Identity Politics in the Public Discourse/ Poetry as a Medium for Encountering the Other

Identity Politics in the Public Discourse Poetry as a Medium for Encountering the Other

Myrna Marianovits Royal College of Art

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1.

Identity politics is a term officially introduced in the field of political discourse by Barbara Smith, in the "Combahee River Collective Statement”, the manifesto of a black feminist organisation she played leading part in and was founded in the 1970s. However, the term has been in use since the 1960s conveying diverse beliefs regarding identity in different political contexts. What this term represented in the context it was officially elaborated was the claiming of political rights for marginalised social groups, through the formation of alliances based on the prioritisation of a certain aspect of some individuals’ identities like race, gender or ethnicity. Though the aim of identity politics was to dredge up social inequalities which were ignored from the wider political rhetoric and practices, this term was gradually disconnected from its ideological substance and became an equivalent of social fragmentation.

Social groups promoting a single element of their identity motivated by a common political interest, disregarding their position in a wider diverse society is what led to identity politics being often related to identitarianism, a far-right political ideology that emerged in France and promoted what Hannah Arendt referred to as Pan-European nationalism. 1 The idea of an ethnopluralist society where diversity is a factor of development and cultural abundance, advocated in the framework of this ideology a “right to difference” that dissembled a social classification legitimising leftovers of the Nazi theories.

Such misconceptions of differentiation derive from the roots of western thought, creating connections between certain social identities and fixed moral attributes which are constantly reproduced in the political discourse sustaining a narrative of inequality, supremacy and fear of “the other”. Denise Ferreira da Silva, in her essay Difference without Separability, by deconstructing core values and theories of the western philosophy, argues that the problem in perceiving cultural and social differences derives from a substantial principle of the prevalent narrative according to which knowledge results from the understanding.

The relation between knowledge and understanding originates in Immanuel Kant’s idea that “knowledge consists in the identification of the limiting forces, or laws that determine what happens to observed things and events (phenomena)”. 2 The remains of this idea in the contemporary thought reflect what Ferreira da Silva addresses as separability –a view that knowledge of things derives from the combination of intuition and understanding and whatever aspect of an observed object or a subject cannot be perceived or processed through these filters, is irrelevant to knowledge. 3 The certainty emerging by the tools of understanding is what gradually shaped these fixed attributes which have ever since been applied on social groups in the form of pattern narratives, either by other groups or individuals amidst periods of social crises, or as implements of different forms of authorities.

In the globalised era of supposed homogeneity where the world is being perceived as a whole, social and economical status has become the main factor for identifying individuals. The loss of cultural identity which occurred after this turning point did not result to a sense of belonging in a wider and more diverse community, but in a rise of

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Hannah Arendt broaches this concept in the 1950s, as an ominous possibility emerging from the cultivation of an Anti-American sentiment in Europe at this time. Hannah Arendt, Essays in Understanding 1930-1954, ed. J .Kohn (New York: Harcourt, 1994), 412-417.

2 Immanuel Kant, “Critique of Pure Reason”, in Denise Ferreira da Silva, “On Difference Without Separability”, 32nd Bienal de São Paulo Incerteza Viva, ed. Jochen Volz and Júlia Rebouças (São Paulo: Fundação Bienal de São Paulo, 2016), 59.

3 Denise Ferreira da Silva, “On Difference Without Separability”, 32nd Bienal de São Paulo Incerteza Viva, ed.

Jochen Volz and Júlia Rebouças (São Paulo: Fundação Bienal de São Paulo, 2016), 59.

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individuality and subjectivity in the form of solitude, this leading, according to Felix Guattari, to a deterioration of human relations. 4 In a context where productivity is the equivalent to evolution and industry has replaced the state, social identities are shaped by classifying individuals according to economic and efficiency factors. As a result, instead of unifying common objectives there are conflicting trajectories of personal development, and social identities become a measure for filtering human relations.

In terms of social interaction, this filter limits down the relations amongst individuals, to the ones profitable for their development, since the spaces where public life mostly takes place are connect to professional and profit driven activities. In addition, subjectivity and the detachment of individuals from the community result to a passive position towards a common achievement, and therefore an initiative for interaction.

In a political context, the mechanism of social classification can be examined through the wider scope of the economic apparatus. Stefano Harney argues that logistics and management science are applied upon all the aspects of our social existence and activity, where every individual is counted as ‘a metric of economy’ and thus accessible. 5 Specifically, he states that ‘the metric of the economy works because logistics produces access, and access inserts the metric, in a vicious circle’. 6 So an individual can be considerable or controlled when being accessible and therefore involved in the societal processes of production and currency. This way certain social groups -being inaccessible- cannot be counted any more as a metric of economy, consequently resulting in lacking involvement and representation in the political discourse. They become “the other” that needs to be displaced from the public discourse because of the reminder of the infinite alterity of any other, impossible to be perceived. Otherness therefore is reflected on one’s face through a representation created and depicted with the use of a language that identifies, describes, and classifies.

Reexamining the term identity politics in the light of this short analysis, unencumbered from the moral context in which it was initially presented, leads to a paradox deriving from the opposite implementations of what it advocates.

This is because the interpretation of this idea can either lead to the formation of connections -by reveal unifying elements, or to a social division eliminating any potential for social coherence. The problem identified in the second case though, does not derive from the essence of identity politics, but from the limited perception of “the other” which raises the possibility of false assumptions and impetuous attributes deriving by prevalent differentiation narratives.

2.

