog is
Hopeful Monsters: Fiction, Poetry, Memories
http://www.livejournal.com/users/jerrymonaco/
Notes, Quotes, Images - From some of my reading and browsing
http://www.livejournal.com/community/jerry_quotes/
Dec. 30th, 2005 @ 01:57 pm
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| » Pity the Monsters! - The Monstrous in the Law - A Utopian Essay - 1 |
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Pity the Monsters! - The Monstrous in the Law and the Severed Head of Justice - A Utopian Essay (First in the Pity the Monsters Series) - Essay Idea 1
"Remarkable Presences" - Part One of an Unwritten Utopian Essay
"Monstrous bodies are the remarkable presences that appear as signs of civic omen, or trauma, and which demand interpretation: they offer a bit of each, apocalypse as well as utopia."
Ingebretsen, Edward J. (2001). At Stake: Monsters and the Rhetoric of Fear in Public Culture. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
The representation of monsters and the monstrous in narrative and poetry is a deep universal of human culture. It is part of the cognitive tangle of the human brain, and even if we do not know in what room of the labyrinth the fear and hope for the monster lives, we can speculate that the fear is basically part of our biological history. As such it is prior to the development of the rule of law. Our hopeful fears of the monstrous and the universal narratives of the monsters of our minds (thrall-unto and triumph-over) along with those narratives we stage for our mothers, fathers, brothers, sisters, and fellow culture-comrades constantly appear in the law and its representations.
It is perhaps true that the monstrous is merely our own fear of decay and deformity, of mis-shappen birth, of attacks by the fates, furies, and nature from without and within and yet this has not stopped us from reifying our fluid fears and hopes of monsters and the monstrous into the law. Let me propose that the "hero" is the monstrousness of the law and "justice" is the fearful monster heroine that the law has repressed.
Taking the Wrong Side Part Two of an Unwritten Utopian Essay
Perseus, David, and Judith,
lords and ladies of the Blood,
Greek demi-gods of the Cross,
rise sword in hand
above the unshaven,
formless decapitation
of the monsters, tubs of guts,
mortifying chunks for the pack.
Pity the monsters!
Pity the monsters!
Perhaps, one always took the wrong side -
Ah, to have known, to have loved
too many Davids and Judiths!
My heart bleeds black blood for the monster.
Robert Lowell, "Florence" in For the Union Dead
Yes! but why should the monster have our pity? Precisely because the monster was transmogrified into its demonic deformity by the monstrousness of the tyrant. In my story the monstrous is the codification of state-rule and the monster is the personification of Justice, untamed in all its polymorphous promiscuity of fury. So perhaps "one always took the wrong side" no matter the side that one takes, for we do not see that in our fearful flight from the monster we run into the arms of the monstrous.
The story goes that when the Medici in Florence were briefly overthrown, and a functioning oligarchical Republic restored, the anti-Medici party set the sculpture of Judith, with a sword raised to decapitate Holofernes, at the side of the main door of Palazzo della Signoria. It was "the symbol of the liberty of the Florentine people."
The Medici upon their restoration responded to this symbol of freedom with their own symbol of the triumph of law over the female monster. The response to Donatello's Judith was Cellini's Perseus. Let me suggest that Perseus is the personification of "the rule of law" and Judith is a personification of justice.
The Cellini-Medici-Perseus as a symbolic response to the Donatello-Republican-Judith shows psychological insight into the deep mythos of justice and the law. Perseus transforms Judith into the Gorgon in the act of severing her head. By the time we see the severed head of Medusa, hair gripped in the fist of Perseus, held like a dangling lantern to turn his enemies into stone, the act of transformation has already taken place. The insane severed head of justice is the Medusa or the Furies transformed from vengeance into pure hatred, or tamed into the red-eyed revenge of the rule of law - the gods and goddesses of the ancients always reappear as the devils of the succeeding age. This was recognized and by Aeschylus in the Oresteia. Note that Cellini's Perseus shows the act of decapitation already complete. Donatello's Judith is poised in mid-motion before the downfall of the sword, always in the act of decapitation.
