Brief notes on Bristow’s American Pandemic plus my usual handwaving (social murder and memory-culture)
As an academic-leaning leftist/left-leaning academic who went to college in the late 90s and grad school in the mid 00s I had some formative experiences and influences that make me uncomfortable with invocations of biology, human nature, essential qualities, etc as explanatory concepts. All of that stuff was just very uncool when I came up, which makes it weird that that kind of stuff seems to have come back, uh, bigly. And having that disposition I’m a little embarrassed by a thought I’ve had a few times recently to the effect that an orientation to the past might be something inherent to (I’m terribly sorry to betray you this way, younger me, but I don’t know how else to put it) the human condition.
What I mean is partly that I think it is unavoidable to situate in time one’s self as individual and/or whatever collectivity or collectivities one is part of: present relates to paste relates to future, at least implicitly. It’s been a very long time since I read it, but I recall the philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre talking about how conceptions of a self and a life (in the sense of ‘that person lived a long life/a good life’ or ‘for my whole life...’ of ‘in my life, my experience has been...’ and so on) are intrinsically narratival. That is, to say ‘self’ and ‘life’ in this sense is to use a word that assumes some ideas of narrative - beginnings, middles, ends - and, it seems to me (I don’t recall if MacIntyre got into this or not) that’s inherently temporal: a middle always comes after a beginning, a beginning always comes before an end, such that these are terms about past/present future or at least distant past/more recent past/still more recent past.
Of course none of that says anything about how large or small engagement with the past actively looms in any individual or collective lives, nor does it say anything about the specifics of the past figures. It just says ‘somewhere in the mix there’s some relation to the past.’ Where in the mix, what relation, what any of that does, means, matters, etc is all something that has to be investigated rather than just assumed. I mean this as analogous to a remark Marx makes in passing somewhere about how while all people eat, there is a world of difference between eating raw meat bolted down in a rush because desperately hungry and the eating of prepared food with knife and fork. ‘Eating’ doesn’t give us any concrete particulars of food in any actual lives, it’s too general a term. (I think I may have used this same analogy in a post the other day about the meaning and management of health, ah well!) How particular foods are prepared and eaten by particular people in time and place specific ways have to be investigated and can’t be simply read off of the categories ‘eating’ and ‘food’. Something very similar goes for orientation to the past: that there tends to be one just says ‘look for it’ and that relation as it actually exists for any actual people is time and place specific in ways analogous to what I just said about eating. (And the two overlap as well - food culture and memory culture often intertwine - or simply are the same thing! - sometimes in important ways.)
Among other things this means historians do something that touches on something everyone does to some extent. I nodded a bit to this in this article - https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/international-labor-and-working-class-history/article/labor-history-and-class-violence-a-meditation-on-the-anniversary-of-lochner-v-new-york/A732309F4B31770EA5706F0FD16AA708 - where I leaned on some remarks by the great EP Thompson, saying that we in the present relate to the past from a position of values in search of a genealogy. I think that’s a good phrase and a good way to think about claims about or claims making use (whether explicitly or implicitly) of accounts of aspects of the past: to think about or with (ideas about) the past is to do something value-laden. (I suppose that since I think everyone just has to think about or with ideas about the past some of the time, even if only implicitly, it follows that I also think people just have to do things with values sometimes. I’d add I don’t think relation to the past is the only are of life where people do this. I think value-ladenness is also inevitable in human life.)
All of this may be obvious or boring or both, I dunno, but just this moment I find it a mix of exciting and mildly annoying for basically the same reasons. To try to get at why, I’m first going to tell you a little about my thoughts on Nancy Bristow’s book American Pandemic, about the flu pandemic of 1918. I’ve barely read it (this is a good story, eh...? of course it’s not, this is Open Mode!), I just read the intro and the conclusion/epilogue so far because I’m trying to go as fast as possible in my effort to learn more about the history of public health (‘as fast as possible’ and ‘as slow as molasses’ are the same thing sometimes I guess). Not having read the rest I dunno for sure but I feel pretty strongly that everyone who remains, as I do, a covid zero marxist zealot should read the intro and ending to this book (I refuse to check if the ending is epilogue or conclusion, you can’t make me; I mean you could make me very easily, I’m a huge pushover, but you are not right this moment making me so bad luck pal).
