TPRI

Admittedly, this post is something of a detour from Brathwaite, but I don’t think it is unrelated. Indeed, my thinking about Brathwaite led me to some of these thoughts on Susan Howe, and their practices can be fruitfully read together, I think. I am indebted without the possibility of repayment to Amanda Hurtado for her stimulating thinking on materialist poetics that led to these thoughts.

from “Anacrusis,” by Myung Mi Kim:

Before this talk bearing the title ANACRUSIS, I would presence the talk that cannot be delivered, the talk that seeks to dislocate (or dispense) formulations. If the talk cannot or does not declare its “point,”(its exchange value), is it relegated to being unrecognizable?

I am the perpetual foreigner at the door of the demand to specify the purpose of the talk (what is it good for?). How to evoke a poetics that does not capitulate to terms sanctioned and policed by the prevailing, dominant discourses invested in the “point of the talk.” It is not the certitude of truth-content but its permeations that attract, avulse, and engender acts of speaking. The talk, if in relation to the task of writing, cannot proceed by argument; it proceeds by enactment–the something made and the process of something being made.

Perhaps I am proposing this occasion as one in which poetics may be addressed as chiasmatic–where the rehearsals of the bound and the radicalizing constantly circulate.

I will be using the following as my definition of caesura:

Howe’s “definition” of caesura comes from Reuven Tsur’s, Playing by Ear and the Tip of the Tongue: Precategorial Information in Poetry (John Benjamins Publishing, 2012). (For the purposes of this discussion, I must strategically ignore the other texts included in the poem.) For the middle “lines” of this poem, Howe has sliced a Xeroxed bit of Tsur’s essay “Metaphor and Figure-ground Relationship” and sandwiched it between several other textual bits (a horizontal sliver at the top, a vertical bit below that positioned perpendicular to the rest of the texts, and a another horizontal slice at the base of the configuration). Note the open parenthesis acting as a caesura between “mid-word” and “or less” that draws our attention to some chiasmatic sonics: “word” and “or,” “curs” and “crit,” and the irregular repetition of “mid,” rendering it a line with (at least) three middles, as if forever in between figure and ground. Tsur summarizes his essay as follows: “…figure-ground relationship is an important element of the way we organize reality in our awareness, including works of art.” Tsur argues that “poets may rely on our habitual figure-ground organizations in extralinguistic reality, and exploit our habitual figure-ground organizations in extralinguistic reality, and exploit our flexibility in shifting attention from one aspect to another so as to achieve certain poetic effects by inducing us to reverse the habitual figure-ground relationships.” Caesura is conventionally understood as a rhythmic (and sometimes punctuated) space/time in the rhythm of metrical poetry, a space that divides discrete phrases. Or, as the Oxford English Dictionary puts it, “In English prosody: a pause or breathing-place about the middle of a metrical line, generally indicated by a pause in the sense.” In English, this space was formalized for centuries (though not as stringently as the French Alexandrine) in the hemistitched pentameter line, such as in Alexander Pope’s: “To err is human; || to forgive, divine,” where the two vertical bars represent the caesural rhythmic and semantic spacetime following the two halves of the hemistitch. In Giorgio Agamben’s political philosophy the concept of the caesura is central. It marks the emergence of the polis from bare life, that is, the initial politico-ontological division, as well as the law’s sovereign power to determinate identity, such as the identity of the state or a given life’s inclusion or exclusion from the law. In this sense, caesura, and its evolution, should not be taken lightly. Susan Howe’s infastructuralist manifestation of ceasure, discussed below, should be read in conjunction with these politico-ontological stakes, as Howe’s work is always particularly attuned to the inclusion and/or exclusion of peoples, lands, histories, and literature’s in history’s writing.

