Psalm 23-Thinking about Davidic Poetics with Glissant
“This is an immense paradox, the great founding books of communities, the Old Testament, the Iliad, the Odyssey, the Chansons de Geste, the Islandic Sagas, the Aeneid, or the African epics, were all books about exile and often about errantry. This epic literature is amazingly prophetic. It tells of the community, but, through relating the community's apparent failure or in any case its being surpassed, it tells of errantry as a temptation (the desire to go against the root) and, frequently, actually experienced. Within the collective books concerning the sacred and the notion of history lies the germ of the exact opposite of what they so loudly proclaim...These are books about the birth of collective consciousness, but they also introduce the unrest and suspense that allow the individual to discover himself there.” (Glissant, 15)
“Then, with Plato, the individual becomes the tomb of the soul. In this way the philosopher introduces the process of individuation and generalization into the tradition of Near Eastern thought, where it is sometimes harmonious, sometimes conflicting. This will be completed (resolved) in the occurrence of Christ. Christ, and He alone, manifested incarnation without the Fall, filiation without the weight of heredity. In him Parmenidean Being and Platonic soul are joined. It is, however, possible to make a case for the real "break" in Western thought having taken place with Plato. …[and so, Glissant formulates Christ]: To an undivided ethnic community, with the legitimacy of filiation, an individualizing act that inaugurates a History of Humanity is appended. Thus, the exclusive linearity of this filiation is succeeded by the undiversifiable linearity of a generalization.” (Glissant, 50–51).
[Thoughts while reading Glissant, 115-120ish] —
How do the terms “vehicular” and “vernacular” relate to forced and free poetics in the Psalms? Put another way, can we tell the difference between the vehicular language of the metropolis and the vernacular language of the periphery in the Psalms?
[Glissant uses “vehicular” in a functionalist sense — to highlight how centers create poetics of empowerment that are greased like a machine. Vernacular, on the other hand, are the imaginary uses of language and poetics by which people on the periphery navigate, survive, and express freedom.]
To make this question specific, if hypothetical: if the individual Psalms were prescribed by “authorities” (teachers, priests, healers, etc.) to misfits (like Šubši-mešrȇ-Šakkan in the Poem of the Righteous Sufferer) with the goal of bringing the misfit into a social assemblage and political subjectivity — we could imagine that the Psalms were used to join misfits to Jerusalem and its “praise Yhwh” center. That is to say, Psalms integrate misfit subjects into the poetic sociality of center (never mind whether that center is an authoratarian, bureaucratic formation of enforcement, an emergent formation that is being co-invented, or a post-colonial formation that is networked in vital socialities of freedom).
We have arrived at a crucial puzzle for analysis of the Psalms. The political uncertainty of their poetic sociality.
For much of the copying tradition in the last two millennia — a handful of Psalms, including Psalm 23, have been passed along with Davidic attribution. Some signal a few details about legendary stories, but many simply attribute the music to David. The Hebrew Masoretic Text attributes 72 of the Psalms to David. The Greek Septuagint extends the attribution to 86 Psalms. Other attributions to Korah, Asaph, Ethan, Moses, and Solomon remind us that a Davidic poetics of the Psalms does not do justice to the complexity of their poetics.
But I am interested in the “contextless” attribution to David at the start of Psalm 23. Far from “locating” the political context, these Psalms stand in an uncertain set of temporalities — in several epic moments: A Psalm of David could refer to the temporality of a founder and his ongoing metropolis. A Psalm of David could refer to the temporality of a marginal bandit grinding it out on the periphery. And a Psalm of David could refer to and the temporality of an epic failure that commemorates an old “character” (royal) center of filiation. These virtual settings for the voice in a psalm encourage multiple points of view for readers—the poetics of center and periphery, the poetics of individual and collective, the poetics of power that climbs a social ladder and a poetics of power that is free, yet stuck in the hole the ladder grows out of.
If the Psalms of David imply a relation with “Jerusalem” (we will say Jerusalem, even though the Psalms probably centered around many other cities) — If the Psalms of David imply a relation with Jerusalem as a royal and temple center, that center is territorial only insofar as the Psalms are imagined to have been sung by the founder of this metropolis (Jerusalem) or by those participating in and commemorating the royal lineages of that metropolis in that metropolis. But because the Psalms are language scripts, copied and re-copied, the territory of that center is, by definition, virtual — the territory and the temple are textualized — and move around with the scrolls they’re inscribed on.