This was a public sculpture. The sculpture itself was an act of political will, but it was recognized as an incomplete act, an act that would always have to be ready to go forward again, because tyranny is a hydra-head and when justice acts in the guise of liberator she must always repeat her actions. A tyrant is never banished for all time. So the actual decapitation is not shown.
Donatello of course could have made other choices. For example look at this disturbingly sexy Judith by Jan Massys.
This Judith is fresh from the act of seduction which allowed her to gain entry to the tent of the General and allowed her to approach the carnal body of Holofernes. But such a portrait as provided by Massys is too intimate for the political act that the Donatello's statue represents. We cannot help but see the details of desire that led to the act of bloody decapitation. Such a representation of triumph over tyranny by the personification of justice would frighten the burgher republican aristocracy more than any possible tyrant. Any woman in your bed - wife, concubine, slave - could perform such an act of decapitation-castration. This Judith is too much the sister of the Gorgon already. Her beauty is as much an aspect of the monster as the snakes in Medusa's hair. And as we know from Buffy the Vampire Slayer, in order to fight the forces of darkness, it is necessary to interiorise some powers of the demon, even if such powers find their origins in a primal rape. (Is Judith a Vampire Slayer?)
Cellini's Perseus has completed the act of decapitation. He shows the severed head to his enemies. He turns them to stone. The judgment of the law brooks no hesitancy. This is unlike the establishment of liberty through an act of justice; such an act may be arbitrary and even mistaken but it is never finished. In the end Judith herself is turned to stone as the statute of Perseus is erected within her sight - justice must be reified in the rule of law or else the order of man will not exist. We must always take the wrong side because the choice as represented to us is between tyrant and monster, rule and vengeance, order and desire, law and love. It is a false choice of course.
[Note: I have hundreds of ideas for essays. They just come too fast for me to write and research. I have decided that I would release these ideas into the cyber-ether, a jagged fragment at a time, in the hope that they will lead me (or you) somewhere. If anyone uses these ideas, please tell me.]
Jerry Monaco
New York City
30 November 2005
Note this Post is part of the Carnival of Vanities #168 @ Denali Flowers.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons License.
--
Jerry Monaco's Philosophy, Politics, Culture Weblog is
Shandean Postscripts to Politics, Philosophy, and Culture
http://www.livejournal.com/users/monacojerry/
His fiction, poetry, weblog is
Hopeful Monsters: Fiction, Poetry, Memories
http://www.livejournal.com/users/jerrymonaco/
Notes, Quotes, Images - From some of my reading and browsing
http://www.livejournal.com/community/jerry_quotes/
Nov. 30th, 2005 @ 06:58 pm
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| » Legal-Regimes and Extralegal Violence: A search for patterns in 'real-existing' law: |
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Legal-Regimes and Extralegal Violence: A search for historical patterns in 'real-existing' law:
"In January 1899, a black laborer at the Land Pebble mine, dared argue with his foreman, who pulled out a pistol and shot the laborer dead. The foreman turned himself in to the Bartow sheriff. But the sheriff brushed the incident aside. Everyone knew what had happened, he said. The foreman should go back to work." Kevin Boyle, The Arc of Justice: A Saga of Race, Civil Rights and Murder in the Jazz Age, p.65.
Such incidents cannot be understood legally, or even from the point of view of common sense, with legal analysis as it stands today. The action of the foreman and sheriff are illegal of course, but then why, in that time and place were they accepted by all of the legal authorities? In any given society such 'extralegal actions' are not an anomaly, but simply the way any given society works. Written laws themselves often only set a framework for extralegal and non-legal actions. Practical questions must be asked. The question is not "What is 'legality'?" in these situations or "What is 'the rule of law'?" but, rather, "What is the legal regime in effect in this case, in this place, in this society?" Furthermore some concept of "extralegal violence", and how extralegal violence is contested and normalized, is necessary.
