Cover of Professor Benjamin’s latest book, Viral Justice (2022)
This month, our imaginations took flight after a sneak preview of Ruha Benjamin’s latest book project, Imagination: A Manifesto. Professor Benjamin invited students to think with her about the ideas buried in social imaginaries today—how might we move beyond the “eugenics imagination” that animates cultural categories, and what might a transition imaginary look like instead? The comments flew thick and fast from students beguiled by her calls for rule-breaking and change-making (an opening example about cutting school emphasized the continuity between the two). Questions clustered around imaginary structures, such as the nation state, which seem desperately intractable in the world today. Is it possible to move beyond the abstraction of the nation-state whilst also recognizing its power and hold over us, and over history—even its value as a tool in the fight against colonialism?
I was particularly struck, as I have been before, by Professor Benjamin’s ability to think through and beyond scholarly debates. Although her work brings the heft of the social sciences to bear in understanding the world, she seems much less interested in disciplinary debates than in the big problems that define our times, and how we might solve them. To this end, she stitches together ideas from academia, literature, community workers, family and friends in her books; as an educator, she emphasizes the messiness of real problems, for example through her work with the Ida B. Wells Just Data Lab, of which she is the founding director. In fact, Professor Benjamin told BUSF this month that she is not wedded to particular words or turns of phrase—you can call it this, or that, but the point is, what effect does it have in the world? To illustrate this message, she described a research paper, ‘The Numbers Don’t Speak for Themselves,’ which showed the counterintuitive way that ideas can operate in the world. In this particular paper, researchers Jennifer L. Eberhardt and Rebecca C. Hetey showed that statistical knowledge about racial disparities in the criminal justice system counterintuitively reinforces stereotypic assumptions that link Black people with crime. In other words, knowing that the policing and incarceration systems in the US target Black people makes Americans more supportive of those very systems. Clearly, the eugenics imagination works through deeply-entrenched patterns of cognition; reprogramming them will require, perhaps, real acts of imagination.
There were many fascinating questions to keep track of in Alison Isenberg’s presentation about her work on Trenton, not least what it means for a historian to be writing about the juxtaposition of archives and memories—and to be feeding back what she finds in the archive to the people who were there, and writing about how they react. So, the question of how many buildings burned that night in April 1968, and the wail of fire engines everywhere. It can transform a community’s narrative to learn that there were only four burning buildings, and that the engines crossed and recrossed the city in pursuit of dozens of false alarms. How to fold that transformation into the story as you tell it?
I was also struck by the way she talked about her collaboration with Purcell Carson. Alison has a respect for the power of well-chosen film footage that bordered on fear: how it can be manipulated, and how the placement of a powerful vignette can drive a narrative, and an argument. Is this effect so much more powerful than analogous manipulations of prose? Film and video are sometimes called “hotter” media than print. Does that heat make them risker for doing history—especially given Alison’s self-professed disciplinary refusal to speculate, absent documentary proof? I may be exaggerating her position a bit—but I think it will be very interesting to hold these questions in mind when we talk to Ruha Benjamin next time about her work in the Just Data Lab. The representation of information, and its social justice ramifications, will be much at stake then.
Our first regular session, with Professor Simone Marchesi of French and Italian. We read Sigmund Freud’s 1919 essay, “The Uncanny,” and studied Francisco Goya’s nightmarish drawing, “El sueño de la razon produce monstruos” (the sleep of reason produces monsters).
Portrait of a Young Woman in White Jacques-Louis David, c. 1798
This year’s edition of the Behrman Undergraduate Society of Fellows began unconventionally. The group had elected to read Ottessa Moshfegh’s My Year of Rest and Relaxation over the summer. As August turned to September, we met for a three hour summit to discuss it along with Jonathan Crary’s 24/7. Moshfegh’s book divided opinion. “It is an exercise in simplification,” said Sam. Natalia found herself bookmarking pages on the infrequent occasions when the narrator “wasn’t hateful”. But others were taken in. “It is an experiment in empathy,” said Ashira. The narrator, said Josephine, is “heroic”.
Over the course of three hours, the group discussed the hateful, the heroic, sleep, rest, medication, awakeness, relatability, responsibility, care, femininity, absence, capitalism, privilege and history. We got to know each other, and set up some coordinates for the rest of the year.
Three groups of questions emerged:
First, does rest and sleep allow an exit from capitalism? Kristiana reminded us that Moshfegh’s narrator can only “rest” because her inheritance is invested in the stock market. (Crary is useful here: he points out that encroachments on sleep have created “the insomniac conditions in which sleep must be bought,” as indeed Moshfegh’s narrator buys it in the novel). Professor Dolven observed that the narrator manages quite a lot of shopping while apparently resting.