Bristow argues that the public culture of the US basically began to ignore the flu pandemic very, very quickly, leaving big disconnects between that public culture and private experiences/memories, with those disconnects intensifying the suffering of some people especially harmed. As a covid zero zealot I found this resonant with my experiences in the present - very fucking awful in that resonance, my god! I wrote an essay a while back using the term ‘broken sociality’ to give a name to this context of disconnect, and did a little more reflecting on it here - https://buttondown.com/nateholdren/archive/thinking-about-moral-injury/ (link to the original essay’s in there too if you want, idk why you would - writing this stuff is bad enough, imagine having to read it, ugh! the mind reels!). Since writing that post I’ve gone on to read what I think is a very, very good essay by the philosopher Jacob Blumenfeld called “Class as Moral Injury.” It’ll be out relatively soon in English. The abstract is at this link in English: https://philarchive.org/rec/BLUKAM Had I read it before I read my book it would have been cited all over my book. If you’re even remotely interested in my stuff (and remotely interested is the appropriate level of interest, to be clear) you should definitely check out that essay once it’s out in English.
Anyway, Bristow’s discusses what I’d call the dominant culture’s turning away from the flu pandemic, in effect privatizing its recollection, creating disconnects between people because there were fewer pathways and resources for connecting. This too resonates with something I’m slowly reading, which is the Negt and Kluge book on what they call a proletarian public sphere or spheres. I’m very early in that book so I dunno really but my impulse is to say that the Negt and Kluge book is concerned with publicness as a type of social activity, and one that’s classed - hence the reference to a specifically proletarian public sphere. (This reminds me, I can’t recall if I’ve written it down before. A recurring phrase in my mind as I think about this stuff is “the ‘public’ in ‘public health’ and the ‘public’ in ‘public sphere’ or ‘publicness’ are not the same thing but have important relationships. That’s a check I can’t actually cash right now but hope to be able to in the future.) The dominant culture’s relative forgetting of the influenza pandemic was a privatization of sorts, in the sense of atomizing or fracturing, and thus was a deficit of (specific kinds of) publicness as activity.
I’ve read only a little of the Bristow as I said so again, I dunno really, but so far I’m tremendously excited about it, on the one hand, to learn more and to follow up the works cited in the endnotes, and frustrated, on the other hand, by Bristow’s references to ‘Americans’ and ‘the U.S.’ as a single group. Maybe this isn’t present in the body of the book, I don’t want to be unfair, but in the bits I’ve read so far there are remarks about how American did this, Americans were disposed to do that, etc, and it all sounds a bit too culturally monolothic for my tastes.
I do want to underscore that I remain very excited to see what’s in the rest of the book, this is just a quibble on my part. I’m inclined, within that quibble, to think of this stuff about memory of the flu pandemic as a matter of politicking, struggle, and production within the culture(s?) of the U.S. over time. So it’s not ‘Americans did this and thought that...’ so much as ‘some Americans did and thought... while others...’, i.e., a tension and conflict-laden process, with the tensions and conflicts running right through individuals themselves (people can be pulled in multiple directions at the same time, can tie themselves in knots, etc). I’m also inclined, again within this quibble, to say this might be generatively thought through via Raymond Williams’s framework of dominant/residual/emergent cultures and dominant/alternative/oppositional cultures: processes, politicking, production within the dominant culture over time rendered the flu pandemic largely outside the dominant culture and rendered it largely a sidelined alternative rather than part of a powerful oppositional force.
Raymond Williams is closely related to why this is simultaneously exciting and annoying, because it marks a point of resonance between, on the one hand, my interest in Williams (an interest pursued at a positively glacial pace) and, on the other hand, my attempts at a public health literature review and the stuff I’ve tried to make sense of regarding the category ‘social murder’, in two ways. One, the Williams seems relevant to stuff Bristow says that I find intellectually exciting and resonant with my experience as covid zero zealot, as well as resonant with the stuff I balk at a little - it’s not that Americans did this or that because of anything about their Americanness, it’s that a process of struggle and production within culture ended up working out this particular way rather than that particular way. That’s mildly annoying because I’d shelved the Williams for the time being to keep up with other obligations (or maybe I should say, to fall behind on other obligations at a slower rate...) whereas I now think I should take the Williams back off the shelf and do the deep dive I’ve been considering doing as it feels newly relevant (which is also exciting to be fair).
Two, I wonder if there may be a broader pattern here related to social murder, as follows: rather than ‘after the flu pandemic, American public culture forgot the experience, sidelining a lot of sufferers and privatizing their recollection of the experience’, I wonder if this is also a story about how social murder has a memorial element: maybe when the tendency to social murder manifests, among the dominoes that it tips over are some dominoes within the realm of the recollection of the past within/across dominant, alternative, and oppositional cultures. That is, people examining the history of social murder are likely to find, as one element of what goes on, a kind of memory work/memory politics/struggle over the past, etc, in line with what I said above about relations to the past, orientation to time, etc.
As usual the point in the typing was to dig the potato of a thought from the mud of my mind, and mission accomplished I supposed, so I’m gonna call that enough mind-gardening for now and get onto other things. If I wash, cook, and serve this particular potato in the future, you’ll likely hear about it right here at Open Mode (just to say, fair warning, the boring will not stop!) Alright, I’m out. Keep on trucking, frenemies!