In poetry, caesuras often provide a chiasmatic mid-line turn (“Pleasure’s a sin, and sometimes sin’s a pleasure,” Byron, Don Juan) or, as in the Pope above, a grammatical repetition. The caesura helps define and/or trouble the figure-ground relation insofar as it foregrounds (i.e. figures) phrases, metrical patterns, and other units of the line, even the sense of the line (and our awareness of it), while also suggesting and regulating, in part by interrupting (and/or being part of) the ground of rhythmic patterning, grammatical structures, subject/object relations, images, etc. a poem plays across and makes. In the Byron line, for example, in the first instance pleasure is collected under the set of sins, as if pleasure were the figure and sin the ground on which it sits. After the caesura, the phrase is reversed and repeated, chiasmatically folded, so that sin becomes a term (at least sometimes) in the set of pleasures, where now sin is a figure sitting on the ground of pleasure. On the one hand caesurae are discrepant spaces of differentiation, and on the other they are relational, harmonic spaces, where beginnings and endings (and middles) are joined in concordance. While Tsur argues that prosodic features of poetry, such as the caesura, can use our habitual organization of “extralinguistic realities” to produce certain poetic effects, effects that might eventuate a shift in our organization of figure-ground relation and/or any aspect of “extralinguistic reality,” as demonstrated in Byron above, Howe’s poetic intervention radicalizes Tsur’s thinking by applying caesura literally to the organization of reality itself, opening an indeterminate aperture onto the threshold between the linguistic and extralinguistic. In the case of the Howe poem from Concordance, this linguistic/extralinguistic threshold also plays along another axis a little closer to home: the poetic and the critical, given that the cut itself is appropriated from a work of poetry criticism. Appropriation in general, such as in Duchamp’s readymades, always plays with the conceptual autonomy of art, as it morphs the social codes of a given object into the “art code.” In the case of textual appropriation the effect is even more complex (a complexity further troped on by Howe in her appropriative iteration of a work of poetics), in part because language itself is already defined by its iterability. As Judith Goldman explains,

“An appropriative work is a copy of a text-in-context: a mode of self-reflexive quotation whose “citational poetics”…involves investment in and displacement of indexical markers of its former identity in a new performance of the text…what an appropriative work cites is (some part of) the larger social assemblage in which that text has been enunciated
as speech act…

Most importantly, however, a work of citational literature is its own speech act: it is a strategically altered iteration that reflexively cites that prior text-as-field but also necessarily appears as a displacement of it, as its own enunciative assemblage. Regardless of its literal representation of that former context or which parts of it seem to matter, citational literature performs quotation as palimpsest. In citing the text-as-context, these works trope on the culture of fragmentation and toxic implicature, the embeddedness of context in text.” (Agon, 136).

While Goldman’s text explicitly refers to conceptual writing, this theorization is apt to describe Howe’s work, and will also be useful later in discussion of Brathwaite, especially Goldman’s development of the idea that conceptual writing (and/or some forms of citational literature) can weaponize the situational context, and therefore textual body, of a given iterative utterance, wielding the language like a gun against its original discursive situation, and against what she calls “toxic implicature,” or the way that discourse can “naturally” include unstated premises, or enthymemes, that are racist but unspoken. She writes,

“To live in a 21st-century society of ubiquitous computing, of digitally networked sociality is to live in conditions of toxic implicature. The weaponized enthymeme” (Agon, 88).

Such a condition of toxic implicature, unfortunately, is not unique to the 21st century, though it might be exacerbated by the trillions of enthymemic assumptions made at 3/4 the speed of light by computational apparatuses. Brathwaite’s SxVx can certainly be said to be commenting on such a condition of toxic implicature, where the unstated premises of the literary culture are, blatantly, according to him, Caribbean=hardly existent. The ironic counter-strategy of the SxVx is, in part, to weaponize Brathwaite’s own previously published poems, redoubling down on the already oppressive conditions against the subaltern. Brathwaite’s Sycorax Video-Style, though not “conceptual writing,” is often precisely “citational literature” as Goldman defines it: “works based on a single, pre-existing text.” The trick with Brathwaite, of course, is that that pre-existing text, unlike most works of conceptual writing, was written by the same author that re-mediates, and/or re-contextualizes it. But the SxVx, similar to works of conceptual writing, aims precisely to, “attend to the text it annexes in terms of the materia and presentation of its words, its physical medium and graphical interface, the social-material network and techniques of its production, dissemination, and consumption including its existence as a commodity in a market, its authorship, the rhetorical directives and assumptions encoded within it, its institutional settings, its social identity and use, its historical moment, the affect it carries or generates.”

