Poetics of Relation (Glissant)

 

Carribean islands have an immense relevance for the poetry of anthropology project, across the French/English divide. And each island has its specificity. Aimé Cesaire stands as a precursor of many things to come. His critique of colonialism and his Cahier d'un retour au pays natal is an anthropological must read. Many carribean writers inhabit the colonial languages with uneasiness and turn this discomfort into a specific relationship with writing and poetic composition, often expanding French and English while turning them upside down, with some help from creole or other languages. Along with language, goes a conflicted relationship with history, colonial history but also the pull to rewrite history via epics, to re-tell Greek myth from the perspectives of the islands.

Among many, perhaps Derek Wallcott and Eduard Glissant stand out, for opposite and complementary reasons.

Glissant’s writings, Poetics of Relation in particular, could have been part of our seminar’s readings. In the last ten years or so Glissant has enjoyed significant popularity in the English reading world, institutional anthropology included (a search on anthrosource lists 44 references), and his relevance in the Francophone world (a notion which G contributed to deconstruct) has long been established, to the extent that some of his articulations, especially in watered down retellings, risk appearing shallow, or excessively emphatic (creolization for example- incidentally, not a notion he invented, unlike many others) and therefore easily appropriated by dominant institutions pursuing the conquering universalism he offered a counterpoint to. This is in part due to the success of his coinages --his word figurations whose immediacy risks erasing the sedimentation they have in Glissant’s own writings where these notions work as mobile signposts rather than hardened concepts or readymade formulas. As his relational approach intimates, notions floating in the air of the times (1980 -1990: globalization, the Baroque, oral/written, computers), are reshuffled into original formulations. But Glissant himself is weary of how what appear as escape routes easily become “new regimes,” perfectly aware that the figures of speech he deploys will soon come to “define,” people, objects and texts, and thus loose the intransitivity he seeks to account for by coining them. The only antidote to the trivialization of his approach, is to read Glissant and read his books from cover to cover. They are full of intuitions, whether you agree with them or not.

 

Here are a few scattered items from the pages of Poetics of Relation that deserve slow engagement.

 

• Glissant’s tribute to Victor Segalen’s incomplete or contradictory project: Glissant argues that for Segalen: “the power to experience the shock of elsewhere is what distinguishes the poet” (30) but also acknowledges Segalen’s ethnocentrism and ultimate failure: “it is not necessary to try to become the other (to become other) nor to "make" him in my image. These projects of transmutation -without metempsychosis- have resulted from the worst pretensions and the greatest of magnanimities on the part of West. They describe the fate of Victor Segalen. [...] I myself believe that he died of the opacity of the Other, of coming face to face with the impossibility of accomplishing the transmutation that he dreamed of.” (193)

 

• Return, detournements, circular nomadism.

 

• A poetics of opacity: “Thus, that which protects the Diverse we call opacity” (62). “The thought of opacity distracts me from absolute truths whose guardian I might believe myself to be. Far from cornering me within futility and inactivity, by making me sensitive to the limits of every method, it relativizes every possibility of every action within me.” (192) “Widespread consent to specific opacities is the most straightforward equivalent of nonbarbarism.” (194).

 

• The notion of Relation, as an anti-ontology, a mobile placeholder for articulating an alternative logic of decentralized connections. Working in relation to totality (the opposite of universality, of totalitarianism) and stemming from the violence of slavery (“the abyss”), Relation emerges out of it and turns its negative charge into a potential. Hence the plantation as the model for modernity but also, in a productive contradiction, its escape route: “The place was closed, but the word derived from it remains open.” (75). “Relation is learning more and more to go beyond judgments into the unexpected dark of art's upsurgings. Its beauty springs from the stable and the unstable, from the deviance of many particular poetics and the clairvoyance of a relational poetics. The more things it standardizes into a state of lethargy, the more rebellious consciousness it arouses.” (138-139) “Relation is a product that in turn produces. What it produces does not partake of Being”. (160), see also page 170 for more anti-ontological statements, and more explicitly “Being is relation: but Relation is safe from the idea of Being.” (185).

 

• On the making of cultures formed in the wake of colonialism: “Then again, what shall we say about composite cultures, whose composition did not result from a union of ‘norms’ but, rather, was built in the margins with all kinds of materials that by their very nature were exceptions to the patience of the rule, to be thrust headlong into the world by necessity, oppression, anguish, greed, or an appetite for adventure?” (91).

 

• A sustained reflection on the politics of language, particularly relevant to Québec.

 

• An “aesthetics of the earth:” “This trend toward international standardization of Consumption will not be reversed unless we make drastic changes in the diverse sensibilities of communities by putting forward the prospect--or at least the possibility-of this revived aesthetic connection with the earth.” (150).

 

• A realistic politics of resistance that does not trivialize strategy nor is content with nursing the negative: “We, have learned that peremptory declarations, grounded in the old Manichaeanism of liberation, are of no use here, because they only contribute to reinforcing a stereotypical language with no hold in reality. These are all liabilities whose dialectics must first be either realized or bypassed.” (152)

 

• “Thought of the Other is sterile without the other of Thought.” (154)

 

• A prefiguration of the current media ecology: “Indeed, what we have is a sequence of moments of inebriation whose sense no fashion could fathom. Commonplaces are rambling, ephemeral particles within communication, this cold nodule; all the ideas are in the air, but it is the public manifestation of these (pushed, whenever possible, to the limit or simplified) that counts.” (176).

 

• A particle of romanticism “Every poetics is a palliative for eternity.” (184)

 

• The immobility of Europe: “Merely consider the hypothesis of a Christian Europe, convinced of its legitimacy, rallied together in its reconstituted universality, having once again, therefore, transformed its forces into a "universal" value-triangulated with the technological strength of the United States and the financial sovereignty of Japan-and you will have some notion of the silence and indifference that for the next fifty years (if it is possible thus to estimate) surround the problems, the dependencies and the chaotic sufferings of the countries of the south with nothingness.” (191)

 

• A Recognition of violence as constitutive and ascetic “Modern violence is anticultural, which means it tries hard to guarantee the open energy of the shock between cultures. Is this a return of barbarism, or is it some prophetic precautionary measure against the barbarism of reductiveness and uniformity?” (197)

 

• echos - chaos