Given as the Troy Lecture, University of Massachusetts, Amherst, in April 1997. First published in the Massachusetts Review, autumn 1997.
I appreciate this opportunity to pull together and present some issues I’ve been wrestling with over the past couple of years. In fact, I confess that I’ve kept for more than eighteen months a folder labeled “Troy Lecture” into which I’ve been sliding handwritten and typewritten notes, made in various states of intense reflection, disquietude, and hope. When I shook this folder out on the kitchen table last January, its contents did not miraculously assemble themselves into the outline of a lecture, as the mountain of peas, beans, and grains sorted themselves out for Psyche in the Greek myth. But they did remind me how persistently certain realities and urgencies had been haunting me over a period of time, ineluctable visitors it seemed.
Psyche’s task was to separate legume from groat, millet grain from lentil. I see mine, rather, as a work of connection.
Let me first sketch out some of my concerns, then try to show how I think they inhere with this lectureship’s focus on art, the humanities, and public education—and with conditions facing all of us, but especially the young who are trying to make sense of their lives in this time.
I begin with the abrupt reshuffling of our once apparently consensual national project: a democratic republic with a large and growing middle class, and equality of opportunity as its great hope. Over the past two decades or less, we have become a pyramidic society of the omnivorously acquisitive few, an insecure, dwindling middle class, and a multiplying number of ill-served, throwaway citizens and workers—finally, a society accused by the highest incarceration rate in the world. We dangle over an enormous gap between national propaganda and the ways most people are actually living: a cognitive and emotional dissonance, a kind of public breakdown, with symptoms along a spectrum from acute self-involvement to extreme anxiety to individual and group violence.
Along with this crisis in our own country I have been thinking about the self-congratulatory self-promotion of capitalism as a global, transnational order, superseding governments and the very meaning of free elections. I have especially been noting the corruptions of language employed to manage our perceptions of all this. Where democracy becomes “free enterprise,” individual rights the self-interest of capital, it’s no wonder that the complex of social policies needed to further democratic equality is dismissed as a hulk of obsolete junk known as “big government.” In the vocabulary kidnapped from liberatory politics, no word has been so pimped as freedom.
I’ve been struck by the presumption, endlessly issuing from the media, in academic discourse, and from liberal as well as conservative platforms, that the questions raised by Marxism, socialism, and communism must inexorably be identified with their use and abuse by certain repressively authoritarian regimes of the twentieth century: therefore they are henceforth to be nonquestions. That because Marxism, socialism, communism were aliases employed by certain stagnating, cruel, and unscrupulous systems, they have and shall have no other existence than as masks for those systems. That American capitalism is the liberatory force of the future with a transnational mission to quench all efforts to keep these questions alive. That capitalism’s violence and amorality are somehow nonaccountable. That communist or socialist parties all over the world, including those of India and South Africa, imitate the degraded communisms of eastern Europe and China.
In this particular presumption, or dogma, capitalism represents itself as a law of history or, rather, a law beyond history, beneath which history now lies, corroding like the Titanic. Or, capitalism presents itself as obedience to a law of nature, man’s “natural” and overwhelming predisposition toward activity that is competitive, aggressive, and acquisitive. Where capitalism invokes freedom, it means the freedom of capital. Where, in any mainstream public discourse, is this self-referential monologue put to the question?
The monologue may claim to be transnational, but its roots are in Western Europe and the United States, and in the United States we have our own idioms. We’re still rehearsing an old, disabling rhetoric, invoking the “free” climate and virgin resources awaiting the first Europeans on this continent, the “free” spirit of individualism and laissez-faire that allowed penniless new arrivals to acquire lands and fortunes. Generally speaking, we don’t trace American opportunity, prosperity, and global power to the genocide of millions of Indians, the claiming and contaminating of Indian lands and natural resources, the presently continuing repression of Indian life and leadership; nor to that Atlantic slave trade which underwrote the wealth of Europe by introducing a captive labor force into both Americas and the Caribbean, and brought the “New World” into the international economy.
We may have heard that the era of modern slavery is finished, is “history,” that the genocide against tribal peoples and the expropriation of land held in trust by them are over and done with along with the last wagon trains. But such institutions and policies do not die—they mutate—and we are living them still: they are the taproots of the economic order that has taken “democracy” as its alias. Our past is seeded in our present and is trying to become our future.
