Too Simple, Too Complex

"Paradoxically, while hardly anyone questions that the self-styled 'advanced industrial democracies' really are democracies, fewer still care to argue that 'the people' actually rule in any one of them, or that it would be a good idea if it did. For in societies where managerial rule is widely practiced, democracy appears as inherently crude and hence unsuited to the task of governing complex and rapidly changing societies. At the same time in those quarters, it is often declared that democracy demands such a high level of political sophistication from citizens as to make it doubtful that it can be mastered by Third World peoples. Thus democracy is too simple for complex societies and too complex for simple ones."

--Sheldon Wolin, "Fugitive Democracy"

Norman O. Brown: "There is Only Poetry"

At the end of Love’s Body, Norman O. Brown writes: “there is only poetry.” The whole statement reads: “The antinomy between mind and body, word and deed, speech and silence, overcome. Everything is only a metaphor; there is only poetry.” The passage concludes the book.

What can this mean?

For Brown, poetry seems to make seemingly disparate things appear as a whole. Differences dissolve into a common matrix. He’s thinking of Blake. Especially Blake’s fire. The all consuming fire. Holocaust, sacrifice, fiery oblivion.

In his tenth chapter, “Fire,” Brown qualifies: “The real fire, the chariot of fire, the Fiery Chariot of his Contemplative Thought. The real fight, the mental fight; poetry, a sword of lightning, ever unsheathed, that consumes the scabbard that would contain it,” (183). Like fire, poetry consumes its surroundings.

This is a creative destruction, as Schumpeter might have it. “Meaning is new, or not at all; a new creation, or not at all; poetry or not at all,” (248). So poetry consumes, and, in its consumptive act, it creates something new. Something emergent.

This creation seems always to be dialectical for Brown. “…in the resurrection, in the awakening, these two are one: poetry,” (266). No, not dialectical—at least not in the sense Kojeve has in mind—but more like the union of substance (in the sense Spinoza meant it), or like the chiasmus of flesh (as with Merleau-Ponty).

Poetry, not psychoanalysis, Brown said, is the art of healing (I’m sure Brown once said this, maybe in an interview). The only true thing about psychoanalysis, Brown quipped (following Adorno), are the exaggerations. For poetry things are different, at least the true things are. Poetry reveals the yoke that binds us. Better, for Brown, poetry is the bond, the nexus in which we all toil. (Nobby loved terms like “syncretism,” “mystical interconnection,” “polymorphous intercommunication,” and “unity,” of course he no less valued the flamboyant too-muchness psychoanalysis always talks about. In marrying the two, think of his felicitous phrasing: “We participate each other, connected as well as separated by a sea of death; living each other’s death, and dying each other’s life.”)

Brown’s poets included Dante, Keats, and Pound. He also liked Olson. In his “Projective Verse,” Olson writes that “a poem is energy.” Of course a poem, no matter how charged with energy its content, will not survive on content alone but through voice. Voice means something like style of thought. And this style, to sound a voice, bears an agenda: not simply to record the actual, but to continuously create the sensation of immersion in the actual. Poetry is near, common, low.

Some say also that poetry must do more. It must dislodge assumption, not by simply opposing it, but by dismantling the systematic proof in which its inevitability is grounded. Others say it must be cautious, ever-diligent not to mistake noble utterance for base perception.

For Brown poetry needed simply to be. Safeguarding the site where poetry can emerge, violently active, is everything. We must set buoys afloat to mark the spots of these sites and of their shipwrecks:

THE SEA MARKE

Charles Olson (recalling John Smith)

Aloofe, aloofe; and come no neare,

The dangers doe appeare;

Which if my ruin had not beene

You had not seene:

I onely lie upon this shelfe

to be a marke to all

which on the same might fall,

That none may perish but my selfe.

Brown may have been the ultimate buoy. His work attests to the wrecks of our time. But it also attends to the hope that is left in the aftermath: “Hope creates from its own wreck the things it contemplates.” And poetry is the beacon of this hope.

What is democracy?

With C. Douglis Lummis I share in the call for a “rectification of names.” As Lummis puts it “Democracy was once a word of the people, a critical word, a revolutionary word. It has been stolen by those who would rule over the people, to add legitimacy to their rule. It is time to take it back.” For Lummis this means “identifying and junking twisted and hypocritical uses” of the phrase. I agree that it is important to confront those who would claim democracy in the name of free markets, (neo)liberal individualism, and consumer choice. Still, I am less motivated to police the boundaries of what constitutes an authentic form of democracy from its bastardized versions. What’s more, I am uninterested in the qualifier radical, which seems so often to adjectivally accompany democracy wherever its etymological meaning gets deployed on the left. For me, democracy needs no qualifier, it simply is radical (democracy goes to the root) from the start. Following Wolin, I see democracy as momentary, constituted in and as struggle, embracing a wide range of fleeting forms. Democracy is a self-consuming artifact, or at least threatens to be. There is promise in this plight: democracy as form of self-rule and freedom that seeks to reject all efforts to ground itself in something outside of itself. And I agree with Laclau and Mouffe in viewing political identity as multifariously rooted in these struggles, articulated at contingent sites of conflict and contestation. Ranciere is right to theorize these as forms of subjectification, not impositions of already recognized social identities, but introductions of new voices that are at once expressive and disruptive.