The problem of defining “the other” begins from the anthropological approach of the term. Modern anthropology developed through a process of identifying differences and “inventing the human other, in order to develop a theory of humankind”. 7 Through observation and theorising factors of differentiation in an epistemological context, a wide range of others has emerged from the field of anthropology. This process of personifying human “others” is reflected in how privileged groups throughout history have been mapping differences and classifying otherness. Such an example can be seen in the relation between the white gaze and the black body, as described by Frantz Fanon in

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Félix Guattari, The Three Ecologies, trans. Ian Pindar and Paul Sutton, (London: The Athlone Press, 2000), 27-28.

Niccolò Cuppini and Mattia Frapporti, “Logistics Genealogies: A Dialogue with Stefano Harney”, Social Text, no.

136 (2018), 95-110.

6 Cuppini and Frapporti, “Logistics Genealogies,” 107.

7 Sundar Sarukkai, “The Other in Anthropology and Philosophy”, Economic and Political Weekly, no. 32 (1997), 14061409. https://www.jstor.org/stable/4405512 5

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Black Skin, White Masks. 8 The white’s look becomes a way for the “black other” to apprehend oneself, while being aware of their alienation. So being seen in the world from the standpoint of the world -according to what Sartre defines as the result of the Other’s look- the “black other” is exposed to the condition of otherness imposed to them by the white observer. 9 The look in this case serves as an implement for the alienation to become part of one’s identity, serving the observer’s attempt to create a narrative of superiority. At the same time, it relies on the mutual process of the being looked at, to legitimise exclusion in the eyes of the non-alienated, indicating -according to Sartre- the common threat that needs to be present in order for individuals to shape a group. 10 Another basic aspect of these representations of otherness, that makes them effective implements of enforcing the idea of the threat, is their derivation from what is thought to be understood and therefore known –so the cognitive process of categorising. What is hard to be perceived, is the non-cognitive substance of others which relies on their relation to the self. The existence of “the other” is essential for one’s ability to process and express, making “dialogical speech and reason possible” and establishing the main principle defining humankind. For Emanuel Levinas, the “face of the other” by evoking the subject, begets an ethical responsibility towards it, as the starting point of reason and discourse. 11 Therefore, by reducing the understanding of others into one’s system of thought, leads to shaping their identity as a reflection of one’s self, disregarding their substance existing prior to the instant of observation and interaction. Understanding the essence of the ethical relation is only possible when perceiving the other not as a knowable entity, but as an active factor to one’s notion of their self –a generator of subjectivity.

Sartre describes subjectivity as one’s obligation to be in one’s consciousness what one is in and to the world. 12 In this approach, the idea and inner understanding of the self is reflected on the individual’s “performance” as the exteriority of this understanding. So the social reality in this sense could not exist a priori, but is a product of material reality being interiorised, processed by consciousness and exteriorised again as multiple performances.

Taking into consideration that in this analysis, the fundamental principles relate to human responsibility and agency regarding the mediation between the self and the world brings us back to the deciding factor of representation in personifying otherness. The Look, by embedding alienation into one’s self conscious and shaping the collective identity of the non-alienated, distorts the individual’s performance and perception of others leading to “a form of subjectivity in which my (purely psychological) identification with other people is mediated by the 'directions' on the world of things”. 13 But the look is not an abstract enemy, it is the product of the human thought and praxis that derives from the urge to de superior, to intimidate and categorise the others in order to become part of the privileged group. The otherness is what forms the required common threat, implementing the substitution of one’s performance –and therefore self-representation to the world- with a predefined identity which serves as a filter in the self exteriorising process.

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I am the slave not of the "idea" that others have of me but of my own appearance, writes Frantz Fanon, indicating how the racial gaze targets populations, without relying on rational narratives, but on rhetorics of strategic differentiation.

9 Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, trans. Charles Lam Markmann, (London: Pluto Press, 1986), 116-140.

10 Jean-Paul Sarte, Critique of Dialectical Reason Vol. 1, trans. Alan Sheridan-Smith, 2nd edn (London: Verso, 2004), 25.

11 Sarukkai, “The Other in Anthropology and Philosophy,” 1406-1409.

12 Jean-Paul Sartre, “The Pursuit of Being”, Being and Nothingness: A Phenomenological Essay on Ontology, (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2003), 15-18.

13 Frederic Jamson, “Forward”, in Jean-Paul Sarte, Critique of Dialectical Reason Vol. 1, trans. Alan Sheridan-Smith, 2nd edn (London: Verso, 2004), 15.

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The concept of self-representation as an essential principle of social reality is closely linked to autonomy and identity in the sense of being a primary element of self-recognition. In a society where public discourse serves as a decision taking mechanism, self-representation becomes a demand that emerges freely into a domain or space of noninterference, communication, recognition and inclusion. 14 Thus, once subjects are freed from determination, it is through mutual self-representation and acclaim that the ethical relation as described by Levinas can be perceived and achieved. Considering knowledge as an unforeseeable process that does not relate to something that is immediately present, but must be re-presented, communication can serve as a means to develop this relation, since “the only way we have for learning about the experience of others is through the language they use to describe it”. 15 3.

Communication, or what Jurgen Habermas addresses as “communicative action” is the coordination of speech acts; 16 an encounter between two individuals aiming to pursuit their goals by reaching to an agreement –that is supposed to be the “inherent telos” of speech. The success of such an encounter is based on the mutual recognition that both individuals’ goals are valuable and respect-worthy. 17 Individuals should appear actively in communication “as unique beings and reveal themselves in their intersubjectivity. At the same time they must recognise one another as equally responsible beings, that is, as beings capable of intersubjective agreement”. 18 Intersubjectivity implies not only the shared understanding of meanings and common sense, but also the intangible space between two individuals interacting –the shared feelings; what lies outside the boundaries of one’s self.

