As a part of b2‘s series on Legacies of the Future: The Life and Work of Edward Said, Wlad Godzich presents “The Stateless and the Proper,” and Stathis Gourgouris on “The Epistemology of Edward Said.”
Search results for: “gourgouris”
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Stathis Gourgouris on "The Idolatry Post-Secularism"
Follow Stathis’ careful examination of “Idolatry, Prohibition, Unrepresentability,” here, for free download from the Duke UP site and from the last issue of boundary 2, Antinomies of the Postsecular.
This is a meditation on the assertion by Cornelius Castoriadis that “every religion is idolatry.” Idolatry here is configured beyond the conventional understanding of the idol as a concrete object of worship which works within the logic of representation. In monotheism, even the unrepresentable—or, perhaps, especially the unrepresentable—is an idol, an object of worship that is otherwise silenced by a language that claims to worship a nonobject. In this sense, the prohibition of images in monotheism (Bildverbot) is a highly sophisticated mode of idolatry.
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sounds
1/ Count G
2/ Experiments in Listening, Experimental Music Workshop
3/ Sora C. Han, “Res Nulla Loquitur: A Multimedia Essay in Seven Parts”
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Martijn Konings–The Modern Money Tangle: An Introduction
This article is part of the b2o: an online journal Special Issue “The Gordian Knot of Finance”.
The Modern Money Tangle: An Introduction
Martijn Konings
It is increasingly evident that the existing economic policy paradigm is a recipe for ongoing economic stagnation, political polarization, and ecological degradation. But this growing awareness often seems peculiarly inconsequential, incapable of driving even minor shifts in the most conspicuously harmful policy settings, including governments’ enormous subsidies for fossil fuel extraction and the near-perfect exemption of extreme private wealth from taxation. Even as electoral systems have become almost as volatile as the stock market, it seems that, when it comes to economic policy, the political center holds, inexplicably.
We tend to call that paradigm “neoliberalism”. The epithet was first used by academics. But, as during the decade following the Global Financial Crisis wider communities of observers found themselves increasingly puzzled by the immunity of economic policy to feedback from social and ecological systems, the label became used more widely (Slobodian 2018, Monbiot and Hutchinson 2024). The problem, by this account, consists in politicians’ and policymakers’ unexamined belief in an expanded role for market mechanisms as the obvious solution to any and all social problems. Moreover, that erroneous belief is self-reinforcing, as the persistence or worsening of social problems is only ever taken to mean that not enough market efficiency has yet been applied.
In the social sciences themselves, neoliberalism has become a contested concept. A general definition – neoliberalism as the reformulation of a classic liberalism in response to the rise and crisis of Keynesianism – is unlikely to encounter many objections. But the critical force of the neoliberalism concept is premised on a more specific claim – namely, the ability to capture the diminishing role of the state and the expansion of the market. It is not at all clear, however, that such a shift in society’s center of gravity, from public to private, has taken place. The very period during which the concept of neoliberalism established itself as a common descriptor was also the era of “quantitative easing” (asset purchases by the central bank) and “macroprudential regulation” (concerning itself not just with the health of individual firms but with macro-level stability) during which Western governments took on an unprecedented level of responsibility for maintaining the balance sheets of large financial institutions (Tooze 2018, Petrou 2021). Entirely contrary to what the neoliberal schema would suggest, the functioning of government institutions has become deeply entangled with the expanded reproduction of private wealth (Konings 2025).
Supported by the significant historical and conceptual nuance that recent scholarship has provided, some have argued that the neoliberalism concept can accommodate such developments. But such qualifications undercut the critical thrust of neoliberalism as an off-the-shelf diagnosis of our current predicament. Others have gone further in questioning the suitability of traditional categories of state and market for capturing structures of power and exploitation that appear simultaneously archaic and futuristic. Neoliberalism, from such a perspective, may simply have buckled under the weight of its own contradictions, and we are now seeing a transition to a very different kind of society – neo-feudalism or technofeudalism (Dean 2020, Varoufakis 2024). Such takes align with the self-image of many Silicon Valley billionaires, who often see themselves less as capitalist entrepreneurs than as the founders of new dynastic bloodlines. But treating such heroic or nihilistic self-stylings as reliable guides to current transformations rather than publicly lived mental health struggles may well be a symptom of what Stathis Gourgouris (2019: 144) understands as social theory’s own “monarchical desire”.
A more helpful angle has been advanced by Modern Monetary Theory (MMT), a perspective that understands economic value as a public construct and found considerable traction by pointing out that such public capacities for value creation had been appropriated by the property-owning class (Wray 2015, Kelton 2020). Taking a leaf from the Marxist book of dialectical historical change, MMT authors propose liberating the machinery of public value creation from the pernicious regime of property relations that it has been made to serve and instead to press it into serving “the birth of the people’s economy”, in the words of Stephanie Kelton (2020). If governments can afford to bail out banks, they can fund programs with actual social value.
MMT precursor Abba Lerner (1943, 1947) viewed his perspective on money as a public token as nothing more than a rigorous statement of the assumptions underpinning Keynes’ General Theory. Keynes himself had tried to make his work acceptable to establishment opinion by concentrating primarily on the role of fiscal policy, leaving the overarching financial structure of the capitalist economy go unquestioned. Even during the heyday of Keynesian hegemony, attempts to wield the public purse were always constrained by the fact that control over monetary policy settings was firmly in the hands of central banks (Major 2014, Feinig 2022). That was a key institutional precondition for the rise of neoliberal inflation targeting. But the absurdity of putting monetary decision-making beyond democratic control became fully evident following the Global Financial Crisis, when central banks made permanent an extensive range of subsidies and guarantees for the holders of financial assets, while governments tightened the public purse strings by cutting social programs.
In this context, arguments that had long been dismissed as crank theory were able to bypass the censure of mainstream economics and find purchase in the public sphere. The vicious response of mainstream economics to the popularity of MMT has done more to underscore than to refute the salience of its provocation – that there exist no actual economic reasons why we can’t repurpose the institutions of the bailout state, away from the gratuitous subsidization of private wealth accumulation and towards shared prosperity.
Finance, MMT understands, holds no secret: it’s just a ledger of society’s transactions and commitments. And if these records are in principle as transparent as any other system of accounts, then what is there to prevent the public and its representatives from taking charge and correcting the perverse misallocations embedded in the current system? According to MMT, the main obstacle here is the flawed, arch-neoliberal idea that governments, like private households, need to “balance the books”. Politicians who operate under the pernicious influence of neoliberal ideology do not recognize that governments are sovereign institutions issuing their own currency and are not subject to the same discipline as households. Adding insult to injury, the principle of public austerity is always readily suspended when banks need bailouts – and invariably reinstated again once the danger of system-level meltdown has passed.
MMT has adopted a very literal reading of neoliberalism, imagining that the force of its ideological obfuscations is the main obstacle to repurposing the mechanisms of quantitative easing for the advancement of the people. In reality, the problem runs deeper. The public underwriting of private balance sheets has a long history. From the mid-twentieth century it served as a key instrument for governments to manage the contradictions of welfare capitalism. During the 1970s, neoliberal ideas of fiscal and monetary austerity became influential not because of their ideological strength, but because they provided a way to manage the inflationary pressure produced by risk socialization. That permitted the routinization of bailout and backstop policies, which culminated in the intravenous liquidity drip-feed that large banks enjoy at present.
That arrangement also has deeper social and political roots than it is typically credited with. Government subsidization of asset values is a major factor responsible for the rise of the “1%”, but it has also underpinned a broader reconstruction of middle-class politics, away from wage expectations to capital gains (Adkins, Cooper and Konings 2020). The nineties represented the high point of this asset-focused middle-class politics, when rising home and stock prices delivered benefits widely enough to give credence to the promise of inclusive wealth.
The trickle-down effect has now come to a halt, but that fact does not by itself undo the ideological or institutional structure of the backstop state. The allocation of public resources has become intertwined with the private wealth accumulation in an endless number of ways that are not easily unwound. The idea that governments can do things themselves, without having to put in place complex financing constructions to mobilize private capital and incentivize the doing of said thing by others, has become so incomprehensible in the bourgeois public sphere that there simply no longer exists a straightforward channel for translating social priorities into public spending priorities. What binds the machinery of policymaking to the power of finance is not a set of discrete ties but rather something akin to a Gordian knot.
How to undo, loosen, transform, or bypass that knot? The recent past offers some clues. Since the Covid crisis, modern money has powerfully expressed both its public and its private character. When emergency struck, governments were instantly capable of doing all the things that politicians and experts routinely advise are just not possible. By expanding the safety net beyond the financial too-big-to-fail establishment, they orchestrated a “quantitative easing for the people”, in the words of Frances Coppola (2019). The world’s most powerful central banker, Federal Reserve chairman Jerome Powell, conceded that there were no real technical limits to the possibility of getting money in the hands of people who needed it (Pelley 2020). Almost overnight, MMT went from indie darling to mainstream pop star. “Is this what winning looks like?”, the New York Times wondered (Smialek 2022). Many declared the end of the neoliberal model.
But before too long, inflation surged, and discourses insisting on strict limits to the use of public money and credit returned to prominence. The discipline thus meted out has been extremely uneven. Central banks across the world have increased interest rates to slow down growth and employment, but for bankers and asset owners the edifice of quantitative easing and liquidity support remains firmly locked in place. Treasuries have similarly tightened the purse strings, swiftly undoing the broadened financial safety nets and undertaking deep cuts in social programs and public education even as they continue to increase spending on the military and corporate tax breaks.
MMTers and other progressives have not failed to call out the hypocrisy, and neoliberal nostrums about the importance of balanced budgets no longer enjoy the same intellectual authority that they once did. But it often seems as if that hardly matters – that the sheer exhaustion of neoliberalism as an intellectual paradigm merely serves to make a mockery of the idea that policy could change in a material way. We can all see that the emperor is not wearing anything, and yet we’re in the midst of a powerful restoration of economic orthodoxy, relentlessly socializing the risk of the largest players while inflicting tight monetary and fiscal policy settings on the rest of the population.
MMTers have allied with other heterodox economists to rebut mainstream arguments for deflationary policy (Weber and Wasner 2023). Inflationary pressures, they argue, had their origins in specific events such as supply-chain disruptions, and should be addressed by targeting those sources – not by carpet-bombing the economic system at large. Such arguments invoke a long history of Keynesian supply-side thinking that aims to undercut inflationary pressures in ways that do not require the central bank or the treasury to deploy their crude instruments of general deflation. The last time such a progressive supply-side agenda had made waves was during the nineties, when Democrats positioned such ideas as an alternative to Reagan’s right-wing supply-side agenda. Then, they became allied to spurious claims about a new economy and ended up providing ideological cover for Clinton’s embrace of fiscal austerity. This time, such ideas synced with the Biden’s administration’s interest in a more active industrial policy meant to counter the economic stagnation that had become evident during the previous decade and to tighten the strategic connections between key economic sectors and America’s geopolitical interests.
While the recentering of the national interest has allowed Keynesian ideas to enjoy greater influence, it has also reinforced the blind spot that has historically plagued that paradigm and that MMT had sought to correct. Even as fiscal and regulatory policy have become fully yoked to the needs of financial assets holders for minimum returns – a dependence that Daniela Gabor (2021) has referred to as the Wall Street consensus, dominated by an asset manager complex that demands comprehensive derisking for any and all projects it invests in, what fell by the wayside with the rise of Bidenomics is a critical focus on the economy’s financial infrastructure as an object of democratic decision-making.
Indeed, the Biden administration has been eager to disavow any interest in in challenging the autonomy of the Federal Reserve – one of its preferred ways to signal that there are “adults in the room” who take advice from experts. In this way, it has left the field open to the far right, which intuits much more readily that the advocates of independent central banking are false prophets, and it has made greater political control over monetary policy one of the key points of its blueprints for a more fascist future such as Project 2025. A progressive agenda that fails to engage that terrain, on which are situated the monetary drivers of the escalating concentration of asset wealth, will be unable find much sustained traction.
MMT has shown us where we need to look – where to direct our attention and bring the struggle. But its wish to beat mainstream economics at its own scientistic game, by advancing objectively better policies rooted in superior expertise, prevents it from recognizing what an effective political engagement might involve. The contributions to this forum resist the temptation to imagine alternatives as if any are readily available. Instead, they examine modern money as a complex tangle, composed of an endless range of dynamically evolving strategies and alliances that straddle any divide between public and private. The financial knot is tighter in some places than in others, but neither orthodox economics nor MMT gets the pattern into sufficiently sharp focus to see the openings and fissures.
In that sense, we should perhaps consider ourselves as occupying the mental space that Keynes did after he completed A Treatise on Money (Keynes 1930), which catalogued the extraordinary expansion of liquid financial instruments during the early twentieth century but had left him uncertain about the meaning of all this. When several years later he wrote the General Theory, his mind was on the day’s most pressing questions, above all the dramatic collapse in output and employment that had occurred during the previous years. While he recognized that such volatility could only occur in a monetary economy, he nonetheless considered it justifiable to let finance drop “into the background” (Keynes 1936: vii). Lerner viewed that as an infelicitous move, sensing correctly that it kept open the door to the restoration of an economic orthodoxy eager to sacrifice human livelihoods at the abstract altar of financial property. The contributions presented here (presented first at a symposium on the Gordian knot of finance held at the University of Sydney, generously sponsored by the Hewlett Foundation), take a step back and linger with the more open-ended curiosity that drove Keynes’ earlier engagement with the institutional logic of financial claims. How has the knot of modern money been tied?
Stefan Eich’s contribution examines money’s constitutive duality, the fact that it is public and private at the same time. He draws attention to the structural similarity of perspectives that think of the financial system as either primarily public or primarily private, and, engaging with MMT as well as other strands of “chartalist” theory, he argues that money is best seen as a constitutional project. The fact that money is at its core both public and private means that political openings always exist, even if those are never opportunities to reconstruct the financial structure from scratch.
Amin Samman asks what it is about the financial system that makes it so resistant to rational public policy intervention. To this end, he draws attention to the role of fictions in the functioning of finance – when speculative projections fail, the response is not sober reflection but a feverish acceleration of their production, eventuating in the installation of the lie as the modus operandi of capital. More earnest, truth-observant policymakers occupy a structurally impossible position, on the one hand interfacing with the delirious virtuality of capitalist finance and on the other attempting to be responsive to rational criticisms.