But there is also more. Democracy isn't just about popular authorization, reciprocal dependency, participatory equality, and conflicting interests. It is also about the deeply historical and epistemic contexts within which these struggles are situated. Democracy may depend on being brought to life, again and again, by insurgent, inventive subalterns. But it also depends on those groups embarking on political projects that surpass extant political topographies.

Incendies

Incendies. The latest film by Quebecois director Dennis Velleneuve. This is a brilliant film, at once striking and lyrical, expressive, full of depth and dimension. A tragedy of Sophoclean proportions. Weaving together past and present into an entangled, aporetic whole, the film gives the supple impression of a world where the repercussions of what has happened endlessly unfurl, opening out, spreading into the shape of the present.

The film is adapted from Wajdi Mouawad’s celebrated screenplay, Scorched. It is an apt title. I recently discovered that the term violence derives etymologically from a constellation of metaphors—fire, flame, blaze, inferno. It makes sense that this family of terms would supply Incendies its title. It is a film about what Adriana Cavarero calls Horrorism—a form of violation grounded in the experience of disfiguration, disgrace, and massacre.

Incendies projects a vision of a world enfolded in violence, but it is a world no less occasioned by survivance. Survivance, Derrida tells us, is about overliving, survivance underscores a dividend—what Bonnie Honig describes as “that surprise extra, the gift that exceeds rightful expectations, the surplus that exceeds causality.” For Gerald Vizenor, survivance “signifies the undeniable trace of presence over absence of victimry.” And this isn’t just about survival politics. Survivance sacralizes the existence of lifeworlds that persist despite their expected erasure. Survivance catalyzes a new more just future conditioned by shining hope, illumination, and affirmation. This is what Incendies is about.

But what animates survivance? From where does it come? The answer given by Incendies: promising…and forgiveness. Promising and forgiveness wield power in a world of violence and wreckage. Together the two human faculties bear the capacity to interrupt and ultimately break cycles of violence that endlessly feed on each other.

Posthumously, Nawal enjoins her twin children, Jeane and Simon, to fulfill one such promise. Jeane must locate her long lost father, and Simon his long lost brother, each delivering a sealed letter composed by their mother before her death. Distributing these letters is not just a matter of discharging a responsibility owed their mother, the promise also carries with it a promise their mother made while still alive, a promise to find her son lost at birth. This was a promise Nawal made to herself, as well as to her son. According to her final wishes, Nawal is meant to be buried naked in the ground, lacking stone or epitaph, since she failed during her life to fulfill the promise made to herself and her son. “There is no burial rite for those who betray promises,” Nawal explains. Only the promise fulfilled by her children can redeem her failure.

Not only do these promises guarantee the dead the rite of a proper burial, they also perform an important function for the world of the living. Promising dispels violence. Amidst the harrowing turmoil and frenzy of a violent outpouring the promise stands as a beckon of shining hope. Forgiveness works like this too. Nawal forgives and is forgiven. Forgiveness liberates.


This is what Arendt tells us too. Promising and forgiveness belong together, “in so far as one of them, forgiving, serves to undo the deeds of the past, whose ‘sins’ hang like Damocles’ sword over every new generation; and the other, binding oneself through promises, serves to set up in the ocean of uncertainty, which is the future by definition, islands of security without which not even continuity, let alone durability of any kind, would be possible in the relationships between men.”

The trouble here though is that Arendt is otherwise clear in her pronouncement that the power of forgiveness is located precisely in its unpredictability. Forgiveness is unpredictable because “it is the only reaction that acts in an unexpected way…Forgiveness is the only reaction which does not merely re-act but acts anew and unexpectedly, unconditioned by the act which provoked it and therefore frees from its conseuqneces both the one who forgives and the one who is forgiven,” (HC, 241). Forgiveness is unpredictable, in other words, because it avoids the reflexive and “more natural” reaction that seeks revenge and retribution.

There is something disturbing about Arendt’s formulation here. Promising is “the remedy for unpredictability, for the chaotic uncertainty of the future.” But if the promise exists to quell the unpredictable, to supply its “solution,” and forgiveness is only powerful to the extent that it is unexpected, then Arendt, however inadvertently, leaves us promising never to forgive. Arendt would no doubt find such a conclusion terribly perverse. Without forgiveness we are doomed to remain captive to the irreversibility of our actions. Unforgiven, we are liable to carry on barred from further action, caught as we are in the circuit of the past’s eternal resonance. Worse, the victims of action’s irreversibility may be tempted toward the antithesis of the political, the violence of retribution.

How does this square with Incendies?

Agonistic Democracy Panel: Radical Democracy Conference, New School, April 2011

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wfiw53A3T2k

The Tree of Life

There are two ways in the world, Terrence Malick tells us in his new film The Tree of Life. The way of nature…and the way of grace (an old, old binary). Presumably, the way of nature is the way of impulse, of instinct, the chaos of creation, the way of the way things are. The way of grace is different. Grace is other-worldly. The forces everywhere clashing in a tangled weave of bedlam is exchanged for the supple benefaction of the power and the glory. Sharp light bends to the curve in a grace lit globe.

Love, or your life will fly by. Or so Malick suggests in another pithy phrasing. The imperative is an ominous one. And love is like grace. It is a choice, a way in the world. Love attunes us to our surroundings. Without love, those surroundings fade to the background. In loving, our lives, full of grace, gain contoured dimension. Love and grace, Malick seems to want to say, make our lives intentioned and intentional. In loving, our lives become vectors. And this is a meaningful existence, fecund with profuse dimensionality. All things shining.