The Responsibility of the Parrot: Crisis, Response, and Sandy Hook

Jordan Yentzer New York University December 21, 2012

When Mark Glaze, the director of Mayors Against Illegal Guns, made a statement in the aftermath of the massacre at Newtowns Sandy Hook Elementary School, he dropped a critique of the White Houses Press Secretary, Jay Carney: I have to wonder if [he] is aware of how perfectly hes parroting the NRAs talking points. Thats exactly what they say after every mass shooting. Its not the time. But the time never comes. Glazes reply was to Carneys comment that to discuss the means by which 20 children were murdered, and the policy surrounding it, so soon after the tragedy would be temerarious.1 This question at hand is this: when does it become appropriate to respond after a traumatic crisis? The response options presented by the media in the past week seem to be blatantly exemplied. The rst would pertain to Glazes concern, vocalized by New York mayor Michael Bloomberg, that we need immediate action,2 and that weapons policy should be addressed without any period of mourning. The second is Carneys option (parroting previous NRA talking points) which demands a postponement of such a discussion for an indenite amount of time. The third option is one that
1 Hufngton, Arianna. Newtown

Massacre: What We Don't Need Is a 'National Conversation' -- We Need Action.

The Blog. The Hufngton Post, 17 Dec. 2012. 18 Dec. 2012.

2

Siddiqui, Sabrina. Michael Bloomberg: Gun Control Needs 'Immediate Action' From Obama In Wake Of School Shooting Hufngtonpost.com. The Hufngton Post, 14 Dec. 2012. 14 Dec. 2012.

embodied such a postponement and was taken up by the NRA itself for a week after the incident in Newtownno response whatsoever. It was not until December 18th, four days after the shooting, that the NRA issued a statement on Twitter, stating what was already abundantly clear: Out of respect for the families, and as a matter of common decency, we have given time for mourning, prayer and a full investigation of the facts before commenting.3 The NRA announced as well that they would be holding a press conference for their comments on December 21st, a week after the massacre. Carney, accused of parroting the NRAs silence and subsequent deferral of commentary, echoes a statement to come, repeating what has not yet been said, what Glaze assumes never comes, for it never yet has come. As such, even Glazes criticism is a parroting of silence. He responds to a tragedy through afrming a permanent absence of something that has not presented itself, bringing even those who have made no comment in a discussion that at once is and is not happening. Jacques Derrida establishes the function of the parrot at Villanova University:
Tomorrow, perhaps next year, perhaps twenty years from now we will - if today there has been any inauguration; we don't know yet, we don't know, we can't today, where I am speaking... who knows? So 'yes' has to be repeated, and immediately, immediately it implies what I call 'iterability', it implies the repetition of itself. Which is a threat,
3

Important Statement from the National Rie Association NRAILA.com. National Rie Association. 18 Dec. 2012.

18 Dec. 2012.

which is threatening at the same time because the second yes may be simply a parody or a record or mechanical repetition; it may say 'yes, yes' like a parrot, which means that the technical reproduction of the originary 'yes' is from the beginning threatening to the living origin of the 'yes', which means that the 'yes' is hounded by its own ghost, its own mechanical ghost, from the beginning. Which means that the second 'yes' will have to reinaugurate, to reinvent the rst one. If tomorrow you don't reinvent today's inauguration... it will have been dead. Every day the inauguration has to be reinvented. So that's one thing.4

The parrot speaks a mechanical repetition, threatening an inauguration, haunting it. Has anything been inaugurated since the death of 27 of Newtowns residents? Or has a ghastly conversation come to besolely a reverberation of a deafening silence that promises already to echo throughout the future? What does the parrot perpetuate? What is already required for parroting? Can the parrot be responsible, despite its ability to respond? Gustave Flaubert begged these questions already in his Un Cur Simple, and in the research he conducted in writing it. Flicit, mourning the loss of the two children she loved, receives Loulou, a companion borne from the very rupture, lling the void that Victor and Virginie left behind. Already, however, the parrot is subject to much scrutiny and derision:
Loulou avait reu du garon boucher un chiquenaude, stant permis denfoncer la tte dans sa corbeille, et depuis lors il tchait toujours de le pincer tranvers sa chemise. Fabu menaait de lui tordre le cou, bien quil ne ft pas cruel, malgr le tatouage de ses bras et ses gros favoris. Au contraire! il avait plutt du penchant pour le perroquet, jusqu vouloir, par humeur joviale, lui apprendre des jurons. Flicit, que ces manires effrayaient, le plaa dans la cuisine...M. Paul, un jour eut limprudence de lui soufer