The above is an incident from Florida in the post-Reconstruction period. It took place in the phosphate mines. Working in the phosphate mines was brutal and dangerous. It consisted of breaking stones for twelve hours a day, seven days a week. Few whites would do the job so the mine owners hired young, single black men, though of course the foremen, managers and owners were white. The camps that developed around the phosphate mines were essentially company run towns, even though they were nominally under the jurisdiction of the County Sheriff, in this case the Sheriff of Bartow. The usual situation followed. Thus, even though prostitution was illegal, it was sanctioned around the camps by the owners of the mines who essentially sold franchises to the brothel owners. The prostitutes were black and the brothel owners white. It is only natural that these camps, and all such company towns would become laws unto themselves. Most analyses of law do not take into account this kind of legal regime. The question is what kind of law is operating in this situation? Why is it here? How did it develop? What were its institutions, etc.?
The sheriff's and the deputies in Bartow "tolerated" and sanctioned this situation and the white elite benefited from it. But the actual operation of such legal regimes is rarely studied as part of real legal systems. Of course, periodically things in the camps would get out of hand and then the Sheriff would go in with newly deputised town's people and settle the trouble with direct collective violence. This collective violence whether it was a 'lynching' or an 'anti-saloon' or anti-gambling raid, was always justified as a maintenance of order. Of course there were and are similar situations through-out history and through-out the world today. And neither is this only a story about race-relations in the United States....
It is also not always a story about good and evil. This is because often legal-regimes are contested. Various kinds of revolutionary situations have existed - in Athens, Republican Rome, during the English Revolution, the American Revolution, the French Revolution - that have established legal regimes that look very similar on the surface to the direct collective extralegal violence that one might have seen in Bartow. Some of these legal regimes may be 'justified' if not quite 'just.' Or to put it more starkly, the collective 'extralegal violence' of the abolitionist raider who frees a group of slaves, must not be put on the same moral level as the collective extralegal violence that keeps the ex-slaves in de facto bondage. Moral judgements should be made separately from the description of the patterns I am considering. The 'is/ought' division should be kept firmly in mind along with the aims of the agents and the purpose of the institutions.
For instance, in mid-Republican Rome, the Plebs seceded from the city and elected two tribunes. T. J. Cornell describes the resulting situation
"The tribunes authority was based on what the Romans called a lex sacrata. This was a collective resolution reinforced by a solemn oath. Having elected their tribunes, the plebeians swore to obey them and to defend them to the death; anyone who should harm them became sacer, a term for which the English word 'accursed' is an inadequate translation. The formula sacer esto ('let him be accursed') was pronounced on persons who by their actions harmed the gods. Such a person became forfeit to the god in question, and on death was surrendered into his power; anyone who killed the offender was therefore carrying out a sacred duty, and did so without incurring any penalty or blood-guilt. In this way the tribunes of the plebs became 'sacrosanct' (i.e. inviolable.)" (T.J Cornell The Beginnings of Rome, 259).
***
"The lex sacrata gave the plebeian tribunes extensive powers which derived ultimately from their inviolability. They were able to enforce their will by coercion (coercito). They could impose fines, imprisonment, or even the death penalty, against anyone who challenged their authority or who made a physical or verbal assault on their persons. Because of the sacrosanctity the tribunes were able to protect individual plebeians from ill treatment by the rich and powerful, and from the arbitrary punishment of the magistrates, by giving the 'assistance' (auxiium). At first this was an extra-legal procedure in which the tribune intervened personally, and rescued plebeians by [260] threatening opponents with the dire consequences of the lex sacrata if they should try to use force against him. In other words it was a form of organized self-help by the plebs, who backed their actions by lynch-law disguised as divine justice." (T.J Cornell The Beginnings of Rome: Italy and Rome from the Bronze Age to the Punic Wars (C. 1000-264 BC) , 259-60).
