Repeat yet again (Classical Bellyflop Series, vol. 2)

I have a frictious relationship with repetition. On the one hand, I don’t believe that anything ever repeats, not really, at least not in the strict sense of a “repetition of the same.” For example: I I I I I I I I. This is not the repetition of the same I. Each I is different. Each occupies a distinct space and has resulted from a distinct pressing of my computer’s keyboard. In casual conversation, one could easily suggest that I have repeated I. But when I really think about it, I don’t see a single I repeated. I see I and I and I and I, always new.

On the other hand, my body seems to feel the return of habitual action, specifically habitual actions that trouble me. The air seems to thicken each morning at 7am when my three-year-old bolts out of bed to start a new day. My body drags itself to an upright position so as to follow and hesitates because of a deep uneasiness about doing this again, of trying to get energy again, of repeating the struggle of parenting. I could possibly describe this as a “continuation” of parenting, instead of a “repetition,” except that there is something very Groundhog’s Day about it. Same with the non-linear path of potty training: poop, again! In this scenario, it doesn’t feel like new poop. It feels like I’m re-living the totality of the “training” process. At the other end of the continuum, where this repetition feels most invasive, I encounter trauma, which is the epitome of this bodily sensation of repetition: I, in the present moment, feel again a series of affronting and unwanted bodily reactions that I have experienced before. This is related to the idea of nomos that I wrote about last time, the habit of experience that instantiates itself through (ostensibly) repeated action. 

I have a frictious relationship with repetition. Does it exist as a natural phenomenon of life, or am I the one who fabricates it? To answer this question, I have, for years, explored the topic of repetition in theatre and performance studies. Each time one performs (any habitual activity) or each time an actor steps onstage to enact a part in a pre-designed performance, what precisely is happening? Do we repeat our actions, or is each time a totally new experience? The most intriguing treatment of these questions, however, appears not in theatre and performance scholarship but in philosophy and psychoanalysis. Gilles Deleuze’s Difference and Repetition and Jacques Lacan’s re-workings of Sigmund Freud’s thoughts on repeated (neurotic and desirous) behavior are texts I return to, repeatedly (?). 

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Classical Bellyflop Series vol. 1, νόμος

Classical Bellyflop Series, vol. 1: νόμος

I recently purchased a subscription to the Loeb Classics Online Library. To encourage my use of this amazing resource, I am starting a blog series called "Classical Bellyflop." The name comes from the feeling of leaping or diving into the classical texts curated in that library. Since my knowledge of Ancient Greek and Latin is pretty basic, however, any dive would scarcely resemble something pretty; not even a cannonball or a jack-knife would serve as an adequate comparison. No, when I dive into Ancient Greece I most certainly bellyflop. The text-water slaps me with as much force as my dive carries with it. The discoveries I make in the text are usually eye-opening and sometimes startling, similar to the surprisingly painful sensation of breaking the water’s surface. In these blog entries, I am confidently admitting my ugly bellyflop into these classical texts. Combined with definitions sourced through the Liddell and Scott online dictionary, these forays into the Loeb Classical Library will chronicle my flops and present them as lessons.

Why lessons? Why share these bellyflops? I am convinced that words are used too carelessly today. The rich histories packed into each and every word of the English language are hardly ever examined. As a teacher and a writer, I feel called to publicize some of these histories and the lessons that I myself learn every time I unpack the language that I use. Additionally, despite the foreignness of the Ancient Greek alphabet, the English language relies on Ancient Greek words to a great extent. Knowing a bit about this reliance helps us to become more astute readers and critical thinkers. This, at least, is my hope.

The first word I am exploring is νόμος (nomos).

 

You have likely encountered this word many times, though it is usually nested within a larger word, such as “astronomy,” “autonomy,” and “antinomial.” The most common definition of “nomos” is “that which is in habitual practice, use or possession,” “use, custom,” and, more generally, “law.” Thus, “astronomy” is the law or habit of the stars. “Autonomy” means to govern the self (auto = self). “Antinomial” is formed by fusing “against” (anti) and “nomos” (law) and means “the rejection of law.”

