Poetics of Relation
Quotes from Édourad Glissant’s theory of poetics and my notes/analyses (indicated by “IEL:”)
Édouard Glissant
Martiniquan writer who theorized poetics in light of French Caribbean multi-lingualism
Quotes from Poetics of Relation —
APPROACHES: Poetics (23-35):
(29–30) The power to experience the shock of elsewhere is what distinguishes the poet. Diver-sity, the quantifiable totality of every possible difference, is the motar driving universal energy, and it must be safe-guarded from assimilations, from fashions passively accepted as the norm, and from standardized customs.
(32) projection of a sensibility toward the world's horizons, the vectorization of this world into metropolises and colonies.
(32) The poetics of Relation — “It is against the comfortable assurances linked to the supposed excellence of a [single] language. A poetics that is latent, open, multilinguaI in intention, directly in contact with everything possible.”
(32) Every expression of the humanities opens onto the fluctuating complexity of the world. Here poetic thought safeguards the particular, since only the totality of truly secure particulars guarantees the energy of Diversity.
(32) this poetics of Relation interweaves and no longer projects —
IEL: the world’s totality does not strike us, rather it accumulates and we appreciate it through sediment — Glissant calls this the poetics of duration, and (33) “it is one of the first principles of the sacred, founding books of community”
(34) It is not merely an encounter, a shock (in Segalen's sense), a métissage but a new and original dimension allowing each person to be there and elsewhere, rooted and open…
métissage = mixing
(34) a limitless métissage…Its most obvious symbol is in the Creole language, whose genius consists in always being open, that is, perhaps, never becoming fixed except according ta systems of variables that we have to imagine as much as define.
(35) the whorls of time, the mingling of centuries and jungles, the same epic voice retying into the weft of the world, beyond any imposed solitude, exaction, or oppression.
(35) the main themes of such a poetics: the dialectics between the oral and the written, the thought of multilingualism, the balance between the present moment and duration, the questioning ofliterary genres, the power of the baroque, the nonprojectile imaginary construct
APPROACHES: A Rooted Errantry (37-):
IEL: This is PROBABLY me.
ELEMENTS: Expanse and Filiation (47-62):
(50) with Plato, the individual becornes the tomb of the soul. In this way the philosopher introduces the process ofindividuation and generalization into the tradition of Near Eastern thought,
(55-56) We will look straight at the sacred, the assumed order in the disorder of Relation, without being stricken with awe. We will discuss it without the solemn chant of the Greek Chorus for our sole influence. We will imagine it without divining the hand of a god there full force. To imagine the tranparency of Relation is also ta justify the opacity of what impels it. The sacred is of us…
(56–57) in Relation, the ones who "discovered" retain absolutely the advantages of this action. But Relation does not "grasp" any such antecedent. The terra incognita lying before us is an inexhaustible sphere of variations born of the contact among cultures.
ELEMENTS: Closed Place, Open World (63–75)
(64) How could a series of autarkies, from one end to the other of the areas involved, from Louisiana to Martinique to Réunion, be capable of kinship? If each Plantation is considered as a closed entity, what is the principle inclining them to function in a similar manner?
(65) Let us, nonetheless, consult these ruins with their uncertain evidence, their extremely fragile monuments, their fre-quently incomplete, obliterated, or ambiguous archives. You can guess already what we are to discover: that the Plantation is one of the focal points for the development of present-day modes of Relation. Within this universe of domination and oppression, of silent or professed dehumanization, fonns of humanity stubbornly persisted. In this outrnoded spot, on the margins of every dynamic, the tendencies of our moder-nity begin to be detectable. Our first attempt must be to locate just such contradictions
(68) We could mark out three moments: literary production-first as an act of survival, then as a dead end or a delusion, finally as an effort or passion of memory. —
(68+) survival — (69) The oral literature of the Plantations is consequently akin to other subsistance-survivaI--techniques set in place by the slaves and their immediate descendants. Everywhere that the obligation to get around the rule of silence existed a literature was created that has no "natural" continuity, if one may put it that way, but, rather, bursts forth in snatches and fragments. The story-teller is a handyman, the djobbeur of the collective soul.
