Honors 345A Rhetoric and
Literature of Rebellion
Narrowing the Questions
The Question of (Non-)Violence
Some people have justified violence in the name of justice and
self-defense. Labels might seem to sort it out: terrorism, revolution, collateral
damage, genocide, self-defense, pre-emptive strike, military action. Each of
these terms comes with its own argument about what’s OK, what’s over the limit.
How do the specifics of a violent act help us decide whether the violence was
“justified”?
Curtis White argues that “violence” (and
he enlarges the concept beyond action) permeates American culture, which he
characterizes as a culture of “legality” in which people simply accept the use
of human beings as “means” (rather than an end in themselves). He suggests
(with some hyperbole?) that we are “free” in American “not to love our
neighbor.” Against what he sees are the dominant virtues (obedience,
pragmatism), he poses the Transcendentalist creed of self-reliance.
What are the strategies of non-violence? Are they all the same? Does the
fact that “non-violence” is often intended to provoke State violence make it
slyly violent (only reversing the direction of the violence and, consequently,
the labeling of the aggressor and victim)?
The Question of Respect
Which rebellions get respect from historians (and lay people)? Do ‘we’
(dis)respect a rebel depending upon how non-rebellious they are in their
delivery?
Vernacular theorist = someone who argues a connection between the material
base of a society (it's basic social and economic structure) and its
"superstructure" (the ideas and values held to be natural or
commonsensical).
Example: The most widespread concept of literacy is the
"functionalist" definition: literacy prepares people to do things in
the world (write checks, read instructions and road signage, vote, learn how to
perform a job). The purpose of literacy is the "efficient transmission of
useful information" (K). So,
Vernacular theorists might critique this situation by calling attention to
the ways in which “functionalist” literacy prepares people to perform jobs but
not think critically about them. Functionalist literacy helps reproduce the status quo. Traditional
"functionalist" literacy is part of the "superstructure"
that serves to reproduce the base (= a consumerist/bureaucratic/militarist
society).
Other examples to discuss: Jefferson, the “Mr. Constance” Video, Solanas,
Kaczynski.
The Question of the Body
How do people use their bodies to rebel? Was Thoreau using his body to
rebel by withdrawing from the “restless, nervous, bustling, trivial 19th
century”? He actually withdrew his body from the multitudes, from the
alienation machine of commodity exchange, from allowing his time/labor to be a
commodity (“cultivate poverty like a garden herb, like sage. Do not trouble
yourself to get new things, whether clothes or friends”), from the “dross” of
material affluence and dissipating friendships (“Society is commonly too cheap.
We meet at very short intervals, not having had time to acquire new value for
each other”), from anything but the bare necessities of food, shelter,
clothing? “Our life,” he says, “is frittered away by detail.”
Can Thoreau’s rebellion be placed alongside the rebellion of Barbara Johns
or Rosa Parks? And what can be said about the lawyers who took cases to
District Court, and later the Appellate Courts and later the Supreme Court?
Their bodies suffered no doubt from stress, from threat of losing their
positions?
None of what Thoreau was or did was staged for others (unless his
“experiment” in the woods was undertaken as fodder for a book). Much of what
takes place in “bohemia” (in hipster enclaves) is a performance of self. “Hip,”
the “private language” of voluntary (or de facto) outsiders who want autonomy,
is, Leland says, a “transaction”; it “requires an audience.” But Hip should not
be confused with “trendy,” which is the process of the consumer market selling
rebellious lifestyles to those who don’t have time or opportunity to fashion
them themselves.
The Question of Spirit
Ann Powers writes,
Many on the left feel that turning inward signals only laziness and narcissism. The bold cries
for a new society that arose during the 1960’s have been replaced by
psychobabble and New Age spiritual dictums…
Curtis White seems
to think conventional political action, which on the left means unionizing and
grass-roots activism (i.e., ACT-UP, Earth Frist!, PETA, Rock for Choice, WHAM,
Women’s Clinic Defense), can’t happen unless or until progressives find a
spiritual connection to one another. He writes:
Forget the party. Forget the revolution. Forget the general
strike…Thoreau’s revolution begins not with discovering comrades to be yoked
together in solidarity but with the embrace of solitude….’Absolutely unmixed
attention is prayer’…Thoreau can be retrieved if we find a way to integrate his
thought into the way we live as a sort of counterlife
opposed to the busywork of the legality of the culture of death”
Is White talking
about becoming a hermit or hipster? Thoreau or Miles Davis? What does he
imagine that this spirit, this counterlife, will accomplish?