As I’ll show in what follows, this usual definition is accompanied by a now rare meaning linked to the production of music in Ancient Greece. Since music, mathematics, and philosophy were so intimately related for the Greeks, this forgotten definition of nomos helps us peer into the connection between order, the frequency of sound, and the workings of both human society and the wider universe.

I discovered this new-old definition of νόμος while writing a book with my friend and collaborator, Matthew Goulish, which maps the contours of the astonishing poetry, drama, and philosophy of Jay Wright. While reading Wright’s most recent book of poetry, The Prime Anniversary (2019), I encountered this verse: 

 

That periodic bouncing between mirror points
might define the note’s order in the scale. Custom
could determine all that the spent soul might fathom,
make of it a blue galaxy that disappoints.
Consider a slow dance about an axis, dust
in an elliptical field. Now Emily must
go mad with her math, and take these errors in trust.

You’ll have to wait for the book to hear our fullest interpretation of stanzas like this one. For now, let me draw your attention to the second line where Wright ends the first sentence and begins another: “[…] the note’s order in the scale. Custom”.

It seems that Wright is aware of the familiar and less-than-common definitions of νόμος. He has united two sentences that each summon one of these definitions. “Custom” hearkens to the traditional meaning, and the discussion of a note’s order in a scale calls to mind the following: “melody [...] a type of early melody created by Terpander for the lyre as an accompaniment to Epic texts.” The Prime Anniversary is dedicated to exploring ancient philosophical ideas in verse, as did the pre-Socratic philosophers. This fact helped me tune into the subtle reference that one could easily miss while trying to figure out what precisely Wright is talking about here.

To give a brief peek into the complex working of this passage, I’ll widen my scope to the entirety of the first sentence: “That periodic bouncing between mirror points / might define the note’s order in the scale.” A “mirror scale,” or “mirror mode,” which comes to mind because of Wright’s word choice, is a musical phenomenon that reveals the type of “distance” between notes that so interested Ancient Greek philosophers. Arthur Fox helps us understand what’s going on in one of his blog entries:

Try reversing or “mirroring” the order of intervals in any given scale. Reversing the order of intervals in a palindromic scale will produce the same scale. Otherwise, we will end up with a new ‘mirror scale‘ that is on the opposite side of the brightness/darkness spectrum.

So, for example, intervals between the scale degrees of the Major (Ionian) scale are as follows:
T – T – ST – T – T – T – ST. If we mirror these degrees, we get the Phrygian mode.

---

For the Ancient Greeks, geometrical relations such as those revealed through the realization of mirror scales hinted at an underlying structural code to the cosmos. Philosophers such as Pythagoras, and even more staid ones like Plato, sought to understand whether the discernment of those underlying codes in nature could translate into a harmonious political situation among humans. If so, then the law of the land (nomos) might be developed from a deep understanding of musical harmony and the placement of notes in a scale (nomos). In fact, despite his protestations against music and its ability to mislead the soul, Plato seems to hint at the benefit of such realizations in his dialogues Laws and Statesman.

Wright, too, senses resonance between the mathematics of harmonious musical relations and the order of the universe, which is why this stanza moves on to discuss the phenomenon of the Blue Galaxy and elliptical orbits. Unlike Plato, however, whose philosophical systems seem to conserve a top-down governmental structure in human society, Wright’s poetry brings some dissonant dissidence. His fusion of sources challenges us to unite cultures and ideas that most people keep separated into categories like “Western,” “African,” “Musicology,” and “Philosophy.” By dismissing the historically developed separation of various modes of thought and cultural production, Wright allows us to think up new combinations. Or, rather, he helps us revisit old unities that provided glimpses of the active Oneness to the universe.

If you think about the geometry of music long enough, you’ll start to understand why so many musicians find spiritual power in their art. A prime example is John Coltrane whose famous diagram of the circle of fifths hints at his dual role as mathematician.

