Flusser’s “Does Writing Have a Future?” discusses writing and inscription as a mode of cataloging and forging history. The act of writing in itself constructs antiquity; by definition, history thus becomes a malleable and alterable narrative. Flusser writes, “…before writing was invented, nothing happened; rather things merely occurred. For something to happen, it has to be noticed and conceived as an event (process) by some consciousness” (8). History, as Flusser describes it, is thus a product of the writing process, an aftermath of inscription. History may also be viewed as a narrative, a collective story that can be added to and subtracted from.

History, and the truth, is seemingly based upon the presence of a voice. As such, by removing and muting the voices of enslaved peoples, the White slave master is not only given control of narratives, but also history as a whole. Examples of this can be seen in Frederick Douglass’s Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, wherein truth and history themselves are altered by the removal of enslaved peoples’ voices. In a description of a slave owner’s abuse and mistreatment of his slaves, Douglass writes,

“It was committed in the presence of slaves, and they of course could neither institute a suit, nor testify against him; and thus the guilty perpetrator of one of the bloodiest and most foul murders goes unwhipped of justice, and uncensured by the community in which he lives” (Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass).

Douglass’s experience with the unpunished slave owner reflects on the ways in which the hegemony silences enslaved peoples, and in doing so, writes history and alters truth. While the slaves could not speak out against Mr. Gore, the latter is both “unwhipped” and “uncensured,” the very opposite of the enslaved peoples’ condition. Due to the silencing of the slaves, Mr. Gore is able to suppress the truth and by doing so, alter history, penning his own innocence and erasing the death of an innocent.

The redirection and adaption of religion in support of slavery is yet another commandeering of truth and history. Douglass makes the inherent hypocrisy and deception innate to slave ownership extremely clear, especially through his description of religion. Douglass uses faith as a point for anti-slavery arguments, against slave owners and those who support the peculiar institution. Douglass believed that this “slaveholding religion” was

“a mere covering for the most horrid crimes,—a justifier of the most appalling barbarity,—a sanctifier of the most hateful frauds,—and a dark shelter under, which the darkest, foulest, grossest, and most infernal deeds of slaveholders find the strongest protection” (Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass).

The manipulation of the historical narrative is vital to maintaining the established hierarchy. He writes, “For of all slaveholders with whom I have ever met, religious slaveholders are the worst.” While religion is presumably something that inspires faith, charity, and kindness, it is often used as “a justifier of the most appalling barbarity.” This manipulation of the truth, or perhaps willful blindness to hypocrisy can still be seen today in right wing and conservative hate speech against minorities, immigrants, and the queer community.

Those who have a voice direct the historical narrative. Flusser embodies this idea when he writes, “[o]nly one who writes lines can think logically, calculate, criticize, pursue knowledge, philosophize–and conduct himself appropriately” (7). This example dances around the notion of reason at the time in much the same way that Gates in “Writing ‘Race’ and the Difference It Makes,” does. Gates writes, “Blacks were “reasonable, “and hence” men, “if – and only if – they demonstrated mastery of ‘the arts and sciences’” (8). Both Gates and Flusser echo the truths that Douglass himself embodies in his narrative; he emphasizes the importance of reason, of voice, and Narrative to not only the attainment of freedom, but also emancipation.

I read the David W. Blight op-ed in the Times today and, funnily, I’d already been planning on engaging with what I found to be a kind of anti-neoliberalism – or rather, (more appropriately) some ambivalence about/critique of the eminence of the individual in the liberal tradition – in Douglass’ Narrative. We’ve talked about Douglass’ coming into a sense of self — the centrality of reading and writing to that process – and Douglass certainly uses the language of individualism to advocate for his own humanity and his own potential. The tragedy of slavery is not only that it fails the individual, however, or that it it excludes the enslaved person from that status altogether, but that it also represents a failure of – and an exclusion from – community, compassion, care: Douglass recognizes the real cruelty – and real malice – of being “let alone.”

