Why is it that one must know, and why is it that knowledge must come from prolonged study rather than direct, instantaneous experience?

In his Songs of Experience, Martin Jay attempts to engage with the figures that we have already seen–Benjamin, Foucault, Barthes, Scott, Derrida, etc.–as a way of understanding precisely what that term “experience” entails. Jay values a post-structuralist notion of “experience [which] involves that moment of ‘pathos’ that we have seen was one of the original Greek connotations of the term, a moment of self-surrender and passivity rather than self-productive activity,” and later compares this “experience” with both Ankersmit’s sublimity and Barthes’s punctum: “Like that shock of sublime historical experience we have seen defended by Frank Ankersmit, the punctum of the photograph interrupts all attempts to contextualize it in a single meta-narrative.”

Towards the end of a several-hundred-page-long investigation, Jay suggests that “we [should] take seriously the notion that experience in virtually all of its guises involves at least a potential learning process produced by an encounter with something new, an obstacle or a challenge that moves the subject beyond where it began,” i.e. surprise. We are dealing with the need for knowledge to save room for non-knowledge, such that “the necessity of an out-side to the interiority of the subject is hard to deny.” And, moreover, “[e]xperience is never created entirely by intentional action, many of our commentators have realized, but instead involves a kind of surrender to or dependency on what it is not, a willingness to risk losing the safety of self-sufficiency and going on a perilous journey of discovery.”

But Jay’s most novel intervention is not his adherence to what we have already seen with respect to surprise and the limits of intentionality. Jay’s most insightful claim is perhaps the declaration that “[t]he unhappy outcome of packaging experience into a commodity to be bought and sold takes us to one last critical issue, the function of experiential legitimation in identity politics disputes. For it is precisely the claim to exclusive ownership of an experience, shared only with members of one’s group, that defines the way it serves to cut short the possibility of including others in a conversation. That is, it seeks to have its past experience recognized as an unimpeachable source of group identity in the present, refusing to risk leaving the comfort of safe harbors for a new journey.” The need to have “past experience recognized” shares many similarities with Butler’s own critique of essentialized identity politics as a form of “attachment,” a critique that stems from Wendy Brown’s analysis of ressentiment in “Wounded Attachments.” [Worth noting, because, again,  attachment is brought into the conversation as an abstract principle of object relations rather than a physiological pattern as per Bowlby.]

Jay probably has in mind the kind of unproductive seminar conversants who argue, adamantly, “you could never understand what I’ve been through; you don’t know my experience!” He is remarking, like Scott, that such deference to an ‘unassailable’ experience prevents the possibility for democratic communication: “it serves to cut short the possibility of including others in a conversation.” In one sense, Jay is operating from the Marxist critique–one that we have already seen in Benjamin’s notions of aura and translation–against the idea that it is possible to “packag[e] experience into a commodity to be bought and sold.” At the same time, untranslatability can be as problematic as translatability, because it should not be taken for granted that one can succeed in one’s “claim to exclusive ownership of an experience.” [And we might remember how the matter of translatability and untranslatability is unresolved, is a problematic that haunts Derrida’s oeuvre where trace is both stasis and movement.]

In the end, one finds that Jay puts–perhaps accidentally–theory into the cross-hairs of his own critique. Jay ends Songs of Experience with an apology: “In my introduction, written too many years ago to admit without embarrassment, I said that I expected that ‘the experience of writing Songs of Experience may lead me where I do not expect to go.’ This has indeed been the case, but the trip is still, I hope, not entirely over. Those of you who have been hearty enough to read this far—those of you, that is, who are the others making my own experience possible and whose experiences I hope will be enriched in return—are thanked for their endurance, and warmly invited to come along as the ride continues.” The irony is that the process of reading several hundred pages is a difficult experience–indeed, Jay describes it like an arduous journey toward discovery–and may therefore serve the function of establishing a coterie which “seeks to have its past experience[, the ‘past experience’ of endless hours in the library,] recognized as an unimpeachable source of group identity in the present,” an unimpeachable group of experts/intellectuals/theorists/dialecticians.

We can perhaps find an example of this “unimpeachable source of group identity” in the contemporary debates over whether the humanities have a responsibility towards those who do not or even cannot read theory. Is it, as many critics vociferously claim, that theorists do not write clearly enough? To some extent, I assent: I say yes, theory could be more approachable. To some extent, I dissent: I say no, people have a responsibility to try, to read what is difficult. Indeed, Butler has found herself at the center of this debate, as someone whose theories are insightful and worth reading, and as someone whose writing could be improved.

Let’s avoid “cumbersome arguments” and give examples for what we mean. Butler received a “Bad Writing Award” for the sentence: “The move from a structuralist account in which capital is understood to structure social relations in relatively homologous ways to a view of hegemony in which power relations are subject to repetition, convergence, and rearticulation brought the question of temporality into the thinking of structure, and marked a shift from a form of Althusserian theory that takes structural totalities as theoretical objects to one in which the insights into the contingent possibility of structure inaugurate a renewed conception of hegemony as bound up with the contingent sites and strategies of the rearticulation of power.”

Joining the criticism of such an award, Martha Nussbaum wrote a deriding article about Butler, “The Professor of Parody.” [We should keep in mind what we have already said about parody, particularly as it relates to Derrida.] Remaking on the above sentence, Nussbaum claims that “Butler [should] have written: ‘Marxist accounts, focusing on capital as the central force structuring social relations, depicted the operations of that force as everywhere uniform. By contrast, Althusserian accounts, focusing on power, see the operations of that force as variegated and as shifting over time.’”

Nussbaum’s version is far more accessible (at least to me), though it does not exactly explain why later forms of class-analysis began to see “operations of that [capital?] force as variegated and as shifting over time.” Butler explains that class-analysis changed to meet the need of understanding “hegemony as bound up with the contingent sites and strategies of the rearticulation of power.” Hegemony re-articulates itself, because the “self”-preservation of power involves creating new institutions/bureaucrats/laws/adjudications that occupy the space of hegemony. Moreover, Nussbaum’s reading does not display fidelity to Butler’s statement: if Butler is saying that the shift from structuralist synchrony to later diachrony is “a shift [away] from a form of Althusserian theory,” then it is not fair to say that “Althusserian accounts” “see the operations of that force as variegated and as shifting over time.” Nussbaum is too simplistic in assuming that Marx is anti-capitalist theory-1 while Althusser is anti-capitalist theory-2. Butler probably has in mind not the shift from Marx to Althusser, but the shift from Althusser to Foucault, Derrida and other post-structuralists–or, at least, “a shift from a form of Althusser,” from Althusser’s early work to his later contributions.