(70) delusion —
(70+) memory — (71) Caribbean literatures, whether in English, Spanish, or French, tended to introduce obscurities and breaks-like so many detours-into the material they dealt with; putting into practice, like the Plantation tales, processes of intensification, breathlessness, digression, and immersion of individual psychology within the draIna of a common destiny. (72) The ruins of the Plantation have affected American cultures all around.
(73) Night in the cabins gave birth to this other enormous silence from which music, inescapable, a murmur at first, finally burst out into this long shout-a music of reserved spirituality through which the body suddenly expresses itself.
(73) These musical expressions born of silence: Negro spirituals and blues, persisting in towns and growing cities; jazz, biguines, and calypsos, bursting into barrios and shantytowns; salsas and reggaes, assembled everything blunt and direct, painfully stifled, and patiently differed into this varied speech. This was the cry of the Plantation, transfigured into the speech of the world.
(74) For three centuries of constraint had borne down so hard that, when this speech took root, it sprouted in the very midst of the field of modernity; that is, it grew for everyone. This is the only sort of universality there is: when, from a specific enclosure, the deepest voice cries out.
(75) The Plantation is one of the beIlies of the world, not the only one, one among so many others, but it has the advantage of being able to be studied with the utmost precision. Thus, the boundary, its structural weakness, becomes our advantage. And in the end its seclusion has been conquered. The place was closed, but the word derived from it remains open. This is one part, a limited part, of the lesson of the world.
ELEMENTS: Concerning a Baroque Abroad in the World (77–79)
ELEMENTS: Concerning the Poem's Information (81–85)
(82) IEL: Glissant is setting up modern global (post-colonial) poetics in relation to science and computers — the language contrast being the certainty and repeatability of science/computing systems vs. a “poetics [that] open[s] onto unpredictable and unheard of things.” And “poetics aims for the space of difference--not exclusion but, rather, where difference is realized in going beyond.”
IEL: If poetics is the language technology humans use to open themselves out from the specific “bellies of the world” (75), then what Glissant says about the power of poetics to “open onto unpredictable and unheard of things,” this poetic power for “going beyond” takes us to a crucial theoretical point. To describe that point, I want to bring in Tanya Luhrman’s theories of absorption and cultural spiritual experiences — because Glissant and Luhrman take us to a similar moment in the birth of poetics.
Luhrman points to a universally human, cognitive experience of absorption where people kindle spiritual experiences — and it is their “rationalizations” that reproduce/generate cultures of metaphysical language. But what Glissant’s political framework has solved that Luhrman’s multi-cultural framework has not — is twofold:
(1) Glissant makes clear how embedded moderns are in a language epoch that figures subjects in light of their boundaries. Luhrman does not critically examine the fascination with “boundaries” between natural and supernatural. But Glissant offers a political description of modern poetics (a theoretical lens on an auto-ethnography), using the structuring arrangement of the Plantation and how it produced modern subjects and their sense of boundaries. The clearest point can be made highlighting how the enslaver and the enslaved experience the boundary of the Plantation. For the enslaver, that boundary is fashioned and guarded to promote the fertility of the Plantation. To cross that boundary is to enjoy the opportunity horizons of trade. Such travel beyond the Plantation, for the enslaver, is resourced travel — his sack is full of goods (cotton, grain, metals, diamonds) — his journey is filled with opportunity and promise. He comes to new places equipped with gifts that can soften relations, win friends, pave pathways, and generate new pleasures. Hence, the enslavers travel, even when riddled by challenges, is fundamentally about the exchange of wealth. The situation is quite different for the enslaved. For the constrained subject of the Plantation, the boundary is forced upon him. Forced — and continually enforced — with all manner of human violences. Like the enslaver, the enslaved also longs to cross the boundary of the Plantation — to freedom. But the enslaved makes that journey with few to no resources. He does not travel with gifts; he travels with needs, precarious modes of survival, and a social deficit of habits formed around embodied agency. His best commodity for exchange is his survival story — his songs of freedom about “going beyond” force, violence, and constraint. The insidious thing — truly insidious thing about the poetics of freedom — is