Second, what kinds of representational styles suit our world? Abigail pointed out that the novel’s lack of dynamism reflects the narrator’s medicated state. Kristiana noted that its choice of narrative perspective forces a reader to confront their own misogyny: “her femininity is part of her unlikability”. For others, however, the narrator’s removal from reality and privilege is boring and unconscionable. Indeed, the novel relies in many ways on prejudicial cultural stereotypes, focalizing the rich, thin, blonde protagonist, and juxtaposing this type with the insecure, needy Jewish friend. Professor Dolven threaded the needle between these conflicting points of view: “This is perhaps the kind of reading the book solicits. It’s not innocent or unknowing about the idea that you might hate it.”
Finally, what kinds of responsibility do we have to care for ourselves, for others, and for the world? According to Beatrix, the narrator’s decisions in My Year of Rest and Relaxation are “such a waste of life”. But for others, they represent a kind of self-care. Beth pointed out that “we resent the narrator’s absence in the way she resents the absence of her parents”. The group noted that the novel pushes history to the edges, constructing a world according to the principles of social media filter bubbles. Yet history makes itself known nonetheless, when the twin towers come crashing down. Rachel put it poetically: “The ills of the world wrap themselves around her”.
There were also sandwiches and sodas. And, before we began our main discussion, we all shared favourite quotations from books that we have found particularly good to think with over the years.
Here are a handful:
Kristiana Filipov: American Gods by Neil Gaiman:
We need individual stories. Without individuals we see only numbers: a thousand dead, a hundred thousand dead, “casualties may rise to a million.” With individual stories, the statistics become people–but even that is a lie, for the people continue to suffer in numbers that themselves are numbing and meaningless. Look, see the child’s swollen, swollen belly, and the flies that crawl at the corners of his eyes, his skeletal limbs: will it make it easier for you to know his name, his age, his dreams, his fears? To see him from the inside? And if it does, are we not doing a disservice to his sister, who lies in the searing dust beside him, a distorted, distended caricature of a human child? And there, if we feel for them, are they now more important to us than a thousand other children touched by the same famine, a thousand other young lives who will soon be food for the flies’ own myriad squirming children? We draw our lines around these moments of pain, and remain upon our islands, and they cannot hurt us. They are covered with a smooth, safe, nacreous layer to let them slip, pearl-like, from our souls without real pain. Fiction allows us to slide into these other heads, these other places, and look out through other eyes. And then in the tale we stop before we die, or we die vicariously and unharmed, and in the world beyond the tale we turn the page or close the book, and we resume our lives. A life, which is, like any other, unlike any other.
Abigail Glickman: “As They Rode Along the Edge,” from The Complete Stories of Leonora Carrington. Translated from the French by Kathrine Talbot
As they rode along the edge, the brambles drew back their thorns like cats retracting their claws.
This was something to see: fifty black cats and as many yellow ones, and then her, and one couldn’t really be altogether sure that she was a human being. Her smell alone threw doubt on it–a mixture of spices and game, the stables, fur and grasses.
Riding a wheel, she took the worst roads, between precipices, across trees. Someone who’s never travelled on a wheel would think it difficult, but she was used to it.
Her name was Virginia Fur, she had a mane of hair yards long and enormous hands with dirty nails; yet the citizens of the mountain respected her and she too always showed a deference for their customs. True, the people up there were plants, animals, birds; otherwise things wouldn’t have been the same. Of course, she had to put up with being insulted by the cats at times, but she insulted them back just as loudly and in the same language. She, Virginia Fur, lived in a village long abandoned by human beings. Her house had holes all over, holes she’d pierced for the fig tree that grew in the kitchen.
Aliya Ram, Autobiography of Red by Anne Carson:
He woke fast from a loud wild dream that vanished at once and lay listening
to the splendid subtle ravines of Hades
where hardworking dawn monkeys were wheedling and baiting one another
up and down the mahogany trees.
The cries took little nicks out of him. This was when Geryon liked to plan
his autobiography, in that blurred state
between awake and asleep when too many intake valves are open in the soul.
Like the terrestrial crust of the earth
which is proportionally ten times thinner than an eggshell, the skin of the soul
is a miracle of mutual pressures.
Millions of kilograms of force pounding up from the earth’s core on the inside to meet
the cold air of the world and stop,
as we do, just in time.
Beatrix Bondor, Moby Dick by Herman Melville:
Were this world an endless plain, and by sailing eastward we could for ever reach new distances, and discover sights more sweet and strange than any Cyclades or Islands of King Solomon, then there were promise in the voyage. But in pursuit of those far mysteries we dream of, or in tormented chase of that demon phantom that, some time or other, swims before all human hearts; while chasing such over this round globe, they either lead us on in barren mazes or midway leave us whelmed.
Rachel Sturley, Middlemarch by George Eliot:
Most of us who turn to any subject with love remember some morning or evening hour when we got on a high stool to reach down an untried volume, or sat with parted lips listening to a new talker, or for very lack of books began to listen to the voices within, as the first traceable beginning of our love.
That delightful labor of the imagination which is not mere arbitrariness, but the exercise of disciplined power — combining and constructing with the clearest eye for probabilities and the fullest obedience to knowledge; and then, in yet more energetic alliance with impartial Nature, standing aloof to invent tests by which to try its own work.