It is also important to note the irony where Nussbaum shows a passage in which Butler includes a series of questions, then follows up on this passage by asking: “Why does Butler prefer to write in this teasing, exasperating way?” If one is to take Nussbaum’s critique of contemporary continental/critical theory seriously, then any defense of theory has to take into account the criticism that continuous reference to a certain group of authors evades the comprehension of an audience that has not also read from those authors, as well as the criticism that including questions in one’s writing may be an inutile practice. Although, it should be noted that the latter claim is severely undercut by Nussbaum’s own rhetorical question.

Butler’s defense tends to rely on Adorno, especially on passages from his Minima Moralia. In Giving an Account of Oneself, Butler features the short epigraph from Adorno: “The value of thought is measured by its distance from the continuity of the familiar.”

In “Bad Writing,” Butler includes a much longer passage from Minima Moralia: “A writer will find that the more precisely, conscientiously, appropriately he expresses himself, the more obscure the literary result is thought whereas a loose and irresponsible formulation is at once rewarded with certain understanding. It avails nothing ascetically to avoid all technical expressions, all allusions to spheres of culture that no longer exist. Rigour and purity in assembling words, however simple the result, create a vacuum. Shoddiness that drifts with the flow of familiar speech is taken as a sign of relevance and contact: people know what they want because they know what other people want. Regard for the object, rather than for communication, is suspect in any expression: anything specific not taken from pre-existent patterns, appears inconsiderate, a symptom of eccentricity, almost of confusion. The logic of the day, which makes so much of its clarity, has naively adopted this perverted notion of everyday speech. Vague expression permits the hearer to imagine whatever suits him and what he already thinks in any case. Rigorous formulation demands unequivocal comprehension, conceptual effort, to which people are deliberately discouraged, and imposes on them in advance of any content a suspension of all received opinions, and thus an isolation, that they violently resist. Only what they do not need first to understand, they consider understandable, only the word coined by commerce, and really alienated, touches them as familiar. Few things contribute so much to the demoralization of intellectuals. Those who would escape it must recognize the advocates of communicability as traitors to what they communicate.”

In “A ‘Bad Writer’ Bites Back,” Butler’s use of Adorno is more accessible: “The philosopher Theodor W. Adorno, who maintained that nothing radical could come of common sense, wrote sentences that made his readers pause and reflect on the power of language to shape the world. A sentence of his such as ‘Man is the ideology of dehumanization’ is hardly transparent in its meaning. Adorno maintained that the way the word ‘man’ was used by some of his contemporaries was dehumanizing.

Taken out of context, the sentence may seem vainly paradoxical. But it becomes clear when we recognize that in Adorno’s time the word ‘man’ was used by humanists to regard the individual in isolation from his or her social context. For Adorno, to be deprived of one’s social context was precisely to suffer dehumanization. Thus, ‘man’ is the ideology of dehumanization.”

We have already seen how Butler privileges disjunction to the continuity of narrative, and how this disjunction relates to her political views. Her allegiance to Adorno’s anti-consumerist version of Marxism should therefore not be surprising. But it is worth noting the extent to which Adorno’s diatribes against “The Culture Industry,” against people who cannot understand, may serve to deny his own need to be comprehended by others. When he says that we “must recognize the advocates of communicability as traitors to what they communicate,” we can see a continuation of the argument against translatability. As Jay, himself a deep reader of Adorno, says, there is an “unhappy outcome of packaging experience into a commodity to be bought and sold.” But there is a tension at the other end, insofar as the argument in favor of untranslatability may serve to reinforce the “claim to exclusive ownership of an experience, shared only with members of one’s group,” a group that “seeks to have its past experience recognized as an unimpeachable source of group identity in the present,” and which therefore “serves to cut short the possibility of including others in a conversation.”

If Nussbaum’s critique is that many theorists rely too much on their audience having a familiarity with the same authors and cultural touchstones, then this is a valid critique, especially if Butler feels that she must cite Adorno to defend herself. As Butler herself notes, Adorno’s statement about the dehumanization of man becomes incomprehensible to those not already familiar with the work of a specific milieu of twentieth century humanists. I can agree with Adorno when he claims that “[i]t avails nothing ascetically to avoid all technical expressions,” insofar as technical expressions evoke necessary narratives for comprehension, and such expressions can be defined for a common audience; however, I do not understand his subsequent defense of “all allusions to spheres of culture that no longer exist.” As we have already seen, “arguing that the original cannot be transported without deformity can give one license to say brusquely, without explanation, ‘go to the original.'”

We might ask ourselves whether the literary text is always superior to the theoretical text, insofar as the literary text seeks to make itself accessible to as many readers as possible, without losing access to the richness of experience. As a rare act of deference, Jay even begins his book with a statement that seems to indicate that literature is superior to theory: “Calling this book Songs of Experience will be understood, I hope, more as an act of homage than as a gesture of hubristic appropriation. William Blake’s justly celebrated poem cycle of the same name, counterpoised as it was to his Songs of Innocence, provides insights into what he called ‘the Two Contrary States of the Soul’ that a sober scholarly treatise can only hope in vain to emulate. No prose ‘Tyger’ will ever blaze as brightly in the night as did his poetry, no academic worm-eaten ‘Rose’ ever seem as sickly. With their brilliant explorations of the religious, political, moral, and psychological implications of the Fall from grace, Blake’s poems set a standard that only the most foolhardy would try to emulate.” Is it that poetry is more immediate to the soul, like an instantaneous song? Or is is that great poems can be read endlessly, in ways that merely “sober” “scholarly” or “academic” “prose” writing cannot?

In thinking of the problematic use of untranslatability, we are being brought back to the potential narcissism, or the narcissistic use, of the deconstructive gesture. It remains apparent that Derrida did a poor job of demonstrating humility, if his intention was to demonstrate the fallibility of any philosophy or system (see especially his claim that “deconstruction is justice.”) This is particularly true when we take into account the deference in Jay’s tone when compared to Derrida’s. There is an extent to which Derrida could have said, “I’m not sure, but I intend to…” Indeed, Martin Hagglund is one reader of Derrida who views himself as fulfilling the task of Derrida’s own work, by systematizing it into a religious/moral/political/aesthetic theory; see Radical Atheism: Derrida and the Time of Life and This Life: Secular Faith and Spiritual Freedom.