When we listen to Coltrane and dwell on images like this, we find another example of the two-fold definition of nomos, much like in Jay Wright’s poem. At stake in Coltrane’s music is the possibility of re-ordering the habits of society through coming up with heretofore-unheard-of orders of notes, as if thinking up new musical formations will bring about a social revolution. Nomos evokes nomos. Play the old standards, things stay the same. Blow off the roof and change blows through.

At this point, it seems important to point out that, in a relatively limited number of steps, I have maneuvered from a dictionary of Ancient Greek words to a theory of political revolution embedded within a jazz musician’s sound. The Loeb Classical Library sent me back to A Love Supreme. What’s important here is not that I’ve discovered some new connection between seemingly disparate human artefacts. Rather, I’ve discovered something that was already embedded in the word “law” or “custom,” a type of knowledge that was released through poetic verse. Is there, perhaps, a methodology here that we can put to repeated use? Begin with poetry. Peer deep into the structure and words of the poetic verse. Unpack the history of the terms and listen to what that history has to say. Through listening, rediscover truths that have been forgotten or intentionally pushed aside, and then put those truths into action in order to bring about change.

New Podcast Episode: Ceremonial Grief Concert

This episode brings us to the Raga Room, nestled in the highly charged environment of Black Mountain, North Carolina, where Will interviews Aditi Sethi, Jojo Silverman, and Greg Lathrop. Once each season, these musicians host a Ceremonial Grief Concert that harnesses the powers of collective grieving and music to hold space for the work of spiritual transformation in the wake of grief.

Listen Here:
https://invitingabundance.net/to-grieve-podcast#Episode8

Write Brightly

 

Write Brightly is now available!! I am extremely excited about this class. I've wanted to make something like this for years. I have stepped up my video-editing game and created a deep dive into the world of academic writing. I think you'll learn a lot.

​Udemy is hosting the course online, and you can find a direct link to the course as well as a detailed overview here: https://invitingabundance.net/write-brightly/

The course is $49.99. For a limited time, I am offering promotional discounts. If you are a former student of mine or if the course price is a little steep for you at the moment, send me an email me at grow@invitingabundance.net.

​This is the third online class that Joanne and I have made as part of our business, Inviting Abundance. You can find information about my Race & Philosophy class and Joanne's Grief Mapping class on our website: invitingabundance.net.

Podcast from Inviting Abundance

Linked to my work at Inviting Abundance, Joanne and I have started publishing a podcast series call To Grieve. As of September 2018, we have 5 episodes. You can find the episodes in one of three ways:

1. Check them out on our website. 
2. Download from iTunes
3. Download from Spotify

To whet your appetite, here's the first episode:

Full STEAM Ahead

I recently had the opportunity to write about STEM curricula in higher education and, more specifically, the importance of adding art into the mix. In acronyms, this topic is understood as the move from STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math) to STEAM (Science, Technology, Engineering, Arts, and Math). I thought I’d share my thoughts on this blog in order to make my language available to anyone who finds themselves in need of advocating for the arts in education.

The STEM to STEAM movement, championed by the Rhode Island School of Design and many institutions around the country, advocates for the necessary inclusion of Art and Design in curricula dedicated primarily to science, technology, engineering and math. The resources and case studies compiled by these advocates demonstrate how exposure to the arts leads to more STEM patents, cultivates creativity in the design thinking behind today’s technology, and helps students from underrepresented cultural groups find footholds in the fields of science and engineering. I agree with all these findings and count myself among the STEM to STEAM advocates, but I also see a bigger reason for institutions of higher education to support and grow its arts offerings.

Adding the “A” to STEM does more than expand the minds of students and professionals. Art, and the Humanities more broadly, help to enhance STEM students’ awareness of the ethical complexities they will face in their careers after college. Pointing to the proliferation of algorithmic software applications, biotechnological advances in the treatment of fatal diseases, and technological solutions to the problem of climate change, Richard Lachman of Ryerson University argues that STEM students need arts education and exposure to the fine arts precisely in order to conceptualize the human lives affected by the technology they will help to build. Computer user interfaces, medical interventions, and renewable energy, he argues, aren’t fundamentally problems of technology. They are, rather, ethical problems that require the flexible and creative kind of ingenuity stimulated by artistic thinking. The arts, not the sciences, provide this ethical dimension and thus arts education in primary, secondary, and higher education must be a necessary component of twenty-first century education in the United States.

