More notes

I’ve been trying all morning to say something and I’ve gotten to the point that I can’t even remember where it was that I was trying to start. I wake up each morning and read the German-language papers too, which fill up with denunciations of leftists who have failed 'to clearly denounce’ Hamas. And I keep coming back to Butler’s invocation of poetry and the unsayable at the end of their piece in the LRB. We all know that what is really unsayable is a clear statement of support for the ruling forces in Gaza, that the language that cannot be spoken -in the countries in which we live- is a specific language that takes clear positions in an asymmetric armed conflict, and not a speculative language of special feelings that we are compelled to wait for, like true believers waiting for angels to come to take us to heaven. It feels absurd to talk now about the ineffably latent and unarticulated without talking first about the blatantly censored and the suppressed. And of course many Palestinians in Gaza do feel pride at the fact that ‘their’ army succeeded in killing as many Israelis as it did, and that too is something almost unspeakable, but it is something unspeakable about a reality that we have produced and that we collude in reproducing now and not something unspeakable in the sense of not-yet-available within the existing system of meanings. ‘Now we feel sadness, fear and pride’, says a Gazan civil liberties activist in this. ‘A spirit of defiance burns in our hearts’.  

And the construction of the community of feeling in the West -is- domestic counterinsurgency. Every managerial group in every publicly funded body in Europe puts out a statement saying that the institution it runs ‘feels’ like ‘horror’ or something equivalent about the 'terrorist attacks' in Israel, and everyone knows this has nothing to do with how anyone actually feels, and none of that even matters because the point is to conduct a pedagogical exercise on the topic of what can and cannot be said, and because being emotionally gaslit by managers speaking through the puppet-mouths of shocked and astonished cultural institutions is the special privilege of liberal citizens of liberal democracies whose governments try to reserve their coercive and penal powers for migrants and special occasions.

‘Now we feel sadness, fear and pride’. And I suppose that like Judith Butler I too would wish to believe in the healing power of the unsayable. I would like to believe in ‘poetry’ as well. But I’m not sure whether it is possible for those things to mean anything unless we can first understand what it might mean to feel pride at news of the deaths of so many unarmed and ‘innocent’ people. I am not yet aware of any western museum, cinema or theatre that has asked people to try to think about what this means. That there are people alive who are more ‘moral’ than you, who have experienced more hurt and sadness than you, who have been abused more than you, and who have felt more convulsive relief than you, who nevertheless have felt astonishing pride at the sight of a mound of corpses, might if only for a second give the big institutional feelers of Western culture pause for thought, if only they were capable of thinking, or the pain of loss, or anything besides the reinscription in a coercive rhetoric of spontaneous emotion of the exact boundaries of what is and is not acceptable to say.  

I woke up this morning from a fitful sleep in which it was impossible to dream anything at all. I sat for hours at my computer in physical pain, uncertain if I had anything to put down. I am not a moral institution. I want to be able to feel what I am not able to feel. I want to understand what it means to live in a reality that is unspeakable, that makes people feel pride at unspeakable things, whether there are any poets to dream about it or not. And I couldn’t care less about trying to shock, or to scandalise, but I cannot see a path to that which we are presently unable to say that doesn’t lead through the middle of what we are presently told not to think. 'Love is also the need for presence in its miracle'. 'They are not asking'.        

Update from Berlin (DG)

A quick update from here. My version of the news or something. I mean the level of silencing of speech just beggars belief. I guess what happened when you were here, with the documenta situation, was a first stage in the rolling back of possible, if gradual and small-scale, rearticulations of the de facto position that had been taking place in recent years--the coming together of the white left and of young kids from migrant backgrounds organising themselves against fascists, in solidarity with Palestine, etc, the presence of Palestinian or pro-Palestinian art in galleries, etc etc. Over the past week the cops have banned any and every Palestine demo, every university and cultural institution has put out out blanket pro-Israel statements, you'll have seen what happened with the Frankfurt Book Fair, etc. The white left seems to have totally evaporated and just merged with the de facto position of the government. So no possibility of big, cathartic, or even just effective expressions of mass outrage at the ongoing ethnic cleansing. Just the streets as normal, tourists coming and going, hypocrisy hanging heavy on the streets like a knife. "Sonst sagt niemand etwas" says Bachmann and it feels like we're living through the truth of that line. On Sunday I did manage to go to the demo on Potsdamer Platz after hearing someone shouting about it on the train. There were a fair few people there gathered in the square. The cops were broadcasting a statement through a megaphone telling people the assembly was illegal and to go home. Occasionally about thirty of them would single out and arrest one kid and pepper spray people around them. Obviously they were filming and you could see plain clothes talking to them occasionally.  The people in the crowd were families, teens and pre-teens, up to old people. Very few white leftists that I could see. The newspaper coverage across the political spectrum is racist like nothing I've seen. Because of the level of the suppression, at the moment the demos are mainly, it seems, kids in Neukölln assembling on the street. Leftists/liberals are either liberal/apathetic, openly in sympathy with the de facto position, or--particularly in the case of those who are not white and/or European--worried that they will lose their jobs, be targeted, or deported. (Clearly this latter is going to be used as an excuse not just to arrest and imprison people but to deport them, and fits very clearly with racist and anti-migrant practices of the state). The pattern in Berlin at least is of the police using support for Palestine as a way to target migrant and post-migrant communities, Palestinian, Turkish, Kurdish and so on, particularly in schools, where wearing a keffiyeh or displaying any kind of Palestinian symbol is banned: you'll have seen the video of the teacher punching the kid in Neukölln. In that sense I guess it has parallels with Macron's rhetoric after the stabbing in France, but it's very specific to Germany and much more extreme than anywhere else in Europe, as far as I can tell. The total effect is that any position other than unconditional support for what is becoming ethnic cleansing is effectively a thought crime. (Imagine the contortions and defensive manouevres that you identify in Judith Butler's piece, L, multiplied by a thousand.)