Calling in Sanders: Black Lives Matter, Public Disruptions, and the Antiblackness of Progressive Optimism

Chad Shomura
Johns Hopkins University
One day short of a year since the murder of Michael Brown, Bernie Sanders was to speak at a public event in Seattle, Washington. After he thanked Seattle for “being one of the most progressive cities” in the US, Marissa Johnson and Mara Willaford, two black women, took to the stage and demanded to be heard. Before yielding the stage, a white male organizer said, “We are trying to be reasonable... We are going to give you the mic—after Senator Sanders.” Those remarks continue the long-standing racist and sexist dismissal of dissent by black women. They signal a progressivist version of liberal colonialist attempts to confine blacks to what Dipesh Chakrabarty calls the “waiting rooms of history."

  Refusing to be made to wait, Johnson passionately denounced colonial settlement, gentrification, racial profiling, Seattle's proclivity to punish blacks from a young age, and the fact that she had to fight her way through a crowd to insist that her life matters. She was met by cries of support and a flood of angry boos. By denouncing white supremacy before a largely hostile white audience of supposedly progressive allies, Johnson and Willaford demonstrated a bravery that beneficiaries of white privilege largely do not understand.

It is important for black protestors to change the distribution of speakers, issues, and affects of public spaces. Along with Martin O'Malley, Sanders was first interrupted in July at the Netroots Nation conference in Phoenix, Arizona, by Black Lives Matter activists Tia Oso, Ashley Yates, and BLM co-founder Patrisse Cullors. They emphasized the importance of “holding the space” to address the state of emergency in which blacks have been relegated for centuries. BLM has rattled the intimate public of the Left, which has found in Sanders the best chance to pursue the unfinished business of progress that has fallen flat during Barack Obama's tenure.

 To protect that optimism, Sanders has been defended across social media and news outlets, oftentimes through criticisms of BLM. Some defenses have been thoughtful; others have ranged from dismissive to explicitly racist. The most common have included: (1) Sanders is the best ally of minorities, as evidenced by his legislation and participation in the Civil Rights Movement; (2) BLM has not shut down events held by Clinton or any of the Republican candidates, who would make better targets; (3) BLM has not supplemented disruption with positive proposals; (4) BLM activists are being disrespectful, selfish, childish, and even opportunistic (one comment on a Facebook thread accused BLM protestors of harboring careerist motives. Though the author retracted that remark after it was challenged, the “likes” it received still stand); (5) Johnson and Willaford have been damaging to BLM and the pursuit of racial justice more broadly; and (6) BLM is an episode in the Left defeating itself through division or identity politics, which amounts to a win for bourgeois, conservative power.
   These responses to BLM—a movement founded and led predominantly by black women—have been advanced overwhelmingly by whites (more often by men than women) and less frequently by blacks and non-black people of color—a fact that is reason for greater reflection. This pattern repeats the trend of whites championing non-whites who agree with their positions and enable them to deflect accusations of racism. That non-whites iterate the same criticisms as whites, however, does not necessarily prove the validity of those criticisms. It suggests that respectability politics is one of their common frames—a frame that props up whiteness by abjecting black voices and radical actions, of BLM and of black women in particular. That abjection is happily supported by the Right.
  It is wrong to say that criticisms of BLM are necessarily racist and patriarchal. It is also wrong to say that defenders of Sanders must be racist, sexist, or playing white. Nonetheless, the pattern above is striking. More alarming still is when defenders of Sanders decry BLM with a similar vehemence to that of the Right. One could easily imagine a game in which criticisms of BLM are shuffled and players guess whether a comment is from a defender of Sanders or from the figureheads and viewership of Fox News. Players might be surprised half of the time.
  For that reason and others, there is an antiblack strand within the most progressive zone of presidential politics today. If there is a history lesson here, it might be that hierarchies of race and gender have been employed to protect optimism in shots for a better world.

Wangechi Mutu, A Shady Promise, 2006.

