A blog of fragments.
DISPATCH 6
Note: When the shadow of one ruin stretches to touch another, will they call it solidarity?
What does it mean to endure, or subvert, or rebuild? Perhaps a more skeletal question: what does it mean to survive? Of course, these questions, and our potential answers, are an effect of location: what does it mean to ask these things as citizens of empire?
As a corollary: they are also an effect of observation. These meanings travel out from us, as waves and particles both, limned by watchful eye. Yet their movement, and our implication within them, constitutes the field of inquiry; which is to say, it all means that we are in relation.
For better and for worse, relationality is the domain of poetry. Ask the sports betters of liberal democracy to define relationality and they will point to a map of red and blue, lead you by hand to the voting booth. For them, relationality is a thread between the sovereign individual and the nation-state conjured by their willpower. The orthodox Marxist anatomizes the universe into a circulation of capital, a grand dialectical battle with a consequence of integers—sociality and culture and feeling are just an obfuscation of the scientific system of material distribution. Only in such an impoverished, sterile vision of the world can the Soviet dream of empire seem like justice.
To be in relation is to be in proximity to others, known and unknown. Proximity here is not about temporal or spatial closeness, but encounters — willing and coercive, psychic and material, historical and speculative — that define the elaboration of our lives. Whether we like it or not—and we decidedly do both—we belong to the demands of ourselves and all our Others, even those we cannot know or have studiously forgotten. The rooms/poleis/encampments we build for ourselves and not-ourselves, opaque inheritances of catastrophe and kindness, the ostensibly contingent happenstances that led us into each other’s arms; we structure and are structured by lifeworlds that irrevocably draw us into relation with one another. To inflect more onto our terms — relationality is nonsovereign, and can only impotently inflate itself into a semblance of sovereignty through domination.
The ghost of Derrida reading Paul Celan emerges here, of response-ability and sovereignties in question, but I most love Lauren Berlant’s elaboration of nonsovereignty through the diminutive, ambivalent melodramatics of inconvenient others:
“Thus, the inconvenience of other people isn’t evidence that the Others were bad objects all along: that would be hell. The inconvenience of the world is at its most confusing when one wants the world but resists some of the costs of wanting. It points to the work required in order to be with even the most abstract of beings or objects, including ourselves, when we have to and at some level want to, even if the wanting includes wanting to dominate situations or merely to coexist. The pleasure in anonymity and in being known; the fear of abandonment to not mattering and the fear of mattering the wrong way. I am describing in inconvenience a structural awkwardness in the encounter between someone and anything, but also conventions of structural subordination. Thus ‘people’ in the title stands for any attachment, any dependency that forces us to face how profoundly nonsovereign we are” (On the Inconvenience of Other People).
Nonsovereignty has an extensive genealogy extending across affect theory, postcolonial studies, animal studies, and all others interested in the subterranean and fungal and entangled. I think of Julietta Singh, Donna Haraway, Lisa Lowe, Lauren Berlant, Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing, and others who deploy the term as a fundamental critique against the monadic form of the individual; maintaining such an illusion requires empire, human/animal divides, and the effacement of all kinds of crossings and intimacies that have and will gesture to alternative forms of living together.
Yet, I write in ruins. My interest lies in re-valencing scenes of negativity — of melancholia, diminishment, and self-effacement — into living encounters with unknown others that may, or may not, provide a sense of being with others that exceed the normative boundaries of the liberal subject — the sovereign individual. To live in the ruins of the present, without condemning us all as simply long- or soon-to-be faceless dead, is to develop strategies for attending to intertwined personal, political, historical, and memorial loss as dynamic encounters rather than static conditions of oppression and disempowerment. We need to train our faculties to pay attention to the dynamisms of what Jasbir Puar calls convivial assemblages, which “foregrounds categories such as race, gender, and sexuality as events — as encounters — rather than as entities or attributes of the subject.”