how the enslaver steals the songs of freedom for himself. He applies songs of freedom, not to a fundamental constraint by which his person is violently constrained to the Plantation — but rather to the smatterings of trouble he encounters while he is on his journey of wealth exchange. Perhaps he carries his sacks of cotton onto a boat, and a storm arises that threatens to capsize his boat. Sure — securing his boat is a story of survival. But the force of weather on his economic travel is not the same as the force of enslavement on his embodiment. Or another trouble that may arise — on his journey to a far, opportune place, the enslaver must travel through intermediate places that incur costs — those places might demand tarrifs or charge him double for staying overnight at the inn. The enslaver may feel sour about this social treatment — and could situate himself as a victim of force (quite reminds me of Candida Moss’s Myth of Persecution). When the enslaver on his economic journey hears the Plantation’s songs of freedom, it is easy to see how he would find them encouraging — positioning himself as a subject of enforced constraint. But for me, that RIGHT THERE is the insidious thing about the economic psychology of poetics. When the enslaver sings the songs of freedom penned by his own slaves. He uses their voices to overcome troubles on his economic journey. — I began this point (#1) as a way of showing how Glissant’s political poetics solves the problem of boundaries that Luhrman’s multi-cultural poetics cannot. Luhrman’s interest in absorption kindling spiritual experience relies on the assumption of a universal cognitive capacity to go beyond. Glissant shows that “going beyond” is economically and socially structured. Everyone is trying to go beyond the Plantation — it’s just that some people are doing so to accrue more wealth and enjoy pleasures of exchange, while others simply want freedom — to escape a foundational violence in order to embody new forms of agency. Glissant offers a meta-description of the modern human experience of “going beyond,” which Luhrman’s investments in bio-medical, cognitive psychology do not.
(2) Glissant’s description of a modern language epoch is so helpful (XXX) — To describe this epoch, he centers the post-colonial Plantation and the heritage of that political structure. He shows how the Plantation and heritages of the Plantation have produced a remarkably global culture oriented towards “going beyond.”
“For three centuries of constraint had borne down so hard that, when this speech took root, it sprouted in the very midst of the field of modernity; that is, it grew for everyone. This is the only sort of universality there is: when, from a specific enclosure, the deepest voice cries out.” (74)
The “field of modernity” includes technologies of travel, the world-wide web, global economics, nation states, scientific knowledge, and the code-linguistics of computing. To put this all very simply — I think Glissant shows us that the “deepest voice” is a widely shared technology of a political subject, not the psychological cognition of a universal human. If Luhrman’s cultural kindling of spiritual experiences fails anywhere, it fails in mis-representing
— and into which modern features of life situate, like traveling to new places, the pleasures of cross-cultural surprise, songs of freedom as a commodity, and the repeatablility of scientfic language (systems) —
Glissant’s description specifies the politics of modern poetics. Glissant and Luhrman both affirm that language is a psychological technology — Luhrman largely discusses that technology as a rational project explaining experiences of psychological absorption. But I think Glissant gives us a greater appreciation for how non-rational poetics, the poetics of surprise and discovery that better characterize spiritual
(84) Oral forms of poetry are multiplying, giving rise to ceremonies, performances, and shows. All around the world-in the Antilles, in the Americas, in Africa and Asia-poets of the spoken word savor this turnaround, which mixes the jangling brilliance of oral rhetoric into the alchemy of written words. Poetic knowledge is no longer inseparable from writing; momentary flashes verge on rhythmic amassings and the monotonies of duration. The sparkle of many languages utterly fulfills its function in such an encounter, in which the lightning of poetry is recreated in time's gasp.
PATHS: Creolizations (89)
(89) forming a complex mix
IEL: Glissant is less interested in the linguistic “content” of the mixture — but the process of mixing.
(89) We are not prompted solely by the defining of our identities but by their relation to everything possible as well-the mutual mutations generated by this interplay of relations.
PATHS: Dictate, Decree (91–101)
IEL: Baroque used to be derangement — but now it just signifies anything that scatters and comes together (see, 91).
(92) How can continuity (which is "desirable") be practiced in this incessant turnover?
