Three stories from a work in progress

1.
Whoever said getting there is half the fun never tried to get to Algeria on a Fulbright. I received the news of my grant back in April; it is now nearly October, I only just got my visa, and I have yet to book a flight. I am in Beirut, where I have been studying Arabic for the last three months. In less than a week, I fly back to the United States for my sister’s wedding, armed with a new stack of flashcards and a gently used copy of Al-Kitab, volume one. The wedding is on October 23. I leave for Algiers on October 24. My entry visa expires two days later. Number of entries: wahida.

It wasn’t supposed to be like this. I was supposed to arrive in Algiers weeks ago, with more than enough time to establish residency, set up my apartment, and prepare for the school year. As things stand now, I get off the plane and go into the classroom. I know what I’m teaching, kind of, but other than that, I’m not sure what to expect. Every university has its own culture, and its own set of protocols and procedures, all of which gets framed by different national and international standards. This is my fifth university in five years so I’m something of an expert when it comes to hitting the ground running. Nonetheless, for me, the University of Algiers is something new, as yet unknown. I’ve taught in the Arab world before, but it was in the context of an American institution. And while that experience gave me some familiarity with the French educational system, Lord knows how that’s been reshaped by the arabization campaigns of the post-colonial era, or if it’s been thrown out altogether. In short, I have no idea what I’m doing, and precious few clues about what I might encounter.

Also, I have no idea where I am living and, as far as I can tell, neither does anyone else. Population in Algeria is booming and, as a result, there is a severe housing shortage in Algiers. I am only half-joking when I tell people that I’m bringing a tent.

While its abundant oil and natural gas reserves ensure a healthy amount of coming-and-going among the business-types, Algeria is not a country that really encourages or receives tourists. Which is one of the reasons that this is so difficult, and one of the reasons I want to go. For most places, to be plugged into the global economy is to be carried away by a set of commercial flows that, while always reconfigured through local norms and conditions, generally blunt the rough edges of cross-cultural exchange. Homogeneity has not yet conquered difference, but pretty much anywhere you go, there’s going to be a Starbucks, and they will speak American. Such touchstones constitute a sort of lingua franca for the global elite, and they make it incredibly easy to get along in the world.

For the most part, this is a phenomenon of the post-Soviet era, one of the things that scholars mean when they throw around portentous words like globalization. Given the coincidence of its civil war with the collapse of the Soviet Union and the reorganization of the world system, however, Algeria has, thus far, avoided re-colonization by the forces of global commodity culture. One decade into the new century, Algeria is one of the few countries not yet reshaped by the Anglophone currents of contemporary capitalism. Just getting there is no mean feat, and once on the ground, English is a minor language, at best. Almost anywhere else in the world, Americans can show up, buy a visa, and be whisked off by an English-speaking cab driver to a moderately priced luxury hotel without much premeditation or worry. Once at the hotel, the staff will greet them in English, and they will meet people at the hotel bar who, because they come from a variety of linguistic backgrounds, speak to one another in stock phrases learned from American television. When it comes to Algeria, however, almost all of this must be negotiated in advance, and in languages that are, for most Americans, hardly familiar.

For me, all of this is part of the appeal. What I am interested in, very generally, is how the idea of America gets thrown about in the Arab world, the ways in which the idea of America is translated into a multitude of competing positions within Arab cultural and political discourse. And because Algeria has not yet been infiltrated by American culture, this makes it something of an ideal laboratory for such experiments. Elsewhere in the Arab world, America is much more present, and ideas about America are generally grounded in material culture. Whether it’s movies, music, or military occupation, for many in the Arab world, images of America are concrete and unavoidable; opinions about America are, as a consequence, shaped in relation to the traces of those tableaux. In Algeria, by contrast, the image of America remains rather indistinct.

2.
The first night I spent in Algiers, I sat up, drinking Pastis, and listening to a radio program on the legacy of the revolution. My Arabic being hopelessly schematic, and my college-level French a distant memory, I spent most of the program struggling to keep up. I managed to catch every fourth word, but otherwise I missed much of the story. Here and there, the name of a place would ring out, as would famous personalities and dates; yet, had it not been for the recurrent strains of Ennio Morricone’s score for Battle of Algiers, I would not have known what I was listening to, or what to listen for, nor would I have paused long over the frequency. Radio in Algeria tends to be a lot of talk, and as someone weaned on a steady stream of commercial pop, it’s simply not my thing, even before the troublesome question of language comes into play. For me, radio has never been much more than background noise, an ambient hum that, especially in solitude, helps to evoke an ethereal, if illusory, sense of connection. While talk has never been particularly congenial to that illusion, other languages have proven downright poisonous. Nonetheless, here in Algiers, silence has a life of its own. At night, it creeps into the house and rearranges the furniture. Rooms echo, doors rattle. Here and there, something will pop. In the neighbor’s apartment, plates clatter in the sink. Radio is my only defense; it gives me the courage to get up from the desk and make a cup of tea, to walk to the balcony and fasten the latch. As the evening draws to a close, I turn on the radio largely to anchor myself, to hear the familiar analog hiss, to lose myself in the quality of the sound, this small measure of security.

Fanon wrote about Algerian radio in remarkably similar terms. In his estimation, radio came to Algeria as something more than a technological innovation or a commercial novelty. For the settler, the colonist, he argued that it offered nothing less than sonic affirmation of imperial power. “[The] radio reminds the settler of the reality of colonial power and, by its very existence, dispenses safety, serenity…Radio-Alger, for the settler, is a daily invitation not to ‘go native,’ not to forget the rightfulness of his culture. The settlers in the remote outposts, the pioneering adventurers, are well aware of this when they say that ‘without wine and the radio, we should already have become Arabized.’” (71-72) For the native, of course, the situation was quite the opposite. Pointing to studies on Algerian psychopathology, Fanon described the radio as a “highly aggressive and hostile” intrusion into Algerian psychic life; its “metallic, cutting, insulting, disagreeable voices all have for the Algerian an accusing, inquisitorial character,” he averred. “The speech delivered is not received, deciphered, understood, but rejected. The communication is never questioned, but is simply refused, for it is precisely the opening of oneself to the other that is organically excluded from the colonial situation.” (88-89)

Fanon’s analysis in L’An Cinq, de la Révolution Algérienne, the monograph from which these passages are drawn, unfolds, if implicitly, as a point by point refutation of the more egregiously racist mis-characterizations of Arab culture long promulgated by the intellectual stewards of European empire. Confronted by an enemy whose brutally repressive war of counter-insurgency was authorized by the Orientalist canard that, left to their own devices, native Algerians would be lost, trapped within the amber of their own recalcitrance, Fanon explored the very real historical dynamics at work within native society. In addition to his exploration of radio, in his study, Fanon considered questions of dress and comportment, gender and family structure, medicine and health. For Fanon, as for Said, the apparent backwardness of native society on many of these points was an illusion, one made manifest, if nominally, through the violent imposition of Europe’s Orient on the social and cultural dynamics that had shaped the greater Arab world.

Following this argument through to its logical conclusion, Fanon stated that, if the native held fast to his traditions, it was only because he rejected European standards as objects emanating from an occupying power, “rooted in the colonial situation,” and thus inassimilable to his way of life. By the same token, if Europeans insisted upon understanding certain practices and social relationships as evidence of Arab backwardness, the poverty of their assessments had no bearing on the historical dynamics operative within those areas of life that they characterized, so dismissively, as traditional. In Fanon’s estimation, areas of life commonly dismissed as traditional had a life of their own, one that was being channeled, and reconfigured, through the dialectic of the revolution. Thus, the haik, long overburdened as a site of cultural struggle over and within the native family, was made over as an accessory of the revolution, “a technique of camouflage,” both adopted and abandoned as a matter of tactical expediency. So too with the radio. Once little more than a mechanical contrivance so thoroughly coextensive with empire that it appeared in dreams and hallucinations endowed with a hostile agency all its own, in the course of the revolution, the radio was made revolutionary. “Listening in on the Revolution, the Algerian existed with it, made it exist…Incorporated…into the life of the nation, the radio will have an exceptional importance in the country’s building phase…The fruitful use that can be made of the radio can well be imagined.” (93, 97)

I have to confess that, on the night in question, I was not interested in listening to the revolution, or in on the revolution, nor was I considering the fruitful uses to which radio might be put. I was, however, enjoying the story of the revolution, even if I couldn’t understand the words, and almost as much as I enjoyed the obscenely French digestif I found squirreled away under the sink in my new apartment. In some very real sense, the language in which it was told didn’t matter all that much, since I come to this story well versed in its broad outlines, if not its particulars. That is to say, I know my Pontecorvo, and I know my Fanon; I have more than a passing acquaintance with Alistair Horne. If anything, the Morricone themes that opened and closed the program signaled that I was hearing a pro forma, if not totemic, mediation of the Algerian revolution, one that was no less comforting, in its way, than the soft, analog hiss that eventually carried me off to sleep. In this sense, it was entirely apposite that the following program was devoted entirely to disco classics, opening with “In the Navy” by the Village People, “Hot Stuff” by Donna Summer, and “Good Times” by Chic. Once the illicit sound of a liminal culture, a non-normative space of sociality and sexuality, here were the remnants of disco as a commercial phenomenon; less the sexualized thrum of the early New York club scene than the groovy soundtrack of someone’s misspent youth. Like the story of the Algerian revolution, here was evidence of all the hallucinatory potentialities that emerge from, nurture, and sustain social and cultural movements, but presented as an opportunity for nostalgic reverie, evidence of someone’s misspent youth. Disco, like revolution, as little more than a security blanket, one that was somewhat frayed, but all the more effective for it.