There are many interesting things that can be said about this passage. For instance, it is an exact illustration of the Sartrean fused-group and how it is united through both an oath and violence. It is also a particularly peculiar illustration (strangely enough) of the establishment of the rule of law through establishing an exception to sovereign power. What the plebs created was a kind of dual-power or counter-sovereignty. An unstable situation in the long run. At these points (when and where the plebs were willing to fight for their legal regime) the legal regime was a matter of a power struggle. What the patricians offered in return was 'the rule of law.' They offered a codified written law and it was given to them. To some extent this split the plebs along class lines. But, still, the plebs kept to their counter-sovereignty until it was integrated into the the legal regime as a whole, eventually becoming a much contested institution in the Roman constitution.
My point here in regard to the division between description and prescription, (i.e. "ought" cannot necessarily be derived from "is") is that personally I would support the self-help (lynch mob) of the plebs in their assertion of their right to self-determination contra the patricians in Republican Rome, but would not support the lynch-mob (self-help) of the nightriders in the period of Reconstruction in their assertion of their white supremacy (self-determination) contra the Union army of occupation and African- Americans, even if parallel patterns are at work. My analytical point is that we should not shrink from noticing the historical parallels, even if they go against our political (ideological) grain.
So my question is, in the above situations and hundreds of more (some of which are documented in this weblog), how do we think of the law? No matter what the stated law is, we must also study the 'real-existing' law that people live day-to-day: How are punishment and rewards allocated? By whom are they allocated? Who is allowed to speak, when and where and who will listen? Where is violence the norm and accepted though technically illegally? And where is it not even seen as technically illegal violence? This law is quite different from the law that is studied in law schools. In fact in law schools we are mostly taught to believe that this law simply does not exist. It is a law of which we dare not speak in a law school classroom. The belief in the non-existence of real, everyday, legal regimes - the law as people experience the law, the law as it is organized in all kinds of institutions (only a few of which are explicitly 'legal institutions') -, the willful ignorance of this law is deeply ideological. Unfortunately, to see this law clearly puts a lawyer in a state of cognitive dissonance with the codified norms of the lawyer's professional code of ethics. I maintain that this result is one of the doctrinal functions of professional codes and must be analyzed as part of the ideology of 'professionalism.'
My basic project has always been to take a page from Llewellyn's book and show that the law is not simply what is written but it is what 'these people do'. But we must expand the notion of 'these people' beyond judges and lawyers and include the cop on the beat and the corporate manager and the foremen and quasi-sovereign institutions in their social 'spaces'. It was this thought that was the beginning of my notion of looking into the patterns of extralegal violence, legal violence, and violence that is not even considered violence within the rule of law. (For instance the deadly conditions in the mines, which were supposedly a matter of contract between mine worker and mine owner.)
So to repeat, in every instance when I am studying an actual dispute or case or 'norm' or law, I would ask: What is the 'legal regime' in this situation? What if the rule of law states one thing about the legality of an action, but in each and every case the legal regime leads to actions that are exceptions to the 'rule of law'? How and why do extralegal actions integrated into a given society's legal institutions?
These considerations, along with the patterns of exception to the rule of law, the institutions of quasi-sovereignty, the construction of dominant ideology, and how these are all integrated into the rule of a dominant class or competing classes is only the beginning of any historical analysis of law and society. Each society must be studied in context. There are no skeleton keys to unlock every door. Yet, I maintain there are general legal and historical patterns from classical Athens, through ancient Rome, following down to the emergence of the nation-state and modern business institutions.
I also believe that most historians and legal commentators have only glimpsed these patterns, mainly because they don't look at human society from the point of view of a methodological naturalism and also because nobody but the "dilettantish" generalist (Lewis Mumford [see The Myth of the Machine a book that greatly influenced me too many years ago], William McNeil, Charles Tilley, or even the regrettable, Jared Diamond, or the even more excitingly regrettable E. O. Wilson) is willing to look at the grand scale of human society,and look at it as just another interesting formation, a kind of natural phenomena with its own patterns. Either I am crazy or I have a lot of work to do that I will probably never finish.
