Reading very old newspapers

 How I moved into the eighteenth century. I have always preferred spoilers, I cannot stand dramatic tension, suspense kills me, so I have decided to move into the eighteenth century, about which I have a clear sense of how it ends. 

 

Reading the famous authors, philosophers and poets, from the eighteenth century has always felt reassuring, now I am embarking on reading newspapers in order to keep up with daily politics—what is happening a certain court, which ministers are falling or rising, where are there threats of war (more places than anyone remembers), what are the blow-by-blow politics of the century—how do the large monarchies threaten each other constantly. Will England and Spain attack each other? How have Russia and the Ottoman empire managed so many long wars against each other? How is the French minister trying to take advantage of all these machinations? 

 

Read the newspapers, save the historians for later. The Wiener Zeitung starts in 1703, Wandsbecker Bote is a much later (1771) addition to Hamburg newspapers. They are all available online. 

 

Back in graduate school in the very first month of the first semester we read Jürgen Habermas’ Strukturwandlung der Öffentlichkeit, where from the start the eminent philosopher notes that newspapers brought information to Hamburg merchants eager to know more about shipping and politics in distant places. Turns out there were even more newspapers than I ever imagined. 

 

We generally have never been told that the eighteen century was packed with newspapers that spread information about Europe and more. Poets and philosophers were supposed to have composed in a vacuum of information about politics and the economies.  I had the vague sense that newspapers became important in the nineteenth century as mass production arose to create the masses, who increasingly were literate. Only when philosophers like Nietzsche fulminated against newspaper reading did they matter—this alas was all wrong. 

 

Newspapers started in northern Europe during the Thirty Years War, when urban populations were eager to know about the movements of threatening armies. Now, as I cannot bear my own century, I am off to the eighteenth to read about day-to-day politics from London, Versailles, Wien, Warsaw, and the Ottoman border. Turns out there are some similarities. Russian stand-offs with Ottomans across the Danube River have a familiar ring. Stay tuned, let's see how it works out.....

The Legacy of Enlightenment Race Theory

March 24 – 25, 2022

 

Organized by: Daniel Purdy, Pennsylvania State University

Sponsored by: Max Kade German-American Research Institute

and College of the Liberal Arts, Pennsylvania State University

 

CONFERENCE SCHEDULE

Updated

 

Thursday, March 24, 2022

 

The Grucci Room, Burrowes Building, Pennsylvania State University

 

10:20 Dean Clarence Lang, College of the Liberal Arts, Pennsylvania State University:Welcome 

 

10:40 Daniel Purdy, Penn State University

 What do we want to learn from this conference?

 

11:15 Robert Bernasconi, Penn State University:  

Philosophical Histories as Sites of Racism

 

Lunch Break

 

1:30 Jeannette Eileen Jones, University of Nebraska: 

‘On the Brain of the Negro’: The Impact of the German Enlightenment on 19^th Century Theories of Blackness

 

2:30 Patrice Nganang, State University of New York—Stony Brook: 

The Peripheries of a World War

 

3:30 Jameliah Shorter-Bourhanou, College of the Holy Cross: 

Reinventing Kant

 

Coffee break

 

4:30 Micol Bez, Northwestern University/ Ecole Normale de Paris -- Institut Jean Nicod:

Facta, Ficta and Picta: Re-thinking Race with Nietzsche and         against Kant?

 

Zoom Registration:

https://psu.zoom.us/meeting/register/tJcud-ihqTkjHtQUnwoLubd6gYB0_71A4nI0

 

 

Friday, March 25, 2022

 

The Grucci Room, Burrowes Building, Pennsylvania State University

 

10:00 Jürgen Overhoff, University of Muenster: 

Prussia's Hidden Slaves: The Lives of Africans in Berlin and        Königsberg in the Eighteenth Century

 

11:00 Carl Niekerk, University of Illinois, Champagne-Urbana: 

Race, Enlightenment Anthropology, and Radical Thought

 

Lunch Break

 

1:30 Adam Blackler, University of Wyoming: 

Popularizing the Nation: Colonial Literature and the Imperial        Imagination

 

2:30 Patricia Simpson, University of Nebraska: 

Enlightened Climates: The Chemistry of Skin and the ‘Souls of    Slaves’ (1800/1900)

 

3:30  John Noyes, University of Toronto: 

Race as Urphänomen. Chamberlain reads Herder

 

Day Two Zoom Registration:

https://psu.zoom.us/meeting/register/tJwkce6opjorHtJTEKoK0PHi-ORagsdiEmCw

 

Questions? Contact conference organizer Daniel Purdy at

dlp14@psu.edu.