To be clear: I am unsettled by how quickly, how self-assuredly, and how aggressively defenders of Sanders—especially when they are white men—have blamed BLM protestors—especially when they are black women—for “disrupting” and “shutting down” Sanders's events, for not thinking or acting strategically, and for diminishing the ostensibly best possibility for social and political progress. Because there are many counter-arguments to defenses of Sanders, one might expect greater forbearance and thoughtful reflection, especially from those who are not black. I am writing this piece as someone who supports both Black Lives Matter and Sanders and whose body is not marked for poverty, intense surveillance, incarceration, brutality, and premature death. I hope that supporters of Sanders who are similarly privileged will consider the following points and that those who do not share that privilege will correct me where I am wrong: 

-A view of BLM as “disruptive” might marginalize black voices by implying them to be outside of and even threatening to Sanders's campaign rather than as integral contributors from within.

-It might be appropriate to say that BLM has “interrupted” Sanders's speeches but inaccurate to say they “shut them down.” As Cullors said at the Netroots event, “It's not like we like shutting shit down but we have to.” When non-blacks say that BLM shuts down Sanders's speeches, it is not because they recognize the agency of black protestors; they are playing a blame game that overlooks the fact that Sanders could have listened and responded to specific concerns on the spot.

-A view of BLM as only interruptive overlooks its demands, which include demilitarization of law enforcement, publication of the names of officers involved in the deaths of black people, and redirection of funds from law enforcement to housing, education, and employment for impoverished black communities.

-It is not enough to say that Sanders has now incorporated BLM demands into his racial justice platform. Defenders of Sanders have to acknowledge that the direct action of black protestors played a significant role—even if they (the defenders) felt deeply upset by the interruptions in Phoenix and Seattle. Non-black defenders should further acknowledge that the pursuit of racial justice will make them uncomfortable and that bad feelings are not sufficient reasons for shouting down black voices and challenging black tactics.

-One could view Sanders and many of his defenders as slow to respond to the rich and powerful BLM protests across the nation. Couldn't Sanders have proactively reached out to BLM to shape his racial justice platform so that it would not have to interrupt him? When those interruptions have happened, why has he not listened and respond to BLM's concerns on the spot? Why did he threaten to leave in Phoenix? Why did he leave in Seattle? Wouldn't reaching out, listening, and responding to BLM on the spot have given Sanders enormous political capital—something desired by his defenders? Why haven't defenders been supporters by holding Sanders accountable, not for purposes of political capital but for racial justice? Is this deficit of accountability shaped by race?

-When they refer to his record, defenders of Sanders seem to believe that blacks can be absorbed into the category of “people of color” while they lump together differently racialized, gendered, and sexualized groups under the conveniently flat label of “minorities.” This presumption, as scholars such as Frank Wilderson and Jared Sexton have pointed out, denies the specificity of antiblack racism—something that could be more greatly acknowledged by Sanders and his supporters.

-It is possible that some in BLM have been targeting Sanders because they view him as their greatest ally and thus hope that he'll address their concerns.

-It can be patronizing for non-blacks to proclaim which presidential candidate will best serve black lives. The complexity and diversity of black needs cannot be encapsulated by presidential platforms nor can they be determined by non-blacks even when some blacks agree.

-To demand that BLM comport with presidential politics is to determine its function and thus deny its agency. That demand is incompatible with the movement's recent announcement that it will not endorse any political party.

-To say that BLM is threatening the nomination of Sanders or the possibility of a unified Left is to subordinate black voices to those of non-blacks. If so, then the progressivist optimism of Sanders's defenders relies on the extension of antiblackness.

-Claims that Johnson and Willaford have damaged the push for racial justice: (1) presume that non-blacks or some blacks know what is good for all black lives; (2) subordinates the pursuit of racial justice to terms that would be acceptable to non-blacks; (3) perpetuates the minoritization of blacks by turning challenges into appeals; (4) maintains the whiteness of public space by marginalizing black outrage to preserve non-black comfort; and (5) conceals these power plays through seemingly innocent terms like “strategies.”

-Dismissals of BLM as “identity politics” presume that police brutality, mass incarceration, and other offshoots of what Saidiya Hartman has called the “afterlife of slavery” are “black issues” that do not implicate everyone in the US. The label of “identity politics” is not only misguided; it absolves non-blacks of the responsibility to dismantle the systems of power that privilege them.