This, of course, is the sort of thing Fanon was getting at, in Les damnés de la terre, when he warned about custom as the worn out husk of culture, the sort of artifactual, anthropological remnant that occupies the European expert on native cultures. Falling asleep with my glass of Pastis—listening not to the revolution but somebody’s secondhand version of the revolution, read through my distinctively first world fantasy of revolution—I found myself in the position of both the colonist who heard in the radio confirmation of the world as he knew it, and the arch-Modernist, here representative of the “Enlightened circles” that go into “ecstasies when confronted with [the] ‘inner truth’” of native tradition. Against much of what has come to be thought of as conventional wisdom, here Fanon’s hypothetical European primitivist is not the romantic who seeks to harness the animus of the other for his own spiritual regeneration, but the expert who finds, in thrall to these ossified traditions, some respite from the onslaught of history.

“The colonialist specialists do not recognize these new forms and rush to the help of the traditions of the indigenous society. It is the colonialists who become the defenders of the native style. We remember perfectly, and the example took on a certain measure of importance since the real nature of colonialism was not involved, the reactions of the white jazz specialists when after the Second World War new styles such as the be-bop took definite shape. The fact is that in their eyes jazz should only be the despairing, broken-down nostalgia of an old Negro who is trapped between give glasses of whiskey, the curse of his race, and the racial hatred of the white men. As soon as the Negro comes to an understanding of himself, and understands the rest of the world differently, when he gives birth to hope and forces back the racist universe, it is clear that his trumpet sounds more clearly and his voice less hoarsely.” (242-3)

It’s important, I think, that in making this point, Fanon reaches for America, and to a distinctively African American cultural form. By the time of his writing, of course, jazz had already made its way around the world, its globalization occasioned, in large part, by the expansion of American military and political power. When African American GIs landed in the ports of Europe and North Africa during the first World War, they brought the blues tradition with them, rooting what had been largely rural traditions in altogether unlikely urban settings. Jazz became the unsuspecting soundtrack to the Allied cause in that conflict, an ironic counterpoint to the occupied peoples’ defense of their occupiers. In the intervening years, the popularity of jazz helped facilitate the emergence of commercial broadcast media, an innovative market in recorded music, and the global reach of American film. Whether commenting on the broad comedy of Charlie Chaplin or the expressive eyes of Marlene Dietrich, as a component of Hollywood cinema, jazz acted as an aural solvent working away at the boundaries between linguistic traditions, helping to translate distinctively American images for a myriad of local idioms. In the years following World War II, as the Cold War turned hot, jazz became a critical part of the American diplomatic mission, as the State Department sought to harness the popularity of jazz in the propaganda war between the First and Second Worlds. Many jazz musicians became remarkably canny players within the American diplomatic community, using their international visibility as icons of Americana to launch covert attacks on the apartheid culture at home. At the same time, just as many drew the ire of younger, less worldly musicians, who saw their elders’ engagement with US empire as little more than a collaborationist shuck and jive.

This, of course, is the moment Fanon gestures at when he refers to bebop and the white critic, the moment when the community of jazz musicians becomes fractious, its family romance turned predictably sour. Given over to sanctimoniousness, recrimination, and acrimony, after 1945, the children of the jazz age stopped coming home. With the advent of bebop, a more explicitly oppositional consciousness emerged among the community of musicians, one that railed against the compromises of an earlier generation by taking a more aggressive posture towards Jim Crow apartheid, and demanding a higher standard of artistic integrity among jazz musicians. While many of the earliest jazz musicians were happy just to get paid, beboppers wrestled with their commodification, seeing the market as an alien influence, one with undue power over their choices as artists. They did not, however, cease to be commodified; and while the increasingly esoteric jazz forms pioneered in the wake of bebop eventually allowed that other child of the blues tradition, rock ‘n’ roll, to run away with the piggy bank, the posturing of bebop artists helped redefine the ways in which future modes of African American cultural production would be packaged and sold. Where the first generation of jazz artists were presented as avatars of the primitive, since bebop, African American culture has been continually refigured as the quintessence of rebellion.

There are no doubt many other processes in play, but whatever its genealogy, in the post-war United States, rebellion has become one of our most important thematic concerns, the trope through which post-war American society, despite extraordinary internal fissures, has managed to reproduce itself and its political culture.

3.
In many ways, the creature comforts of global travel are the latest manifestation of post-war suburban domesticity, outposts of consumerist retreat far removed from the plebian rabble. Since 1945, Americans have wrapped themselves in a cocoon of relative affluence, one underwritten, for many years, by America’s unrivaled status as industrial capitalist superpower. As long as there were big profits to be made from manufacturing, industrialists kept wages high; in turn, unions more or less agreed to forego extended labor actions. And as long as profits, wages, and benefits continued to rise—something made possible by the growth of overseas consumer markets and the increasing productivity of American labor—the system hummed along nicely, with government greasing the wheels through various forms of social and economic subsidies, as well as direct intervention in contentious business-labor negotiations. Through the GI Bill and the Interstate Highway Act, the federal government funded the emergence of a relatively affluent, educated, suburban, white middle-class. Still reeling from the austerity of the Depression and the trauma of the war, this middle-class quickly shuffled off its urban ethnic working-class roots, losing itself in a fantasy of consumer choice, upward mobility, and racial exclusivity.

Oh yeah, and all of this was made possible by cheap energy, brought to you courtesy of ARAMCO, the US corporation that, since the mid-1930s, controlled the majority of oil production in the Arabian peninsula.

This utopia was never available to everybody, and its stultifying culture of white-bread consumption and cultural homogeneity has turned on its head many times over the past seventy years. Beatniks, rockers, hippies, punks and skaters, as well as any number of their more obscure subcultural progeny, have emerged in reaction to suburban domesticity, and as potentially radical experiments in race treason and class suicide. Of course, over the past forty years, the flight from suburban domesticity has become part of the narrative—and the prerogative—of middle-class privilege, with the subcultures that were forged in that flight packaged and put on sale for suburban consumers. Since the end of the Vietnam War, the ability of the suburbs to accommodate difference has become one of their greatest recommendations, even as the suburbs themselves were becoming economically unfeasible. With the recovery of European and Asian economies in the 1960s, facilitated by American investments and driven by the rising demand for American-style consumer goods, American industrialists began to see declining profits. This decline was rendered all the more severe by the sharp spike in transportation and shipping costs brought on by the 1973 energy crisis. Unwilling to accept even a moderate decline in the rate of profit, business leaders began railing against the greed of unions and the largesse of the state, advocating actively for a wage-freeze and a severe reduction in upper-income taxes. Convinced that American industry was a loss leader, investors began funneling their capital into derivatives, removing their money from the material economy of commodity production and household reproduction by placing it in the ever more profitable domain of the financial marketplace.

And that oil thing? In the 1970s, after more than two decades of Palestinian displacement, the Arab League and OPEC decided to use their access to energy as a weapon in the Arab-Israeli conflict. The Saudis nationalized ARAMCO, and in 1973, the Arab states turned off the tap. The price of gas shot up. Since then, America and its allies have intervened, at somewhat regular intervals, to disrupt the formation of any Arab power bloc. The price of our cheap gas and our suburban comforts is political instability in the Middle East.

Incidentally, this is the reason why Reaganomics doesn’t work, except to the benefit of financial markets. For a feudal society to function, the lords need either to love, or fear, the peasants. And, at this point, the lords of our economy have neither love nor fear. As far as they are concerned, the vast majority of the population is now beside the point, only distantly connected to the creation of wealth. The American people are an expense, one justified by the legitimacy they bestow on the regime of pillage and plunder. This is, perhaps, the biggest reason why America seems to be on the brink of a new reckoning, a correction in the fullest sense of the word. Over the last seventy years, the narratives through which Americans have organized their lives—whether those of bourgeois domesticity or its companion, bohemian decadence—have become entwined with the prosperity bestowed upon us by our infinitely flexible economic system. Now that the system has reached its outer limit, its point of utter incoherence, those narratives are unraveling. This is registered, at one level, as a crisis of national identity, as evidenced by the stark differences in national narratives proffered by the so-called Tea Party movement and the partisans of Camp Obama. In some sense, however, the crisis of American identity is perpetual; people have been trying to figure out what an American is since before there was an America to worry about. What is perhaps more important is what this crisis moment means for the narratives that organize the ways that we live, day-to-day, year-to-year, the ways in which we plan the arcs of our lives. To be middle-class in American once meant that you could expect certain things—a decent job that provided reasonable health care, a thirty-year fixed-rate mortgage at a relatively low interest rate, a secure pension. None of these things entirely mitigated hardship or struggle or the tough times that inevitably come, but they did provide some anchorage in rough seas. Now, I find myself surrounded by peers, all highly educated and well paid, who can barely afford rent on a one-bedroom walk-up in the city.

“The last few years have been marked by an inverted millenarianism in which premonitions of the future, catastrophic or redemptive, have been replaced by senses of the end of this or that (the end of ideology, art, or social class; the 'crisis' of Leninism, social democracy, or the welfare state, etc., etc.); taken together, all of these perhaps constitute what is increasingly called postmodernism. The case for its existence depends on the hypothesis of some radical break or coupure, generally traced back to the end of the 1950s or the early 1960s.” That’s Fredric Jameson in 1984. Here, nearly thirty years later, a decade into the new century, the sense of the end remains, but it is a far more eschatological sense of the end, one tied to very real premonitions of environmental calamity and economic exhaustion.