By teaching individuals about empathy, the nuances of interpersonal communication, and the stories too often forgotten by dominant historical narratives, the arts and arts-based education prepare students to participate in the larger socio-political questions surrounding the big issues of our times. I argue that educational institutions that foreground their offerings in science, technology, engineering, and math education have a responsibility to engage in and with the arts for the simple reason that without it the degrees being offered are entirely incomplete. To provide a college degree that is more than a slip of paper, colleges must create the conditions for on-campus experiences that challenge students to think about the local and global worlds in which they take part. That is, if arts education leads students to engage in the ethical dimension of STEM applications, then universities have an ethical imperative for supporting the arts on their campuses.

I do, however, recognize the challenges in implementing the vision that I am elaborating here.  One reason that colleges and universities have a hard time fully understanding the ethical impact of arts education is that artistic thinking focuses not primarily on results but on process. The qualitative value of art making, furthermore, is extremely hard to measure, and thus the quantitative proof of art’s impact on STEM students is difficult to see in the short term. I believe, nonetheless, that the road to achieving the ethical enrichment sought by STEAM advocates such as Lachman and myself begins with a shift in perspective, one that touts process, play, and experimentation as much as concrete and easily repeatable learning outcomes. Universities will need to hire administrators with backgrounds in the arts and in arts education capable of translating the language of art-making into terms that all faculty and students at the university can understand. Likewise, I think that universities would do well to promote faculty members into administrative positions so as to promote unity among all university employees as the institution as a whole moves forward with large-scale projects such as those in the areas of art outreach and engagement.

While it might seem that STEAM curricula should first arise at the primary and secondary education levels in order to create a foundation for the type of change advocated by arts activists and educators like myself, I actually believe that colleges and universities should take the lead role. By demonstrating that the arts and the sciences can collaborate together in the transformative education of our nation’s young adults, universities will send the message that similar curricula are needed at the earlier stages of learning.

Ritual and Everyday Life

Four years ago, two former of students of mine asked me to make a video "about ritual" for a devised theatre piece they were making. I complied with the request and created this 10-minute reflection on the connection between ritual, counting, ordering the universe, and brushing your teeth. I just found this video and I think it holds up! Let me know what you think!

Thoughts on "Two-Spirit People"

[Originally posted on willdaddario.com/blog]

I recently read: Two-Spirit People: Native American Gender Identity, Sexuality, and Spirituality, eds. Sue-Ellen Jacobs, Wesley Thomas, and Sabine Lang (Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 1997). What follows are my initial thoughts on this book, which I have written out in preparation for writing an article about the Cree two-spirit artist Kent Monkman.


This books resulted from two conferences held by the Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research dedicated to the issue of gender and sexuality in Native American and Indigenous First Nation populations. The editors acknowledge the originally unpublished manuscript of Beatrice Medicine (Standing Rock Lakota), “Changing Native American Sex Roles in an Urban Context” (1979) as a pivotal moment in the scholarship on this issue.