Conference Website: https://sites.psu.edu/racetheoryconference

 

Broken Up Translations between New York City and Buenos Aires. "Todo lo que se olvida en un instante" (Everything That Is Forgotten in an Instant)

 

Seen at the 2021 MOMA Film Festival online:

In watching this film, the first thrill was that of recognition: hearing my old Bronx Science friend, 

Richard Shpuntoff speaking Argentine Spanish—an admittedly personal response to the film. Next we hear his daughters and wife teaching how to pronounce Spanish words like an Argentine--with a soft 'D.' 

Then it becomes immediately clear that the film is playfully separating the subtitles from the voice over and then from the images as well. We have expectations about subtitles providing a reasonable translation of what someone is saying in a film. Richard explains that he works in Buenos Aires making subtitles for films; that he has done so for many thousands of films. 

This is the point where he separates the two levels of meaning. But this is not some chaotic Dadaist shredding. As you watch your way through the movie, you get the feeling that subtitles at the beginning of the film matched voice over dialogue at the end of the film. The effect is to bring the end of the film back around to its beginning—like a well-wrought essay. Something they taught us in high school. 

Along the way, the film has all sorts of juxtapositions—the movie is fundamentally about contrasts and parallels between the US and Argentina, New York and Buenos Aires, Jose Marti and FDR. Richard recalls the history of urban development in NYC by talking about the Cross Bronx and the Bruckner Expressways but the images show almost identical elevated highways in Buenos Aires. We all have heard that Robert Moses was a dictator, but then Richard is speaking about dictatorship in Argentina and its American support through Nelson Rockefeller. 

The three levels—voice, image, text— are out of synch to make a point about relations from one end of the Americas to the other. Yet by the end of the film, you realize that there is a circularity to this lack of synchronization. 

Most crucially, there is the adorable footage of Richard’s 80+ father walking around the Lower East Side/Chinatown describing the neighborhood when he was a boy during the Great Depression. At first it seems that Richard is drawing his father’s recollections about moving from Brooklyn to Manhattan into his own travels between NYC and Buenos Aires, but then three-quarters of the way through the film we get footage of his father at home in the kitchen discussing politics and suddenly you see where Richard gets his own politics and how much his journey replicates the ongoing contrast in NYC, between outer borough and the City. 

The juxtapositions between sound-image-text become both a history of US politics in the Americas and a biography for father and son.

Nazis and Cowboys at the Border

Americans, it seems, cannot help drawing analogies between current politics and Nazi Germany. The potential for similarities is on everyone’s mind, from the left to the right. We all grew up with the Allied defeat of the Nazis and the liberation of inmates from concentration camps as the keystone to America’s claim to hold a unique, higher moral position in world politics.  If pundits, politicians, and voters feel compelled to draw divergent analogies between current policies and German history, then we should all maybe take a class on the subject, read some books along the way. While we are studying German history, we should review our own. Given our current free-for-all with Holocaust comparisons, the need for basic humanities education in history and culture is more urgent than ever.

Nazi comparisons circulate as memes, without much historical analysis to back them up. For decades, Godwin’s Law was used by internet discussion groups whenever anyone hauled out the Nazis. The Law both predicted and regulated online discussions by stating that the longer any social media conversation lasted over time, the probability that someone would draw a comparison to Hitler became virtually assured, at which the point the conversation should be ended.  This rule kept dialogues within bounds and pulled the plug of crazy accusations. But recently, Mike Godwin has allowed for his Law to be suspended, with the important proviso that anyone making the Nazi comparison really needs to have the historical proof to back it up. https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-intersect/wp/2017/08/14/the-creator-of-godwins-law-explains-why-some-nazi-comparisons-dont-break-his-famous-internet-rule/?utm_term=.6e9e8d5b540f

Earlier this week in response to the US policy of separating children from the parents who were attempting to cross the border, Holocaust survivors drew the analogy to their own treatment under the Nazis https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2018/jun/18/separation-children-parents-families-us-border-trump

By no means were only left-wing critics invoking the analogy.  On Twitter, Michael Hayden, the former director of the CIA, also compared the Trump administration’s border policy with concentration camps. https://www.nationalreview.com/news/ex-cia-chief-defends-tweet-comparing-trump-border-policy-to-nazi-concentration-camps/If his goal was to shock the public, then Hayden succeeded. The Nazi comparison became so convincing to many that Attorney General Sessions felt the need to respond on Monday by claiming that the difference between US immigrant camps and Nazi concentration camps came down to the notion that the US was trying to keep inmates from entering the country, while the Nazis were trying to prevent Jews from leaving, he made three mistakes. http://thehill.com/homenews/administration/392923-sessions-real-exaggeration-to-compare-family-separation-to