D.T. Max’s review of Hagglund indicates, again, that these male writers are consistently failing in either humility or self-awareness. “One can’t dispel the suspicion that the ideal life Hägglund is envisaging is something like his own—ethically and intellectually satisfying work, pursued as a worthy end in itself, with plenty of freedom and vacation time (though institutionally dependent on a busy, fertile capitalism). To be fair, one could say the same of Camus, when he asserts, in ‘The Myth of Sisyphus,’ that ‘the absurd man’ should try out, in the name of freedom, a variety of roles: the conqueror, the seducer, the actor, and the writer. Camus knew quite a lot about the last three of those roles.” It should be noted that the jump from Hagglund to Camus, even though the two have/had “philosopher” as their listed occupation, is somewhat ignorant of the history of philosophy, is therefore incautious; however, it is not an unfitting comparison.

Before addressing the Myth of Sisyphus mentioned above, I want to take a detour through another of Camus’s books: my favorite. Sales of Camus’s The Plague have been increasing as of late, mostly due to advertisers peddling the book as a way that one can come to understand the present conditions of the Covid-19 pandemic. But, before this pandemic, I once listened to a speech delivered by the then-president of “Doctors Without Borders,” Joanne Liu, who said that The Plague convinced her to become a doctor. She said that the most meaningful line, to her, was what Dr. Rieux says: “I’ve never managed to get used to seeing people die. That’s all know.”

The line is useful for understanding Camus’s own philosophy of the absurd, mentioned by D.T. Max, and how it pertains to what we have already said of surprise, of knowledge’s need to save room for non-knowledge, i.e. there is an important parallel between “All I know is that I never can get used to death” and “All I know is that I know nothing.” According to Camus, life is absurd–has no final or definitive meaning–and it is up to us to figure out a way of coming to terms with that. The dream is lost as soon as we come to pretend, or even come to believe, that we understand; the absurd is something to be faced, never forgotten. Camus uses the Myth of Sisyphus to describe this absurdity: like Sisyphus who rolls his boulder up the hill only for it to fall every time, who must do the whole thing over again, who must act as if somehow this time it will remain atop the hill, so too are our actions as repetitive as they are futile. But, in the face of such inexplicable futility, Camus assures us: “we must imagine Sisyphus happy.”

It is important to note that Dr. Rieux achieves his particular relation to the absurd through his relationship with other people; his absurdity shares something in common with the Otherness of the Other. No matter what, I can never fully understand the other person, certainly cannot understand their pained faces, their deaths. In the cases of Derrida and Levinas, the relationship to the face is a relationship to someone who will consistently surprise; from their writings on women, we might take it for granted that their wives were precisely such a source of surprise, as someone ever-present but ever-unknowable. Hans Ruin’s Being with the Dead even remarks on the extent to which Derrida and Levinas take more seriously the task of responding to the Other’s death, the task of mourning, than philosophers traditionally do. Although, we might use the status of women in their work as a way to question how effectively they achieved the mourning, or at least the listening to the Other, that they prescribed.

It is also worth noting the extent to which Ruin attempts to distance himself from Derrida and Levinas. If Derrida and Levinas too commonly use the term responsibility instead of responsiveness to refer to how successors may be put in the position of responding to or for their predecessors, then Ruin has in mind the fact that one’s debts are not always to the dead: “[Instead of using the term responsibility like Derrida and Levinas,] it is perhaps more appropriate to speak of responsiveness since “responsibility” promises to translate into moral and legal rules. In the domain of being with the dead there is no certainty or definitive rules. In the end, we can never really know what we owe the dead or what they demand from us.” Put more simply, Derrida and Levinas do not sufficiently problematize the issue of tradition and ancestrality, perhaps because of their status as survivors of Jewish persecution: a survivor’s guilt.

As an example of (what I am calling) survivor’s guilt, Ruin tries to problematize the relationship to the dead with a dialogue between Antigone and Ismene, where Ismene catches her sister Antigone about to leave to bury their brothers, an outlawed burial for which Antigone is likely to die. Ismene reproaches her for deciding to bury them, begs her to stay: “What comfort is my life if you leave me?” Ruin seems to side with Ismene as he describes Antigone as “cold and full of scorn for the sister, whom she leaves behind to mourn her.” Ruin explains that this “dialogue between the sisters gives us a concentrated microcosm of the inner pathology of how the living can be claimed by the dead and forced to choose sides[: between the living and the dead].” Ruin repeatedly references this Sophie’s choice, this scene of choosing between loved ones, in this case the living and dead, and explains that Sophocles “depicts and uses the tension between the sisters to say something meaningful about the living and the dead and the limits of the former’s commitments to the latter.” Ruin ends his book with the reminder that “a reading was proposed that focuses on the dialogue and conflict between the sisters” so that “there is an inherent ethical and political ambiguity” in one’s relationship to “the claims of the dead.” Clearly, answers are not offered, only questions– perhaps because “[i]n the domain of being with the dead there is no certainty or definitive rules.”

Though he glosses the dilemma of choosing between the living and the no-longer living, Ruin does not himself engage with the possibility of natality or futurity; he mentions those who live here and those having-been here, but I cannot find his engagement with the not-yet living. The absence of children is a noteworthy lacuna, as child-rearing forms a substantial way that people engage their responsibility to the dead as well as their responsibility to the living. Victims of oppression, or the descendants of victims, may often feel that they need to have or raise children, and then one must ask whether these ought to be genetic children, and how one is to engage with them. Current disputes among colonizing, capital-owning classes and the colonized proletariat are not merely over burial, nor even over representation, but over reproduction itself. Who has the right to reproduce and how? What do we owe the not-yet living and should we even have children? And what do we owe the living, the children who are already here?

It may be the case that (at least part of) the way that we deal with the incomprehensibility of our own desire, our ability to know what it is we want, is to make it so that we want what the other wants. Those familiar with psychoanalytic literature might take this to be a restatement of people’s need  to be dominated, led, dictated: an immature adolescent’s fear of supposed “adult” independence. (See Foucault’s claim that there is “the fascism in us all, in our heads and in our everyday behavior, the fascism that causes us to love power, to desire the very thing that dominates and exploits us.”) But, if we look at the example of Dr. Rieux, wanting what the other wants does not need to be a move towards authoritarianism; moreover, I have in mind the extent to which the standard markers of adulthood, as responsibilities, are purposeful moves towards dependence.