-Why not believe that the Left splinters itself when it does not proactively address antiblack racism? Who defined the core of the Left, centered it around Bernie, and made fights against antiblack racism a peripheral concern anyway? One suspect is “whiteness.”

-Finally, most appalling has been paternalistic claims that BLM needs to educate itself on Sanders's record and on how to organize, strategize, and effect change. Part of that criticism shifts the definition of political action into the hands of whiteness, with men as determiners and women and “respectable” people of color and blacks as supporters. Condemnations of the tactics of BLM presume that black protestors have not already been planning in ongoing, rich, and productive ways—a presumption that is particularly condescending given the magnitude and widespread success of BLM that is due to the wits and resilience of black activists today and to long histories of black resistance and radicalism that have literally changed the world.

Given this array of points (which is not at all exhaustive), my stomach turns when defenders of Sanders hastily close the disagreements that they arguably opened by not holding Sanders accountable for building a platform shaped at the outset by the demands of BLM. Some of the points raised by defenders are indeed important, such as the need for positive proposals and to think about the broader political field. Those points, which had already been made by blacks, are not untrue, just contestable—as are a number of the points I have made. We could go back and forth on numerous issues because objective standards of evaluation are unavailable.
   I am not saying that non-blacks cannot challenge BLM. That might be permissible if those of us who are not black exercise extreme caution because even well-meaning challenges can disqualify black voices through feats of speaker privilege. Antiblackness rears its head not only in explicit remarks and harsh tones but in quick assertions as well. We might wait for the emergence of black reactions to events, commit to an ethos of generous listening, identify the black voices with which we agree, and explicitly acknowledge the validity of black voices that disagree. These and other actions of patience and care might lead us to raise questions and suggestions rather than proclamations and judgments.
    Many defenders of Sanders have not acted in these ways. They have proceeded as if their arguments lie on solid ground and have presumed that BLM has not given thought to their issues, either properly or at all. Given the rapidity with which BLM has been criticized, I am worried that defenders of Sanders will begin to use the “We stand together” chant, which was designed by the Sanders campaign for the purpose of drowning out disruptions by black protestors.

 I am not wishing to call out Sanders and his defenders so much as to call them in, as Ngọc Loan Trần has put it. Sanders has indeed been more responsive to BLM than other candidates have been. Since the Netroots event, he has rolled out racial justice goals that accord with BLM's demands, responded to #SayTheirNames in his speeches, and hired the black criminal justice advocate Symone Sanders as his press secretary after she pressed him on issues raised by BLM. These shifts are genuine reasons for hope. They are not, however, reasons for an unchecked optimism that can be a vector of antiblack racism and sexism when it discredits blacks, speaks over them, shouts them down, and confines them to the waiting rooms of US history, whether progressivist or otherwise.
   To close this article and send off this call in, I offer the words of Sanders—not Bernie, but Symone: “Do I think everyone in the movement agrees with the way the protestors commanded the stage today? No. Am I going to condemn the protestors for standing up and expressing themselves? No. Because their voices matter.”

*Many thanks to Diana Leong and Jairus Grove for their helpful suggestions on an earlier version of this piece.

Hands Up Dont Shoot: Democracy's Casualties, Democracy's Heroes

Steven Johnston 
Neal A. Maxwell Chair in Political Theory, Public Policy, and Public Service, University of Utah

Last month, when the citizens of Ferguson, Missouri, took to their own streets to protest the police killing of one of their own, would-be college student Michael Brown, they converted otherwise ordinary roads into public political spaces. One incarnation—necessarily imperfect—of the people themselves decided they must assemble, voice their outrage and indignation, and demand immediate redress from public officials. The people deployed on the streets in support of Michael Brown and his family, but more than Michaels Brown was at issue on the streets, as Ferguson, like many other small American towns around major cities, suffers from all manner of social, political, economic, and racial inequities and injustices. 

The shooting of Michael Brown thus functioned as both cause and occasion for politics. This is one example of American democracy at its best, the horrible circumstances notwithstanding. Democracy presupposes that citizens respond to questionable exercises of state power, especially the use of deadly violence. To remain silent in the face of state violence is to become mere subject, a Hobbesian creature who knows his place in the order of things and stays there. The police, accordingly, should have left Ferguson’s democratic citizens alone and remained in their barracks.
American police, of course, do not appreciate politics exercised on the streets, perhaps especially when it’s conducted by minorities—whether racial, economic, or otherwise. 