According to Michail Bakhtin, dialogue exists on these borders –or thresholds- between individuals, who he does not perceive as beings “within” them, but as "extraterritorial" entities. 19 So, the communicative action should take place in between two individuals being always and wholly on the boundary –open towards each other- “having no sovereign internal territory, so when looking inside their self, they look into the eyes of another or with the eyes of another”. 20 Looking into the self, in this sense can lead to the reveal of as many -unknown till this moment- aspects of one’s self as the various individuals one encounters, seeking mutual understanding through speech.

Hannah Arendt argues that speech emerges as a response to human’s birth; it is fired by the existence of others, but it can only be defined by the self, since it is a drive connected to the onset of one’s existence –an initiative to start experiencing this new condition. It is this stage of infancy where the unexpected starts. Just as one’s birth can result to an infinite amount of contingencies, speech –so the starting point of an encounter- can lead to various manifestations of intersubjectivity. 21

14

Claire Colebrook, Ethics and Representation: From Kant to Post-Structuralism (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1999), 2.

15 One of the main principles in Wittgenstein's model of language acquisition.

Paul Broks, “Neuropsychologist Paul Broks on Wittgenstein”, A History of Ideas, aired on BBC Radio 4, 7 August 2015, 12:04 min, https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b06442qk 16 Here is implied the use of language as a medium for coordinating action, although according to Habermas there are other such mediums as well.

17 https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/habermas/#TheComAct 18 Jurgen Habermas, “Hannah Arendt’s Communications Concept of Power”, Hannah Arendt; Critical Essays, ed.

Lewis P. Hinchman and Sandra K. Hinchman (New York: State University of N.Y. Press, 1994), 215.

19 Gary Saul Morson and Caryl Emerson, Mikhail Bakhtin: Creation of a Prosaics (California: Stanford University Press, 1990), 51-52.

20 Mikhail Bakhtin, Problems of Dostoevsky's Poetics, trans. Caryl Emerson (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984), 287.

21 Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition, 2nd edn, (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1998), 176-177.

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So, the performative attitude of each subject should be driven from the urge to explore the multiplicity of potential agreements emerging from the encounter. This disposition to perceive both the other and the self is what distinguishes a communicative action from the strategic forms of social interaction.

Strategy –being a definite system of preconceived actions- occurs when the sequence of performances following the encounter is premeditated -so when an individual understates the other’s personal goals or has already settled on a certain telos of the act. This type of encounter is what Jurgen Habermas addresses as a strategic action, a condition of communication where “actors are not so much interested in mutual understanding as in achieving the individual goals they each bring to the situation”. 22 The concept of management implemented in the coordination of public interactions is in that sense the result of interlinked attempts of control through strategic actions based on the wide acceptance of predefined identities –thus, on the misconception of knowing the other- and serving certain interests.

In this context, what is today being defined as public discourse, where the implication of each speaker is predetermined through a classification of accessibility and where “human individuals emerge as independent social units only in an ‘equalitatian’ relation to capital”, 23 strategy is eliminating any possibility for an unexpected agreement.

Through the process of observation and determination of moral attributes in the form of political identities, the genre of public discourse has become an implement of the apparatus to reduce communication into strategic actions, where the telos can be controlled and directed towards the maintenance of intended power relations.

In Jean-François Lyotard’s understanding of speech, each phrase delivered preexists in a certain regime and what converts a sequence of phrases into an act of communication, are the linkages made between them by the participating parties. In the context of the political regime, the creation and manipulation of these links can serve as strategic implements for undercutting the speech of the multiple personified representations of Otherness. The creation of “new events, hegemonic discourses or grand narratives that often want to pre-program how those links are to be made and thus control all future phrases or events” is addressed by Lyotard as the problematic condition of the differend. 24 This condition is what enables a strategic action in which certain parties have no right to claim justice within the dominant language of the political regime. The damage imposed to the excluded individuals is this way “accompanied with the loss of means to prove the damage”. 25 “The others” being deprived of their right as active participants to the public discourse, are consequently led to the privation of testifying the damage and bringing to prominence the aspects of their existence overshadowed by their assigned identity. Thus, losing the right to selfrepresentation translates to the loss of possibility to be represented according to what one wishes to be representing.

4.

Understanding this rather intertemporal attitude towards Otherness as being a significant factor of configuring and sustaining power relations within societies throughout human history could set the foundations for investigating alternative avenues of communication and reexamining the essential role of ethics in human relations. Levinas, in his work Totality and Infinity, describes history as violence, in which the initial “ethical” encounter exists only in the micro 22

https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/habermas/#TheComAct Louis Dumont, “From Mandeville to Marx: The Genesis and Triumph of Economic Ideology”, 1977, quoted in Claire Colebrook, Ethics and Representation: From Kant to Post-Structuralism (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1999), 3.

24 Jean François Lyotard, The Differend: Phrases in Dispute, trans. Georges Van Den Abbeele (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1988), 80.

25 Lyotard, The Differend, 5.

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scale of relations amongst individuals entailing intrsubjective dialogue. 26 In what he addresses as a face-to-face encounter is where one can rediscover the values of engaging with the other –not being a distinguished objectified paradigm of alteriny, but a force calling one to account for oneself- and expanding one’s notion of the world.

