Language and Oppression in the Classroom

In the United States, there is a widely held confidence in our guarantee of the equality of opportunity. We believe that each individual, no matter how humble their beginnings, is equally capable of attaining any position they aim for. This belief find its support in our consensus that schools, and more specifically classrooms, are locations where this equality is established and ensured. In a collection of essays entitled “Teaching Transgress,” social critic bell hooks gives careful consideration to the classroom environment and those individuals who populate it. The situation she describes stands in direct refutation to our confidence in equality of opportunity through education varies greatly across economic class, race, gender, and many other aspects of identity. Further, she argues that the classroom has become a space of oppression for those who are already disadvantaged. In what follows, we will engage with two of hooks’ essays entitled “Language” and “Confronting Class in the Classroom” to demonstrate how our use of language is one aspect of classroom activity supports the reification of oppressive social structures. Our discussion will focus particularly on the issue of black oppression by white supremacist values. We will also make reference of Claudia Rankine’s Citizen: An American Lyric, where we find descriptions of experience that hooks’ theoretical claims.

Reflecting on her own relationship to class and privilege, hooks recalls the differences of experience between herself and her classmates at Stanford University.¹ She found that the privileged students held those around them to a different set of standards than what she was familiar with. For example, certain behaviors that she felt were characteristic of any human being were condemned and attributed to the lower classes. Simple reactions such as unrestrained laughter, being loud, and being angry were deemed unacceptable in this academic setting. hooks noticed that individuals from upper and middle class backgrounds felt discomfort when “heated exchanges” took place in class because they associated loudness and emotionality with threat. Natural, emotional reactions to the content of discussion were avoided in place of choreographed exchanges of data. Students who were unwilling to conform to these values and practices were typically excluded by the privileged and marked as troublemakers or outsiders. hooks writes “If one was not from a privileged class group, adopting a similar demeanor to that of the group could help one advance. It is still necessary for students to assimilate bourgeois values in order to be deemed acceptable.”² Students from lower to middle class backgrounds could attempt to mimic the behaviors of someone from a more privileged background to fit in; however, this mimicry often caused them more stress and internal tension. This stress arises from what we shall describe below as a suppression and devaluation of authentic and free expression in supposedly democratic spaces. Socially enacted suppression of this kind does not only correspond to differences of class. Because the status quo supports connections drawn between race and economic class, the restrictive use of language in academic and professional settings makes experiences of racial oppression possible therein.³

In “Language,” hooks calls attention to the experiential divide between those who grew up speaking standard English and those who grew up speaking black vernacular, as well as the structural biases against the latter. She begins with a quote from the poem “The Burning of Paper Instead of Children” by Adrienne Rich: “This is the oppressor’s language yet I need it to talk to you.”⁴ This quote reflects that the dominant language is so institutionally established in colonial societies that there is no support for alternative modes of communication. In the American context, it attends to the impact of a history of colonization and white supremacy on the development black identities. English was used in colonial America to invoke fear in African slaves, and still has the power to invoke superiority over working class blacks.⁵ hooks explains that for many black individuals, “it is difficult not to hear in standard English always the sound of slaughter and conquest.”⁶ Because slaves would be punished for making use of their native tongue, they found ways to bend the English language, to reshape it to include their own experience and values.⁷ In response, black vernacular was and continues to be developed as a space of resistance it provides a mode of communicating and relating to the world that is not subordinate to the values of oppressors. hooks describes black vernacular as liberatory language, as “an intimate speech that could say far more than [is] permissible within the boundaries of standard English.”⁸

It is often considered inappropriate in academic and professional settings, and this is communicated both explicitly and implicitly to black individuals. On one occasion hooks integrated black vernacular into her work only to have it sent back, translated into standard English by her editors.⁹ In Citizen, Rankine recounts an unfortunately familiar experience that characterizes the oppressive force of such dismissal:

Standing outside the conference room, unseen by the two men waiting for other to arrive, you hear one say to the other that being around black people is like watching a foreign film without translation. Because you will spend the nest two hours around the table that makes conversing easier, you consider waiting a few minutes before entering the room.¹¹

To some this may appear to be a small offense. But for many black individuals, experiences like these are quotidian reminders: if you make use of black vernacular, though it may be your native tongue, your academic or professional legitimacy may be challenged. Conversely, when white individuals make use of black vernacular, it’s all in good fun. To illustrate this discrepancy, hooks reflects upon the impact of black vernacular appearing in mass media platforms such as music or television. While she appreciates the importance of its presence in popular culture, as a result she has seen it trivialized and delegitimized by the mimicry of some white individuals. Consider this “friendly” interaction described by Rankine:

You are rushing to meet a friend in a distant neighborhood of Santa Monica. This friend says, as you walk toward her, You are late you nappy-headed ho. … Maybe the content of her statement is irrelevant and she only means to signal the stereotype of “black people time” by employing what she perceives to be “black people language.” … You don’t know what she means. You don’t know what response she expects from you nor do you care. For all your previous understandings, suddenly incoherence feels violent.

When the utility of black vernacular is reduced to entertainment or comedy, the intimate relationship between language and its native speakers is disrespected. In both these cases we observe the instantiation of inequality between white and black individuals, between standard English and black vernacular; neither language nor speaker are given the same support by the status quo. Reflecting on the above discussion of hooks’ experience at Stanford, this inequality can be instantiated by the attitudes we bring to academic settings and the way we treat each other therein. To correct this, we must realize that the development of a liberatory language is not enough to ensure equal participation in society. The language must also be acknowledged in a way that values the intimate relationship between individuals and their native language.

The classroom is also a space full of potential for overcoming such lingual inequality. hooks believes that be encouraging black students to make use of their native language in class, to speak from their own experience, and to value their unique perspective as a worthy contribution to academic dialogue, we encourage them to take up a stance of resistance against the oppressive status quo. She observed that with regard to black vernacular this could be particularly frustrating for white students who spoke exclusively standard English “because they could hear the words that were said but not comprehend their meaning.”¹² Because standard English is privileged by the status quo, white students don’t ordinarily have to engage in such translation to participate in dialogue. The same luxury is not afforded to those for whom black vernacular is their native tongue; their participation typically involves translation. Accordingly, it is not unreasonable to expect educators to offer support to those who are less than privileged by creating a space that demands everyone remain open to the potential need to engage in translation and to work cooperatively toward overcoming misunderstandings, toward developing shared values. In her own classroom, hooks encourages her students to make efforts to understand one another across lingual boundaries. When misunderstandings occur, she urges students to use these opportunities as “space[s] to learn.”¹³ To create a classroom that is truly open and inviting to students and educators of all backgrounds, we must first understand that communication does not require immediate understanding. Rather, a strong ability to communicate is marked by readiness to work through misunderstandings. hooks asserts that until educators receive training to adopt pedagogy that responds to the diversity of backgrounds present in classrooms, they will be unable to guarantee an equal education for every student.¹⁴

Restrictive language is not only source of racial oppression in education. Additionally, race is not the only aspect of identity which is disadvantaged by status quo. Therefore, language use is not the only area in which educators are in need of growth. Equality in the classroom cannot be achieved until we are are willing to acknowledge and work against the numerous sources of inequality present throughout society. In this effort, it is especially important that privileged individuals recognize their role in maintaining those structures and their obligation not to be complicit in oppression. In the classroom setting, the status quo creates a microcosmic privilege for the educator which may blind them to their participation in the reification of oppressive dichotomies.¹⁵ In The Ethics of Ambiguity, Simone de Beauvoir claims that “to will oneself free is to also will others free.”¹⁶ Relating this statement to our present discussion, we maintain that once the educators free themselves of the dominant value system they can create learning environments which empower their students to liberate themselves. We do not propose that such liberation is achievable entirely by transforming our relationship to language. Rather, we hope to have drawn attention to language as a tool with which we support this liberation in ways beyond what we typically consider. Politicians, administrators, and educators are the only individuals who shape the norms and practices of classrooms. Students are indespensable participants in academic settings. As such, we are capable of challenging and diminishing oppressive value structures through our use of language. Education is multidirectional: we all learn from and are shaped by one another. When we keep that in mind, we defend ourselves against the silencing power of the status quo. We can work to devalue standard English in classrooms by adopting the strategies outlined by hooks. In this effort, our goal need not be the removal of standard English from classrooms, but the removal of the structural supports which maintain its privilege.