Notes from my daybook, 27 October 2010

Wake
Breakfast
Coffee, read

Work-out

Shower

Walk neighborhood

Work on rough syllabus

Write letter to friends
Book—stuff re: embassy

Blog entry

Email PR with blog post

L. on Iranian liberalism

* * *

My Algerian daybook is remarkably uninspired. Each entry begins with the same litany of tasks: wake, breakfast, coffee—read. If I instruct myself to write, I will then move to the computer, from the breakfast nook to the dining table, before wasting myself, in thrall, to one project or another. Some days I generate enough momentum to keep at it well into the evening. More often than not, I am exhausted by lunch. Words come easy, but purpose does not. One point rarely leads into another. My thoughts are febrile; my face is flushed.

The days are extraordinarily long, distended even. They have shape only to the extent that I give them shape; to the extent that I make notes for myself about what I should be doing, what I need to do, what I want to do, where I need to go, what I need to buy. There is food and all the rituals of food. There is coffee, and then there is tea. I work until dusk, or until I hear the muezzin call for maghrib. I make dinner. I read a book. After dark, the city stops. From my window, it is fluorescent and it is orange, all shadow and reflection. It is wind and the absence of wind. I stand on the balcony and watch the dogs forage through the trash. There is a heavy tread on the stairs, slow and brooding. Somewhere, next door, something falls.

Silence lives in Algiers. At night it creeps into the house and rearranges the furniture. Rooms echo, doors rattle. Here and there, something will pop. I turn on the radio. I go to bed.

* * *

This is a character I play. You will know him by these signs.

A Fragment of a Point that Might Well Lead Somewhere But Doesn’t As of Yet

Yesterday, after a brief stop at the embassy to turn over my housing deposit, I went downtown. The geography of Algiers is still somewhat baffling, but as the car descended the hills into lower town, even with all the defensive walls and blind curves, I began to understand how the city fits together. For the first time, I was near the sea and, as such, I could plot myself; if not in relation to the city, then to the historical geographies of the greater Mediterranean. To the east is Sicily; then, further on, the Phoenician ports at Tyre and Saida, on the Levantine coast just south of Beirut; to the north, there is Barcelona and Marseilles, with its legendary port; to the west, Oran and, further still, Gibraltar, the narrow strait through which Europe absorbed its knowledge of the ancient world. Along the sea, the city itself is crescent shaped, and from the corniche, near the Grande Poste, I could make out Martyrs’ Memorial across the bay. From there I walked north, on Didouche Mourad, toward the Casbah, before getting lost in a tangle of streets that deposited me, bewildered but unharmed, under the loggias that line the western shore. Here and there was a garden, a fountain, or a memorial to something so apparently obvious that it need not be explained. And rising above all, like a visitation from the specter of Baron von Hausmann, row after row of whitewashed buildings, done up in the style of the Second Empire, the uniform blue of their shutters momentarily contrasted with the cloud-hung, steel-slate sky.

Near the center of town, in the middle of Didouche Mourad, a statue of Emir Abd al-Qader sits in a small park, penned in, on all sides, by shops and administrative buildings. The emir faces east, astride a horse, situated atop a high pedestal. In one hand he holds the reigns of his mount. In another, his scimitar; it is raised, waiting to strike. Wrapped around the base of the monument are other images, either representations of the emir at different moments in his life, or portraits of his comrades, fellow horsemen doing battle with the infidel French. The portraits are stylized, as is the statue. It reads as deco: the lines are a bit too dramatic, the curves far too severe. It would not be mistaken for life, but it is as representational as the non-representational ever hopes to be. It has that look: the look that screams Works Progress Administration, or early Soviet Realist. The legend on the monument is composed in Arabic script, and placed near its summit, four or more feet from the ground. Given the angle, and the stylized lettering, it is almost impossible to read; its legibility depends, in large part, on the time of day and the quality of light. Beneath, near the base, someone has scrawled a more obvious, more insistent, dedication. “Bab El Oued lves Cristiano Ronaldo.” The glory of the professional soccer player, here invoked, is apparently as compelling as the immortality of the scholar, the soldier, the man of God.

Monumental art, of this variety, is designed not to invoke memory but to stabilize its contents, to cut through the rhizomorphic density of signifiers that constitute the monstrous body of the past, and to articulate some purpose, some direction, some significance. This emir is not the emir, but the emir as mnemonic, both a pattern, and a prompt. He is the condensation of a revolutionary history, the meaning of which depends upon the performative register of historical narrative. This emir is not the emir, and the emir has no meaning, absent the retelling of twice-told tales, and the inscription of his life—an idealist conceit—over the fractious body of the nation. This emir is not the emir, but the embodiment of the heroic mode; here brought to earth, but not too near, by the very familiarity of the visage. This emir is not the emir, but the emir as embodiment of all men in the struggle, the representation of a particular type of man, of masculinity, of strength in pursuit of power; and of power pursued not for its own sake, but for the purposes of justice. This emir is not the emir, but the emir rendered for the purposes of state; a nationalist icon, surrounded, if not overwhelmed, by the city that surges around him.

Ronaldo, by contrast, arrives as the monstrous body of capital itself. Only a fragment, a seedling, a sliver, it grows and it festers. In agitating, it remaps the social body, rendering it in his image. Ronaldo arrives as the consummate body: he is the avatar of neoliberalism. His story is well sold. He grew up poor, his house barely a shack. He was saved by football. He built his mother a home. He gets his teeth fixed. He strips off his shirt. He goes shopping. He vacations in France. He is desire embodied; not desired or desirous, but representative of the desire to realize one’s desire, to live and to be and to make oneself through consumption, through spectacle; to be seen, to become not a person, but a body, an object among objects; to be secure in that firmament, held fast as a thing within the order of things.

Scene/Seen

Graffiti on the door to my classroom at Bouzareah: "exterminate all the brutes"

Wasn't Conrad more direct?

Zombie Goats

Goats are scary. Delicious, but terrifying. This, at least, is what I was forced to concede when I stumbled upon one during my afternoon walk. Adha is upon us, and so are the goats, recalling traumatic screen memories, and touching off long dormant childhood fears. If you did not happen to grow up in a region of the world where children were in thrall to the Goatman, be very very glad.

Does delusion rhyme with Deleuzian?

I don't know, but when you wake to Sade on the radio at 4:30 in the morning and head straight for Virginia Woolf before making breakfast, downing four cups of coffee, and planting yourself in front of the word processor, you find yourself wondering these things. Especially after you decide that the only way to understand Cristiano Ronaldo is as "the monstrous body of capital, the avatar of neoliberalism itself." That voice is hard to shake: it's so nightmarishly portentious it seems like you must be getting at some deep insight when, really, you're just skimming off surfaces.

The rains done come. Sountrack for the day: Toto's "Rosanna"

The new masculinity

Until next month, my internet is going to be spotty, but I will do my best to stay in touch and keep everyone updated. Expect a barrage of posts after December 9. For the meantime, chew on this: On the statue of Abd al Qader in downtown Algiers, we find this graffiti: "Bab El Oued (the neighborhood immediately west of the Casbah) lves (sic) Cristiano Ronaldo" Analysis forthcoming.

First thoughts on arriving in Algiers

I started writing this at 5:30 in the morning. I’ve already been up for an hour. I’m running on four hours of uninterrupted sleep, which is still better than the night before.

Barcelona and the anxiety of it seems a long way away. Once I made it through security in Algiers, picked up my luggage, and met the embassy expeditor, I relaxed. Algiers, in general, seems very relaxed. For all the awkward attempts at predicting how I might react, or what I should expect, at least immediately, it all seems very easy, undemanding. The city strikes me as almost polite; the first day I was here, I walked around Cite Said Hamdine, through traffic, in a light rain, and although traffic was slow, it was steady, and there seemed to be little of the insufferably egoistic sense of urgency that drives people to rush, or to attempt silly maneuvers. I felt almost at ease being in traffic; not the ease of experience, as in Beirut or in Cairo, where I know how to navigate the streets and where everyone speeds and no one seems like they will ever stop, but an almost Zen-like being-at-peace with the traffic. Perhaps it’s just jetlag, but so far I do not feel agitated in Algiers, even though, conventionally speaking, there is plenty that probably should. Agitate me, that is.

My first glimpse of Algiers came as the plane was landing, and through a dense layer of fog. Even obscured by the clouds, my immediate impression of the city was: it’s so green. I have not yet explored enough of the city to be able to orient myself, and I have no way of judging our angle of approach, but as soon as we were over land, I noticed what seemed like huge blocks of greens so vibrant they cut through the grey, almost as if they had been painted on. These were adjacent patches of more deeply real, dark greens. I’m still not sure how to account for the combinations, and at the time, I thought I was seeing things. Just a few minutes before, when we were still above the clouds and in the sun, I had briefly convinced myself that a bright flash of white was the glare off the Ville Blanche. Once we ducked under the clouds, I decided that my anxieties and expectations were such that I could not be certain about anything I was seeing. I decided that, to go with the impressions as they came rather than trying to work things out, was the only sound strategy in such unknown circumstances, particularly when I kept on waiting for things to happen, for the world to unfold, as I expected it should.

A few thoughts on those expectations, and on my fascination with the greenery of Algiers: my experience of this city has already been powerfully mediated, and while all such experiences are mediated by media, in this case, I am profoundly aware of the specific combinations of media through which my experience is being construed. Most of the images come in black, white, and various—unfortunate and illegitimate—shades of gray, as do the texts, and the concepts.