Dick Bryan argues that a preoccupation with how to undo or cut the Gordian knot may be misplaced. For each bit of loosening we achieve, capital has tricks up its sleeve to tighten its grip. Instead of focusing too much on the knot itself, we might think of ways to slip past it by designing financial connections that may not instantly become entangled in existing networks and their power concentrations. Challenging any clear-cut distinction between money and asset, he argues that crypto currencies could be designed to play that role.
Janet Roitman takes a different look at the image of the Gordian knot as a global imperial structure, and she asks whether it in fact attributes too much efficacy to the power of finance. While acknowledging the strength of the international currency hierarchy, she shows that dynamics challenging the dollar system arise from within the dynamic of capitalism itself. New financial technologies are instruments of economic competition, and in that capacity, they offer new opportunities for exploitation but inevitably also for the loosening of constraints, however limited or compromised such emancipation may be.
While Roitman turns our attention to the fissures in the global financial knot, Michelle Chihara concludes the forum by pointing out a major kink in the heartland of modern money. She argues that, for all our fascination with the ghost towns that the bursting of the Chinese real estate bubble produced, vacant property is a key aspect of the functioning of contemporary global capitalism. The jarring combination of vacant apartments serving as subsidized storage for transnational wealth on the one hand and a rapidly growing population of homeless and underhoused on the other, is giving rise to new forms of protest, reminding us that the grip of money is rooted in the compliances of everyday life.
Taken together, the contributions collected here shed light on different aspects of the tangle of promises, claims and commitments that constitute modern money. Such a perspective militates against the promise of a neatly executed, wholesale policy shift to reorient the economic system, but that does not entail a hard Hayekian anti-constructivism as the only alternative. MMT might be likened to a subject of psychoanalysis that, upon realizing that the world holds no deep secret, declares itself cured – but, when venturing back out, finds that its relationship to that world has undergone little practical change. It still has to do the work of deconstructing, transforming, or otherwise navigating the actual web of fictions, promises, lies, and obfuscations that it has built. In few areas of life is such thoughtful deconstruction more imperative than in our relationship to modern money, which is structured by so many layers of miseducation and misapprehension that transforming its practical operation is necessarily as much about revising our understanding as it is about getting our hands on the institutional machinery of its creation.
Martijn Konings is Professor of Political Economy and Social Theory at the University of Sydney. He is the author of The Emotional Logic of Capitalism (Stanford University Press, 2015), Neoliberalism (with Damien Cahill, Polity, 2017) Capital and Time (Stanford University Press, 2018), The Asset Economy (with Lisa Adkins and Melinda Cooper, Polity, 2020), and The Bailout State: Why Governments Rescue Banks, Not People (Polity, 2025).
References
Adkins, Lisa, Melinda Cooper and Martijn Konings. 2020. The Asset Economy, Polity.
Brown, Wendy. 2015. Undoing the Demos: Neoliberalism’s Stealth Revolution, Zone.
Coppola, Frances. 2019. The Case For People’s Quantitative Easing, Polity.
Dean, Jodi. 2020. “Neofeudalism: The End of Capitalism?”, Los Angeles Review of Books, May 12.
Feinig Jakob. 2022. Moral Economies of Money: Politics and the Monetary Constitution of Society, Stanford University Press.
Gabor, Daniela. 2021. “The Wall Street Consensus”, Development and Change, 52(3).
Gourgouris, Stathis. 2018. The Perils of the One, Columbia University Press.
Kelton, Stephanie. 2020 The Deficit Myth: Modern Monetary Theory and the Birth of the People’s Economy, PublicAffairs, 2020.
Konings, Martijn. 2025. The Bailout State: Why Governments Rescue Banks, Not People, Polity.
Lerner, Abba P. 1943. “Functional Finance and the Federal Debt”, Social Research, 10(1).
Lerner, Abba P. 1947. “Money as a Creature of the State”, American Economic Review, 37(2).
Keynes, John Maynard. 1930. A Treatise on Money, Cambridge University Press.
Keynes, John Maynard. 1936. The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money, Harcourt, Brace and Company.
Major, Aaron. 2014. Architects of Austerity: International Finance and the Politics of Growth, Stanford University Press.
Monbiot, George and Peter Hutchison. 2024. Invisible Doctrine: The Secret History of Neoliberalism, Crown.
Pelley, Scott. 2018. “Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell on the coronavirus-ravaged economy”, CBS News, May 18.
Petrou, Karen. 2021. Engine of Inequality: The Fed and the Future of Wealth in America, Wiley.
Slobodian, Quinn. 2018. Globalists: The End of Empire and the Birth of Neoliberalism, Harvard University Press.
Smialek, Jeanna. 2022. “Is This What Winning Looks Like?”, New York Times, February 7.
Tooze, Adam. 2018. Crashed: How a Decade of Financial Crises Changed the World, Viking.
Varoufakis, Yanis. 2024. Technofeudalism: What Killed Capitalism, Melville House, 2024.
Weber, Isabella M. and Evan Wasner. 2023. “Sellers’ Inflation, Profits and Conflict: Why Can Large Firms Hike Prices in an Emergency?”, Review of Keynesian Economics, 11(2), 2023.
Wray, L. Randall. 2015. Modern Money Theory: A Primer on Macroeconomics for Sovereign Monetary Systems, Palgrave Macmillan.
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Experiments in Listening–boundary 2 annual conference
**PLEASE NOTE THE LOCATION CHANGE FOR SATURDAY DUE TO THE HUGHES FIRE**
Experiments in Listening
Friday, January 24-Saturday January 25, 2025
University of Southern California and California Institute of the Arts
Supported by the MA Aesthetics and Politics program and the Herb Alpert School of Music at the California Institute of the Arts; the USC Dornsife Experimental Humanities Lab; the Division of Cinema and Media Studies at USC’s School of Cinematic Arts; and boundary 2: an international journal of literature and culture.
With additional support from the Dean of the School of Critical Studies at CalArts; the USC Dornsife Graduate Dean and Divisional Vice Dean for the Humanities, the USC Department of Comparative Literature, and the USC Department of English.
This event is also supported by the Nick England Intercultural Arts Project Grant at CalArts.
Organized by Arne De Boever, Kara Keeling, Erin Graff Zivin, and Michael Pisaro-Liu.
“To anyone in the habit of thinking with their ears…” Thus begins Theodor W. Adorno’s famous essay “Cultural Criticism and Society”. But what does it mean to think with one’s ears? How does one get into the habit of it? And what are the critical and societal (ethical and political) benefits of thinking with one’s ears?
“Experiments in Listening” proposes to address these questions starting from the experimental performing arts. Conceived between an arts institute, a university, and a contrarian international journal of literature and culture, the conference seeks to “emancipate the listener” (to riff on Jacques Rancière) into considering their ears as not only aesthetic but also political instruments that are as central to how we think, make, and live as our speech.
Friday, January 24
University of Southern California
10am-12n
ROOM: USC, Taper Hall of Humanities (THH) 309K
boundary 2 editorial meeting for boundary 2 editors
Lunch for boundary 2 editors and conference speakers
*
1:30pm-3:15pm
ROOM: USC, SCA 112
Listening session/ Moderator: Erin Graff Zivin
Gabrielle Civil, “listening: in and out of place”
Fumi Okiji, “To Listen Ornamentally”
Josh Kun, “Migrant Listening”
3:30-5:30pm
ROOM: USC, SCA 112
Listening session/ Moderator: Kara Keeling
Michael Ned Holte, “Looking for Air in the Waves”
Mlondi Zondi, “Sound and Suffering”
Leah Feldman, “Azbuka Strikes Back”
Nina Eidsheim, “Pussy Listening”
6pm-7:30pm
Dinner for conference speakers — USC
8:00-10pm
ROOM: CalArts DTLA building. 1264 West 1st Street.
8pm: Reception
8:30pm: Screening of Omar Chowdhury, BAN♡ITS (17m22s, 2024) (in progress).
Out near the porous, lawless eastern border between Bangladesh and India, a diasporic artist returns to make works with a band of washed up ban♡its who are obsessed with Heath Ledger’s Joker. As they comically re-enact their glorified past, we confront the divergent histories and philosophies of peasant banditry and political resistance and its unexpected causes and contexts. The resulting para-fiction questions its authorship and morality and asks: when the art world comes calling, who are the real ban♡its?
9pm: Performance by Notnef Greco (Deviant Fond and Count G).
Saturday, January 25
The REEF building (1933 South Broadway, Los Angeles, California 90007)
10-11:50am:
ROOM: Screening Room, 12th floor
Coffee and pastries.
Listening session/ Performance. Moderator: Arne De Boever
Arne De Boever, “Silent Music”
Michael Pisaro-Liu, “Experimental Music Workshop” (1 hour). Performance of Antoine Beuger, Für kurze Zeit geboren: für Spieler/ Hörer (beliebig viele)/ Born for a Short Time: For Performers/ Listeners (as many as you like) (1991).
Conference speakers will participate in the performance. Performance will be audio/video-recorded and posted at boundary 2 online. A livestream will be available here. Composer Antoine Beuger will be joining us for the Q&A after the performance via zoom.
Lunch for conference speakers–Commons, 12th floor
1:30pm-3:15pm
ROOM: Screening Room, 12th floor
Coffee and pastries.
Listening session/ Moderator: Kara Keeling
Gavin Steingo, “Whale Song Recordings”
Natalie Belisle, “Inclination: The Kinaesthesis of Afro-Latin American Sound”
Stathis Gourgouris, “The Julius Eastman – Arthur Russell Encounter”
3:30-5:15pm
ROOM: Screening Room, 12th floor
Listening session/ Moderator: Erin Graff Zivin
Edwin Hill, “On Acoustic Jurisprudence”
Bruce Robbins, “Listening On Campus”
Jonathan Leal, “If Anzaldúa Were a DJ, What Would She Spin?”
5:30-6:15pm
ROOM: Screening Room, 12th floor
Student Theory Slam/ Moderator: Arne De Boever
Reina Akkoush
Jacob Blumberg
Sean Seu
Inger Flem Soto
…
6:30pm-8pm
Dinner for conference speakers–Commons, 12th floor
8pm
ROOM: Screening Room, 12th floor
8pm: Reception
8:30pm: Tung-Hui Hu, “How to Loop Today”
Listener Biographies
Reina Akkoush is an award-winning Lebanese graphic and type designer currently pursuing an MA in Aesthetics and Politics at the California Institute of the Arts. Research interests include Middle Eastern design, Arabic typography, Marxist critical theory, cultural memory and decolonial thought in the global south.
Natalie L. Belisle is an Assistant Professor of Spanish and Comparative Literature in the Department of Latin American and Iberian Cultures at the University of Southern California, where her research and teaching focus on contemporary Caribbean and Afro-Latin American literature, cultural production, and aesthetics. Professor Belisle’s first book Caribbean Inhospitality: The Poetics of Strangers at Home will be published by Rutgers University Press in 2025.
Jacob Blumberg is an artist and producer working across the disciplines of music, film, photography, fine art, performance art, and religious art. Global in scope and local in focus, Jacob’s work as a collaborator and creator centers deep listening, voice, and play.
Arne De Boever teaches American Studies in the School of Critical Studies at the California Institute of the Arts. He is the author of seven books on contemporary fiction and philosophy, as well as numerous articles, reviews, and translations. His new book Post-Exceptionalism: Art After Political Theology was published by Edinburgh University Press in 2025.
Omar R. Chowdhury is a Bangladeshi artist and filmmaker. He creates para-fictional installations, films and performances that animate the fault lines of diasporic life and its various radical histories. He has had recent presentations and performances at Busan Biennial 2024 (South Korea), Contour Biennial 10 (Mechelen), Dhaka Art Summit, Beursschouwburg (Brussels), De Appel (Amsterdam), and screenings at International Film Festival Rotterdam, Film and Video Umbrella (London), Haus der Kulturen der Welt (Berlin), and Queensland Gallery of Modern Art (Brisbane) for Asia Pacific Triennial 8.
Gabrielle Civil is a black feminist performance artist, poet, and writer, originally from Detroit, MI. Her most recent performance memoir In & Out of Place (2024), encompasses her time living and making art in Mexico. The aim of her work is to open up space.
Nina Eidsheim is a vocalist, sound studies scholar and theorist. She brings extensive knowledge, experience and innovative approaches to practice-based research that focuses on sound and listening. The author of Sensing Sound: Singing and Listening as Vibrational Practice and The Race of Sound: Listening, Timbre, and Vocality in African American Music.
Inger Flem Soto is a doctoral student in Comparative Studies in Literature and Culture at USC. She is interested in issues of sexual difference, continental philosophy, psychoanalysis, and Latin American feminist thought. Her dissertation focuses on the mother figure in Chilean works of literature and philosophy.
Stathis Gourgouris is professor of classics, English, and comparative literature and society at Columbia University. He is the author of several books on political philosophy, aesthetics, and poetics, the most recent being Nothing Sacred (2024).
Edwin Hill is Associate Professor in the Department of French and the Department of American Studies & Ethnicity at the University of Southern California. His research lies at the African diasporic intersections of French and Francophone studies, sound and popular music studies, theories of race.
Michael Ned Holte is a writer, curator, and educator living in Los Angeles. Since 2009, he has been a member of the faculty of the Program in Art at CalArts, and he currently serves as an Associate Dean of the School of Art. He is the author of Good Listener: Meditations on Music and Pauline Oliveros (Sming Sming Books, 2024).
Tung-Hui Hu is a poet and media scholar. He is the author of three books of poetry, most recently Greenhouses, Lighthouses, which grew out of his graduate studies in film, as well as two studies of digital culture, A Prehistory of the Cloud and Digital Lethargy: Dispatches from an Age of Disconnection, an exploration of burnout, isolation, and disempowerment in the digital underclass.
Kara Keeling is Professor and Chair of Cinema and Media Studies in the School of Cinematic Arts at the University of Southern California. Keeling is author of Queer Times, Black Futures (New York University Press, 2019) and The Witch’s Flight: The Cinematic, the Black Femme, and the Image of Common Sense (Duke University Press, 2007).
Josh Kun is a cultural historian, author, curator, and MacArthur Fellow. He is Professor and Chair in Cross-Cultural Communication in the USC Annenberg School and is the inaugural USC Vice Provost for the Arts.
Jonathan Leal (he/him) is an Assistant Professor of English at the University of Southern California. He is the author of Dreams in Double Time (Duke University Press, 2023), which received an Honorable Mention for Best Book of History, Criticism, and Culture from the Jazz Journalists Association. His next book, Wild Tongue: A Borderlands Mixtape, is under contract with Duke University Press.