These are only the beginnings of my thoughts that have led to my reflections on legal and social institutions.
Perhaps the notions of 'legal regime' and 'extralegal actions' will be useful to you. I think they fit with what you are doing.
Jerry Monaco
22 September 2005
New York City
Related post: Theses on the Concept of "extra-legal violence" with references to the "Rule of Law" and the idea of the "legal regime"
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Sep. 22nd, 2005 @ 07:32 pm
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| » Theses on the Concept of "extra-legal violence" |
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Theses on the Concept of "extra-legal violence" with references to the "Rule of Law" and the idea of the "legal regime":
The concept of extra legal violence is to some extent a misnomer but it is still very useful.
In the first place we have to make a distinction between tolerated, and in some cases encouraged, extra-legal violence, extra-legal violence that is contested by or not tolerated by some sectors of the elite, and extra-legal violence that is contested or supported by other sectors of the culture or by the multitude. We must also designate a kind of violence that is neither legal nor illegal, what I will call non-legal violence. Then we must designate a kind of violence that is illegal. Only by studying each historical and cultural context of a particular legal system, and by studying what legal institutions do and don't do, what the rule of law covers and doesn't cover can we decide how extra-legal violence is interpreted within a society. I call this historical and cultural context of a legal system a "legal regime." (Two examples: Any study of race relations in the United States and especially the 'culture of terror' against African Americans - lynching, assassination, individual killings of black workers, etc. - will show that extra-legal violence was a part of the United States legal regime. Any study of the system of the pater-familias in the time of the Roman Republic would provide a similar example.
It is the institution of the law that establishes the concept of what we designate extra-legal, non-legal, and of course illegal. When a legal regime is established and legal institutions develop, at the same time there is an establishment of violence that is legally sanctioned, extra-legal violence that is tolerated, and non-legal violence that is not even recognized as a violation of humans (or nature). In a society where legal institutions exist these recognitions and non-recognitions of violence are made a part of the structures of the institutions, themselves.
Many human societies have established legal regimes but do not have formal legal institutions or at least very few. In such societies there is a sense that most violence is extra-legal and is only justified or not justified after the fact if the particular act of violence becomes contentious in that society. These societies simply do not have a concept of the 'rule of law.' Through out the whole of human history most societies had no established legal regimes at all, only customs, informal rules, and customary ways of making decisions. In such societies the very concept of "legal," "illegal", "extra-legal" are simply anachronistic. It is an artifact of the legal-mind that they we apply legal notions to the whole of society as if this such an application were only natural. Such notions as law, the rule of law, and legal institutions are only applicable to societies that have developed organized state institutions and up until very recently most human societies did not have such institutions. Only relatively recently in the history of the human species have such institutions come into existence. Legal institutions must be looked at with this general background in mind. Up until 5,000 years ago a study of the human species could have been made without once mentioning the notion of law and absolutely nothing would have been lost from such a study. Even as recently as 2,000 years ago what we call law has only been applied to a small portion of the human species. All of this is relevant historical background when studying how the "rule of law" establishes a tolerance of extra-legal and non-legal violence.
In any society where a legal regime exists, and legal institutions are established, and there is a notion of what we now call the "rule of law", these institutions and notions also create tolerated and/or encouraged acts of extra-legal and non-legal violence that are an essential part of the legal regime and social enforcement of rules and customs. To some extent the relation between extra-legal violence, non-legal violence and notions of legality are not even recognized, and yet they are often essential to the social order. It is to the extent that the relation between these notions go unrecognized in any legal regime, it is to that extent, that the notion of legality reveals its ideological bounds.