If, like Dr. Rieux, I always act according to the principle that I will offer children medical attention, then I have enough room for continuous thought/questioning; “How am I to save/help this child?” may be much easier for me to navigate than the more nebulous “How am I to live?” It may even be that many people have children because they struggle to answer the question “How am I to live?” and so they therefore desire to replace this question with the easier: “How am I to care for my child?” Of course, it remains to be seen who can or should be the other person that continues to surprise us. Why does it have to be my child or my wife, or whatever the case may be? Is it that what matters is a certain history, a shared experience, by which I/we develop “an unimpeachable source of group identity in the present”?

Clearly, Dr. Rieux is not alone in the structure by which he has created his life. D.T. Max is right, though, to point out that Camus was not the president of Doctors Without Borders, even if his words inspired one. Instead, he chose to approach the absurd through writing, which is how we have come to know him. While Italo Calvino has written about inaccurate language as a “plague” in his Six Memos, it is a bit of a stretch to say that creating new narratives, phrases, uses of language is comparable to offering medical attention to someone who direly needs it.

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What is the relationship between writing and medicine? Well, it might help if we go to Chekov, who was himself a doctor in addition to a writer. He once said, in a letter to his friend Alexei Suvorin, in 1888, “medicine is my lawful wife and literature my mistress.” Though this comparison might indicate that literature is secondary to medicine, it at least serves to maintain a difference between them. In another letter to Suvorin, that same year, Chekov explains how, against his “literary colleagues,” he “always insist[ed] that it is not the artist’s business to solve problems that require a specialist’s knowledge,” because “it is a bad thing if a writer tackles a subject he does not understand.” In other words, he felt that medical textbooks cannot be turned into literature as we commonly understand it, nor could literature be used as textbooks.

Chekov explained in greater detail the difference between “the artist’s business” and the “specialist’s knowledge”: “You[, Suvorin,] are confusing two notions, the solution of a problem and the correct posing of the question. Only the second is essential for the artist.” Solutions require a particular relationship to an environment, like the “specialist’s knowledge,” and the writer inherently lacks any such tethers to the object of fictional writing. So while the degree to which a writer can delimit possibilities is not as fine as a point, it is not completely open; rather, it is somewhat bounded into the form of a “correct posing of the question.”

Chekov ultimately compares his business as a writer, who governs the thought of his readers, with that of a judge who governs the behaviors of a court. With this jurisprudential metaphor, we might hear echoes of Derrida and his distinction between deconstructive interpretation and non-deconstructive application of the law. Chekov writes: “It is the business of the judge to put the right questions, but the answers must be given by the jury according to their own lights.” So, in managing between science and the humanities, we find ourselves reduced to the formulation of proper questions.

In his letter, Chekov seems to counteract, in advance, the possibility that writing could be possible without a question. As he explains it, “[a]n artist observes, selects, guesses, combines—and this in itself presupposes a problem: unless he had set himself a problem from the very first there would be nothing to conjecture and nothing to select.” He even decides to use “the language of psychiatry,” which declares “that creative work involves problems and purposes,” such that “if an author boasted to me of having written a novel without a preconceived design, under a sudden inspiration, I should call him mad.” While more contemporary theorists would place stress on how there is madness in all things, insofar as no one is ever successfully able to explain the “preconceived design” for one’s actions, Chekov takes a different tact.

We find the same themes of writerly intention and disease repeated in a later letter to Suvorin, in 1892. This time, Chekov’s letter compares the desire to make art to a dis-ease. Chekov explains that there is “a disease which for the artist is worse than syphilis or sexual exhaustion. We lack ‘something,’ that is true, and that means that, lift the robe of our muse, and you will find within an empty void.” Lifting veils and dealing with dis-ease, are we dealing again with the ineffability of the Other? This later letter is deeply puzzling, as it presents many ambivalences within Chekov.

This enigmatic ‘we’ may be taken to be Chekov’s “contemporaries—that is, [literary] men between thirty and forty-five” who have not “given the world one single drop of alcohol” but merely “paint life as it is, but beyond that—nothing at all.” Chekov castigates Suvorin: “You are a hard drinker, and I have regaled you with sweet lemonade, and you, after giving the lemonade its due, justly observe that there is no spirit in it.”

Alcohol is not to be found in Chekov nor his contemporaries, but in “the writers, who we say are for all time or are simply good, and who intoxicate [emphasis mine] us,” and “are going towards something and are summoning you towards it, too,” such that “you feel not with your mind, but with your whole being, that they have some object, just like the ghost of Hamlet’s father, who did not come and disturb the imagination for nothing.” We might understand this alcohol better insofar as even a ‘realist’ like Tolstoy can “have more immediate objects—the abolition of serfdom, the liberation of their country, politics, beauty, or simply vodka,” as well as “remote objects—God, life beyond the grave, the happiness of humanity, and so on.” This particular kind of realism is at issue, because even though the best of these realists “paint life as it is,” “you feel, besides life as it is, the life which ought to be, and that captivates you.”

One could therefore diagnose the realists as diseased, mad, drunkards, because they act as if they grasped something that is still ineffable, and therefore do not quite succeed as realists. In the language of the earlier letter, they act as if they had solutions instead of questions. But, the writers of Chekov’s day are better because their writing does not display “immediate nor remote aims,” because these writers “have no politics,” “do not believe in revolution,” “have no God,” “are not afraid of ghosts, and I [Chekov] personally [among them] am not afraid even of death and blindness.”

Yet, it is also possible that Chekov’s brand of artist is diseased, insofar as “in our soul there is a great empty space.” As he puts it, the artists of his day are diseased because “[w]e lack ‘something,’ that is true, and that means that, lift the robe of our muse, and you will find within an empty void.” The artist may be diseased; but, so, too, the absence of art appears to be a melancholy disease. Chekov’s contemporaries may be diseased because “[o]ne who wants nothing, hopes for nothing, and fears nothing, cannot be an artist.” Yet, Chekov seems to hold on to this model of writing because “whether it is a disease or not—what it is does not matter.” Even though the artist’s “position is worse than a governor’s,” because today’s artists “write mechanically, merely obeying the long-established arrangement in accordance with which some men go into the government service, others into trade, others write,” Chekov seems to support sober bureaucracy, a steady-paying job, over a crazed intoxication.