Fumi Okiji is Associate Professor of Rhetoric at the University of California, Berkeley. She arrived at the academy by way of the London jazz scene and draws on sound practices to inform her writing.
Michael Pisaro-Liu is a guitarist and composer. Recordings of his music can be found on Edition Wandelweiser, erstwhile records, elsewhere music, Potlatch, another timbre, ftarri, winds measure and other labels. Pisaro-Liu is the Director of Composition and Experimental Music at CalArts.
Bruce Robbins is Old Dominion Foundation Professor in the Humanities at Columbia University. He is the author of Secular Vocations: Intellectuals, Professionalism, Culture (1993), Perpetual War: Cosmopolitanism from the Viewpoint of Violence (2012), and, most recently, Atrocity: A Literary History (2025).
Gavin Steingo is a professor in the Department of Music at Princeton University. He is working on a series of books and articles about whales, music, politics, and the environment.
Sean Koa Seu practices dramaturgy, theater direction, and production. He has credits with the National Asian American Theatre Company, Transport Group, and Lincoln Center Theater. He produced the short documentary The Victorias, which was acquired by The New Yorker in 2022.
Erin Graff Zivin is Professor of Spanish and Portuguese and Comparative Literature at the University of Southern California, where she is Director of the USC Dornsife Experimental Humanities Lab. She is the author of three books—Anarchaeologies: Reading as Misreading (Fordham UP, 2020), Figurative Inquisitions: Conversion, Torture, and Truth in the Luso-Hispanic Atlantic (Northwestern UP, 2014), and The Wandering Signifier: Rhetoric of Jewishness in the Latin American Imaginary (Duke UP, 2008)—and is completing a fourth book entitled “Transmedial Exposure.”
Mlondi Zondi (they/he) is an assistant professor of comparative literature at the University of Southern California. In addition to scholarly research, he/they also work in performance and dramaturgy. Mlondi’s writing is forthcoming or has been published in TDR: The Drama Review, ASAP Journal, Liquid Blackness, Contemporary Literature, Text and Performance Quarterly, Mortality, Canadian Journal of African Studies, Safundi, Performance Philosophy, Espace Art Actuel, and Propter Nos.
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2022 boundary 2 Annual Conference-50th Anniversary Meeting Videos Available Now
The 2022 boundary 2 Annual Conference was held from March 31-April 2 at Dartmouth College. The meeting also celebrated the 50th anniversary of the journal. Talks from the conference are now available online below and via YouTube.
Paul A. Bové: The Education of Henry Adams
Charles Bernstein: Reading from his Poetry
Arne DeBoever: Smears
David Golumbia: Cyberlibertarianism
Bruce Robbins: There Is No Why
Christian Thorne: “What We Once Hoped of Critique”
Jonathan Arac: William Empson and the Invention of Modern Literary Study
Stathis Gourgouris: No More Artificial Anthropisms
Donald E. Pease: Settler Liberalism
Lindsay Waters: Still Enmired in the Age of Incommensurability
R.A. Judy: Poetic Socialities and Aesthetic Anarchy
Hortense Spillers: Closing Remarks
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Rob Wilson, Stubborn Resistance: Juliana Spahr’s Auto-ethnography in the U.S. Poetic Undercommons
by Rob Wilson
a review of Julianna Spahr’s DuBois’s Telegram (Harvard University Press, 2018)
He called his doctor and joked to him that he was ill with late capitalism. His doctor did not laugh…
–Juliana Spahr and David Buuck, “The Side Effect,” An Army of Lovers.[1]
Change is quick but revolution
will take a while.
America has not even begun as yet.
–Diane di Prima, “Revolutionary Letter # 10”[2]
Amid atrophied hopes for a literature effectively ‘revolutionary’ in a precarious time of post-Occupy, authoritarian revanchism, the far-flung ills and blockages of Late Capitalism, and what she tracks as returns of “stubborn nationalism,” Juliana Spahr stakes her claim for U.S. poetry with a bleakly Adorno-esque refusal she aims to conjure into new millennial credibility: “’this is not a time for political works of art.’”[3] The three postwar U.S. literary movements she tracks in Du Bois’s Telegram: Literary Resistance and State Containment – turn-of-the-new-century alter Englishes, avant-garde modernism, and movement literatures of resistance since the mid-1960s– will offer an emplotted “slide from [Audré] Lorde to Adorno” (15). This means the shift from claims of poetic activism in writing as such, back to negation, irony, or qualification of such immediate claims for transformative resistance. All this movement is figured under the pervasiveness of capitalist structures and presumes what Spahr calls literature’s semi-autonomous or “half-in and half-out relationship with capitalism” (16) and so many varied refusals of “complicit nationalism” (53). To phrase this in the book’s overall analytical trajectory, Spahr tracks how “movement literature with its ties to militant resistance [across the late 60s and early 70s] morphed into multicultural literature” across later decades that instead seek to represent national inclusion and canonical assimilation of diversity (127).
Spahr’s much-needed lyric/critical jeremiad, putting the micro-literary (poetics) and the macro-political (structured relations) together where they belong, tracks an under-recognized trajectory of state interference in literary figurations and more sublimated avowals into the turn of the twenty-first century as immersive poet-scholar subject. Spahr complicates and renews “the vexed and uneven relationship between literature and politics,” challenging the all too literary avowal that “literature has a role to play in the political sphere, that it can provoke and resist” (4); that writing (especially “language writing”) as such comprises a politics of resistance in its negations, fragments, non-linearity, and deconstructions. Framing structural issues and social relations between literature and the state as well as alternative forms of what literature might do politically, Spahr deepens the grasp between such historical ties and private foundations, sites of higher education, as well as publishing outlets both multinational and “a localized, decentralized small press culture” (5) in localities like Honolulu, Oakland and Buffalo. The book is ‘auto-ethnographic” of Spahr’s own entanglements, complicities, and refusals of American literary-national culture and its university programs and funding structures that sustain it short of revolution and resistance as nourished in the coalitional social “undercommons.”[4]
Writing on the side of alternative languages and social forms, language becoming minor and de-Anglicized, Spahr embraces the micropolitical flux of what M. M. Bakhtin called the “heteroglossia” within the dialogics of the sign.[5] She yet warns that “there is no robust counter” as alternative to state funding forms and modes of liberal domination, “with a politics that is anything more contestatory than liberal” (26). Her heart, as poet, editor, publisher, and teacher, remains tied to alternative production and circulation sites in communities of resistance from subpress collective in Honolulu and Chain in Philadelphia to Commune Editions in Oakland. Even as she elaborates multiple forms (experimental, multicultural, neo-formal modernist or worse) for containing, manipulating, acculturating, and restricting “literary resistance” by the American state, still somehow, this study remains hopeful of “antistate” (53) as well as “other-than-national” (53) poetics in form, substance, and social relation.
This is no melancholic rear-view mirror, but a proleptic movement forward as such into and beyond the contemporary. The sustained argument or, better said, way of reading this poetry is finely scaled at critical-creative levels of macro and micro intervention that may just carry the new millennial day (“it survives”), even if as W. H. Auden demurred in the radical thirties of Yeats, Eliot, Pound, and Rukeyser,
For poetry makes nothing happen: it survives
In the valley of its making where executives</p
From ranches of isolation and the busy griefs,
Raw towns that we believe and die in; it survives,
A way of happening, a mouth.[6]
Making unexpected linkages from Paris and NYC to Africa and the Pacific, Spahr’s study shows that American liberal-literary culture (not just amid well-studied Cold War antagonisms and cooptation but into the blockages of the present moment), was never that free or autonomous. It was never under-determined or “apolitical” in poetry’s homespun global diplomatic role to shape the world into an American telos figured as freedom, liberation, and self-determination, especially in the global wake of World War II and rise of English.
“Relentless monitoring” and co-optation of literary sites, outlets, and works became the US state-funded norm to counter, mollify, moderate, neutralize, and defuse resistance and thus keep any form of “armed militancy” (especially black or Third-World affiliated) at foreign bay (130-131). Networks of foundation funding and State Department support provided the capillary flow of power and capital, covertly and more openly so at times across the sixties and seventies if still “under recognized” (141) in its pervasive impact and consequences as Spahr claims. At the university level, this meant “an institutionalization of these culturalist movements that would sever them from more insurgent and militant possibilities as they were located within the university” (139). Such networks of biopower helped to produce and contain racialized resistance, as Roderick Ferguson, Eric Bennett, and Jodi Melamed et al have noted, as recuperated within if not beyond the Cold War academy.[7]
Challenging her own immersion in lyric ideologies of First World privilege and a university literary culture aligned with US “imperial globalization,” Spahr exposes claims, taking academic dominion as absorbed in her “avoidance” training at SUNY Buffalo, that “the modernist tradition excluded [valuing] writing that had direct connection to thriving culturalist and anticolonialist movements of the time” (8). “I was thinking,” Spahr admits while tracking her own counterconversion to “poetry’s [subaltern] socialities and prosovereignty literatures” in counter-nationalist Hawai’i in the 1990s and the alter- or other-than-Englishes then emerging, “in the way the State Department and the liberal foundations that worked with the State Department wanted me to think” (10).[8] As Spahr will admit later in chapter three reflecting on another wave of stubborn nationalism, “in many ways this book is an autobiography about how my education [at Bard and Buffalo] told me that certain forms of literature were autonomous when they were not and how long it took me to realize this” (110). Still, Spahr’s will to cultivate resistance remains no less stubborn, no less deeply affiliated as material and literary intervention.
We need a larger context for mapping strategies of liberal containment, then and now, as in the global critical visions of Aamir Mufti and Stathis Gourgouris working against the unity of the Anglo-global norm and residual claims of Bandung humanism.[9] For this Spahr deftly turns back to a Cold War moment of resistance in an uncanny trans-Atlantic sign. The Congress of Black Writers and Artists was planned, for Paris 1956, to serve as “a second Bandung” to help promote the production of literature by black writers, in effect aiming at a kind of literary self-determination beyond colonial interference or world-systemic alignment (1) by the US or USSR. W.E.B. Du Bois, whose passport had been revoked by the US government the year before, sent a telegraph explaining his non-attendance and refusing acquiescence to the state: “Any Negro-American who travels abroad today,” Du Bois wrote, “must either not discuss the conditions in the United States or say the sort of thing which our state department wishes the world to believe.”[10] He further explained his action in terms of political refusal and social re-alignment: “The government especially objects to me because I am a socialist and because I believe in peace with Communist states like the Soviet Union and their right to exist in security” (2).
Indeed, as Spahr elaborates this longer duration, CIA front groups would fund Americans attending as writers and expected ideological acquiescence in return for such support: “In addition, all [writers, such as Richard Wright, Mercer Cook, and Horace Mann Bond et al] had agreed to file reports to the Congress for Cultural Freedom, another CIA front group created to covertly launder funds from the CIA into various cultural diplomacy projects, when they returned” (2). In this particular Paris conference forum, the US state department wanted to assure that voices of anti-colonialism would not carry the agenda and that systemic critiques tying US racism to such figurations in Europe and the Caribbean would be diminished. Here Richard Wright played anti-communist informant, assuring that figures such as Duke Ellington would attend the congress rather than the antinomian Paul Robeson whom James Baldwin, by contrast, had long defended as figure of radical black critique from Harlem to Paris to Moscow.
Bandung in 1955 had awoken this US apparatus to African literature as a site of decolonization struggle (93), even as embraced through quasi-blackface figures like Uli Beier funded from Nigeria to Papua New Guinea.[11] “The combination of cultural center and [literary] journal was a classic CIA pattern at the time,” meaning post-Bandung as Spahr explains (96). The CIA works with private US foundations to support postcolonial English writing in Africa and the Boom in Latin America as literary freedom beyond ordinary realism at best or some version of “apolitical’ influencing the transnational imaginary and containing the literature of decolonization. Not as Aime Cesaire advocated for Martinique, revolution in the name of bread, fresh air, and poetry. All literature is embedded in social relations, struggles, and wars of position however sublimated. Spahr rather jarringly supports Pascale Casanova’s all-too-Francocentric assumption of aesthetic experimentation that literature is created via “incessant struggle and competition over the very nature of literature itself—an endless succession of literary manifestos, movements, assaults and revolutions,” both at the world and national level.[12] This agonistic struggle to define and canonize American poetry, Spahr shows, had the manipulation of the nation-state as long shadow to its formally “autonomous” achievements.
Spahr presumes, with the world republic of letters model of Casanova she invokes, that there is an inherent conservation function to “literature that is written in the language of the state, the standard language” (12). But such writing is always being opposed, denaturalized, and denationalized from various angles, as in the poetry of Myung Mi Kim et al. Such resistance is read at best as partial or transient or, by now, “rare.” Spahr views such resistance as “supplementary” to more radical claims. She notes how literary ties to social movements of resistance “so often fail to be revolutionary for long, fail to grow, or merely maintain [community] solidarity” (14).
In chapter one, Spahr assumes that a poetics in by-now-dominant English that includes “languages other than English” might offer “a possible literature of resistance,” at least to “linguistic curtailment” or death of minor or other languages (29), linguicide-via-global-hegemony.[13] Given the threat of monolingual nationalism cum globalization, other languages from Polish to Thai heritages et al begin to manifest in American English poetry, but hardly marked as “a language of liberation” (33). Pidgin appears besides colonial languages and is used as investigative medium for global routes and colonial crossings that lead to the present settler-colonial layering: as in the exemplary transpacific Korean/American work of Myung Mi Kim in Dura and Commons, read by Spahr as situating “the 38th Parallel [tied] to her personal narrative to be understood as a larger historical narrative, as the result of globalizing capitalism” (39).
Spahr rightly argues, in such contexts of language mixtures, language politics, and entangled resistances to state-sponsored English anguish in dominated spaces, that “Hawai’i provides an unusually succinct example here of both the importance of literature to [Hawaiian] nationalism and of resistance to [US] nationalism at the turn of the twenty-first century (41-42). Her reading of these tensions in an array of contexts and struggles from the 1970s to the present is convincing. Hawaiian language becomes imprisoned yet flourishing, Pidgin English both inflated into anticolonial tactic and accommodated into tourist functioning, as is her related reading of the ambivalent Narragansett language use in experimental texts in Rhode Island in the early 1990s and Nahuatl language use in Francisco X. Alarcon. Nevertheless, as a force of resistance to dominant-state nationalism and the capitalist dynamics of globalization, Spahr invokes David Graeber on the militant anti-globalization movements from Seattle to Chiapas, assuring that for the state “it is puppets, not literature that police fear at this time” (55).[14]
In chapter two, Spahr queries how much of an “other than national” challenge literary modernism was as an internationalism of resistance to any such U.S. “literary nationalism,” as she was taught at Buffalo. Such a poetics embraced “syntactically atypical grammars” and dialectics of idiolects as in “smashing and crashing” (76) prosody of Gertrude Stein’s Tender Buttons that (in its “bourgeois interior” as “imperial space” [74]) yet challenged official verse culture in the New Critical mode (57). “Nashville, not Paris, was the center” of this official American-verse culture refusal to be sure (57): “I carried this division in my suitcase with me to my first job at the University of Hawai’i at Manoa” (58) she admits of her pre-conversion model opposing lyric quietude to post-language traditions. Stein’s works need to be read, as she learned in Hawaii, as a response to colonialism and imposed languages (61), “very aware of language politics” (61) in such sites of linguistic and cultural domination and shifting hierarchies.