Indeed, the SxVx, as Brathwaite sometimes explains it, is meant to inflict violence on the entire situation of global publishing. In an interview with Nathaniel Mackey he avers, “Publishing nowadays is always an act of terror.”

Before straying too far, we should return to Howe’s text. While not “citational literature,” exactly, Howe works extensively with “textual readymades,” and is certainly a precursor to conceptual writing. Evocatively, the “readymade text” here, Tsur’s essay, is language meant to be commenting on poetry that is now incorporated into poetry, thus demonstrating poetry’s absorbent power. This differending poetics sites the space where the codes called “the critical” and “the poetic” cross, and where the subtle institutional and social structures that proffer these identities operate coextensively in an infra world. In this way, Howe cites the differend (or caesura) itself “between” these codes, thus creating a new site that I refer to as infrastructuralist poetics, a superposition of the critical and the poetic that is also neither. In the poem, we understand the citation both in its “original” identity as obviously “from” a work of criticism, while we recognize, simultaneously, that it is now, also, unassailably, “the poem.” That flickering vacillation is infrastructuralist to the extent that it causes in the reader an indeterminate shuttling back and forth between these codes that eventually becomes so rapid as to create a new image altogether, and image of the relation, that is also an image of that relation’s opacity. That point of relation, or difference, or caesura between the two codes becomes an infrastructuralist relation when its historical contingency and historicity becomes foregrounded, and the works themselves recede into the background, while, of course, infernally mixing them (figure-ground) together. This hypostatized relation, the reader realizes, is their own determination of the poetic and the critical, a determination that is now clearly historicized, if simply by being absolutely confused. This flicker between poetics, aesthetics, and analysis, like three colors of off-white strobing somewhere in a dark room, is finally a failure to determine the undeterminable: the precise point where criticism “becomes” poetry, and vice-versa. Howe, in cutting out the formcontent from one page what will become part of the formcontent of another page (her poem), effectively blasts a hole through criticism as if she stood before it a loaded gun, leaving behind a materially altered page in its wake (shown below).

There is important material signification at work here. Beyond this semiotic flickering code-crossing context creation, by forming her poem out of a “cut” taken from literal material reality (i.e. from Tsur’s book), a “cut” that in its taking and re-using creates another line of reality, Howe opens us to a materialist prosody that is able to retain the linguistic use of the extralinguistic (not unlike the way that Zukofsky often appropriates non-poetic texts in “A” that evince perfect poetic-prosodic qualities that he then situates into larger formal structures of his own devising), while reconfiguring caesura itself as a new rhythm in material reality. In this way, Howe uses Tsur’s critical theory to craft (and reflexively theorize her own craft (where craft becomes a poetic craft (boat) of transit) a poem that extends his theoretical insight about the way poets use extralinguistic habits. The concern here is the ongoing, continuous production of a space that neither poetry nor criticism completely cover, an absolute heterotopic heterological spacetime. It is in this space that poetics, properly, occurs. Howe’s poem tacitly argues (without any such argument), extending Tsur, that not only do poets use our habitual organizations of figure-ground in extralinguistic reality to create poetic effects, but that by doing so, poets also change those prosodic effects themselves, and reality in the process. As Myung Mi Kim reminds us, “the [poem], if in relation to the task of writing, cannot proceed by argument; it proceeds by enactment–the something made and the process of something being made.” Poets can redefine prosodic elements that have become fossils of language (and poetics) by updating their meaning in use, by enacting something made and the process of something being made. Howe’s materialist caesura does this precisely, insisting that caesura might retain relevance beyond its local use to describe a spacetime semi-pause in a hemistitched pentameter line, because the power of its meaning is mutable enough to accommodate her own practice of material caesura, and she makes it so (or, at least, her poem does), while still relating to the practice of caesura overall as a form of rhythmic organization into discrete units, phrases, or measures.

We might call the image above a representation of Howe’s “actual” or “literal” caesura (caes from the Latin “cut”/”hewn”), or we might call it a cannonball tearing through the page. Howe does not “get rid” of the old definition of caesura, rather, she finds within its matrix the etymological means to extend its use up to and including (and looking beyond) her own practice. Poetics, this suggests, reads and enacts, enacts and reads, while, finally, eschewing reading to the higher purpose of a non-readerly genesis of the untheorized, and, finally, the untheorizable. Caesura, the poem suggests, will be defined by its enaction, and not, at least not only, retroactively by discursive prose. This co-dependence should be emphasized, as neither, finally, exists without the other.