These concerns engage me as a citizen, feeling daily in my relationships with my fellow citizens the effects of a system based in the accumulation of wealth—the value against which all other values must justify themselves. We all feel these effects, almost namelessly, as we go about our individual lives and as the fragments of a still ill-defined people.
But these are also my concerns as a poet, as the practitioner of an ancient and severely tested art. In a society in such extreme pain, I think these are any writer’s, any artist’s, concerns: the unnamed harm to human relationships, the blockage of inquiry, the oblique contempt with which we are depicted to ourselves and to others, in prevailing image making; a malnourishment that extends from the body to the imagination itself. Capital vulgarizes and reduces complex relations to a banal iconography. There is hate speech, but there is also a more generally accepted language of contempt and self-contempt—the term baby boomers, for instance, infantilizes and demeans an entire generation. In the interests of marketing, distinctions fade and subtleties vanish.
This devaluation of language, this flattening of images, results in a massive inarticulation, even among the educated. Language itself collapses into shallowness. Everything indeed tends toward becoming a thing until people can speak only in terms of the thing, the inert and always obsolescent commodity. We are, whatever our generation, marked as “consumers”—but what of the human energy we put forth, the actual needs we feel as distinct from the pursuit of consumption? What about the hunger no commodity can satisfy because it is not a hunger for something on a shelf? Or the hunger forced to consume the throwaway dinners in a fast-food restaurant dumpster?
Any artist faces the necessity to explore, by whatever means, human relationships—which may or may not be perceived as political. But there are also, and always, the changing questions of the medium itself, the craft and its demands.
The study of silence has long engrossed me. The matrix of a poet’s work consists not only of what is there to be absorbed and worked on, but also of what is missing, desaparecido, rendered unspeakable, thus unthinkable. It is through these invisible holes in reality that poetry makes its way—certainly for women and other marginalized subjects and for disempowered and colonized peoples generally, but ultimately for all who practice any art at its deeper levels. The impulse to create begins—often terribly and fearfully—in a tunnel of silence. Every real poem is the breaking of an existing silence, and the first question we might ask any poem is, What kind of voice is breaking silence, and what kind of silence is being broken?
And yet I need to say here that silence is not always or necessarily oppressive, it is not always or necessarily a denial or extinguishing of some reality. It can be fertilizing, it can bathe the imagination, it can, as in great open spaces—I think of those plains stretching far below the Hopi mesas in Arizona—be the nimbus of a way of life, a condition of vision. Such living silences are more and more endangered throughout the world, by commerce and appropriation. Even in conversation, here in North America, we who so eagerly unpack our most private concerns before strangers dread the imaginative space that silence might open between two people or within a group. Television, obviously, abhors such silence.
But the silence I abhor is dead silence, like a dead spot in an auditorium, a dead telephone, silence where language needed to be and was prevented. I am talking about the silence of a Lexan-sealed isolation cell in a maximum security prison, of evidence destroyed, of a language forbidden to be spoken, a vocabulary declared defunct, questions forbidden to be asked. I am also thinking of the dead sound of senseless noise, of verbal displacement, when a rich and active idiom is replaced by banal and inoffensive speech, or words of active courage by the bluster of false transgression, crudely offensive yet finally impotent.
Never has the silence of displacement been so deafening and so omnipresent. Poetic language lives, labors, amid this displacement; and so does political vision.
I’ve been reflecting—not so much nostalgically as critically—on the early 1970s, when the emergent women’s liberation movement was pouring its vitality into a great many channels: organizing, theorizing, institution building, communications, the arts, research, and journalism. For most of the women engaged with that movement, at least for a while, there was an unforgettable sense of coming alive, of newness and connectedness. You could feel the power of a social critique, a politics, that seemed capable of clarifying previously mystified and haunted terrain. Seeded for over a century in the continuity of other movements for justice—labor, anti-lynching, civil rights, anti-imperialism, antimilitarism, socialism—it called those movements to account for perpetuating old injuries of misogyny, old sexual divisions of power.
A certain elasticity of economic opportunities and means in that period, combined with intense intellectual and creative ferment, made it possible to imagine hitherto nonexistent resources and then work to realize them: women’s centers for politics and culture, rape-crisis hotlines and counseling, action groups for reproductive rights, safe houses for battered women and their children, feminist health clinics and credit unions, and also feminist and lesbian presses, newspapers, arts journals, bookstores, theater, film and video collectives, cultural workshops and institutes. As always, the new liberatory politics broke open new cultural and intellectual space. For a period at least, political analysis and activism were interactive with cultural work, and “women’s culture” had not broken itself off from “women’s liberation.”