Chekov explains that he is “at least so far clever as not to conceal from [him]self [his] disease, and not to deceive [him]self, and not to cover up [his] own emptiness with other people’s rags, such as the [utopian Socialist] ideas [from Russian thinkers] of the [eighteen] sixties, and so on.” Just as Camus thinks that one has to be an absurd hero to accept the world as it is, Chekov seems to be saying that there is something heroically mad in secular sanity. As he puts it: “I am not going to throw myself like Garshin over the banisters, but I am not going to flatter myself with hopes of a better future either.” Then the absurd hero encounters the irony of his own absurdity: “I am not to blame for my disease, and it’s not for me to cure myself, for this disease, it must be supposed, has some good purpose hidden from us, and is not sent in vain.” It’s his own absurdity because Chekov’s description of his disease, as “not sent in vain,” ends up perfectly mirroring the condition of other Christian or Marxist or Utopian writers that “have some object, just like the ghost of Hamlet’s father, who did not come and disturb the imagination for nothing.”

In yet another letter Chekov rejects the idea that his writing is diseased: “I believe I am mentally sound. It is true I have no special desire to live, but that is not, so far, disease, but something probably passing and natural.” Although, Constance Garnett, Chekov’s translator, disagrees: “It is quite possible that if Chekhov had taken care of himself his disease would not have developed so rapidly or proved fatal. The feverish energy of his temperament, his readiness to respond to every impression, and his thirst for activity, drove him from south to north and back again, regardless of his health and of the climate. Like all invalids, he ought to have gone on living in the same place, at Nice or at Yalta, until he was better, but he lived exactly as though he had been in good health.”

What we have at hand are the detriments that occur when ambition prevents sight, such that one is “not afraid even of death and blindness,” such that abstraction removes necessary texture. Perhaps because of his literary ambition, Chekov was not, as Garnett claims, able to see to his own body. Such a state is similar to the madness that Chekov describes, when a writer struggles to be self-present, is unable to say to himself the reasons for which he writes. Writing should be didactic, but this does not mean that writing must be simple or without narrative. Rather, the difficulty is to construct a question that is meaningful.

At hand is a particular relationship between questions and the writer’s narrative, where narrative itself is regarded as a kind of question, such that the totality of a writer’s narrative amounts to the correct posing of the question. We might therefore say that questions are intrinsically narrativistic, and require a level of scale and scope that statements do not. Questions leave blank spaces, in that they do not fill in what is unknown, and create blank space, in that their conjunctive synthesis is what creates room for speculation.

Given that Chekov puts questions in an entirely different ontological realm from solutions/statements, it is worth mulling over what precisely comprises a question. Indeed, the epoché of the question plays a particularly important role in recent philosophy’s ethics concerning discourse, and we have seen it throughout the ambigrams of Derrida, White, Butler, and Kleinberg.

Agamben has himself, I think unsuccessfully, tried to argue that commandments are separate from statements, that the imperative mood is ontologically distinct from the indicative. Notably, both the imperative command “Duck!” and the indicative statement “[It’s] Above you!” work in eliciting someone’s response. I think that the distinction can also be meaningfully dismissed through gerundives. “Take this turn” and “this is the turn [to be taken]” both function when indicating directions.

The difference, if there is a difference, is that imperatives often carry a sense of urgency that most statements lack. In other words, imperatives are combinatory entities that carry an indicative statement regarding an action as well as another statement regarding the value of that action. “Wash the dishes!” is almost always, tacitly, accompanied with an or else statement, which indicates that “something bad will happen if you do not wash the dishes.” When the speaker looks fearful “something bad” is more readily taken to be something outside the speaker’s control; but, when showing an angry face, the speaker seems to threaten to cause that “something bad.”

In fact, a common issue in family therapy is that most adults forget how imperatives function as combinations. While the speaker might be aware of the negative consequences of (in)action, imperatives rarely convey these negative consequences to the person to whom they are addressed. People learn far better from statements like “if you do not wash the dishes, I will have to do them, and will then be far too tired to take you where you want to go tomorrow.” Admittedly, defining carefully what one means requires far more work on the parent in the short-term, but will lead to greater long-term results as their children begin to learn consequences: the options within which they have to choose. This small example gives an indication of how often people fail in communication, and how the ethics of discourse is perhaps not taken as seriously as it should be. Hence the need for literature to cor-rect language, to speak di-rectly, to offer the “correct posing of the question.”

I should also point out that I do not think that there are statements which are individual atoms and value judgements which are combinatory molecules. No, I take seriously the idea that nothing is accessed in isolation, and indeed this is part of Derrida’s notion of trace as arche-writing. There is always a webbing, a residue, that sticks to our linguistic offerings and makes them more than we mean them to be. All statements are combinatory.

The issue is not how we can make statements that are not combinatory, but how we can make sure that the combinatory components are as explicit as possible. The person who gives commands instead of consequences is as dangerous as the judge who gives the jury a decision instead of the “correct posing of the question.” We have at hand a particular way that questions can be less punctual [less “point-like”] than statements, though they are themselves bounded. And this brings us back to the origins of this inquiry: the trace as a kind of fragment, the fragmentarity of the fragment, what gives us an idea of something as partial, as a piece of a greater vessel. The fragment allows us to deal with Derrida’s dilemma of having the trace as stasis and as movement. The fragmentary trace is not so static as to be a point, not so mobile as to be unbounded–something of a balance between between presence and absence: the silhouette of desire.

And if questions are representative of this fragmentariness, then I therefore do think that there is something ontologically distinct about interrogatives when compared to indicatives or imperatives.

In a sense, it is true, questions are always imperatives insofar as they can be translated as “tell me about X” or even “think about X.” But the imperatives to speak or to think are significantly different from other worldly actions. “Tell me about” or “think about” are inherently unbounded actions. If I ask you to pick up the keys, I know what you will do; although, if I ask you to tell me what you think, I do not know what you will say. Similarly, I can represent my command as my asking you to do something. We are dealing with the difference between asking for something and asking something.

We might also think of how difficult a good question is to find. Many of those who ask “questions” at the end of a lecture really are stating their own experiences or beliefs. Questioners at the end of a lecture really want to offer their own perspective; if they are asking a question, they are only asking “How does your view change when you encounter my own thinking?”, “Did you already have access to my knowledge?”, “Am I right?” By virtue either of the content of one’s lecture, or the very form of standing before the podium, the presenter has come to occupy a scene of importance in the audience’s mind, such that the audience now feels the need to ask for approval. They are asking for something; they are not asking something.