The image above shows an intervening rhythm in material reality that is produced by cutting the material page, a literal cutting or hewing of the world that is also symbolic act. It is an “actual” cut in the page, an “actual” “literal” caesura, thus it emphasizes what I’ve been calling the poetic symbolic, or the material ground of all signification. As a meaningful act, it is of the mathematical symbolic, as semantic knowledge. Thus, as I have been arguing, this technique re-writes the mathematical symbolic and poetic symbolic relationship, re-defining a ratio between the knowable and the strictly material (finally, unknowable). It cuts into the rhythmic material reality of Tsur’s text, forever altering its social-historical context, while creating a new text altogether.

Presumably, to create her poem, Howe has Xeroxed or printed this page from Tsur’s book and cut around the space that is in my image left in relief. This quadrilateral space (a kind of trapezoid) is a literal caesura, leaving behind the poem:

Howe’s caesura emphasizes the slashing of the inverted mark (as “slash” is literally slashed by her cut). Too, any reader of Howe will be sensitive to “marks” and “mark-making,” even, perhaps, this negative mark. As any caesura does, this one emphasizes the phrases dividing the line “(marked by a slas) || l ending or phrase / ending: when it o || phrase), it is “over- / ridden,” generating, “__…”ern. In the present…” There is so much to read here that we might become dizzy even trying. Note, just to begin, that the conventional orthography for a caesura is a double vertical bar “||”. To quote the text I might indicate the caesura “I|,” then the cut “d” as “|”, writing (as I do above), “II |,” so that my own transcription suggests the beginning of another caesura. Howe has included the “).” in her poem, leaving behind open space on the page where there were once two successive punctuation marks signaling closure. All of Howe’s text collages create such “negative marks,” and these negative markings are worth further poetic study, not least because there are, if inversely, part of the poem. If the critic might have thought that their object of study was Howe’s poem, it is clear that such a thinking is deeply inadequate (or at least merely anacrusitical), as the poem has caused the necessity of this investigation, and leaves all explorations of the poem, finally, insufficient. Put differently, we cannot say that Howe’s poem begins and ends with the collage on the page published in Concordance; rather, its beginning and ending is surrounded by a caesural anacrusis, a concept I will return to below. It carefully anticipates my reading, and draws me into its meaning-making agenda, opening itself up (anacrusis) to the interrupted rhythm I will bring to it (caesura). That our readings themselves should be considered extraparapoetic caesural intervals is one of the grounds of infrastructuralist poetics. Howe throws the limits of paratextuality out the door, instituting, instead, an infinite anacrusis, where each reading must become like that preliminary, uncounted unstressed non-metrical word or syllable that remains part of the “lift” of a line, but does not “count” in its meter (one definition of anacrusis). An anacrusitical reading is the only (in)adequate poetics. Each reading is nothing more than a slight aperture onto a univocal and porous reality. The poems are pinholes of weak messianism anticipating my resurrection of the dead text as the birth of a shift in becoming; a faint, weak, ecliptic anacrusis that is also the condition for opening.

We might now have two poems (columns on either side of the material ceasura):

1) “(marked by a slash / ending: when it o / ridden,” generating”

2) “| ending or phrase / phrase), it is “over- / ern. In the present”

In the present, to be in the present, to be, to be being, there is non-being, the yet-to-be, becoming; the “in the present” is, sometimes, “over – / ern”(ed) (“vertical bar” ending or phrase phrase); o ridden,” generating…a caesura can also mark the space between an invocation, as in the opening of the Iliad:

μῆνιν ἄειδε θεὰ || Πηληϊάδεω Ἀχιλῆος

Sing, o goddess || the rage of Achilles, the son of Peleus.