Notes:

1. hooks, bell. Teaching to Transgress: Education as the Practice of Freedom. Routledge, 1994.

2. Ibid. p. 178

3. Ibid.

4. Ibid. p. 167

5. Ibid. p. 171

6. Ibid. p. 169

7. Ibid. p. 170, This development also forced colonizers to rethink the meaning of the English language

8. Ibid. p. 179

9. Ibid.

10. Rankine, Claudia, Citizen: an American Lyric. Graywolf Press, 2014, p. 50

11. Ibid. p. 42

12. hooks, bell. Teaching to Transgress: Education as the Practice of Freedom. Routledge, 1994.

13. Ibid. p. 172

14. Ibid.

15. Ibid. pp. 137-142

16. Beauvoir, Simone de. The Ethics of Ambiguity. Philosophical Library, 2015.

Violence, Oppression, Freedom

All violence is an oppression that instantiates further oppressions. This instantiation is not merely potential: when an act of violence occurs, it reveals not only an immediate and tangible oppression, but also a necessary and simultaneously indefinite procession of future oppressions towards a nebulous horizon. Oppression, as either a singular act or the plurality of these acts, is the concrete denial of freedom, experienced as such by existential subjects within a co-authored realm of intersubjectivity. Thus, commit violence is to deny freedom indefinitely. However, certain apparently violent acts — acts of destruction or displacement — are only truly violent when they fulfill this requirement over and against freedom. We are thus confronted not only with several sets of elementary distinctions, but also with several subsequent questions. What constitutes an episode of authentic violence? How can an episode of destruction or displacement be carried out non-violently? And finally, what kinds of liberating action are made additionally possible by non-violent destruction and displacement?

Let us examine a passage from Simone De Beauvoir’s Ethics of Ambiguity concerning freedom. In the second part of the third chapter of this text, De Beauvoir delivers an intricate preliminary outline of freedom:

… a freedom wills itself genuinely only by willing itself as an indefinite movement through freedom of others; as soon as it withdraws into itself, it denies itself on behalf of dome object which it prefers to itself. … to be free is not to have the power to do anything you like, it is to be able to surpass the given toward open future; the existence of others as a freedom defines my situation and is even the condition of my own freedom.¹

This passage requires dissection on two fronts. First, on that of the forward “willing” of freedom, and second, on that of the “existence of others.” We see in this passage that in this passage that freedom is an open futurity in the sense that it requires a forward horizon of ambiguity. Freedom must move towards the future in its openness, which is only possible when this future is not restricted by the prioritization of some object — Church, the State, the Party, etc.² — over (and against) the world of subjects who will freedom. Furthermore, this willing-of-freedom requires as a necessary condition a recognition by the freedom-willing subject of the freedom of others who are themselves freedom-willing subjects in precisely the same way While the different projects with which the freedom of each individual subject is concerned are unique as flakes of snow upon an untrodden field, to actualize freedom requires co-recognition of the subjectivity, and thus the freedom, of others. To be free us not merely to act freely with mere apparent freedom, but to recognize the conditions that make this action possible. To extend the snow metaphor, the individual flake of snow is only unique inasmuch as its shape is preserved, and its shape is preserved only to the extent that its cool surroundings — among other flakes — provide the conditions for this preservation. Were an individual flake to land alone among the dirt and weeds, it would quickly melt into nothing, its individually dissolved.

We are thus presented with the positive aspects of freedom, defined as both the willing of itself towards an open future — as demanded by the willing subject — and the intersubjective world that freedom unequivocally demands.

As with the intersubjective realm of free individuals, the realm of oppression also requires intersubjectivity of a sort. The relationship between the oppressor and the oppressed is an imbalanced reciprocity, requiring the performance of both parts for its continuity. However, this relationship also requires the violation of the subjectivity of the oppressed, whose experience as freedom-willing individuals must be denied in order for the oppressor to remain as such. In the first chapter of Pedagogy of the Oppressed Paulo Freire offers a cogent preliminary analysis of the dynamics of oppression:

The oppressed, having internalized the image of the oppressor and adopted his guidelines, are fearful of freedom. Freedom would require them to eject this image and replace it with autonomy and responsibility … Freedom is not an ideal located outside of man … It is rather the indispensable condition for the quest for human completion … the situation of oppression is a dehumanized and dehumanizing totality affecting both the oppressors and those whom they oppress.³

Oppression has a peculiar twofold character: it is an imbalanced exercise of power favoring the oppressor over the oppressed, while simultaneously it is a “dehumanizing totality,” not only violating the subjectivity of the oppressed, but also trapping the oppressor within a vicious cycle of objectification. This dialectical movement favors the oppressor in terms of materiality — it is by denying their freedom that the oppressor is able to overpower and exploit the oppressed. The oppressor fails to realize, however, that this apparent freedom — in the form of material power over others — is itself simply enslavement of another sort. The oppressor is enslaved to an endless demand for power, for as long as the oppressor denies the freedom of others and manufactures an endless war against itself in the for, of these oppressed others’ struggle for freedom, its futurity is denied by a fixed point. In the oppressor’s pursuit of this fixed point, and in the subsequent demand of the oppressed to now struggle for freedom indefinitely, the open horizon of a free future is closed to all. There is freedom nowhere, and misery everywhere.

Let us return to Simone De Beauvoir’s Ethics of Ambiguity for clues as to how we may proceed. Sometime after the above exposition on freedom, De Beauvoir delivers an analysis of violence as it relates to the oppressor:

… by virtue of the fact that the oppressors refuse to co-operate in the affirmation of freedom, they embody, in the eyes of all men of good will, the absurdity of facticity; by calling for the triumph of freedom over facticity, ethics also demands that they be suppressed; and since their subjectivity, by definition, escapes out control, it will be possible to act only on their objective presence; others will here have to be treated like things, with violence … the fact is that one finds himself forced to treat certain men as things in order to win the freedom of all.⁴

This passage both complicates and concretizes our preceding analysis. According to De Beauvoir, the oppressor, by denying the freedom of others, is opened to violent action by the oppressed. In effect, we are presented with “the oppressor oppressed in return,”⁵ but only to the extent that the situation demands. The oppressed are justified in this violence by the radical demands of an ethics that promotes “the freedom of all.” De Beauvoir further qualifies this passage when she later claims that “violence is justified only if it opens concrete possibilities to the freedom which I am trying to save.”⁶ Even with this addition we are still left, seemingly abandoned, at the semantic impasse of violence and freedom. If violence against the oppressor is merely a dynamic reversal of the oppressive relationship that defines both oppressor and oppressed, then the necessary entrapment of subjects by violence is confirmed. To authentically commit violence is this to set into motion a perpetually oppressive apparatus, whereby both oppressor and oppressed, animated by the gravity of their objectification, are doomed to encircle one another endlessly. In this encircling they enframe the violent space between them as it shrinks and shrinks until the moment of collision between them, which is the final destruction of them both.

Fortunately, our situation is not without hope. There remains, in spite of the weight of the preceding analysis, the possibility of liberating action. Our final analysis, then, will be motivated by this possibility. We must uncover its concrete moments, and contemplate their use for the project of liberation, will require precision and diligence on our part.