Quite apart from the media’s brief blaze of attention on a few white faces, the movement created its own spaces for dissent and disputation. The very idea of a monolithic movement was disputed early on by working-class women, by socialist feminists, by women of color, by lesbians, by women who were all of these. There were confrontations about hierarchy and democracy, about which women speak for women and how and why; about sexuality; about how racial and class separations frame what we see and how we set about organizing. There were the tenacity and courage of those who stood up in meeting after meeting to say again what others did not want to hear: that the basic facts of inequality and power in North America cannot be addressed in gender terms only.
Granting authority to women’s experience as that which has been disprized, distorted, obliterated, this movement also had to reckon with the fact that on the other side of silence women have enormous differences of experience.
“Identity politics” was one attempt to address this contradiction. I first encountered the term in a much-discussed and widely reprinted black feminist manifesto, the Combahee River Collective statement, first published in 1977. This “identity politics” was a necessary response to the devaluation and invisibility of African American women in all movements, but it was implicitly and explicitly seen as moving toward solidarity. The project of changing structures of inequality would be carried on from a self-conscious and analytic knowledge of one’s own location in the intersections of gender, race, class, sexual orientation. This self-consciousness was a necessary step toward the self-definition of African American women against both white and male self-universalizing, but it was not an end in itself. The collective voiced its own “need to do political work and to move beyond consciousness-raising and serving exclusively as an emotional support group.”
Had such a reading of “identity politics” been responsively taken up by a critical mass of white women, it might have led us to see—and act on—the racialization of our lives, how our experiences of color and class were shaped by capitalist patriarchy’s variant and contradictory uses for different female identities. As the 1980s wore on, “identity” became a synonym for “safe space” in which alikeness rather than difference could be explored. An often stifling self-reference and narrow group chauvinism developed.
Meanwhile, capitalism lost no time in rearranging itself around this phenomenon called “feminism,” bringing some women closer to centers of power while extruding most others at an accelerating rate. A narrow identity politics could easily be displayed on a buffet table of lifestyles by the caterers of personal solutions. We are learning that only a politics of the whole society can resist such assimilation.
I have focused briefly on the women’s liberation movement both because of my own ongoing stake in it and because it embodied for a while the kind of creative space a liberatory political movement can make possible: “a visionary relation to reality.” Why this happens has something to do with the sheer power of a collective imagining of change and a sense of collective hope. Coming together with others to define common desires and needs, and to identify the forces that frustrate them, can be a strong tonic for the imagination. And there has been a vital dynamic between art—here I speak particularly of writing, a seizing of language, a transformation of subjectivity—and the continuing life of movements for social transformation. Where language and images help us name and recognize ourselves and our condition, and practical activity for liberation renews and challenges art, there is a complementarity as necessary as the circulation of the blood. Liberatory politics is, after all, not simply opposition but an expression of the impulse to create the new, an expanding sense of what’s humanly possible.
The movements of the 1960s and the 1970s in the United States were openings out of apertures previously sealed, into collective imagination and hope. They wore their own blinders, made their own misjudgments. They have been relentlessly trivialized, derided, and demonized by the Right and by what’s now known as the political center. They have also been disparaged, as Aijaz Ahmad notes, in many of the texts of postmodernism, as mere “false consciousness” or “folly,” while in academic critical theory Marxist or socialist thought may be dismissed outright or treated “as a method primarily of reading.”
In this time of manic official optimism and much public denial and despair, I know that the present generation of students must and will negotiate their own ways among such claims. Yet when I think of the political education of students now in college, I have to think of the political silences and displacements of the past twenty years. I think of the fabric of discussion, the great rents in that fabric, about the packaging and marketing of each generation’s prefabricated desires and needs.
I have deplored the retreat into the personal as a current fetish of mass-market culture. The conglomerate publishing industry stays afloat in part on a blurry slick of heavily promoted self-help literature, personal memoirs by early bloomers, celebrity biographies, the packaging of authors complete with sex scandals and lawsuits. From television talk shows and interviews you might deduce that all human interactions are limited to individual predicaments, family injuries, personal confessions and revelations.