Dialogue therefore, as a possibility of evoking one’s responsibility towards the other and generating intersubjectivity, is the mechanism that facilitates the transcendence from the encounter to a relation. Dialogue, consists of the repetitive sequence of speech acts. In every act, Levinas identifies an internal processing of an idea and the interpretation of the externalised result of this process and addresses these two aspects of a statement as the Saying and the Said respectively. The Saying relates to the self-exposure to the other –to the sincerity facilitating a form of giving and the Said refers to the interpretive possibilities of the communicated outcome. 27 In Merleau-Ponty’s Phenomenology of Perception, thought is described as an illusion of an inner life –a process which does not exist in an internal realm separated from the world and the aggregate of significations generated throughout the evolution of speech. Thought is not prior to expression, but is a process driven by a momentary intention of sense-giving, utilising already available meanings to produce a genuine gesture –a new possibility of encounter. 28 The uniqueness of such a gesture consists of the dual relation between the performer and the unknown -until this moment, multiple perceptions and experiences of the audience that could only be revealed through the response to what has been expressed. The inevitable subjectivity occurring in the moment of the gesture is therefore the main factor enabling and preserving the authenticity of an encounter. Therefore, what imperils the outcome of the encounter, by allowing the manipulation of meaning and the delineation of the performer’s intention is the possibility of interpretation provided from the preexisting concepts and meanings that preclude the detachment of the said from its ontological substance.

Though on the surface Levinas’s approach of an ethical encounter seems to disregard the effect of this ontological obstacle and the way it could be deployed to serve power relations and conflicting interests existing in every communicative action, he does imply the idealistic aspect of his analysis by placing it in the sphere of “possibility”. In his pursuit of an ethical communication he identifies the immemorial trace haunting each language while bearing witness to the “glory of the infinite” and the perception of proximity to the other destining the saying to a predicative predetermined said. 29 Thus, the ethical saying lies in a presemiotic dimension as a “a possibility of meaning distinct from that which comes to signs from the simultaneity of systems or the logical definition of concepts” 30. Exceeding the limits of significations and linguistic systems can -according to Levinas- lead to this anarchic ethical saying –the act of ultimate giving enabling the honest and unpredicted outcome of the encounter- and therefore a said allocated to subjectivity to produce infinite interpretations. This possibility is laid bare in the poetic said, where the words are not objects of a narrative, but an inner expression that obtains its meaning through the process of interaction and

26

Emanuel Levinas, Totality and Infinity: An Essay on Exteriority, trans. Alphonso Lingis (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1969), 52-57.

27 Gabriel Riera, “The Possibility of the Poetic Said in Otherwise than Being (Allusion, or Blanchot in Lévinas)”, Diacritics, no. 44 (2004), 13-36. https://www.jstor.org/stable/3805815 28 Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, trans. Colin Smith (New York: The Humanities Press, 1962), 183.

29 Gabriel Riera, “The Possibility of the Poetic Said in Otherwise than Being (Allusion, or Blanchot in Lévinas)”, Diacritics, no. 34 (2004), 13-36, 17. https://www.jstor.org/stable/3805815 30 Emanuel Levinas, Otherwise than Being: or Beyond Essence, trans. Alphonso Lingis (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1998), 259.

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reflection of the other’s experience. It is the poetic said that “exposes the possibility of a subversion of essence and accomplishes a dismantling of the normative and violent dimension of coherence” 31.

The possibility of poetry, as conceived by Levinas could not emerge from a writing or a saying defined by aesthetical norms and dedicated to featuring its self-perfection, since that would be a closed entity disregarding the existence of the other, -it would not be gesture. On the contrary, he suggests a poetry which “interrupts itself in order to allow into these gaps, its other voice”. 32 Such a poem emerges as a living being entailing an other, or an anyone in its ad infinitum trajectory towards wholeness through an additive process of constructing meaning. The use of the word anyone –indicating the insignificance of any preexisting identity in a poetic discourse- implies the possibility of an honest encounter beyond otherness, since otherness in this sense becomes the equivalent of sameness by emasculating all factors of differentiation.

5.

A poetic said when perceived as an ethical gesture could be traced –in its most accessible and primordial form- in the actual poetic expression, in the sense of a language that does not serve as a strategic implement for discourse, but instead depicts one’s ultimate exposure to the world. The ethical aspect of a poetic attempt lies in the essential condition of encountering the other, by expressing an “ineludable question, an unprecedented demand” 33 that includes the other’s response in the understanding of its totality. The poem stands as an entity of its own -though as a subject and never as an object- in the form of a Levinasian face which “prior to manifestation, opens the possibility of relation to the other” 34 just as an argument does, in an honest communicative action. Though poetry –poetics more specifically- can be identified in various manifestations of ethical exposure to the other, examining this gesture through the scope of its depictions in language -as a verbal saying, could possibly provide a more clear understanding of its dialogical and communicative aspect.

In the pursuit of a poetic said as perceived in the previous analysis, it would be enlightening to touch upon the poetry –and literary criticism- of Paul Celan and Maurice Blanchot, who were connected personally –but most of all intellectually- with Emmanuel Levinas. The ethical concerns emerging in Celan’s writing and the anarchic and insubordinate attitude of Blanchot towards any poetic expression reflect two critical elements of the poetic said that could facilitate the possibility of perceiving its substance.

“The poem becomes – under what conditions – the poem of a person who still perceives, still turns towards phenomena, addressing and questioning them. The poem becomes conversation – often desperate conversation.

Only the space of this conversation can establish what is addressed, can gather into a ‘you’ around the naming and speaking I. But this ‘you’, come about by dint of being named and addressed, brings its otherness into the present.” 35

31 32

Gabriel Riera, “The Possibility of the Poetic Said in Otherwise than Being,” 19.

Leslie Hill, “Distrust of Poetry: https://www.jstor.org/stable/3840694 33 Hill, “Distrust of Poetry,” 6.

34

35

Levinas, Blanchot,

Celan”,

MLN,

no.

120 (2005),

986-1008,

6.

Hill, “Distrust of Poetry,” 5.

_Paul Celan, The Meridian, ed. Böschenstein, Bernhard and Heino Schmull, trans. Joris, Pierre (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2011), 1-15.