When I exited baggage claim I met my expeditor. He took me off to meet the embassy car. The minute I sat down, the driver handed me a brown paper envelope with the legend “Welcome to Algiers!” and we were off. At the hotel bar in St. Paul, the day before Jill’s wedding, I had a distressing encounter with an ex-military man who insisted both that I should not go to Algiers and that I had to be some sort of spook. “Are you with the G?” he kept asking. I insisted that I was not, but he didn’t believe me. “You wouldn’t tell me, in any case,” he added, “Would you?” I am not a spy, but at that moment, it definitely felt as if I was playing out the part in some creaky BBC melodrama. Settling into a government car and being handed a sheaf of official papers in an exotic foreign land: it was all very MI-6. I am still waiting for my tuxedo, my Aston Martin, and my expense account.

The hotel owes me breakfast, however. I am off for café and baguette.

Jean-Paul Sartre: Colonialism, Neocolonialism, and the Tricontinental Revolution

In his introduction to Jean-Paul Sartre’s essays on colonialism and neocolonialism, Robert J.C. Young situates Sartre within the intellectual culture of the tricontinental revolution, thereby opening up fresh perspectives on the relationship between Sartre’s intellectual work and the development of his political commitments. “[There] is comparatively little in [Sartre’s] early work,” Young writes, “to suggest his later increasing preoccupation with social justice at a global level.” Nevertheless, over the second half of his life, as his philosophical work was restaged, transformed, and activated by the intellectuals of the tricontinental revolution, Sartre became increasingly occupied by the politics of social justice, with particular emphasis on the revolution against colonialism in Latin America, Asia, and Africa. Despite his stature as one of the giants of twentieth century philosophy and Western literature, for many within the revolution, Sartre was, in the words of Mudimbe, “an African philosopher,” insofar as he recognized the revolution as an epistemological as well as political formation, one that reanimated indigenous traditions of thought and praxis over and against the empty shell of the European Enlightenment. During his later life, Sartre went to some length to avoid his conscription into the project of that Enlightenment—famously rejecting the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1964—and while his posthumous reputation remains very much that of a Dead White Man, Young insists upon seeing Sartre as a generative influence upon postcolonial thought, a deferential comrade in the struggle over theory and practice.

For Young, the definitive moment in Sartre’s turn toward the anti-colonial revolution was the Second World War and, more particularly, the experience of participating in the French Resistance. “Sartre,” he argues, “was the first philosopher who responded to his historical experiences of the war by reformulating his political and philosophical position.” Young is not alone in noting the significance of the war to the overall shape of Sartre’s intellectual project. And there is, of course, no dearth of scholarship concerning the impact of the war on European intellectual culture. What one draws from Young’s reading, however, is just how differently different intellectuals, and different intellectual traditions, grappled with the war and its consequences for political thought. “The war showed [Sartre] that life was not simply a series of existential choices against circumstance: that the domination of power turns the subject into an object: in this situation, freedom is constituted by taking responsibility to transform oneself back into an agent.” While the intellectuals of the German left all but rejected the politics of radical transformation, fearful that such commitments led, inexorably, to the gulag and the death camp, and the French left plunged headlong into the generative anti-humanism that now travels under the name post-structuralism, Sartre—with the revolutionaries of the Third World—was quietly reinventing the human.

By and large, European intellectuals responded to the moral and political crisis of the war by throwing out the Enlightenment and, with it, the idea of the human. The concentration camp, they argued, was the ultimate expression of human reason, its most pure, and brutal, manifestation. If, after all the great schemes for humanizing the world, all the idealism and the debate and the dogma, all you got was calculated, mechanized, impersonal death, perhaps it was best to leave the Enlightenment alone. There is, of course, something very compelling about the argument, but a whole lot of baby went out with that bathwater. As so-called Third World intellectuals have been pointing out for the past sixty years, fascism wasn’t the telos of the Enlightenment, but its dialectical handmaiden. Slavery? Colonialism? As Aimé Césaire suggested, Hitler’s crime was not the systematic murder of millions of Jews, Catholics, Roma, Communists, and homosexuals, nor was it his totalitarian project for a German Reich that would engulf Europe. It was, rather, introducing to Europe, and practicing upon “white people,” brutal techniques of population management and social control that were invented for use in the colonies. This hypocrisy was laid bare, in Algeria, during the VE Day celebrations in Sétif, where the gendarmes massacred thousands of Arabs that had massed in support of Algerian independence. Fortunately, the new anti-humanism of the French left demonstrated, conclusively, that the desire for freedom was atavistic. In calling for independence, the Arabs were merely demonstrating their backwardness.

Among European intellectuals, Sartre was one of the few who took such hypocrisy as the basis of an ethical imperative. As Young suggests, Sartre’s continuing engagement with humanism should not be understood as an uncritical or naïve endorsement of the Enlightenment, but as his commitment to the cultural and epistemological project of the Tricontinental revolution. Third World revolutionaries understood themselves, very consciously, as engaged in the project of remaking humanism; of inaugurating a modernity that embraced, and benefitted, the totality of humanity, rather than its palest portion. In the later years of his life, Sartre identified himself with this project: his philosophy evolved as a critique of the racist underpinnings of the Enlightenment problematic, and a commitment to the realization of a new humanism in the revolutionary movement toward emancipation. As such, Sartre’s post-war work is ever more framed by the practicalities of anti-colonial revolution, to the extent that his European intellectual contemporaries would come to rail against his influence among university students in the 1960s, especially when it came to Sartre’s position on the role of violence in social struggles.

For his commitment to the politics of anti-colonial revolution, Sartre was declared a Stalinist by his friends and physically threatened by his enemies. In the early 1960s, French colons, enraged by Sartre’s support for Algerian independence, attempted an assassination by planting a bomb in the Left Bank apartment he shared with Simone de Beauvoir. The bomb went off, but the plot failed; they had placed it in the wrong apartment. Despite his critics, Sartre would go on to become something of a hero of the New Left. When the students of Paris closed down the universities in May 1968, it was Sartre to whom they directed their demands, because only Sartre, they felt, could understand their concerns.

What’s striking about Sartre’s writings on colonialism, as represented in the Routledge collection “Colonialism and Neocolonialism,” is the extent to which—the title aside—France remains, for him, the locus of political commitment. Of the essays collected in this volume, nearly half are about De Gaulle; and in these, Sartre goes on, at some length, about the relationship between the Algerian war, and the desecration of French democracy. After the armistice in 1962, he wrote:

“Today, no one is unaware that we have ruined, starved and massacred a nation of poor people to bring them to their knees. They remained standing. But at what a price! While the delegations were putting an end to the business, 2,400,000 Algerians remained in the slow death camps; we have killed more than a million of them. The land lies abandoned, the douars have been obliterated by bombing, the livestock—the peasants’ meager wealth—has disappeared. After seven years, Algeria must start from scratch: first of all win the peace, then hang on with the greatest of difficulty to the poverty we have created: that will be our parting gift….[I]n order to avoid the famous selling-off of our Empire, we have sold off France: in order to forge arms, we have cast our institutions into the fire; our freedoms and our guarantees, Democracy and Justice, everything has burnt; nothing remains. Simply ending the fighting is not enough to reclaim our wasted wealth: we too, I am afraid, in a different area, will have to start from scratch. But the Algerians have retained their revolutionary strength. Where is ours?”

In passages like these, Sartre speaks to the dynamics of our present crisis. In his estimation, during the Algerian war, French democracy was held hostage by the intransigence of the pieds-noirs, their inability to recognize the inevitability of Arab independence, and the moral right of Arab Algerians to self-determination. This, of course, was not an uncommon analysis of the Algerian situation, even at the time, particularly among those French and Algerian-French liberals, like Albert Camus, who hoped for Algeria to remain part of France. Camus, among others, argued that “the problems” in Algeria were prompted by disreputable segments of the European population, people who were so aggressively racist that they could not imagine granting Arabs social, political, or economic rights on par with Europeans. Sartre saw this line of reasoning as collaborationist nonsense. France could not solve the Algerian crisis through reform because colonialism cannot be reformed. Colonialism, he argued, is a system designed to allow for the most brutal and systematic exploitation of indigenous resources. If you reform exploitation out of colonialism, it stops being profitable, and if it stops being profitable, the system collapses. This was the materialist point that underwrote his feelings about the inevitability of Algerian independence. At some point, the Algerian war started to cost France more than France could possibly hope to get out of Algeria. Although the conflict would continue as long as vanity, ego, and pride got in the way, economic rationality would eventually win the day. Sartre, however, took this even further. One could not hope to save French Algeria, he argued, because it was only through Algeria that France could hope to save itself.

This is maybe the most crucial point in Sartre’s later work, and it’s where we might want to start thinking about the present moment. It would be easy to read Sartre’s engagement with the politics and culture of the anti-colonial revolution as another example of a white man hoping to find himself by traversing the heart of darkness and discovering its secrets. (It’s easy to imagine this as Lacan’s objection to Sartre, but since my Lacan has been constructed through Zizek, maybe I’m telegraphing.) My sense, however, is that Sartre was not particularly interested in therapeutic engagements with “alien” cultures, not that he was entirely above such things. In his essay on Cartier-Bresson’s photographs of China, for instance, he more or less thanks the photographer for killing his Orientalism; suggesting that, on the one hand, he had indulged such fantasies but that, at the same time, he was glad to be rid of them. Instead, what I draw from Sartre is more a sense of political opportunity, and moral obligation, in the face of the Third World revolution. This all sounds incredibly squishy, but it comes down to a set of questions that are, in some sense, rather practical. After independence, when the pieds-noirs fled Algeria, they destroyed what remained of its commercial and political infrastructure. Sartre understood, all too well, how the extraction of this indemnity handicapped the newly independent nation. Just as previous generations had obliterated almost all hope for an independent Haiti by forcing its government to compensate France for the loss of its property, the vicious destruction of Algeria’s infrastructure all but ensured a long period of economic austerity and political turbulence. For Sartre, at the end of the Algerian war, the only way for France to recoup its moral standing in the world was to become a model of political morality among the post-imperial powers; and to become that model was to commit French resources to the rebuilding of Algeria. In calling on the French to save themselves, Sartre was calling upon them to refuse the domestic politics that would allow for neo-colonial exploitation, and to build a new France alongside the new Algeria.