While the summer had gradually advanced over the western fields beyond the avenue of elms, the bare room had gathered within it those memories of an inward life which fill the air as with a cloud of good or bad angels, the invisible yet active forms of our spiritual triumphs or our spiritual falls.
Sam Bisno, The Name of the Rose by Umberto Eco:
What I mean is that to tell a story you must first of all construct a world, furnished as much as possible, down to the slightest details. If I were to construct a river, I would need two banks; and if on the left bank I put a fisherman, and if I were to give this fisherman a wrathful character and a police record, then I could start writing, translating into words everything that would inevitably happen. What does a fisherman do? He fishes (and thence a whole sequence of actions, more or less obligatory). And then what happens? Either the fish are biting or they are not. If they bite, the fisherman catches them and then goes home happy. End of story. If there are no fish, since he is a wrathful type he will perhaps become angry. Perhaps he will break his fishing rod. This is not much; still, it is already a sketch. But there is an Indian proverb that goes, “Sit on the bank of a river and wait: your enemy’s corpse will soon float by.” And what if a corpse were to come down the stream—since this possibility is inherent in an intertextual area like a river? We must also bear in mind that my fisherman has a police record. Will he want to risk trouble? What will he do? Will he run away and pretend not to have seen the corpse? Will he feel vulnerable, because this, after all, is the corpse of the man he hated? Wrathful as he is, will he fly into a rage because he was not able to wreak personally his longed-for vengeance? As you see, as soon as one’s invented world has been furnished just a little, there is already the beginning of a story. There is already the beginning of a style, too, because a fisherman who is fishing should establish a slow, fluvial pace, cadenced by his waiting, which should be patient but also marked by the fits of his impatient wrath. The problem is to construct the world: the words will practically come on their own.
Kayra Guven, Madonna in a Fur Coat by Sabahattin Ali:
Of all the people I have chanced upon in life, there is no one who has left a greater impression. Months have passed but still Raif Efendi haunts my thoughts. As I sit here alone, I can see his honest face, gazing off into the distance but ready, nonetheless, to greet all who cross his path with a smile. Yet he was hardly an extraordinary man. In fact, he was rather ordinary, with no distinguishing features—no different from the hundreds of others we meet and fail to notice in the course of a normal day. Indeed, there was no part of his life—public or private—that might give rise to curiosity. He was, in the end, the sort of man who causes us to ask ourselves, ‘What does he live for? What does he find in life? What logic compels him to keep breathing? What philosophy drives him as he wanders the earth?’ But we ask in vain if we fail to look beyond the surface—if we forget that beneath each surface lurks another realm, in which a caged mind whirls alone. It is, perhaps, easier to dismiss a man whose face gives no indication of an inner life. And what a pity that is: a dash of curiosity is all it takes to stumble upon treasures we never expected. That said, we rarely seek that which we do not expect to find. Send a hero into a dragon’s den, and his task is clear. It is a hero of another order who can summon up the courage to lower himself into a well of which we have no knowledge.
Jeff Dolven, The Faerie Queene by Edmund Spenser
Vnkindnesse past, they gan of solace treat, And bathe in pleasaunce of the ioyous shade, Which shielded them against the boyling heat, And with greene boughes decking a gloomy glade, About the fountaine like a girlond made; Whose bubbling waue did euer freshly well, Ne euer would through feruent sommer fade: The sacred Nymph, which therein wont to dwell, Was out of Dianes fauour, as it then befell.
The cause was this: one day when Phoebe fayre With all her band was following the chace, This Nymph, quite tyr’d with heat of scorching ayre, Sat downe to rest in middest of the race: The goddesse wroth gan fowly her disgrace, And bad the waters, which from her did flow, Be such as she her selfe was then in place. Thenceforth her waters waxed dull and slow, And all that drunke thereof, did faint and feeble grow.
Hereof this gentle knight vnweeting was, And lying downe vpon the sandie graile, Drunke of the streame, as cleare as cristall glas; Eftsoones his manly forces gan to faile, And mightie strong was turnd to feeble fraile. His chaunged powres at first them selues not felt, Till crudled cold his corage gan assaile, And chearefull bloud in faintnesse chill did melt, Which like a feuer fit through all his body swelt.
Yet goodly court he made still to his Dame, Pourd out in loosnesse on the grassy grownd, Both carelesse of his health, and of his fame: Till at the last he heard a dreadfull sownd, Which through the wood loud bellowing, did rebownd, That all the earth for terrour seemd to shake, And trees did tremble. Th’Elfe therewith astownd, Vpstarted lightly from his looser make, And his vnready weapons gan in hand to take.
Anna Allport, Oedipus Rex by Sophocles
KREON:
No. Reason it out, as I have done.
Think of this first: would any sane man prefer
Power, with all a king’s anxieties,
To that same power and the grace of sleep?
Certainly not I.
I have never longed for the king’s power—only his rights.
You must be logged in to post a comment.