Since the late 1960s in Los Angeles, local police have created military-style assault forces to deal not only with all manner of crime, but also and more importantly with whatever political opposition, dissent, resistance, or tumult may be developing in the community. Los Angeles invented SWAT (Special Weapons and Tactics) teams in response to the urban uprisings in Watts in the mid-1960s. They were first deployed as part of an ongoing war against the Black Panther Party, one reason Los Angeles Police Chief Darryl Gates originally wanted to name his creation the Special Weapons Attack Team, a fitting moniker.

Given Los Angeles’s success it became the model for the country. America’s police forces have been thoroughly militarized in the decades since LAPD’s Frankensteinian creation, thanks first to the War on Drugs and later the War on Terror. American police resemble military units and act as occupation forces, treating citizens, as countless commentators have remarked, like enemies in need of surveillance, control, and subordination. There are critics of the militarization of America’s police forces who argue that SWAT originally served a legitimate purpose, to respond to extraordinary situations that standard police elements could not handle. The problem, they say, is mission creep. SWAT-style teams now handle routine police matters in which their equipment, training, tactics, and mindset are not only inappropriate but deadly inappropriate. 

Examples abound of SWAT teams entering the wrong home or the right home at the wrong time and wreaking great damage. Yet, as LAPD’s history reveals, the problem is not—or not just—mission creep. SWAT was a political instrument and expression from the get-go. It was a military response to a political condition. Rather than address and correct what engendered America’s urban uprisings in the 1960s, the American state at all levels assumed effective suppression was the appropriate response. 

Given this problematic history, it comes as no surprise that American police would be unleashed against democratic citizens enacting their civic responsibilities at national political conventions in New York (2004) and St. Paul (2008) or against democratic citizens calling attention to the cancerous, anti-democratic maldistribution of wealth in public spaces across the country as part of Occupy Wall Street (2011-2012). Darryl Gates’s vision of America has been largely realized.

The democratic resisters in Ferguson teach us not only that it is time to disarm and rehabilitate American police forces across the country, stripping them of their armored vehicles, riot gear, Kevlar vests, automatic weapons, sniper rifles, night vision goggles, assortment of gases, and military sensibility, but it is time to recover and revalue the art of democratic politics as forceful, militant resistance. When police fire tear gas at democratic citizens exercising their political rights and responsibilities, it is legitimate for those citizens to fire back those very same canisters. When the state imposes a curfew against democratic citizens mobilized on the streets to hold public officials accountable, they should refuse orders to disperse and hold their ground. 

If the police move against them with violence, their response is now a matter of legitimate self-defense—and the practices of nonviolence might be best. But they might not be. It is only because democratic citizens in Ferguson fought back that there is any prospect for further democratic—and democratizing—action in its aftermath. Barack Obama intoned, “There is never an excuse for violence against police or for those who would use this tragedy as a cover for vandalism and looting.” He then added: “There’s also no excuse for police to use excessive force against peaceful protests or to throw protestors in jail for lawfully exercising their First Amendment rights.” It’s not just that Obama is apparently blind to his own double standard, namely, that while citizens commit “violence against police,” police only exercise “excessive force” against citizens (of which throwing protestors into jail does not even seem to be an instance). It’s that Obama’s political reflex was to express concern for the police, not democratic citizens, reversing the order of priority in a democracy, where the people rule and police are their servants.

Obama, much like Missouri Governor Jay Nixon, was unduly concerned with the protection of private property. Looting and vandalism are also political phenomena, uncomfortable truths American politicians are largely unwilling to confront. Besides, denial allows for easy moralizing and excuses a resort to arms. Democracies should remember that tumults like the one in Ferguson are part and parcel of American history. Response should center on correcting the conditions that made them necessary in the first place, not slandering, discrediting, and suppressing them. If democracies, always feeling vulnerable from threats foreign and domestic, are willing to pay whatever sums of money national security requires (because you can’t put a price on safety), they should be willing to pay whatever sums of money the often unruly exercise of democratic politics requires—because you can’t put a price on freedom, equality, and justice. Some may suggest that this threatens to render democracy a suicide pact. Well, in many respects democracy is a suicide pact. Democracy’s enactment, as in Ferguson, does leave us vulnerable—which is precisely why we don’t need the police on the streets to exacerbate it. We’re fine on our own, even if it doesn’t always appear that way to some, to those allergic to and frightened by democratic politics.