We might begin with a brief return to Paulo Freire, whose analysis of oppression leads him directly to an analysis of violence and an analysis of the relationship between the two:

Any situation in which “A” objectively exploits “B” or hinders his and her pursuit of self-affirmation as a responsible person is one of oppression. Such a situation itself constitutes violence … because it interferes with the individuals ontological and historical vocation to be more fully human. With the establishment of a relationship of oppression, violence has already begun. Never in history has violence been initiated by the oppressed. … Violence is initiated by those who oppress, who exploit, who fail to recognize others as persons — not by those who are oppressed, exploited, and unrecognized.⁷

In the first order, Freire’s analysis offers us semantic shift; in the second order, and as a consequence, it offers us a shift in responsibility. According to Freire. violent action by the oppressed — against those who oppress — is categorically different from violence by the latter against the former. This difference is due precisely to the historical nature of violence and oppression. All oppressive relationships can be traced back through time to an intial moment of violence, understood as one subject’s concrete denial of the freedom of another. Therefore, according to Freire, for the oppressed to act “violently” against their oppressors is simply not violence, but rather an act of opposition against violence.

We are thus left with a historical justification to act out against oppression, but are still without a precise existential blueprint for the various permutations of this acting-out. Additionally, this justification itself is problematic, if the material enslavement of the oppressed exists as part of a system that also requires the existential enslavement of the oppressors, then to commit violence against the oppressors will be to preserve the fundamental structures of violence in the system, which no semantic shift can concretely overcome. We can see that this shift preserves our own definition of violence as the instantiation of a continual oppression, while also adding an historical dimension to the problem of oppression in relation to violence. However, it is still inadequate for the purpose of escaping the dialectics of oppression.

To move forward from here will require careful cultivation — by many actors — of the field of possibility for liberating action. In the broadest sense, our analysis has ascertained the existential requirements of such actions. We have established that oppression demands the rejection or denial of the freedom of others, whose very existence as subjects requires freedom as antecedent. Furthermore, any authentically violent action will necessarily manufacture oppression indefinitely. Any action against the oppression of a violent system, if it is not itself violence, will recognize the freedom of others in this way.

Our strategies for liberation, therefore, must recognize the oppressors as subjects; our mission as liberators will be to develop tactics that destabilize violent structures without compromising the subjectivity of the oppressors. It will be the goal of the second part of this discussion to arrive at particular, concrete, material tactics in this way.

Notes:

1. De Beauvoir, Simone. The Ethics of Ambiguity. Kensington Publishing, 2002, Print, 91-92

2. For a deeper, more targeted examination of ‘objects’ of this sort in relation to freedom, see De Beauvoir’s discussion of the “serious man” in The Ethics of Ambiguity, pg. 45-52

3. Freire, Paulo. Pedagogy of the Oppressed. Continuum Publishing, 2005. Print 47

4. De Beauvoir. The Ethics of Ambiguity. 97

5. Ibid.

6. Ibid. 137

7. Freire. Pedagogy of the Oppressed. 55

This Paper is Alienated Labor

When one reads works of Karl Marx regarding the alienation of labor and its victims, what comes to mind is a hot, steaming, filthy factory with weary shells of men pumping away at levers and hefting hammers over nondescript metal objects until sweat streaks their bodies with the dirt that has accumulated after hours of labor. And one would be right, of course, in having this image as the definition of alienated labor. However, a well-postured, cleanly dressed young man quietly tapping away at his keyboard, coffee and sandwich by his side in a cozy spot at his local library is also performing alienated labor. In reading Marx, it is easy to take such dramaticized descriptions as “diabolical activity,” “emasculating,” and “the barbarous worker” and remove them from a realistic context that one may find themselves in normal life. But this would go against the goal of Marx, who wished the public to see the alienating nature of the labor they performed everyday no matter how civilized it may seem. There is no doubt that writing a paper for a college class is one of the most civilized forms of labor that exists in society today, yet most would be hesitant to even call it labor (and they would mean alienated labor as the two are synonymous in this age where non-alienated labor is called a “hobby” or a “passion”). For once one does that, there is little that we do in our daily lives that we cannot call labor. Indeed, a great portion of our lives is made up of tasks that do not directly serve ourselves, despite the assumption that they might. This is even true in the education system. There is an assumption that an act like writing cannot be forced, that it is a voluntary activity that requires higher functions of the mind and can even be enjoyed if one has the right mindset. This assumption follows, labor must involve repetitive, mindless actions that stress the physical body and drains a person of their energy. However, this description might fit into the pictures that Marx’s writing conjures, the alienation of labor is very present in our daily tasks no matter how little we sweat or how much we think.

From the moment I was assigned this task of writing this paper, it has been alienating labor. This is because “[the labor] is not [my] own, but someone else’s” (74). This is to say that the labor is not done for myself. Its product belongs to someone else, namely, my very fair, kind, and handsome professor, for he assigned the labor I am performing. If I had, however, assigned myself the task of writing this paper because I felt that it directly benefitted me, then it would be non-alienating labor. Some might say that there could be no comparison between writing this paper and a more classic example of alienated labor such as the mindless toil of a factory laborer. They would say I have soo much choice and freedom that the factory laborer does not. Yet while I did choose the topic of the paper, the source, and the content, it is still for the purpose of fulfilling the desire of someone else. Making such a claim about choice and freedom would be like sating that a worker does not labor because he can choose which factory to work at, what he wears, and even at what station he performs his labor. In the end it does not matter how much freedom I have, under what conditions I labor, or at what I labor, all that is important to Marx and the concept of alienated labor is for whom I labor.

It may be useful to bridge the gap between the conventional capitalist working world that Marx alludes to and the illusion we have of the non-laboring, pure purposed bubble that is education. Firstly, there is no divide between the two despite the prejudice and appearances. As it is becoming more and more apparent, higher education is most often just another step in the ladder of ascension to the capitalist ideal: a job that affords one with material wealth and individual security. One only needs to look at a mainstream american movie depicting a happy family to see this ideal realized. Education as the facilitation of labor-training can be seen historically through the eyes of capitalist industrial developmeny. Dr. Peter Gray, a research professor at Boston College who specializes in education and its role in society says that not long after the 17th century, “employers in industry saw schooling as a way to create better workers. To them, the most crucial lessons were punctuality, following directions, tolerance for long hours of work, and a minimal ability to read and write.” Now, of course, education has changed a bit since then as reading and writing are in fact a focus of education. Yet it is wise to note that most jobs in the past did not require reading and writing while now they do. The education system has thus emphasized these skills a great deal. The fundamentals of a “good work ethic,” however, still apply quite succinctly between education and the working world. With the focus of education being to adjust children into the world we live in and the world we live in being one where alienating labor is the normal mode of operation, of course the focus of education is to have children adjust to this mode and practice such operations. And now, with the goal of higher education (and even the goal of doing well in secondary schooling) being so transparently for the acquisition of getting a “good job,” it is easy to see how even in the “sacred” area of education, the alienation of labor still pervades. As such, students cannot be seen as pure, self-motivated individuals who seek knowledge as the common ideal goes, but as laborers alienated from their work. Their papers, presentations, and exams are the commodities they produce in exchange for evaluation and grading. Moreover, a student’s “labor produces not only commodities: it produces itself and the worker as a commodity” (71). When students come out the other side of 17 years of education as a neat, ready-to-work package labeled with transcripts, resumes, and a diploma, it is only too easy to see them as the commodity that they are, to be traded in the world (or “employed”) just as raw materials and produce are. They are only seen as their “labor which has been congealed into an object” (72).