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Celan, referring to poetic language, clarifies that “it does not transfigure, does not ‘poeticise’, but names and posits, and endeavors to measure out the domain of what is given and what is possible” 36 –echoing Merleau-Ponty’s understanding of expression as a genuine gesture. By approaching the poem as an encounter with the outside –or the other- he implies the phenomenological relation facilitating the interpretation of words and at the same time deconstructs any suspicion of materiality connected to the poem as an object that could potentially undergo any critical evaluation according to predetermined conventions. 37 In this sense the poetic expression is perceived as a moment of interaction –a dialogue unencumbered from aesthetical criteria that does not entail highly intellectual and pretentious handling of language, instead of being thought of as a work of art, existing almost in the sphere of the Kantian transcendent. This argument however should not lead to the misconception that the poet does not undergo an intellectual process of constructing the saying –however it relates more to an intuitive giving, rather than heeding accepted standards.

Levinas not only refers to Celan’s poetry as a depiction of the ethical relation he seeks for in the manifestations of poetic language, but Celan’s language also informed Levinas’s philosophical elaboration. Correspondingly, Celan’s “poetic and poetological engagement with ethical concerns reveals its full scope in the light of Levinas’s ethics” 38. His themes and the way he composes his poetry, illuminate the correlative dimension of the Saying and the Said, while unintentionally proposing an implement for actual speech communication, if considered within the framework of Michael Bakhtin’s dialogical –and therefore existential, according to his argument- nature of any literary work. Bakhtin identifies the aspect of discourse in multiple levels of the poetic process –from the inner dialogical relationships existing in a literary piece, 39 to the encounter of a world’s representation with the real world, mutually and simultaneously enriching each other. 40 In the examination of Bakhtin’s understanding of dialogue -as a relation between multiple manifestations of existence-, and the apprehension of this concept as a respective elaboration on the encounter between two subjects as conceived by Levinas, lies the possibility of an ethical-dialogical engagement with Celan’s poetry.

One of the reasons why Maurice Blanchot could be perceived as a representative of this ethical language sought out in this analysis, is the refusal -reflected in his writing- to comply with any norms and laws demanding a narrative in the traditional sense. The anarchic language serving as a prerequisite for the ethical encounter is not only a core element in his poetic expression, but also a substantial value in his literary criticism. In Blanchot’s own words: "One must understand that poetry refuses to accept all the forces of submission and immobility, that it cannot content itself with sleep whose ease is dangerous, that it seeks surreality insofar as the domain is its irreconciliability". 41 “They demanded: Tell us “exactly” how things happened. –An account? I began: I am neither learned nor ignorant. I have known some joy. This is saying too little. I related the story in its entirety, to which

36 37 38

Hill, “Distrust of Poetry,” 19.

Christofer Fynsk, Language and Relation: …That There is Language (Stanford: Stanford UP, 1996), 135-158.

Willianm D. Melaney, “Blanchot’s Inaugural Poetics: Visibility and the Infinite Conversation”, Phenomenology/Ontopoiesis Retrieving Geo-cosmic Horizons of Antiquity: Logos and Life, ed. Anna-Teresa Tymieniecka (New York: Springer, 2011), 467.

39 Mikhail Bakhtin, Problems of Dostoevsky's Poetics, trans. Caryl Emerson (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984), 92.

40 David Patterson, “Mikhail Bakhtin and the Dialogical Dimensions of the Novel”, The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, no. 44 (1985), 131-139, 1. https://www.jstor.org/stable/430515 41 Maurice Blanchot, The Work of Fire (Stanford: Stanfrod University Press, 1995), 102.

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they listened, it seems, with great interest –at least initially. But the end was a surprise for them all.

“After that beginning”, they said, “you should proceed to the facts.” How so? The account was over.

Then I noticed, for the first time, that they were two and that this infringement on their traditional method –even though it can be explained away by the fact that one of them was an eye doctor, the other a specialist in mental illnesses- increasingly gave our conversation the character of an authoritarian interrogation, overseen and controlled by a strict set of rules. To be sure, neither of them was the chief of police. But being two, due to that, they were three, and this third one remained firmly convinced, I am sure, that a writer, a man who speaks and reasons with distinction, is always capable of recounting the facts which he remembers.

An account? No, no account, nevermore.” 42 Derrida in his analysis of Blanchot’s La Folie du Jour explains how this piece of writing is an account, but outside the objective space of a structured literary work that follows certain linguistic and logical laws, instead he identifies an inner system of rules serving its own language and self-interruption and places the writing in the sphere of discourse. 43 This kind of poetic expression which is “against the expectations of those who –in the name of the lawrequire that order reign in the account” 44 –as any other expression and narration externalising one’s subjective way of experiencing the world- is a way to perceive one’s saying beyond any element identifying the author. The language proposed by Blanchot exceeds the idea of a homogenous aggregate human existence –and narration of the lived world- highlighting what George Bataille describes as the heterogenous –the space of outcast- where this language can be freed from demands and predetermined significations. The poet therefore, depicts the personified otherness, the one who “belongs to the foreign, to the outside -which knows no intimacy or limit”. 45 Approaching the poet as an exposed alterity demanding an encounter, is therefore what facilitates an honest elaboration on one’s said, since the heterogeneity implied by the impossibility of the same eliminates the interpretation according to any fixed premisses prior to the encounter. Blanchot though does not only emphasise on the alterity characterising the poet, but includes in his analysis the subjectivity of the reader as a major factor “constituting” the manifold existence of a poem. For him the poetic encounter liberates both subjects from any intention or anticipation, facilitating this way the emergence of any contingent relational outcome.

Through the works and approach of the poetic practice of both Celan and Blanchot one can sense the possibility of a dialogical experience beyond aesthetics and linguistic normative concepts, with heterogeneity being the scope of approaching the other.

6.

