Ron Silliman proffers: Straight white males, for good reason, have some insight into what it feels like to be the unmarked case it feels normal & natural. Which is precisely why the instances that prove revealing & enriching artistically, whether in film or poetry or whatever, are those that either deconstruct or overstate the case. In that latter sense, it is precisely the overblown macho at the heart of Olson's Maximus that is one of its more endearing qualities Olson's absent-minded professor is also (always already) Archie Bunker.
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Insisting hetero, white men are "unmarked" is a way of passively resisting a complex discussion about the problems homogeneous, ideological apparatuses create for individuals who attempt to represent themselves to each other rather than allowing a passive representation of self by an other. [Linguistic note: moving from an active present to a passive present strips the verb and its explicit action/implicit sense; it is nominalized.]
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It is always already illusory to assume the biological presence of specific people who fit a category they solely participate in defining; hence, conferring upon themselves and their self-same members a specific privilege and power structure they created from out of history--a history, by the way, that has no authoritative intent in presentation. History's events are there in a heap, and we pick through the pile the things we find most engaging and offer the record of picking as ORDER. Well, lots of pickers, all different recordings.
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A white power structure exists in spite of history. White privilege is troubling for most of us. When we confront it, it shrinks from public view (for many reasons, which I will leave for now.) Once we step outside of a spectral category to look back at its structure, on-going construction and cultivation, we must re-construct an image of that category or an image of its identity from out of which our critique will come. Very much a mirror. Very troubling: How can we critically think about our being in the world if we must rely on our construction of the world, recongizable and defined examples from the world, in order to look at it?
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For Gunther, other umbrists, too--I tease about your poem's use of metonymy (School of Sleep, I remixed and parodied as School of Peeps below)--I see a problem with the idea that we can actually see the whole in a part of the whole: might be a gesture with a whole range of meaning in poetry but when it comes to human being, to difference, to what Holderlin claims is the role of the poet--to show the difference between subject and object, when it comes to pointing it out--we experience a problem. Privilege-ing is what difference is about. What do you see? Where do you see it? What is the claim for seeing it there and in that way? Good questions, but the kicker is: Who can accurately see it there and then? Who can speak the seeing? Who cultivates the difference? And NOW we have access to understanding, tho not forgiving, the fascistic turn many modernist authorities took. They chose...bad move.
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And, Ron, I am not willing to see Olson's sexist macho rambling as endearing. I love Olson. I really love Olson's conversations with Creeley. The men move me. But he is endearing when he is attempting to locate the world in place and history, when he is producing myth and space. He is plodding and a shit when he is a pig. But that is his honesty: Maximus is THERE. Good.
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The answer to WHO CHOOSES? is not A poet. (See my list on Face and Mask below.)
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Hamlet did this to Gertrude--in her chambers; he required her to decide which image she would honor as the guiding authority in her life: the dead Father (the King), the false Father (usurper/lover), or the rising Father (son). He did this by holding up likenesses and by getting her to look at herself in a mirror. Of course, her identification (her heart-of-hearts) is with The King through her interaction with His Son--order is (attempted to be) restored through definitions of identity, sexually to politically. However, it is the heterosexual usurpation of a homogeneous order that demands illusion, self-gratification, power and sanity. It ignores women, sexuality, death, mystery, language, sisterhood and contemporaneity, et al.
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Ideological apparatuses are always false. An UNMARKED position is, nevertheless, a marked position. It is simply a position that a specific body is allowed a specific relationship to while all other bodies are proscribed from that definition though they see it and are affected by it. Pardon my examples...Being MARKED--the black kid in a white suburban neighborhood at 3AM just because or a woman as football player--is a sign of the need for a body to excuse position. Being UNMARKED--a white man at a state university or a Mexican dishwasher in a brew-pub--is a sign of the need for a marked body to excuse position in relation to an unmarked body.
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Straight, white men, certainly, feel the position. But such a critique does not free-up men from responsibility in actively playing the role. White men have the unique privilege of being allowed to transgress. They need not excuse their behavior unless a consistent and vocal reason is put forth in the community. In fact, gay white men have often been conferred true radicality, as if it were biological in them, while lesbian transgression is proscribed as part of the sexy order in the world. [I am thinking about, for example, Andrew Sullivan's fame and acceptance. He is GIVEN creedence simply because he is out. Nevermind the lies and garbage he spews on his blog.] Moreover, any transience in between these positions is just not accepted by the majoritarian impulse in all communities. Ridiculous notions. In addition, it is permissible now for white guys to participate in critical race and gender conversations--a sign of enlightenment. Another ridiculous notion. Jackson Katz, who studies masculinity and violence, gathers speaking fees on the circuit and is often advertised as "the first man to receive a minor in Women's Studies" at wherever...point: he is not really unmarked, yet profits from his arbitrary relationship to positionality in the market. And he is one to talk about this unmarked business. In fact, he insists on the existence of a white race; therefore, privileging a specific kind of definition for individuals who participate in his discourse community.
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Don't get me wrong. We have to "have" the conversations. However, it is not tough for a white guy to play the role and feel the pain any longer. Those in my generation, who are not fundamentalists, have grown-up looking suspiciously at our fathers--the older generation of white men--who suffer about their white masculinity publicly. We were grossed out by the whole Iron John thing, for example. My generation has had to suffer (to use Silliman's sense, "what it feels like to be the unmarked case", with all irony noted) challenges not to our security as straight, gay, by, tans-, white, black (the typical, social representations of folks) but challenges to our ability to be identified at all--to have any individuality. The Army puts it this way in its ads: Be all that you can be. It is implied that [YOU CAN] be EVERYTHING that you CHOOSE to be. White guys like my father, who experienced the unreal political, social and technological changes from the 50s through the 80s--the Reagan Admin and 80s consumer culture put a stop to it, sent it underground--are visibly uncomfortable.