Marx says our natural tendency as humans is to create and produce as “means to life” (76). He says our “essential nature” is to have our satisfaction of needs determined our “life-activity.” Yet it is clearly false to say that I need to write this paper to continue living. While in the larger system of society, writing this paper has a hand in my continued living, I may certainly find other ways of surviving. Instead, seeing how much of my life I have spent writing papers (a good deal I imagine), writing papers can be seen as my “life-activity” that determines how I live. I do not write to live (even professional writers do not “write to live” because writing does not satisfy a need, it is done to procure the satisfaction of a need i.e. buying groceries), I live to write (at least in this present moment — tomorrow I will be living to study to take a test). Marx wrote that this way of living is an entirely backwards way to live and estranges us from our essential nature (78). And, because we are estranged from our nature, we are estranged from each other. I would say this quote true considering my current situation and surroundings: I am sitting not less than two feet away from another human being here in the library with no one else around us. He is performing labor in the form of solving sheets of math problems and I am performing my labor of writing this paper. We do not talk and we do not look at each other except out of a natural curiosity that fights its way through our estranged natures. We might as well not even exist to each other. I do not believe there is a better example of the estrangement of two beings that we experience on a daily basis. And to call this “normal” as we do is to deny us freedom in our functioning as human beings.

Everyone has experienced the sensation of anticipation that comes before the end of a class. This anticipation comes not from our desire to experience the class in its entire duration but from our to not be in it anymore. You want this cease this activity for it is foreign to you and “does not belong to your essential being” (74). Similarly, everyone knows the dread and suffering that comes with the knowledge that a paper is due soon and therefore that labor must be performed. The paper is not congruent with your essential being because someone else has had a part in determining it. Were I to write a paper of my own will, it would not be the paper that I am writing right now. I mat try to bring myself into the labor, making it extremely personal or incredibly relevant to my current situation ( as this paper could not more be), but the work will always be “external” for the labor does not belong to me. In either of these situations I cannot be entirely myself and “therefore only feel [myself] outside of [my] work” (74). I am not content while working because I am “not home when [I am] working, and when [I am] working [I am] not at home. I eat, sleep, and socialize. This is roughly what Marx calls our “animal functions” in that they are necessary for mere survival. They do not strictly define us as human. Marx wrote that our self-motivated labor defines us as human. yet with all of my labor being devoted to the purposes of others, I am robbed of my defining human trait. In not finding a home or satisfaction in my labor, I turn to my “animal functions” to replace this. I have no doubt that this is the reason for the excessive partying that goes on in college. In an effort to fill this void, people will over-indulge in their “animal functions,” taking them to extremes and resulting in bad decisions and hangovers. For those who would attempt non-alienating labor in their freetime, a seemingly more beneficial supplement to alienating labor, they must face the internal biases that have been formed within us.

Because alienated labor, the activity which we find to drain us of our strength as independent and willful humans, is so strongly associated with cognitively challenging tasks (I cite this paper as I forcibly continue to extract meaningful analysis from Marx onto the 6th page) that we have a natural aversion to them. It would be rare to find a student writing an essay, like this one, by their own will. a paper like this, no matter the importance of the material, is considered “work.” I quote “work” as an almost derogatory word that has emerged from our world of alienated labor. No longer is work, or labor, something we associate with need fulfillment or as an enjoyable declaration of our humanity. It is something to be avoided if possible and certainly not a word one uses for an activity they enjoy. We call work that we enjoy a “hobby.” A hobby is the labor that we enjoy and choose to do. It is free from the requirements or acquisition of others. It is labor entirely self-directed and owned. It is the vestige of non-alienating labor. What was once the defining activity of humankind is now reduced to something one does when they are not “working.” I have a hobby — I draw. Many have said that I should be an artist as my job. Artists are one of the few who have the possibility of performing non-alienating labor as their job. They create what they want, as they want. Even if they sell their art, they created it for themselves (at least the successful ones do). But more often than not, an artist will end up like everyone else, under the direction of someone else, their labor owned by someone else. To bring the artist example close to the topic of this paper, writing, the same could be said about a book author. Of course those (the successful ones) are few and far between as well. There is a still a place in our society for non-alienating labor but it is a privilege given to an extreme minority. The rest of us are working 9 to 5s and writing papers.

This ideal of alienated labor as the standard is mostly unsatisfactory (with the exception of the self-directed artist, writer, etc.) to the working class or, as Marx labels it, the proletariat. They are stuck in this unfortunate alienating loop, to :live only so long as they find work, and who find work only so long as their labour increases capital.” However there is a group of people that come out on top in this system. The ruling class, referred to by Marx as the Bourgeoisie, consists of those who are rich in profitable capital and may use their wealth earned from the labor of others to facilitate their own (non-alienating) labors. They may in fact perform the same sorts of labor that the proletariat do, such as writing papers about important subjects (even subjects that are important to them) but the key difference is that they own their own labor. Therefore all that is produced by their labor comes back to benefit them. They are not separated from their labor.

Of course, this is not how it has always been. Capitalism is not the de-facto method of functioning for a society as is apparent from indigenous societies such as the native americans, where land was not owned labor was not purchased. We believe that our scientific and material advancements signify progress as human beings, that writing a paper for someone else is preferable to procuring one’s own food. But in seeing as the alienation that is present in our more “advanced” society is a cause of our feeling unsatisfied and decidedly non-human, this cannot be so easily said. Marx speaks of the proletariat class becoming conscious of this fact and becoming the “revolutionary class” (167). I feels as though, in writing this paper, in experiencing the alienation from my labor and recognizing it for what it is, I am a small part of this change. Of course, this collective consciousness has a long ways to go to reach its zenith will come from the younger generation. They will be sitting in their libraries, writing their papers, all purposefully unaware of those surrounding them who are in the same situation, and then they too will be “compelled to face with sober sense, [their] real conditions of life, and [their] relations with [their] kind” (162).

Works Cited:

Gray, Peter. “A Brief History of Education.” Psychology Today, Sussex Publishers, 20 Aug. 2008

Tucker, R. C., Marx, K., & Engels, F. (1978). The Marx-Engels Reader. New York: Norton.

A Phenomenological Response to Rationalism and Empiricism

In his work the Phenomenology of Perception, Maurice Merleau-Ponty offers a criticism of both the rationalist and the empiricist points of view on perception. He argues that those schools of thought have a misguided view on the phenomenon because they both “build perception out of the perceived,” he tells us, “in the end [empiricists and rationalists] understand neither” (5). And yet in spite of this shared error, the way in which the rationalist builds perception with relation to consciousness is not in agreement with the way the empiricist does the same. For the empiricist, the subject plays the part of a passive receiver of information and has no agency in the matter of perception. The rationalist on the other hand views consciousness as a constitutive force that already possesses the concepts of everything that is perceived (30). As Merleau-Ponty explains:

What was lacking for empiricism was an internal connection between the object and act it triggers. What intellectualism lacks is the contingency of the opportunities for thought. Consciousness is too poor in the first case and too rich in the second for any phenomenon to be able to solicit it.³⁰

Empiricism takes the act of perception to be done wholly outside of consciousness — perception is simply the process of sensory organs translating stimuli into sounds, colors, etc. In this purely mechanistic account of the body perceptual organs portray reality to the mind by converting stimuli into a corresponding image. Meanwhile, the rationalist believes that consciousness constitutes everything we perceive. Both of these views are problematic because, as Merleau-Ponty argues, perception is not so clearly delineated between consciousness and the outside world. There can be instances in which a phenomenon “solicit[s]” our consciousness. For example, consider the case of one hearing a loud noise, being unaware of its origin (30). In this situation one would attempt to discover the source of the noise. Consider also the more subtle example of the examination of a work of modern art. On first approach, one may not know where to direct her gaze. But there is still a sense that continuing to explore the work with her eyes will bring her to some understanding of it as a whole. In this case, the desire to explore the work may come from herself. But there is also a sense of calling coming from the art itself. In contrast to these points of view on perception to these points of view on perception, Merleau-Ponty posits that “[w]e must recognize the indeterminate as a positive phenomenon” (7). He explains his point using the idea of the intentional arc (31). This model maps our mode of existence towards the world as a physical space and as a place of coexistence. On this intentional arc certain modes of existence such as sexuality, motricity, and perception are more immediate than scientific understanding. On this basis Merleau-Ponty argues that scientific understanding cannot be useful to understanding perception phenomenologically. He fleshes out the disconnect between perception and scientific comprehension through the Muller-Lyer illusion:

The two central line segments in this illusion are of the same measurable length. But one segment has open arrows on its ends, the other closed arrows. This makes the open-arrowed segment appear to be longer. Merleau-Ponty explains that “[t]he two straight lines of the Muller-Lyer illusion are neither equal nor unequal,” but both at the same time. Empiricism and rationalism refuse to allow for this because it contradicts the scientific belief in an objective world that can be uniformly understood through measurement and calculation. The Muller-Lyer illusion is particularly challenging for the empiricist, who explains that it causes a misperception, as the image produced by the brain does not match the visual stimuli. For both schools of thought the supposed solution to this issue is the concept of attention — when one pats closer attention, the lines can be seen to be the same length. However, the empircist’s defense of attention will ultimately be based o circular logic — an indeterminate perception is not valid because it does not follow the constancy hypothesis, and the constancy hypothesis is necessary because it agrees with scientific consciousness. But the premise that scientfic understanding of perception is necesary is still not explained. The rationalist theory also falls apart in attempting to defend the notion of attention. If consciousness already contains everything that allows for the construction of the world, there should be no need for attention; the world would always be perceived correctly. In contrast to rationalism and empiricism, Merleau-Ponty argues that perception is a “living communication with the world that makes it present to us as the familiar place of our life” (53). The act of perception is a connection between the body and its world wherein each influences the other. This view of the body as an active participant in perception is later carried on in the Phenomenology of Perception during Merleau-Ponty’s discussion of spatiality and motricity.

In the chapter entitled “The Spatiality of One’s own Body and Motricity,” it is asserted that we do not, as Descartes posits, live in “positional spatiality” but instead in “situational spatiality” (102). By this Merleau-Ponty means that we only exist in a world and understand the relations within this world thorugh our ability to moce; our spatiality is situational because we have the ability to change its situations through motion (105). Merleau-Ponty explains that it is a mistake to form spatiality from “objective” positions. Instead, spatiality can be derived. Because of the sense of motion in our spatiality, we are contained by space — we inhabit it. Space becomes a realm of possibility rather than, as both the empiricist and the rationalist would hold, one of limitation. Merleau-Ponty’s view of spatiality is grounded in our body, which always “exists towards” its tasks (103).

Merleau-Ponty offers our experience of the body as proof that we do not observe space as a series of fixed points. I always have knowledge of my body as a whole. For example, one is able to perform the task of typing without first thinking about about where her hands are located. As Merleau-Ponty explains, “I holf my body as an invisible possession and I know the position of each of my limbs through a body schema” (100-101). This body schema allows for the pre-reflective knowledge of the body as a whole. When one is typing, she does not need to think of how each of her fingers need to move, but only of the position of the letters. The body will non-reflectively form the words because it “exists towards” this task (103). Typing would be a very different activity if one truly existed in a Cartesian grid system. If this were the case, one would first need to observe the position of each key on the keyboard as well as the distance between the keys. Next, the position of each finger would need to be determined. Finally, one would need to consciously move each giner , making sure that they reach the correct postion on the keyboard.

Merleau-Ponty further the examines spatiality through the example of a patient named Schneider. Schneider has suffered irreplacable brain damage from fighting in the first world war and can no longer relate to his experience the same way most people do. He is unable to perform some simple tasks related to spatiality and the body, such as pointing at an object with his eyes closed. Merleau-Ponty explains that this task is actually more complicated than it seems. Our experience of space happens in one of two ways: through concrete movement or through abstract movement. Concrete movement is the incorporation of the body to manipulate an object and complete a task, such as in the example of typing. Abstract motion loses the bodily aspect and instead requires thinking of the world as a series of objects that are related through their positions. This second type of spatiality is what gives Schneider trouble. According to Merleau-Ponty the fact that Schneider only has problems with abstract motion reveals that one’s primary connection with space is a concrete one in which the body is engaged as an active manipulator (109). Schneider clearly has no trouble with concrete tasks, as he is a very effective wallet maker. Abstract movement, which is the basis of the Cartesian grid system, should then be viewed as a conscious act that takes one away from her basic experience of spatiality as grounded in the actual. This type of movement implies that a normal person’s body can be “situated in the virtual,” whereas Schneider’s body is “enclosed in the actual” (111). He is unable to conceive of the different ways in which one might relate to the object in general, and is only left with the means by which he can physcially relate to it. But for the normal person, spatiality is not a series of objective positions, instead being the “variable reach of our intentions and our gestures” (144). We are pssive beings that exist within the confines of space, as both the empiricist and the rationalist would have us believe. In fact, we can only understand space through our active motricity.

Works Cited:

Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. Phenomenology of Perception. Translated by Donald A. Landes, Routledge, 2002

Qiao, Fred. “Application Stuff.” Muller Lyer Illusion | Project | IDeATe, 18 Oct., 2015, ideate.xsead.cmu.edu/gallery/projects/muller-lyer-illution.

On Conscience

In John Russon’s first three chapters of Sites of Exposure, he primarily deals with subjectivity abd experience, as well as the roles and relations that one’s subjectivity takes up within the world. In this paper, we will dive into his fourth and final chapter titled “Thanksgiving,” which concerns itself with the ethics of the “now.” The question I will address in my presentation is how Russon’s analysis of conscience in chapter four enhances and elaborates upon his initial discussion of subjectivity in chapter one. In doing so, I will first begin by summarizing and explaining Russon’s lesson on conscience. Afterward, I will discuss some of his initial thoughts on subjectivity and how it relates to conscience. Finally, I will breifly draw our further connections and implications of this notion, specifically with refard to Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s position on freedom.

Russon begins his discussion of conscience with the example of Huseyn ibn Ali’s defiance toward a plea to avoid death in the 7th century, common era. Huseyn was successor to his father, Ali, who was the second official succcessor to the prophet Mohammad as the leader of the Umayyad Caliphate. Huseyn led an army to challenge the legitmacy of the government of Damascus, and when his march reached the city of Karbala, they were slaughtered. Huseyn was told to hold back from Karbala to avoid certain death, but he proclaimed that Allah’s command cannot be resisted. Here, Russon states that Huseyn is exhibiting his conscience. Russon goes on to explain that conscience is “a call to oneself,” and that “answering to the call further requires that I act in this world, now: it calls me to take a stand in acuality. Conscientious action is therefore always an expression of the meaning of the call within the parametes of this actual situation; it is therefore necessarily an ‘interpretation,’ a rendering of ultimate value into the necessarily one-sided terms of my home world” (Russon, 125). He notes that our situations our finite situation is subordinate of our infinite nature of the world. This infinite nature is communicated to us in our realizations, and in them, we come to see that our finite situation is subordinate of our infinite reality. As Russon puts it, “conscience is the self-conscious recognition of simultaneously finite-infinite nature of our existence” (Russon, 125). He goes on to explain conscience in Caravaggio’s portrait of “St. Matthew and the Angel,” which is the cover image if the text. In the image, St. Matthew’s humanity and finitude are emphasized by his appearance and expression. His revelation appears as a divine subject, an otherworldly entity which brings inspiration not from his own human 0wn finitude but from beyond it. After this, Russon, explicates that the calling of consciousness is one of action and engagement, and that “the call of conscience is always, from a ‘worldly’ point of view, and ‘otherworldly’ madness” (Russon, 126). He makes example of this by introducing Bastian-LePage’s portrait of “Joan of Arc,” where Joan is supposedly receiving her calling her father’s garden. Here, we see that she seems to be lost in another world while actually present in this world, which could be interpreted as her loss of self to “madness.” Russon states that because conscience is “a step ‘beyond,’ the experience of the call cannot include the terms for rendering it sensible, and it is thus always a risk, always a matter of taking a chance on oneself in the hope that one has truly grasped its sense” (Russon, 127).

