Alex Hirsch — Standing Rock, and Ecological Risk, After Trump

Alexander Keller Hirsch is Assistant Professor in the Department of Political Science at the University of Alaska, Fairbanks. He can be reached at ahirsch@alaska.edu.

Having evaluated an early development plan that would have routed the Dakota Access pipeline (DAPL) across the Missouri River north of Bismarck, and close to the municipal water supply, the US Army Corps of Engineers determined that the “high consequences” of the plan rendered it too dangerous to pursue. In September of 2014, however, the Corps approved a permit for an alternative plan that re-routed the pipeline south, through Sioux country. In a statement reported in the Bismarck Tribune, the Corps wrote, “Given the engineering design, proposed installation methodology, quality of material selected, operations measures and response plans the risk of an inadvertent release in, or reaching, Lake Oahe is extremely low.” 

On December 4, the Corps finally announced that it would not allow the new DAPL course; a decision that is the net result of months of intense public pressure after Standing Rock became a global flash point for indigenous and environmental activism. Water protectors, who plan to remain encamped throughout the winter, are celebrating cautiously. Given the recent election, it is unclear how durable the government’s decision will be. The Army Corps of Engineers falls under the Department of the Army, which serves at the pleasure of the president. Just what will replace Obama’s precarious lame duck administration remains, ominously, an open question.

For the moment it appears the protestors have won a significant victory, and this clears more breathing room for reflection: Why were the Sioux being forced, literally at gunpoint, to accept the same ecological risks that the white residents of Bismarck were not expected to assume? 

In part, understanding the answer to this question means confronting the longue duree of sovereign struggle in the greater Black Hills region, and the ways the Standing Rock opposition to the DAPL attends to, but also expands upon, this legacy. 

This is where the Fort Laramie Treaty was originally signed in 1851, which defined the federally recognized boundaries of Sioux, Crow, and Cheyenne territory. The treaty was broken, time and again, after the “bloody” Bozeman Trail, which shot through that territory, was fashioned to support the rush to unearth gold in Montana and Wyoming, north and west of the reservation. This is where, subsequently, Red Cloud (Oglala Lakota) led an insurrection against the Fort Rice and Fort Buford entrenchments along the upper Missouri river, staging points for protecting reservation trespassers. In 1878, Sitting Bull, along with his Hunkpapa followers, killed 210 of Lieutenant Colonel General George Armstrong’s soldiers after they invaded Greasy Grass, a Sioux village settled along what the Army called the Little Big Horn River. This is where, by the late 1880s, the region’s buffalo were nearly hunted out of existence by European settlers, threatening the traditional Sioux way of life; and where pandemics of measles, influenza, and whooping cough killed thousands. The Ghost Dance, a nonviolent messianic movement that swept the region in the wake of the buffalo’s disappearance, presaged the end of settler expansion, and foreshadowed indigenous renewal. In 1890, a detachment of the the US 7th Calvary Regiment escorted hundreds of Miniconjou Lakota and Hunkpapa Lakota to the Wounded Knee Creek, where they were executed. Eighty-three years later, at the height of the American Indian Movement (AIM), 200 Lakota seized and staged an armed occupation of the town of Wounded Knee for 71 days, demanding new treaty negotiations. 

From this historical perspective, the present contestation over the DAPL can be viewed as the continuation of a longer survivance story of self-determination for an embattled people who have been defying the forces of colonization for generations. The police have trained high pressure hoses on the protestors, who have already been subject to violent encounters with DAPL security attack dogs, and other measures of brutality amid the siege.

But understanding the answer to the question of why the previous pipeline plan would traverse Lake Oahe, a sacred cultural site and the main source of drinking water for Standing Rock, is also a matter of coming to terms with who is expected to adopt risk, when others are not. 

How ought risk to be distributed? Who should shoulder the burden of vulnerability, and become exposed to the perils of ecological danger? And who ought to be shielded from the liabilities that attend such danger?

Charges of environmental racism have been rejected by the Dakota Access company, which claims that, “The most significant route revisions occurred primarily due to attempts to avoid tribal and federally owned lands, minimize environmental impacts, avoid environmentally sensitive areas, and maximize collocation.”