(92) For a long time we have divined both order and disorder in the world and projected these as measure and excess. But every poetics led us to believe something that, of course, is not wrong: that excessiveness of order and a measured disorder exist as weIl.
(93) [After numerous examples of échos-monde, Glissant culminates the list and reflects:] Spoken languages, without exception, have become échos-monde, whose lack we are only just beginning to feel each time one is wiped out by this circularity in evolution. Echos-monde are not exacerbations that result directly from the convulsive conditions of Relation. They are at work in the matter of the world; they prophesy or illuminate it, divert it or conversely gain strength within it.
(94) The chaos-monde is only disorder if one assumes there to be an order whose full force poetics is not prepared to reveal (poetics is not a science). The ambition of poetics, rather, is to safeguard the energy of this order. The aesthetics of the universe assumed preestablished norms; the aesthetics of chaos-monde is the impassioned illustration and refutation of these.
(94) Relation is that which simultaneously realizes and expresses this motion. It is the chaos-monde relating (to itself).
(94–95) The poetics of Relation (which is, therefore, part of the aesthetics of the chaos-monde) senses, assumes, opens, gathers, scatters, continues, and transforms the thought of these elements, these forms, and this motion.
(95) Equilibrium…the ability to endure…It is no longer through deepening a tradition but through the tendency of aIl traditions to enter into relation that this is achieved.
(95) Techniques of relation are gradually substituted for techniques of the absolute, which frequently were techniques of self-absolution. The arts of expanse relate (dilate) the arts of depth.
(96) An idiom like Creole, one so rapidly constituted in so fluid a field of relations, cannot be analyzed the way, for exampIe, it was done for Indo-European languages that aggregated slowly around their roots. We need to know why this Creole language was the only one to appear, why it took the same forms in both the Caribbean basin and the Indian Ocean, and why solely in countries colonized by the French; whereas the other languages of this colonization process, English and Spanish, remained inflexible as far as the colonized populations were concerned, their only concessions being pidgins or other dialects that were derived.
(97) Traditional linguistics, when applied to such a case, seeks first and foremost (and counter to what the history of the language would indicate) to "classify" this language. That is-and it is perfectly understandable-it attempts to endow it with a body of rules and specifically stated standards ensuring its ability to endure. … In other words, the alleged scientific character can lapse into scholarly illusion, can conceal its strategem for "staying put."
(98) one could assume that the true basis for an ability to endure is that the rule of usage have both momentum and diffraction
(98) One can imagine language diasporas that would change so rapidly within themselves and with such feedback, so many turnarounds of norms (deviations and back and forth) that their fixity would lie in that change. Their ability to endure would not be accessible through deepening but through the shimmer of variety. It would be a fluid equilibrium. This lin-guistic sparkle, 50 far removed from the mechanics of sabirs and codes, is still inconceivable for us, but only because we are paralyzed to this day by monolingual prejudice ("my language is my root").
(98-99) Normative decrees have ceased to be the authoritative rule as far as vehicular languages are concerned. EngIish and Spanish, the most massive of these, and seemingly the best entrenched in a sort of continental nature, met on the territory of the United States (Puerto Ricans, Chicanos, the irnmigrants in Florida). It may weIl be that their massiveness has become fissured, that alongside the variances proliferating Anglo-American, Iucky contaminations from the Spanish will occur, and vice versa.
(99) Will ideograms, pictograms, and other forms of writing show up in this panorama?
(101) [Speaking about the global popularity of word games in which letters are revealed in no particular order, and the word must be guessed] —> “These games seem to me a nostalgic exercise not devoid of a strong tinge of collective anxiety.”
PATHS: To Build the Tower (103–109)
(103) "Live in seclusion or open up to the other": this was supposedly the only alternative for any population demanding the right to speak its own language. It is how inherited premises of centuries-old domination were given legitimacy. Either you speak a language that is "universal," or on its way to being so, and participate in the life of the world; or else you retreat into your particular idiom-quite unfit for sharing-in which case you cut yourself off from the world to wallow alone and sterile in your so-called identity.
