How should we read Glissant today?

In this episode, Caro Fowler and former RAP fellow Sora Han revisit Édouard Glissant's Poetics of Relation and his frequently invoked concept of "the right to opacity." Beginning with Glissant's dedication to the murdered Jamaican poet Michael Smith, they explore the relationship between poetry, sound, and performance, asking what becomes possible when we return to foundational texts with fresh eyes and ears.

Transcript

SPEAKER_01 0:12

Welcome to Iconoclast Art History with Carol. This episode is coming out of a conference we had here at The Clark on the practices of writing sonic art and art history, which was convened by Caitlin Molsey and Dylan Robinson. And at that conference, the theorist, poet, writer Edward Glissant was consistently cited, which I found really interesting is I tend not to think about him as a theorist of sound per se. I've also been thinking a lot about Glissant and the right to opacity, which is a phrase that is often cited, and it makes sense in this world in which black and indigenous artists are increasingly asked to commoditize their identities and present a transparent self for the art market. The call for the right to opacity as a means to protect oneself certainly resonates in today's world. But its citational force also sometimes occludes for me what is particular within Gleeson's call for opacity, which is also an engagement with the fundamental mystery of the self to ourselves. I was also inspired to recently reopen his book and read the dedication to Michael Smith, a Jamaican poet who was murdered by political opponents. A poet whose performance of his work and play with sound, vibration, and feeling is inseparable from the work itself. And this dedication both made sense to me for why Gleissant would be so important for theorists of sound. And then also began to transform how I actually read Glee Sant. So I asked my friend Sora Han if she would be in conversation with me about these questions. And there's an important note on this conversation, kind of undergirding some of what Sora and I are talking about, is the fact that we both watched these bootlegged clips of Michael Smith from a documentary that's on YouTube, which is really amazing. Sora actually tried to track it down from the British Film Institute to see if we could get a copy. We were unable to, but I highly recommend watching the clips of his performances in this documentary. Should you be able to find the bootlegged clips on YouTube, or should you find yourself at the British Film Institute where it seems it can be screened in person only. I would also say, just to kind of set this up, or what came out of this interview for me, is that in the first interview of Iconoclast Art Histories, I talked to David Scott, and we were talking about the lack of political imagination that I feel in this moment. And he suggested that we should go back and read texts that we have inherited. And in the words of David, to quote him, ask ourselves whether there are other ways that we might read those texts that are so formative for us to at least begin to clear the ground in some way. At the time, I wasn't sure what David meant, and I might have even slightly disagreed with him or just thought, is it really about going back and reading things that have already been written? But in this conversation with Sora, I came to see what it would mean to go back and read text that we've inherited and the ways in which those readings might begin to clear the ground to make space for something new. So thanks for listening. If you have comments, questions, or feedback, please feel free to reach out to me, see Fowlerclerkart.edu. And here's the conversation. And so to read his dedication, he says, for Michael Smith, assassinated poet of the archipelago's Latin with palpable death. I feel like there's multiple ways we could get into that. But maybe the first way would be to talk about how does that dedication for you reframe or allow an expansion or rethinking of poetics of relation for this moment or what it means to have that specific dedication.

SPEAKER_00 4:32

Yes, yes. It has something to do with wanting to um I think really uh revisit the entanglement of word and sound, or poetry and song, beyond the ways that those genres have been separated out from each other and also arranged epistemologically into a racial hierarchy, right? Colonial, very literate culture and language is able to pursue the purity of the written word, um, and less civilized cultures and languages are really tied to orality or oral traditions. And I think Smith's poetry, Glissant's poetic of relation, figure of the wandering poet, I think is an insistent sort of refusal of that hierarchy.

SPEAKER_01 5:38

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 5:38

Part of the refusal is precisely about trying to get at a form of knowing that is not separating out feeling from understanding. Right.

SPEAKER_01 5:52

So do you think for you, because I want to bear down a little bit on the specificity of the wanderer that you see in Glissant's work, is that coming out in the specificity of it? Is the nature of that of the wandering poet it demands the sonic?