It is often stated, I think incorrectly, that the post-lecture questioner just wants to be heard, just wants to hear himself (indeed it is often a “he”) speak. No, the speaker wants to hear something in return; but, it is true that he is limited in what he is willing to hear. The speech is always tied to a request, and this is the request for approval. Unfortunately, to ask for approval is impossible, particularly in such circumstances; it requires experience to approve of a person–even then, approval is always subject to revision. The post-lecture questioner is often dealing with the unseemly reality of not being at the podium, of partaking in a crowd that has just listened to someone else speak for a considerable length of time uninterrupted, and therefore fears the possibility that there may be whole crowds of people whose thoughts are less useful than a single expert’s, and therefore fears that–as part of the crowd–one’s own speech may be inutile. The questioner may therefore fail to pose to himself the question, “what does this event do to what I previously knew?” The questioner’s failure to resolve this question internally is yet more proof that people fail constantly in synthetic judgment, and that is why merely listening to the lecturer rarely suffices to make one capable of being the next lecturer.

In other words, I am saying that requests for approval–though they masquerade as questions: “am I right to think…?” “is it okay if…?” “do I deserve to be here?”–are really imperatives demanding reassurance. Questions worthy of being considered questions offer a platform upon which the other may think; they do not circumscribe a set of actions, such as the binary of “yes” or “no.” We might also say that, if every statement is addressed from one to another, has an intended response in or from the other, then questions differ from statements in that their intended responses are always more explicit. If both questions and statements are combinatory, then both have blank spaces, where the blank space of a statement comprises the internal regions of subtext/implication/assumption; the difference is that questions make one’s blank spaces visible. But how is one to have one’s questions, not statements, published?

If the function of the public presenter of discourse–whether we call this an academic, a historian, a philosopher, a theorist, a preacher, a teacher, etc.–is to instill useful patterns of thought in an audience, then it seems that questions would serve precisely this function. “These are the questions one should ask oneself.” Or, “these are the questions I am asking myself.” “This is that towards which I think the current human capacities for thought should be directed.” It is worth noting that, in his analysis of discourse, White only includes figurative statements, whether they be metaphors, metonymies, synecdoches, or ironies. This is particularly troubling since White declared that “the stylistic device of Ironic language” is “the rhetorical figure of aporia (literally ‘doubt’), in which the author signals in advance as real or feigned disbelief in the truth of his own statements.” Is this “real or feigned disbelief” not what we have seen in the ambigrammatic question which can be read both rhetorically and sincerely?

The need to have a properly bounded question is also at play when Butler feels that she cannot give an adequate account for all of the humanities, especially when she does not even know who has addressed the question to her. Similarly, the proper boundedness of the question, of the scene of response, is at play when Butler is managing between the transcendent and the sensible aspects of Levinas’s notion of the face. We have already seen how Butler “makes the argument that ‘it is not enough to say, in a Levinasian vein, that the claim [of responsibility for other people] is made upon me prior to my knowing,’ because, while that is ‘formally true,’ its ‘truth is of no use.’ One has to acknowledge that ‘the claim of the other upon me takes place, when it takes place, through the senses, which are crafted in part through various forms of media: the social organization of sound and voice, of image and text, of tactility and smell.'”

So, it is worth noting that Levinas’s inquiry on the face nowhere inspires in him a desire to clinically research how faces affect human emotion and development. Indeed, we might refer back to how Collingwood considered the need for historical research to be motivated, always, by clearly posed questions, and considered these questions “scientific.” When Jay cites Francis Bacon in Songs of Experience, or when he writes that “we [should] take seriously the notion that experience in virtually all of its guises involves at least a potential learning process produced by an encounter with something new,” we may be dealing with the extent to which the humanities–perhaps unwittingly–prove the need for the scientific method.

Although, the issue is still blurry: though he studied medicine, if we believe Garnett, Chekov did not sufficiently listen to his own body, but was instead absorbed in his literary ambitions, perhaps intoxicated by them, such that “if Chekhov had taken care of himself his disease would not have developed so rapidly or proved fatal.” Indeed, the humanities often find themselves trapped between the specific demands of the body and the abstract search for moral principles. However, the recent rise of affect theory has supported identifying the demands of the body as the humanities’ proper intellectual pursuit.

It is worth noting the turn by which Eve Sedgwick began to incorporate the science of affect into her work on queer theory; we might even regard this as a natural turn, because, if affect theory is a way of reading the body, Sedgwick’s avowal of affect aids in queer theory’s quest to document unexpected and disavowed sources of pleasure. In fact, in Sedgwick’s seminal essay on affect theory, she relies on Silvan Tomkins, who was among the first to study the impact of facial expressions on emotion. Sedgwick claims that Tomkins “seems to challenge these habits and procedures” of contemporary theory, and therefore is “a figure whom such habits and procedures would tend sharply to rebuke.” “You don’t have to be long out of kindergarten to make mincemeat of, let’s say, a psychology that depends on the separate existence of eight (only sometimes it’s nine) distinct affects hardwired into the human biological system.” Yet Tomkins succeeds, through clinical observation, to achieve a “formidably rich phenomenology of emotions” and this achievement is not “in any accidental or separable relation to his highly suspect scientism.” There is a “double-movement” involved, such that “his scientism seems to interpret as an alternative and far coarser scientism the very theory that would find his so easy to dismiss.”

It should be no surprise that the other major advocate of affect theory, Brian Massumi, makes such heavy use of Deleuze. In Anti-Oedipus, Deleuze (and Guattari) had already addressed the potential for deconstruction to omit worldly observation. As Derrida put it, “in all scientific fields, notably in biology, this notion [of the presence of the present] seems currently to be dominant and irreducible.” Unlike Derrida, Deleuze (with Guattari) makes constant reference to biology and ethology, as well as the natural sciences more broadly. Deleuze might therefore take more seriously than Derrida the human body’s existence as a body.