Take, for example, how Douglass recounts the treatment of his grandmother after the death of the man that enslaved her (forgive the enormous block quote!) :

She had been the source of all his wealth; she had peopled his plantation with slaves; she had become a great grandmother in his service. She had rocked him in infancy, attended him in childhood, served him through life, and at his death wiped from his icy brow the cold death-sweat, and closed his eyes forever. She was nevertheless left a slave—a slave for life—a slave in the hands of strangers; and in their hands she saw her children, her grandchildren, and her great-grandchildren, divided, like so many sheep, without being gratified with the small privilege of a single word, as to their or her own destiny.  And, to cap the climax of their base ingratitude and fiendish barbarity, my grandmother, who was now very old…her frame already racked with the pains of old age, and complete helplessness fast stealing over her once active limbs, they took her to the woods, built her a little hut, put up a little mud-chimney, and then made her welcome to the privilege of supporting herself there in perfect loneliness; thus virtually turning her out to die!

What is framed as a “privilege” by the slave owners and is otherwise conceived of, in the liberal tradition, as a “right” – the right to autonomy, to self-sufficiency – is here made a mockery of: in the context of the slave system, it is revealed to be not only insufficient, but cruel; not freedom, but a death sentence. (I’m thinking of Douglass’ evocation, later on, of Patrick Henry’s famous utterance: “give me liberty or give me death!”) Notably, it is this experience, “more than another,” which for Douglass “served to deepen my conviction of the infernal character of slavery”: having witnessed and recounted many active forms of violence – beatings, rape, murder – it is nevertheless this act of not-doing that angers Douglass the most. (And inspires, I think, some of his most heart-rending –wrenching?– writing).

Likewise, Douglass remembers “Henny” – an enslaved girl who is known to be “helpless” and is resented and targeted by their master for that very fact. Recently-converted, Douglass’ “benevolent master, to use his own words, ‘set her adrift to take care of herself.’” Here, the absence of care³ exposes hypocrisy in the practice of liberal Christianity: “The outspread wing of American christianity, apparently broad enough to give shelter to a perishing world, refuses to cover us.” (My Bondage)

This is all to point out the ways in which Douglass was, as Blight writes, “both a radical thinker and a proponent of classic 19th-century political liberalism.” There’s much to think about, for the purposes of our class, Douglass’ familiarity with, mastery of, and belief in, this particular European tradition – how, and on what authority, this allowed him to be such “ferocious critic” of a country founded on those principles.¹ There’s lots to be said, moreover, about the ways in which the facts of Douglass’ life – his status as a “self-made man,” in both an ontological and material sense – track with the values of that tradition. But it seems particularly gross to me that conservative leaders would co-opt that narrative – an act that ironically un-”makes” Douglass as “self-made” man – in order to cast him “a radical for individualism, never concerned with “the interests of the collective” – when the Narrative* itself very obviously reflects such concerns. Douglass writes not only to liberate himself but to liberate others; he writes in relation to others – in opposition as an Other – but also in solidarity. This is true in the literal sense, within the text – as when he writes protections for his and his friends’ escape – but also motivation for writing the text itself: it is the means by which he might prove himself, and thus, his race.

This dual purpose – to hold himself as both exceptional/distinct and as representative of/ one of a kind– is evident.² But: he identifies himself strongly with his “fellow-slaves,” and at times the distinction between the individual and the group becomes unclear. “We were linked and interlinked with each other,” he writes:

We never undertook to do anything, of any importance, without a mutual consultation. We never moved separately. We were one; and as much so by our tempers and dispositions, as by the mutual hardships to which we were necessarily subjected by our condition as slaves.

They attempt to escape together; in their capture, “our greatest concern was about separation.” Why, if Douglass is acting only in his own self-interest, should be the case?

I wonder, here, about the value and role of collective action – of the ways in which the mutual interests of individuals and of groups are made more possible through organizing, and through identification – through “rational sympathy,” to paraphrase a paraphrase of Wollstonecraft. “Their object in separating us was to hinder concert”; as I mentioned in the notes, this is the object, too, of the prohibition of reading and writing: not only might “a slave become a man” through writing himself  – i.e. develop “consciousness,” but, given the potential of reading and writing to connect individuals through space and time, to spread and weaponize it: to develop race consciousness, as well.

