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i continue to be baffled by this thread
so now its time for a bit of a rant.
this "white guilt" meme is of a piece with a facile relativization move which result effectively in this claim:
"people have been exterminating each other since x so therefore all exterminations are interchangeable and no-one particularly responsible either in real time or after the fact--so there's no problem with not thinking terribly hard about the specificities of any of this---so if we take the european rush into africa of the 1870s-1890s, there is no particular need to think real hard about why things might've happened when they did because this colonialism business is simply an expression of this recurring tendency that human beings have to exterminate other populations of human beings for fun and profit."
which is a nice, pious way to avoid thinking--not to mention actual political and historical problems--because pushed a little bit, these recurrent waves of extermination follow as logically from original sin as they do from any social-historical situation--and because massacre recurs, the only problem that is really posed by any given example of it is the question of where's jesus---because like most non-believers, you imagine that only a god could "save us"--which might be true so long as you imagine that we do not DO anything---so context becomes secondary, so rationale becomes secondary, so effects become secondary--and so the belgians in the congo are the same as the romans in carthage are the same as (pick your extermination, insert here)--none of it anyone's fault, none of it even a problem---except in a kind of vague "boo hoo history is tragic, man" kinda way---which translates into "history is a bummer man"-----which translates into avoiding it---and this business of vague reference to massacre upon massacre as if the recurrence is in itself explanatory is a way of avoiding history--you avoid it by erasing agency, erasing ideology, erasing the idea that there was any particular political or personal choices involved in the framing and carrying out of this or that genocide--human beings become like the scorpion--they dont consciously DO any of this--they simply express their nature.
this is the kind of bullshit that follows from watching the history channel---everything from the past that can be crammed onto a screen is interchangeable with everything else because none of it passes beyond the limits of the television and actually impacts on the spectator.
that's what much of the thread is turning into--a performance of and justification for a spectator's relation to history---as if the relations that obtain between yourself, your couch and your tv set are the same as your relation to history. which means that the accumulated interchangable imagery that is the past is presented primarily as therapy, and its effect is to enable you to pretend that you are transcendent, unconditioned yourself--you watch those who are conditioned, who are stuck in history, in footage of manly men running back and forth between explosions or in imagery of carnage.
and that's what you get then: the anonymous interchangeable shadows that run across the screen during history channel programming are conditioned by history--you sitting there watching tv are not--the pattern of recurrent massacre that you can derive from juxtaposing tv image atop tv image demonstrates that Those People are Violent--but you, sitting there watching, you are not effected. you are Outside time, you are Outside socialization: you are pure gaze sitting on a transcendent sofa expressing your inward being by watching. your frame of reference is not problematic--you are not running around inside history channel footage--you are watching that footage---so none of your dispositions are involved in what you are watching--from which it follows that you "make youself"----sui generis--- because we all know that the relation of television to viewer is a trans-historical one, no problem with it.
now to head off the possibility of a response based on this idiotic notion of "white guilt"---what i am saying is that your subject position is embedded within, shaped by, performs ideological claims/images that operate in varying degrees of relation to aspects of the past---colonialism for example has given way in the main to neo-colonialism, but the patterns of economic organization have remained in many sectors more or less the same, and in many others the worst forms of capitalist exploitation have been transferred to southern hemisphere countries--and ignored by the likes of the history channel---so that your way of life in 2007 is not so separate from that of any european bourgeois during the colonial period--same inconsistencies, same problems of what you look at as over against what you dont--the idea that you can point to some imaginary moment and say "colonialism stopped then, we no longer have to worry about it'--which is a correlate of this spectatorship relation to the world, to history---that is absurd. you are still in an ideological context that is geared around the justification/normalization of types of colonial exploitation. you perform this justification every day--but the Spectator chooses not to see that, as for the Spectator, what matters is history as Spectacle, as Montage, as something distant and over with and interesting for antiquarian reasons.
so i dont really understand how many of the posts are supposed to help with the project outlined in the op since they havent started to even think about the problems the project is about, one way or another--instead, you have a series of distancing claims...
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a gramophone its corrugated trumpet silver handle
spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear
it make you sick.
-kamau brathwaite
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