Literary movements towards aesthetic revolution, even in the ferment of little magazines like Transition that played such a crucial role in fomenting international modernism, as Spahr will summarize, “are poked and prodded into existence by social forces and influences”(63). This occurs even in sublimating modernists like Woof, Eliot and Stein, here read as writing “in a world changed by colonialism” (68). Even Stein, as Spahr tracks her modernist experimental movements into and out of abstractionism, becomes a “cringe-inducing” jingoist (77) and stubborn nationalist Example One. As “national governments [began to] manipulate, cultivate, and fund what [Casanova] calls ‘autonomous’ literature to instrumentalized it as nationalist” (77). Spahr rehearses how (ironically in a “Casanova-style rhetoric” [82] embracing aesthetic autonomy) the postwar CIA became increasingly interested in promoting “abstract and avant-garde art forms” as signals of American freedom, ideological transcendence, and anti-communist play via state-sponsored cultural diplomacy to rival that of the Soviet Union.
Stein’s Four Saints in Three Acts and Gershwin’s Porgy and Bess would be funded, spread, performed, and highlighted internationally as American works “to instrumentalize blackness in cultural diplomacy” via state or private sponsorship (83). Fending off critiques of the USA became a mid-century literary goal, funded, sponsored, nourished at home and distributed abroad in a nexus of state and private sponsorship. This infrastructure makes this “world republic of letters” as Spahr rehearses in compelling scope and detail, wobble with capitalist distortion at the Cold War core of this emergent American-global nexus. Moreover, this core, on the American front from Richard Wright to James Baldwin and William Faulkner et al, took thick-cultural dominion in anthology and university study, as “writers amplified by these networks are disproportionally [still] represented in the canon of American literature” (89). This cultural diplomacy and funding produced and contained resistance on the home front. It became, in effect a capillary version of Foucault’s liberal nexus of power and resistance: “It might be that at the end of the twentieth century one could not become a successfully resistant writer,” Spahr argues, “without having at some moment been supported or amplified by the publication and distribution technologies of these [state-sponsored] networks” (90-1).[15]
Even in a seemingly post-national or multinational publishing era of the global novel, “the role the Standard English realist novel has in upholding U.S. nationalism” is not abolished especially as it can absorb other national forms and cultural modes, and even as “state sponsored multiculturalism” continues (146-147) through tactics of cultural diplomacy enduringly global. Resistance in the new millennium grows ever more atrophied. Mainstream American poetry, in the wake of programs like Poetry for Bush, becomes gleefully accommodationist, “conventional and outmoded” as in business-value poetic works of Kooser, Keillor, Barr, Gioia et al (157). Such literature produces a faux populism and apolitical muse of cheery pluralism, as in the nationalist inaugural poems (here read as multicultural “strawpoem[s]”) performed by Maya Angelou, Elizabeth Alexander and Richard Blanco. Spahr goes against the grain of this naturalized claim to ratify social diversity as achieved via American literary inclusion: “How to understand this insistence by institutions that U.S. literary production is diverse, is a sort of social justice program [justifying the nation], when it is not in the aggregate is something I am attempting to puzzle through” (182). All this is taking place at a time when the literary vocation has become increasingly professionalized and, at the core, tied to academic legitimation.
Nowadays, across the new century signified by the neoliberal MFA industry, “literature has been sequestered into [American] irrelevance” (184), Spahr concludes. This is a poetics shorn of ties to movements of social resistance, militant or antifascist dissent.[16] More literature is produced but less is read, or read by smaller literary-supporting and reviewing communities, becoming inconsequential, sustained by those with a professional stake in literary production and consumption or its sheer continuation, limited in political efficacy by such “structural conditions” as she elaborates them in this study.
“If I was a poet,” as the auto-fiction narrator in Ben Lerner’s Leaving the Atocha Station (2011) confesses, “I had become one because poetry, more intensely than any other practice, could not evade its anachronism and marginality and so constituted a kind of acknowledgement of my own preposterousness, admitting my bad faith in good faith, so to speak.”[17] This is one of many deconstructive feedback loops of self-irony undermining the postmodernist will to literary activism via formalist experimentation. Drifting into and out of “the handful of prefabricated subject positions proffered by capital or whatever you wanted to call it,” Lerner’s hyper-reflective expatriate poet (funded by a Fulbright fellowship) is haunted by dope-addled inaction, museum going, urban drifting, and North American privilege as well as what he calls “bad faith” leftist claims to overcome the political-literary divide running from the Spanish Civil War to 9/11 and the US War in Iraq. “I could lie about my interest in the literary response to the war because by making a mockery of the notion that literature could be commensurate with mass murder I was not defaming the latter,” Lerner admits of his picaresque literary protagonist, “but the dilettantes of the former, rejecting the political claims repeatedly made by the so-called left for a poetry radical only in its unpopularity” (101). The Fulbright director in Madrid is only too happy when the Spanish Civil War-researching American expatriate poet finally gives a talk on a “literature now” panel (as Spahr’s study would have predicted) disavowing the political efficacy of literature to alter history, in the tortured self-ironizing claim that “literature reflects politics more than it affects it, an important distinction” (175).
Leaving behind the 2004 terrorist bombing of Madrid’s Atocha Station if not ironically abiding in deferral tactics of virtuality mimed in the John Ashbery poem of the novel’s very title, Lerner undermines more extremist claims (contra Du Bois, di Prima et al) that “poems [function] as machines to make things happen” (52) in history or society, then or now.[18] By novel’s end, Lerner’s writer-hero gnostically abides in scare-quotes of irony (as in “the so-called left” or, later, “when history came alive, I was sleeping at the Ritz” [158]) and a future-perfect virtuality. Lerner’s novel is riddled with affects that Benjamin had called at the dawn of European literary modernism the “left-wing melancholy” of idealized attachments to the past, defeated causes, bad poetry, and failed revolutionary dreams.[19] It is this sense of perpetual poetic self-irony that Spahr herself (as does Lerner’s persona by contemporary analogy) battles against by affirming (against neoliberal odds) the will to break through forever signifying utopic virtuality and backward-focused defeat or compulsion into stronger, transformative, and abiding forms of “resistance.”[20]
In the face of stubborn nationalism, professionalized academia, white privilege, and multicultural accommodation, Spahr’s Du Bois’s Telegram (like a message blasted from future movements) refuses perpetual self-irony, left melancholy, and pessimism of the defeated will: “We are for sure not there, yet. But one can always hope” (194). That is, to align with insurgent forces of the undercommons to manifest modes of “stubborn resistance” in poetry and other works and sites, as in an emergent subterranean nexus of social domains and labor.[21]
[1] Juliana Spahr and David Buuck, “The Side Effect,” An Army of Lovers (San Francisco, CA: City Lights Press, 2013), 101.
[2] Diane di Prima, Revolutionary Letters (San Francisco, CA: Last Gasp, 2007), 20.
[3] Juliana Spahr, Du Bois’s Telegram: Literary Resistance and State Containment (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard UP, 2018), 15. Spahr is quoting from Theodor W. Adorno, Notes to Literature, trans. Shierry Weber Nicholsen, vol. 2 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1992), 93-94. Further references to Du Bois’ Telegram will occur parenthetically.
[4] In defense of revolutionary energies and tactics surging up in the present moment of neo-liberal blockage, Spahr credibly invokes Stefano Harney and Fred Moten, The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning and Black Study, (Brooklyn, New York: Minor Compositions, 2013).
[5] See The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays by M. M. Bakhtin, trans. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist (Austin: University of Texas, 1981) on literary language as “ideologically saturated” with contestation and subversion, 171.
[6] W. H. Auden, “In Memory of W.B. Yeats,” Collected Poems, ed. Edward Mendelson (New York: Random House, 1976), 197.
[7] At varying levels of racial and class containment as well as productive proliferation across university culture, see Roderick Ferguson, The Reorder of Things: The University and Its Pedagogies of Minority Difference (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2012); Jodi Melamed, Represent and Destroy: Rationalizing Violence in the New Racial Capitalism (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2011); and Eric Bennet, Workshops of Empire: Stegner, Engle, and American Creative Writing during the Cold War (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2015).
[8] On counter-conversions taking place across the decolonizing Pacific at the time Spahr was teaching in Hawai’i during the 1990s, see Rob Wilson, Be Always Converting, Be Always Converted: An American Poetics (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2009), especially chapter four on the world vision of Epeli Hau’ofa’s polytheistic Oceania, 119-142.
[9] See Aamir R. Mufti, Forget English!: Orientalisms and World Literature (Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 2016) and Stathis Gourgourias, The Perils of the One (New York: Columbia University Press, 2019).
[10] The FBI file of state surveillance on James Baldwin contains some 1884 pages of documents, becoming a kind of “fiction produced by the state” about the writer’s ties to the Communist party, the Black Panthers, and other radical movements, and his Paris ties: see Hannah K. Gold, “Why Did the FBI Spy on James Baldwin?”, The Intercept, August 15, 2015): https://theintercept.com/2015/08/15/fbi-spy-james-baldwin/. Gold quotes Baldwin’s scathing insight that J. Edgar Hoover is “history’s most highly paid (and most utterly useless) voyeur.”
[11] For global political contexts within and beyond anti-colonial claims at Bandung, see Aamir Mufti, “The Late Style of Bandung Humanism,” boundary 2 conference on February 12, 2013: https://www.boundary2.org/2013/02/aamir-mufti-the-late-style-of-bandung-humanism/.
[12] Pascale Casanova, The World Republic of Letters, trans. Malcolm DeBevoise (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 2004), 12.
[13] Even in the US, Spahr observes in her capaciously empirical first chapter, there are still 169 languages indigenous to this mongrel polity and 430 languages spoken across it, reflecting and refracting varied reactions to the rise of global English, Du Bois’s Telegram, 30.
[14] David Graeber, Possibilities: Essays on Hierarchy, Rebellion and Desire (Oakland, CA: AK Press, 2007).
[15] Although Foucault is not invoked in Spahr’s study, the problematic of state power not merely repressing but actually aiding, informing, producing, and abetting certain forms of resistance and dissent, would be compatible with his thickly elaborated model of neoliberal governmentality as an ‘agonism’ of reciprocal incitation, discipline, and struggle across social fields: see Michel Foucault, The Foucault Effect: Studies in Governmentality, ed. Graham Burchell, Colin Gordon, and Peter Miller (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991), 4-5, 141.
[16] For the longer duration of poetry valued as a site of cultural production and imagination opposed to forms of state domination, tyranny, and terror, see Paul Bové, Poetry Against Torture: Criticism, History, and the Human (Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2010).
[17] Ben Lerner, Leaving the Atocha Station (Minneapolis, Minnesota: Coffee House Press, 2011), 101. Further references to this work will occur parenthetically.
[18] For a far-ranging intertextual reading of the relationship between Lerner’s two novels and his own hyper-reflective poetics signifying claims of ”virtuality” as contemporary American poet, in the postmodern wake of John Ashbery, Jack Spicer, Robert Creeley et al, see Daniel Katz, “’I did not walk here all the way from prose’: Ben Lerner’s Virtual Poetics,” Textual Practice 31 (2017): 315-337. Lerner’s post-Ashbery poetics, self-referentially cited by the novel’s Lerner-like protagonist Adam Gordon in To the Atocha Station, (pp. 90-91), had first been published as “The Future Continuous: Ashbery’s Lyric Mediacy,” in boundary 2 37 (2010): 201-213. See also Ben Lerner, “Of Accumulation: The Collected Poems of Robert Creeley,” boundary 2 35 (2008): 251-262, as particularly relevant to the Marfa chapter of Lerner’s second novel, 10:04 (New York: Faber and Faber, 2014) set “at the house where Creeley began to die” (167).
[19] Walter Benjamin, “Left-Wing Melancholy,” republished in The Weimar Republic Sourcebook, edited A. Kaes, M. Jay, and E. Dimendberg (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994), 305. See also Wendy Brown’s focus on Stuart Hall’s overcoming this attachment to lost objects and idealizations of some quasi-Marxist revolutionary past, “Resisting Left Melancholia,” Verso Books blog (February 12, 2017): https://www.versobooks.com/blogs/3092-resisting-left-melancholia. Brown’s influential essay had first appeared in boundary 2 26 (1999): 19-27.
[20] “Resistance” can seem an antiquated slogan. In a neo-liberal capitalist regime assuming self-surveillance and self-exploiting labor and consumption, as Byung-Chul Han grimly argues, wherein “auto-exploitation” of the achievement-driven subject has become everyday norm, “People who fail in the achievement-society see themselves as responsible for their lot and feel shame instead of questioning society and the system…no resistance to the [neoliberal] system can emerge in the first place” See Byung-Chul Han, Psychopolitics: Neoliberalism and New Technologies of Power, trans. Erik Butler (London and New York: Verso, 2017), 6; and (by contrast) the heretical tactics of “Idiotism” in Chapter 13. Hence, “depressive” affects and the “psychopolitical” ills and compulsions of Late Capitalism are tracked in Spahr and Buuck, An Army of Lovers (see footnote one above). Writing becomes less the resistance than the insistence of such psychosomatic and systemic ills.
[21] I still admire the subterranean and quasi-messianic force of Bob Kaufman’s absurd/communist (Abomunist) demand from the undercommons of Cold War San Francisco, as first articulated in his Beatitude mimeograph journal (1959): “Abomunists demand statehood for North Beach.” See Bob Kaufman, “Abomunist Manifesto,” Solitudes Crowded with Loneliness (New York: New Directions, 1965), 81. Kaufman’s “black Jesus” tactics of silence, flight, self-martyrdom, and absurdity seem close to what Byung-Chul Han calls (after Deleuze) the immanent beatitude of “Idiotism,” Psychopolitics, 86-87.