The relationship of the individual to a community, to social power, and to the great upheavals of collective human experience will always be the richest and most complex of questions. The blotted-out question might well be: With any personal history, what is to be done? What do we know when we know your story? With whom do you believe your lot is cast?
If I seem to come down hard on “the personal,” it’s not because I undervalue individual experience, or the human impulse to narrative, or because I believe in any kind of simplistic “universal”—male or female, old or new. Garrett Hongo gives an eloquent account of the personal essay as one means for a community to come to know itself, to reject both external and internal stereotyping, to hear “stories that are somehow forbidden and tagged as aberrational, as militant, as depraved.”
For a writer, as you live in this kind of silence, in this kind of misery, not knowing quite what it is that the world is not giving you, .. . that your work cannot address as yet, you are at the beginning of a critique of culture and society. It is the moment when powerful personal alienation slips into critical thinking;—the origin of imagination. It is this initial step of intellection that enables the emergence of new, transformative, even revolutionary creativity. It occurs at the juncture between the production of art and the exercise of deep critical thought.
Conglomerate publishing and marketing have little interest in such junctures.
I have been trying to decipher the moral ecology of this nonaccountable economy, this old order calling itself new. What are its effects on our emotional and affectional and intellectual life? Over the past decade I would have found it harder to look steadily and long at the scene around us without using Marx’s perception that economic relationships—the relationships of production—will, unchecked, infiltrate all other social relationships at the public and the most private levels. Not that Marx thought that feelings, spirit, human relationships are just inert products of the economy. Rather, he was outraged by capital’s treatment of human labor and human energy as a means, its hostility to the development of the whole person, its reduction of the entire web of existence to commodity: what can be produced and sold for profit. In place of all the physical and spiritual senses, he tells us, there is the sense of possession, which is the alienation of all these senses. Marx was passionate about the insensibility of a system that must extract ever more humanity from the human being: time and space for love, for sleep and dreaming, time to create art, time for both solitude and communal life, time to explore the idea of an expanding universe of freedom.
For a few years now, the Republican Congress and the Right have been repetitiously characterized by the term mean-spirited. By extension, the same phrase has been used to describe the mood of the disgruntled American voter. I have always found this term suspiciously off the mark. If it were only a matter of spirits! Mean-spiritedness has been as American as cherry pie—alongside other tendencies: it has designated a parochial or provincial strain in a greater social texture.
Mean-spiritedness as a generalized social symptom suggests an inexplicable national mood, a bad attitude, a souring of social conscience and compassion. But people don’t succumb to sourness, resentment, and fear for no reason. The phrase directs us toward social behavior but not to the economic relationships that Marx perceived as staining all social behavior. It refers to attitude but not to policies and powers and the interests they serve. It’s a diversionary piece of cant that obscures the lived impact of increasingly cruel legislation and propaganda against poor people, immigrants, women, children, youth, the old, the sick—all who are at risk to begin with—and that also masks the erosion of modest middle-class hopes, in the name of the market or of a chimera known as the balanced budget.
We have all seen attempts to graph numerically the effects of these policies: numbers of people who have slid from apartments or rented rooms or splintered households into the streets; a population of working people without health care, child care, safe and affordable shelter. But each of these people is more than a body to be counted: each is a mind and a soul. Numbers of children left alone or in the care of other children so parents can work; of children doing time in schools that are no more than holding pens for youth and lethal for many. Each of these children possesses an intelligence, creative urge, and capacity that cannot be accounted for by quantifying. Numbers of working people, blue-collar and white-collar, who have lost full-time jobs with pensions to so-called downsizing and restructuring and the export of the production process—working several jobs piecemeal for ever-sinking wages and with mandatory overtime. Each of these people is more than a pinpoint on a chart: each was born to her or his own usefulness and uniqueness. Numbers of prisons now under construction—a “growth industry” in this country, whose public schools and urban hospitals are disintegrating. These prisons, too, are holding pens for youth, disproportionately so for young African American men. The prison as shadow factory, where inmates assemble, at 35 cents an hour, parts for cars and computers, or take telephone reservations for TWA and Best Western—a captive cheap labor force. Women—of all colors—are the fastest growing incarcerated group, two-thirds being mothers of dependent children. A growing population of lifers and people on death row. A death-penalty system tabulated strenuously to race. In the words of the death-row journalist Mumia Abu-Jamal, “the barest illusion of rehabilitation [is being] replaced by dehumanization by design” in the maximum-security, sensory-deprivation units of the penal system in the United States, and in prison policies overall.