And, if we are to extrapolate from Douglass’ biography as well as his autobiography  –Douglass’ “fans” on the right certainly “take the liberty” (yuk yuk) – what to make of Douglass’ decision, despite great financial risk – and at the cost, moreover, of some of his closest personal/professional relationships – to start, of all things, a newspaper? Why is print so important? What can and does it do that lecturing cannot? What purpose does it serve? Who does it reach? Who is it for? And what does the concept ownership mean in this context?

…

¹ From My Bondage:

The fundamental principles of the republic, to which the humblest white man, whether born here or elsewhere, may appeal with confidence, in the hope of awakening a favorable response, are held to be inapplicable to us. The glorious doctrines of your revolutionary fathers, and the more glorious teachings of the Son of God, are construed and applied against us. We are literally scourged beyond the beneficent range of both authorities, human and divine.”

² Having escaped, eventually, on his own, Douglass is simultaneously grateful for and burdened by his “exceptionalism”; again, liberty and loneliness are linked under the conditions of white supremacy: “…the loneliness overcame me. There I was in the midst of thousands, and yet a perfect stranger; without home and without friends, in the midst of thousands of my own brethren.”

³ I want to be clear, here, that I’m not suggesting that Henny was in any way “better off” being enslaved or that I’m advancing even a sliver of a Calhoun-ish “positive good” kinda trash – only that Douglass seems to recognize the malevolence of carelessness (pretty well illustrated these days).

*Noting here the ways in which autobiography collapses subject and author – the narrative of his life vs. The Narrative of the Life; the narrative as the object of his creation vs as his real and lived experience; himself as the author of the story, and himself in the story – the distance and overlap between them, as in Sartre’s “Why Write?”: how is this related to/ interact with DuBois’ “double consciousness”? And how is Satre’s “revealing” related (or not) to Foucault’s “geneology”?

(I write this blog post in celebration of Frederick Douglass’ 200th birthday!)

The most pivotal and quotable moment in the narratives of Frederick Douglass is his declarative dialectic “You have seen how a man was made a slave; you shall see how a slave was made a man” in Narrative Of The Life Of Frederick Douglass (Douglass, Chapter X). Douglass is a fan of dialectics and peppers his narrative with them including examples like  “I began to want to live upon free land as well as with Freeland” and “I will give Mr. Freeland the credit of being the best master I ever had, till I became my own master” (Douglass, Chapter X). I argue when a black formerly enslaved man like Douglass toys with signifers (an ideal that oppresses and controls him) he can reclaim power of these relationships through his writing. If literary black consciousness is founded on how the black subject relates himself (or herself) to how they think of themselves compared to how the world thinks of them, when the black author changes the relationship of age-old dialectics created to destroy him – they can create new identity and authoritative power. I believe Douglass purposely makes himself a blank slate to be inscribed on, just to see if he can rework his relationship to the world.

In Narrative Of The Life, Douglass informs the reader that since they have seen how a man had been made a slave, he will demonstrate how a slave can be made into a man. In that statement, Douglass admits three important things – firstly, that he was a man before he was a slave and that manhood had been forcibly and purposely taken from him. Secondly, that the slave can be made back into a man – the tools are there, and the slave’s condition can be reversed once he is declared to be a man. Lastly, and most importantly, Douglass isn’t saying this to his readers with the chiding encouragement of his amenusesises. Douglass takes the authoritative mastership of announcing that you will see this. I think of this moment as Douglass pulling back the infamous “veil” of blackness to reveal manhood underneath the slave. It was invasive when his amenuseisises did it – but it seems rightful and just when he does – that’s because he is revealing his own manhood but under the terms that you define it the way that he does.