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David Fieni — Review of Abdelkébir Khatibi’s “Class Warrior – Taoist Style”
Abdelkébir Khatibi
Class Warrior – Taoist Style, translated by Matt Reeck (Wesleyan University Press, 2017).
by David Fieni
This essay has been peer-reviewed by the b2o editorial collective.
The improbable mash-up of Marxism and Taoism announced by the title of Abdelkébir Khatibi’s long poem from 1976, Class Warrior – Taoist Style, unfolds in language both brash and opaque, promising a kind of free verse handbook for militants interested in experimenting with new ways of combining action and creation, praxis and poièsis. The book’s forty sections perform a détournement of the rhetorical techniques of Lao Tzu’s Tao Te Ching while simultaneously re-purposing and deforming both Taoist and Marxist thought and discourse. And yet while on the surface Khatibi seems to offer a poetic manifesto doubling as a sapiential treatise (and tripling as a tactical guide for revolutionaries), the text also tempts us with a retreat into the space of literary singularity. Such a reading of the poem could appear to provide evidence of Winnifred Woodhull’s claim that “a subversive poetics has gradually replaced work for change in the political field,” how for Khatibi and many others writing in French since the end of the 1960s, “poetic language has come to be associated with an ‘other’ politics radically divorced from social institutions and from material relations of domination” (x). The challenge of locating the political in Khatibi’s poem lies in the difficulty of reading it in the context of the author’s poetics of singularity without letting what at first glance appears to be a dehistoricized deconstructionism have the last word.
Perhaps more than any other postcolonial intellectual of his generation, Khatibi brought together the impulses of decolonization and deconstruction, while problematizing both. Born in 1938 in El Jadida, Morocco, Khatibi came of age during the nationalist fight against the French Protectorate (1953-1956), studied sociology at the Sorbonne, where he wrote his thesis, Le Roman Maghrebin (1968), then returned to Morocco, where he directed the Institut de sociologie before joining the Centre de recherches scientifiques in Rabat in 1973. He published in a wide range of genres, including novels, poetry, plays, and essays on art, culture, politics, philosophy, and literature. His “thinking friendship” with Jacques Derrida culminated with the dialogue that grew out of Derrida’s The Monolingualism of the Other (1996).[1] Khatibi viewed deconstruction as a decolonizing force targeting both “Western metaphysics” and the metaphysical tradition in Arab and Islamic thought. He remains an important, if often overlooked, practitioner and theorist of deconstruction, even as he often challenged its half-hidden abstractions with lived practices taken from Moroccan life. The publication of Class Warrior provides an occasion to revisit a major theme that runs throughout Khatibi’s work: how can the postcolonial writer remain at once creative, critical and committed?
Khatibi’s thinking about decolonization is remarkable for the unflinching critical acumen he brought to the task. He begins “Pensée-autre” (“Other-Thinking”), the opening essay of 1983’s Maghreb Pluriel, by acknowledging Fanon’s call to look for “something else” outside “the European game,” but instantly interrogates what he understands as “the right to difference” at the root of this call:
The innermost depths of our being, struck down and tormented by the so-called Western will to power, hallucinated by humiliation, by brutal and brutalizing domination, can under no circumstances be absorbed by the naïve declaration of a right to difference, as if this “right” was not already inherent to the law of life, that is, to insoluble violence, to the insurrection against one’s own alienation. (Khatibi 1983: 11)
Class Warrior — Taoist Style sets into poetic form the “insurrection” of “insoluble” differences transecting personal and collective experience. Even as the language of political struggle pervades the poem, Khatibi opens the work with a warning against empty political language:
history is a word
ideology a word
the unconscious a word
words are like dares
in the mouths of the ignorantor each sign regenerates
an undeniable freshness
don’t get lost in your own thinking
don’t disappear into that of otherstest the blood of your thinking
because in answer to your question
you will find only quavering targets
action shapes words
like the arc consumes the crystalline arrow. (1)[2]This first section highlights the importance of the context of an utterance (“the mouths of the ignorant”), distinguishes signs from thinking, urges equilibrium between one’s own thought-worlds and those of others, and asserts the formative force of action relative to language in an image that conceives of the speech act as an act of war (“action shapes words / like the arc consumes the crystalline arrow”). Subsequent sections introduce the set pieces of the poem’s political vocabulary and set them in motion: “the class warrior” is a “sovereign orphan” (2) who engages “the class enemy” in a revolution both violent and erotic. “While laughing,” Khatibi tells the reader, “prepare the act of very great violence” (9). The class war is planetary in scope: “if all oppressed peoples took up arms / they would dance proudly on the class enemy” (20).
The class warfare described in Khatibi’s poem entails a “radical divestment” (21) on the part of the class warrior (désappropriation tranchante) in the act of revolutionary self-fashioning. At the same time, the text warns against the kind of annihilation of cultural resources that imperialism, colonialism, nationalism, and capitalism alike have sought to accomplish:
how to fight without losing ourselves?
know this:
now that action germinates in every body
and your body is changing directions
fling yourself toward the class enemy
and over and over display your fiery ardor
over and over draw the enemy in before pouncing. (38)The question asked at the beginning of the above passage will find an answer thirty-three years later from Édouard Glissant. To the question, “how to fight without losing ourselves?” Glissant will reply with his poetics of relation, affirming “I can change through exchanging with the Other without losing or distorting myself” (Diawara). A question about fighting becomes one about transformation, yet in Khatibi the class warrior’s battle is ultimately about the radical opening of the self to difference and otherness, even if he prefers the language of violence to that of “exchange.” These lines join difference and identity (as “two words to point to the same knot” (35)) to the “ardor” of the activated revolutionary body. This is as close as the poem gets to delivering on the unique tactical advice promised by the title, as the class warrior engages the class enemy through a series of choreographed movements alternating between advance and retreat.[3] In 1971’s La Mémoire Tatouée, Khatibi describes his own participation in anti-colonial battles in similar fashion: “In El Jadida, I improvised myself mobile protestor, changing neighborhoods, without a fixed plan: the labyrinth of streets provided the key to whoever could zigzag between the assault and our underground forces” (96). The mobilized body lives the space of the Moroccan city as a new language as “the city was reinventing itself as a new syntax” (96).[4] Just as the city at war became a language, the language of Class Warrior becomes a space of combat.
One important way that the manner of “class warfare” reveals itself in the poem occurs in the ways that Khatibi’s poetics of erasure, divestment, and self-disappropriation subvert the supposed content of the poem’s truth claims. Section eighteen opens with the declaration that first draws then erases the image of a border in the mind of the reader:
the border between two countries is invisible
that’s how I can merge with your language without losing myself. (18)To affirm the invisible nature of the border, Khatibi must first inscribe its imaginary existence in language. It is not simply that national borders do not exist in some utopian realm of the poetic imagination, but rather that in the act of erasing the border the poem produces a gesture of signification, which in its vibratory symmetry, exceeds its monolingual signifieds, thereby opening a space where languages and beings may merge without being entirely erased. The next lines return the reader to the sound of words, and thus to the affective violence of style and manner:
stick to the wild sound of the word “barbarous”
you will know the difference of difference
that your whirling jubilation will bring you
learn the language of the other
so that the language of your veins will be distillednothing can surpass the word “barbarous”
turned into a sword to fight sand
confront the rapidity of my language and learn. (18)
The poem here substitutes the supposed wildness of the barbarous person with the “wild sound of the word ‘barbarous.’” By focusing on the sound of the word itself, Khatibi replaces the act of hearing the other without comprehending the root of this word, and instead exploits the sound substance of the signifier itself in order to hijack the direction of the violence that this word has for so long conveyed. This tactic of linguistic “terrorism”[5] becomes the class warrior’s ultimate weapon, “a sword to fight sand.” The final line of the section returns the reader to the speed and agility of the poem’s gestural style, its “shapeshifting calligraphy” (3). Khatibi’s poetics are on full display here, as writing and erasure, sound and silencing, stasis and motion cancel each other out in the creation of a kind of sculpted static that only signifies in the interstices of the poem’s various semiotic modes.
As translator Matt Reeck has pointed out, Khatibi begins his idiosyncratic use of the term “class warrior” in La Mémoire Tatouée, where Khatibi mentions his desire to “abolish all tribes” (Khatibi 1971: 21) and become “a class warrior in the tribe of words” (191).[6] While Reeck identifies the poem’s “Marxist vocabulary” as its “most noticeable lexical feature” (140), his view of the poem follows a line of argument put forward by Marc Gontard, one of Khatibi’s first scholarly critics, that would make of Class Warrior something like a kind of self-help book for personal transformation. For his part, Gontard focuses on Khatibi’s use and deformation of the rhetorical devices in the Tao Te Ching without so much as once mentioning Marx or Marxism. According to Gontard, “The class warrior ‘in the Taoist style’ erects an implacable enemy of all orthodoxies. For him, ‘the great revolution has no heroes,’ and his action leads him to oppose all received ideas, established norms, and totalitarian knowledge” (89). To be sure, there is much in the poem, and in statements that Khatibi himself has made about his work, to encourage a reading of the poem as an articulation of a kind of “permanent critique” on a personal level. This critique is made possible not by the author’s privileged membership in a Republic of Letters, but rather in what he calls the “tribe of words.” Class Warrior – Taoist Style would then teach a specific kind of combat against a rather idiosyncratically defined “class enemy”: a combat that takes place within the social world of language, and where the “class enemy” would be anyone belonging to a group that defines itself as orthodox and self-identical.
The second section of the poem sketches out the moving figure of the class warrior for the reader, declaring that
the orphan
is the class warrior
the sovereign orphan. (2)Reeck’s euphonious translation veers ever so slightly away from an important subtlety in the French, which tells us that the class warrior is “sovereignly orphan” — souverainement orphelin. The difference between adjective and adverb is the difference between ontology and manner: the class warrior’s orphan-hood is not essentially sovereign, but rather something he performs in a sovereign manner, that is, in a style that imitates the self-contained autonomy at the heart of sovereignty. In the following lines, the poem itself imitates the rhetorical style of the Tao Te Ching, by first asking a question, and then instead of answering it, presenting the problem to which the orphan would be the solution:
what does “orphan” mean to us?
every hierarchy presupposes
a father a mother and a third
every politics
a master a slave and a thirdKhatibi posits the figure of the orphan as a remainder of the violent processes of both Freudian Oedipal normativity and a Hegelian/Marxian dialectical overcoming. The “sovereignly orphan” class warrior is a product of revolutionary Oedipal violence that cuts him off from all tribes based on filiation, blood, and self-identity. This is why, in the next line, Khatibi tells readers that “the historical person is a disgrace” (2). Writing in the context of the 1970s, after the promises of national independence and Arab and Pan-African unity had begun to lose their luster, in the midst of the Moroccan années de plomb, which saw many of Khatibi’s friends and fellow writers imprisoned and tortured for taking political stands, Class Warrior grapples with the problem of neo-colonial mimicry in a supposedly decolonizing world. “Can you disfigure the class enemy,” the very next lines ask, “without taking on his likeness? (2). Khatibi aims to decolonize the very concept of class struggle, in a postcolonial world where the “class enemy” has changed appearance while still maintaining the relational class antagonism of a nationalist neoliberal elite.
The class warrior performs her sovereign autonomy without being defined by it, while at the same time guarding against being consumed by the class enemy, who is, according to the poem, the one consumed by sovereignty:
sovereignty burns
the class enemy
Like a straw dog (2).[7]Here Khatibi alludes to the sacrificial straw dogs in the Tao Te Ching, which function in the ancient Chinese text as signifiers that only represent the object of ritual sacrifice. Lao Tzu writes:
Heaven and earth are Inhumane:
they use the ten thousand things like straw dogs.
And the sage too is Inhumane:
he uses the hundred-fold people like straw dogs. (37)Whereas the Tao Te Ching aligns all of creation (“the ten thousand things”) as signifiers to be consumed, Khatibi specifies the class enemy, which he defines in terms of signifiers arranged as binary pairs:
inside outside
nearby far away
visible invisible
capital work
this is the class enemy (3)Khatibi’s tactical advice on how to win the war against the class enemy begins with a re-ordering of how one thinks and signifies, which will lead to a radical shift in praxis, and, ultimately, to a transfiguration of the body, which opens dialogue with the previously unthinkable.
how to defeat the class enemy?
change your thought categories
and you will change your actions
change your actions
and you will raise up your body
raise up your body
and you will talk with the unthinkablepolitics is sensual
a shapeshifting calligraphy. (3)The first three sections of the poem thus stage a fable of the class warrior combatting the class enemy in a way that joins language to action, action to the body, and the body to thought, all of it sketched out in the fluid calligraphic gestures of a phantom hand writing with disappearing ink.
Despite the many ways that the poem deforms Marxist thought, Khatibi’s fable remains faithful to a Marxist understanding of class in the sense that “class” for the class warrior is a fluid and changeable relation, and not a static universal category, as it is for the class enemy. Specifically, for Marx, class described the relation between people, labor, and the means of production. In a letter from 1852, Marx affirmed what he thought was new in his analysis of class, namely “that the existence of classes is only bound up with particular historical phases in the development of production” (Marx 1978: 220). While there is some validity to the argument that Khatibi’s work often appears to lack clear historical and geographical grounding (Woodhull xviii), one should also reproach critics who fail to situate the development of Khatibi’s output in the historical conditions of its production. At the precise center of the poem, Khatibi addresses the historical nature of the class warrior’s being and provides what appears to be the poem’s most tangible reference to historical events. The section begins with a question about the exploitation of one’s past by others and oneself, which Khatibi terms “the usury of your historical being.” He asks:
how to defeat the usury of your historical being?
mobile ungraspable
you will confront the enemy while timing your breathin appearing
take on the suppleness of the dancing reed (21)Again, the enemy here would be the very conceptualization of class itself, and with it, categorical thought, understood as a fixed, rigid, and abstract essence, and the correct tactical advice for fighting this enemy would involve the agility and suppleness of the calligraphic gesture.