To put it another way, I hold in suspicion that scenes of violently imposed diminishment mark either an absence of relation or a recondite reservoir of potentiality awaiting recuperation through (political, medical, etc.) intervention. Living long enough in ruins, where it is presumed that our comforts must be clawed from the ashes of increasingly familiar others, it is clear that the recourses offered by liberalism cannot even sufficiently describe these scenes of negativity; in fact, the people, lifeworlds, and modes of being negated or neglected by liberalism are either eradicated or induced to assimilate into the very forms of sociality that produce such exclusions in the first place.
All this to say — I am not nearly so advanced as those who can carry the flame of momentous change, the belief in the Event. While I try to do all that I am called and able to do, I am much more interested in scenes that cannot promise enduring legibility, that are not afforded the security of surviving beyond their own improvised staging. I think poems, at best, render legible surprising, dexterous relations (between words and worlds, enjambment and image, etc.) that are always already wilted in the twilight of everyday modalities.
If novels — God forbid — can make a claim to moral instruction, are to be held in breastpocket as a pleasingly distorted map of the world, then poems flourish and die in the span of their own short breaths, requiring us to bring their imaginative short-circuits back into life through our own fleeting encounters, over and over again. How often I’ve fled into my interior life only to read poetry, like Franny Choi’s The World Keeps Ending, and the World Goes On, that stages a dynamic of love that does not retreat from the apocalyptic but extends across it. Or even just at the level of language—the surprise of a soft ribbon turning into metallic sound and iron sharpening into blade in Phillip B. Williams’s “Final Poem for the Deer” (“Deer you get lost in. Deer with a ribbon / of brass bells around its neck and an iron / sword in its antlers’ altar”) moves me to think and feel unexpected transformation in even the most mundane parts of my life.
In my time reading submissions for lit mags, I have noticed a recurring type of short prose piece. A city bustles with messy life — children play in a park ringed with trash, gutted animals are carried through backdoors and into immaculate restaurant kitchens, a stranger smoking a cigarette looks at the narrator with a look of disgust tainted with desire, and it is intimated that the look is exchanged. Suddenly, everything beautiful and ugly looks up: angels or some other otherworldly figures descend from the heavens. The whole city stops.
Sometimes the angels condemn the city; other times they are there to reassure. If the story is good, the angels’ judgement is withheld, and we are left with silence and an ending. I think about this type of story often as a desire for life clarified — even when the judgement itself is withheld, the space for its pronouncement is cleaved from the ongoing overpresence of a city laden with the enthralling and the hideous. The logic of the Event is alluring for both stewards of empire and their revolutionaries.
I think contemporary poetry can resist this inflated bubble of pronouncement over, and instead immerse itself in crawling ongoingness through various discursive strategies ranging from pop culture references to bringing us into the register of the body, often through desire. Even at the level of language, it’s the dynamic unfolding of the poem — that “ribbon / of brass bells” — that produces worldmaking modes of encounter, rather than considering sentences as units of data. What and how a sentence means cannot be shunted away from the unfolding of the sentence itself. To write of ruins, not as a sterile site incapable of reproducing itself or generating new worlds, is to not hold oneself in apprehension of the coming of angels.
If we’re to proceed with negative formulations, we can walk alongside a common definition of poetry as writing what cannot be said, as an oblique discourse of the unsayable. I think there is a productive thread to draw through poetry as threshold in Bachelard’s The Poetics of Space, Glissant’s Poetics of Relation, and more recent interdisciplinary work on nonsovereignty. But such thoughts require more time, more living in relation, more uncertainty that I need to recognize as part of life rather than as opposition to the good life.
To insist on poetry in times of material, cultural, and political evisceration is to believe that change can be marshaled from the interstices of legible projects. I find myself unmoved in the face of revolutionary anthems or the calculations of political enfranchisement, where small dollars grow bigger or die. I can’t imagine a future where rage is productivized into statecraft. Instead, I’m a creature awash with minor and ugly feelings — ugly in the sense that Sianne Ngai uses to think through feelings that are not deployed into productive avenues but instead are politically ambiguous, leaving one in ambivalent situations of suspended agency. It is precisely in that felt suspension of agency that we can make up new ways to find each other and ourselves, to acknowledge and imagine new proximities that do not cost us everything we try to hold onto.