Though the title of the book presents “Two-Spirit People” as the primary matter of inquiry and investigation, the individual contributions never settle on a fixed definition for this key term. While the authorial identities of the contributors—some self-identified two-spirits, some Native anthropologists, and some non-Native anthropologists and ethnographers—ensures that consensus will never truly coalesce, there is a great deal of productivity churning within the dissensual voice emanating from the book as a whole. “Two-spirit” is not a static category, neither is it a label that gives itself over to felicitous translation to and from distinct indigenous languages.
​
The term two-spirit is, instead, delightfully asymmetrical and unstable. It is not, therefore, a conventional term within the realm of identity politics where identity markers seek to stabilize the identity of minority groups and/or oppressed peoples. It acts, instead, like a promise of sorts, one that calls specific male- and female-bodied indigenous peoples from a number of tribes together in order to obtain a kind of balance. Carry H. House (Navajo/Oneida) calls this a balancing of the male and female, female and male aspects of both individuals and the universe (225). Claire R. Ferrer sees the balance as a straddling between two ages serving the purpose of opening and closing what she calls a “chiasm.” For her, Bernard Second, a Mescalero Apache multigendered singer of ceremonies, opens and closes the chiasm in order to help others understand how the mythic present and lived present are truly the same (247). And yet, any homogenous understanding of the healthful effects of such acts  acquires a kind of asymmetry when non-Native people such as myself try to zoom out and understand the two-spirit identity as a Pan-Indian phenomenon.

Sabine Lang writes the following: "Native American gay and lesbian communities all over the United States and Canada are made up of people from various tribes as well as those of mixed descent. Perhaps for that reason, the two-spirit identity seems to be basically pan-Indian; participants at two-spirit gatherings, for example, are united by common symbols and actions, mainly of Plains provenance, regardless of the participants’ specific tribal background" (112). As Medicine adds, however, "The use of 'two-spirit' as a Pan-Indian term is not intended to be translated from English to Native Languages, however. To do so changes the common meaning it has acquired by self-identified two-spirit Native Americans" (147).
Here, again, we run into what I keep referring to as the term’s asymmetrical relation. The identity “two-spirit” joins together a number of individuals from different tribes, thereby enacting a unification and manufacturing a kind of solidarity, and yet by translating the term “two-spirit” back into the distinct tribal languages of these newly unified individuals we end up entering back into a somewhat contentious heterogeneity. Sue-Ellen Jacobs, Wesley Thomas (Navajo), and Sabine Lang’s introduction clarifies this contentiousness by explaining that, "In some cultural contexts, translating it to a Native language could even be dangerous. For example, if 'two-spirit' were translated into one of the Athapaskan languages (such as Navajo or Apache) the word could be understood to mean that such a person possesses both a living and a dead spirit—not a desirable situation [...] If 'two-spirit' were translated into Shoshone, the literal translation would be 'ghost'" (3). In sum, this book presents “Two-Spirit” people as a disjunctively unified group, and it presents the enterprise of understanding two-spirit culture and belief as a deft undertaking requiring recourse to multiple native languages and epistemologies as well as to fraught historiographies drafted through Western modes of seeing and knowing.

Composed as it was in the early 1990s, this book decides first to plough through the historical ground composed by the word “berdache” that features so prominently in colonial narratives of, for example, men dressing as woman in Native groups between the 16th and 19th centuries. If there is one thing upon which all the contributors to this book agree, it is that the word “berdache” carries a harmful legacy of colonization and enforced homogeneity and should no longer be used by anyone to discuss any type of person. Even once that word is put aside, however, the thorniness of language and naming presents another obstacle. 

Tucked within the name “two-spirit,” one finds the words Winkte (Lakota), Nádleeh (Navajo), Kwidó (Tewa), Tainna wa’ippe (Shoshone), Dubuds (Paiute), Lhamana (Zuni), Warharmi (Kamia), and Hwame (Mohave). Each of these words, in turn, leads to contested stories that require the employment of still more contested terms if those stories are to be translated into English for the benefit of Western-trained scholars. So as not to go astray, Western scholars need to adjust the philosophical frames that structures the appraisal of two-spirit stories and histories, as Carolyn Epple writes in her article about the Navajo nádleehi: "How then to define nádleehí? Presently, it would appear to be a nearly impossible task. Western epistemologies do not accommodate persons who are both herself and himself as well as everything else. Instead, we must adopt a different way of perceiving the universe, one that is processual, interconnected, and dynamic" (184). This non-Native perspective is balanced by Wesley Thomas’s observations that a fluid and processual understanding of identity hides beneath the colonizing activities of Christian missionaries who sought to “civilize” the Navajo. Beyond the binary male/female genders so crucial to the Christian morality system, researchers like Thomas find five gender categories, three of which rely on ontological nuances unlocked by the nádleeh, which, properly speaking, is more of a social role than a stable identity category. Even the word “gender” isn’t quite right because, as Farrer points out, “The Athapaskan languages, in which the Apachean languages and Navajo fall, are languages where there are no gender-specific pronouns and where gender is not coded in nouns either” (245). To enter the world of two-spirit scholarship requires a loose grip on the supposed certainties of analytical language as well as an open mind capable of rethinking the functionality of terms like “sexuality” and “gender,” which, upon first glance, seem so necessary in thinking about two-spirits.