The next nine lines of the poem present a test case for locating the concrete historical and political circumstances of the composition of Class Warrior in relation to which the fluid poetics of the poem emerged:
prisoner
cast off your personal fears
practice the asceticism of non-actionafter the torture
demystify the torturersO suicide
go back to fight the class enemy
or hit the open road
always nuance your aggressionRead within the context of the poem alone, these lines might at first suggest that the “prisoner” being addressed is the person unable to escape from the confines of rigid thinking, who has become so indebted to the past by the “usury” of her “historical being,” that she has become subject to torture and sees suicide as the only escape. The historical context, however, adumbrates these lines with the grim reality of the imprisonment, torture, and suicide of a generation of Moroccan activists, artists, and writers.[8] While it is impossible not to think of Khatibi’s colleagues, such as Abdelatif Laâbi, who were in the middle of long stints in prison at the time that Khatibi was writing Class Warrior, it is nonetheless difficult to untangle the multiple threads of capture knotted in the single word “prisoner.” Perhaps the most sympathetic reading would have Khatibi offering poetic support and solidarity to his incarcerated friends, urging them to see the hollowness of the torturer’s performance of sovereignty, and encouraging the dead to rise, find freedom, and continue the fight against the class enemy in the spirit of Taoist non-action.
While attention to historical context remains imperative for all reading, authorial intention can never be the only horizon delimiting reception of a text. Whereas Khatibi’s avowed politics remain one particular force that shapes our understanding of Class Warrior, this is certainly a text that signifies well beyond the poet’s intentions, beyond his commitment to a political program or engagement with social institutions. What is more important for potential readers today, I would argue, is the apparatus of the poem and its use for life, the text understood as a resource for resistance, transformation, and liberation from all forms of domination based on fixed categories of thought, including notions of identity deriving from normative configurations of race, ethnicity, religion, nation, and social class. Can we only know the use-value of a poem by seeing the poet’s credentials as a militant? On the contrary, the experience of reading tells us that each reader creates a new context of reception, engaging the war of categories, words, thoughts, action, bodies, the knot of identity and difference as we continue to “stretch” Marx for decolonial critique.[9]
The above comments are not intended as an apology for what some critics have seen as Khatibi’s failure to properly champion the cause of women’s writing in Morocco, or his disillusionment with the increasingly militant turn that the journal Souffles took in the late 1960s.[10] It is the prerogative of criticism to examine contradictions that obtain when the text and the world are held up to each other. A careful reading of this poem, however, shows how, in a first move, Class Warrior might seem to seduce the reader to withdraw into a revolution that would be exclusively poetic, but then, in a second move, the text exceeds its own status as a purely literary document. In the “Preface Letter” he provides for Gontard’s book, Khatibi includes a telling confession that can help readers locate both the political in the text and better understand the relation between politics and style in the poem:
I don’t believe in any literature of liberation. The writing incarnated in an obdurate experience, moves toward the impossible, silence and erasure. And this is precisely where subversion is at work, a subversion one cannot announce ahead of time, nor give the force of law. Maghrebian or not, the writer (whosoever bears or risks bearing this title), if he extricates himself from all supposedly “committed” aesthetic and artistic postures, immediately finds himself confronted by the unnamable. Perhaps then he will be able to listen to the voice of others and of the absolute outside, perhaps he will speak, he will write without assistance, without salvation and without gods. (Khatibi 1981: 9).
Khatibi stakes out an adamantly secular position here, in the idiosyncratically Saidian sense of a “secular criticism.”[11] His critique of “supposedly ‘committed’ aesthetic and artistic postures” and his affirmation of a politics of listening to the “absolute outside” elucidate the opening lines of Class Warrior: “history is a word / ideology a word / the unconscious a word” (1). In lieu of hollow ideological repetitions, Khatibi aims for the unthinkable, the unnamable, and the impossible, and he does so in the spirit of detranscendentalized, anticolonial revolt inspired by Marxist thinking. As he phrases it in a different section of the poem, “stick to an impossible mode of production” (37). Khatibi replaces a “literature of liberation” with the search for an unforeseeable “subversion” that may effervesce within the established systems and structures of language, thought, and society.
This refusal of any facile, triumphalist poetics of “liberation” echoes throughout Class Warrior. “I heard it said / that dream science cures your illness / I heard that and I balled my fists // knowledge will never cure your irremediable distemper” (28). Here we have a poetics that resonates with Khatibi’s decision to stay in Morocco and work within the system, as opposed to seeking “liberation” in France or elsewhere, as so many writers and thinkers of his generation had done. The taoist manner adopted by the class warrior would certainly seem to be a function of Khatibi’s life in Morocco under the oppressive regime of Hassan II, as the poet sought out ways to fight with agility, suppleness, and nuance without fleeing.
The publication of Class Warrior — Taoist Style in English is part of a resurgence of interest in francophone Moroccan writers, and Khatibi in particular in the Anglophone world. Alongside Olivia C. Harrison and Teresa Villa-Ignacio’s 2016 anthology, Souffles-Anfas (Stanford), Donald Nicholson-Smith’s monumental In Praise of Defeat, an 800-plus page collection of poems by Abdellatif Laâbi, Peter Thompson’s 2016 translation of Khatibi’s Tattooed Memory (L’Harmattan), and Burcu Yalim’s forthcoming translation of Khatibi’s Plural Maghreb (Bloomsbury), Reeck’s Class Warrior – Taoist Style provide readers of English important points of contact with the difficult, powerful, and generative work of Khatibi and other major Moroccan writers of his generation. Nonetheless, new questions emerge with the translation into English of work that actively sought to terrorize, deform, and destabilize the French language and divest it of its capacity to commit “historical usury” against its users. What happens to the virtual intertextuality of Arabic and “Berber” languages that animate the syntactical and rhetorical gestures of Moroccan literature in French (along with other signifying practices) when the Francophone text enters into the system of Global English? And what new combinations of praxis and poièsis might Khatibi in English give rise to?
References
Diawara, Manthia. 2009. Édouard Glissant: One World in Relation. K’a Yéléma Productions, 48 min.
Fanon, Frantz. 2004. The Wretched of the Earth. Translated by Richard Philcox; introductions by Jean-Paul Sartre and Homi K. Bhabha. n.p.: New York: Grove Press.
Fieni, David. 2013. “Introduction: Désappropriation de soi et poétique de l’intersigne chez Khatibi.” Expression Maghrébines 12, no. 1 : 1-17.
Gontard, Marc. 1981. La Violence du Texte : Études sur la littérature marocaine de langue française. Paris: L’Harmattan.
Gourgouris, Stathis. 2013. Lessons in Secular Criticism. New York: Fordham University Press.
Khatibi, Abdelkébir. 2017. Class Warrior – Taoist Style. Translated by Matt Reeck. Middletown, Connecticut: Wesleyan University Press.
—. 2007. Jacques Derrida, en effet. Drawings by Valerio Adami. Neuilly-sur-Seine: Al Manar.
—. 1999. La Langue de l’autre. New York: Mains secrètes.
—. 1971. La Mémoire Tatouée: Autobiographie d’un Décolonisé. Paris: Les lettres nouvelles.
—. 1976. Lutteur de Classe à la Manière Taoiste. Paris: Éditions Sindbad.
—. 1983. Maghreb Pluriel. Paris : Denoël. Unpublished translation by Olivia C. Harrison.
—. 1981. “Préface-Lettre.” Preface to La Violence du Texte : Études sur la littérature marocaine de langue française, by Marc Gontard, Paris: L’Harmattan.
Laâbi, Abdellatif. 2016. “Contemporary Maghrebi Literature and Francophonie.” In Souffles-Anfas: A Critical Anthology from the Moroccan Journal of Culture and Politics. Edited by Olivia C. Harrison and Teresa Villa-Ignacio. Stanford, California: Stanford University Press.
Lao Tzu. 2015. Tao Te Ching. Translated by David Hinton. Berkeley: Counterpoint. Accessed April 26, 2018. ProQuest Ebook Central.
Marx, Karl. 1978. “Class Struggle and Mode of Production.” The Marx-Engels Reader, edited by Robert C. Tucker. 2D ed. New York: Norton.
Mufti, Aamir. “Critical Secularism: A Reintroduction for Perilous Times.” boundary 2 31, no. 2 (2004): 1-9. https://muse.jhu.edu/ (accessed May 1, 2018).
Reeck, Matt. 2017. “Poetics of the Orphan in Abdelkébir Khatibi’s Early Work.” Journal of French and Francophone Philosophy – Revue de la philosophie française et de langue française, 25, no. 1: 132-149.
Said, Edward. 1983. The World, the Text, and the Critic. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press.
Slyomovics, Susan. 2005. The Performance of Human Rights in Morocco. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.
Woodhull, Winifred. 1993. Transfigurations of the Maghreb: Feminism, Decolonization, and Literature. Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press.
Notes
[1] See especially Khatibi’s Jacques Derrida, en effet (2007) and La Langue de l’autre (1999).
[2] For simplified reference in both the English and French editions, numbered references to Class Warrior – Taoist Style refer to the section number, not to the page number.
[3] Compare this passage in Khatibi to the following passage from the Tao Te Ching:
There was once a saying among those who wielded armies:
I’d much rather be a guest than a host,
much rather retreat a foot than advance an inch.This is called marching without marching,
rolling up sleeves without baring arms,
raising swords without brandishing weapons,
entering battle without facing an enemy. (108)[4] For more on Khatibi’s singular understanding of “syntax,” see my introduction to a special issue on Khatibi, “Désappropriation de soi et poétique de l’intersigne chez Khatibi” (2013).
[5] The term comes from Laâbi, who used it in a 1970 issues of Souffles: “This is why Maghrebi or Negro-African literature of French expression is nothing short of a terrorist literature, i.e., a literature that on all levels (syntactic, phonetic, morphological, graphical, symbolic, etc.) shatters the original logic of the French language” (28).
[6] Reeck discusses this on p. 140 in “Poetics of the Orphan in Abdelkébir Khatibi’s Early Work” (2017).
[7] I have amended Reeck’s translation here, which mistakenly substitutes “class warrior” where the text should read “class enemy.”
[8] See Slymovics (2005) for her important and brilliant account of the imprisonment, torture, and trials during the “years of lead.”
[9] The reference is to Fanon’s well-known claim, in The Wretched of the Earth, that “a Marxist analysis should always be slightly stretched when it comes to addressing the colonial issue” (5).
[10] See Woodhull, pp. xx-xiv.
[11] I am of course thinking of Edward Said’s introduction to The World, the Text, and the Critic, as well as the work of Mufti (2004) and Gourgouris (2013).
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Hubris and Heteronomy: A Review of Lessons in Secular Criticism
A Review of Stathis Gourgouris’s Lessons in Secular Criticism
In Spring 2013, boundary 2 published a special issue, Antinomies of the Postsecular, which assessed the so-called “turn to religion” in the humanities and social sciences. Under the movement term “postsecularism,” this academic turn to religion, commends itself as a necessary response to “the return of religion” as a social and political force in contemporary life. Whether such a “return” has actually occurred and what is at stake in making this assertion was the subject of b2’s special issue. The goal of the contributors to Antinomies of the Postsecular, as editor Aamir Mufti explained in his introduction, was to expose “the internal conceptual incoherence” of postsecularism as “an emergent orthodoxy” and to question the “political affiliations” of secularism’s critics, as revealed “by their treatment of modern religiosity” (3, 4).
One major source of incoherence is postsecularism’s account of secularization as a closed process with an expiration date for religion. By this misreading of Weber, to cite one of postsecularism’s bugbears, secularization is an abject failure. The global persistence of religion, which b2’s issue acknowledges as a neutral historical fact, is mistakenly interpreted as a resurgence or revival pressing up from cultures in resistance to secularism. The latter is conceived as an anti-popular and imperialistic instrument of domination, having its sources in European Enlightenment and the hubris of Western reason. Genealogical critiques of Enlightenment/secularism add to the irony of secularization’s alleged failure by detecting ghosted forms of “the sacred,” having Christian derivation, within reason’s self-understanding and within the liberal political imaginaries that rationalism underwrites. Reason is indebted to that which it disavows and tries to sequester; it was doomed to misprize the intimate entanglement of religion with culture and politics. Reacting to this misbegotten rule of reason, postsecularists resort to “culturalism”: shielding religion from external judgment by defending it as an expression of profoundly rooted local sensibilities (or, in more Foucauldian language, “practices” and “discourses”) buffering subjectivities against modernizing deracination and disciplinary schemes. Post-secularism’s attack on the ways that the Western liberal states have inscribed and bounded religion(s) thus frames these problems, which are certainly worthy of address, such that the secular is undermined as a source of analytical questioning while religion is insulated as a source of identity, filiation, and empowerment. Whatever the merits of this understanding of “the return to religion” – b2’s contributors found few – the conclusions that it reaches align post-secularism with some strange bedfellows: the anti-secular positions of religious fundamentalisms and conservative political theologies as well as those of religiously inflected liberation movements. Post-secularists may not seek some of these political affiliations and may even find them undesirable in many particulars, but their reading of modernity’s ailments finds enemies in common. Proponents of skepticism and intellectual consensus, for example, can find themselves on the defensive because they have the effrontery to throw acids on a people’s traditional beliefs.
Stathis Gourgouris, one of the scholars featured in Antinomies of the Postsecular, has elaborated his case against postsecularism in Lessons in Secular Criticism (Fordham, 2013), the first of a planned triptych that will include The Perils of the One and Nothing Sacred. Professor of Comparative Literature and Director of the Institute for the Comparative Literature and Society at Columbia University, Gourgouris comes to this project well-equipped by his previous works, the books Dream Nation: Enlightenment, Colonization, and the Institution of Modern Greece (Stanford 1996), Does Literature Think? Literature as Theory for an Antimythical Era (Stanford, 2003), Freud and Fundamentalism (Fordham 2010); his translations of sociologist Cornelius Castoriadis (who is an intellectual touchstone for Gourgouris in this book); his two essays for Antinomies of the Post-Secular, one of which, “Why I Am Not a Post-Secularist,” is reproduced here; and his heated debate with Saba Mahmood in The Immanent Frame, which was one of the highlights of the on-line journal’s 2008 exchange, “Is Critique Secular?”
The “secular criticism” in Gourgouris’s title has its provenance in Edward Said’s The World, the Text, and the Critic (1983), and his set of “lessons” (in the post-structuralist sense of the leçon, or ceaselessly thinking reflexively) can be seen as extending b2’s ongoing task of theorizing what Said meant by his conjoining of “secular” and “critique.” For Gourgouris, the two are inextricable, the first in its worldly orientation making possible the articulation of the second. Secular criticism is “an experimental, often interrogative practice, alert to contingencies and skeptical toward whatever escapes the worldly”; particularly, it is skeptical toward any notion of “authority that is assumed to emerge from elsewhere,” toward any knowledge “presented as sovereign, unmarked by whatever social-historical institution actually possesses it” (13, 64, xiv). These knowledges include discourses of secularism that would make any legal-political boundary between religion and the state rest on a metaphysical distinction between the secular and the religious wrongly conceived as essences. This is Gourgouris’s key dialectical movie: to preserve the secular as a practice and as “a space” that makes the practice possible, it must be defined over and beyond the limitations imposed on it by both academic post-secularism and secularism as an institutional power.