Jacques Derrida; John D. Caputo. Deconstruction in a Nutshell. (Fordham UP; 1997) 28.

aux narines la fume dun cigare; une autre fois que Mme Lormeau lagaait du bout de son ombrelle, il en happa la virole; enn, il se perdit. Loulou had been snapped at by the butchers boy, having allowed himself to wedge his head through his cage, and since then he always tried to nip him through his shirt. Fabu threatened to wring his neck, even though he was not cruel, despite the tattoos on his arms, and his long whiskers. On the contrary! He had more so a penchant for the parrot, such that he wanted, in a jovial spirit, to teach him swear words. Flicit, disturbed by these manners, placed him in the kitchen Monsieur Paul, one day had the imprudence to blow at him from his nostrils the smoke of his cigar; another time when Madame Lormeau was bothering him with the tip of her parasol, he snatched the ferrule from it; nally, he got lost. 5

Loulou, borne already out of loss, becomes suddenly lost himself, by nothing, as a disconnected result of menace, bother, and imprudence, only to return to Flicit suddenly as un poids lger [qui] lui tomba sur lpaule, (a light weight that fell upon her shoulder).6 The parrot returns, appropriating an inappropriate responsibilityone that appears through a mistranslation, through a hearing-through-an-others-ears.

Il se perdit, presents a difculty in translation, as the reexive se perdre does directly translate to the English to

lose oneself. To get lost would be a mistranslation, as loss would thusly become an object posessed by an autonomous subject, or an object understood by a subject (in the sense of getting as comprehendingget it?). The French redirects loss to the subject, rendering the subject simultaneously an object, creating a double-bind as a result of loss akin to the English lose oneself where the self is simultaneously and coterminously that which is losing, and that which is lost. This aporetic sense of loss is of great importance, for despite Loulous loss of himself, Flicit suffers a consequence as well: Elle lavait pos sur lherbe pour le rafrachir, sabsenta une minute; et, quand elle revint, plus de perroquet! (She had placed him upon the bush to refresh him, left him one minute; and, when she came back, [no] more parrot!) Here, the French plus de parroquet signies at once no more parrot, as well as more of parrot, demonstrating a monstrosity already in Loulous reexive lossit is a phenomenon with which Flicit cannot cope. Either he is lost or not, and as such, she makes a futile attempt to retrieve him. Gustave Flaubert. Un Cur Simple. (Livres de Poche; 1994) 74-5. (Translations of Flaubert are my own.) Here is another interesting mistranslation. A weight on ones shoulders harkens to the English idiom of a burden or certain responsibility, absent in the French language. Ibid., 76.
6

The parrot manifests a maladie, un mal doreilles. Three years suddenly pass, and Flicit becomes deaf, afrms her stupidity, and retains the capacity to hear only one squawking echo:
Des bourdonnements illusoires achevaient de la troubler. Souvent sa matresse lui disait: Mon Dieu! comme vous tes bte!; elle rpliquait: Oui, Madame, en cherchant quelque chose autour delle. Le petit cercle de ses ides se rtrcit encore, et le carillon des cloches, le mugissement des bufs, nexistaient plus. Tous les tres fonctionnaient avec le silence des fantmes. Un seul bruit arrivait maintenant ses oreilles, la voix du perroquet. Illusory hummings ended up confusing her. Often her mistress said to her: My God! how stupid [bte] 7 you are! She replied: Yes, Madame, looking for something around her. The little circle of her ideas retracted itself still more, and the ringing of bells, the mooing of the steer, no longer existed. All beings functioned with the silence of ghosts. One sole noise now reached her ears, the voice of the parrot.8

Then the parrot dies. Flicit stuffs it, begins to revere its corpse, praying to it, speaking to it as if it were the Holy Spirit (le Saint-Esprit). Flicit becomes ill, stricken with pneumonia, goes blind, and on her deathbed,
quand elle exhala son dernier soufe, elle crut voir, dans les cieux entrouverts, un perroquet gigantesque, panant au-dessus de sa tte.