I intend to show that extra-legal violence and non-legal violence can be mapped from society to society and legal regime to legal regime. I also intend to show that these maps of legal regimes have a certain congruity, from each to each, and more - that they are to a great extent historically homologous. This is only a first step to a larger project. Extra-legal violence is to some extent relatively easy to define because we know 'violence' when we see it (unless you only read Derrida or Agamben and Benjamine's Critique of Violence). What is harder to define is violation and human exploitation in general. The larger project is to show how legality, extra-legality, and non-legality can be mapped in the relation to what is recognized as human exploitation and what is not, what is allowable coercion and what is not allowable coercion.
Jerry Monaco
New York
Wednesday, August 24, 2005
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Aug. 24th, 2005 @ 07:36 pm
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| » Quotes on Law and Violence: Quotes Collection #2 |
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Quotes on Law and Violence: Quotes Collection #2
(Notes on Quotes: I have posted 3 Quotes Notebooks. This is the second. The first quote book is located at 1 Dec. 2004 and contains quotes on "Ideology and Language." The third quote book is at 15 Dec. 2004 and contains quotes relating to "Literary Criticism." My intention is to assume some knowledge of these quotes in my written entries and to refer to these quotes as I go along. The quotes are worth reading in themselves and are probably more enjoyable, in a name dropping way, than anything by this blogger. It is for this reason that I will begin to include quotes of myself in these quote books. It is all simply food for thought.)
James Baldwin Quotes:
JB:-1 - The civilized have created the wretched, quite coldly and deliberately, and do not intend to change the status quo; are responsible for their slaughter and enslavement; rain down bombs on defenseless children whenever and wherever they decide that their "vital interests" are menaced, and think nothing of torturing a man to death: these people are not to be taken seriously when they speak of the "sanctity" of human life, or the "conscience" of the civilized world.
- James Baldwin Source: page 489 of COLLECTED ESSAYS (1998), from chapter one of "The Devil Finds Work" (orig. pub. 1976)
Fredrick Douglas Quotes
"Power concedes nothing without demand": Finding the Level of (In)Justice
Those who profess to favor freedom, and yet deprecate agitation, are men who want crops without plowing up the ground. They want rain without thunder and lightning. ...Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will. ...Find out just what people will submit to, and you have found the exact amount of injustice and wrong which will be imposed upon them; and these will continue until they are resisted with either words or blows, or with both. The limits of tyrants are prescribed by the endurance of those whom they oppress.
--Frederick Douglass, 1849
Ugo Mattei Quotes:
Imperial Law, the Rule of Law, against Solidarity
Imperial law is produced, in the interest of international capital, by a variety of both public and private institutions, all sharing a gap in legitimacy, sometimes called the "democratic deficit." Imperial law is shaped by a spectacular process of exaggeration, aimed at building consent for the purpose of hegemonic domination. Imperial law subordinates local legal arrangements world-wide, reproducing on the global scale the same phenomenon of legal dualism that thus far has characterized the law of developing countries. Predatory economic globalization is the vehicle, the all-mighty ally, and the beneficiary of imperial law. Ironically, despite its absolute lack of democratic legitimacy, imperial law imposes as a natural necessity, by means of discursive practices branded "democracy and the rule of law," a reactive legal philosophy that outlaws redistribution of wealth based on social solidarity.
Ugo Mattei, A Theory Of Imperial Law: A Study On U.S. Hegemony And The Latin Resistance 10 Ind. J. Global Legal Stud. 383, 383-84.
Jerry Monaco Quotes:
Law as the Hope for Justice and Law as the Normalization of Violence
JM:1 - In all city-states where the history is known, it was the demos or the plebs - the multitude, the mob - who demanded the codification of customs into written law. The desire of the mob was for laws that would place limits on the arbitrary violence of the rulers and masters. And so they did to a small extent. The demand for written law by the mob was the hope for fairness and justice. Society had become too complex and divided between rich and poor, lords and landless, for the poor and landless to hope justice would result from the personal vengeance of the "furies" or the condescension of the paterfamilias. The institution of the written law did not, and could not, satisfy the hopes of the mob; this is because in all societies yet extent law has been an affirmation of the status quo -- i.e. the normalization of violence through the creation of "legitimate" mechanisms of state violence and the confirmation of "private" mechanisms of class and caste violence. The whole process of how the demand for the rule of law is transformed into the normalization of violence can be seen in its naked form in growing city-states and in times of great historical transition. The focus of an historical study of the relation between the compliments of sovereignty and law, ideology and violence, would best begin here, with that early state-formation, known as the city-state.