The poetic function of speech –being referred in this analysis as a poetic said- is any form of associative narration where words are not literally used and therefore could not be other than subjectively interpreted. In this sense, the poetic said could emerge from various gestures of exposure to the other, though in order to find sameness in the heterogeneous entail the existence of common mechanisms of association between the interacting subjects. In other 42

Maurice Blanchot, The Madness of the Day, trans. Lydia Davis (New York: Station Hill Press, 1993), 32.

Jacques Derrida, “The Law of Genre”, Critical Inquiry, no. 7 (1980), trans. by Avital Ronell, 55-81, 17-18. https://www.jstor.org/stable/1343176 44 Derrida, “The Law of Genre,” 14.

43

45

Maurice Blanchot, “Literature and the Original Experience”, The Space of Literature, trans. Ann Smock (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1982), 237.

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words, a poetic said derives from the intention to share and communicate something that would evoke the participation of an other in order to reach the purpose of its conception, but could not ensure an ethical outcome when the interpreting tools are in conflict. Attempts of communication that claim for interaction and involvement of the other, stipulate a poetic said rather than express one and therefore these acts are themselves starting points for potential ethical relations, whether they result to the emergence of a unifying factor or a cause of rupture. Focusing again on language, examples of such attempts of communication transcend poetry as a literary genre or work of art and can be identified in any manifestation of speech that provokes a response, rather than fulfills a need for externalising a thought.

Considering that the main aim of Levinas’s approach of an encounter is to propose ethical relations as a condition for the pursuit of justice and equality, we should examine the factors generating mutual interpretive procedures under the scope of the wider social sphere. In an encounter taking place beyond the survey occurring in the public discourse, this common associative tools –or codes of communication- can be possibly detected in various utilisations of the vernacular. It is in the common language, the slang, the informal use of terms that entail a shared experience in order to be deciphered, where an ethical unifying outcome of an encounter can be potentially obtained.

Through the regaining of such unifying factors in smaller scale interactions arises the possibility of reexamining an ethical and inclusive public discourse.

Robert Frost writes about vernacular poetry implying a shift from patterns and norms, to a focus on the density of the message that could emerge from the use of colloquial speech, addressing the latter as “the sound of sense”. 46 Focusing on the proximity and conversational aspect of the vernacular and the sounds of everyday communication he identifies the elements that delineate a poetic said as a demand for interaction. 47 The use of an inclusive language, accessible from as much subjectivities as possible –that contribute in its density through a variety of interpretations- multiplies the possibility of encounters and unexpected connections. The language people use when being relaxed -and not exposed to a strategic action where the outcome of their speech is either preconceived or interpreted through the filter of their dominant identity or a certain contending interest- emerges purely from the way they have experienced the world and therefore the words themselves. Thus, unity as one depiction of an ethical relation can be obtained through the other’s common experience which is what generates the mutual understanding of words.

Vernacular poetry has been always a collective avenue for outlet of the repressed and lots of its manifestations entail as a core factor the expression of the mutual experience of being in otherness, being in excile –where the actual origins of poetry can be detected according to Blanchot. Exclusion has always been a generative factor in the formation of communities -and identity politics were in reality born as a response to this exclusion, which confronts us again with the conflicting intentions considering the use of the term. In the light of a shared otherness poetry emerged both as a unifying factor for these communities, but also as an implement in this response. Taking as an example the African American literature, the vernacular –in the sense of a language rooted in certain cultural and traditional aspects defining a community- is distinctive in various literary manifestations, from spirituals, to work songs to the

46

Justin Replogle, “Vernacular Poetry: Frost to Frank O'Hara”, Twentieth Century Literature, no. 24 (1978), 137-153, 7. https://www.jstor.org/stable/441124 47 Replogle, “Vernacular Poetry: Frost to Frank O'Hara,” 2.

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poetry of Phillis Wheatley. 48 In these examples, either through an oral expression addressing God, or songs accompanying and narrating the labour process, or in Wheatley’s case, written poetry expressing the condition of black people in the framework of a white audience, the subject is always the shared experience –the hardship of the enslaved. These examples can be perceived as forms of protest, since in all three cases the suffering is being externalised and therefore cannot be ignored.

Twas mercy brought me from my Pagan land, Taught my benighted soul to understand That there's a God, that there's a Saviour too: Once I redemption neither sought nor knew.

Some view our sable race with scornful eye, "Their colour is a diabolic die."

Remember, Christians, Negros, black as Cain, May be refin'd and join th'angelic train. 49 Poetry for Plato has always been “closer to a greatest danger than any other phenomenon” 50 and this is because its reason of being, its origins and its dynamics lie on the political discourse. The Platonic dialogues focus on poetry, but mainly in relation to tragedy –dramatic poetry- as an example of innovative, but at the same time intertemporal form of art. Through tragedy one can understand how poetry while being informed by the human condition and social matters, can convey a political topic to the public by addressing every individual as part of the society. It is inclusive and at the same time insurgent, depicting this ways the ultimate dynamic and possibilities of vernacular poetry.

The insurgent aspect of poetry can be identified today in manifestations and applications of the poetic said as a tool for coalition beyond and against prevalent narratives and power structures when examining protest language. The use of words reflecting a common experience deriving from a condition of “lack”, construct a narrative that cannot be accessible from a privileged position, since the experience is absent for the later. It cannot be argued, that exceeding the dominant narrative and therefore a predetermined interpretation of words will never be fully possible as long as there are fixed logistic interests controlling the public discourse, though what poetry can offer is a depiction of a “utopia” as conceived by Percy Bysshe Shelley, -a simultaneously unifying and motivating idea that could lead towards a gradual reform through ethical idealism. 51 Poetry as protest language, relies on two core factors; addressing an audience with common experiences to form relations through a reflection of the mutual concept of an ideal condition, and prevent the requisite accessibility for the articulation of the narrative to be controlled.