(104) In this explosion of incredible diversity, linguistic relations have become marked bl' creations springing from the friction between languages, bl' the give-and-take of sudden innovation (for example, initiatory street languages in southern countries), and by masses of generally accepted notions as weIl as passive prejudices.
(104–105) The relationship of domination, consequently, is the most blatant, gaining strength in technological expansion and generalizing a neutral uniformity. Dominated languages are thus pigeonholed as folklore or technical irresponsibility. … The relationship of fascination has become, of course, less and less virulent, but it drove intellectual elites of "developing countries" to the reverent usage of a language of prestige that has only served them as self~impoverishment. Relationships of multiplicity or contagion exist wherever mixtures explode into momentary flashes of creation, especially in the languages of young people. … Relationships of polite subservience or mockery come about when frequent contact with tourist enclaves plays a substantial role, along with daily practices of subordination or domestic service. … Relationships of tangency are by far the most insidious, appearing whenever there are composite languages, languages of compromise between two or more idioms-for example, the Creoles of francophone regions in the Americas or the lndian Ocean. Then the erosion of the new language must be forestalled, as it is eaten away from within through the mere weight of one of its components, which, meanwhile, becomes reinforced as an agent of domination. Relationships of subversion exist when an entire community encourages some new and frequently antiestablishment usage of a language. Relationships of intolerance are seen, for example, in the teaching of a communication language… [ital original, bold is mine]
(109) On the other side of the bitter struggles against domination and for the liberation of the imagination, there opens up a multiply dispersed zone in which we are gripped by vertigo. But this is not the vertigo preceding apocalypse and Babel's faii. It is the shiver of a beginning, confronted with extreme possibility. It is possible to build the Tower-in every language.
PATHS: Transparency and Opacity (111–)
(111) There still exist centers of domination, [but no one center or single metropolis of knowledge] …There is opacity now at the bottom of the mirror, a whole alluvium deposited by populations, silt that is fertile but, in actual fact, indistinct and unexplored…
(111) concrete and undisguised domination [which is] the Anglo-American mode
(112) It is true that the leveling effect of Anglo-Arnerican is a persistent threat for everyone and that this language, in turn, risks being transformed into a technical salesman's Esperanto, a perfunctory containerization of expression … It is also true that the actual situation is that languages lacking the support of economic power and the competitive politics that convey this are slowly disappearing. … the fatal trend to annihilate idiom. …It would be more beautiful to live in a symphony of languages than in sorne reduced universal monolingualism-neutral and standardized. There is one thing we can be sure of: a lingua franca (humanistic French, Anglo-American sabir, or Esperanto code) is always apoetical.
(113) According to this way of thinking, for example, the French language has always been inseparable from a pursuit of the dignity of mankind, insofar as man is conceived of as an irreducible entity.
(113) [Re: French] …the language of the Rights of Man, would provide useful protection against excesses set in motion by the presuppositions of any procla-mation of the Rights of Peoples. La francophonie would provide that transcendency by giving the correct version of humanism. [but, p. 114 —] Languages have no mission.
(115) The literary text plays the contradictory role of a producer of opacity. Because the writer, entering the dense mass of his writings, renounces an absolute, his poetic intention, full of self-evidence and sublimity. Writing's relation to that absolute is relative; that is, it actually renders it opaque by realizing it in language. The text passes from a dreamed-of transparency to the opacity produced in words. Because the written text opposes anything that might lead a reader to formulate the author's intention differently. At the same time he can only guess at the shape of this intention. The reader goes, or rather tries to go back, from the produced opacity to the transparency that he read into it.
(115–116) Literary textuaI practice thus represents an opposition between two opacities: the irreducible opacity of the text, even when it is a matter of the most harmless sonnet, and the always evolving opacity of the author or a reader. Sometimes the latter becomes literally conscious of this opposition, in which case he describes the text as "difficult." Both learning a language and translation have in common the attempt to give "some transparency" back to a text. That is, they strive to bridge two series of opacities: in the case of language learning these would be the text and the novice reader confronting it, for whom any text is supposedly difficult. In the case of translation the transparency must provide a passage from a risky text to what is possible for another text.”