How, then, is one to distinguish that their calling is of a divine nature and not of a diabolical one? Russon adresses this question by bringing forth the example of Mohammad and the so-called Satanic verses, in which the question arose whether Mohammad’s preaching was compatible with the worship of pre-Islamic deities. Mohammad concluded that the deities were fit to serve as intermediaries between believers and God, but he soon fell back on this decision to sat that it was unacceptable to pay respect to these deities and that he had fallen victim to the voice of Satan rather than the voice of God. Russon claims that this example “points powerfully to the position of interpretive responsibility that one cannot shake: the infinitude of the call will always be received by us in the terms of our finitude, that is, the very nature of the situation of ‘the call’ entails that we will alwats be interpreting and therfore always operating in the context of our own judgment, our own perception, even as the message is ‘not our own'” (Russon, 128). So, in conscience, one cannot know if they are truly right or wrong, for we are beings which operate based on judgment. We do not blindly act on the “otherworldness” of conscience, but, instead, we use the conditions of our situation, our perspective, and our judgment to mediate the relationship between this calling and our actions therein. Russon tells that this self-defined intervention is exhibited by Arjuna in the Hindu epic, the Mahabharata. Arjuna is faced with a decision to fire an arrow which would start a war between two armies, one of which contains himself and his brothers and the other which contains his cousins. Arjuna has doubts in making this decision because he does not want to do something which would cause extreme violence. Lord Krishma drives Arjuna’s chariot onto the battlefield and tells him that he is only entitled to the action, and not the fruits of it, for “not to act would be a gesture of great selfishness demonstrating his attachment to his desire to feel good about himself” and that “his refusal to shoot would be as decisive a gesture as his shooting the arrow” (Russon, 129). So, Arjuna shoots the arrow. This story captures the idea of conscience while also exemplifying that in one’s choosing an action, theu oppose other possibilities. In wrapping up his talk of conscience, Russon states that “conscience answers to a demand that is universal and infinite, but that has to be realized locally and specifically,” and that “the sense of promise and possibility opints to a beyond that can never be realized as such, and so the demand to ‘go beyond,’ to ‘go there,’ will always be realized in a new ‘here'” (Russon, 130). This points to the fact that our reality and conscience are realized situationally. Russon ends the lesson by asserting that “conscience is the experience of the call to acknowledge this reality, and wirnessing to the moment in its infinitude this call for the expression of that infinitude” (Russon, 131).

Now that we have an understanding of Russon’s view on conscience, we can examine how it builds off of his initial discussion of subjectivity in chapter one. Chapter one, titled “Portraits,” contains three lessons: “On Being a Subject,” “The Event of Experience and the Advent of Meaning,” and “Things.” The first lesson brings forth several interesting points concerning our seubjectivity. How we portray others, is usually — and seemingly inherently or by default — done by imagining the person from the front. Furthermore, they are typically middle-aged and tend to be in a neutral stance. It is in this way that we often portray others as an object, rather than a subject. Russon uses several portraits as examples to show how one may portray a person (or people) as a subject (or subjects), because to experience a person as a person, is to experience them as a subject. This further relates to the idea that our being discerns the way in which things appear to us, namely that they are responsive to our subjectivity. The appearance of things offers itself to our own interpretation, and therfore everything is subject to our own judgment, just as it is in the understanding of our conscience and its calling. The second lesson of chapter one explains that the “I” and “it,” or subject and object, are participatory in a co-happening, or dance, so to speak. Tusson states that “my experience, my being a subject, alwats takes the form of an event, a spontaneous happening, inexplicable to itself on the basis of anything beyond itself, inasmuch as any explanation by some such ‘beyond’ is always an explanation within the terms of experience, an explanation within the happening it is supposed to explain” (Russon, 19). This means that our experience is not predetermined by the self, but rather that our situations and surroundings act directly upon our field of possibility. This ties into the fact that our conscience is affected by the finitude of our environs insofar as we realize the infinite within the finite. Russon later states in this second lesson that “reality is meaningful to a subject, but a subject — and, indeed, reality — is ultimately inherently mysterious” (Russon, 29). This is to say that as we find meaning through our subjectivity things hold no meaning in the objective world. As the question of meaning remains mystifying, so, too, does one’s conscience. Just like we, as subjects, find meaning within the world, it is up to us to determine our callings to be divine or diabolical. In other words, it is you who is resopnsible for deeming the nature of your conscience to be good or bad in certain instances.

The third lesson of chapter one speaks of the here and now, and also of the dance between subject and object. It tells us that there is a particular trait of inseparability between one’s sense of self and others, as well as one’s sense of self and the external world. Other people and thinfs represent significance to the subject, and there is some sort of past which can be attributed to these senses. The world of appearance is the ultimate domain which dictates the senses that we have toward certain people or things. Likewise, our conscience is interpreted on these same bases: we are left to use our judgment which is an amalgamation of reason and experience. Through these lessons, we can realize how conscience fits into the experience of subjectivity.

Now, we will briefly turn to Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s idea of freedom in order to further conceptualize Russon’s idea of conscience. Merleau-Ponty suggests that freedom is neither absolute nor nil, but that it arises under the condition of our universal engagement in the world, which means that our freedom is an agency within a world which contains predetermined meaning and values. In this, we are never able to fully separate ourselves from our situations, not to say that we are only free in part, but that our actions reside in the context of our situations. The nature of freedom exists in our intersubjectivity, for each subject recognizes each other in situations as a faciticity of being-in-itself. Simply put, Merleau-Ponty’s concept of freedom is resembled as a sort of consciousness in which a subject’s actions are performed within a field of possibility. In every situation, freedom is present as a mode of being-in-the- world unless the subjecy becomes disconnected from the situation. Having said this, it is clear to see that as we are free to act within a range of situational possiblity, we are also able to act and imagine the infinite, but only within the context of the finite situations in which we reside. Conclusively we hav come to understand the nature of conscience, and so I leave you with this final question: how might one’s dreams indicate the nature of an infinite reality?

Works Cited:

Russon, John. Sites of Exposure: Art, Politics, and the Nature of Experience. Indiana University Press, 2017.

A Nostalgic Future

I discovered HAIM’s debut album Days Are Gone the summer before freshman year of colllege during the roiling time of a changing point in my life. These were the days before I became afficted to Pitchfork and paid attention to new releases, back when I still bought albums on itunes and listened to them on an ipod nano. HAIM was just on the verge of attaining notoreity, so they were still known to the wider public as the Jewish trio with long hair who made weird faces while they played their instruments.

Days Are Gone is ultimately an album centered around nostalgia. The album thematically climaxes at the titular track. Este Haim takes lead vocals, singing in her exceptionally clear mezzo through fuzzed retro synth: “You can have my past / I never get that back / But I’m moving on / cause those days are gone.” I was about to leave for my first semester of college, I was beginning to figure myself out as a person, and I was feeling nostalgia of high school ending and the rest of my life about to begin. The pertinent album hit at a perfect time to fall absolutely in love. And I listened to it nearly every day for three months of my life, a point in my life where I was thinking at once about the future and the past. I can rarely think about the past now without thinking about that album because of course, those days are gone.