Flicit becomes animal in this passage. Of course, bte signies both the animal and the stupid. Flaubert will dene btes in the Dictionnaire des Ides Reues as such: Ah! si les btes pouvaient parler! Il y en a qui sont plus intelligentes que des hommes. (10) Avital Ronell has established and disestablished several connections already between the animal, the stupid, and the mute in her work Stupidity, suggesting that it is the inability or failure to respond characterizes all three. The case of Flicit, however, functions differently here, for she responds as the parrot does, as we have already seen suggested by Derrida. The parrot can speak, can respond, but remains nevertheless irresponsible and non-animal (mechanistic).
7 8

Gustave Flaubert. Un Cur Simple. (Livres de Poche; 1994) 77.

when she exhaled her last breath, she believed she saw, in the heavens opened, a gigantic parrot, soaring above her head.9

Flicit ends at the parrot, beneath the parrot. The parrot returns inappropriately, in belief and in death, from the heavens. The post-traumatic parrot arrives again, this time named Brenda, in the nal pages of Sophie Calles Prenez Soin de Vous. Calles project begs the same questions of proper response:
Jai reu un mail de rupture. Je nai pas su rpondre. Ctait comme sil ne mtait pas destin. I received an email telling me it was over. I didnt know how to respond. It was almost as if it hadnt been meant for me. 10

Already unable to respond to the email, Calle attempts to transfer responsibility elsewhere, forwarding the rupturing email to 107 women, asking them to analyze it, comment on it, dance it, sing it. Dissect it. Exhaust it. Understand it for [her]. Answer for [her]. It was a way of taking the time to break up. A way of taking care of [her]self.11 The nal response in Calles work is from Brenda, a parrot, in the form of a video. Brenda, presented with a paper copy of the email, shrieks several words from it, and subsequently attempts to eat the paper itself. Calle has already parroted the email,

Ibid., 95. Sophie Calle. Prenez Soin de Vous (Actes Sud; 2007). (Translations are the authors.) Ibid.

10

11

mechanically afrming it, copying it, disseminating it, while never reinaugurating it. The email is cast out, and returns in 107 different ways, each parroting the squawk of Sophie Calle. Calles inability to respond, her irresponsibility, her stupidity in the face of the rupture parrots the parrot. Each received response, rather than increasing a number of options for responding, only retracts Calles focus closer and closer upon the email, allowing for closure upon the voice of the parrot. One page succeeds those of Brendawhite, with a few words in the bottom corner: This was all about a letter. Not the man who wrote it... Calles work was about a letter of rupture, a response to the event of rupture, not the cause of it. As such, each parroting response to Calles request surrounded the rupture, the breakage and the wound within and opened by the letter. Each response attempts to ingest the letter in its parody, already accepting a non-understanding and a disgust that is required for such a response. Brenda fails to eat the words, however, tearing them to shreds, rufing her feathers, and dropping the paper entirely, moaning something incomprehensible. Responding to a rupture takes time, and Calle is fully aware of this, as the rupture requires a complete defamiliarization with itself as event, and its incessent, haunting, parroting return. Derrida has already made note of the returning habit of

the rupture, linking it to redoubling, in his essay, Structure, Sign and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences:
This event I called a rupture, the disruption alluded to at the beginning of this paper, would presumably have come about when the structurality of structure had to begin to be thought, that is to say, repeated, and this why I said that this disruption was repetition in all of the senses of this word. From then on it became necessary to think the law which governed, as it were, the desire for the center in the constitution of structure and the process of signication prescribing its displacements and its substitutions for this law of the central presencebut a central presence which was never itself, which has always already been transported outside itself in its surrogate. The surrogate does not substitute itself for anything which has somehow pre-existed it. From then on it was probably necessary to begin to think that there was no center, that the center could not be thought in the form of a beingpresent, that the center had no natural locus, that it was not a xed locus but a function, a sort of non-locus in which an innite number of sign-substitutions came into play. This moment was that in which language invaded the universal problematic; that in which, in the absence of a center or origin, everything became discourseprovided we can agree on this word that is to say, when everything became a system where the central signied, the original or transcendental signied, is never absolutely present outside a system of differences. The absence of the transcendental signied extends the domain and the interplay of signication ad innitum. 12