Reading the generative ruins Howe makes in her sources would institute an entire new literary history, a history that might completely re-think the antinomies of progress (see: Ray Brassier: Final Repression: Adorno and Marcuse on the Antinomy of Progress). From Anacrusis, by Myung Mi Kim:

“Allowing for the floating materiality of matter that “does not fit” or “is not part of a metrical pattern” asks urgent questions about the terms under which ideas of the metrical pattern (that is, ideas of authority and maintenance of the superstructures that support these mechanisms) emerge and are validated. What is under consideration: the poem as investigation, the poem as action–the poem embodying points along a fragmentary axis that factor in, layer in, and cross fields of meaning, elaborating and multiplying the means of sense making. To encounter and to problematize the political and economical terms that function to determine and codify legibility. Say: a poetics through which to come into legibility without delimiting the range of what is possible to be uttered.

[…]

To unravel and at the same moment more vigilantly wend through the rhythms, speeches, dictions, deformations, and cadences presenced in the poem.

[…]

The poem undertakes the task of deciphering and embodying a “particularizable” prosody of one’s living.

[…]

The poem may be said to reside in disrupted, dilated, circulatory spaces, and it is the means by which one translates and notates this provisional location that evokes, prompts, and demonstrates agency–the ear by which the measure by which the prosody by which to calibrate a poetics that augments the liberatory potential of writing, the storehouse of the human–“

I am here with the means by which [this] one translates and notates this provisional location that evokes, prompts, and demonstrates agency.

What I’m calling infrastructure denotes an emergent contemporary conceptual understanding or agreement— an understanding I describe using what Derrida calls différance and what Stiegler calls technics. Infrastructure is différance and technics topologically wrapping around the other as the moving points of a torus (or any shape a relation between différance  and technics might become). It is called différance  when understood in the poetic symbolic, and it is called technics when understood in the mathematical symbolic. It is related to what Brathwaite calls the nommos, and what Kristeva might call the thetic, or more precisely, the way Kristeva understands the vacillation between the thetic and the semiotic, where the semiotic’s precondition is the thetic, an immaterial symbolic consistency, that the semiotic can rupture. It is also close to what is often meant by “the materiality of the signifier.” Infrastructure names a relatively new general understanding that results from telecommunications culture where objects under ceaseless transformation are not strange (like the constant updating of car models or ioSs, or entire networks, like 5g). It is our general comfort with the idea of systems under transformation. Marx’s theory of the commodity is apropos, as the science of capitalism/commodity/knowledge/ideology inaugurated by Marx, was, according to Althusser, the science of parsing where ideology motivates the understanding of an object’s inside and outside, therefore, perhaps, where that identity might change. In this sense, all infrastructure is Marxist because at the core of its identity as a concept is the irreconcilable transformation of things materially, conceptually, socially, and symbolically, transformations that are necessarily motivated by systems of production and class struggle.

We call infrastructure that which we assign an identity predicated on the rubric of technics, understood as epiphylogenesis, and différance, understood as the unnamable inheritance of the trace. The différance  of technics is infrastructure. I am not trying to provide a theory of something called infrastructure, but rather, I am trying to name what appears to me to be a relatively new sociological phenomenon/concept that we have become accustomed to naming infrastructure. That is, I am trying to describe the utility of the concept of infrastructure for describing the social/material conditions of the present, and show that it is used this way. A more properly genealogical study of the concept, I imagine, would lead to such conclusions: that infrastructure is the name for a topological conceptual figure of technics + différance, or, as I have been arguing, all that which can change in a given identity/object without fundamentally destroying the core conceptual knowledge about it. In this way, somewhat paradoxically, what I’m calling infrastructure is both what holds things together and what can change without altering the conceptual understanding of the thing’s consistence (i.e. it consists as a certain ratio of the mathematical symbolic and the poetic symbolic). This is related to the way infrastructure is used by Althusser and, by extension, Jameson, to describe the relation between “base” and “superstructure.” Like Kristeva’s material semiotic irruption (signifying process) of the sign into the thetic/symbolic figure. Like Deleuze’s “pre-signaletic material,” and what the “sea” or “nommos” often means in Brathwaite (like a particular spirit of an object), and the relation between what he calls “Closed Systems” and “Open Systems.” What Glissant might mean, simply, by “relation,” and close to what Fanon and Wynter are getting at with “sociogenic.”