Deleuze (with Guattari) supports Derrida’s idea of the trace or arche-writing: “Jacques Derrida is correct in saying that every language presupposes a writing system from which it originates, if by that he means the existence and the connection of some sort of graphism—writing in the largest sense of the term.” But this notion of writing can itself become transcendental, because, though Derrida describes how “difference we ascertain progressively cannot be thought without the trace,” Deleuze counters that “[i]t might be said of th[e] eye that it sees the word–it sees it, it does not read it.” Under Derrida, Deleuze claims, “[t]he signifier is the sign that has become a sign of the sign, the despotic sign having replaced the territorial sign, having crossed the threshold of deterritorialization; the signifier is merely the deterritorialized sign itself. The sign made letter.” The eye which sees instead of reads, which has access to words instead of mere letters, is not this “deterritorialized sign” but is rather “the primitive territorial sign” which “is self-validating” because “[i]t is not a sign of a sign nor a desire of a desire.”

To put it differently, Derrida’s critique demonstrated how the search for meaning prevented observation; deconstruction originally relied on how supposed access to meaning, to a signified, prevented the observation of signifiers. But Deleuze is quick to point out how “the signifier does not appear to keep its promise,” but instead reinforces the “imperialism” of the question “What does it mean?” and therefore “render[s] all the answers insufficient” in advance “by relegating them to the status of a simple signified.”

Sedgwick notes a “double-movement” “whereby [Tomkins’]s scientism seems to interpret as an alternative and far coarser scientism the very theory that would find his so easy to dismiss.” Similarly, Deleuze argues that deconstruction “challenges exegesis in the name of recitation, pure textuality, and superior ‘scientificity.'” At work is the issue of abstraction, of the need for moral principles, whereby “[d]esire no longer dares to desire, having become a desire of desire.”

But we might also put some hesitancy on Deleuze’s critique if we note the existence of boredom, the simultaneity of presence/absence in desire, how frequently people do not know what it is that they want. At work, also, is how much people do not want to know what it is they want. We have already seen how the need for surprise has led to knowledge’s attempts to save room for non-knowledge. There exists the “desire to make something beyond our immediate understanding for the sake of evoking greater significance.”

Indeed, let’s try to go to Tomkins’s own theory of affect, to try to make sense of what precisely comprises the affect of surprise. Tomkins explains that a shift from uncertainty to certainty, a decrease in stimulation, is the origin of joy: “In contrast to stimulation increase and stimulation level, there is also the affect that operates on the principle of stimulation reduction. The smile of joy is based on such a mechanism. The smile of joy is innately activated in our view by any relatively steep reduction of the density of stimulation and neural firing. Thus, sudden relief from such negative stimulations as pain, fear, distress, or aggression will produce the smile of joy.”

But, joy is a particularly difficult affect to replicate, because “[a]ny affect requiring any degree of uncertainty for activation is all but impossible to repeat exactly, even when the circumstances, in fact or in memory, are duplicated exactly.” In other words, joy relies on something novel, something which induces a state of unfamiliarity, such that “[n]o joke is ever quite as funny on repetition.” While repetition is necessary, because “the smile is an affect that can be emitted to the familiar,” one first “requires some novelty if excitement is to be activated sufficiently so that its reduction constitutes an adequate stimulus for the smile.”

So while the joke itself cannot be repeated, there is a kind of cyclical process of familiarity and unfamiliarity involved in the evocation of joy through surprise. The fading of memory allows a fad to become new every few decades. Indeed, we might think of the repetitive childhood games of appearance and disappearance that elicit a baby’s smile, “the joy of the infant at the sight of the mother.” We might think of the common game of peek-a-boo, whereby “[t]he mother’s face is one of the few objects in the environment with sufficient variation in appearance to produce both excitement at its sudden appearance and the smile at the sudden reduction of this excitement when the face is recognized as a familiar one.”

It is entirely possible that the function of literature is itself to be a more complicated game, for those times when–dulled by age or repetition–peek-a-boo fails to be exciting. It may no longer be possible, as Levinas does, to maintain a boundary between literature and laughter, the enigmatic responsibility of equivocation and the animal irresponsibility of the comic mechanism. We can think of the basic structure of literature through rhyming, where the audience knows what is coming, and where–at the end of each line–the audience is surprised to find the familiar. Great lyricism may therefore be found in those lines that demonstrate great command of language, are able to recall rare words and phrases, such that the audience has to struggle to imagine the ending that will justify the meter, thus inducing through concentration a great “density of stimulation and neural firing,” which is only to be resolved in the masterful rhyme that metes it.

Let’s also use this example of literary surprise to remember how “every text induces desire, and that any piece of media is successful to the extent that it manages to induce and resolve desire (perhaps the desire induced will always exceed, by varying degrees, the desire resolved). The examples that come first to mind: an author of mysteries, who must make the reader enjoy the labyrinth enough to seek its center; the romance-writer whose audience cannot wait for the lovers’ union, even if found only on the page, and especially if on the page, because the audience cannot substitute in their own imagination the emotions elicited by the author’s pen; the philosopher whose enigmatic declarations induce in the cynical student a need to find worldly, particular examples.”

It is therefore possible that–by refusing to use common terms, references, and expressions–literature and theory serve to induce in the reader an unfamiliarity, such that there is a concentrated intensity, a density of neural firing, which will only later be resolved with the reappearance of the common and the familiar. The unfamiliar is evoked by “enigmatic declarations” that will only be resolved within “worldly, particular examples.” Let’s also remember Adorno’s claim that “[t]he value of thought is measured by its distance from the continuity of the familiar.”

Or we might also go to Adorno’s claim that “[r]igorous formulation demands unequivocal comprehension, conceptual effort, to which people are deliberately discouraged, and imposes on them in advance of any content a suspension of all received opinions, and thus an isolation, that they violently resist. Only what they do not need first to understand, they consider understandable, only the word coined by commerce, and really alienated, touches them as familiar. [emphases mine]” Adorno is hasty to argue that an overly commercialized consciousness is not willing to seek intellectual stimulation, and therefore does not achieve literary reception/production, which requires “a suspension of all received opinions” in order to generate “conceptual effort,” only in order for this density of neural firing to be resolved in what the aesthete regards as “familiar.”

Adorno’s formulation may fail to take into account the common adage that the function of art is to “disturb the comfortable and comfort the disturbed.” Behind this adage is the belief that those of different classes, of different statuses, have differing relationships to art. In those of a privileged class there is a boredom, an indolence, which requires first a moment of surprise, a punctum, which can disturb their numbed comfort. In those of an underprivileged class there is a pain, a tiredness that prevents further thought or disturbance, which must first be comforted.