The rupture, or the disruption decenters structure. Derrida is working to demonstrate the uncertainty already within language as a result of some unknown, indistinguishable rupture. What remains of import here, however, is the ruptures decentralization, recentralization, and interplay of signication ad innitum. The rupture, Derrida points out, destroys structure, rendering all response necessarily impossible in that any response to a certain structural locus will already miss, as the
Jacques Derrida. Structure, Sign, and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences. Writing and Difference. (Routledge; 1997) 279.
12

very nature of the post-ruptural structure is always decenteredits center is always on the move. In Calles work, we see 107 failed responses, each failing as a consequence of themselves. If there were an appropriate response, then there would be no need for 107 different versions. The response to a rupture must be divided, and responsibility for a rupture is shattered again and again, ad innitum, and divvied out amongst all who care to even catch a quick glance. Flicit cannot fail to cope once, she must fail incessantly until the moment of her death, which even then provides her with an illusory, sensory failure. Brenda fails to be herself: parroting a parroting, she drops the words. She stops responding, stops parroting. The response will miss, and already has. The response cannot miss if any law demands its missing, that is to say, a response to a rupture demands that it is not to a rupture. As such, when Calle declares that this was all about a letter, it necessarily cannot beunless we consider about to imply a missing in and through its inexactitude, which is already impossibleand we have to turn the page back to Brenda, hearing her shriek and repeat an interminable parroty of a letter that cannot be cared for, that demands a deferral of response that Calle understood by not understanding. The rupture has already become an impossible event (which is why

10

Derrida will place event within quotation marks), that renders all response irresponsible. From time to time, however, we may become stuck upon one parroted response attempt, one line of thought, one trace or resonating thread. This gettingstuck, getting-it, or understanding is the doom and vice of Flicit, who sees celestial truth, and its revelation, in one parrot. So, now, in the aftermath of the recent Sandy Hook Elementary shooting, the question remains: how do we respond? When do we respond? It is, however, impossible to answer such questions, for the essay of response is already imbued within and without such questions. We have already responded by missing, by assuming a response, by wishing a response. We cannot, however, stop therefor the impossibility of response is already a dangerous thread that works to prevent and destory resolution, resolve, notions of hope, continuity, (r)evolution, etc. The problem is the parrot, and the answer is the parrot. Glazes concern is just, and he should be ooded with anxiety to hear Carney suggest that it is never the time to take action in response to a crisis. But it is this sort of anxiety that already characterizes the problem at handhe cannot respond to Carneys non-response. On Friday, December 21st, 2012, NRA CEO Wayne LaPierre attempted as well a response, after a week of consideration and care not to be too

11

hasty, stating that the only thing that stops a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun,13 and calling for the stationing of armed police ofcers in all schools. Here, Glazes statement falls apart once again, as Carneys non-attempt does not parrot LaPierres suggested response. LaPierres statement, however, manages to parrot the crisis in a certain way: it calls for bringing arms into the school, which may have been the primary source for the rupture itself. What follows, quite obviously, is the question of what stops a good guy with a gun? The answer is the question, and is in the question, that is to say, what. The crisis, the rupture is that to which nothing can respond. What can respond? What can respond. The parrot responds to the crisis: What? What. The parrot restates the question, the parrot afrms mechanically. It is imperative that we are careful in our parroting, for we are never responsible for the crisis when we desire to respond, but when we repeat without understanding, when we parrot, we believe our essays and our attempts to withhold great truths, as if from the heavens opened, soaring above our heads.

Full text of remarks from National Rie Association CEO Wayne LaPierre on gun control debate one week after Newtown school shooting tragedy nydailynews.com. New York Daily News, 21 Dec. 2012. 21 Dec. 2012.
13

12

Works Cited

Calle, Sophie. Prenez Soin De Vous. [Paris]: Actes Sud, 2007. Print. Derrida, Jacques, and Alan Bass. "Structure, Sign, and Play in the Discourse of Human Sciences." Writing and Difference. London: Routledge, 1997. N. pag. Print. Derrida, Jacques, and John D. Caputo. Deconstruction in a Nutshell: A Conversation with Jacques Derrida. New York: Fordham UP, 1997. Print. Flaubert, Gustave, and Marie-France Azma. Un Coeur Simple. Paris: Le Livre De Poche, 1994. Print. Flaubert, Gustave. Dictionnaire Des Ides Reues. Paris: ditions Du Boucher, 2002. LeBoucher.com. 2002. Web. 21 Dec. 2012. Hufngton, Arianna. "Newtown Massacre: What We Don't Need Is a 'National Conversation' -- We Need Action." The Hufngton Post. N.p., 17 Dec. 2012. Web. 18 Dec. 2012. "Michael Bloomberg: Gun Control Needs 'Immediate Action' From Obama In ..." Hufngton Post. N.p., 14 Dec. 2012. Web. 18 Dec. 2012. Ronell, Avital. Stupidity. Urbana: University of Illinois, 2002. Print.

13