If the break with the star could be accomplished in the manner of an event — if we could (if only through the violence that operates in our bruised space), depart from the cosmic order (the world), where whatever the visible disorder, order always dominates — still, the thought of the disaster, in its adjourned imminence, would lend itself to an experience of discovery whereby we could only be recuperated, not exposed to that which escapes in motionless flight, is separate from the living and from the dying and is no experience, but outside the realm of phenomena. (Maurice Blanchot, The Writing of the Disaster)

The semiotic’s breach of the symbolic in so-called poetic practice can probably be ascribed to the very unstable yet forceful positing of the thetic…When [the thetic phase of the signifying process is obstructed or resisted by problems…these problems take the place of the symbolic and] give rise to “fantasies”; more importantly, they attempt to dissolve the first social censorship — the bar between signifier and signified — and, simultaneously, the first guarantee of the subject’s position — signification, then meaning (the sentence and its syntax). Language thus tends to be drawn out of its symbolic function (sign-syntax) and is opened out within a semiotic articulation: with a material support such as the voice, the semiotic network gives “music” to literature…we shall content that it is the thetic, and not fetishism, that is inherent in every cultural production, because fetishism is a displacement of the thetic onto the realm of the drives. The instinctual chora articulates facilitations and stases, but fetishism is a telescoping of the symbolic’s characteristic thetic moment and of one of those instinctually invested stases (bodies, parts of bodies, orifices, containing objects, and so forth). This stasis thus becomes the ersatz of the sign. Fetishism is a stasis that acts as a thesis…the text signifies the un-signifying (the semiotic), which ignores meaning and operates before meaning or despite it. Therefore it cannot be said that everything signifies, nor that everything is “mechanistic.” In opposition to such dichotomies, whether “materialis” or “metaphysical,” the text offers itself as the dialectic of two heterogeneous operations that are, reciprocally and inseparably, preconditions for each other…language is simultanesously “analog” and “digital” [and] it is, above all, a doubly articulated system (signifier and signified), which is precisely what distinguishes it from codes. We therefore maintain that what we call the semiotic can be described as both analog and digital: the functioning of the semiotic chora is made up of continuities that are segmented in order to organize a digital system as the chora’s guarantee of survival (just as digitality is the means of survival both for the living cell and society); the stases marked by the facilitation of the drives are the discrete elements in this digital system, indispensable for maintaining the semiotic chora…Through its thetic, altering aspect, the signifier represents the subject — not the thetic ego but the very process by which it is posited…The thetic — that crucial place on the basis of which the human being constitutes himself as signifying and/or social — is the very place textual experience aims toward. In this sense, textual experience represents one of the most daring explorations the subject can allow himself, one that delves into his constitutive process. But at the same time and as a result, textual experience reaches the very foundation of the social — that which is exploited by sociality but which elaborates and can go beyond it, either destroying or transforming it. (Julia Kristeva, Revolution in Poetic Language, 63-7.) Bold Mine.

…signatures themselves, in the Derridean sense, regain the meaning lost to proper names through the endless enmeshment of the signifier in its network of substitutions and differences…[the application a signature technique] to [one’s own signature] calls attention to the recombinatory network of substitutions and differences which threathen the proper name is what Derrida termed “Dissemination”: the ways in which the trace of the signifier moves in order to generate and multiply meaning, always contingent and unstable, because the same movement in turn leads back to…”the force and form of its disarrangement puncturing the semantic horizon” of any text. Uncontrollable and contingent chance, like the proximity of a name to some other common noun, announces the generating florescence and disintegration that define Derridean dissemination and that, for Derrida, defines the name: “the structure of the proper name sets this process (of dissemination) in motion. That’s what a proper name is for]. (Derrida qtd. in Craig Dworkin, Radium of the Word: A Poetics of Materiality, 64).