Each of these women and men “inside” has, or once had, a self to offer the world, a presence. And the slippage toward prison of those “outside”—so many of them young—who feel themselves becoming social and economic discards, is a process obscured by catchwords like drugs and crime. We are supposed to blink away from that reality. But what happens behind bars, in any country, isn’t sealed off from the quality of civil life. “Dehumanization by design” cannot take place behind bars without also occurring in public space at large. In the public spaces of the wealthiest, most powerful of all nations, ours.
Against a background and foreground of crisis, of technology dazzling in means and maniacally violent in substance, among declarations of resignation and predictions of social chaos, I have from time to time—I know I’m not alone in this—felt almost unbearable foreboding, a terrifying loss of gravity, and furious grief. I’m a writer in a country where native-born fascistic tendencies, allied to the practices of “free” marketing, have been trying to eviscerate language of meaning. I have often felt doubly cut off: that I cannot effectively be heard, and that those voices I need most to hear are being cut off from me. Any writer has necessary questions as to whether her words deserve to stand, whether his are worth reading. But it’s also been a question, for me, of feeling that almost everything that has fertilized and sustained my work is in danger. I have known that this is, in fact, the very material I have to work with: it is not “in spite of the times” that I will write, but I will try to write, in both senses, out of my time.
(There is a 1973 painting by Dorothea Tanning in which the arm of the woman painter literally breaks through the canvas: we don’t see the brush, we see the arm up to the wrist, and the gash in the material. That, viscerally, depicts what it means to me, to try to write out of one’s time.)
I have stayed connected with activism and with people whose phoenix politics are reborn continually out of the nest charred by hostility and lying. I have talked long with other friends. I have searched for words—my own and those of other writers. I’ve been drawn to those writers, in so many world locations, who have felt the need to question the very activity their lives had been shaped around: to interrogate the value of the written word in the face of many kinds of danger, enormous human needs. I wasn’t looking for easy reassurances but rather for evidence that others, in other societies, also had to struggle with that question.
Whatever her or his social identity, the writer is, by the nature of the act of writing, someone who strives for communication and connection, someone who searches, through language, to keep alive the conversation with what Octavio Paz has called “the lost community.” Even if what’s written feels like a note thrust into a bottle to be thrown into the sea. The Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish writes of the incapacity of poetry to find a linguistic equivalent to conditions such as the 1982 Israeli shelling of Beirut: We are now not to describe, as much as we are to be described. We’re being born totally, or else dying totally. In his remarkable prose-meditation on that war, he also says, Yet I want to break into song. . . . I want to find a language that transforms language itself into steel for the spirit—a language to use against these sparkling silver insects, these jets. I want to sing. I want a language that I can lean on and that can lean on me, that asks me to hear witness and that I can ask to hear witness, to what power there is in us to overcome this cosmic isolation.
Darwish writes from the heart of a military massacre. The Caribbean-Canadian poet Dionne Brand writes from colonial diaspora: I’ve had moments when the life of my people has been so overwhelming to bear that poetry seemed useless, and I cannot say that there is any moment when I do not think that now. Yet finally, she admits, like Darwish: Poetry is here, just here. Something wrestling with how we live, something dangerous, something honest.
I’ve gone back many times to Eduardo Galeano’s essay “In Defense of the Word,” in which he says:
I do not share the attitude of those writers who claim for themselves divine privileges not granted to ordinary mortals, nor of those who beat their breasts and rend their clothes as they clamor for public pardon for having lived a life devoted to serving a useless vocation. Neither so godly, nor so contemptible. . . .
The prevailing social order perverts or annihilates the creative capacity of the immense majority of people and reduces the possibility of creation—an age-old response to human anguish and the certainty of death—to its professional exercise by a handful of specialists. How many “specialists” are we in Latin America? For whom do we write, whom do we reach? Where is our real public? (Let us mistrust applause. At times we are congratulated by those who consider us innocuous.)
To claim that literature on its own is going to change reality would be an act of madness or arrogance. It seems to me no less foolish to deny that it can aid in making this change.
Galeano’s “defense” was written after his magazine, Crisis, was closed down by the Argentine government. As a writer in exile, he has continued to interrogate the place of the written word, of literature, in a political order that forbids literacy and creative expression to so many; that denies the value of literature as a vehicle for social change even as it fears its power. Like Nadine Gordimer in South Africa, he knows that censorship can assume many faces, from the shutting down of magazines and the banning of books by some writers, to the imprisonment and torture of others, to the structural censorship produced by utterly unequal educational opportunities and by restricted access to the means of distribution—both features of North American society that have become more and more pronounced over the past two decades.