Another idea that stems from Douglass’ favor with dialectical language is his interest in the sign and the signified. For theory sake, the central claim of Ferdinand De Saussure’s Course in General Linguistics is that language is a “double entity”, “united in the brain by an associative bond” (Saussure, 852). In this, he explains language to be the unification of the “signified” – or the concept of the language – and the “signifier” – or the sound image of the word; this unification creates the “sign”(Saussure, 852). If we think of the sign of “black” to have the signified “slave” – then we build our context of blackness its relationship to pain and slavery. Douglass toys with this in the ways he allows himself to be erased and recreated for the reader. The most poignant example is Frederick Douglass’ renaming by Mr. Johnson: “I gave Mr. Johnson the privilege of choosing me a name, but told him he must not take from me the name of “Frederick.” I must hold on to that, to preserve a sense of my identity” (Douglass, Chapter XI). What I find is truly telling is the linguistic meaning of the renaming. Frederick (Bailey) Douglass, linguistically, is a name that is a double entity. The first name was given by a black mother, and the last (Bailey/Douglass) was rooted in his history as a slave. Douglass wipes himself clean – but with the mastership of a white voice. However, Douglass allows this – he creates the parameters of his own erasure. In numerous examples, Frederick Douglass is well aware of the double entities he walks – of a blackness vs. manhood, of his birth from a black mother vs. his white father, of being enslaved vs. speaking about his freedom – and toys with language to express this. He creates a new betweenness literary blackness can exist in – a literary double consciousness built on the two-headedness of being oppressed and speaking of that oppression.

As I’m evaluating your excellent posts on (mostly) Du Bois, I couldn’t help but think about a recent musical exchange that feels very Du Boisian. The first track comes from the guitarist/singer/songwriter Michael Kiwanuka, and it’s got a little late-60s Marvin Gaye to it:

The second comes from Jason Isbell, ex-guitarist for Drive-By Truckers:

The Du Boisian theme of perspective is very strong here–that we can only see a blinkered view, depending on our social location. And the theme of “second sight” as a gift as well: the struggle to reconcile the sense of one’s self with the way one appears in the eyes of the other. Isbell’s version ends up a bit preacher and more “protest songy” IMO, but both tracks try to occupy that ethical space “between the world and me” on some level.

In the introduction to The Souls of Black Folk, W.E.B. Du Bois explains that he has endeavored “to sketch, in vague uncertain outline” the content of the spiritual life of Black Americans, and has ended his chronicle with a “tale told twice but seldom written, and a chapter of song” (1) In all these opening remarks, Du Bois makes reference to the content of the Black struggle but seems to acknowledge that his transmission of it is a daunting task, and particularly in regards to the selection of a medium which conveys in full fidelity. 

The contrast between his phenotypically marked Blackness and the whiteness of his New England education make Du Bois a racially liminal subject, especially given his acute understanding of the Veil that hangs between these two worlds in America. Furthermore, Du Bois’s initial caveats suggest that there is a challenge to transmitting the experiential content of one side to the other, and vice versa. Frustrated by this lack of common tongue, he confronts “the paradox that the knowledge his people needed was a twice-told tale to his white neighbors, while the knowledge which would teach the white world was Greek to his own flesh and blood.” His absorption into white culture informs him of those tales so obvious that they are commonly repeated to white individuals but never shared with Black folks; strangely, when he speaks of the teachings that root from in his Blackness which white communities could benefit from, he frames this knowledge as “Greek” to his soul. The shadow of Classical European culture seems to tinge even Du Bois’ perception of his Black identity. 

To the white audience, the reality of Black suffering and religious life can be, at best, only “sketched” – gestured to in an affectively charged but potentially “unintelligible” fashion. The disparity in suffering makes broaching the gap between White oppression and Black experience seemingly impossible, though Du Bois tries. In attempting to pen the tale “seldom written”, he acknowledges the ontological gap between textual and oral accounts which he is up against. Turning the inscriptive apparatus on its head, he harnesses it to the end of Black liberation by the creation of this text.

However, the fact that Du Bois begins each section and finally concludes the entire work with music is not insignificant. “The passion of its human sorrow” is beyond what the colonizing means of language offer. Instead, the Black experience is sooner understood in its sonorous dimension – for instance, through its oral history, its spirituals and Sorrow Songs. With this emphasis on the voice and direct communication – unlike writing, which preserves ideas in an amber and takes them out of human circulation -oral history guarantees transmission from generation to generation, subverting the logocentrism of the Western tradition through the recourse to totalizing power of music.