The first factor, has been more than efficiently described by Audre Lorde who precisely cited; “poetry is not a luxury.

It is a vital necessity of our existence. It forms the quality of the light within which we predicate our hopes and dreams toward survival and change, first made into language, then into idea, then into more tangible action. […] Poetry is the

48

Molly Hiro, Black Enough? African American Writers and the Vernacular Tradition (Portland: English Faculty Publications and Presentations, 2015), 7.

49 Phillis Wheatley, “On Being Brought from Africa to America”, Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral (London: Forgotten Books, 2018).

50 https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/plato-aesthetics/ 51

Michael Henry Scrivener, Radical Shelley: The Philosophical Anarchism and Utopian Thought of Percy Bysshe Shelley (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1982), 13.

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way we help give name to the nameless so it can be thought”. 52 The transition from language to an idea is in this sense the poetic said that unifies in the light of Shelley’s conception of utopia, and the nameless being named is the collectively externalised experience as a step towards the tangible action.

7.

In order to approach the second factor of what could be described as an insurgent possibility of the poetic expression, it would be enlightening to take some steps back in this analysis, so as to identify the practices of human logistics that represent the contemporary strategies of what has been until now vaguely referred as power structures.

Stefano Harney argues that the birth of modern logistics lies in the Atlantic slave trade, since logistics are not only about the controlled flows of information and commodities, but also about the “demand for access; topographical, jurisdictional, but as importantly bodily and social access”. 53 Gradually transformed into processes of human management and consultation ensuring the accessibility of individuals as parameters of the controlled movement of profit, logistics manage to permeate every aspect of social activity. The limits between human existence as part of a productive mechanism and a singular social entity are blurred, since the public sphere is at the same time “the interface of movement and financialisation of commodities” and therefore “an opportunity for speculation”. 54 In the process of calculation and classification of the factors required for this “speculation” is where, the distorted perception of identity politics comes as an implement for excluding the non-efficient metrics –human entities- from the financial and consequently public interface.

But, in parallel to logistics, emerged also the only possibility of resistance to the access they seek and this possibility relies on the common experience. The relations, the codes of a language formed as to be spoken under the logistical surveillance, but never being accessible from the later are all reflections of a shared experience of being that construct ethical relations as a first step to Shelley’s utopia. The “demand for access was paradoxically and necessarily a radical opening of being, a practice of touch without surface or border or edge, a practice of hapticality”. 55 This loving touch is the closest manifestation to an ethical encounter -a shared experience where the poetic said can lead to an authentic relation, a condition of unencumbered openness between two individuals. Emerging from a focus on shared conditions, on a common incompleteness, instead of parameters of differentiation-, this touch could be perceived as the second factor facilitating the possibility of a poetic said in the Levinasian concept. This is because hapticality “evokes the strategy of collectivity as resistance, the feeling of others in a demonstration, the collectivity of a protest song”, 56 the improvised expression informed by the mutual condition.

Thus, hapticality and affection could be approached as means for relational synapses –in the sense of creating communities and networks informed by the notion of shared experiences and embodied cognition, while implying

52

Poetry is Not a Luxury is an essay by Audre Lorde first published in 1977 an can be found in the following link; https://makinglearning.files.wordpress.com/2014/01/poetry-is-not-a-luxury-audre-lorde.pdf 53 Niccolò Cuppini and Mattia Frapporti, “Logistics Genealogies: A Dialogue with Stefano Harney”, Social Text, no.

136 (2018), 96.

54 Cuppini and Frapporti, “Logistics Genealogies,” 96.

55 56

Cuppini and Frapporti, “Logistics Genealogies,” 98.

Flora Reznik, Julia Bee, Sissel Marie Tonn, Christoph Brunner and Jonathan Reus, “Reading Room #16 – Ecologies of Existence (part 2)”, Instrument Inventors Initiative, 29 March 2017.

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multiple manifestation of communication, both deriving from actual speech and from a gesture –a performative action addressing the other next to me.

The term poetics derives from the Greek word ποιεῖν –poiein- meaning "to make” 57 -thus, by definitions applies to multiple manifestations of creative expression exceeding language and the term’s predominant reference to poetry.

But poetics are also forms of haptical gestures, because of the intention to change entailed in the etymology of the word poiein, which according to Plato is an action of shaping, thus literary changing the form. 58 In this sense, they are actions both creative and destructive, departing from the instrumental practices attuned to the “rhythm of work imposed upon the brain, -a kind of rhythm that very quickly obliterates it and wrecks it”. 59 Poetics could be referred to as moments when the making deviates from the imposed fixation of catching up –which as Fanon argues is what crumbled away human unity, 60 in the same way hapticality is a “hold” distracting the flows of logistics.

The ways one can then practice poetics as a demonstration of resistance to the logistic order, as a gesture of hapticality aiming for relation can be detected in one’s everyday life, in praxes disconnected from the obsessions of innovation, economic development and speculation. Either through speech or making, poetry emerges as one’s exposure to the Uncanny, the strangely familiar experience of a primordial human condition, unencumbered by socioeconomic contexts –an experience of touching the other through the unifying factor of existence. In the pursuit of authenticity and ethical relations, one should reconsider these practices of being -nestled deep in subjectivity- for which being with the other and for the other are inseparable and representative of one’s choice of existential manners. It is one’s love for gardening that stands as a representative implement, an insurgent practice unencumbered from the agony of profit and the social demands, that reaches for the affection of the other who’s passion always was to become a gardener.