The Psalms should be understood as an ancient (advanced) language technology for virtual centers. The Psalms are both indebted to an old viral genre (prayers and incantation hymns) and sung in and around the founding of territorial and hierarchical centers (royal, temple, kingship, etc.), now distilling a pure subjectivity of the center crafted not by territory but by poetics. What makes this poetics hard to analyze viz. Relation is also what makes them novel viz. historical language technologies. If Psalms recollect ancient settings of filiation and expose the language roots of the homogenizing founding stories of those cultural centers — then when the roots are severed, poetic sociality becomes detached from land and temple. Psalms craft subjects in relation to new virtual (linguistic) centers. The historical context is completely opaque and this is the precise key to the Psalm’s durability. We cannot know whether the poetics were “originally” the expressive vernaculars of those who founded a center or whether they were the forced vehicular discourses that those same centers prescribed/enforced. We must wonder if these poetics were performed as free creative actions, under political force, as compelled dominations, or as voluntary initiation into a sociality? In short, the Psalms do not signal how much freedom and agency (or their opposite, how much conscription and force) led the singer to voice this poetic song. Indeed, our modern obsession with individual freedom tends to produce a contrast between our sense that poetics is ejaculatory vs. scripted; original to an individual vs. repeated collectively. This obsession is so deeply unhelpful. For one, the Psalms most certainly were scripted for collective use and repeated or riffed in performance. But “original author” and their free creativity is an unhelpful criteria for analyzing free poetics, because the opposition on which it is based (between free individual creativity and conformist, collective scripts) assumes the modern individual is the model subjectivity for definitions of freedom. It is actually the collective persons who are joined to each other through shared performances of a Psalm’s scripted subjectivity — that way of seeing the Psalms better reveals the social and political conditions of distress that made their sediments durable and the conditions of oppression or freedom that made them possible in the first place and in each subsequent place.
The Psalms are not about individual hardships. Their framing as speeches of David is about their status as “public language made possible by specific, shared conditions” — which in one sense, are the conditions of territorializing centers at their founding (and deterritorializing centers are their fall) → What I find fascinating about Psalm 23, at least, is that the reading I propose — focalizing a subject in precarity, horror, and distress — exposes the poetic call for protection from the supposed center. If this is vehicular language, it asks subjects to orient themselves towards a center that has not yet been founded (stories of David’s experiences) and towards a center that already threatens them (the idiom of shepherd/sheep). This discussion lays a path towards reconsideration of the Psalm’s apotropaic function — not to analyze the historical thickness of apotropaic language so much as to notice how the features of Psalms I have just discussed help us analyze an historical emergence — of individual subjectivity trying to survive and asking for protection from threats to survival. And not just the emergence of any individual subjectivity — this is an individual subjectivity that we can attach to lineages of the modern individual subject. In terms of Psalm 23, this individual subject is someone recalling a royal founder, but who is now looking for tailored protections within generalized and relatable circumstances of political precarity. Is this the birth of the Western, biblical individual? If so, this individual emerges from a centering discourse that was comprised of knowledge about the dangers of centers themselves. To be very specific, the biblical individual invented by the Psalms voices free poetics through commemorative speech about the founding of a center — but not necessarily as an act of re-founding a center — instead, the scripting of Psalms acts as an archive for public (shared) idioms of distress warning about the specific conditions of life produced by that center. As the Psalms of individual lament become more detached from the territorial founding of Jerusalem and the royal filiation of Judean/Yehud subjectivity, the more the Psalms own language scripts become the center — they become increasingly portable, virtual language technologies of subject-formation — the opacity of their specific historical conditions becomes the very technique that makes them durable (generative of a tradition about individual selves and the poetics that gives individual experience a sense of free expression).
On the dangers of centers —
On the day the tabernacle was set up, the cloud covered the tabernacle, the tent of the covenant, and from evening until morning it was over the tabernacle, having the appearance of fire. It was always so: the cloud covered it by day and the appearance of fire by night. (Numbers 9:15–16)
Larry Ortega, “Totem: Pillar of Light” (more)