- From "A Sartrean Essay on Law and Violence in Republican Rome"
Thomas More Quotes:
Public Law as Extortion of the rich from the Poor:
What is worse, the rich every day extort a part of their daily allowance from the poor not only by private fraud but by public law ... and finally, by making laws, have palmed it off as justice. Consequently, when I consider and turn over in my mind the state of all commonwealths flourishing anywhere today, so help me God, I can see nothing else than a kind of conspiracy of the rich, who are aiming at their own interests under the name and title of the commonwealth. They invent and devise all ways and means by which, first, they may keep without fear of loss all that they have amassed by evil practices and, secondly, they may then purchase as cheaply as possible and abuse the toil and labour of all the poor. These devices become law as soon as the rich have once decreed their observance in the name of the public--that is, of the poor also!
Thomas More, Utopia (1516), reprinted in 4 The Complete Works of St. Thomas More 217, 241 (Edward Surtz & J.H. Hexter eds., 1965).
Thomas More on Enclosure: The Sheep that Eat Men
Your sheep ... which are usually so tame and so cheaply fed, begin now, according to report, to be so greedy and wild that they devour human beings themselves and devastate and depopulate fields, houses, and towns....
[I]n order that one insatiable glutton and accursed plague of his native land may join field to field and surround many thousand acres with one fence, tenants are evicted. Some of them, either circumvented by fraud or overwhelmed by violence, are stripped even of their own property, or else, wearied by unjust acts, are driven to sell. By hook or by crook the poor wretches are compelled to leave their homes--men and women, husbands and wives, orphans and widows, parents with little children and a household not rich but numerous, since farming requires many hands....
[I]n wandering from place to place, what remains for them but to steal and be hanged--justly, you may say!--or to wander and beg....
Thus, the unscrupulous greed of a few is ruining the very thing by virtue of which your island was once counted fortunate in the extreme....
Cast out these ruinous plagues. Make laws that the destroyers of farmsteads and country villages should either restore them or hand them over to people who will restore them and who are ready to build. Restrict this right of rich individuals to buy up everything and this licence to exercise a kind of monopoly for themselves."
THOMAS MORE, in IV UTOPIA (THE COMPLETE WORKS OF ST. THOMAS MORE) 65-71 (1963).
Bertrand Russell Quotes
A Minimal Basis for the Concept of "Justice"
All who are not lunatics are agreed about certain things. That it is better to be alive than dead, better to be adequately fed than starved, better to be free than a slave. Many people desire those things only for themselves and their friends; they are quite content that their enemies should suffer. These people can be refuted by science: Humankind has become so much one family that we cannot insure our own prosperity except by insuring that of everyone else. If you wish to be happy yourself, you must resign yourself to seeing others also happy.
- Bertrand Russell statement (1950), in "The science to save us from Science", in GREAT ESSAYS IN SCIENCE edited by Martin Gardner (Prometheus, 1994)
Adam Smith Quotes:
Laws: A Combination of the Rich to Oppress the Poor
AS:1 - Laws and government may be considered... as a combination of the rich to oppress the poor, and preserve to themselves the inequality of goods which would otherwise be soon destroyed by the attacks of the poor .... The government and laws ... tell them they must either continue poor or acquire wealth in the same manner as they have done.
Lecture by Adam Smith (Feb. 22, 1763), in Lectures on Jurisprudence 207, 208- 09 (R.L. Meek et al. eds., 1978).
Shandean Postscripts to Politics, Philosophy & Culture
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Dec. 3rd, 2004 @ 11:59 pm
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