Converstation with Shelby

Shelby: The massification of these cultural-linguistic elements or artifacts attempts nothing

other than the commodification (and so reproduction) of human misery in the guise of

a reactivated critique or struggle. But fashionable misery/struggle is its own antidote

and end-- as such it appears supra-historical. Ultimately, not only do these pseudostruggles callously- imperiously- abstract from the concrete particulars of colonial history and experience for the sake of some sham humanitarian pathos-- they also make the original instance of domination seem necessary and thereby justified, as if it were always already a matter of a kind of demure self-righteous melancholy.

It also makes me think about how in some ways these gestures are exemplary of a

pretty deep-seated tendency in a lot of folk music-- did not a lot of the anti-war folk

music around Vietnam end up according a kind of consumer value to the war itself? Did

the hippies actually even desire peace or we're they just circuitously enjoying the state

of exception the war made possible.

I guess my concern is not with folk music per se but folk music adapted to mass culture.

C: Wondering if the demure self-righteous melancholy of theses collage babes goes as far with appropriation as to justify the original persecution though I like everything else that you said in that first statement a lot.  Folk music, outside of consumer folk, is amazing, and allowing stories of hardship to be distributed through the oldest form of storytelling, music.  And real folk music tells your own story.  You are right that hippie folk distributed itself through capitalism and was a shadow element to the war.  Very interesting point.  Stylistically it also was escapist, grabbing onto Native American and Indian cultures as a way to disassociate from being a consumerist American but I have mixed feelings, negative and positive about the empowerment of cultures by acts of spectacle.  Money.  I really like your comment about post-history as a muting of dialogue and how fashion works with that.  Very cool.  But I do appreciate how hippie culture in general created a make it yourself social structure highlighting personal labor and experience.

Shelby: It would obviously be heavy handed at best to claim that the Bard girls were unconsciously justifying the early American colonial genocide of indigenous cultures if by this I meant to be describing and individual case—instead I take them to be exemplary of a large-scale social tendency or ideological disposition, a kind of mood, that does not so much attempt to justify these things as to make them appear a-historical.  An object of melancholic attachment is one that is internalized as always already lost—and necessarily so.  What melancholia enjoys is precisely the certainty that the object of desire (archaic mother) is unattainable or beyond all volitional grasping--- signifying this loss is no replacement, his words can’t capture the immemorial Thing.  So it’s this no-thing that I embed in me- that I become (a squaw).  To this extent the true tragedy of genocide disappears with the possibility that things could have gone otherwise—think of Aristotle’s poetics.  It appears that the loss was necessary and in that sense alone justified.  One could very well respond to the bards girls “that’s not your mother but so many mothers of so many children that aren’t you!”

C: This a-historical advantage, this sense of stalling or stopping, reprieves our notion of time and self awareness  away from the active transitional agency of the present. When drafting characterizations out of the past, history as facade looses the constructs and doubt of personal consciousness, awareness delivered in the inner-eye. Does the cartooning of the squaw, or the larger rhizomatic presentation of history that flattens the linear narrative of time into a patina that can be slipped on and reduced without actually dragging the past into the present, go so far as to justify the oppressive original actions, it does only in so far as it actually reconstitutes history by crassly and wrongfully wearing it's forms as a mask of personal image. Changing the nature of imagination into the surface of branding, dislodges us from our own doubt of history, in so far as history as a story is dependent and understood entirely as a personal vision inside the sea of cultural memory.  Justification of past atrocities, individual situations, by the softened contemporary perspective wishing only to use the past as caricature vs. a character, which in its own right will always fail, will always rewrite the story. History is an unspoken narrative written in all the living minds as a collection of rewrites and smudgy imagery.  No one, not even the historians can be experts on the past, and by knowing the narrative of history, with the satisfaction of a distilled notion of reality as illustrated through the construct of history, we are left only with the craftwork of our imagination, or our ability to illustrate, or possibly empathize with, the scenarios of history. Imagination about struggle is a difficult gap to not feel self conscious about, there is a natural authority and agency to the author of cultural history that as we know from history museums, or historical films, co-ops the suffering of others by rebranding them with the aesthetic agreements of our age. Information plain and simple has always been the spine of history, orienting the news of history along the axis of date and location.  But what eye, what romanticism, can actually stand in as an authority on any other life, let alone the single life of an individual, or even more complex the situational more of a group of people. It is not just the fact that they were not their mothers, they are mothers abandoned from the material world, reliant exclusively on our reconstruction of their story, where no one is a true authority. We are not even authorities on our own personal history, blurring facts, faces, into the constructs of thinking itself, outside of the quivering and fear known only to us animals in the moment of true danger and never fully as a mentally projected experience, conjuring would dilute the action and awareness of our own survival.  The use of the squaw, reoriented and softened, refined and decontextualized away from history, muted from narrative into a tool for pleasure, is unfair to the broader social awareness of a culture and the responsibility of history.