It is true that accidents are less probable with pipelines than other modes of oil shipping. But we face here the classic issue in probability theory that the book, The Black Swan, should have resolved years ago: though less frequent, pipeline disasters are far more serious in their effects. According to data from the federal Pipeline and Hazardous Materials Safety Administration, since 1986, there have been 8,000 “serious incidents” (roughly 300 per year), which have cost the lives of over 500 people (in addition to 2,300 injuries), and incurred $7 billion in damage. Since that time, pipeline accidents have spilled an average of 76,000 barrels per year, or more than 3 million gallons of oil (the equivalent of 200 barrels every day). 

Progress on the DAPL project are currently stalled. But one question remains insufficiently resolved: What does the election of Donald J. Trump as the 45th president of the United States portend for Standing Rock? 

During their presidential campaigns, neither Hillary Clinton nor Donald Trump adopted official positions on the controversy surrounding Standing Rock. Hours after it was announced that Trump had won the election, however, the share price for Energy Transfer Equity, operator of the DAPL, skyrocketed. In part, the stock jump indexes confidence that President-elect Trump will curate a cabinet conducive to the pipeline’s successful completion. Along with corporate oil executives Harold Hamm and Forrest Lucas, Sarah Palin -- of “Drill, Baby, Drill” fame -- are presently on the short list for positions as US Energy Secretary and Secretary of the Interior. The stock surge may also indicate market faith that Trump, who has disclosed his personal investment (between $500,000 and $1 million, according to the Wall Street Journal) in Energy Transfer Equity, will incentivize resuming DAPL construction. What is more, in a recent statement, President-elect Trump issued explicit support for finishing the pipeline.

In an interview with Chris Matthews of MSNBC, Rudy Giuliani compared Trump’s electoral college triumph to Andrew Jackson’s victory in 1827. As with Jackson, Giuliani argued, “The people are rising up against a government they find to be dysfunctional.” Given the legacy of Jackson’s notorious Indian removal policy, the analogy bears the ill-omened mark of a dark Indigenous future under the auspices of a Trump presidency. 

In his excellent book on Jackson, Michael Rogin underscores what Hannah Arendt once argued, that the meeting of European settler and Indian on the American continent formed an important factor in the origins of totalitarianism: “Consider as central to the American-Indian experience: the collapse of conceptions of human rights in the face of culturally distant peoples, with resulting civilized atrocities defended as responses to savage atrocities; easy to talk about, and occasional practice of, tribal extermination; the perceived impossibility of cultural coexistence, and a growing acceptance of ‘inevitable’ Indian extinction; total war, with all-or-nothing conflicts over living space, and minimal combatant-noncombatant distinctions; and the inability of the savage people to retire behind a stable frontier, provoking whites’ confidence in their ability to conquer, subdue, and advance over all obstacles in their environment.” 

Of course, Trump’s presidency has already been accused of consolidating totalitarian impulses. The question for Standing Rock, as for us all, is how his election will influence who will be expected to adopt risks, when others are not. 

Too Hard to Keep

Alexander Keller Hirsch is Assistant Professor in the Department of Political Science at the University of Alaska, Fairbanks. He can be reached at ahirsch@alaska.edu.

Since 2010, the artist Jason Lazarus has been collecting and curating photographs deemed “too hard to keep” by their owners. The growing archive of images contributes to what he calls a “repository of photographs, photo-objects, and digital files” that are, for whatever reason, considered “too painful to live with any longer.” This is a public receptacle for excessive affect, a place where we can deposit material objects charged with the aura of a feeling that is, as Lazarus writes, “too difficult to hold on to, but too meaningful to destroy.”

A brilliant project. But this phrase—“too hard to keep, but too meaningful to destroy”—may be misleading. The “but” is too quick. It might be that some of these pictures are too meaningful to destroy because they are too hard to keep. One must jettison the relic of a memory if it betokens a grief that is overwhelming enough. But, precisely because that grief is so overwhelming, one must take care not to obliterate its artifact, for doing so would threaten a source of meaning and intensified aliveness.