Exclusion and privation of the right to be represented in the political discourse have always been problematic conditions entailed in every hierarchical social structure. But, as mentioned above this narrative should be approached in the light of possibilities –as a stimulus for elaboration that could potentially lead to a reexamination of the ways exclusion –the imposed otherness- impacts one’s relations in a smaller, interpersonal scale. Discussing the subversion of established power structures that control and define one’s participation in the decision-making discourse could be impossible without the redefinition of ethical intersubjective encounters amongst individuals.

In this framework, poetics in all the possible forms are being perceived as a gesture towards the other –as a pure and honest exposure open to the various possible outcomes of an intersubjective praxis. Understanding poetry and poetic language as an expression of existential manifestations deriving from the way one experiences the world, is presented here as a primary step to the pursuit of unifying factors that would enhance the retrieval of ethical relations and eliminate the false perception of individualism facilitating the implementation of differentiation and social division.

Connecting with the other through the shared love for gardening instead of diverging under the fear of alterity and the

57

M. A. R. Habib, A History of Literary Criticism: From Plato to the Present (Hoboken: John Wiley & Sons, 2008), 262.

58 Stathis Gourgouris, “Poiein: Political Infinitive”, PMLA, no. 123 (2008), 223-228, 3. https://www.jstor.org/stable/25501842 59 Franz Fanon in Stefano Harney, “Hapticality in the Undercommons, or From Operations Management to Black Ops”, Routledge Companion to Art and Politics, ed. Randy Martin (New York: Taylor & Francis, 2015), 2.

60 Fanon in Stefano Harney, “Hapticality in the Undercommons,” 2.

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misconception of differentiation implied by dominant identifying narratives, can both present a possibility towards social coherence and an act of resistance to the objectification of individuals in the logistical reality.

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_Sartre, Jean-Paul. Being and Nothingness: A Phenomenological Essay on Ontology. (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2003). _ Sarte, Jean-Paul. Critique of Dialectical Reason Vol. 1, trans. by Alan Sheridan-Smith, 2nd edn. (London: Verso, 2004). _Scrivener, Michael Henry, Radical Shelley: The Philosophical Anarchism and Utopian Thought of Percy Bysshe Shelley (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1982).

_Wheatley, Phillis, ‘On Being Brought from Africa to America’, in Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral (London: Forgotten Books, 2018).

Online Articles _Cuppini, Niccolò and Mattia Frapporti. ‘Logistics Genealogies: A Dialogue with Stefano Harney’, in Social Text, 136 (2018), 95-110. https://doi.org/10.1215/01642472-6917802 [accessed 20 April 2020] _Derrida, Jacques, ‘The Law of Genre’, in Critical Inquiry 7 (1980), trans. by Avital Ronell, 55-81. https://www.jstor.org/stable/1343176 [accessed 04 July 2020] _Gourgouris, Stathis, ‘Poiein: Political Infinitive’, in PMLA 123 (2008), 223-228. https://www.jstor.org/stable/25501842 [accessed 06 July 2020] _Hill, Leslie, ‘Distrust of Poetry: Levinas, Blanchot, Celan’, in MLN 120 (2005), 986-1008. https://www.jstor.org/stable/3840694 [accessed 05 July 2020] _Patterson, David, ‘Mikhail Bakhtin and the Dialogical Dimensions of the Novel’, in The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 44 (1985), 131-139. https://www.jstor.org/stable/430515 [accessed 04 July 2020] _Replogle, Justin ‘Vernacular Poetry: Frost to Frank O'Hara’, in Twentieth Century Literature 24 (1978), 137-153. https://www.jstor.org/stable/441124 [accessed 06 July 2020] _Ricoeur , Paul and Matthew Escobar. ‘Otherwise: A Reading of Emmanuel Levinas's Otherwise than Being or beyond Essence’, in Yale French Studies 104 (2004), 82-99. https://www.jstor.org/stable/3182506 [accessed 29 April 2020] _Riera, Gabriel. ‘The Possibility of the Poetic Said in Otherwise than Being (Allusion, or Blanchot in Lévinas)’, in Diacritics 34 (2004), 13-36. https://www.jstor.org/stable/3805815 [accessed 29 April 2020] _Ricoeur, Paul and Matthew Escobar, ‘Otherwise: A Reading of Emmanuel Levinas's Otherwise than Being or beyond Essence’, in Yale French Studies 104 (2004), 82-99. https://www.jstor.org/stable/3182506 [accessed 29 April 2020] _ Sarukkai, Sundar. ‘The Other in Anthropology and Philosophy’, in Economic and Political Weekly 32 (1997), 14061409. https://www.jstor.org/stable/4405512 [accessed 24 April 2020] Websites and Online Databases _Bee, Julia, Christoph Brunner, Jonathan Reus, Flora Reznik and Sissel Marie Tonn, ‘Reading Room #16 – Ecologies of Existence (part 2)’, Instrument Inventors Initiative, 29 March 2017. https://instrumentinventors.org/research/reading-room-16-ecologies-of-existence-part-2/ [accessed 06 July 2020] _Bohman, James and Rehg, William, ‘The Theory of Communicative Action’, in The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy , Fall 2017. https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/fall2017/entries/habermas/ [accessed 06 July 2020] _Lorde, Audre, Poetry is not a luxury, 1985. https://makinglearning.files.wordpress.com/2014/01/poetry-is-not-aluxury-audre-lorde.pdf [accessed 06 July 2020] _Pappas, Nickolas, ‘Plato’s Aesthetics’, in The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Fall 2020. https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/fall2020/entries/plato-aesthetics/ [accessed 06 July 2020] Radio Podcasts _ Broks, Paul. ‘Neuropsychologist Paul Broks on Wittgenstein’, in A History of Ideas, aired on BBC Radio 4, 7 August 2015, 12:04 min. https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b06442qk

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