On the question of my whereabouts.

My apologies for my extended absence: the last weeks have been trying, to say the least. Near the end of August, my usually ironclad stomach gave out, and I was down for a week what was maybe a really nasty parasite, seriously advanced sun-stroke, or food poisoning. I had just recovered when I received news that my grandmother had died. Within less than twelve hours, I was on a plane for the States, bound for her funeral. I spent about a week in the Midwest, doing odds and ends grant maintenance, before returning to Beirut. Upon my return, I spent nearly three weeks wrangling to get my Algerian entry visa. Typically, Americans apply for their visas from the Algerian embassy in the US. Although I had already been granted special permission from the Algerian Ministry of Foreign Affairs that would allow me to apply from Beirut, the memo didn’t get into the right hands, and my application was rejected. After some tense days, and testy email exchanges with consular officials, Diplomat A contacted Diplomat B who contacted Diplomat C, and all was well. This episode afforded me the opportunity to be insistent in French; which, you may be surprised to find out, is fairly easy. Since getting my visa, I’ve been arranging for travel, first back to the States, where I will be attending my sister’s wedding, and then to Algiers. If all goes as planned (insha’allah) I will arrive there on October 25, around 1:20PM.

Oh yeah, and I’ve been studying Arabic through all of this. And planning my courses for this fall. With everything else that’s been going on, I keep on forgetting that I’m going there to teach.

In any case: my plan, now, is that the blog updates will become much more regular once I’m actually in Algeria. Of course, that depends on what sort of internet access I have, and whatnot. I’ve got one more esoteric post that I’m working on, concerning Jean-Paul Sartre, his writings on colonialism, and post-war French intellectual culture; hopefully I’ll be able to get that up before I go back to Amreeka on Tuesday. Incidentally, did you know that Sartre is one of two people to have voluntarily refused a Nobel Prize? Look it up. 1964. Literature. His rationale: he didn’t want to be made over as a monument to the cultural superiority of the West. Suck it, Sweden.

Six degrees of Abd al-Qader

Bookforum links to my piece from the "Utne Reader," which was reprinted, last month, from the spring issue of "Bidoun."

http://www.bookforum.com/blog/#entry6401

Addendum

A while ago, I started writing an essay about the film Field of Dreams, predicated upon the notion that one of its signature lines—“If you build it, he will come”—was an almost perfect distillation of the fetishism at the heart of contemporary American capitalism. In Field of Dreams, the main character is a farmer named Ray Kinsella, an ex-hippie who spent much of his youth trying to get away from the farm, and from his father. As the film opens, Ray is working in the fields when he hears a voice whisper the words quoted above. Rather than questioning his mental competency, Ray concludes that he must build a baseball field in the middle of his corn, and that, if he does, Shoeless Joe Jackson will “get to come back and play ball again.” Which is more or less what happens. Ray builds his baseball field, Shoeless Joe shows up, and the farm becomes a hot ticket for all the Major Leaguers in the afterlife. This sort of cornball fantasy is really only the set up for a more earthbound story about Ray, his family, and their farm, which they are in danger of losing, particularly after Ray sacrifices much of his acreage—and their savings—to build the field. At the film’s denouement, the town banker, Ray’s brother-in-law, tells Ray that if he sells his land, the bank will let him keep his house. Ray is about to sign off on the deal when his daughter suggests that they can make the field over as a tourist attraction, where people can come, watch a game, “and it will be just like when they were little kids.”

There is, of course, more to the story, but you get the point. Field of Dreams is, in part, an allegory for the farm crisis of the 1980s, perhaps the first generalized economic crisis of the post-Keynesian era. That crisis was brought on by the credit-fueled expansion of US farming operations during the late 1970s, itself predicated upon the opening of the Chinese market to American produce following Nixon’s normalization of US-Chinese trade relations in 1972. The opening of that market made for relatively high commodities prices throughout the 1970s, yet when it closed, following the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in 1979, commodities bottomed out, and many farmers were unable to maintain their debts. For all practical purposes, the farm crisis of the 1980s all but killed the family farm in the United States. While benevolent patriarch family farmers often continue to work the land, agribusiness corporations now control the majority of their produce, leaving those families who managed to hold onto their farms in a state of perpetual economic peril.

Of course, Field of Dreams is also an allegory for how rural America “got out” of that particular economic crisis. Although not everyone can build a baseball field in the middle of their corn, a generation of rural policy makers and business interests has taken Field of Dreams’ utopic sense of wish fulfillment as a viable model for social and economic development. “If you build it, they will come,” has translated into, “Use state revenues to build and promote privately-owned tourist destinations, on the off chance that people will show up, pay big, and continue coming back.” This is the same reasoning that sees second- and- third-tier cities in the American rust belt building extensive downtown conference centers—again at taxpayers’ expense—or that underwrites the ubiquity of gaming and casino culture throughout the United States. It is a narcotic train of thought, one that imagines an exchange of money for the promise of experience, sensation, affect. In Field of Dreams, the promise is of a simpler time, a gentler America, thoroughly in possession of its rural roots. That this gentler America corresponds to the rural community of a pre-farm crisis, pre-Watergate US is born out in a sequence where Ray quixotically time-trips to 1972, and by and large, it is this simpler America that the entrepreneurs of rural tourism have sought to evoke. Family farms, for instance, may no longer exist on paper, but if you want to revel in the myth of rural American plenitude and rootedness—what Sarah Palin likes to call “the real America”—they are there to find. In most cases, however, what you’re looking at is a museum piece along the lines of Plimoth Plantation or Colonial Williamsburg. Although Midwestern farms still perform an important social function, in terms of their resonance within the within the wider field of American culture, they are less substance than simulation.

The essay in which I expected to explore these themes never quite came together, in large part because other projects got in the way. It is, however, something that I thought to return to, as I try to clarify some of the commitments and questions that I began to allude to in the final passages of my previous post. When I started writing about Field of Dreams, a largely unexplored element of the story, something I hadn’t thought about before, began to occupy my attention. Whatever its larger allegorical valences, Field of Dreams is, more or less explicitly, the story of Ray, his father, and the conflicts that defined their relationship. In Field of Dreams, that conflict is mediated through baseball, and by Ray’s rejection of his father’s passion for the game. Hoping to realize his dreams through his son, Ray’s father makes baseball practice into a chore, eventually leading Ray to abandon the game and, in due course, his father. Now that he is a father, and now that his father is dead, Ray regrets this childish disavowal, so much so that he will follow the mad pronouncements of “the Voice” in the hope of redeeming his father’s childhood hero, Shoeless Joe Jackson. This quest ends, of course, not with Shoeless Joe’s return, but with the mysterious appearance of Ray’s father—young and hopeful, unaware of his son, his life, or the conflict that eventually consumed their relationship. The film closes with Ray and his father playing catch, symbolically healing the rift between them.

Father-son conflict is certainly nothing new in literature, and it’s perhaps the general ubiquity of the theme that kept me from thinking about it in the terms offered by the film. In Field of Dreams, however, the conflict between Ray and his father stands in for a more generalized, intergenerational tension between the children of the baby boom and their parents; this conflict, in turn, becomes the vehicle by which economic upheaval is read, culturally. The swift, deliberate, at times cataclysmic, unmaking of the Keynesian state is here presented as an opportunity to resolve the conflict between these generations, a conflict that had once been posed, in far more radical terms, as a critique of the culture of unexamined privilege, abundance, and conspicuous consumption enabled by American military, political, and economic hegemony of the post-war era. Like Reaganite and post-Reaganite political discourse, in general, Field of Dreams rewrites the oppositional culture of the New Left and the greater Sixties as a moment of unaccountable, irrational, ultimately regrettable excess, and the film does its best to discipline that regrettable exuberance by framing it within a teleological narrative of American progress. This is captured, at the end of the film, when James Earl Jones—playing a character based not even loosely on J.D. Salinger—delivers a stirring aria on the dialectics of American history. Baseball, he avows, is America’s only constant; all else is flux. Where the New Left understood the material abundance of the United States in the post-war era as an unprecedented opportunity to critique the uneven distribution of poverty and wealth around the world, in Field of Dreams, this critique is rendered banal—childish, even. The oppositional culture of the 1960s becomes nothing more than a temper tantrum, a concentrated burst of adolescent outrage over uptight parents and suburban conformity.

What’s interesting about this is just how painfully uninteresting it is. The question is no longer how many roads a man must walk down; it is, rather, how many times we have to retrace our steps. American culture since the 1960s has been obsessed with the 1960s, and we have replayed this decade over and again, ad infinitum, ad nauseam. At this point, the 60s are less a time, a place, a sociocultural location, or even a commodity fetish: they are a kind of infinitely flexible parable of cultural flux, one that can be bent to any number of purposes, any number of ends. Politically, the fetishization of the 1960s began with Nixon and was formalized by Reagan, neither of whom could have attacked the regulatory and state apparatuses that supported Eisenhower era American prosperity head on, but were more than capable of doing so once “regulation” and “big government” were made over as inheritances from the New Left. Nixon and Reagan inaugurated the notion of “necessary adjustment” versus “predatory reformism” that is now so successfully mined by shills like Glenn Beck. As many have noted, these latter-day attempts, by the Right, at capturing the moral authority of history of the civil rights movement play upon already existing divisions within the coalition that constituted that movement. This is one of the reasons why Martin Luther King (that is, King prior to 1966) has been so roundly celebrated by the state, to the exclusion of more troublesome—though arguably more important—figures like A. Philip Randolph, Bayard Rustin, or Ella Baker. The problem, of course, is that it is actually impossible to understand King’s spiritual and political project outside the terms of social and cultural dynamics within that movement; just as it would be impossible to understand Malcolm X outside the context of global movements against colonialism, movements that, in the greater Muslim world, often took the form of ecstatic, Islamic revivals. Within the statist history of the period, however, King and X get to play Good Negro/Bad Negro, as barely realized metonyms for “good reform” and “bad radical.”