As Kaja Silverman puts it, “A photograph is the umbilical cord connecting us to what we have loved and lost, to what is gone because we failed to save it, or to what might have been, but now will never be.” The Too Hard to Keep archive is flush with photographs that index such a loss. But it also calls attention to the impasses faced by those who inhabit an afterness where it is not only loss that is at stake, but also the loss of loss itself. Lazarus requires that the owners of photographs “truly part” with the images they donate to his project. He accepts digital copies only on condition that other digital copies be deleted: “If you’re going to part with it—part with it, then what you’re seeing hastraction… It is the remnant of the decision to relinquish the image from theirarchive into a public archive.”

Lazarus’ exhibitions are, in this sense, intensely political. Though most of the images depict subjects and themes that are sometimes considered too intimate, or perhaps too quotidian, to be political—the most common motifs include people, open landscapes, pets, death beds, sun sets, erotic connections, empty rooms—indeed, with Too Hard to Keep, it is precisely this ordinary intimacy that becomes a patent source of political experience. The exhibitions summon into a public domain the pain of those who have suffered private loss by inviting witness-spectators to the gallery. By doing so, they reflect a mise-en-scène of grief that builds a felicitous connection between strangers. A demos is assembled at the site of an aesthetic object that beams forth what is too hard to keep, and too meaningful to destroy.

One of the photographs, a black and white taken in what must be the early 1970s, pictures a crowd of a dozen or so friends posing for a group shot. Everyone is smiling and joking around. One man is sitting on another man’s shoulders, dragging on a cigarette. Beneath them a dog is climbing into a woman’s lap.

Everything appears normal, but for the lower right hand corner, where one of the persons originally pictured has had their shape cut out. They have been deleted, and replaced with the trace of a blank white empty space. The effect is disquieting. In an effort to censor a portion of the photograph, the owner has attempted to purge the image of someone, presumably the source of some wounding or loss. But, tragically, as with all cases of censorship, the eye is drawn to what is repressed. Hardly spirited away, the entire photograph becomes about the cut out and, by extension, the person who is no longer there but whose spectral remainder continues to haunt the image as the presence of an absence.

Another picture in the collection appears to be self-conscious about this. The photograph features a woman who is raising her hand to shield herself from being photographed. The corner of her face is glimpsed, as is a curtain of hair clinging to her jaw line, but her face is otherwise obscured. The backdrop, a shock of over exposed green flora, brightens the image, as it shapes and lends dimension to the aegis of her hand.  The owner of the photograph need not edit the image, the woman is already censoring herself. And yet, one wonders whether this attempt to self-erase is itself a part of why the photograph is too hard to keep and too meaningful to destroy.

Lazarus’ submissions are received anonymously, and without explanation, and the images, when exhibited, are displayed without reference or description. The effect is powerful. The viewer cannot help but imagine what makes this empty landscape too hard to keep, or what renders that person’s image too painful to live with. The result is that the art nearly becomes the story we tell ourselves about what happened.

We recognize, of course, that the story we tell cannot possibly encompass the reality behind the images, even if some pictures invite more or less accurate educated guesses. Whatever the distance between fiction and reality, the story we tell reflects the irrepressible desire to craft narrative around an unsettling and furtive object. Great art, Theodor Adorno once wrote, depicts something that we do not and cannot know. He might have added that, in part, what makes such art resonant is that its audience must try, and then generatively fail, to come to terms with it through storytelling.

In this way, Too Hard to Keep suggests an interesting avenue for reckoning with afterness. Instead of placing the emphasis on punishing perpetrators, or capacitating victims through forgiveness, Too Hard to Keep hones in on the role of the witness. In the standard literature, witnessing is often described as a mode of observation, whereby a bystander sees an event unfold, and then later bears testimony to this experience. But with Lazarus’ project witnesses cannot see the event. The photographs offer evidence of something beyond our ken.

And the exhibitions are hardly Truth and Reconciliation hearings. The TRC in South Africa, for instance, invited victims, perpetrators, and witnesses alike to enter into a public sphere and share stories about past suffering such that, A) The truth of atrocity could become official record, and B) Rituals of mass forgiveness could set restorative justice in motion. But with Too Hard to Keep, the goal is manifestly not to be released from resentment through forgiveness. Indeed, the very premise of the collection is that these images represent a source of pain that is too meaningful to neutralize through reconciliation. And rather than focus on delivering an accurate portrayal of what we have observed, witness-spectators are instead acutely aware that their testimony will largely be fantasy.  

