Protocol 5/3/11 and an interesting article from the Star Trib

There was a water bottle laying in the middle of the room and as Ben entered, he asked if it was one of ours. No one responded that it was and Ben kicked the water bottle across the room. He announced that he had to grab some papers but that we should check out an article from the Star Tribune that he had on his computer, shown to the class via projector. “How does Fasolt help us make sense of this problem?” Ben asked then left the room while the difficultators began to set up. The class look at the article, which was about the issue of gay marriage among religious officials, focusing on how a Pastor Sergio Choy feels same-sex marriage would be like trying to make water out or hydrogen or oxygen alone.

Ben returned and wrote the program on the board which was as follows:

1) Gay Marriage and H2O: Fasolt Lives!

2) Housekeeping

3) Difficultation

4) On historicism and historical materialism – or, who’s Wally B, and what’s he trying to do?

Ben sat down and took attendance and invited us to move into a more condensed circle. Rachel noted that one of Ben’s shoes is untied and Ben said that he knows, then directs our attention back to the article, asking us what we see and what Fasolt would say about how Pastor Choy lives and breaths. Jordan said that one part that stuck out to here was the risk of overstepping role and going against the tide of history. This would be stopping change and the way history is going by legislators that oppose gay marriage. Liz added that the part about the church leaders not being members of the state church of Minnesota stuck out to her. Ben added in a bit about medieval universalism and that separation of church and state makes no sense before the historical revolt where the emperor controlled space and time. Sophie spoke about the social structure of marriage and natural law, mentioning how Choy likens gay marriage to trying to make water out of only oxygen or hydrogen, and that to him gay marriage goes against natural law. Ben tied this back to Fasolt, saying that the historical revolt is still being played out. Gay rights activists are trying to be progressive, to make a break from the past and change to a different and better future while residual elements of medieval universalism still exist. In pop culture, Ben argued, medieval universalism is not gone, by trying to make social arrangement like natural law, and arguing how it is, or how it was when we lived with the pope and the emperor in power, as timeless as a water molecule. Elissa asked if this was a division in the religious community and Ben said absolutely. There are huge breaks in the Lutheran Church concerning homosexuals and the idea of breaks in the church itself is a concept that we could not have without Luther.

Next, we moved on to housekeeping. We received our papers back along with self-evaluation forms to fill out and bring with us when we meet with Ben to discuss our grades for the paper. Ben then asked if we found external writing three difficult and by asking us to raise our hands in a sort of social experiment, he compared how much experience we had in the past with writing such papers with how difficult we found writing this paper. Ben said that this semester was a bit like watching figure skating then, at the end, being asked to figure skate. He understood that we might have a bit trouble writing in this style if we didn’t have much previous experience and that we wouldn’t be marked down for something we didn’t know. Kate G. mentioned that the most difficult part for her was the act of trying to come up with the actual question. Ben said that practice would help, then asked us if other classes had asked us to something we didn’t know how to do. Many people raised their hands and Ben said that at least he wasn’t alone in making that mistake and, if we had this problem in the future, that we should go talk to the professor about it, as that will help immensely.

We moved on to the Benjamin reading and the difficultation began. We numbered off into groups of three and each group was assigned a thesis, find important concept in it and connect to two other theses. My group – Elissa, Kate L, Mandy and Tam – discussed how thesis VI was anti-Ranke and what the idea of a dangerous event could be. Our group finished discussing a few seconds early and the topic of papers came up. Mandy informed us that papers can be made to appear longer by tweaking margins, character spacing and changing the font size of periods.

Our group was called on to share first, and Elissa spoke about the first sentence of the thesis: “To articulate the past historically does not mean to recognize it ‘the way it really was’” (Benjamin 255). Elissa said that this was anti-Ranke and that “wie es eigentlich gewesen” is that it is a too selective view of history. She also mentioned that we had been confused by Benjamin’s mention of a moment of danger. Ben said that in Hegel and Ranke’s methods of doing history, one went back to the archives and string things together “like beads on a rosary.” However, this is a problem. Ben decided to leave the question in the air of what the problem of Ranke is. Elissa also mentioned the passage about men singled out by history and that it sounded Hegelish. Mandy mentioned that we had connected this thesis to V and VII. In V, we linked to the line, “For every image of the past that is not recognized by the present as one of its own concerns threatens to disappear irretrievably” (Benjamin 255). Karrie mentioned that this was the concept of a stepping stone and that if one isn’t important enough, it disappears. Ben clarified the idea of the moment of danger as the Nazis and Hitler, as this was written in 1939. The threat of the 3^rd Reich was extremely immediate and palpable. If we see the past as just in the past, as nothing to do with us, it’s one step from forgetting about it entirely. In Benjamin: “Only that historian will have the gift of fanning the spark of hope in the past who is firmly convinced that even the dead will not be safe from the enemy if he wins. And this enemy has not ceased to be victorious” (255); this being that if the enemy wins, the dead will not be safe. Ben mentioned the digging up of corpses and desecrating them, along with the more figurative sense of people in paintings being removed during the French and Russian Revolution if it was decided that they shouldn’t be remembered by history. Today, it is much easier to do such things with Photoshop. Ben said that the Holocaust wasn’t just about killing Jews but killing the history of Jewry. Elissa asked about who Benjamin talked about religion in the reading, as she found he had be interested in Jewish mysticism. She asked if those moments about Judaism were in the religious sense or about Hitler. Ben said that it was both, in the same time with the same thing. Benjamin was interested in negative dialectics and how God and the Anti-Christ could be the same thing. Carrie added that in thesis VII, “The nature of this sadness stands out more clearly if one asks with whom the adherents of historicism actually empathize. The answer is inevitable: with the victor” (page 256) was important. Ben said to look at think about what the sadness Benjamin was talking about could be and to look the quote from Flaubert. We looked at the quote then Ben asked the class how many people had heard of Carthage. Three people had. Ben asked how many of us had heard of Rome and we all raised our hands. Ben explained that Rome and Carthage were two great empires that had existed at the same time. They fought a serious of wars, Rome won, Carthage lost and now everyone remembers Rome. For those that try to tell the history of Carthage, the trampled people, there is a great cost in trying to tell their story; it is difficult and spiritually hard. Viewing history from the losers does not view people moving towards a happy future. In historicism, however, you end up empathizing with the victor. In things such as the American Pageant, Fort Snelling and High Hitler, the benefits of the victors tramping on the losers is shown. If only this perspective is shown, then a whole other history (that of the Dakota, in the case of Fort Snelling) is forgotten entirely. We preserve the archives of the victors, but not all archives. Ben noted that before the Nazis began burning people, they burned books.