A closer look at this argument raises a number of problems.  First, in the context of the immigration debate, Session’s distinction between using concentration camps to either expel or contain a population was trivial and missed the entire moral issue. Second, he essentially conceded the validity of the comparison by getting caught up in technicalities. By making minor policy distinctions, Session implied that the two policies really were somewhat similar; they just differed in terms of why people are being herded and separated into camps. Unspoken but plainly visible was the implication that both the Nazis and the Trump administration were acting out a racial policy; Third, even in conceding the comparison, Sessions demonstrated a fuzzy understanding of the Nazi past. In the 1930s, before the escalation of racial genocide, the Nazis were also expelling Jews from the German Reich, so long as they were stripped of any valuables or financial assets they might have possessed. The threat of incarceration in a concentration camp drove many to leave. Only during the Second World War as the Nazis began their industrial extermination of Jews, were camps used as a means of holding and killing. For Session’s distinction to make any sense, he would have had to be made some very detail arguments about Nazi concentration camp policy.  The one positive side to Sessions’ confused rebuttal: at least we all have returned to the belief that the Nazis were a horror, beyond acceptable. Not too long ago, even that universally agreed-upon principle seemed under fire.

Well into the 1980s, the Holocaust was considered such a unique calamity that no other event could possibly be compared to it, in part because it should never happen again. For the last thirty years, as the Holocaust has become the standard by which all other genocides are evaluated, its singularity gave way to a cautious examination of resemblances between atrocities.  But now we have moved into an entirely new kind of rhetoric, one that encourages analogies to how Nazi Germany as an unreflective short-hand for evil.  Now Holocaust comparisons do the work for Americans unwilling or unable to apply their own democratic principles to public policy decisions.  The automatic response seems to be: “Let’s turn to German history, because we can all agree on how awful the Nazis were,” rather than “Let’s make our own moral decisions, because we are a long-standing republic with an immense legacy of immigration.”

Unified Germany has since at least the second Iraq war, made a point of rejected US policies that contradict what its citizens believe to be their nation’s obligations after overcoming Communism and Fascism.  After Trump’s election these differences have become even more obvious.  If the Nazis are not scary enough, the current administration has added Angela Merkel’s decision to allow over a million refugees to enter Germany to the list of German policies to avoid. Current US border policy is explained as another attempt to avoid becoming Germany, except this time it is the democratically elected Christian Democratic coalition that is the scary foreign actor.  To reinforce this hyped scenario, the President trumpeted scurrilous fabrications about German crime rates and the supposed collapse of public order. Our European ally has been forced to deny these charges by explaining that their society is quite peaceful. https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/fact-checker/wp/2018/06/20/president-trumps-claim-that-crime-is-up-in-germany/?utm_term=.257a422cbc7f

 Germans of course have responded to the Trump administration with their own analogies, which do not get much press here, based on their terrible history with a militarized border wall that tore families apart for decades. If Ronald Reagan urged Mikhail Gorbachev to “Tear down this wall,” the mayor of Berlin was urging Donald Trump not to build one.  https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/europe/donald-trump-build-the-wall-mexico-border-executive-order-berlin-mayor-warning-dont-suffering-a7550696.html

Quick comparisons with the Nazis all too often serve as a screen onto which we can project our fears while blocking us from examining historical connections much closer to home. Drawing half-baked analogies to Germany prevents Americans from making their own moral judgments. If Americans really want to learn something from the way that Germans dealt with the violent past, then we should also devote real effort and education to examining our own violent, racist history. Instead of worrying about how close we come to Nazis, instead of always basing our policies on which foreigner we happen to fear the most, could we not simply judge our own policies from our own history? For example, how does the administration’s current policy compare to the treatment the Irish, southern Italians, Chinese, Japanese, and Russian Jews received at the border and in society when they emigrated to the United States in the nineteenth century? How does it compare to the incarceration and separation of Native Americans and African slaves? Forget the Nazis for a moment, talk about ourselves. In the current debate, they are just a distraction from our own incapacity for historical reflection.  Why not base policy on our centuries long experience with immigration? Drawing analogies to other countries’ history means we pass over our own.  

Academic Colds

Academic Colds 

The undergraduate cold comes as the convulsive culmination of a five-week run of all-nighters, talking, reading, , finding previously undiscovered locations to have sex, drinking through the weekends, popping pills on Tuesdays and Wednesdays in the soft easy chairs of the campus lounge. The undergraduate cold forces you to lie in your own dormitory bed alone, as you hack and sweat your way through two whole days of blurry solitude.  By the second afternoon, you wonder if you should give up smoking, by the next day you are willing to follow that hippy girl’s advice on how to eat healthy, but by the third day you are back outside sucking in the nicotine, cold breeze, ready for the next round.