“God,” writes Samuel Beckett in Watt, “is a witness who cannot be sworn.” In part, God cannot be sworn as a witness because in vowing to bear truthful testimony He swears an oath to Himself—He promises to tell the “whole truth and nothing but the truth, so help me God.” An exercise in tautology. With Too Hard to Keep we are also cast as witnesses who cannot be sworn, though not because the authority of our testimony is rooted in a redundant promise to ourselves. Rather, our inability to be sworn is due to the fact that we cannot offer testimony to an event that remains crucially hidden from us.

Remarkably, in the case of Too Hard to Keep, this invisibility of the event, and the accompanying lack of an ability to tell the truth about it, is precisely what gives witnessing its power. In part, this power is located in the affinity that is struck between witness-spectators and owner-victims in the political space of the gallery.

But unlike most other genres of affinity, this one is not quite grounded in empathy. If empathy is like sharing in and responding to another person’s pain because one knows it and has experienced it before, then the feeling nurtures a shared horizon of understanding anchored in memory. With Too Hard to Keep, however, witnesses cannot develop empathy for the photograph owners, because it is unclear what the loss is, and as such it is uncertain whether one too has taken part in it. Instead, the affinity that connects witnesses and owners stems from what I call inverse empathy: a tenderness toward the suffering of the other that is rooted in a creative imagining of what may have been. This inverse case foregrounds conviviality not in a collective public memory, but rather in a shared imaginable.  The emphasis lies not with the truth of what clearly happened, but rather with the fantasy of what might have taken place, and with the stories witnesses tell about this imaginable past.  

A photograph is “in no way a presence,” Roland Barthes tells us; rather, “its reality is that of the having-been-there.” But with Too Hard to Keep, we bear explicit witness to our own having not been there. Peering into these images, it feels as though we have been transformed into a tragic chorus -- the witnessing body par excellence -- but one that has arrived too late to the scene of loss. This is an analogue to Franz Kafka’s parable about the tardy messiah who arrives too late to tender redemption, except that in this case our belatedness turns out to be helpful, actually. Indeed, it provides the precondition for inverse empathy. Only late witnesses need imagine.

But what kind of demos does inverse empathy convene? Not exactly one embedded in a sustained fidelity to the event. Nor is this a demos adhered to melancholia, since the event and its attendant loss are both clandestine for witnesses. Rather, this demos is attuned to the world of possibilities opened up by imagining what others’ pain might entail. As with other forms of democratic relation, this one convokes a public object -- in this case a photograph -- but that object is not like a social contract or a birth right, concepts both that name what is, or ought to be, guaranteed for members of the group. Instead, this becoming-in-relation takes shape around what is ultimately uncertain, and it is exercised through an invitation to envision who the other is, and what has happened to them. Like a will to chance in reverse, Too Hard to Keep signals a supple and precarious world held in common by citizens who enter together into a life without guarantees, except that the focus is trained on the enigmatic past, rather than the unpredictable future.

What can this do for photograph owners? Perhaps not much. Redemption may be limited for those who possess photographs that symbolize a loss that is too hard to keep and too meaningful to destroy. Friedrich Nietzsche famously argued that we ought to forget our painful past, accept life on life’s terms, embrace amor fati and move on (“I wish to be only a Yes-sayer”), such that we can be free to occupy an unfettered present. By contrast, the philosopher and Holocaust survivor Jean Améry called for a “revolt against reality,” arguing that victims ought to embrace their resentments, such that the “criminal is nailed to his deed.”

But Lazarus offers a third way: not sublime forgetfulness, but not infinite despair either. Too Hard to Keep invites photograph owners to forsake, but not erase, what cannot be kept and cannot be destroyed. And it opens an avenue for victims to invoke unwitting witnesses who can only imagine what they are seeing. Crucially, the photo has been capitulated to a demos – a tardy tragic chorus – that may not be able to fix what has been broken, but can bear witness to the trace of what remains.

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.