Throughout freshman year I changed, as everybody does. Possibly what transitioned the most over the past two years were my views on music, which went from “sure, I like alt music,” “yeah, I listen to the Artic Monkeys sometimes” to a state close to obsession, for which HAIM’s album was the catalyst. This period climaxed during the following summer before sophomore year. I consider this a period of heavy character development for myself. I suppose if my life were a movie directed by John Hughes this would be the part where you see a montage set to something like “Waterloo” by ABBA and it’s shots of my incredibly aesthetic highschool friends smoking on golf courses and going to Denny’s at 2 o’clock in the morning and having the time of their lives. I still think about that summer today.

Fast forward to right now, my penulitmate summer of college. The final summer to pretend I’m not an adult. The final summer to throw down and forget the crushing responsibility of everything to come after I graduate. Needless to say, I’ve been feeling pretty nostalgic again. There’s a line in Buffy the Vampire Slayer about the concept of “graduation goggles,” where suddenly everyone is friends with everyone and they all exchange yearbooks and think of the fun times of highschool. Peopleb become precious and memories become sand slipping through your fingers , so you should grasp these memories as hard as you can while you have the chanve. I may not be in highschool anymore. but the memories have become more valuable than gold in a time when everything I know is about to change.

Remembering the things that have already happened is a deep comfort. Everything changes except the past. What’s already happened is permanently stained on the inside of our brain and will forever influence the future. And there is absolutely no thing we can do about that. In my own little world I’m currently laboring under the delusion that I will be remembered. Logically I know that in the long run of the universe I am a mere speck forgotten in a bigger-than-I-could-possibly-imagine-masterpiece. But within my own existence I am the protagonist. Everything that I do seems important because the lens of myself is the only lens I can ever have fully within my own life. It’s hard to think about the past without thinking about the future. The more I remember what was, that will never be. For everything – everything – will one day be forgotten.

It’s poetic, then, that at another stochastic point of my life sandwiched between thinking about the future and remembering the past, HAIM released their second album, Something To Tell You. While it was no Days Are Gone, the album was still excellent. Just enough of a disco-throwback to be a perfect summer release; just stripped enough to be a slight shift awat from their debut. I’ve been listening to it nonstop, and I’m experiencing a deja vu of Days Are Gone all over again, Even more oddly perfect, the themes of Something To Tell You are ultimately about converations and changing relationships with people. If Days Are Gone is moving forward, Something To Tell You is standing stock-still, frozen in the present.

The penultimate songs of Days Are Gone and Something To Tell You complement each other perfectly. The 2013 Glastonbury live performance of “Let Me Go” on Days Are Gone is one of my favorite live peformances of all time. The studo version of this song is excellent. The live version of this song is unreal. HAIM takes what is in studio a synth based song, and makes it such a raw, crackling rock song you can’y help but scream along with them. It’s set in the frantic key of G minor, and ends with a 3 minute frenzied drum solo framing a sense of hopeless rebellion : “let me go / you know I’m not one for leaving / let me go.” Thematically, the singer prays to be removed from their decision making process, begging for someone else to decide to take their responsibility.

The penultimate song of Something To Tell You, “Right Now,” is critically acknowledged as the best sonf on the album. It’s stripped down piano ballad that builds to a crunchy riff performed on a Gibson SG and a drumming that ignites your heart in almost the exact way the live performance “Let Me Go” does. Only this time, instead of asking someone else to make the decision for her, Danielle sings: “Finally on the other side now / and I could see for miles / and I’ve forgotten every line.” Almost as though the chaos the audience is left with at the end of “Let Me Go” is resolved and everthing is okay. The terrifying unknown has become thoughful clarity. And it’s starkly in the momeny with the title repeated throughout the song until it becomes a mantra. “Let Me Go” is about an unknown future, “Right Now” is about the known present. I am at a point where my life is about to radically change I’m going to graduate, move to a new place, and have to start again from scratch. It’s terrifying. I want so badly to step out of this moment and fast forward ten years to when I own a house and have tenure and a Roth IRA account. To settle into the monotony of adult life and be absolutely content in every wat. That, or return to the dafety of the past and the comfort of things already happened that I can never ever change.

HAIM is not a perfect band, and I am not a perfect person. Much like how the phrase “I know” is said 44 times within Days Are Gone, the patterns of me life are predictable. In this moment I may not konw what comes next, but I do know that whatever it is: it’ll work out. It’s far enough awat to still have hope. And until then I have the warm blanket of the past to keep me company this summer, remembering what was through the strange memory-triggering effect music has. I once listened to a HAIM album nearly every day three years ago, and I am now listening to a HAIM album nearly every day three years later. The year Days Are Gone came into my life was one of the most important years for me so far. Everything has kept getting better since then, so I’m taking Something To Tell You coming out this penultimate summer of college as a good omen for the future.

I think I’ll go listen to it again.

Romanticism and the Ubiqiuity of Desire

A single preoccupation has threaded its way through the entire range of our diverse and broad-spanning course readings: desire. Authors both within and without the established canon of Romanticism are fascinated with desire and its psychological complexities. The obsession with desire has remained a salient feature of dsicourse and a sustained point of observation; I have decided that further pursuit of the topic is the most natural continuation of my notes. In this essay I aim to effect a comprehensive survey of the concept of desire as it manifests itself in various texts.

My analysis progresses from the general foundations to the specific nuances of desire. Firstly, I lay groundwork for discussion by explicating the essential paradox implicit in all forms of desire, calling attention to the them of paradox as presented in the works of Charlotte Dacre, Percy Shelley, Lord Byron, and Samuel Taylor Coleridge. I conceptualize desire as lack and examine how attainment of the desired object extinguishes desire. I also examine the role of resistance in desire and the process by which resistance increases the object’s irresistability.

Secondly, I argue that desire’s forms in our readings are manifold, analyzing its multiplicity of expressions in Eliza Fenwick, Dacre, William Wordsworth, and Shelley. I examine these authors’ explorations of desire in terms of four main categories: desire for the body in the form of Gothic love, desire for the mind in the form of sentimental love; and desire for the soul, which I find to be the most quintessentially Romantic form of desire. The Romantic desire for the soul is articulated both as an attempt to unify one’s self and as a yearning to fully transcend the self, either through empathy or through union with an ideal archetype.

Thirdly, I investigate the integral role of desire in the formation of identity. Desire is seen as the impetus for individuation and a crucial force in determining one’s sense of self. I locate this aspect of desire in the works of Fenwick, Dacre, and Byron. I argue that desire’s role in the development of the self is twofold. In one sense, the degree to which desires are fulfilled or denied early in life shapes ethical behavior later in life. In another sense, the individual wishes to set himself apart from other selves, defining himself against the world in a quest for unique personal identity.

In the fourth and final portion of my discussion, I argue that the Romantic treatment of desire lends itself to a fatalistic and essentialist view of the self in which individual agency is underpinned and determined by fundamental passivity. This is seen repeatedly seen in Dacre, and is also evident in the passive poetics of Percy Shelley. Desire frequently appears as a force altogether beyond voluntary control, as though it acts upon — or takes possession of — the unwitting subject. In this view, free will illusory or, at best, preceded by and subject to the rule of desire. The implications of this outlook are several, and are relevant to the discourse of gender politics, the poetics of spontaneity, and the effects of literature on readers.

