Protocol 3.3.11: DeLillo writes Arendt

Somehow the light wasn't the same in the room today.

Or perhaps it was just Ben's imagination. But the fluorescence seemed stronger, harsher, not only unopposed but rather encouraged by the dim grey outside the window. Hallie arranged chairs. Heidi related a story to Mandi about building a burrito out of balloons, with difficulty (and Tam listened in). Ben put on music -- later to be revealed as "Happiness Is Overrated" by Airborne Toxic Event -- and wrote the program on the board:

PROGRAM
1) Workshopping our truths
2) Sex murders, solitude and loneliness
--> how, and why, to read political theory
3) back to DeLillo -- making sense of history, everyday life, and emergency

Nobody recognized the song. Ben showed us the band's website, despite a few conflicts with technology, pointing out the one brief reference to White Noise: occasionally they are asked to sign a copy. Ben doesn't think they are very good anyway.

Maybe the fluorescence, that hollower, emptier light, was a foreshadowing. Rachel, Ahmed, Mariana, and Karrie were all absent today. (Sickness lurked in the extra space, the vacant chairs.) Solitude and loneliness waited in the text, on the board.

But first, Ben had a question for Hongfa; maybe he was focusing too much on his mistakes, but how would she have felt about the last blog assignment if he had asked us write on Jack's 'view' of history, instead of his 'argument'? Hongfa affirmed that she would have preferred 'view'; the assignment would have made more sense to her. This answer seemed to satisfy Ben, who then directed us to the first item on the program, Workshopping our truths. Each of us turned to a neighbor and discussed the truths we had been thinking about for our external writing assignment -- and which facts we were using, who we were writing to, etc. The class fell into organized chatter. About two minutes later Ben interrupted to tell us to switch people, so the second person could talk about their ideas. There was an immediate silence, an implied, "......Oh," as we realized we not been following direction. Everyone had already talked; we were done. Ben read our faces, read the audible pause, and expressed his surprise at the brevity of our conversations.
As people began to share their ideas, it became apparent that more than a few people were planning on writing on the Fort Snelling topic, the controversiality of preserving and glorifying a building which was for the Dakota a concentration camp. The question, it seemed, was who the information should be sent to -- it is important that we think strategically about this element of the assignment. Also, Ben noted, if a few people are researching the same topic, they are welcome to pool their research; they just must create their own texts. Minneapolis, incidentally, is a sort of center of American Indian studies, so there are a lot of resources available. Hallie suggested, on the topic of who to send their texts to, that the people working at Fort Snelling probably already know about the Dakota history there -- they are probably already being pressured. So the public may be a better choice of recipient. Ben thought that the people in charge at Fort Snelling may know its history, but that the 'lower-level' workers may not -- so they could be interesting choice, if it were possible to reach them. Maybe the best way would simply be to go, in person, and hand it to them. Again, Ben stressed the importance of carefully choosing our audience.
Turning to logistics, Mandi asked if Ben still wanted a hard copy of the text, if we didn't email it. Ben said yes, please. Elissa asked if we needed to have the metacommentary ready with the rough draft next week. Ben said we should start thinking and talking about it, but no, it is not required. Brittany asked for more detail on the metacommentary. Ben elaborated thus: the text itself is what we will be sending. But there will be a lot of stuff we'll be thinking about, which won't be obvious in the text. Ben wants to know what we've been thinking; we should take a look back and cite where our thoughts came from. The metacommentary should be an answer to the question, Why did you do it that way? Together, the text and metacommentary should be 1000 words. Tam wanted to know what we should do if we don't know who to send it to. Ben said we had to find out, and asked what her subject was; Tam replied that she wanted to write about political violence in America. Ben advised her to be specific: that instead of writing about political violence, generally, she should think about what specific truth she wanted to communicate, and focus on that. Also, he noted, if our content doesn't directly relate to our studies in class, we should just make a theoretical link, and put that in the commentary -- for example, link it to Hegel, or Arendt, or whoever else. And of course, we are welcome to talk to him about the assignment, or to talk to each other. It is not an easy assignment.

And what did we find on sex murders?
[Silence.]
Really?

Disappointed by our lack of initiative, after the collective interest in the topic on Tuesday, Ben gave a brief demonstration: Research 101. He said he'd arrived at school at 10, realized he'd forgotten to look up sex murders, and typed into Google, Hitler "sex murders". The following text came up, an excerpt from the book Hitler by Joachim C. Fest. Ben read it aloud:

As soon as he had recovered his composure, he continued on to Hamburg after all. There, amid the cheers of thousands, he delivered one of his passionate speeches that whipped the audience into a kind of collective orgy, all waiting tensely for the moment of release, the orgasm that manifested itself in a wild outcry. The parallel is too patent to be passed over; it lets us see Hitler's oratorical triumphs as surrogate actions of a churning sexuality unable to find its object. No doubt there was a deeper meaning to Hitler's frequent comparison of the masses to "woman." And we need only look at the corresponding pages in Mein Kampf, at the wholly erotic fervor that the idea and the image of the masses aroused in him, to see what he sought and found as he stood on the platform high above the masses filling the arena -- his masses. Solitary, unable to make contact, he more and more craved such collective unions. In a revealing turn of phrase (if we may believe the source) he once called the masses his "only bride." His oratorical discharges were largely instinctual, and his audience, unnerved by prolonged distress and reduced to a few elemental needs, reacted on the same instinctual wave length. The sound recordings of the period clearly convey the peculiarly obscene, copulatory character of mass meetings: the silence at the beginning, as of a whole multitude holding its breath; the short, shrill yappings; the minor climaxes and first sounds of liberation on the part of the crowd; finally the frenzy, more climaxes, and then the ecstasies released by the finally unblocked oratorical orgasms. The writer Rene Schickele once spoke of Hitler's speeches as being like "sex murders." And many other contemporary observers have tried to describe the sensually charged liquescence of these demonstrations in the language of diabolism.

