Power & Freedom
Allen Ginsberg
Howl & Footnote to Howl
(Political Science 506)
The Disciplined Society
• The functional inversion of the disciplines
– Example: free schools founded on negative justification
(combat godlessness, idleness, gangs of beggars), but
move to positive justification (prepare child for job market,
develop the mind)
• The swarming of the disciplinary mechanisms
– Disciplinary mechanisms emerge into society
– Example: schools supervise children’s families
• State control of mechanisms of discipline
– Police, interested in everything, omnipresent surveillance
– Police are disciplinary mechanism that fills the gaps
between other mechanisms
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The Disciplined Society
• Disciplines as “infra-law” (222)
– System of omnipresent but uncertain surveillance
– “systems of micro-power that are essentially non-egalitarian and
asymmetrical”
• Example: female sexual morality, health, violence, surveillance
– Treated as very foundation of society, without which it will collapse
• “a series of mechanisms for unbalancing power relations definitively and
everywhere; hence the persistence in regarding them as the humble, but
concrete form of every morality, whereas they are a set of physico-political
techniques.” (223)
– “The formation of knowledge and the increase of power regularly
reinforce one another in a circular process” (224)
– Names and power
• How could this system of power be resisted?
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Allen Ginsberg
• 1926-1997
• “Beat” poet
• Ginsberg’s mother, Naomi
Livergant Ginsberg
– Politically radical and mentally
unwell, hugely influential on
Ginsberg’s life & work
– His other most famous poem,
“Kaddish”, written at her death
• Carl Solomon
– Ginsberg met him in a mental
institution during a period
when each was briefly
institutionalized. Formed
lifelong friendship.
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Howl
• 1957 Obscenity trial in San Francisco
– "filthy, vulgar, obscene, and disgusting language.”
– Judge: “Would there be any freedom of press or
speech if one must reduce his vocabulary to vapid
innocuous euphemisms?”
• 2007 Obscenity fear
– Pacifica radio planned to broadcast in order to
commemorate 50th anniversary of Howl’s protection
under First Amendment
– But feared fines from the FCC, put it online
– Differing basis of censorship: public morals vs.
“offensiveness” and affordability of free speech
5
Escape & Transcendence
• Over a world of power, materialism, and time:
• “Who threw their watches off the roof / to
cast their vote for Eternity outside of Time, &
alarm clocks / fell on their heads every day for
the next decade” (16)
– Desperate attempts to transcend end in failure
• “…or were run down by the / drunken taxicabs
of Absolute Reality” (16)
– What could be more crudely real than that?
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Escape & Transcendence
• Modes of
transcendence
– Spirituality
– Humiliation of the flesh
– Sex
– Drugs
– Art
– Violation of taboo
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Moloch!
• Leviticus 18:21: “And thou shalt not let any of thy
seed pass through the fire to Molech, neither shalt
thou profane the name of thy God: I am the LORD.”
• A divine commandment to disdain
• Worship of Moloch equated to profaning the name of God.
• Cannibal-god of the Canaanites, the enemies of the
children of Israel
– The enemies of the few, the chosen, the faithful
• Idolatry and abomination
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I’m with you in Rockland
• where you bang on the catatonic piano the
soul / is innocent and immortal it should
never die / ungodly in an armed madhouse
– The spiritual elevated over the material
• But it can be killed
– Ungodly armed madhouse sounds a lot like
Moloch
• The asylum is the world in microcosm
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Footnote to Howl
• Holy! Holy! Holy! Holy! Holy! Holy! Holy! Holy!
– Radical tonal shift, from sadness and solitude, futility and
self-destruction, cannibal-gods and insane asylums to
ecstatic recognition of universal holiness
– Holiness ≠ sacredness
• Holiness is the mark of the presence and/or favor of God
• The world is holy! The soul is holy! The skin is holy! /
The nose is holy! The tongue and cock and hand / and
asshole holy!
– Continues theme that the despised are in fact the elevated
– But begins to attack the duality present in the poem so far,
as both the spiritual and the material are presented as of
like holiness
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Footnote to Howl
• Holy forgiveness! mercy! charity! faith! Holy!
Ours! / bodies! suffering! magnanimity!
– Holiness here is achieved, as the “best minds” failed
to do
– Not in transcendence, but in immanence
– Not “lifting Moloch to Heaven,” but recognizing the
“Angel in Moloch”
• Not elevating the earthly into the divine, but recognizing the
presence of divinity in the mundane. The world, good and
bad, spiritual and material, is itself holy.
• Breaking every boundary
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