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I mean, I have no problem with gay marriage. Makes no sense to me to prohibit marriage and to limit it to a particular type of human couple. But I know what the pain is that causes older generations to melt at the thought--not because I understand it but because when I close my eyes, I can see a face suffering with it. What is it that folks hold on to with a desire to prohibit gay marriage? Outside of a new excuse to hate outright, a rational response is that "We need tradition." WHO knows what that is? But we know how to sympathize with the desire for order.
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Do we not have these same discussions in workshops and theory seminars, at conferences and blogs, each and every day? ...sure we do. And my generation knows we do. How? Well, we were brought up with shows like Sesame Street that taught us how to sing "Which one of these things is NOT like the other?" And Sesame Street was populated by all kinds of people who spoke TWO languages. What do we expect? Of course, we are confused.
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I find it hard, to revisit gay marriage, to suffer the issue if I tried. I have been taught to considered blackness, homosexuality, being with men and women, democracy, religion, war, drugs, jail, apartheid, racism, social class. I was in kindergarten and first grade when the majority of folks were coming home from Vietnam. But I know I cannot experience what I don't BE. And whatever the reality and ideology of biology and sociology, I have that choice TO BE.
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I am allowed to do what I cannot talk about doing, what I cannot really do. That's privilege: I try to recognize it every chance I get. I try to betray myself because, in many ways, such traitor-behavior is the only radicality society allows a guy who looks like me. I haven't had a choice but to participate. This invasive, (in)forming public sphere is what scares the average white, right winger/left winger (remember, NeoCons are ex-lefties) male so much. Experience requires either an acceptance that we live in a state that presents us with mere illusions to represent a grasp on reality or the acceptance of such ideology but in a latent, covert manner. This is a contemporary version of modern, existential angst--we can either live with the revolt of, not the flesh, but the ideology of the flesh, or we can see it and choose to ignore it. Still--no one can claim ignorance. Such ability faded away when the left learned the reality of Stalinist Russia. (I ain't a slammin' Socialism...just pointing to a last great betrayal of Ideology.) There is no excuse for pretending that representation can become reality. See, Mel Gibson's attempt to teach us the reality of the "passion of Christ" through extreme brutality. Gibson, as he has so often made clear, believes that a person can beat sense into another person. Thankfully, you cannot crucify Christ into reality.
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Being unmarked might be a burden to those who rely on it and know it offers unearned privileges, but this problem is really only a problem for the capitalist materialists--those men and women, regardless of culture or class who depend on their identification with the market and the spectacle of their ideological representation by OTHERS. China's recent public denials are good examples: No violation of human rights in China; No birds here with the flu; SARS? What is SARS? The US just released its human rights report and points our finger (on our behalf) at others. But one need only visit the Texas Dept of Crim Justice home page and see that, in fact, we make a profit killing citizens from other countries and quite a few more of our own.
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For those of us who know we have a privilege conferred on our ordinary being that the majority of folks aren't offered, we also know we don't have a choice to use it or not. Such a choice is part of the ideological privilege, and we can work on that problem in public...we lack what Dubois calls double-consciousness. That arbitrary, pointless, apolitical, simple choice to recognize or not recognize positionality is a manifestation of white privilege not a recognition of the problem. In other words, it is the problem. Nobody else is given such ideological status but white men, their wives or lovers and possibly some family members. Of course, as with Gertrude, their partners only reap position while gazing through the white male image. "My partner and I" etc etc
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I would ask Ron Silliman concerning "the unmarked case": Who is it FOR?
He writes: "...Which is precisely why the instances that prove revealing & enriching artistically, whether in film or poetry or whatever, are those that either deconstruct or overstate the case..."
I submit that the instances prove "revealing & enriching" for the white men they are self-referring to, for or (not AND, JLG) against.
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I am going to re-read Fanny Howe's Tis of Thee tomorrow and review it, here, on Dagzine. Howe addresses, first, how men and women see these instances differently quite well. Also, I want to divorce the notion that we rely on that to talk about privilege properly we should address white privilege. I think such demands on discourse about privilege ignore (and prejudicially so) the privilege that all folks use. This privilege may often be WHITE. Nevertheless, no matter what color we modify a pervasive ideological apparatus as possessing, any person of any color can make use of it. Howe's work gets at this point as does Spike Lee with his films Do the Right Thing and Bamboozled .
Now, I am not claiming we shouldn't address white power structures in society. We must. I claim that we shouldn't stop the conversation at that point.
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More to come on this...I was going to write about it yesterday. I have missed a few days b/c of student conferneces. I love to watch them learn and to learn with them. I relish conferences. So...
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Anyhow, CSPAN aired, this morning, a discussion moderated by NPR's Tavis Smiley, "The State of the Black Family." Worth watching the rerun CSPAN is airing at 1:30 to 5pm EASTERN time. On right now. Smiley, at one point, interrupts the excellent conversation to point out that "They are watching us." White folks just don't have to say things like that...therefore, we are in a position to learn something about ourselves from people who we take for granted each day; often, through enlightened discussions about how problematic being UNmarked really is.
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