SPEAKER_00 6:12

Um so Glissant's reference to the troubadour, yeah, the figure, is actually pointed.

SPEAKER_01 6:20

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 6:21

It's not just an example for Glissant of a mystery, and of course, the sense of history that Glissant is working with is not even the beginning stages of the Renaissance, which is when the troubadour really emerges and then disappears as a figure. He's talking about very ancient forms of cultural production, I guess. We can call it that. And he elevates the figure of the troubadour as this figure who is really pushing it back against rootedness.

SPEAKER_01 6:57

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 6:57

He wants a form of wandering, or the other word he uses is errantry that can really let go of this idea of rootedness.

SPEAKER_01 7:09

One thing that's interesting about the troubadours is that their work emerged at the same time as the very early paper authorial culture, but they were on the brink of that. And so there's a way in which their work is very aware of authorship, but also plays with the property over one's work and authorship. And it seems to me that they emerge in a moment before early capitalism of European print culture, too. So it's this kind of creative impulse and moment of language and play before it's fixed into print, or before it's fixed into the commoditization of the author and their creative works.

SPEAKER_00 7:55

Poetry is constantly haunted by this kind of break, that print culture and the way that composition gets identified with writing or the word on the one hand, and then the history prior, which is that written composition or the composition of words was always entangled with musical accompaniment. And I think the troubadours, Marjorie Perloff calls it the kind of apogee of the development of this way of producing now what we call poetry, which is verbal composition with musical composition or accompaniment. I think that part of the reason why the troubadour in particular is so prominent or something very specific in Glissot is because, of course, he's also writing from within a French literary culture, and he wants to both claim that his own positioning within the language, but also warp the way that French as a language in particular is very defensive, actually, of preserving some kind of rootedness of its literary traditions versus, and he writes about this, Spanish or English, say, other colonial languages in the Caribbean that don't so jealously guard the boundaries of what English or Spanish is globally. And I found this really fascinating mention of something that Lissant said, and it's recounted by Betsy Wang, the translator of Poetics of Religion, where she says that um let me find it. Yeah, in her translator's preface, she notes that Glissant once remarked, quote, the English readers are going to know more than the French, right? And he's speaking about know more of know more about what he's talking about in his text than the French.

SPEAKER_01 10:33

That's so interesting. So that lays up nicely for the next kind of thing I wanted to think about was moving from the dedication to the title and the poetics of relation. And I feel that poetics is a word that is often very easily deployed right now in titles, but obviously it has such a specific meaning for Glisson. And I know that it also has a very specific meaning for you, too. I asked you to be part of a panel titled Poetics, and one of the things that I loved in your response is that you specifically weren't interested in talking about poetry per se, but you were interested in thinking about the structuring force of poetics, what thinking about a poetic structure might entail. And so if we bear down on poetics and the title, I would love to just hear for you what the specificity of this for glissant, beyond, I think, for him too. It's not just that he has two grasped by two poets and is very invested in the poetic tradition of the Caribbean, which obviously he is, but that there's something deeper, that there's something about poetics that is structurally necessary for the ethics of encounter and aesthetic encounter that he wants to engage with. And so I would love to bear down on that word with you.

SPEAKER_00 11:58

Yeah, I guess for me, and I realized how profoundly shaped I am in my sense of poetics by having read Poetics of Relation as I was writing my last book, Moo, which is really focused on the space of the untranslatable. And I think I do a lot more with the untranslatable in terms of its relationship to law as a form of writing. But of course, I think or something, the untranslatable is a kind of structural element of textuality itself. So it's both the kind of historical circumstance of the Antilles for him, where he's so many different languages, um, so many colonial languages, but also the vernaculars and the combinatory types of languages that are highly localized and specific that emerge under extreme conditions of duress. So he always speaks of not a dialectic of difference, but dialectics of difference. His plural sense of the dialectics, I think, is very much tied to this multiplicity, this linguistic multiplicity. So poetics for him, and I'm gonna be very wedded to you or very closely to the way that he explores these concepts, is the force or power or energy that emerges when you take a concept and kind of wrestle it away from this idea of understanding its transparent sense, lift from that concept through performance the principle of the concept. So the ethics of the concept, or what the concept as a fixed idea allows in the ways that we relate, or even position ourselves in the spacetime of you know wherever one might be, but for him, it's this kind of architecture help us, the terra incognita, he calls it. So poetics is always working from the multiplicity of languages, the internal differentiation of one language within its own kind of life of being spoken, um, and also the energy that emerges from putting concepts into and it's not it's in that sense it's not sort of broader, wider, looser reference to many different things when people refer to poetics today.