Lacan theorized that identity is formed outside ourselves, at a distance: the infant begins to understand the concept of “I” through an identification with his own image in the mirror.¹ That image organizes the self into one “thing”; it presents the child as “whole” – as physically contained within the body – when she has, until this point, experienced herself as fragmented (she has no motor functions, language–she is, as Professor Allred put it – almost a force of entropy itself).  The mirror-self is a reflection, and a mirage: it is us and not-us; it is the origin of both our selfhood and our estrangement from ourselves. The body – the “thing”– becomes, per Foucault, “the locus of (this) disassociated self” which can only “adopt the illusion of a substantial unity.”

The split between self and other, and self and body – and the distinctions, if they can be made, between the body and the inscriptions done by others upon it – comes up in the DuBois, as well. Identity is shaped by looking at oneself, with the purpose of finding – forgive me! – One Self; but DuBois, instead, “ever feels his twoness, —an American, a Negro; two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings; two warring ideals in one dark body.”  The “jubilant assumption” (Lacan) of a unified identity via the body is thus complicated by – rendered impossible, actually – by the realization of the inscription of “blackness” upon it. For DuBois, there is not simply an identification and division between the self and the mirror-self (or the “dissociated self), but a further doubling: the black American must see himself “through the revelation of the other world.” He is doubly-divided –“other” than his image in the mirror and the “Other” in cultural, historical sense, creating a sort of prism in which the image of “self” is refracted, forever fragmented.

Fragmentation, dissociation: this is language of trauma. Why, then – as Prof. Allred asked – should DuBois describe this state as a “gift”? Why, even as he describes the psychological, artistic, and spiritual costs of double-consciousness – both to the individual and to the race – does he nevertheless feel “no desire to tear down that veil, to creep through”? What benefit does this “gift” convey?

The “second sight” of the black American evokes, but is not merely what we might otherwise call the “outsider’s perspective”– he is very much of the country, particular to this country: again, he is both “an American, a Negro, two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings…” This striving takes place within one “warring” body, in which the two categories that are otherwise so painstakingly and violently delineated are inescapably bound: the black American is, like the mirror-self, both me and not-me.² But the veil, ironically, reveals: it exposes not only the “fictive of unity of identity”–to be American or to be black is not just one thing or one story– but, likewise, suggests the history of the US – history itself – may (and must) be complicated, undone– “cut,” per Foucault. Perhaps this is the gif that DuBois speaks of: “He would not Africanize America, for America has too much to teach the world and Africa. He would not bleach his Negro soul in a flood of white Americanism, for he knows that Negro blood has a message for the world.”

1. Went back to my Norton Anthology for the Lacan: from  “The Mirror Stage as Formative of the Function of the I as Revealed in Psychoanalytic Experience.”
2. “…the real Other for the white man is and will continue to be the black man. And conversely. Only for the white man The Other is perceived on the level of the body image, absolutely as not-self-that is, the unidentifiable, the inassimilable.” (Fanon in Black Skin, White Masks)

Du Bois begins his first chapter, “Of Our Spiritual Strivings” with “Between me and the other world there is ever an unasked question: unasked by some through feelings of delicacy; by others through the difficulty of rightly framing it. All, nevertheless, flutter round it.” This moment sets the tone for the remainder of the chapter. The use of the word “between” as the first word of the novel shows that there is a force that separates Du Bois and the “other world”. “Between” immediately creates the separation “between” Du Bois, and who he represents, with the “other”. The use of the word “other” shows that Du Bois, and who he represents, is a part of an alternate world. With that alternate world includes an alternate identity. 

Du Bois addresses the looming question between himself and the others — which he later identifies as, “how does it feel to be a problem?” — and some-what empathizes with the “other” world’s misunderstanding for his world. He includes that there are “feelings of delicacy” and a “difficulty of rightly framing it” — including these sentiments grounds Du Bois and his arguments, as he shows his level of understanding with the other world. With that said, he uses the word “it” to emphasize this unspoken question, while harnessing this sense of passive aggressiveness that those of the other world use when facing him, a black man. In other words, the use of the word “it” uses the same obscure tactics to address issues as white Americans, by not directly addressing them. 