Diasporic Politics Boomerang

Bonnie Honig
Brown University

Israel cultivates support from outside. The Jewish diaspora is its lifeline. Many North American Jews are raised to identify with Israel, many go visit or donate money, some even learn Hebrew! (What more proof of devotion could you need?) But -- then if we criticize their "policies", Israel says "wait, why such a double standard for Israel? Why don't you criticize Syria, Libya, Iran?" The answer is: “Syria, Libya, and Iran didn’t ask us to plant trees in their soil for tu b’shevat (the holiday of the trees, chag ha’elanot). They didn’t send us tree stamps to lick onto sheets of paper to illustrate how many trees would be planted with money we, as schoolchildren, raised in the diaspora. They did not ask us for money to help build hospitals to care for their wounded. They did not enlist us as their diasporic support community and they did not encourage us to personally identify with them. Their bloodshed is horrific but it feels less like it is on MY hands...."

When I was growing up I attended Hebrew Day School, and for a year or two our teacher for Jewish Laws, Norms, and Customs (I think) was a man named Aggassi, I think, or Agas. I remember because Agas means “pear” in Hebrew and the man had precisely that unfortunately shaped body. So he stuck in my (otherwise terrible) memory.

  I also remember one lesson he taught. He was describing Moses praying on the mountain and said Moses miraculously held his arms up in prayer for 40 days and 40 nights (or something like that). My seat in the class of 20 or so girls was in the back row. I surreptitiously held up my arms to see what was so hard about that? The teacher saw me and chuckled at my scepticism. He asked me to come to the front of the class. Did I not believe it was difficult? That holding one’s arms up like that was a miracle? He said I should stand in the corner in front of the classroom with my arms up to see how long I could last. It wasn’t long.

I think Mr. Aggas(si) was a shaliach. A shaliach is someone who is “sent,” an emissary. He was sent from Israel to us, as were others, usually for 2-year terms, to live in our Jewish community. Shlichim (the plural of shaliach) led our youth groups, taught in our Hebrew Schools, served as counselors in Jewish summer camps, and lent support in synagogues and after school activities.

There was in my youth, as now, a vast and diverse system of shlichim, sponsored by a variety of organizations with sometimes disparate goals and ideals. But they all overlapped in their aim and methods: Israelis cycled in and out of our communities, breathing their enthusiasm for Israel into us, inspiring and inspiriting us with love for that distant land. They secured our affective support, loyalty, identification, donations and, often, a commitment to one day move to Israel, to become part of this great Jewish nation that sent us these young men. (I only knew male shlichim. Perhaps there were also women – shlichot?)

All that work, all that infrastructure, created a web of communities with deep affective and intergenerational ties to the Land and – for a long time -- unflinching support for Israel and its security ‘needs’. We learned a lot about Israel, but we hardly heard anything about displacement, occupation, Palestinian refugees. When we did hear something, it was said their crisis was manufactured by the unwillingness of other Arab countries to take them in and that they had left voluntarily, in any case. Not “our” concern. Israel was always precarious, we learned, but it had a promising virility (personified for us, tween girls, by all those male shlichim in their 20’s and 30’s), and a will to survive. We learned that we needed Israel and that it needed us. (Well, “she” needed us, is what we were actually told). We were both surrounded by enemies, after all: Israel by hostile Arab nations, and we by a pervasive anti-semitism that may have gone underground since Nazism but was always waiting to spring back up. Sharing a precarious existence, we were told again and again, we had only ourselves to count on and we needed each other to survive.

The shlichim were just one part of a vast array of messagings and messengers that impressed us into the fate of the struggling Jewish democracy in the Middle East. In my middle school context, no one entertained the thought of a possible conflict between those terms – Jewish, ethno-national state and a democratic state. I had to go to college for that thought to become a thinkable thought.