SPEAKER_01 15:28

Yeah. Do you think that there's do you think that poetics for him or in your reading of it, do you think it's also a way to give structure and form to or what I've heard you describe as like the divinatory, like the the metaphysical of the material world?

SPEAKER_00 15:55

Yeah, I do think that in this moment there there is a way in which mysticism and divination have emerged in our cultural critical language to try to hold on to the space of poetics or um the untranslatable. So a way to know without conceding or requiring the fixing of concepts and ideas and categories. I think that there is something very intentional that Glissant is doing to hold open that space for sure. Um there is this really interesting um moment in the text, and I think it's in the section on distancing, where he's offering a critique of both political and mystical frameworks for ecological understandings of space and time. And he is arguing that both political, meaning rational or mystical ways of relating to the environment are all um part of feeding this kind of universal machine of consumption.

SPEAKER_01 17:32

Yeah. And the toxicity of rootedness, right? Like this idea that we're rooted to a place that is then ours.

SPEAKER_00 17:40

Yes, yes, and that the political sense of rootedness is very much tied to use and extraction, efficiency, the way that we typically think of the kind of cartographic imagination of colonialism, and then the mysticism, which is the a more ontological, I think he would say, an ontological claim of possession to a land, of having been original to a land. He's critical of both of those frameworks of rootedness.

SPEAKER_01 18:18

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 18:18

And this is a very radical point.

SPEAKER_01 18:21

Sorry to interrupt, but he's very specific about the specific history of the Caribbean and the ways in which there was genocide of the indigenous populations, and then the enslaved laborers were brought in first from Africa and then from elsewhere. Do you think that that's an argument that could be as easily made, say in North America in this moment, without causing kind of enormous upheaval in academia?

SPEAKER_00 18:51

Well, I have to say that as someone who you know is and makes a life in the North American sort of continent. Yeah, I also wanted to refute the argument that he's making there, and in part refute it empirically, which is to say that he does assume, right? He explicitly says that the indigenous population in the Caribbean um were exterminated. And and I empirically think that that it that has been refuted, right? That the complete extinction of a group of people, I think, is a very it's an extreme conclusion, but also a very difficult conclusion.

SPEAKER_01 19:43

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 19:43

Um, in the sense that we know that these histories of violence always also relied on the intimacy of the two sort of the the colonized and the colonizer, right? And their intimacy produced entanglements that would exceed any sort of like formal recognition of a population and their uh kind of prior existence, right? Their prior modes of existence. You know, that was my first sort of reaction to this theoretical argument he's making, but ultimately I think that the argument he's making is not empirical, yeah. He's sort of asking us to imagine, and we don't need to the empirical conclusion that I think he he offers, but I I think he's asking us to imagine land unmediated by these layers of territorialization, and that's where he is becomes very poetic. And one of the very striking images that he offers, and I should probably read this line because it's so important. So he says, distancings are necessary to relation and depend on it, like the coexistence of sea olive and manchineal. This is on page 157. And um he has a glossary, and the both plants are not in the glossary, the manchineal plant is in the glossary. Yeah, and the way that he defines it is that it's a plant found growing side by side with the sea olive on the beaches of Martinique. When touched, the fruit of the manchineal inflicts painful burns that the leaf of the sea olive can heal. And yeah, you know, when he talks about rhizomed land or Martinique and snow. Soil and he asks us to imagine land unmediated by territorialization. He gives us this figure of the form of plant life, right, that whose root systems both slow the erosion of the island without defending against the way that erosion changes the island. And then the two plant forms they kind of produce this pharmaconic rhizome in the air, right? Where they together offer both poison and cure. And this to me is his way of using poetics to concretize the concept of land. And I'm not sure that we can honor this figure, right? This entwined entangled organism with claims of possession.