What I find in these pages is a necessarily fragmented picture of two-spirit history and contemporary life, one that forces a confrontation with the language I use (and want to use) to identify both individuals and individual expressions. Two-Spirit artistic works, then, offer a tremendously complicated matter of study since the works themselves will surely contain as many asymmetrical and ever-shifting relationships as the word “two-spirit.” Preparing to write about the words of Kent Monkman, I will listen especially carefully to this thought on the term two-spirit from Terry Tafoya (Taos/Warm Springs): “[The term is] Not born but created and, once created for a specific purpose, [it gains] a life of its own, surpassing the intentions of its creator, and eventually providing something life-affirming and nurturing” (193). It is a word belonging to what Cindy Patton calls a “dissident vernacular” in which “meanings created by and in communities are upsetting to the dominant culture precisely because speaking in one’s own fashion is a means of resistance, a strengthening of the subculture that has created the new meaning’ (1990:148)” (cit. Tafoya 193-194).

Scholars of theatre and performance studies frequently wander into the neighboring disciplines of cultural anthropology and ethnography in order to locate primary source material about groups who fall outside of the “Western” subject position. As such, it is highly likely that theatre and performance studies scholars interested in two-spirit people will find this book. For those who do, I think it is important to allow for the disagreements of the individual contributions to ring out and the tension between first-person accounts from Native authors, on the one hand, and third-person accounts of academics, on the other hand, to open up productive spaces of philosophical inquiry.

Trump and Ubu Power

[Originally posted at www.theater-historiography.org; also posted at http://www.willdaddario.com/blog]

Say No to Know Nothings

by WILL DADDARIO on JULY 16TH, 2016

While reading The Cherokee Nation and the Trail of Tears[1] by Theda Perdue and Michael D. Green, I found a footnote to the historic Know Nothing party of the mid-nineteenth century ensconced in a passage about the institutional history of U.S. slavery. The name of the party rang a bell in my memory, but I couldn’t come up with any particulars so I looked into it. After a few minutes of online research, I found myself wondering at the repetition of history, especially Marx’s (oft-cited) famous addendum, “…first as tragedy, then as farce.” Is not Donald Trump the new, more farcical version of John Bell who ran for president on the Know Nothing ticket in 1859, or, perhaps more accurately, the new Henry J. Gardner who became Massachusetts’s Know Nothing governor in 1854? What started off as a historical retracing of one trail of tears soon led to the recognition of another equally troubling road.

Several news outlets have posted articles and op-eds about the similarities between Trump, the current GOP, and the Know Nothings of the 1850s (see notes below and links/footnotes along the way). Such similarities include an overt racist-nationalist platform of exclusion, a party membership of mostly working class white men seeking personal economic improvement, and an honest (if not also ironic) embrace of ignorance (“I Know Nothing!”) as the party’s shibboleth. Indeed, the link between Trump and Gardner emerges from research into these similarities, specifically in the fact that, despite the party’s working class base, the eventual Massachusetts governor was a wool merchant who improved upon his already-considerable wealth thanks to his elite family’s connections. Like Trump, Gardner seemed to have had little in common with his constituents’ economic identities and needs.