During the 2008 election, there were hopeful signs that this delusional retelling of the 1960s was coming to a close: signs made all the more hopeful after the historical abuses of the 2004 election, when John Kerry’s exemplary Vietnam war record was held up as evidence of his unfitness to be Commander in Chief, while Bush’s draft-dodging frat house bawdies were made over as proof that he was true red, white, and blue. When John McCain and Sarah Palin tried to smear Obama by linking him with William Ayers, a founding member of the Weather Underground who had, up until 2008, been a fairly obscure figure in the history of the New Left, Obama very calmly countered that he was barely in his teens when the Weather carried out their violent campaign of property destruction. McCain could, of course, claim the moral authority of having served in the Air Force during the Vietnam War, and having been tortured as a prison of the Viet Cong, but given the unavoidable fact of Obama’s age, he could not make the election into a referendum on the 1960s, as Bush had with Kerry. Although many attempts were made to pin Obama to radical New Left proxies like Bill Ayers and Reverend Jeremiah Wright, Obama’s very literary sensitivity to historical narrative allowed him to reframe these points of contention on terms more congenial to himself. Indeed, had anyone in the McCain camp bothered to read Dreams of My Father, they might have realized that Obama was operating in a different register, one that—it now seems—is perhaps more Reaganite than was first apparent.

Since the election, of course, the 60s have come back; although at times, to be honest, it seems as if the Right won’t be content until they have helped themselves to the entirety of the Left revolutionary tradition. (When, for instance, did the American Right become “red,” as in, “red states”? And remember during the health care debate when they were trying to claim that Hitler was an arch-Leftist? Apparently Adorno need not have exiled himself to LA after all.) Whether it’s Sarah Palin claiming the mantle of feminist, or Glenn Beck positioning himself as a dream Martin Luther King had been dreaming, there has been a somewhat concerted attempt, on the erratic populist front of the American Right, to mobilize the legacy of the 1960s. In this case, however, what we have is an attempt to purge that legacy of its excesses, as well as its latter-day manipulation by those perpetual bogeymen of Right-wing politics, the revisionists. In some part, this is probably because Comrade Obama is so freakishly adept at working these angles himself; at the same time, I think it speaks to the aging of the electorate, and the queer sense of political marginalization that now occupies much of the boomer generation. For a very long time, the boomers and their concerns have been at the center of the national narrative, and even though they continue to exercise hegemony over the very institutions that shape our culture and our politics, on at least one level, the 2008 election was a strange wake-up call, a presentiment of political impotence, if not physical mortality. This was perhaps more apparent during the primaries, when, after Obama began to pull away from the pack, the Clinton campaign started making noises about “the youth” upsetting their plans, violating the carefully negotiated succession of power within the Democratic Party. (I’ve since talked to many Clinton staffers, still bitter, who continue to spin this line.) What was odd about the variable of “youth” in this equation, however, was that it seemed to be defined as almost anyone under the age of sixty. I was an Obama supporter, 2008 was my fourth presidential election, and I am by no means a rash or unsubtle political thinker. Indeed, I turned thirty the month that Comrade Obama won the nomination; although I am by no means old, in the idiom of the 1960s, this makes me too old to trust.

We’re stuck on this track because of the fundamental melancholia of boomer culture, forever locked in self-referential contemplation of the lost object of its youth. It has become something of a commonplace that there are two 1960s. There are the 1960s before the Kennedy assassination in November 1963, an optimistic time that belonged, really, to the 1950s. The other 1960s, the one that we are better acquainted with, began after January 1964, with the British Invasion, escalation in Vietnam, the murder of civil rights activists in Mississippi, and the church bombings in Montgomery. Boomer culture is trapped in solipsistic contemplation of the trauma of 1963-64, as evidenced by any number of pop cultural touchstones treading lightly over the pleasures of the Eisenhower era. As early as 1973, George Lucas tapped into boomer nostalgia and cemented the notion of 63-64 as watershed by setting his second feature, American Graffiti, in the lost idyll of 1962. American Graffiti helped create a vogue for period films as nostalgia pieces, and perhaps its most important contribution to this now extensive genre was the soundtrack. Composed entirely of pop songs from the late 1950s and early 1960s, Lucas’s film was not the first to eschew the traditional film scores—this is another innovation that he picked up from Kubrick—but it was the first to use a soundtrack of recycled pop to evoke a period. The pop soundtrack is now an almost unavoidable component of commercial film and movie marketing, a slyly calculated means of establishing a affective resonance between media outlets and amplifying the emotional appeal of a given product. The soundtrack marketing phenomenon allows even films that are not plugged into nostalgia culture to establish themselves as nostalgia pieces, commercially ordained signposts announcing themselves as the cultural sensibility of a particular moment in time.

All of which is to say that the vogue for nostalgia that has distinguished American popular culture since 1973 is symptomatic of what Eric Lott has called, in his blistering critique of post-68 liberal political thought, boomeritis. For Lott, boomeritis describes the revulsion for radical commitment evinced by many members of the generation of ’68, those who, for whatever reason, reject aggressive modes of radical critique and direct action as inherently damaging to the goals of “legitimate” protest movements. (The widespread excoriation of the Weather Underground is a good example of this; while there are obvious limits to the course of violent property destruction pursued by the Weather, and the organization might be faulted for not being strategic enough in the ways in which it utilized violence, most critiques of the group are wholesale, and often blame the organization for discrediting the anti-war movement, as a whole.) Lott finds this mode of self-legitimizing political thought in a variety of thinkers who were formed by the protest movements of the 1960s, including, but not limited to, the self-appointed eminence grise of the 1960s, Todd Gitlin. What is particularly important about Lott’s critique of boomeritis is that it begins to suggest all the ways in which the revolution of the 1960s, incomplete though it may be, has been made over as the cultural logic by which the state effects its reproduction—the logic, in other words, by which the self-anointed political class reproduces is hegemony over a state project that has come to see democracy and citizenship as liabilities. This state project treats democracy and citizenship in much the way that it treats the history of the 1960s: instead of principles or ideals to which we strive, they are made over as nostalgic reveries to be consumed, along with the rest of the consumer goods that now occupy and organize social life.

What happens to revolution when it becomes the narrative by which the capitalism consolidates its hold over the state? And what happens to the history of revolution when it becomes the object of melancholy self-immolation, the thing that prevents the realization of revolutionary potential? We are fast approaching the limits of this self-referential cultural formation, the point at which it will no longer be possible to sustain the delusional fantasy that finds us living in a past that never was. The holodeck culture of wish-fulfillment imagined by Field of Dreams, in which one can imagine the resolution of the social and cultural contradictions of capital in and through the delirious immateriality of money, has reached its limit. The question now is what can be salvaged, given the ways in which the nostalgic contemplation of the past has poisoned our culture, our history. Where do we start? How do we begin again?

Algeria, Indians, the New Left, and Boomer-itis: How does this story end?

At the end of my second year of college, I participated in a student-led takeover of our college administration building, in protest of the college’s decision to offer an honorary degree to media mogul Ted Turner. The protest against Turner had been building for months, beginning with meetings held by Proud Indigenous Peoples for Education, one of the many “cultural” organizations funded by the student government, and the most visible indigenous peoples’ organization on our campus. For many years, indigenous rights organizations had been building strong bases of support, organizing around issues related to the use of “Indian” mascots in professional sports. The concerns that PIPE raised had grown out of this movement. How, they asked, could our college, located in the middle of the Twin Cities—home to one of the largest, most vibrant, and politically active American Indian communities in the country—invite the owner of the Atlanta Braves to be part of our annual commencement ceremonies?

Although PIPE had probably less than ten members, the concerns they raised resonated with other students and cultural organizations. Our college prided itself on its commitment to internationalism and cultural diversity; as students, we were highly attuned to the ways in which its rhetoric did not match our reality. Cultural organizations were typically expected to perform difference in order to substantiate the college’s diversity, yet there was little in the way of institutional support for our organizations outside the funds they received through the student government. Students wanted to see that the energy that they had devoted to creating the aura of diversity—something the college was quick to exploit in student recruitment and development campaigns—was being reciprocated at the institutional level, whether in terms of an expanded office of multicultural affairs, a campus-wide commitment to anti-racism workshops, or greater community outreach. At the very least, we wanted some assurance that our efforts were recognized as both significant contributions to the college, and as a form of work. Students sacrificed a great deal to keep those organizations up and running and reaching out to the community at large, and by offering Ted Turner an honorary degree, we felt that the college had insulted us, and denigrated the ways in which we expressed our commitment to it.