SPEAKER_01 23:20

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 23:22

And I think that's part of the performative nature of his theoretical writing. It just leaves us suspended.

SPEAKER_01 23:31

And well, also that image is so beautiful for thinking about his very structure of poetics too, right? Because it it just hovers there, right? Like that definition in the glossary just hovers there. And there's no it feels like it would be to to seek transparency within that definition to say, okay, one represents the colonizer and one represents the that would break it apart, that would, and then it would lose its power and it would lose its meaning and it would lose its kind of presence as the space to think within. So I think that's also a nice example of his poetics.

SPEAKER_00 24:12

Yeah, yeah. And it's interesting that his glossary comes before the theoretical writing. The glossary is not till the end where you might say, Oh, here I'm as I'm reading the text, yeah, here's this plant that I've never come across.

SPEAKER_01 24:29

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 24:30

Let me look it up. He puts it up front. The necessity for why we would want to know what this plant is, totally opaque in the beginning with the glossary. So the glossary itself is offering opacity versus transparency or a source of transparency that comes later that's withheld. And how do you find out that this plant concludes the section where he is trying to think about the relationship between liberatory violence of anti-colonial movements and the relationship between liberatory, those liberatory movements, inclusive of their political violence, with thought and relation or the thought of relation. So on the one hand, we can think of this rhizomed plant as representative of the entanglement of the history of colonization. Um as well as the necessity of thinking about the entanglement between politics and poetics, violence and writing or cultural production.

SPEAKER_01 25:58

Also part of what actually I think I loved about that what came palpable for me with the dedication to Michael Smith was also that I know sometimes poetics of relation are within that text, he's he has been critiqued for perhaps losing some of his political edge or political force, and that it's a bit utopian in this idea of holding this space for an encounter. Whereas it seems that in the passage you're pointing to, or with the dedication to Michael Smith, he really is, I would say, as much as Martin Luther King, it is very much grounded in an acute awareness of the violence of his political and present moment. And there's no doubt about that.

SPEAKER_00 26:44

That's what makes his text very radical, that I think is contained in the expanse of the book form itself versus the ways that the concepts from it get mobilized.

SPEAKER_01 26:58

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 26:59

And this is something that I think all of us in this moment have to really reckon with where information is so readily accessible, right? Um, and why it might be important and necessary for us to return to the book form or the book-like version of his ideas to be able to see the labor and the labor of his writing and his own poetics in trying to grapple with the political implications of the concepts. You know, I had a question for you in and wondering about how the poetics that he develops from the world of the Caribbean and the histories that are alive there, um, how they sort of shape your own critique and sense of possibility and looking specifically at the way that Dutch painting has rendered seascapes. Oh specific. It's really specific because the archipelagic is so important as a geological form for him and his poetics.

SPEAKER_01 28:18

And I wasn't reading him when I I think he suffered for me in exactly what you're saying. His the right to opacity and the passages of opacity are cited so often that then I think one can actually read the text itself. And so I wasn't thinking with him very deeply, I would say, when I was thinking about Dutch seascapes or Dutch maritime space. But when I came to actually read the text itself and to read the book itself and find something very different than what than the, I would say, the vibe in the air that kind of goes around sometimes when his work is cited. When I wrote my book, he wasn't someone who I thought a lot with. And even now, I have to say, I think sometimes it's unfair, but I think sometimes there are concepts that are so widely distributed and cited that they lose their force and I find them difficult to think with. I mean, as a scholar of the 17th century, I would say this about Descartes. Descartes and his writings is pretty fascinating and out there. Cartesianism as structure is less fascinating, but it's hard to separate the two. And I find this a little bit with Glissant. I love reading his text and dwelling within his text. I find it hard to set it aside and then go into the world and be in conversation about it because there is such a specific idea of opacity and his writing. So it it's un, yeah, it's complicated that some of those texts that have been so impactful, I actually don't always think with as much because I find it a little suffocating.