My own addition to these publications comes in the form of a connection between Trump, the Know Nothings (past and present, official party members and merely like-minded), and that which Michel Foucault dubbed the “Ubus” of power. In the early lectures of the 1974-1975 academic year now published as Abnormal, Foucault links specific historical political leaders with the protagonist in Alfred Jarry’s Ubu Roi. What allows this link is Foucault’s observation of “the unavoidability, the inevitability of power, which can function in its full rigor and at the extreme point of its rationality even when in the hands of someone who is effectively discredited” (13). Nero and Hitler, for example, populate what Jana Sawicki calls this “tradition of vile and buffoonish sovereigns.”[2] Hesitant to facilitate any overly simplistic connections between Trump and Hitler, thereby allowing dialogue and debate to dissolve into platitudes, I do support adding Trump to Foucault’s category of Ubu Rulers. We are witnessing not only the farcical (and, therefore, post-tragic) return of the Know Nothings today but also an index of the racist-nationalist conditions that allow such Ubus to take center stage in the U.S. theatre of politics.

Sawicki underscores a similar point in her speculation on the whereabouts of Ubu-power’s many residences: “Perhaps it also resides in a lack of critical reflection on the historical conditions in which such forms of authority arose.” Indeed, when Foucault, in his 1978 essay “What is Enlightenment?” ends by calling for a “critical ontology of ourselves,” which amounts to a historiography of the present, he is asking us all to refuse Ubu government:

The critical ontology of ourselves has to be considered not, certainly, as a theory, a doctrine, nor even as a permanent body of knowledge that is accumulating; it has to be conceived as an attitude, an ethos, a philosophical life in which the critique of what we are is at one and the same time the historical analysis of the limits that are imposed on us and an experiment with the possibility of going beyond them.[3]

The only chance we have of out-maneuvering the vile buffoonery of the persona known as “Trump” is to create a series of conditions that excoriates pride in ignorance, the likes of which we see not only in the mass of Trumpeteers but also in the belligerent leftist supporters who instigate violence at Trump rallies. As the perspicacious George Saunders has recently outlined in The New Yorker,[4] the true damage of the current political fracas has become visible not as a divisive and sickeningly facile binary opposition between Right and Left ideologies but, rather, as a perpetuation of willful ignorance that keeps the U.S. electorate from participating in meaningful conversations dedicated to the nuanced weave of our country’s political fabric.

To my mind, the disaster that has given rise to the resurgence of Know-Nothing-ness is the evacuation of (yes, I’ll say it and mean it) critical thinking from the halls of Secondary and Higher Education. Given Foucault’s astute reference to Jarry’s theatricality, and my own predilection for performance theory and theatre historiography, I am confident that theatre education (both theory and practice) can thrive as a system capable of performing a critical ontology of ourselves, particularly through its recourse to the study of theatricality in everyday life and the performativity of language. Conversely, however, I am fearful that the ossification of theatre and performance studies in higher education, not to mention the almost complete absence of a fine-arts based critical vocabulary in primary and secondary education, can aid in the momentum of the Know Nothings. Without a self-reflexive and philosophical appraisal of the politics of representation, theatre can easily devolve into thoroughly commodified spectacle, and from there spectacle can be freed up to celebrate the Ubus of the world.

With the highly theatrical and absurd conventions of both the Democratic and Republican parties coming up, I urge us to attend to the conditions that make specific statements possible, to the representational practices that manufacture instrumental visibility, and to the everyday silences that create moral vacuums.

[Other notes]

From Encyclopedia Britannica online

“When Congress assembled on Dec. 3, 1855, 43 representatives were avowed members of the Know-Nothing party.”[5]

• “The Kansas-Nebraska Act was passed by the U.S. Congress on May 30, 1854. It allowed people in the territories of Kansas and Nebraska to decide for themselves whether or not to allow slavery within their borders. The Act served to repeal the Missouri Compromise of 1820 which prohibited slavery north of latitude 36°30´.”[6]

“In 1849 the secret Order of the Star-Spangled Banner formed in New York City, and soon after lodges formed in nearly every other major American city. Members, when asked about their nativist organizations, were supposed to reply that they knew nothing, hence the name. As its membership and importance grew in the 1850s, the group slowly shed its clandestine character and took the official name American Party.”

