As scholars, writers, and critics we spend a significant portion of our lives thinking, talking, and writing about the past. The nature of language itself insists that we constantly grapple with history, as it requires us to define ourselves in light of or against what came before. And, as we seek to articulate ourselves (and others), and to speak about the present in any kind of coherent way, language demands that we understand the present, not as something autonomous and self-determining, but as a phenomena inextricably linked, through its own temporal constructions, with the past. In Thomas P. Anderson’s book, Performing Early Modern Trauma (an excellent work of scholarship I have mentioned before on this blog), he provides a note of caution to those who deal on a regular basis (as we all truly do, being users of language) with history. Contending that “history is always with us, even when we think we have moved on,” he encourages us to consider the perhaps inevitable distortion we perform upon the past in seeking to resurrect it. Warning against making the dead (whom we continually revive with our critical projects) “martyrs again to our own critical designs and aspirations,” Thomas discloses the anamorphic potential inherent to scholarship (as well as to all forms of utterance, I contend).
Presidential debates are fecund sites for pontificating about the past. In October, GOP candidate Mitt Romney underwent heat for his defense of corporations; in suggesting that corporations are people too, he conjured the logic not only of the Gilded Age, which first described corporations as people (more as people who could be sued, than as people who could invoke human rights), but also of the 2010 legislation that gave corporations the right to free speech (see Richard White’s October op-ed in Politico). This invocation of supreme court legislation in defense of his policy opinions acknowledges the constitution as a living document (something supreme court justice Clarence Thomas has routinely contested), and recognizes not only the debt the present owes to the past, but the nature of political rhetoric, as something which contains the potential for the anamorphic distortion Anderson describes, especially when ideologies are stake. Romney’s defense of corporations, that they are comprised of people (effectively making them human beings?), is an argument as indebted to capitalist (and democratic) ideology, as it is to the nation-building strategies employed by 16th century Protestant Reformers in England and the Catholic Church under the Pinochet regime in Chile (as per example), all of which privileged the institution at the cost of individuals. Interestingly, Romney’s comment about corporations anticipates Newt Gingrich’s recent blunder about Palestinians, as they both acknowledge a certain relationship to the past that is hopelessly tied up in dangerous political ideologies that are now (in many cases) taken for truths.
When listening to Newt Gingrich (the unfortunate Republican front-runner) speak recently about the “invented” nature of the Palestinian people, a comment which rightly awarded him significant criticism, I couldn’t help but think of American politics as the recent site of some of the most damaging and ostentatious distortions of history, and of Gingrich’s own violation, as a self-proclaimed historian, of the code of ethics Anderson prescribes. Of course the phenomena is nothing new, and Gingrich’s explicit subscription to a certain set of ideologies that defines a “people” by their status as a nation and thus as the litmus test for their legitimacy—a problematic construction at best, is typical of contemporary political rhetoric, as it soaks (and thus distorts) history in ideology, but it does make me think about what we owe to the past and why, especially as the past is always a past about people, Palestinian or otherwise, as our nation’s own complicated relationship with Israel (of which Gingrich was speaking when remarking on Palestinians) attests to. And if, as the supreme court recently ruled, a corporation can be legally defined as a person, what does that make a nation-less Palestinian? According to Gingrich, “invented.” These are important questions, and for that reason, likely ones never to be seriously addressed by any politician, much less a Romney or a Gingrich. Perhaps then we, and by we I mean individuals and institutions, should begin to reconsider what we mean when we talk about people, in order that we might know how to honestly and fruitfully speak about the past without performing the kind of violence upon it that has become paradigmatic of (specifically American) political discourse.
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