Many Contingencies

Joking! Just joking. But we have been having a bit of an email exchange.

[EVAN] This seems to be along the lines of some themes you’re exploring in your blog lately: 

Marinetti says in his manifesto on the Ethiopian colonial war: “For twenty-seven years we Futurists have rebelled against the branding of war as antiaesthetic… Accordingly, we state: …War is beautiful because it establishes man’s dominion over the subjugated machinery by means of gas masks, terrifying megaphones, flame throwers, and small tanks.  War is beautiful because it initiates the dreamt-of metalization of the human body.  War is beautiful because it enriches a flowering meadow with the fiery orchids of machine guns.  War is beautiful because it combines the gunfire, the cannonades, the cease-fire, the scents, and the stench of putrefaction into a symphony.  War s beautiful because it creates new architecture, like that of the big tanks, the geometrical formation flights, the smoke spirals from burning villages, and many others…Poets and artists of Futurism! …remember these principles of an aesthetics of war so that your struggle for a new literature and a new graphic art…may be illumined by them!”…   

“*Fiat ars—pereat mundus*,” says Fascism, and, as Marinetti admits, expects war to supply the artistic gratification of a sense perception that has been changed by technology.  This is evidently the consummation of “l’art pour l’art.”

  –Walter Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction” Epilogue. 

[CHLOE] Yes, I’ve encountered that one before. And yes, it does provide food for thought, an interesting angle. But, of course, the question to which this line of thinking delivers me is — if war and violence have so much  potential for beauty (which they do), then what, really, is the value of ‘beauty’ (so narrowly defined) after all? Which is the question Benjamin is putting out there, I suppose, when he refers to this aesthetic move as “evidently the consummation of ‘l’art pour l’art.’”

I’ll easily grant the beauty potential of degradation, suffering, pure destruction (Dr. Strangelove, anyone?). But the way that this is used in any sort of defense of same seems to be just another indicator that the mind/body schism of modernity is a device that can get away from us, cease to be a tool for intellect and become a social virus.

[EVAN] I don’t know.  I sent you that quote because you keep getting on this kick of really trying to take those who glorify violence seriously, at least in a certain sense.  That’s probably good, I think there is some kind of value/beauty in mano-a-mano struggle, but I’m not sure that its not also the ugliest thing in the world.  What about the struggles in 13th century France, “Kill them all, god will know his own.”  This is the place where a whole village was (supposedly, accounts vary) taken, and everyone’s eyes were cut out, one by one, their lips and noses removed so that their living faces looked like skulls.  They were put into a line with one hand on the shoulder of the next man and the foremost left with one eye to guide the rest back to the next Cathar refuge.  Then think of all the catapults launching excrement  over city walls to destroy the other side with dysentery, of the kings and soldiers drawing all their people into the city walls and everybody desperate and scared, but mostly hungry and thirsty; wondering if in fact they weren’t going to wake up in the morning because the muscles which moved languidly, lethargically the night before just wouldn’t have the strength to move the following morning. And then think of mustard gas and people dying from excess vomiting and chemical warfare and perfect diseases killing everybody  indiscriminately and skin flaking off in charred powder and burnt out lungs and brittle vocal chords with people crying in a Mickey mouse voice “help me, help me…”. Because that shit is what war is really about. That plus the winning side desperately raping and pillaging to try and still their own sense of horror (it is worse to do these deeds than to have them done to you, worse to lose faith in others than to lose faith in yourself).

So yeah.  We shouldn’t lose sight of the value of life-or-death struggle, in the value of we-must-win-against-all-opposition.  But when someone has to choose to become a soldier (I mean really, not from the point of view of some sort of machismo illusion, viewing all war as an extension of greco-roman wrestling—though I doubt whether its often been done from any other point of view), its a really fucked up decision.  And every moment of beauty is probably punctuated 10-fold by moments of disgust.  And you’re probably sacrificing yourself on an altar whether you win or lose, live or die—you aren’t really going to be ok with the outcome and the circumstances.

But yeah, there are moments of beauty: all the moments, where a person gives up their safety of home, body, morals, etc. for the sake of a dream.  All the moments where a soldier throws himself hopelessly into the fray purely for the sake of others (”Move out and draw fire” is a phrase a Green Beret I knew used to say jokingly, but I knew that was “haha, only serious”).  Its beautiful because it’s already a defeat, and being broken is one of the most beautiful things that can happen to you.  I don’t know why that is, or what to make of it, other than that it has something to do with the kind of doubt you always are desperate for, something to do with the world presencing itself before you and you becoming just a part in it (”we are so small amongst the stars, so large against the sky”–Leonard Cohen).  Bleh.

Fuck, I hope that doesn’t bring too much negative imagery to the surface.  Sorry.

[CHLOE] Okay, first of all, as best I can tell, when you refer to this “kick I’m on”  you’re talking specifically about ONE PARAGRAPH of my recent writing, a coda in parentheses at the bottom of an essay, which I placed there specifically to counter such arguments that you now seem to suggest I’m making.

In part I put in that paragraph because of YOUR own defense of the honor in being a soldier, which you may or may not remember making. On some level, also, that one paragraph is an acknowledgement of Nietszche, and what Foucault proceeded to do with Nietszche.

If you’ll kindly review the rest of my many hundreds of recent words, you’ll be reminded that I don’t spend a lot of time glorifying war and violence. Duh. Incorrectly framing responses to my writings as arguments or corrective measures makes me peevish. As you can probably tell from my snippy tone. Sigh. I’ll stop that.

For the most part I take the horrors of war, that you are referring to here so explicitly, as obvious givens. Perhaps that is the trouble here — or troubles, plural. A flaw in my own self-presentation, perhaps, is to not make my baseline awareness of continuing atrocity explicit, for one thing. But in a much larger sense, I do think that the collective lack of a basic cognizance of the “shit [that] is what war is really about” is one of the reasons we as a society continue to let our government fight them.

The point I’m trying to make in writing about men, violence, and war is coming from a place of compassion for those who have had guns placed in their hands. Cannon fodder, is what they call them. I am fully aware of how “the winning side desperately raping and pillaging” does so “to try and still their own sense of horror.” While I wouldn’t quite say the following, as hyperbole it makes the point I’m trying to make perfectly: “it is worse to do these deeds than to have them done to you.”

Men who become soldiers are damaged by war, because war is horrific. But why do they keep throwing themselves into it? That has to do with who we are at home. It has to do with gender, it has to do with American society. If social change is going to occur, it is going to occur in many registers, through many different kinds of action and engagment. The register in which I most frequently operate is one in which I use language to make social critiques — but I like to try to point out the correspondence between my register of operation and others.

What does philosophy have to do with society? What does society have to do with politics? What does beauty or the sublime have to do with any of it? In this particular context I’m not using the word “beauty” in a way that can be neatly contrasted with “ugliness.” I’m using “beauty” as a gloss for “aesthetically valuable,” encompassing sublimity, which I think is actually more often applicable to the aesthetics of the horrors of war. Appropriately, the reference to Italian fascism in the early 20th century brings up a whole slough of interesting thought on the effects of modernity on conceptions of beauty and aesthetic value.

Again, what I was trying to accomplish in that one-paragraph coda was to acknowledge that, yes, perhaps there is beauty in the horrors of war and the masculine culture of violence, but that these nodes of aesthetic value are simply not enough to legitimate their continuing unexamined and unchecked.