I question the “free” market’s devotion to freedom of expression. Let’s bear in mind that when threats of violence came down against the publication and selling of Salman Rushdie’s Satanic Verses, the chain bookstores took it off their shelves, while independent booksellers continued to stock it. The various small, independent presses in this country, which have had an integral relationship with the independent booksellers, are walking a difficult and risky edge as costs rise, support funding dwindles, and corporate distribution becomes more monolithic. The survival of a great diversity of books, and of work by writers far less internationally notable than Rushdie, depends on diverse interests having the means to make such books available.
It also means a nonelite but educated audience, a population who are literate, who read and talk to each other, who may be factory workers or bakers or bank tellers or paramedicals or plumbers or computer consultants or farmworkers, whose first language may be Croatian or Tagalog or Spanish or Vietnamese but who are given to critical thinking, who care about art, an intelligentsia beyond intellectual specialists.
I have encountered a bracingly hard self-questioning and self-criticism in politically embattled writers, along with their belief that language can be a vital instrument in combating unreality and lies. I have been grateful for their clarity, whether as to Latin America, South Africa, the Caribbean, North America, or the Middle East, about the systems that abuse and waste the majority of human lives. Overall, there is the conviction—and these are writers of poetry, fiction, travel, fantasy—that the writer’s freedom to communicate can’t be severed from universal public education and universal public access to the word.
Universal public education has two possible—and contradictory—missions. One is the development of a literate, articulate, and well-informed citizenry so that the democratic process can continue to evolve and the promise of radical equality can be brought closer to realization. The other is the perpetuation of a class system dividing an elite, nominally “gifted” few, tracked from an early age, from a very large underclass essentially to be written off as alienated from language and science, from poetry and politics, from history and hope, an underclass to be funneled—whatever its dreams and hopes—toward low-wage temporary jobs. The second is the direction our society has taken. The results are devastating in terms of the betrayal of a generation of youth. The loss to the whole society is incalculable.
But to take the other direction, to choose an imaginative, highly developed, educational system that would serve all citizens at every age—a vast, shared, public schooling in which each of us felt a stake, as with public roads, there when needed, ready when you choose to use them—this would mean changing almost everything else.
It would mean refusing, categorically, the shallow premises of official pieties and banalities. As Jonathan Kozol writes in a “Memo to President Clinton”:
You have spoken at times of the need to put computers into ghetto schools, to set up zones of enterprise in ghetto neighborhoods, and to crack down more aggressively on crime in ghetto streets. Yet you have never asked the nation to consider whether ghetto schools and the ghetto itself represent abhorrent, morally offensive institutions. Is the ghetto ... to be accepted as a permanent cancer on the body of American democracy? Is its existence never to be challenged? Is its persistence never to be questioned? Is it the moral agenda of our President to do no more than speak about more comely versions of apartheid, of entrepreneurial segregation ... ?
Well, but of course, voices are saying, we’re now seeing the worst of breakaway capitalism, even one or two millionaires are wondering if things haven’t gone far enough. Perhaps the thing can be restructured, reinvented? After all, it’s all we’ve got, the only system we in this country have ever known! Without capitalism’s lure of high stakes and risk, its glamour of individual power, how could we have conceived, designed, developed the astonishing technological fireworks of the end of this century—this technology with the power to generate ever more swiftly obsolescent products for consumption, ever more wondrous connections among the well connected?
Other voices speak of a technology that can redeem or rescue us. Some who are part of this pyrotechnic moment see it as illuminating enormous possibilities—in education, for one instance. Yet how will this come about without consistent mentoring and monitoring by nontechnical, nonprofit-oriented interests? And where will such mentoring come from? whose power will validate it?
Is technology, rather than democracy, our destiny? Who, what groups, give it direction and purpose? To whom does it really belong? What should be its content? With spectacular advances in medical technology, why not free universal health care? If computers in every ghetto school, why ghettos at all? and why not classroom teachers who are well trained and well paid? If national defense is the issue, why not, as poet-activist Frances Payne Adler suggests, a “national defense” budget that defends the people through affordable health, education, and shelter for everyone? Why should such minimal social needs be so threatening? Technology—magnificent, but merely a means after all—will not of itself resolve questions like these.