The Turner campaign built for many months. At first, it seemed as if there was not enough energy to galvanize students outside the cultural organizations. As we neared commencement, however, the campaign began to pick up speed. Our closed-door meetings, polite sit-downs with administrators, and consciousness-raising exercises gave way to more vocal protests, with student and community leaders taking their message to the quad. In one very memorable instance, members of the American Indian Movement came to campus, and Clyde Bellecourt spoke, at length, about the history of indigenous peoples’ activism in Minnesota, and the place of Native peoples in the greater struggle for social and economic justice. There was drumming, and we danced, and immediately afterward, a small group of us—led by the intrepid Janel Stead—crossed to the administration building, determined to make an appointment with the college president. Janel may have been the only person who understood this (I certainly didn’t, then) but the time had come to force the issue. With barely a week to go before commencement, and support for the campaign growing by the day, there was no question that the college would be willing to take our demands seriously. While our administrators were always willing to talk, now they would have to negotiate. We scheduled a meeting for the next morning and went off to figure out our strategy.

The date, incidentally, was May 5, 1998, and that evening, my friends Brett and Bill and I inaugurated a tradition that we would continue to observe for many years: the celebration of Karl Marx’s birthday. The three of us were to live together that summer, and we had decided that we would read Capital, for the first time, together. The logic of this decision escapes me, although I suspect that our interest in Marx had something to do with the loose, largely uninformed way in which many of our professors dismissed him and his work. As anti-authoritarian as post-structuralism may be, on our campus, in the late 1990s, it was orthodoxy, and the stridently authoritarian manner in which it was presented was bound to inspire a backlash. So, with little direction or plan, and some dismissive criticism from even the most sympathetic professors, we set out to read the big book. On Marx’s birthday, we celebrated that commitment, as we celebrated him, with vodka and Kool-Aid, not entirely attentive to the irony. That night, well after dark, we ran around campus, copying out quotes from Marx’s more famous writings in sidewalk chalk. On the path leading to the administration building, Brett transcribed a passage from the Brumaire: “Men make their own history, but they do not make it just as they please….The tradition of all the dead generations lies like a nightmare on the brains of the living.”

Those were the words that greeted us the next morning when we arrived for our meeting with the president. I don’t remember much of the meeting, except that Vernon Bellecourt was with us, and after it became clear the administration did not want to negotiate, he pulled out his cell phone. We found this horribly amusing. Within minutes, however, AIM security had shown up, and the rest of us had gone into action mode. I went back to my room to collect some supplies while others took up positions around the building. By ten, we were entrenched, and while we allowed work to go on as usual, our energy, our enthusiasm, and our presence transformed the space. Protest should not be thought of as an end in itself, but protests have a sort of performative power that is, for lack of a better word, intoxicating, transformative. From his reading of St. Paul, Agamben tells us that, in the post-Messianic future, everything will be as it is now, but different. While this may seem like an unbearable bit of sophistry, it offers a relatively economical description of what a protest is like. Protests take place in space, they occupy space, and they transform it; they release the inherent, suppressed possibilities of a space, giving play to unthought of relations between people, places, and things. Everything is as it was before, but everything is different; some new, intangible, unquantifiable magic has been introduced into the world, and once you’ve felt it, it’s difficult to let that go.

The news spread quickly. While I was in my room, a friend who was involved in desegregation work in Minneapolis called me to ask if I could be at a meeting that night. Very abruptly, I told him that I couldn’t talk, and explained the situation. He got very excited. “Adam, why didn’t you tell me?!” he demanded, clearly elated. Fifteen minutes later, he was on site, as were twenty or thirty others from his cohort. Others came and went, including students from nearby colleges and universities, and some of the local news media. Sympathetic professors came and sat with us in support; a few offered to meet with the administration on our behalf. In addition to those of us who stayed in the building, a group of students gathered below, holding signs and placards, and chanting slogans. One student, alone against the world, held a counter-protest; we realized later that it was staged for the benefit of an independent film. At some point, those of us in the building ordered pizza. All the while, members of the AIM council of elders sat on the lawn below. Janel and others would go down to confer with them throughout the day. With the bustle of activity, as the evening drew near, Marx’s words were completely obscured, only a dull, dusty shadow beneath our feet.

The occupation ended around five, when word came down that Turner had decided to decline the college’s offer of an honorary degree. None of us had expected such a decisive victory, and while we were elated at the outcome, it left us wondering about our larger purpose. The Turner campaign had helped bring into focus many otherwise vague concerns, and we had expected that the protest would mark the beginning of a longer period of negotiation over questions of curriculum development, social programming, student recruitment, and ethnic studies. Within the intellectual and social space created by the campaign, students had begun to articulate new visions of how they hoped to interface with the administration, as well as a different sense of the obligations that bound students, faculty, and staff. The Turner campaign, in other words, had become, over the course of several months, one of the most dynamic political spaces within an already-dynamic campus political environment. As students attempted to position themselves as collaborators to the institutional processes that framed, and enabled, their education, Turner was valuable as an antagonist, yet he was never much more than a symbol. Once Turner had removed himself from the conflict, much of the urgency was lost, and—despite many of our best intentions and efforts—the larger agenda was abandoned.

None of this was on our radar the night after the occupation, when we gathered to reflect on the events of the day and plan our next moves with regard to the administration. For at least the next week, we knew, there would be meetings with different administrators, including a sit-down with members of the Board of Trustees, and we had to map out strategy. At the same time, we wanted to discuss how we might move forward with our larger agenda after the loss of our star antagonist, and as we were faced with the end of the academic year. Our energy would peak, we knew, unless we were able to find new outlets, and new purposes, that would sustain us over the summer months. That evening, we asked Clyde about AIM’s plans for the summer, and whether or not there was some role that we might play in the organization during the coming months. Part of our vision was of a more active relationship between the college and local communities—something more dynamic and ongoing than the missionary outreach that went on in the name of the college’s commitment to “service”—and I think we hoped that we might use the summer to build bridges with the American Indian community of the Twin Cities. Clyde, for his part, had different ideas. The American Indian Movement was grateful for our commitment, he told us, and to honor the success of our campaign, the elders of the organization were inviting us to the annual AIM Sundance, to be held that summer, at the sacred pipestone quarries outside Pipestone, Minnesota. He gave us literature and asked for our contact information. We pressed him for advice on activism. “Just come to the Sundance,” he replied. We made our promises, and went off to study for finals.

That August, I was one of two students who took the elders up on their invitation. For ten days, my friend Emily and I camped out, with several hundred others, in empty fields near the pipestone quarries in western Minnesota. The Sundance itself took place over about six or seven days. Like the Turner protest, the ritual brought into the open a sideways reality, a world that sat alongside the material plane, but that remained, for the most part, beyond the realm of sight. The Sundance remade the world, filling it with portent, elevating our most mundane actions from the banal to the sublime. The morning after we arrived, I woke early to take part in a sun ceremony in which we greeted the dawn with drums, song, and dance. On a small hill overlooking the camp, we sang for the sun, and when the first sliver of light appeared just over the rise, it felt as if we had brought it up. We knew that the sun came because we asked it to, and from then on, everything that we did seemed desperately important, utterly ripe with purpose.

This sense was only heightened when, later that day, we marched into the woods in search of the sacred Sundance tree. The tree had to be of a certain age and height; it had to be living; and, perhaps most importantly, it had to be cut and carried to the Sundance site without ever touching the ground. When we located the appropriate specimen, its trunk was smudged with sage, and the elders prayed, while the rest of the community prepared for its removal. Over several hours, the men hacked away at it with an axe. When one tired, another would step in, and the children would take advantage of the break to rush in and scoop up the wood chips left in their wake. As the operation neared its end, and it became apparent how the tree was going to fall, those of us who held back began to arrange large timbers on the ground. They would catch the weight of the trunk and prevent it from touching the earth. After it was on the ground, we gathered around it, and with a truly spectacular measure of martial discipline, we hoisted it—all one hundred feet of living wood—above our heads, and began marching back to the camp. We carried the tree over a mile back to the Sundance grounds. After adorning the tree for the ritual, tying its branches with bundles of tobacco, we set it upright, fitting its base into a large hole that had been carved into the earth. Using ropes tied to its upper branches, we held the tree upright while others filled in the soil at its base. This final operation took about thirty minutes, during which we exhausted ourselves keeping the tree in position. When it was over, however, the tree was secure in the earth, and we had become, in the course of the afternoon, somehow sanctified. Although we were tired and sore, we had accomplished something that seemed utterly improbable, and in the act of creating the sacred space, we had become something greater than ourselves.

This is, of course, the purpose of a Sundance, which is something that Clyde knew when he invited us. Although generations of anthropologists have been thrown by the name, the Sundance is, in essence, an allegory for birth: the Sundancers spend several days making circuits around the tree, pausing to dance at each of the cardinal points. The tree is in the umbilical cord, the link to the mother, here figured as the body of the earth, and by dancing to the north, south, east, and west, the dancers salute the different spirits and spirit realms that cohabitate with our material world. On the final day of the ritual, after several days without food, the Sundancers pierce their chests with large chunks of wood or bone, before tying themselves to the sacred tree. With what remains of their strength, they fling themselves to the ground in an attempt at breaking free. They continue in this manner until their flesh tears and they are released, or they are exhausted and unable to go on. This final drama, generally referred to as “piercing,” represents the birth that is a rebirth, the transformation of the dancer, and the renewal of the community that is his support.

I have never liked to talk about the Sundance. For a long time I thought this was because of principle, because the experience of the dance was not really mine to share. While this is, in many respects, an entirely reasonable objection, in my case, it masks something far less noble. My difficulty in talking about the Sundance suggests resistance, in a purely psychoanalytic sense; resistance, here, designating something of such deeply felt personal importance that it can be approached, through language, only obliquely. The Sundance was, for me, something traumatic and formative. I can talk about it, but I cannot understand; it can be told, but not narrated. This characterization might not make sense unless I tell you that I have been tripping over these last five lines for several hours now, and that I have written and deleted several pages trying to find a way to weave together all that has come before. I can think about the Sundance, I can describe the Sundance, I can even suggest some of what the Sundance means to me; yet somehow something always goes missing, something always gets left out, something always gets in the way. What this something is, on my own, I cannot even begin to conceive.