Lessons is organized into six chapters, the first half breaking down flawed conceptions of the secular and the second half building Gourgouris’ case that secular criticism is necessary if we are to imagine more democratic societies than we presently know. Chapter One, “The Poiein of Secular Criticism,” disputes anthropologist Talal Asad’s effort to draw a lineage for the notion of critique that traces it to Platonic and Christian traditions. Asad discovers in critique a displaced religious attitude: a quest after and veneration of the Truth, abstracted from an image of God but still bearing the imprint of monotheism, for the Truth of the critic is unalterable, inalienable, and singular (8). In other words, Said’s fearless intellectual inherits a practice of thinking made possible by religious/mystical modes of contemplation and rigorous ascesis of the subjective. For Gourgouris, the irony Asad relishes in this situation is willfully produced by his genealogy, which does not so much trace continuities as force analogies between worldly criticism and a “theological desire.” For the analogy to function, it requires a representation of “secular” criticism (Asad would effectively put Said’s adjective in scare quotes) as the effort to clear man’s thinking for the revelation of “a hypergood.”
Gourgouris instead sees critique as an activity like poiesis. Here Gourgouris is returning in capsule form to the theory of poetics that he develops at length in Does Literature Think? In that work, through meticulous close readings of Sophocles, Flaubert, Benjamin, Kafka, Celan, Genet, and DeLillo, Gourgouris models poesis as a unique kind of cognition that requires the making of things not thought before, and that in making these things also unmakes what is given: “to form is to make form happen, to change form (including one’s own)”(11). Poiesis is a making of the new and unmaking of the known materials of society (discourses, images, narratives) that potentiates far-reaching self-alteration: “things that may indeed appear to be impossible in the present time . . . cannot be said to be generically impossible, impossible for all time” (26). As Gourgouris proceeds, poiesis is valuable because its most sophisticated artistic products dramatize what critique also endeavors to enact: autonomy (auto-nomos), understood here not as reason’s free submission to “the hypergood,” but as the questioning, historicizing, and pluralizing of the authorities (epistemological, political) to which self-altering subjects give only provisional consent.
In trying to define secular criticism away from Said, Asad erroneously conceives it as a quest after a transcendental. The uncovered Truth, in this conceptualization, becomes a law given to the self from elsewhere, like a command from the almighty. In Gourgouris’s estimation, Asad makes the critic’s relation to reason heteronomous. Heteronomy, which receives greater elaboration in Chapter Four, is both a structure of decision and a state of alienation. In contrast to autonomy, heteronomy describes a structure in which “the law” (the reason for deciding) is given externally, from the other. For Gourgouris, all law is self-generated out of the social imaginaries of existing communities. Heteronomy therefore cannot exist except in a state where the law has been othered, occulted in a beyond that is made more real, more authoritative in being both beyond and more real, than the humble state in which men direct their own affairs. Whenever humans sever themselves from this worldly state of decision-making and institute an absolute other for sanctioning what they do, they have created a heteronomous structure. Under the self-alienated conditions of heteronomy, decisions take the form of a command/obedience structure, in which one listens rather than questions. Any transcendental is, intrinsically, something that commands, even though it is produced by the humans who obey it.
Having countered Asad’s attempt to impose a heteronomous structure on critique, Gourgouris’s second chapter proceeds to ferret out the transcendental in secularism. By the latter, Gourgouris refers to an institutional term representing “a range of prospects in the exercise of power,” particularly as pertains to state mechanisms (28-29). A priori and dogmatic substantiations of secularism Gourgouris deems “metaphysical,” and this adjective functions similarly to “transcendental” in the book’s proliferative terminology. However, there is a subtle reason for the differentiation that proves important. The “metaphysical” ends up being the name for any non-theistic statement of transcendental first principles; it designates whatever is taken to be an incontestable foundation, without confounding the notional foundation with the sacred of theology or religion (29). A metaphysic and a divine law are each, in application, heteronomous, but the former is “a set of principles that posit themselves independently of historical reality” rather than something held sacred that eternal God has posited (30). It is crucial for Gourgouris to provide these dual definitions, for his opponents, Talal Asad and anthropologist Saba Mahmood , discern secularism’s metaphysical layers only to theologize them for the purpose of revealing modernity’s disavowed religious substrata: “It is one thing to speak of the metaphysics of secularism and another to equate secularism with religion” (34).
An example of one of the “metaphysics” on which secularism rests would be the pre-social individual theorized by classical liberalism. It is the sanctity of this individual, god-like in his agency, his clarity, and his identity with himself, that secularism is often said to protect from religious intolerance. In contrast, Gourgouris sees this figure of bourgeois enlightenment caught up in the self-altering forces unleashed by a still ongoing process of secularization. The form of autonomy that secularization bares for view is thoroughly social in character (44). To be autonomous is not to give oneself the law, but, as citizens, to give the law to ourselves. It is as social members that we decide what the law is; to be autonomous is to not only to give ourselves the law, but also to recognize ourselves interrogating the law together. Catholic philosopher Charles Taylor, who emerges as another opponent in Gourgouris’ Chapter Two (titled “De-Transcendentalizing the Secular”), has also famously argued against the reified idea of the individual in classical liberalism. However, he believes that our modern social imaginaries have built such protective carapaces around the self that we have difficulty experiencing an outside to its liberal representation. In well-known formulations, he has described the modern self as too “buffered” against any motivations that can be confused with enchantment. As a result, modern man – for all his sense of self-mastery – is actually dispossessed, haunted by a God-reference that has been voided of transcendence, though modern man still needs the transformational openness that God once provided. In other words, Taylor does not theologize the secular, as do Asad and Mahmood, but he does see it as impoverished. Gourgouris objects to “Taylor’s whole framework of valuation and determination,” and he pivots to Taylor’s A Secular Age (2007) for the purpose of redefining alterity without resort to a “heteronomous” position outside history (43). Taylor is wrong to say that moderns need transcendence in order to experience a liberating otherness. Recalling his theory of poiesis, Gourgoruis argues that the otherness is something created by the self in its working upon the materials it finds within the world. This otherness is “immanent,” emerging from within autonomy, and involves no inrushing from a space beyond history: “The immanence of autonomy does not mean closure in a purely self-referential or self-sufficient signification . . . . Autonomy is nonsensical as a permanent state, as the property of a thing, which is why it has nothing to do with the imaginary of self-possession or the legacy of possessive individualism that is the crux of liberal law” (44). That Taylor cannot see the possibility of human satisfaction in autonomous self-alteration, whether achieved via politics, art, or eros, is a measure of his melancholic appraisal of the worldly: “Taylor cannot fathom that fullness, total plenitude and fulfillment, can be found in the finite and the fragile, in the ephemeral and the mortal, in the uncertain and the passing” (41). It is Gourgouris’ task, in his third chapter, “Why I Am Not a Post-Secularist,” to defend the sufficiency of the finite and the mortal to answer human striving and imagining.
“I am not a post-secularist,” he states with bald conviction, “because I am an atheist.” This first line begins the most eloquent of all the book’s chapters. Within its concentrated length, Gourgouris not only provides a vigorous case for atheism against its cultured despisers, but also builds his case that only a secular space, oriented toward a future in which the distinction theism/atheism will no longer matter, can produce the conditions for radical democratic politics to thrive. Since the second point is one that Gourgouris will amplify in subsequent chapters, I will also defer addressing it here and focus for the time being on his case for atheism. In marked contrast to the New Atheists, Gourgouris does not bother with demolishing proofs of God or citing evidence pointing up the absurdity of biblical accounts of creation or belief in miracles. To quote Wallace Stevens, Gourgouris plainly looks out from a horizon in which the gods are “dispelled in mid-air and dissolve[d] like clouds,” and makes “no cry for their return.” God’s death is a Christian idea. Outside the Christian imaginary, where Gourgouris places himself, the de-sacralization of society inflicts no melancholia – no divine haunting, absence, or silence, none of the governing motifs of writings that have seen in modernity a state of ruination. At the same time, there is nothing heroic in Gourgouris’s atheism either, for the question of God’s existence is no great either-or in his thought. The question is “irrelevant” to the secular consciousness he wishes others to imagine with him: “It would mean to live not as if God does not exist but to live as if God does not matter” (69). Rather than a ruined world doddering from shorn foundations, Gourgouris finds in a terrene of finite things, and ineluctable death, much cause for “wonder.” The word, connecting philosophy and myth in Greek, links aesthetic pleasure and speculation in Gourgouris’s usage; the experience of wonder felt in the human encounter with what is new and extraordinary discredits miracles, for it leads to questioning. Furthermore, it replaces the need for such beliefs with the pleasure taken in curiosity and in creative acts of pattern-making that give a feeling of intelligibility to reality. Reaching back to the Greeks as a touchstone, Gourgouris treats hubris as a passion imperceptibly sliding behind wonder that he condones in advance of its appearance as a specifiable motive. Hubris is conventionally the other to Truth, but Gourgouris prefers its risks to heteronomy (76). Still, there is a tragic element in Gourgouris’ account of a desacralized world. It stems not, as in pessimistic readings of Greek tragedy, from the defiance of a transcendental order. It is the “irredeemably sad” recognition that autonomy is possible only under conditions of impermanence. History is radically open-ended and shaped solely by human self-determination, and that very limitlessness is not circumscribed by death, but extended by it, for death denaturalizes all humanly constructed boundaries (106). The lucidity for which Gourgouris calls in these passages recalls Camus’s tragic humanism, except that Gourgouris’ never passes through despair.
Atheism, then, is tragic autonomy, attuned to the wonder as well as the mutability of finite existence and undaunted by the Christian proposition of the death of God. While I agree with Gourgouris that Christianity makes God’s death central to salvation history, I do not believe that he accurately represents this event’s theological significance within orthodox belief. Moreover, I believe that he unnecessarily dualizes the Christian and Greek imaginaries.To take up the first objection, Gourgouris mistakenly summarizes dogma as such: “God dies so that he may be resurrected, simple as that. The instrumental outcome is all that matters (the abolition of sin happens with the Resurrection, not Crucifixion), and the reality of God’s death – God’s suicide, to be exact, vanishes behind the interminable ritual repetition of a mythical spectacle” (73). This misconstrues how atonement is supposed to be effectuated. Paul, Anselm, Athanasius are touchstones here, but no systematic Christian theologian dissociates the Atonement from the Crucifixion or argues that redemption only becomes possible with the Resurrection. The Crucifixion always entails the Resurrection, and the Resurrection always implies the Crucifixion, and they always work together to accomplish salvation. Certainly in the doctrine of Atonement there are relative degrees of emphasis between the Western and Eastern Churches, and between Protestantism, Catholicism, and Eastern Orthodoxy. In Eastern Orthodoxy, there are many more icons of the Resurrection, as there is a greater stress on deification, or theosis, in the teachings of the Byzantine and Russian churches. It is interesting, further, to compare the iconographical emphasis of the Orthodox (focus on the risen and transfigured Christ, as in the Pantocrator icon) versus Catholics (focus on the suffering and broken Christ) versus Protestants (typically, an empty cross, which combines the meanings of both the former). Nonetheless, in each tradition, soteriology depends on the joint significance of the Crucifixion and the Resurrection: they work in tandem, never in isolation or separated by time. I have continued on this matter at some length not because it undermines Gourgouris’s case for atheism – it does not – but because he handles Christian thought somewhat ham-fistedly. Occasionally, his animus is wittily abrasive, as in his hilariously irreverent description of Christ as a reanimated zombie; but he can ride roughshod over subtleties and sometimes make neglectful over-generalizations.
This leads me to the second objection. Gourgouris opposes the Christian imaginary to the Greek in a manner that needlessly dualizes them and downplays the practice of religion among the ancient Greeks. Part of the problem here stems from Gourgouris’s tendency to celebrate what was thinkable in the Greek imaginary versus what is typical of the Christian imaginary. The “thinkable” here is an idea that I am interpolating from Castoriadis, whose own reflections on the ancient Greeks are clearly an influence on Gourgouris. Put baldly, the thinkable refers to what is possible to formulate and speak out of a social imaginary at given point and time in its history. The thinkable need not be typical and, indeed, may be inassimilable to conventional, inherited thought. The Christian imaginary Gourgouris sees in broad strokes: the mystification of authority, the darkening of antiquity, the denial of death, heteronomous dogma. In the Greek imaginary, contrastingly, Gourgouris finds the capacity, not everywhere actualized but available, for wonder, lucidity, democracy, and autonomy. This sampling of the ancient Greeks accentuates their modernity, but it occludes quite a bit that would destabilize Gourgouris’ binary of enlightened Greek versus regressive Christian. As E. R. Dodds reminded us some time ago in his classic, The Greeks and the Irrational, religion was robust even in the age of democracy and the great tragedians. Beliefs persisted in daemons, magic, soothsaying, oracles, and mystery cults. Animals were still sacrificed to the gods regularly as part of the civic calendar in Athens, and citizens made use of sacred images in public places of worship. Festivals, prayers, and processions still took place. Despite secularization among the philosophes, new religions like Orphism and Pythagoreanism developed in the 4th century, and Socrates was executed, among other reasons, for impiety. Or does Gourgouris limit his version of the Greek imaginary to the elements of modernity in the Classical Age and the Ionian Enlightenment?
The answer comes indirectly through Chapter Four, which connects poiesis and autonomy, themes of chapters 1-3, to ontology and politics, which will cascade into the book’s fifth and sixth chapters. The modernity of the Greek imaginary lies not in its rationalism, but in the polis and in the arts, where autonomy was a self-consciousness project. The project did not require the disenchantment of myth, as superstition or error, so much as its appropriation for poetic self-creation, as Gourgouris makes clear in Does Literature Think? With threads to this earlier book, Chapters Four and Five of Lessons in Secular Criticism, “Confronting Heteronomy” and “The Void Occupied Unconcealed,” go to a fascinating place conceptually, a rethinking of idolatry that extends its domain to transcendence, even if Gourgouris gets the reader there by way of a disputable theory about the operation of myth on the Athenian stage. The claims that he makes for an expanded sense of idolatry, as distinguished from myth, prepare for the criticism that he mounts of socialist philosopher Claude Lefort’s famous essay on democracy, “The Persistence of the Theologico-Political?” (1980).