We need to begin changing the questions. To become less afraid to ask the still-unanswered questions posed by Marxism, socialism and communism. Not to interrogate old, corrupt hierarchical systems, but to ask anew, for our own time: What constitutes ownership? What is work? How can people be assured of a just share in the products of their precious human exertions? How can we move from a production system in which human labor is merely a disposable means to a process that depends on and expands connective relationships, mutual respect, the dignity of work, the fullest possible development of the human subject? How much inequality will we go on tolerating in the world’s richest and most powerful nation? What, anyway, is social wealth? Is it only to be defined as private ownership? What does the much abused and trampled word revolution mean to us? How can revolutions be prevented from locking in on themselves? how can women and men together imagine “revolution in permanence,” continually unfolding through time?
And if we are writers writing first of all from our own desire and need, if this is irresistible work for us, if in writing we experience certain kinds of power and freedom that may be unavailable to us in other ways—surely it would follow that we would want to make that kind of forming, shaping, naming, telling, accessible for anyone who can use it. It would seem only natural for writers to care passionately about literacy, public education, public libraries, public opportunities in all the arts. But more: if we care about the freedom of the word, about language as a liberatory current, if we care about the imagination, we will care about economic justice.
For the pull and suck of Capital’s project tend toward reducing, not expanding, overall human intelligence, wit, expressiveness, creative rebellion. If free enterprise is to be totalizingly free, a value in and for itself, it can have no stake in other realms of value. It may pay lip service to charitable works, but its drive is toward what works for the accumulation of wealth; this is a monomaniacal system. Certainly it cannot enrich the realm of the social imagination, least of all the imagination of solidarity and cooperative human endeavor, the unfulfilled imagination of radical equality.
In a poem written in the early 1970s in Argentina, just as the political ground was shifting to a right-wing consolidation, military government, torture, disappearances and massacres, the poet Juan Gelman reflects on delusions of political compromise. The poem is called “Clarities”:
who has seen the dove marry the hawk
mistrust affection the exploited the exploiter? false
are such unspeakable marriages
disasters are born of such marriages discord sadness
how long can the house of such a marriage last?
wouldn’t
the least breeze grind it down destroy it the sky crush it
to ruins? oh, my country!
sad! enraged! beautiful! oh my country facing the firing
squad!
stained with revolutionary blood!
the parrots the color of mitre
that go clucking in almost every tree
and courting on every branch
are they more alone? less alone? lonely? for
who has seen the butcher marry the tender calf
tenderness marry capitalism? false
are such unspeakable marriages
disasters are born of such marriages discord sadness
clarities such as
the day itself spinning in the iron cupola
above this poem
I have talked at some length about capitalism’s drive to disenfranchise and dehumanize, to invade the very zones of feeling and relationship we deal with as writers—which Marx described long ago—because those processes still need to be described as doing what they still do. I have spoken from the perspective of a writer and a longtime teacher, trying to grasp the ill winds and the sharp veerings of her time—a human being who thinks of herself as an artist, and then must ask herself what that means.
I want to end by saying this to you: We’re not simply trapped in the present. We are not caged within a narrowing corridor at “the end of history.” Nor do any of us have to windsurf on the currents of a system that depends on the betrayal of so many others. We do have choices. We’re living through a certain part of history that needs us to live it and make it and write it. We can make that history with many others, people we will never know. Or, we can live in default, under protest perhaps, but neutered in our senses and in our sympathies.
We have to keep on asking the questions still being defined as nonquestions—the ones beginning Why ... ? What if... ? We will be told these are childish, naive, “pre-postmodern” questions. They are the imagination’s questions.
Many of you in this audience are professional intellectuals, or studying to become so, or are otherwise engaged in the activities of a public university. Writers and intellectuals can name, we can describe, we can depict, we can witness—without sacrificing craft, nuance, or beauty. Above all, and at our best, we may sometimes help question the questions.
Let us try to do this, if we do it, without grandiosity. Let’s recognize too, without false humility, the limits of the zone in which we work. Writing and teaching are kinds of work, and the relative creative freedom of the writer or teacher depends on the conditions of human labor overall and everywhere.
For what are we, anyway, at our best, but one small, persistent cluster in a greater ferment of human activity—still and forever turning toward, tuned for, the possible, the unrealized and irrepressible design?
1997