The "I am" and the 'Happen to be" - a cultural semantics

 

Culture shows its hand molecular bits and bytes, the way the Id shows itself in dreams, a self-directed movie starring IT itself. Look for the conjunctions, look for the negations, the excuses, the condensations.

Look for, for instance at “happens to be”.

“Happens to be” is all around us. I was reading a book about an artist the other day, and I came across the phrase: “A painting by a young artist, who happens to be African American and gay…” Happens, here, sends us back to chance itself. He could “happen to be” unhyphenated American and straight, couldn’t he? In which case he would, presumably, not happen to be at all, but would be. There he’d be, an “I am”, pure as Jehovah in the burning bush. Our pre-birth identities wait, like slips of paper in a box, to be selected blindly. Like, say, the slips of paper in the box in Shirley Jackson’s “The Lottery.” Somebody has to be stoned. Those are the rules of the routine. But who, that is the variable. That is what is written on the slip. Who will “happen to be”?

Such, as our tongue knows, is the lightly exerted pressure on that “happens to be.” It looks like an ontological statement of fact, and it sounds like an apologetic.

Trust the sound.

“Happens to be” joins together the otherwise sociologically separate strands of neo-liberalism: on the one hand, the lessons of the civil rights era – non-discrimination/diversity; and on the other hand, the master of hap, Fortuna and her wheel, the free market with its invisible hand up your rectum, jumping the puppets, who all say “I am”. Not, mind you, the government – the era of big government is always over, in neo-liberal culture, even if it exerts itself muscularly now and then to save the big banks and the one percent and becomes wildly aggressive and polices the world, all of course in the name of Freedom. In what other name can you reduce schools and hospitals to rubble?

The leftist critique of neo-liberalism can’t be simply, as it was under classical liberalism, that it is all a class act – with Capital v. Labor as the fighters in the ring. Because the spectrum of injustices and differences are not engrossed by Capital v. Labor. That lesson of the civil rights (and de-colonial) era has to ring in our ears, if that is one “happens to be” a leftist.

“Happens to be” is an overdetermined phrase. It is apologetic in that odd way in which one apologizes to a bigot for his or her bigotry. “I happen to be x” – Jewish, black, trans-sexual, whatever – is a way to deflect a certain meanness, a certain threat in the conversation, with one’s counterpart who is, for instance, talking trash about Jews, blacks, gays, or whatever. In this conversation, the “I am” is always on the side of insisting. “The Great I am” – this is what Sam Pollitt’s wife,  Henny, calls her American New Dealer husband, Sam, that bully and humanitarian.  It happens that you, my counterpart – my comrade, my brother or sister – are standing here with an x. A “happen to be” x. An all natural x.

 

“Happens to be” was forced aboard the slave ships, and driven out of the territories. “I am” built the log cabin, the Georgian mansion (now available for weddings) and, if it didn’t build the railroads, profited mightily from railroad stock. The “I am” earns his billions – the “Happens to be” is the parasite on welfare who also happens to have physically built the railroads, clerked at the convenience store, flipped the burgers, nursed the patient, and all that low grade stuff they do.

Truly, from the “I am’s point of view, what is more natural than chance? The happens to be should be happy that they are allowed even to be.  And chance is what provides us with our “diversity” – we can’t all be white straight men, cause somebody has to clean the toilets, am I right? And yet, when we tease out this “happens to be”, we begin to wonder why the heteronormative hick never happens to be – he just is. Does anybody ever say, I happen to be white? Does our egg, our Humpty Dumpty, our man whose words mean what he wants them to mean, ever happen to be?

This is just a little flicker in the national, in the international conversation between the ’I am’ and the ‘happen to be’. Neo-liberal culture is so obviously exhausted, is so obviously tied in knots by its own self-contradictions, that one thinks surely it is at an end. It isn’t, though. Happens to be still creeps through our conversations, our second thoughts, our apologies. The way we confront, and the way, at the last moment, we deflect. Happens to be is the deeper character, the more sophisticated character, the rascal and the sage, but the political advantage seems to be all with the I am.

And yet: who among us, in the end, wants to be the I am? The great loud I am. As the glaciers go down and hedonics turns out to measure unhappiness, after all. 

The great depression, my friends, my dearest friends, has been internalized. We are left to drift.