Notes for Tuesday 2/21: Orders of Business

A few quick things:

1) Thanks again for the interviews. They're really impressive so far, and you should all hang them to them, both for later in this course and for your personal archive.

2) As far as the essay on the slavery exhibition, I want you to remember I will read any drafts you send me. I'd like to receive any drafts before this weekend begins Saturday, and that way give you the best possible comments. This can easily take place by email; just send it as an attachment or text. I will read anything, of any size or progress.

PLEASE re-read my instructions from the hand-out. This essay can read however you want, but I do want you to address my questions and organize your thoughts appropriately. Perhaps we can talk about this tomorrow. This essay is due March 1.


3) I'm going to nix tomorrow's lecture and combine it with next week's. I will focus on Hiroshima and 'biopolitics' togeher, which may work even better than the original plan. Get ready to retrieve your Hedges book for next week, too.

Some of next week's homework, especially from Monday to Wednesday, will require you to access the internet and go online. Please be ready for this.

Tuesday Class Notes 2/21: Night and Fog, Frankl

We began class today with a short series of questions asking us to recall, reflect, and react to the film Night and Fog that we viewed last Wednesday. Most us had never seen footage or images of war that were that graphic. A few of us had seen films like Schlinder's List and The Pianist, and others of us had encountered the Holocaust through documentaries and websites, some of which focused on the Nazis or World War II. I mentioned how our general lack of knowledge about war, except for sources such as those, reveals the strange place war and knowledge about war inhabits in our culture. Some wars, like World War II, receive prominent places in cultural history and collective memory--leaders gathered together, for instance, to honor the invasion and landing at Normandy in June 2004 (the 60 year anniversary). If you're interested in that, follow the link below:

http://www.cbn.com/CBNNews/News/040607c.asp

I should note that there are other places where war conversations take place--a 'discourse' about war, if you will. One of those places is here, in the academy, in colleges, where free thought is encouraged. In many ways, freedom of speech and freedom of thought, which are our constitutaional rights, are best expressed today in classrooms. Everywhere else you need a permit, or you aren't allowed to speak, since speaking is reserved for pundits and politicians and journalists.

Then we moved our conversation into a dialogue about Night and Fog. We all agreed that, for the most part, this was a hard film to watch. It was difficult to hear, since it was in French, and it was difficult to see, since the subtitles flashed quite quickly across the screen. We could manage flipping back and forth between the images and the words, but it certaintly wasn't an easy 'interface.' Of course, the images themselves were shocking and difficult to view.

One reaction to the film was to feel shocked, but then to try and surpress what we saw by not thinking about the images, by concentrating on the belief that such horror was 'impossible.' There was a disconnection between what we saw and what we wanted to believe. In some ways, that' s the definition of this course: how do remember and process the shock of war, and make sense of the knowledge it gives us? We may, in fact, choose to 'repress' it, which is what happens both to individuals and to cultures and nations. (Ironically, this may be why our knowledge of war and what it does is so vague to begin with.) We also know that some people, like soldiers, never recover from the things they see, and return home disturbed. Our lack of knowledge is both the reason for a course like this and the explanation for why this course has no textbook to guide us. This course, in some ways, represents the ultimate taboo in the culture: these things are not seen, while sometimes they are read. (Remember, Elie Wiesel's personal account of the Holocuast, Night, is currently on Oprah's book club.)

Before we ended our discussion of the film, we thought about why this film was made in first place. We decided it was both to inform about and to possibly prevent it from happening again. The concept of 'prevention' is something we will read about tonight in our Sontag article, which is the first chapter from her book Regarding the Pain of Others.

Two terms bridged us between the film and Frankl's book Man's Search for Meaning. The first term was 'testimony,' and the second term was 'witness.' These are both complex terms, and both derive from the practice of law. Testimony and witness are both ways to speak about a truth, and are associated, ultimately, with notions of innocence, guilt, and justice. Testimony is knowledge spoken by someone who saw, and they could be called a witness. A witness, however, can both give testimony and hear testimony. In this class, we are acting as distant witnesses for many of the events and conflicts we read about.

One piece of testimony, and one witness we're reading, is Frankl himself. Our conversation ranged over his experiences in the camp, and we ended our discussion by reading a passage out loud about how it felt to become just a 'body', and become an 'it', through the horror of the concentration camp. We will continue with this discussion, and modify and evolve it, when we continue tomorrow.

If anyone has other notes or ideas about today's class, I want to encourage you to post them.