Why do I suddenly recall all this now? Because the affective machinery has malfunctioned. Affect has a life of its own. Once installed, it does not always obey the law, norms and customs to which some try to harness it. Even corporeal lessons can have a variety of impacts. Being made to stand alone in front of a classroom can return a child to the fold. But it can also habituate children to stand alone in front of others when situations call for it. That very devotion to the “Land,” cultivated with such care and detail in my own youth, is what forces many of us to stand apart now, to recoil and protest. As families do when confronted with violence committed by one of their own, we members of the cultivated Jewish diaspora now find ourselves split into two: loyal members of the fold and shocked critics. And we look uncomprehendingly at each other. This is not something new. It has been going on for over thirty years, for me. For some more; for others less.

What I have described here is just a piece of the puzzle. It explains why some of us criticize, confront, protest, and boycott in particular in response to what is done by Israel because (even if we have not been to Israel for decades, or never at all) we know, we know – because we were taught so well – that all of this IS being done in our name. We know, because as children we licked those tree stamps onto those sheets of paper every year for tu b’shevat and I, anyway, can still taste them.

Living On

Alex Hirsch

University of Alaska, Fairbanks

One popular view in contemporary democratic thinking holds that everything is densely interwoven in a field of public flesh. Everything is crossed and crossing over in a richly enfolded chiasm pulsing with togetherness. The world is seen as an active nexus where singularities merge and respond in mutual transfer. “We participate each other,” writes Norman O. Brown.

There is something highly seductive about this vision. But of course this is only half the story. The constant presence of friction, struggle and conflict – of politics – built into human affairs, belies all this conviviality. The idea that we are always already thrown open to one another misses the point that despite this situation we remain crucially at odds with one another.

This is the point of departure for what some are starting to call the tragic sensibility. To start, the tragic sensibility downplays rationality and especially rationality’s pretension to sovereign mastery over destiny and fate. It also casts doubt on the faith in the sufficiency and autonomy of the self. More specifically, the tragic sensibility names the rivalry between, on the one hand, what our will intends and, on the other, the worldly forces that conspire to thwart those intentions. In this way, it affirms the notion that we are vulnerable to powers not entirely within our control. But there is more. The tragic sensibility offers a searching reflection on the moral conflict generated out of contestations over the meaning of public pain.  

A haunting example of this can be found in Incendies (2010). A kind of Sophoclean tragedy, the film traces the journeys of twin siblings, Jean and Simon Marwan, through an unnamed Middle Eastern country (which we can safely assume is Lebanon) that is mired in a history of religious strife and catastrophic violence. Each sibling is tasked with tracking down an estranged family member (Jean, the twins’ father; Simon, their brother) when Nawal, their mother, posthumously leaves behind two sealed letters to be delivered to each by the twins.

As the twins work respectively to locate their father and brother they begin to unravel the mystery of their mother’s life. Weaving together past and present into an uncanny mosaic, the film gives the supple impression of a world where the consequences of what has happened endlessly open out. 

In a series of flashbacks to the 1970s and ‘80s we learn that as a young woman Nawal was a Christian who fell in love with and was impregnated by a Muslim (Palestinian?) refugee. She eventually gave birth to a son; but, having disgraced her family (once by bearing a child out of wedlock, again by loving a Muslim), the boy is abandoned to a local orphanage while Nawal herself is banished to Daresh, a fictional city on the brink of civil war. 

In Daresh, Nawal enrolls at the local university where she becomes a student activist and editor of a pacifist newspaper. Disgusted with the wanton violence committed by those who espouse the faith to justify hatred, Nawal disavows her Christian past in the name of promoting a peaceful future. 

In one of the film’s most wrenching scenes, we see Nawal riding a bus through a dangerous region of the countryside, frantically searching for her misplaced son amongst orphanages recently razed by Christian guerilla fighters. Along the way the bus is viciously attacked by the Phalangist, who spray a torrent of machine gun fire into its interior before setting the bus ablaze. Nawal, having survived the initial assault along with a handful of others, escapes by baring her cross out the bus doorway. Ironically, the Christian identity Nawal had repudiated saves her life but only at the price of making her the hapless witness and unwitting accomplice to a massacre. 