Make no mistake — this isn’t a romance of disempowerment that valorizes oppression as innovation for the better. Thinking and feeling relationality, nonsovereignty, and negativity is aimed at breaking apart the calcified fantasies of sovereignty that transform the ruins of the present into a mastered domain of citizenry. I turn to poetry and writing to think through discursive strategies for staying attentive to obfuscated entanglements that can relieve and apply pressure in different ways. There is no single answer here, no line that can produce a coherent narrative that makes everything, including people, fall into place. Instead, I have found that even the most technical discussions of craft always return to the difficulties of living.
And so, too, do we return. What it means to live transforms and is transformed by the context of its unfolding and observation, and I am not speaking in the depraved way that reifies oppression into equal debate. What I mean is this: some months ago, when Americans were flagellating themselves online about the genocide in Gaza, moaning about how they could not possibly go on, I saw a post from a Palestinian (which I sadly have lost) that said something along the lines of: I do not expect you to stop your entire lives. But, when you feel joy, think of our joy. It’s a line that I have thought about almost every single day, and it took me a while to appreciate what it means.
It is a call for encounter, for our feeling to meet the feelings of others, in all their complications and qualifications and immediacies. More specifically, it makes us recognize our ostensibly private pleasures as an encounter with others who we efface in the elaboration of our collective lives. White guilt is so convenient because it circumscribes encounter into a specific feeling of negativity; others and their encroaching needs can be warded off through the performance of acknowledgement rather than the enduring messy stuckness of being-in-relation.
Joy (and other feelings, including feelings of detachment) takes on new dimensions in the scene of encounter. I have thought about this line especially as many white Americans insist on “protecting your joy” as a precondition for their supposedly forthcoming political action. What does it mean to insist on a kindness and generosity and hope that refuse the ambivalent dynamics of encounter? I think it means to dream in and of infrastructures of death and destruction, to wish for a kind of comfort that is untainted by the very world it imposes. The disavowal of encounter structures the imaginary that can only hope for better elections, larger town squares, to expand the very institutions that conjure the fantasy of sovereignty from blood and domination, and softer types of violence that can, if everything goes right, be gently mistaken for life itself.
Of course, many of us languish in our own ruins, but ruin can bring about its own refusals of encounter. For example, there are many Americans who express a frustration that Palestinians supposedly overestimate the amount of power one has in America. They then list all their own precarities: health problems and disabilities, their daughters they cannot protect, etc. By this self-interested logic, disempowerment prevents solidarity, which is to say, Palestinians can only hope to receive anything from me after I am empowered, a limitless horizon of capitalist and liberal fantasying that any colonized person will recognize as empire itself.
I think this is why nonsovereignty is such a useful term, as disempowerment is laden with connotations of inability — it is a static condition of immobility rather than, to return to Jasbir Puar and many others, an event and an encounter. While disempowerment can leave us in the nothingness of failedsovereignty, each one of us an unrecognized royal heir awaiting our rightful office, nonsovereignty gestures to a labile interdependence of unpredictable and mixed help and harm. What it can and does mean, or bring about, can only be improvised and incompletely known; it is a humbling lesson of encounter.
As nonsovereign dwellers of the ruins of the present, there is no prescriptive guide that can eradicate ambiguity and ambivalence, no separate site of judgement for making sense of our ongoingness. Although it might seem self-evident, it is difficult to reckon with the fact that the work of change is a transformative context that is contextually transformative upon itself, often without the scaffolding that ensures its endurance, that it will all add up and be worth it. Doing “the work” of change can and must be a lot of things, but it is ultimately done in the messy unfolding of our lives, where unexpected connections are made without any reassurances of it all mattering, or making perfect sense, or even that we really know who we address—like poetry. Though all is uncertain, I think that, if the flame of revolution does come, it will be born from the friction that occurs when one joy meets another.