Nevertheless, anyone who thought the entire secret of Hitler's success as an orator lay in this use of speech as a sexual surrogate would be making a serious mistake. Rather, once again it was the curious coupling of delirium and rationality that characterized his oratory. Gesticulating in the glare of spotlights, pale, his voice hoarse as he hurled his charges, tirades, and outbursts of hatred, he remained always the alert master of his emotions. For all his seeming abandon, he never lost control.

Ben then asked us to take it apart. Elissa said she could clearly see the "sex" part, but where was the murder? Tam half-joked that maybe he "turned them on and then turned them off." Ben said there was definitely a tension there, a manipulation. He asked Shukri to comment on the DeLillo passage she had used in her blog, on page 73:

Many of those crowds were assembled in the name of death. They were there to attend tributes to the dead. Processions, songs, speeches, dialogues with the dead, recitations of the names of the dead. They were there to see pyres and flaming wheels, thousands of flags dipped in salute, thousands of uniformed mourners. There were ranks and squadrons, elaborate backdrops, blood banners and black dress uniforms. Crowds came to form a shield against their own dying. To become a crowd is to keep out death. To break off from the crowd is to risk death as an individual, to face dying alone. Crowds came for this reason above all others. They were there to be a crowd.

Ben said, The Third Reich was a death cult. There is a dialectic at work, here, between sex and death, orgasm and murder. Tam asked what a dialectic is, and Heidi offered: it is the structure of two things existing, destroying each other, in opposition. Ben defined it further as an eternal tension between things and their opposites -- and that yes, they can contradict each other and destroy each other, but they can also add to each other. So, sex is the creation of life. Death is the destruction of life. How are these things related? They are intertwined everywhere, even in language; in literature the orgasm has been called "the little death." In regard to Hitler and the 'sex murders,' he was getting these crowds charged up in order to commit murder. Generally, historians agree that fascism leads to war.

Going back to Fest, he said, you can see the dialectic in the "curious coupling of delirium and rationality". In Network, we saw this dialectic between Howard Beale and the profit-makers. We see the dialectic combined in the characters of Hitler, Martin Luther Thomas, and Glenn Beck.

After a slight digression discussing WikiLeaks and the meaning of nationhood (it is a myth), we turned to the person on our other side and looked for the Question and Thesis in the Hannah Arendt selection. After locating these two positions in the text, we were to consider how the Arendt related to Fest and DeLillo, and how DeLillo's novel was an extended commentary on Arendt. Brittany wondered if this question and thesis approach to reading was specific to political theory; Ben said no -- it is a useful way to think about any argument. He then asked Emily, Hongfa and Kate where they had located the question; they were unsure. Lindsey said that she (/we) had located it at the very beginning. Ben agreed with her analysis, and asked how we might re-state the question in plain English. In the end it was decided that "What led to totalitarian government?" was basically sufficient. Brittany answered the question with, "organized loneliness" -- but Ben said not yet! Don't give away the answer. He then brought up a question of Elissa's, the question of whether or not Hannah Arendt was a feminist; he said that she's generally thought to be rather anti-feminist. Brittany brought up the fact that she was the first female professor at Princeton University, 10 years before female students were even admitted. Ben noted that Arendt had an interesting relationship with structures of domination and oppression. She also was really into the Classics -- Greek philosophy and such; she lived mainly before the feminist movement, before there was a feminism-in-language. She was one of the most brilliant philosophers of the 20th century. Brittany interjected that she actually had preferred not to be called a philosopher, but rather a political theorist, because 'philosopher' concerned only 'man' in the singular. Ben found this interesting, and not necessarily surprising.

Elissa found a possible 'answer' to the 'question,' or a thesis, on page 478, where Arendt states that "organized loneliness is considerably more dangerous." Ben asked her to explain -- what is organized loneliness?

Mandi said that to her, isolation versus solitude versus loneliness made sense. Elissa thought that solitude made sense, but not isolation -- it was difficult to see the difference between isolation and loneliness. Hallie said it reminded her of White Noise, and the nuclear family -- within which one is never isolated, but still lonely. Ben referred us to page 476 of the Arendt, and clarified that isolation is a physical state, whereas solitude and loneliness are mental states of being. Mandi connected these ideas to solitary confinement, quoting Arendt to say that "solitude can become loneliness", and that in loneliness, one is deserted by one's own self.

Ben, paraphrasing, said that solitude is a virtue, because (referencing the top of page 475) one chooses to leave company; one works, makes things, in solitude. It is an enriching thing, 'time to one's self'. Loneliness, on the other hand, is when you lose that part of yourself. It is empty, incomplete, and it is not chosen. It is forced on you. It is a vice. It is modern.

So where is the thesis?

Tam suggested it was at the very end, on page 479. Ben said that here she is talking about a hope, and it is not an answer to the question, but rather a tag on the end. I suggested that it was at the top of page 478, and Ben agreed. Here Arendt writes, "What prepares men for totalitarian domination in the non-totalitarian world is the fact that loneliness, once a borderline experience usually suffered in certain marginal social conditions like old age, has become an everyday experience of the evergrowing masses of our century. The merciless process into which totalitarianism drives and organizes the masses looks like a suicidal escape from this reality." Ben connected this 'suicidal escape' to the passage from DeLillo on page 73, becoming a crowd to keep out death. He asked us to consider this argument as we read part 3 of White Noise, and to come next week with passages that relate to and/or add to what we talked about today.