“the American Party fell apart after 1856. Antislavery Know-Nothings joined the Republican Party, while Southern members flocked to the proslavery banner still held aloft by the Democratic Party. By 1859 the American Party’s strength was largely confined to the border states. In 1860 remnants of the Know-Nothings joined old-line Whigs to form the Constitutional Union Party and nominated John Bell of Tennessee for president.”

• On Bell (from Wikipedia):[7]
  • “Planter,” or plantation owner; “Although a slaveowner, Bell was one of the few southern politicians to oppose the expansion of slavery in the 1850s…”
  • “During his 1860 presidential campaign, he argued that secession was unnecessary since the Constitution protected slavery, an argument which resonated with voters in border states, helping him capture the electoral votes of Tennessee, Kentucky and Virginia.”
  • Speaker of the House (1834–1835)
  • “briefly served as Secretary of War during the administration of William Henry Harrison (1841)”

“Two other groups that took the name American Party appeared in the 1870s and ’80s. One of these, organized in California in 1886, proposed a briefly popular platform calling mainly for the exclusion of Chinese and other Asians from industrial employment.”

From Ashefield Historical Society

“Although the Know-Nothing party or the American Party was a national political organization, it was strongest in Massachusetts. This party was based on nativistic beliefs and its members were native born male Protestants who were opposed to immigrants being able to vote or hold political office.”[8]

“One of the most influential party members was Henry J. Gardner who was elected as the Commonwealth’s Governor in 1854. Most of the party’s members were from the working class and wished for many reforms that would affect their lives. Gardner, however, was a wealthy wool merchant and a member of the so-called Boston Brahmins (a small elite group of families who were extremely wealthy and well-educated).”

• Trump parallel??!

From Op-Ed in Baltimore Sun from July 13, 2016

http://www.baltimoresun.com/news/opinion/oped/bs-ed-know-nothing-20160713-7-story.html

“Eric Heavner taught political science at Towson University for 10 years and now works for a Baltimore real estate developer.”

• …indeed…

“Perhaps Mr. Trump will skip the convention and go it alone. Such a move would appeal to Mr. Trump’s love of sensationalism, and it would it not be unprecedented. Teddy Roosevelt, for example, broke away from the Republican Party to run for president under the Bull Moose Party banner in 1912, and Strom Thurmond bolted from the Democratic Party to run as a Dixiecrat in 1948.”

“Despite the years that separate Mr. Trump and the Know-Nothing Party, they have much in common. […] their message is virtually the same: Immigrants take away jobs from true Americans and threaten the American way of life. There are other similarities. The Know-Nothings’ were anti-Catholic. Mr. Trump is anti-Muslim. The know-Nothings believed only native-born Americans should be allowed to vote and hold public office. Mr. Trump played the native-born American card by questioning President Obama’s birthplace.”

From HuffPo’s “The GOP: The New Know Nothing Part?”

January 18, 2016

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/the-gop-the-new-know-noth_b_9010454

John W. Traphagan, Professor of Religious Studies and Human Dimensions of Organizations, University of Texas, Austin

Conclusion: “When we look at the GOP of 2016, it seems very much as though we are witnessing a new version of the Know Nothings of the 1850s. One can only hope that this time it is equally short-lived.”

ENDNOTES

[1] http://www.penguin.com/book/the-cherokee-nation-and-the-trail-of-tears-by-theda-perdue-and-michael-d-green/9780143113676

[2] http://ndpr.nd.edu/news/23977-abnormal-lectures-at-the-college-de-france-1974-1975/

[3] http://philosophy.eserver.org/foucault/what-is-enlightenment.html

[4] http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2016/07/11/george-saunders-goes-to-trump-rallies

[5] https://www.britannica.com/topic/Know-Nothing-party

[6] http://www.historyplace.com/lincoln/kansas.htm

[7] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Bell_(Tennessee_politician)

[8] http://www.ashfieldhistorical.org/nothing.htm