(119) [we must] take into account this internaI multiplicity of languages, which goes even further than the old divisions of dialects that were peculiar to each language. Finally, and this observation is how the process operates, the share of opacity allotted to each language, whether vehicular or vernacular, dominating or dominated, is vastly increased by this new multiplicity. The situation al competence of each of the languages of our world is overde-termined by the complexity of these l'elationships. The inter-naI multiplicity of languages here confirms the reality of mul-tilingualism and corresponds to it organically. Our poetics are overwhelmed by it.
Vehicular vs. vernacular — (116) So we must reevaluate vehicular languages, that is, the Western languages, which have spread practically every-where in the world. — (117) We can see another difference in the relationship, whether rnanifest or latent, of these vehicular languages to the ver-nacular or cornposite or subversive languages with which they have been in contact. — (104) …communication, or vehicular, languages. But we have come to realize that aIl lit-eraI literacl' needs to be buttressed bl' a culturalliteracl' that opens up possibilities and allows the revival of autonomous creative forces from within, and hence "inside," the language under consideration — (99*) It is not essential to note that archipelagic agglomerations of language have formed everywhere. Either according to "roots" or farnilies: Indo-European languages, Latin languages, etc. Or according to their characteristic techniques of relation: composite languages, Creole languages, etc. Or according to both dimensions at once: vehicular languages and their pidgins, aIl languages and their dialects, etc. It is dangerous for the world's poetic diversity rnerely to link each of these agglomerations to sorne politically self-interested project. What is important is to track down the constants both within the agglornera-tions and within the majority of their confluences: Is there a hidden order to contacts arnong languages?
(120) Opacities must be preserved; an appetite for opportune obscurity in translation must be created; and falsely convenient vehicular sabirs must be relentlessly refuted. The framework is not made oftransparency; and it is not enough to assert one's right ta linguistic difference or, conversely, to interlexicalit:y, to be sure of realizing them.
PATHS: The Black Beach
THEORIES: Relation
THEORIES: The Relative and Chaos
THEORIES: Distancing, Determining
THEORIES: That That
THEORIES: Relinked, (Relayed), Related
POETICS: Generalization
POETICS: That Those Beings Be Not Being
POETICS: For Opacity
POETICS: Open Circle, Lived Relation
POETICS: The Burning Beach
More Glissant — Glissant’s Poetics of Specificity
My points:
Glissant’s ethical and aesthetic commitment to the “other” of poetics does not foreclose recognition and connection — in fact, poetic reading for the language of the “other” helps restrain the consumption, erasure, and overwriting that makes their testimony invisible.
At another extreme, Glissant is also not advocating for a poetics of complete estrangement — poetics of estrangement would construct language as if voiced from an an “Other.” The poetics of Relation encourages recognition — it replaces the metaphor of possessing poetics with relating to them.
The standardized custom of reading Psalm 23 in an evangelical Christian state of spirit possession has arrested the ancient song’s “poetics of Relation.” The poem’s themes of precarity, sickness, and horror, as well as closer attention to its theme of comfort, can recover them.
For Glissant, all worlds are precarious — yielding a shared human condition about which persons can relate. But as subjects of differently specific, precarious worlds, each engages their linguistic technologies (forced idioms, vernaculars, modes of expression, voice-languages, use-languages, etc.) to
free poetics recognizes how subjects “forced” idioms, vernaculars, and expressions
I would like to suggest that laying aside the Western convention of individual depth as a feature of universal persons — does not mean that humans are never deep. It simply means that individual depth emerges as a response to specific conditions. For example, Western psychic interiority [XXX-does someone talk about this?!]
Laying the universal human to rest as the defunct myth of the Enlightenment’s poetics of Depth — opens the territories of plurality — not just the temporal differences that differentiate human conditions — but the regional differences. These two dimensions, time and space (Glissant engages Kant for this) are both free poetics.
“The spirit of universalization, moreover, is willingly connected with a tendency to deny specifie times and histories that are peripheral (Borges or Saint-john Perse), and the aspiration toward this universal tends to disclaim particular spaces and evolutions (V. S. Naipaul)” (trans. notes in Glissant, 212–13).
