It has of late been quite difficult to feel American. We are at the moment missing two of the three most important American holidays - Christmas and Super Bowl Sunday - while having already missed our favorite, Thanksgiving. But I am also having a hard time feeling American in the wake of the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting. Partly this is a result of my experience of the shooting and its aftermath being mediated by foreign news. Often these stories are presented with a tone of exasperation - "Why is America still so fixated on guns?" "Why hasn't America done anything to curb its cultures of violence?" - an exasperation that has as its effect a cultural distancing from and of America, an affect that is sometimes condescending but always baffled. There is also, though, a distance that arises from not being present to or participating in any public acts or rituals of mourning, rituals that not only help to sort through experience, but in sorting through also structure feeling. As public this is a sharing of feeling, which is not quite a shared feeling, but is rather a feeling of that which we share and have lost together. So there is, here, half-a-world away, a loss that cannot quite be articulated and not quite felt.
Witnessed from our distance, though, many of the public acts that are pretending to a public mourning are deliberate attempts to forget the publicness of this violence and so are attempts to undermine the publicness of mourning. This is to say, attempts to disavow the necessary political act of feeling that is public mourning. One such re-action is quite obvious in its depoliticizing plea to keep politics out. In one of its many senses, this plea is simply a party-politics undermining of whatever political opportunity may arise at this moment. In another sense, though, this plea can take the form of an undermining of our common public space, a reduction of the public to individual emotion or desire that closes down any deliberation about or contestation of our being together in common. A second re-action is focusing on Adam Lanza, conflating a concerned discussion of violence with an accusation of mental illness. This might, of course, and in some instances seems to, function in a way that opens up spaces for public mourning by opening a discussion of cultures of ostracization and our gutted (mental) health care system, both embodied in and by our prison system. But as our practice has for so long been one of pathologizing mental illness, mental illness in this focus on Adam Lanza is more often functioning to individualize guilt and blame and so isolate the individual. But there is also a re-action that is deliberately political, mourning this loss, in part, by working for cultural and political change, a mourning that has focused on, to name those movements that have made it in to the international news cycles, gun control, our mental health care system, our cultures of violence, and our seemingly nihilistic embrace of neo-liberalism. If mourning is an act of feeling loss, of naming loss, of understanding loss - an act of re-membering what has been lost in order for something other to be, a something other that allows for the tragedy of loss to remain within any possible peaceful future -, it is only this last action that seems to be a public mourning, a mourning that recognizes that if this violent loss is public it is a violence and loss that arises within our being together and so is a violence and loss that we must all become responsible to. But, again from this distance, this last, this public mourning, seems the most difficult; it seems easy to depoliticize or individualize and ostracize the loss, almost impossible to mourn as public.
Maybe my present lack of feeling American can tie some of this together. Too simply, maybe this is all trying to articulate that our public rituals, our national holidays, are rituals of forgetting, while also acknowledging that we have very few spaces for public mourning, or rather, spaces for articulating and practicing, and so making public, mourning. And maybe it is because we have so few spaces and rituals of public mourning that, against all evidence, even as they continue to happen, these mass acts of violence continue to feel like an exception, and so an exception that cannot fully be felt.
Witnessed from our distance, though, many of the public acts that are pretending to a public mourning are deliberate attempts to forget the publicness of this violence and so are attempts to undermine the publicness of mourning. This is to say, attempts to disavow the necessary political act of feeling that is public mourning. One such re-action is quite obvious in its depoliticizing plea to keep politics out. In one of its many senses, this plea is simply a party-politics undermining of whatever political opportunity may arise at this moment. In another sense, though, this plea can take the form of an undermining of our common public space, a reduction of the public to individual emotion or desire that closes down any deliberation about or contestation of our being together in common. A second re-action is focusing on Adam Lanza, conflating a concerned discussion of violence with an accusation of mental illness. This might, of course, and in some instances seems to, function in a way that opens up spaces for public mourning by opening a discussion of cultures of ostracization and our gutted (mental) health care system, both embodied in and by our prison system. But as our practice has for so long been one of pathologizing mental illness, mental illness in this focus on Adam Lanza is more often functioning to individualize guilt and blame and so isolate the individual. But there is also a re-action that is deliberately political, mourning this loss, in part, by working for cultural and political change, a mourning that has focused on, to name those movements that have made it in to the international news cycles, gun control, our mental health care system, our cultures of violence, and our seemingly nihilistic embrace of neo-liberalism. If mourning is an act of feeling loss, of naming loss, of understanding loss - an act of re-membering what has been lost in order for something other to be, a something other that allows for the tragedy of loss to remain within any possible peaceful future -, it is only this last action that seems to be a public mourning, a mourning that recognizes that if this violent loss is public it is a violence and loss that arises within our being together and so is a violence and loss that we must all become responsible to. But, again from this distance, this last, this public mourning, seems the most difficult; it seems easy to depoliticize or individualize and ostracize the loss, almost impossible to mourn as public.
Maybe my present lack of feeling American can tie some of this together. Too simply, maybe this is all trying to articulate that our public rituals, our national holidays, are rituals of forgetting, while also acknowledging that we have very few spaces for public mourning, or rather, spaces for articulating and practicing, and so making public, mourning. And maybe it is because we have so few spaces and rituals of public mourning that, against all evidence, even as they continue to happen, these mass acts of violence continue to feel like an exception, and so an exception that cannot fully be felt.
i had the same reaction to 9/11 -- as a nation, we do not know how to mourn. we still haven't learned. thanks for posting this -- good to have some broader/global perspective.
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