Du Bois doesn’t harp on the fact that white Americans believe black people (they are not yet Americans) are a problem. Importantly, Du Bois does not believe that he is a problem — he treats this moment as an opportunity to educate himself, and engage in a conversation with white Americans on the issues that haunt the US. With that said, Du Bois fears the efforts to “Africanize America,” as he particularly fears the loss of history in intersecting the white American with the black American. After the Emancipation, African Americans faced a major identity crisis, with black women facing the brunt of the terror in comparison to the men. While black men were struggling with their manhood, black woman were struggling with their womanhood, which Du Bois seems to completely ignore. 

The best work that recounts the experience of black female slaves, both during and after the Emancipation, is bell hooks’s “ain’t i a woman?” While Du Bois makes the valiant case for the freedom of life for black men, he simultaneously disregards the life of black women, which almost completely diminishes the notion of “human opportunity.” 

In W.E.B. Du Bois’ first paragraph of his book The Souls of Black Folk, he mentions the problem of the 20th century, which is the problem of the color line. Du Bois wants for his reader, specifically the white reader, to know the strife of the Black Folk in his writing. The strive that whites can’t see because of a “veil”, a “veil” that separates the blacks and the whites. Unlike the whites, the blacks are able to see through the “veil”, and they can see how the whites perceive them. Unfortunately, the whites perceive the black folk as a problem. The problem is that the whites don’t accept the blacks as part of their “species”. The problem is that white Americans don’t see the black American as being part of the Nation. A nation that has been created by the free labor of blacks during slavery, and are continually building through a “second slavery”.  Black Americans have been subordinated by a “veil” which has been created by the white people.

Du Bois states: “The Nation has not yet found peace from its sins; the freedman has not yet found in freedom his promised land” (Du Bois). Du Bois is indicating that the black folk have not yet gained true freedom, even after emancipation. To Du Bois, the Nation has not found peace from its sins, probably because the black folk are in a “second slavery” that renders black people without a voice via institutions in law and education. In Henry Louis Gates, Jr.’s “Writing ‘Race’ and the Difference it Makes”, he states: “Learning to read and to write, then, was not only difficult, it was a violation of a law” (Gates 9). Gates, let us know that Blacks weren’t allowed to learn and write since it was against the law. How are blacks going to express themselves when speaking is not enough, since “most Europeans privileged writing” (Gates 9)? Whites have created laws in order to keep the black people silenced in any way possible. The same white people who created slavery, and laws of segregation.

The problem is that the black folk have not been given the opportunity to represent themselves, they have been represented by others. Du Bois states: “The Negro is a sort of seventh son, born with a veil, and gifted with second-sight in this American world,—a world which yields him no true self-consciousness, but only lets him see himself through the revelation of the other world” (Du Bois). Unfortunately the “other world”, the white world, sees the black body as a “problem”, and inferior. Gates lets us know that Africans were perceived as inferior because the ability to read and write was viewed as a human quality that Africans lacked, and the lack of writing meant that Africans lacked “reason”. Gates indicates: “Blacks were most commonly represented on the chain either as the lowest of the human races or as first cousin to the ape. Because writing, according to Hume, was the ultimate sign of difference between animal and human” (Gates 12). The “other world”, or the world of the whites, would represent blacks as a human race that is closely related to animals. Gates and Du Bois would agree that white philosophers such as Hegel, Hume, and Kant are the ones that are part of the problem, since they provided the world with pseudoscience of why Africans are inferior. These philosopher have marked the black body as a “problem”.

When Du Bois is being asked “How does it feel to be a problem?” (Du Bois), he is being viewed as a marked body. The white people who ask him that question are assuming that he is problem, but don’t realize that the problem is their prejudice. They, the white people, don’t realize that the problem has been rooted by them through pseudoscience, slavery, segregation, and racism.