Group two then discussed their section, thesis VIII. Hallie pointed out the first sentence: “The tradition of the oppressed teaches us that the ‘state of emergency’ in which we live Is not the exception but the rule” which she said states we’re constantly in a state of emergency, which gives us authority to do nearly anything. We need to realize that we’re not the exception but the rule otherwise we have no chance of fighting fascism. Ben asked, “Who’s we?” and Hallie said they were the people who disagree with fascism. Ben added they were the people who, like Benjamin, looked upon the immediate world and said, “What the fuck?” They wondered what had happened and how they could do anything about it. There are two levels to this piece by Benjamin – how we understand history, and how we make history. Hallie said that the state of emergency is treated as a historical norm and that a real state of emergency needs to occur – in a revolution, perhaps in our own consciousness in how we view progress. Ben added that it was breaking out of continuity, something we’ve never seen before. Though it would be impossible to have a revolution in the mind that didn’t have to do with the body, it was all part of how to get out of the iron cage. Hallie then mentioned thesis XIII and the Social Democrats, who were against the Nazis. Ben said that they were a bit like the Democratic party in the US, a mainstream left-of-center Marxist worker party that Benjamin didn’t like very much. Liz brought up thesis IX and the Angel of History and “one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet” (page 257) and that this was an image of the continual state of exception. Ben explained that in our idea of a timeline, this is like a continuous shit pile, what history is like right here, right now, which we can’t see if we are looking at history like Hegel. Brittany brought up the critique of concept in thesis XIII: “A critique of the concept of such a progression much bet the basis of any criticism of the concept of progress itself” (page 261). Liz added that we have to step back and look at what we are talking about to understand current state. Ben said that Social Democrats spoke to workers of things always getting better, but this led to Nazism and there is something wrong with this perception of history. We have to criticize this idea of progress.

Group three went next with thesis XII. Sophie mentioned the shift in perception of viewing working class as avenger to liberator, which Benjamin criticizes, saying the working class forgets the sacrifices they have made. Ben asked what the connection was to Fasolt and Rachel said you can’t make a clear break from the past; you have to know where your are coming from and have memories of where you’ve been. Ben added that if you are always told about positive progress, you are not going to fight, you’re just going to sit on a “conveyor belt.” But if you are motivated by every generation before you, as avengers of them, you see things differently. Ben also mentioned how in Judaism, each generation is taught that they brought themselves out of Egypt, rather than it just affecting the past. This is the concept Benjamin argues is lost and that we need back. Sophie connected to thesis XI, with the Protestant work ethic, which led to workers being enslaved.

Rachel then said we were going to look at articles relating to the death of Osama Bin Ladin and take concepts from the Benjamin reading and see how they articles were dangerous and where there were holes in the story. First we watched a video about Bin Ladin’s death that showed a great deal of footage from 9/11, including the towers falling with a woman screaming in the background and a man hysterically yelling, “Oh my God” over and over. It also showed people celebrating Bin Ladin, which the video described as an “outbreak of joy” over the death of man who was “one of the most hated men since Adolf Hitler.” Ben said that the difficultators were arguing that the articles and video presented the idea of historicism and, given what we’ve talked about thus far with Benjamin, what are the problems and what’s dangerous? Mandy mentioned the connection with Hitler and Bin Ladin both having their deaths publicized on May 1^st, though she said she wasn’t sure it was true. “Even if it’s not, it makes so much sense,” Ben said, and described how you can group names like Hitler, Bin Ladin and the USSR into a signifier box. We went back into our groups to discuss the articles and we will continue the discussion on Thursday.

On a side note, I found this article from the Star Tribune the other day and thought it might be of interest, given the discussion we had today: http://www.startribune.com/world/121047769.html