In previous posts I have outlined 2 versions of Brathwaite’s SxVx. The first involves what other authors refer to as “re-mediation,” wherein Brathwaite, using the SxVx style, creates new versions of poems he has previously published. Certain poems have been published and republished this way many times across many books, as well as performed and recorded. I suspect there are the most versions of “Letter Sycorax,” “originally” published in X/Self (1987), and reproduced across his oeuvre in many different versions in many different publications. I refer to this kind of poem as a “first order topological poem,” because it references an “originary” point as the first publication, and then introduces a roving, diffuse set of points relative to this “original.” It also implicitly references a single printed version of the text produced by Brathwaite’s StyleWriter (Sycorax) that is then reproduced in book form by photographing that page, or by making a simulacrum in a separate design software. This reference to the single original page is shared by the second order topological poems discussed below. Another way to say this, in the theoretical language that I’m developing, is that the first order topological poems introduce a transformational point in the mathematical symbolic that emerges in a variety of ways relative to its infrastructural identity, or poetic symbolic being. An example of this kind of SxVx is below. In his larger retrospective critical/autobiographical SxVx works, such as Barbajan Poems and MR, Brathwaite will note where the “original” poem was published. Here, for example, after the quote, KB writes, “[see the ‘DreamSycorax New(s)Letter’ in MiddlePassages (1993)]. (I have inverted the color scheme of these passages to remain consistent with this blog’s aesthetic):

From this, a reader might track down the “original” publication and read the differences between that publication and this one. And many critics have. In this way, as the SxVx develops, Brathwaite’s poetic oeuvre becomes an infrastructural challenge to the reader or critic, where every reading increasingly feels partial, not just because, as in some difficult poetry, you don’t “understand” the poems, but because it explicitly references an externality you may not have access to. This novel form of partiality, an index of the proliferating media environmental of the late 20th century, has the effect of producing a latent, present absence in any reading. An implicit ‘non-knowledge’ emerges in every reading, a kind of indeterminate center-without-center, origin-without-original, or what Fred Moten has called, referencing Andrew Benjamin, anoriginality. On the other hand, there is no guarantee of any sufficient reading even should the tenacious critic track down every version of a given poem. Not only will the critic never truly exhaust “every” version of the poem (doing so necessarily begins to balloon into the vertiginous task of collecting every iteration of every published version in order to track the differences between copies of the same publication), but they will come to realize that this system under transformation, or infrastructuralist poem, includes them, the critic, in it, as the poem will have creepingly become a catalytic supplement to the critic’s life, a potentially fatal supplement that wastes time, drawing the critic ever nearer-death, as they realize, finally, the startling persistence of the poem. The poem, on the one hand, needs the reader, and on the other hand, dispenses with you by using you. We might refer to this as a fundamental lack of poetic sufficiency that has the paradoxical effect of producing a radical excess of existence bordering on the infinite. All poems could be said to accomplish this, but Brathwaite’s poetry accomplishes this uniquely as a spatial configuration that mimes (and is) the disaster of the contemporary present, and the fact of the present as a constant shattering of the stitch between past and future. My insistence on attempting to quote Brathwaite only photographically indexes an impossible to determine (but actual) measurement of time reciprocal to the poetic value I believe this work has. It is the time of my life given over to the poem. And this is precisely the beginning of living.

The poet has undergone a series of terrible disasters. Their cosmos has been disrupted. They have become without any guiding star (dis / astro) or, perhaps worse, have come under the sign of pure negation, where cosmos itself has disappeared. The result of this disaster is that the poet can no longer write, at least in any conventional sense. The poet’s fist of silent stone consigns them to nothing. The world itself becomes nothing.

From that Bermuda’s triangle emerges a new sign of hope, not an EYE, but a VOICE (Legba, Sycorax, KB’s deceased wife, his own poetic oeuvre now turned to stone for chiseling).

While Brathwaite will continue to write poetry, prose, criticism, and history, it will now be done under the sign of this cosmological disruption, a disruption that will be formally thematized in the SxVx, a disruption that will be indexed as an ongoing disaster. That Brathwaite refers to SxVx as a voice, I think, attempts to unify the phonemic and graphemic (and performative, and infrastructural) aspects of language into a morphic, 4-dimensional system that tried to take seriously Einstein’s general theory of relativity as the major cosmological disruption of the 20th century, the flipside of the terrors of genocide, colonialism, and environmental degradation.

If the first order topological poem refers to the poem that has been previously printed, the second order topological poem refers to the poem without any such origin. It is “born-topological” (or infrastructural), so to speak, in that it gives no privilege to any kind of published origin. This is work that is done entirely in the SxVx style, such as Brathwaite’s many publications in journals and magazines like Wasafari and Black Renaissance / Renaissance Noire, and in books, such as DreamStories, or work that refers to a recording where poetic material is inscribed without ever assuming the material formality of a published book, so things like lectures, readings, and interviews, such as conVERSations, Barbajan Poems, and MR, an interview, a lecture, and something like a seminar/course record, respectively.