SPEAKER_00 30:11

Yeah, it's almost as if the very thing that he is critiquing has already preemptively occluded a way to think with his text in this in the mode that he is trying to describe for us or perform for us or demonstrate for us. Because the idea that you can take a concept from a text like poetics of relation and then use them as anchors, right? Ideas that anchor a set of questions or a set of forms that should be brought together and thought together. That is exactly, I think, something that he cautions against. Presupposes that, well, concepts as concepts are concepts as pure ideas, concepts in their lexical form are universalizable.

SPEAKER_01 31:18

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 31:19

Right. If we could lexically translate opacity into many different languages, right, yeah, then we would be universalizing the idea that it indexes. Yeah. Whereas I think Michael Smith Poetics and the particular poem that's performed in those clips of the documentary, we can believe it. Like I really thought about that performance a lot and went back and found this his underground sort of publication of a set of poems in which that specific one is published in. And there is a radical instability to the word Qian in that poem.

SPEAKER_01 32:10

Oh, that's so interesting.

SPEAKER_00 32:12

The power that it generates in his reading of it versus in the written form of the poem, how it signifies, what meaning we're supposed to ascribe to it, whether you're an insider, meaning that you are familiar with Jamaican Petrois, or an outsider. I literally, as someone on the outside, if I were to encounter that poem without his performance, I really would not know. Does can mean can't, cannot, or does it mean can? That's so interesting. You only know that from the performance. Anyway, I that's just an example of how opacity works in Michael Smith's particular poem and performance. But that I think at least I, as someone who wants to interpret and think with Lisa, I would want to extend that kind of radical ambiguity.

SPEAKER_01 33:15

Yeah. Well, I think you're exactly getting it. The I think the beauty of the text that then is, as you're pointing out, the paradox of it is that in and itself should be read as, or not should, but could be read as this unstable, performative work of theoretical exercise that as scholars increasingly try to stabilize it and make the concept of opacity transparent to their own research and their own paradigm.

SPEAKER_00 33:45

And I think he's he's working within that. I want to say that he's already aware of that with his kind of postscript on opacity that we find at the end of the text.

SPEAKER_01 34:01

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 34:01

We see him working through it in an earlier chapter on transparency, and then we find it again in this kind of postscript where he's not talking about it as a kind of linguistic literary reality, he's talking about it as a right, yeah. Which honestly, Carol, I had not really thought about carefully until your questions. What does it mean to turn an idea or a concept into an object of right? Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 34:51

As a legal theorist, what does that mean for you? I mean, like that's meaning something very specific for you right now.

SPEAKER_00 34:58

I think so many people now are some people have known this for a very long time. Some people are just newly awakening to the reality that formal rights really don't exist unless we exercise them. Yeah and that and that formal rights become democratic insofar as many different people get to exercise and access those rights. And so before that postscript on opacity, I don't think we ever would have imagined that opacity would be subject to realization in a kind of legalistic way, right to opacity. But I wanna say that it's at least the way that I want to think with it or extend it, is that rights are inherently performative. And so what he's suggesting there is that opacity becomes real in our relations, insofar as it's performed, and poetics and poetry are one way in which they're performed. Literary texts are one way in which opacity is made concrete and knowable in partial ways to us. So literary or poetic forms of opacity are not the only way or privileged way, but that we should be involved in many different sort of creative forms of opacity for ourselves. And this is a very difficult thing, I think, interpersonally, and also in the relationship between a subject and the state or state institutions. Um, in those kind of very power-related forms of linguistic exchange, right? How do we enact opacity so that what is coercive about that linguistic exchange can be opened up without submitting to the given kind of arrangements of power and coercion in exchange? I think that is like a very material scene in which opacity should be given much more kind of nuancing analytical thought to when we lay claim to it.

SPEAKER_01 37:43

Well, he says in the postscript, he says, so quoting, he says, it does not disturb me to accept that there are places where my identity is obscure to me, and the fact that it amazes me does not mean I relinquish it. And then he goes into talking about the rule of action, what is called ethics, or else the ideal or logical relation would gain ground as an obvious fact by not being mixed into the preconceived transparency of universal models. This idea of rights and relinquish and the fact that he holds on to this concept of amazes me that oneself could be an amazing mystery unto oneself that he's not willing to relinquish is part of what you're articulating is that in the relate coercive relationships within say state power now, the actions individuals take in the world seem to always have to correlate with a certain ideological or identitarian stance. But ideally, one should be able to act in the world that does not always hold these certainties.