Paradox is an abiding attribute of all desire, from carnal lust to spiritual longing. We recognize the paradoxical nature of desire when we conceive of desire as a perception of lack or absence. The desiring subject is impelled toward pursuit of the desired object by this propulsive lack; however, the eventual attainment of the object immediately dissolves the desire, because the lack no longer exists. Dacre’s narrator reflects on the paradox of attainment just prior to introducing the character of Count Ardolph in Zofloya. “That it is but too often an ungenerous principle in human nature, first most ardently to desire the possession of a certain object, and despise it when obtained, cannot be disowned” (Dacre 47). Interestingly, the paradox of attainment is subverted in Ardolph, whose desire for Laurina Loredani is kept alive by the paradox of resistance, which we will explore shortly. However, for Victoria, the paradox of attainment manifests periodically, ultimately culminating in her damnation. She hops from one desire to the next, never fulfilled, growing tired of her present possession and yearning for novelty. Her marriage to Il Conte Berenza is ill-fated thanks to her insatiability, and she quickly begins to desire Berenza’s brother Henriquez with relentless passion. The paradox is visualized most powerfully in Victoria’s strange premonitory dreams, where the object of her desire is violently destroyed immediately upon attainment: “Exultation filled the bosom of Victoria; she attempted to take the hand of Henriquez; but casting her eyes upon him, she beheld him changed to a frightful skeleton, and in terror awoke,” (146). The moment of Victoria’s gratification is simultaneously the moment of Henriquez’s ruin: this vision is tragically realized in later chapters. The narrator of Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage identifies a similar problem when the titular character feels “the fulness of satiety,” a state “[w]orse than adversity,” (Byron, 24). Carnal desire seems to tempt the subject with promises of pleasure, only to withhold the anticipated delight or even offer pain in its stead. Is it better as Byron would have us think, to face adversity than to fulfill our wants?

Some form of adversity is always present in the dynamic of desire, whether it be in the form of physical separation, social taboo, conflicting self-restrainment, or simply difficulty. Desire necessarily requires requires a rift or obstacle between subject and object, or else lack is impossible. This aspect is often most interestingly revealed when the obstacle is oneself. Desire is utterly ineluctable; one cannot wrest oneself free of it by struggling, and one in fact strengthens the desire in attempting to do so. Coleridge’s Christabel offers an incisively symbolic image of this predicament via the bard’s dream–the dream crouches to help a crying dove in the woods,

When lo! I saw a bright green snake

Coiled around its wings and neck.

Green as the herbs on which it couched,

Close by the dove’s its head crouched;

And with the dove it heaves and stirs,

Swelling its neck as she swelled hers!

(Christabel Part II stanza 21)

Here, resistance is illustrated as not only futile, but counterproductive. Just as the dove subjects herself to greater misery by struggling against the snake, so the desiring subject resigns herself to the power of desire by struggling against it. This paradox of resistance is thoroughly embodied in Ardolph, whose desire to keep Laurina in thrall increases in proportion to the difficulty of the task: “Had no obstacles existed to his possession of her, and even to his retaining her afterwards, the depraved Ardolph had either never sought, or long since have disdained her,” (Dacre, 70). In order to keep his passion alive, the villainous Ardolph exchanges the disappointment inherent in attainment for the difficulty of perpetual resistance. Still, Ardolph cannot escape the paradox of desire; indeed of all the characters we encounter, he seems to most revel in it.

The essence of desire is paradox. But desire is not merely paradoxical–it is also profoundly multidimensional. Desire occurs at all levels of human experience, from the merely lustful to the utterly sublime. Bodily desire is virtually synonymous with the “Gothic love” encountered in texts such as Zofloya and Percy Shelley’s Zastrozzi and St. Irvyne. In reflecting on the relationship between Wolfstein and Megalena, the narrator of St. Irvyne remarks on the transience and superficiality of Gothic love: “the love with which Wolfstein regarded Megalena… was not of that nature which was likely to remain throughout existence… yet did he love her now; at least if heated admiration of her person and accomplishments, independently of mind, be love,” (Shelley, 189). The narrator’s reflection carries questioning undertones, unsure of whether the appetitive passion that Wolfstein feels for Megalena even deserves to be called “love.” Gothic love almost always concludes with ennui and dissolution of bonds. This merely bodily desire stands in contrast with the mental desire of “sentimental” love, a variety also prominent in St. Irvyne in the relationship between Fitzeustace and Eloise. Fitzeustace is attracted not only to Eloise’s physical charms, but also to her intellect and sensibility, having finally “found one who could understand, who could sympathize in, the feelings and sensations which every child of nature whom the world’s refinements and luxury have not vitiated, must feel,” (Shelley, 243). Fitzeustace desires a partner who is mentally innocent, uncorrupted by society’s stultifying influence. A similar form of sentimental love is represented and critiqued in Fenwick’s Secresy, where Arthur Murden explains that he “wanted beauty without vanity, talent without ostentation, delicacy without timidity, and courage without boast. If I saw the semblance of any of these qualities, I hastened to search for the rest,” (Fenwick, 244). Murden’s yearning for a being with the combined attributes of beauty, talent, delicacy, and courage reflect the idealistic proclivities of sentimental love, a form of desire that is either evolved from or opposed to the sensuous transience of Gothic love. Sentimental love is ultimately presented as naive and potentially destructive in Secresy. Nonetheless, the object of desire’s shift from the body to the mind initiates a turn inward from the world of sense to the realm of thought and feeling.

This inward turn is the quintessence of Romantic poetry. It is the loftiest ad most spiritual form of desire present in our readings; it is a desire for intrapersonal and intrapersonal unity, a wish to mend the isolated ego and become one with reality. In her Romantic Potency: The Paradox of Desire, Laura Claridge locates the Romantic “key to desire: the radical and the humanly insatiable yearning of the infant for the lost Eden of a unified self–before the advent of symbolic organization. The Romantics attempt the impossible: to transcend the medium of words and reach that original paradise of silence–but with their voices intact,” (Claridge, 2). Romantic desire longs for a return to the preverbal awe and wonder of early childhood, a desire that is, as Claridge indicates, “radical” in its quest back to the roots of being. I consider this a desire not merely for mind, but for soul, in that it aims for contact with a reality beyond the rational conceptualization characteristic of mind.

Contrary to Claridge, I maintain that the attainment of this Romantic desire for the soul is at least poetically represented as possible, if not possible in actuality. One route to its is the cultivation of empathy. In his Preface to Lyrical Ballads, Wordsworth claims that it is “the wish of the Poet to bring his feelings near those of the persons whose feelings he describes, nay, for short spaces of time perhaps, to let himself slip into an entire delusion, and even confound and identify his own feelings with theirs,” (Wordsworth, 604). Wordsworth’s poetics of empathy is really only a means to an end, that end being the total suspension of the boundary between self and other. Wordsworth wants, temporarily, to nullify the concepts of “I” and “you” so that the two become indistinct. Shelley expresses a similar but subtly different sentiment in his reluctant definition of Love in “On Love,” having insisted just prior to this definition that language inevitably falls short of expressing the inarticulable truth: “Thou demandest what is Love. It is that powerful attraction towards all that we conceive or fear or hope beyond ourselves when we find within our own thoughts the chasm of an insufficient void and seek to awaken in all things that are a community with what we experience within . ourselves,” (Shelley, 632). Here again we see desire presented as lack, an “insufficient void,” a troubling awareness of the self’s separation from the world. Shelley’s formulation of Romantic desire is of a slightly more active character than Wordsworth’s; rather than passively melt into the subjectivity of the other and experience their emotions, Shelley wants his own emotions to be felt by the other. As Deanna Koretsky reamarks in “Unhallowed arts’; Frankenstein and the Poetics of Suicide,” Percy Shelley sees love as “tantamount not to understanding, but to being understood’,” (Koretsky, 249). Shelley is less interested in traveling beyond the self than he is in unifying it or, to repurpose Claridge’s language, keeping it intact.

Shelley and Wordsworth embody two sub-varieties of the Romantic desire for the soul. The distinction of Shelley’s unificatory desires from Wordsworth’s empathic desires is worth noting with regard to Shelley’s Alastor. In Alastor, Shelley presents union with an ideal archetype as an alternative route to the attainment of the soul-desire–but, as in Fenwick, this union proves impossible. The Poet’s dream-maiden is a manifestation of his