The tragedy of the scene can be viewed in light of what Bernard Williams writes of tragic situations: there was nothing Nawal could do and yet something had to be done. For Williams, what makes scenes such as this tragic is that Nawal is caught between an impossible choice (reclaim her Christian identity and live, or maintain her righteous contempt and die) and a no less compelling imperative to act (sacrifice her pacifist ideal and act vengefully against the Phalangist in order to prevent such massacres in the future). There is no right thing to do. Whatever Nawal does she is at once right and wrong. There is only the tragic happening and Nawal’s response to what that happening has rendered in her. 

Read in this light, one might say that the tragic sensibility is less interested in coming up with prescriptive standards of action (what should Nawal do?) than in asking questions about how to live on despite the lack of available options (how can Nawal survive such a scene with her moral integrity intact?). As Bonnie Honig puts it, the goal is “to salvage from the wreckage of the situation enough narrative unity for the self to go on.” 

 

There is plenty that can be said about what this modicum of narrative unity might be composed of (a self that is, as Kathleen Stewart puts it, a “fabulation that enfolds the intensities it finds itself in”). But what the tragic sensibility helps to supplement is a sense of what Hayden White means when, in a tragic key, he writes “History is not something that one understands, it is something one endures – if one is lucky.”

This is not to say that with tragedy there is no hope. The tragic sensibility is not tantamount to resignation. Rather, it is about finding ways to live with the intractable quality of conflict endemic to human experience. Not in order to be free of the troubling questions such conflicts evoke. Instead, the tragic sensibility is about grappling with the predicament of yearning for redemption and yet always failing to become redeemed. This is what Paul Gilroy means when he defines tragedy as “suffering made useful but not redemptive.” The tragic sensibility is all about finding ways of being lucky (in White’s sense); not merely to survive, but to live on (an important difference) even when mourning and redemption read like so much messianism. More, it is about marshaling creative forms of aesthetic responsiveness, political judgment, and critical imagination germane to the shared precarity such a condition entails. 

Think of Palestine, where the tragic sensibility of Incendies has taken hold. The goal of reconciling the sectarian conflict between Israeli settlers and Arab aboriginals has long been abandoned by most everyday inhabitants of the West Bank, Gaza, and East Jerusalem. Instead the accent is placed on harnessing ways of living with what has turned out to be irredeemable. 

Neil Hertz talks about this in his recent ethnographic travelogue, Pastoral in Palestine. In 2011, Hertz lived in Ramallah, a Palestinian enclave settled in section A (according to the Oslo Accords of 1993/1995) of the West Bank, while teaching in neighbouring Abu Dis. He writes that of the many people he met, people whose occupied cultures were constantly under threat of erosion and collapse, few expressed any wish for reconciliation; only a desire to invent new modes of being / becoming in the midst of catastrophe. Hertz recalls encounter after encounter with people for whom “There is no solution, only ‘The Situation.’” Salim, a dinner guest, explains this to Hertz one evening: “It will just go on…One must live with it.”

This isn’t pessimism. Nor is it complacency. Indeed, one might say Salim’s position is akin to what Jonathan Lear means by “radical hope.” By this Lear is referring to a hope that is directed toward some future goodness that transcends the current ability to understand what it is: “Radical hope anticipates a good for which those who have the hope as yet lack the appropriate concepts with which to understand it.” A hope that looks forward despite the future’s unpredictability; a hope without guarantees. Only a tragic sense that if we persevere, and act to sustain ourselves, we may get lucky. 

It is important that we recognize all the ways that we are borne out in thick expressions of mutual active witnessing that take shape in everyday rhythms of life. In the flux of a complex world, we really do “participate one another.” But this way of speaking must be complemented by a tragic sensibility sensitive to all the ways that we are connected as well as separated by what is happening and what the happening’s breaking down is doing to us. And we must listen carefully to those like Nawal and Salim who have been quietly inventing modes of staying power, techniques for committing to living on with the tragic sensibility when the deus ex machina of redemption remains an empty promise.