We might also put considerable pressure on Adorno’s claim that “only the word coined by commerce, and really alienated, touches them as familiar.” We have already seen how Jay interprets Adorno and finds a tension between translatability and untranslatability, how differences in past experiences may “cut short the possibility of including others in a conversation.” We have also seen how theory itself relates to this difference in past experience, insofar as “the process of reading several hundred pages is a difficult experience–indeed, Jay describes it like an arduous journey toward discovery–and may therefore serve the function of establishing a coterie which ‘seeks to have its past experience[, the ‘past experience’ of endless hours in the library,] recognized as an unimpeachable source of group identity in the present,’ an unimpeachable group of experts/intellectuals/theorists/dialecticians.” We are dealing with the fact that the “familiar” will ultimately be contingent, will rely on divergences in experiences, such that it remains to be seen how much the familiar may be abstracted in order to be translatable from one event to another. We are recalling why I do not defend, as does Adorno, “allusions to spheres of culture that no longer exist.”

At the same time, we are also dealing with the difference between the proper and improper “posing of the question,” to return to Chekov. We might remember how “Guess what?” and “Did you know?” are “[s]imple questions, but they are rather common methods by which we coax the other’s curiosity from its dingy cell,” in order to create “a reciprocal induction of desires in those of an informed class, as they perform these kinds of simple, verbal repetitions.” Thinking about how unfamiliarity might be generated artificially, rather than through a careful analysis of the desire at hand, can help to explain why “I am skeptical that merely inducing desire can suffice for the one who seeks to become a great artist; the more worthwhile task may be identifying those hungering ignorances within us, so that we may better define and find those elusive objects of our desires.”

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Given how I do not want to perpetuate “allusions to spheres of culture that no longer exist,” I often worry that I am focusing on an obscure corner of thought: the work of a few authors that is not widely read nor is it influential, or even on work that has already been substantially critiqued. If I am noticing the “the extent to which the humanities–perhaps unwittingly–prove the need for the scientific method,” as well as the “ambivalent loathing among intellectuals (which might explain their cannibalistic criticism), who feel the need to decry indolence, while also struggling to justify their own inactivity,” then perhaps it would be better if I just did away with this inquiry into the humanities entirely, and just devoted myself to medical studies.

So what has medicine been saying about the humanities?

In a recent article on “Structural Competency” in Medical Education, Metzel and Hansen (2013) take for granted that the social sciences and humanities may meaningfully come to bear on the practice of medicine; their opinion is similar to what we have seen of Chekov, how Chekov loved literature as well as medicine, felt that literature was necessary for the “correct posing of the question.” Metzel and Hansen (2013) argue that the humanities and social sciences play a particular role in highlighting the ills of “stigma and inequality,” such that their insights may be coupled with the medical field’s more direct knowledge of a body’s ills.

“As [they] detail throughout this paper, differing notions of structure also figure prominently in a number of present-day discourses that help explain attitudes about, and stigmatizations of, illness and health. Stigma researchers highlight ways in which stigma is produced by structural or institutional forces, such as unequal access to treatment, unfair tax codes, or discriminatory laws. Meanwhile, social scientists and humanities scholars add important conceptualizations of structure as a system that produces and reproduces the social world, and that is thus deeply linked to culture because it provides the system of values affixed to bodies and diseases.”

“Calling on these and other literatures,” becomes necessary for developing a doctor’s “structural competency” “not so much for replacing awareness of ‘culture’ in medical settings, but for recognizing how ‘culture’ and ‘structure’ are mutually co-implicated in producing stigma and inequality.” The knowledge of “political and public-health activists” therefore reveals how “structures of oppression, such as racism or debt,” undergird what are “seemingly biological conditions of morbidity and mortality.”

So, even while I doubt whether the humanities are truly necessary, whether we might all just be better off with a more focused practicum of medical education, Metzel and Hansen respond that “[m]edical education has of late developed a potential over-competency syndrome, claiming expertise over a range of highly complex topics that have eluded humanities and social science scholars for years–recent initiatives call for doctors to develop ‘gender and sex competencies’ and ‘religious competency,’ as but a few examples.”

In other words, Metzel and Hansen seem to buy into the idea that there is a need for each discipline’s specialization, such “that conceptualizing and intervening into abstract social formations is a skill that requires study and practice over time.” While Metzel and Hansen therefore seem to advocate for experts of segmented domains, they maintain that “competency” “does not imply mastery” particularly as such mastery would have to occur “within the context of already overbooked schedules or curricula.” In other words, Metzel and Hansen are engaged with the need to acknowledge positionality, a kind of localized knowledge, in order “that the competency that results from such efforts helps clinicians develop, not the hubris of mastery, but the humility to recognize the complexity of the structural constraints that patients and doctors operate within.”

It then seems that, because they privilege questions over solutions, this humility is the particular offering of the humanities and social sciences. I do not know whether to laugh or cry, whether there is a reduction of neural stimulation or an increased density, when I find the return of the unexpected familiar: Hansel and Metzel claim that “[t]he term humility usefully comes from medical educators (Hunt, 2001) who voice critique of cultural competency through the concept, developed by the philosopher Emmanuel Levinas, that the Other always lies beyond the comprehension of the self.”

In this citation, Hansel and Metzel seem to claim that the work of Emmanuel Levinas is/was necessary for the development of cultural humility, which we might parse as knowledge saving room for non-knowledge. This reading is common among philosophical/theoretical circles, where it is taken for granted that Levinas’s critique of Heidegger, his critique of Western philosophy after Nazism, provided the entree of Judaic thought into mainstream philosophy/theory. Totality and Infinity is especially representative for this kind of thought, because it provides “the concept” “that the Other always lies beyond the comprehension of the self.” Yet, the claim that Levinas, or even his “Judaic” quality, provides newfound access to cultural humility is severely undercut, not only by what we have already seen Levinas saying about women, but also by his racism.

In an interview after the Sino-Soviet conflict, Levinas claimed that Europe is haunted by: “The yellow peril! It is not racial, it is spiritual. It does not involve inferior values; it involves a radical strangeness, a stranger to the weight of its past, from where there does not filter any familiar voice or inflection, a lunar or Martian past.”

Similarly, in another interview, Levinas denigrates African culture, and Fred Moten takes issue with Levinas’s anti-Black racism specifically, in an essay entitled “There Is No Racism Intended.” The essay begins with the following epigraph:

“Emmanuel Levinas: I always say–but under my breath–that the Bible and the Greeks present the only serious issues in human life; everything else is dancing. I think these texts are open to the whole world. There is no racism intended.