The Turner protest, by contrast, feels as familiar as a pop hit from my youth. And like a long forgotten pop song, I can go for years without hearing it, yet when it comes on the radio, I can remember every word, hit every note. The Turner protest marked the end of a certain romance of the political, and the beginning of a more studious engagement with the question of history, politics, and social change. Perhaps the most crucial moment of the protest, with regard to these questions, came late in the day, shortly before it was announced that Turner would not be coming to campus. As he was showing a sympathetic professor around the occupied administration building, I heard one of the students who had been long active in the campaign casually remark that the protest outside looked “just like the 1960s.” The professor responded, without missing a beat, “It looks like the twenty-first century.” Reflecting on this now, twelve years later, it seems all too cute, the sort of thing that, were I making a movie, I would immediately cut from the script. Yet, when it happened, it happened to a much different person, and I took this bit of portentous tedium as fabulously revelatory. In that moment, it was as if we had passed over some previously unseen threshold, and into a world that was more fully our own. Although I did not grow up in a household that was suffused by memories of the 1960s, many of my classmates and colleagues did; and while I had only the slightest inclination of what this meant, in that moment, in that protest, it felt as if we were announcing ourselves as arbiters of a new tradition, the vessels through which something new might be realized, and something lost might be redeemed.

Except it didn’t quite happen like that. Although we began to embroider the mythology of that day even before it was over, as the protest was unfolding, these intimations were vague, at best. Over subsequent revisions, however, the story has grown, to the extent that, for myself, the events themselves have taken on a host of new meanings. In the coming months, I had a falling out with the student who made the off-hand remark I found so significant, a falling out that, on its face, had everything to do with tactics and strategy but that, I now recognize, had much more to do with the ways in which we related to the histories in which we were embedded, and the use of history as a resource in social struggle. I spent the last two years of college engaged in an almost agonizingly self-conscious study of the New Left and its history, one that was animated by a desire to figure out what went wrong, what went right, and what lessons we might apply as we moved forward. For the student with whom I quarreled, the way forward was to reject the past and move on, secure in the righteousness of the course. This is, no doubt, a caricature of something far more complex, but it feels right, if only because it continues to seem a fair characterization of contemporary youth activism. The imperative to do something—anything—often continues to hold more weight than the need to understand why one is doing something, or the need to conceive of action in terms of some larger strategy. Although I have enormous respect for the accomplishments of this sort of anarcho-libertarianism, I remain now, as then, unconvinced of its capacity to seal the deal, to mount anything more than a brazen frontal assault that will—because it is under-theorized, under-organized, and under-prepared—inevitably falter.

The flip side of this, of course, is that my protracted engagement with the past has taken me further and further from question of actual politics, so much so that my not infrequent ruminations on strategy and tactics now feel like covert explanations as to why I have so long abandoned the political. While I reject the opposition of theory to practice, in terms of emotional satisfaction, the small, often intellectual struggles in which I am typically engaged seem a poor substitute for the actual business of getting things done, of pulling the levers, of making history move.

I realize that this makes me sound unbearably self-important, the sort of intellectual bore one studiously avoids at cocktail parties. And, in some part, that is who I am, and I have almost made my peace with that fact. I am not, however, trying to impress anyone with my desperate leaps of intellectual daring; I am trying, as best I can, to explain—to myself as much as anyone—how I came to Algeria because of a set of political and intellectual commitments that were formed when I was not yet twenty. Algeria is, I have come to believe, the end of this particular story, the denouement of something I more or less stumbled into nearly fifteen years ago, the final stage of a project that is now almost complete. Algeria loomed large in the imagination of the New Left, and the New Left has long loomed large in the consciousness of my generation, particularly for those of us who found some sense of meaning, some purpose, in politics and activism. The reasons for this have to do as much with a settling of generational accounts, of trying to sort through the tortured bonds that bind us to the Boomers, the links that continually frustrate my generation in its attempts at coming into itself. In going to Algeria, then, I am hoping to accomplish something eminently practical, which may be nothing more than finding an ending to a story that I am sick of reading. But like the Sundance, however, there is something more, something unaccountable, something that I cannot quite articulate; I know I want the story to end, but I’m not yet sure how.

The Turner Thesis

This is the second piece of a larger essay. Part one can be found below.

* * *

The occupation ended around five, when word came down that Turner had decided to decline the college’s offer of an honorary degree. None of us had expected such a decisive victory, and while we were elated at the outcome, it left us wondering about our larger purpose. The Turner campaign had helped bring into focus many otherwise vague concerns, and we had expected that the protest would mark the beginning of a longer period of negotiation over questions of curriculum development, social programming, student recruitment, and ethnic studies. Within the intellectual and social space created by the campaign, students had begun to articulate new visions of how they hoped to interface with the administration, as well as a different sense of the obligations that bound students, faculty, and staff. The Turner campaign, in other words, had become, over the course of several months, one of the most dynamic political spaces within an already-dynamic campus political environment. As students attempted to position themselves as collaborators to the institutional processes that framed, and enabled, their education, Turner was valuable as an antagonist, yet he was never much more than a symbol. Once Turner had removed himself from the conflict, much of the urgency was lost, and—despite many of our best intentions and efforts—the larger agenda was abandoned.

None of this was on our radar the night after the occupation, when we gathered to reflect on the events of the day and plan our next moves with regard to the administration. For at least the next week, we knew, there would be meetings with different administrators, including a sit-down with members of the Board of Trustees, and we had to map out strategy. At the same time, we wanted to discuss how we might move forward with our larger agenda after the loss of our star antagonist, and as we were faced with the end of the academic year. Our energy would peak, we knew, unless we were able to find new outlets, and new purposes, that would sustain us over the summer months. That evening, we asked Clyde about AIM’s plans for the summer, and whether or not there was some role that we might play in the organization during the coming months. Part of our vision was of a more active relationship between the college and local communities—something more dynamic and ongoing than the missionary outreach that went on in the name of the college’s commitment to “service”—and I think we hoped that we might use the summer to build bridges with the American Indian community of the Twin Cities. Clyde, for his part, had different ideas. The American Indian Movement was grateful for our commitment, he told us, and to honor the success of our campaign, the elders of the organization were inviting us to the annual AIM Sundance, to be held that summer, at the sacred pipestone quarries outside Pipestone, Minnesota. He gave us literature and asked for our contact information. We pressed him for advice on activism. “Just come to the Sundance,” he replied. We made our promises, and went off to study for finals.

That August, I was one of two students who took the elders up on their invitation. For ten days, my friend Emily and I camped out, with several hundred others, in empty fields near the pipestone quarries in western Minnesota. The Sundance itself took place over about six or seven days. Like the Turner protest, the ritual brought into the open a sideways reality, a world that sat alongside the material plane, but that remained, for the most part, beyond the realm of sight. The Sundance remade the world, filling it with portent, elevating our most mundane actions from the banal to the sublime. The morning after we arrived, I woke early to take part in a sun ceremony in which we greeted the dawn with drums, song, and dance. On a small hill overlooking the camp, we sang for the sun, and when the first sliver of light appeared just over the rise, it felt as if we had brought it up. We knew that the sun came because we asked it to, and from then on, everything that we did seemed desperately important, utterly ripe with purpose.

This sense was only heightened when, later that day, we marched into the woods in search of the sacred Sundance tree. The tree had to be of a certain age and height; it had to be living; and, perhaps most importantly, it had to be cut and carried to the Sundance site without ever touching the ground. When we located the appropriate specimen, its trunk was smudged with sage, and the elders prayed, while the rest of the community prepared for its removal. Over several hours, the men hacked away at it with an axe. When one tired, another would step in, and the children would take advantage of the break to rush in and scoop up the wood chips left in their wake. As the operation neared its end, and it became apparent how the tree was going to fall, those of us who held back began to arrange large timbers on the ground. They would catch the weight of the trunk and prevent it from touching the earth. After it was on the ground, we gathered around it, and with a truly spectacular measure of martial discipline, we hoisted it—all one hundred feet of living wood—above our heads, and began marching back to the camp. We carried the tree over a mile back to the Sundance grounds. After adorning the tree for the ritual, tying its branches with bundles of tobacco, we set it upright, fitting its base into a large hole that had been carved into the earth. Using ropes tied to its upper branches, we held the tree upright while others filled in the soil at its base. This final operation took about thirty minutes, during which we exhausted ourselves keeping the tree in position. When it was over, however, the tree was secure in the earth, and we had become, in the course of the afternoon, somehow sanctified. Although we were tired and sore, we had accomplished something that seemed utterly improbable, and in the act of creating the sacred space, we had become something greater than ourselves.

This is, of course, the purpose of a Sundance, which is something that Clyde knew when he invited us. Although generations of anthropologists have been thrown by the name, the Sundance is, in essence, an allegory for birth: the Sundancers spend several days making circuits around the tree, pausing to dance at each of the cardinal points. The tree is in the umbilical cord, the link to the mother, here figured as the body of the earth, and by dancing to the north, south, east, and west, the dancers salute the different spirits and spirit realms that cohabitate with our material world. On the final day of the ritual, after several days without food, the Sundancers pierce their chests with large chunks of wood or bone, before tying themselves to the sacred tree. With what remains of their strength, they fling themselves to the ground in an attempt at breaking free. They continue in this manner until their flesh tears and they are released, or they are exhausted and unable to go on. This final drama, generally referred to as “piercing,” represents the birth that is a rebirth, the transformation of the dancer, and the renewal of the community that is his support.