In Gourgouris’s reading of classical Greek theater, myths were not only the narrative sources for tragedy, but also the stuff for mythographic reflection performed by the dramas. Myth, as he describes it in Does Literature Think? (2003), was a material means for Greek dramatists and their public audiences to reflect on the groundlessness of human creation (the making and unmaking of forms in history) where there is no divine anthropogony to teleologize nomos. In “Confronting Heteronomy,” he imports Castoriadis’s ontology to describe what both take to be the Greeks’ insight into the chaos of Being against which humans generate their societies and authorize them. Being was, is, and always will be disunited (105). Its differentiation “permeates all existence and thus precipitates the conditions for human beings to realize that (1) there is a necessity for nomos, for otherwise life is defeated by its own meaninglessness; and (2) this necessity does not confine humans to a de facto subjugation to nomos because it opens the way for them to create meaning and the frameworks of meaning” (106). Societies, however always occlude the generative chaos against which humans give form to their lives. The sacred’s chief function, in fact, is to mask the chaos of Being. The sacred is fundamentally distinguished from mythic imagining as Gourgouris defines it in Does Literature Think? Whereas myth is metapoetic, the sacred is the ossification of myth and its fusion with religious authority. Whereas myth tarries fearlessly with non-being as it produces figures of self-othering, the sacred throws up idols. Gourgouris does not except iconoclastic monotheisms from the accusation of idolatry; the more transcendental the image of the divine, the more cunning an idol it is. A complete image ban still produces an idol because its transforms non-representability into a sign of a latent absolute. To conceptualize idolatry this way is to sap the power of both blasphemy and iconoclasm as these have been practiced in Islam, Judaism, and Christianity. Monotheistic religions authenticate themselves by producing counter-sacreds whose images they can then desacralize. Applying Gourgouris’ logic, they are deflecting from their own cores of idolatry: in the religion of the heretic, they show the chaos of Being in order to make necessary the transcendental structure that conceals it again.
Nationalism and statism are also forms of idolatry that certify themselves with religious motifs and images. In turning to Lefort’s widely cited 1980 essay, Gourgouris intends to rescue its insights into the groundlessness of democracy while criticizing its pessimistic account of secularization. Gourgouris’s goal is to stave off post-secularist agendas that have seized on “The Persistence of the Theologico-Political?” – just as they have Nazi jurist Carl Schmitt’s Political Theology – to delineate a theological desire within democracy that yearns for the symbolic structure of Christianity. Lefort observes a rupture between democratic political imaginaries and those of pre-modern Europe. In the latter, the state was symbolized by the king, a God-man having two bodies, one earthly/mortal and the other supernatural/immortal. In this corporatist representation, the state was embodied as the sovereign One: an infallible, omnipotent unity transcending the political subjects who die for it. The theological analog of this symbolism, of course, was the Incarnation. Democracies cannot sustain the corporatist representation of the state since the dēmos – the multitude – is sovereign and the autonomous practice of democratic politics decenters power, institutionalizes conflict. In the revolutionary moment, the markers of unity and certainty in the old imaginary dissolve, leaving democracy poised generatively upon the void between the real and the timeless One, which is now seen for the phantasm that it always was. Gourgouris affirms Lefort’s central insight that democracy “is the historical regime whose radical characteristic is to stage its internal conflicts openly for itself” in a space of power that is denuded of “the symbolic constitution of authority because, quite literally, there is no body in power” (Lessons 132). However, he objects when Lefort tries to explain why post-revolutionary societies revert to some form of the pre-modern political imaginary, in which power is once again authenticated by its mediating relation, in the body of the One, to a ground externalized as something sacred or metaphysical. According to Lefort, the tendency within democracies to become fissiparous and the horror of the void itself bring about a crisis that partially re-sacralizes politics: “Lefort seems to entertain the idea of a sort of recurrent desecularization, a sort of reincarnation of the religious in the midst of the void” (137, 138). In the West, the form these representational metempsychoses take is derivative from the Christian Incarnation, since this is the exemplary model from the past. Gourgouris intervenes here to say that what Lefort describes is not the recovery of any specifically Christian content. It is simply a reversion to idolatry, the old desire to conceal the “condition of radical uncertainty” that is our human lot (140). In place of the idol of the One, he proposes a continual disruption of symbolic representation in favor of “the uninterrupted visibility of the dēmos,” revealed again and again in all of its “multiplicity” and “internal antagonism” (143).
Refugees in front of the ruins of the temple of Theseus (1922) Gourgouris thus calls for a poetic intervention in the symbolic field that will alter inherited political imaginaries so that the dēmos can see and reflect on its self-constitutive role, its struggle internally to find a political ground for renewed consent to the law that it gives itself in an undetermined historical process. To construct and sustain the form of “governmentality” that Gourgouris here imagines would require not only novel institutions but also the reconfiguration of mass media technologies and an end to entrenched patterns of consumer addiction. He follows the articulation of this mammoth task with a sixth chapter, “Responding to the Deregulation of the Political,” that moves from the analysis of post-secularism to a meditation on the promise of the recent global assembly movements, such as Occupy, the Arab Spring in the Middle East, and the Indignant Citizens Movement in Spain and Greece. These groups, we are to understand, enact the politics of secular criticism through their withdrawal of consent to neo-liberal capital and their demand instead for direct democracy.
Gourgouris’s hopeful speculations on the world movement for democracy return the text to his advocacy for “a politics of wonder,” a new politics combining skepticism and utopia for which atheism (as he defines it in Chapter 3) is best-fitted (Lessons 83). Crucially, Gourgouris’s atheism imagines its own obsolescence at a point beyond which the question of belief and quarrels over the secular versus the religious will have become irrelevant to the ways that people live with each other. In the meantime, however, it aims, in the mode of secular critique, to overthrow both the sacred of religion and dogmatic appeals to Reason in order to attack heteronomy in every guise. Only autonomy (as critique, poiesis, law-making, and self-instituting imaginary) can produce democracy as yet untried. Though Gourgouris, to his great credit, takes blinkered secularism as well as religion as threats to autonomy, I would like to turn, before closing, to his case that religion’s deference to divine power withers emancipatory politics.To review, Gourgouris argues that religion restricts decision-making to a command-obedience structure in which the believer defers to a heteronomous authority. This power might be embodied in a hieratic office or a disembodied, transcendent and unrepresentable. Although Gourgouris tends to speak of religion categorically, he seems to object particularly to Abrahamic monotheisms, in which the language of sovereign God and redeemed subject, whether taken metaphorically or literally, implies a horizon of non-questioning and fealty to belief. (One wonders how successfully Gourgouris could apply the command-obedience model to polytheistic religions, like Shinto or Hindu, non-theistic religions like Buddhism, or pantheistic ones like Taoism.) Gourgouris does not exempt liberation theologies from his criticism of the command-obedience structure even though they may be aligned with populist or anti-imperialist movements. In a tributary of his quarrel with Saba Mahmood in Chapter Two, for example, he states: “I would never doubt, for instance, the revolutionary inspiration that liberation theology once gave to certain oppressed societies . . . . But as I have said several times, this does not mean that, come postinsurgency time, the time of self-determination, a politics based on religious command can institute modes of social autonomy – at least in known history this has never happened”(49-50). In the last instance, the religious “command” prevents people from seeing that they alone give authorization to their self-determination. Gourgouris follows this characterization with an arresting statement: “This is not to say, I repeat, that emancipatory politics cannot emerge from within a religious language. But it is to say that if it does, it must place this very language in question; it must deauthorize this language as command” (50). This remark, suggesting how religious language might revise itself to become viable for Gourgouris’s politics, comes as a surprise given the force of his secular convictions, but it is worth following up.
Let’s take for example James Cone’s God of the Oppressed, a classic of liberation theology. I do not intend it to be representative of its tradition, but illustrative of the incoherence that emerges when old language is unimaginatively combined with a revolutionary-reform message. Jostling with each other, we see the following formulations: “Divine freedom . . . . expresses God’s will to be in relation to creatures in the social context of their striving for the fulfillment of humanity” (175); “[H]uman beings are free only when that freedom is grounded in divine revelation” (182); “God is the sovereign ruler and nothing can thwart God’s will to liberate the oppressed”(196). On the one hand, Cone describes God entering history to strive alongside the poor and the disenfranchised in their struggle with entrenched, monopolized power and its ideology; God joins in all aspects of this conflict, which entails a prophetic critique of Christendom’s complicity in racism and social inequality. On the other hand, God is pictured as an omnipotent sovereign who controls providential history and on whom human freedom depends for its realization. Gourgouris might quarrel with both sides of Cone’s formulation, but he would most certainly object to the second, and rightly so given his premises. The self-interrogative act of self-determination is seemingly annulled by language that places sovereignty with God, here an absolute power that transcends the merely earthly powers of the oppressor. One could say apologetically that Cone is simply using inherited biblical language as inspired rhetoric to buttress an unswerving ethical commitment, but this rhetorical reading not only naturalizes what is supernatural in Cone’s text, it also preserves the objectionable notion that commitment (in this case, to justice) requires certainty of such sustained subjective intensity that, if necessary, it should be produced by belief in an unassailable authority. It is precisely the power to generate “subjective normative intensities,” or the Jamesian “will-to-believe,” that fashionably anti-liberal critics like Stanley Fish prize in religions and find lacking in “weak” or “indifferent” secularism. However, the religious command, in producing the strong, insistent form of belief that seems so attractive to those who see uncertainty as an impediment to commitment, can also become a mechanism for silencing internal dissent and steeling belief in the urgency of the belief. Such a mindset one can hardly imagine coping with the social heterogeneity that any democratic politics worthy of the name must include in its reflection.
I am not convinced, as Gourgouris seems to be, that monotheisms always produce the heteronomous subject that I have just described, but history indicates that the second is highly correlated with the first, especially when the religion – be it Christian, Jewish, or Muslim in identity – draws its impetus from the refusal of modernization. Taking seriously the impediments to autonomy that Gourgouris finds in the mindset fostered by (monotheistic) religious language, it is worth, for the sake of secular criticism, opening a conversation with theologies that have intentionally weakened the modeling of the divine and human relationship on sovereign-to-subject. There is the rich yet unfairly maligned tradition of theological modernism, which augmented certain trends in religious liberalism toward immanence. Contemporary with the end of the modernist movement, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, a pastor of the anti-Nazi Confessing Church in Germany, spent the months in prison prior to his execution writing about “a world come of age,” a world in which man had won “autonomy,” a world that did not need false religious obligations or inhibitions, that did not need a God conceived as the beyond of our cognitive faculties. The kind of command-obedience structure that Gourgouris calls heteronomous Bonhoeffer, in his prison letters, denounces as “phariseeism” and “religious methodism” (Letters 362). Cognizant also of the authoritarian impulses in his own religious tradition, Bonhoeffer feared the cultural temptation in the West to make a leap back toward “the heteronomy” of the Middle Ages (Letters 360). Rather than submit to this temptation himself, Bonhoeffer stresses in the letters not God as “sovereign” but God as “sufferer,” for only this God could enter a world that no longer had need of an omnipotent being that explains everything and wills everything (361). More recently, the varieties of “process theology,” “weak theology,” “secular theology,” and “a/theology” represented in the figures of David Ray Griffin, James Cobb, James Caputo, and Mark C. Taylor have worked in distinct ways to enlarge space for human agency and response while smashing as idols religious and metaphysical certitudes. Influenced by the ontology of Alfred North Whitehead, Griffin and Cobb deny divine perfection and truth, and emphasize God’s temporality as well as man’s. Bridging the post-liberal theologies of Bonhoeffer and Paul Tillich (who famously urged his contemporaries to be unafraid to let “the God of theism” disappear “into the anxiety of doubt”) and Derridean post-structuralism’s sensitivity to contingency and context, Caputo defines God not as a person but as an ever breaking “event” that awakens human desire for something namelessly undeconstructible and always yet to come; this event relativizes all the logics and structures of the world, including those of religion. Taylor describes a nearly featureless God that animates networks of creative processes in nature and culture, structuring and de-structuring them according to “no mind or Logos,” but coming restlessly to consciousness in humans; this idea of the divine cannot be the object of faith, the metaphysical foundation of decision, or the limit to human interpretation (After God 346). Like Caputo, Taylor wants to transform the language of religion and not only attach old language to democratic causes. I should mention that some of these thinkers begin from premises (man as homo religiosus, the death of god as ongoing event, the spiritual underpinnings of secularism) against which Gourgouris has compellingly raised his voice, but they have shown greater capacity for dialogue, self-criticism, and nimbleness of thought than culturalist proponents of the post-secular.
Modish attention to demographic trends pointing up the statistical vitality of religion should not guarantee respect for belief or earn providential auguries of religion’s imperishability. One hundred years from now our world may be substantially more secular than it is now and atheism a preferential option for most of the population. Yet, in our contemporary conjuncture, it would be unnecessary and perhaps even detrimental to exclude from one’s theorization of a new democratic politics the religious liberals, humanists, progressives, and liberationists who could be its allies in the struggle against “the scorched earth policies of global financial capitalism” (xviii). Though with deep reservations, Gourgouris hints that it might be possible for people with a variety of religious as well as secular philosophical views to work toward common political goals and values so long as they avoid heteronomous formulations of belief. His book would have benefitted from taking into account already existing resources in theology for weakening the sovereign-to-subject language of traditional god talk. Notwithstanding this omission and some distortions in his dualizing of Greeks and Christians, he makes an essential intervention in the post-secularism debates by pointing out, through a range of deft responses to key texts, the laziness of intellectuals’ defenses of religious self-righteousness and declarations of secularization’s failure. More incisively still, he exposes the fallacy of conflating secular criticism with institutionalized secularism, and of tethering the latter to theology. Anyone seeking to comprehend the high stakes in the so-called “turn to religion” will find Lessons in Secular Criticism a most bracing read.
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Jason Stevens has taught at Harvard University and the University of Maryland, Baltimore County, and he has been a fellow of the National Humanities Center (Durham, NC). His work focuses on mid-late 20th century American literature and U. S. cultural and intellectual history, with emphases on the intersections of fiction, popular culture, religion, and ethnicity. His first book was God-Fearing and Free: A Spiritual History of America’s Cold War (Harvard University Press 2010). His writings have also appeared in boundary 2, American Literature, Literature/Film Quarterly, and The Immanent Frame. In 2014-2015, he is a fellow at the Center for the Humanities, University of Pittsburgh, where he has been completing a book project on American film noir and making preparations for the international conference, “Protestantism on Screen” (Wittenberg, June 2015), of which he is co-sponsor.
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Notes