SPEAKER_00 38:54

Yeah, what if the assertion of the right to opacity is consenting not to relinquish one's identity, right? Because what is so precious about that identity is that it's partial, that there's a part of it that's a mystery.

SPEAKER_01 39:18

Yeah, he says all human beings are fractal in nature.

SPEAKER_00 39:22

Yes. So in exercising the right to opacity, we're consenting not to relinquish that kind of identity.

SPEAKER_01 39:31

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 39:31

Not the identity that's reducible to cultural difference, but that part of identity which is illuminated by this mystery, this ennobility, at the same time, because a poetics of relation is ultimately a kind of radical openness. There's also this other consent, I think, involved in exercising the right to opacity as a refusal to consent. So on the one hand, you're consenting not to participate in this universalizing form of difference. You're also consenting to this totality of relation that lives in all of us. So I think that the issue or the very difficult thing here in this past in that passage that you read, Carol, is like what is the subject or what is the identity that he's referring to that then opens up the exercise of a right in this way.

SPEAKER_01 40:39

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 40:40

And it's a kind of identity that we do that we don't necessarily um think of when we think of identity politics or identity claims, which is that I am this, right? I am, it doesn't need to be one thing, but I am this, which is multiple things, this kind of certainty of what the I is comprised of. I think for Glissant in this passage is an I that is partial and that is constantly seeking that part of identity which is not known and unknowable. And when that I speaks or when that I asserts this right, it also gives permission, I think, to others to also wonder about whether their identities can also be inhabited in that way.

SPEAKER_01 41:40

Yeah. I agree, but that's where I want to take it. And that's how I read it too. What I find interesting then is the tying to ethical action in the world, it also allows people to have complex political actions in the world or complex actions in the world in which the ethics of their actions are maybe not always clear even to themselves, or that anything, you know, I'm rereading it right now for something else. But in some ways, I feel like the paradigmatic example of that is beloved. Her action is beyond the law, it's beyond ethics, it's neither bad nor good. It was an action in the world that then is the history of herself.

SPEAKER_00 42:19

Yeah. Ask us to consider and imagine what world does the character live in or do the characters live in such that this would be an ethical act.

SPEAKER_01 42:34

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 42:34

I think that that's part of what opacity uh as an open concept is supposed to do, which is to say, how does it open up onto totality? A totality that we can't know, totality by definition, something that we can only partially articulate or partially know, and to be historically strangered from a world in which universal ideas or universalizable values are the norm, and to be placed into another time space where universality does not reign as a value. I think then what is that? What is that world? What is that space-time? I don't think I would dare try to answer that question on my own. I think that is something that people can come together to ask questions about and try to articulate. And that's like the poetic force that he talks about that we generate that did not exist until we were able to enact that displacement for ourselves. And I really love that because somehow it is a repeating sort of lesson of our kind of radical social movements in this sort of long period of decolonization or the kind of 20th century civil rights reconstructive project. It is a repeating lesson that the social mobilization and the social desire for equality, for truer democracy, through all of these values that now are completely these values that are frontally attacked by authoritarian regimes. Is that the kinds of revolutions and legal reform that we're able to enact need to constantly be regenerated through further revolutionary kind of um modes of organizing and discourse and creativity. Otherwise, in becoming fixed and formalized and institutionalized, they are dismantled in, as we've seen, in a matter of, you know, a year. This year certainly has just been brutal in that way. So I guess that's why I really love this idea of the openness of poetic force. Because history, I think, teaches us that we can't we can't do without it. And it's not a luxury, as many people say.

SPEAKER_01 45:53

Yeah. So thank you, Sora. I think it's a good thing. Any questions, comments, feedback, feel free to reach out to Caro at cfowler at clart.edu. Please do feel free to like or subscribe. Thanks so much.