The graduate student cold sweeps up on you unexpectedly as if you had no idea it was coming, at first you resist, confident that if you focus on your course readings you can shake off these minor symptoms, then the fever overpowers you, and you bike to the drugstore only worsening your condition, so that you can take too many pills that leave you head spinning as you coast down the hill to your apartment.  The loudest, nihilistic music fills your head as you sweat on your fake leather sofa, left over from a design era you thought had been completely superseded.

The dissertation cold comes mercifully just as you have finished your second chapter, but have no idea how to proceed. You have written all the new, original thoughts you could muster and you are barely halfway done.  Too exhausted to consider failure, you have no idea what could possibly exist outside completion, you collapse into your queen side bed as your “partner” decides to sleep over at her girlfriend’s apartment, so as to leave you more space to recover.

The untenured cold is like an on-campus job interview for which you prepare madly, only to have the opportunity pass away within a few days. You guzzle cold medicine like it has no effect. The head of the search committee runs into you in the bathroom sucking down Nyquil and just smiles. You sweat through your talk while the audience prepares their uncomprehending questions. You drive home alone in a blizzard that forces you to sleep on the side of the highway for the first time.

The tenured cold is like the tiresome colleague, who emphasizes his own grand accomplishments in relation to your minor successes every time you have a meeting. Tenured colds have to be tolerated with an air of Buddha, for if you are not sanguine enough they may dog you to the grave. The tenured cold may have no end, it may never leave you. It may embrace your being completely, until you submit to the dean’s retirement package, forcing you to vacate your office even as your brow sweats feverishly.

What's in a name

 Snowtheory: when a blanket of ice suspends normal operations, leaving us free to ponder what we will for a few hours before the everyday world recovers sufficiently to throw its old obligations on us once again.

Everybody Knows

Everybody knows,

so we can all agree that Leonard Cohen was a careful student of modern song, as Bruce Springsteen is. When you sing a popular song, you want everybody to know it.

What does everyone know? Cohen tells us in detail, but so have earlier African-American songwriters such as Nat King Cole in one of the finest Christmas Songs—“Everybody knows” the standard elements of a white Christmas. He tells us, “Everybody knows a turkey and some mistletoe, Help to make the season bright.” And then he hones in on the real excuse for consumer Christmas, the kids, “They know that Santa's on his way
He's loaded lots of toys and goodies on his sleigh”

Indeed the line “everybody knows” is an acknowledgement of the specific features of mainstream culture, we all know, both children and parents with their knowing nod, even those who live outside Middle American, those who serve and entertain but do not belong wholly. Nat King Cole’s gentle acknowledgement of cliché and convention, a relatively quiet tip off that he is singing for an audience that has very specific expectations, a collection of listeners who want to hear standard references in their Christmas songs, we all know what they we are supposed to hear.

This acquiescence to tradition and hegemony is then given a more critical version in Nina Simone’s “Misssissippi Goddamn” where “everybody knows” refers to the universal understood news that this particularly retrograde state does unspeakably horrible things to black folks, which everybody knows, but which cannot possibly be stated in song directly. Common knowledge here is not about the comforts of a Christian holiday but the brutality of racism, The phrase always also means that we don’t need to express these things because they are already known, whether its Nat King Cole’s Christmas or the violence of deep Southern racism.  Simone sings, “And everybody knows about Mississippi goddam” to tell us that we have all read the newspaper and that both black and white people know what goes on, but the line implies also that there are distinctly different forms of knowing. Everybody knows what they know which means they surely disagree. Nina Simone elaborates, then in case not everyone in the audience knows what she does:

 Hound dogs on my trail
School children sitting in jail
Black cat cross my path
I think every day's gonna be my last

Leonard Cohen expands on Nina Simone’s knowledge by listing off all the unacknowledged things that we know: that the dice were loaded, that the fight was fixed—for anyone who first heard the song, the list goes on to include more than civil rights politics to include our own personal, subjective delusions about ourselves.  When I first heard the song, I was thrilled that someone had finally spelled out –not just the fact that the world was crooked, but that we all knew it, despite whatever official optimism we Americans are required to project.

So when Bruce Springsteen sings the lines in “The Ghost of Tom Joad”:

Well the highway is alive tonight
Where it's headed everybody knows

He is turning against his own mythology of the promised land, even as he is echoing the lyrics of earlier songs. Springsteen borrows but only in order to acknowledge that his own hope of escape was false—a statement that may have surprised his fans but which he tells them they should have known of course.  In the end, they prefer the myth and not what everyone knows. Springsteen’s working class has abandoned his political viewpoint, and he is left with the cultured, academic crowd that studies the history of American song lyrics. Everybody knows now has been turned into a nasty revival of the violence coupled with political apathy—everybody always knew so what can we do? Thus, the phrase today has turned from a cynical critique of the system to a passive acceptance by working class voters who empower the wrong kind of boss because "everybody rolls with their fingers crossed."