The most baroque of these publications is probably MR, Brathwaite’s early 2000s massive two-volume publication that both theorizes Magical Realism in his peculiar style, and records, to some degree, a course/seminar he taught at NYU on Magical Realism. The book even includes part of an essay written by one of his students. These two books are fairly extreme magpie-like affairs, including visual imagery, photographs, paintings, diagrams, high stylistic variance, various levels of legibility, type-size, etc. The book is self-consciously incomplete and consistently references a book to come that will finish the many sections marked with astericks that indicate a more complete essay or book on the way. No such book ever materialized, leaving MR incomplete and partial both in the sense meant in reference to the first order topological poems above, but also in a new sense, a sense that I think importantly folds the critic/reader into Brathwaite’s SxVx project that would seek to attempt a new style adequate to the cosmological disruptions of the contemporary world, a world of disasters, yes, but also great possibility. The second-order topological poem, then, is what Brathwaite refers to as an “Open-System,” containing no formal closure, but retaining some invariance between the mathematical symbolic and poetic symbolic (as developed earlier). I.E. it retains a name (MR), but encourages readerly/writerly/critical intervention. I want to argue that this called-for intervention, an interpellating hailing without option, to complete the incomplete quite exceeds the kind of intervention usually associated with 20th century theories of readerly participation. It isn’t enough that a reader “complete the poem in their mind,” or “co-create the poem,” in order to mime constructivist subjectivity. There is no closure to reject. The point is that there is no “co-” here, and that the process of subjectivity devolves into a signification process whereby subjectivity and identity do not not obtain. In this sense, it is a radical call to enter, with Brathwaite and the SxVx, a new cosmology, one, he thinks, that is already underway, of rhizomatic palimpsest, of multiple representation, and of quantum relation, indeterminacy, and opacity.

In Lyn Hejinian’s famous “The Rejection of Closure” she writes, “Writing’s forms are not merely shapes but forces; formal questions are about dynamics—they ask how, where, and why the writing moves, what are the types, di­rections, number, and velocities of a work’s motion. The mate­rial aporia objectifies the poem in the context of ideas and of lan­guage itself.” I am arguing that this material aporia can be further radicalized against objectification, as a simple hypostatization of objectification, and the Brathwaite achieves this through the homeomorphic first order and second order topological poems. I hope to make a bridge between Hejnian, Umberto Eco, and Brathwaite, in that each uses “open” and “closed” in specific ways that are related but different. Hejinian closes her essay, reasserting her point that words can never “match” the world, thus open a creative/productive gap in their use,

“Yet the incapacity of language to match the world permits us to distinguish our ideas and ourselves from the world and things in it from each other. The undifferentiated is one mass, the dif­ferentiated is multiple. The (unimaginable) complete text, the text that contains everything, would in fact be a closed text. It would be insufferable.

A central activity of poetic language is formal. In being formal, in making form distinct, it opens—makes variousness and multiplicity and possibility articulate and clear. While failing in the attempt to match the world, we discover structure, distinc­tion, the integrity and separateness of things. As Bob Perelman writes:

At the sound of my voice
I spoke and, egged on
By the discrepancy, wrote
The rest out as poetry.(25)

Resting is an egg. Writing can only be as poetry. Discrepancy (discrepant engagement). Speaking to sound of one’s voice is to speak to an internal difference, an internal discrepancy, a threshold of poetry that is never crossed, but is a continuous crossing. That Hejinian closes her essay with an appeal to poetry that ostensibly agrees with her previous statement offers a novel simulacrum of closure. Here, the essay ends only with poetry. In fact, the essay ends with a page number: 25 (or parenthesis, really). But of course the notes follow. The last note offers where the poem begins (p. 11 of Perelman’s “My One Voice” in Primer). We know the poem must be at least 14 pages long. But where does it end? There is only one way to find out.

MR includes many, many more citations and outright appropriations of other author’s work than do works like conVERSations or Barbajan Poems. Interspersed with citations/remediations of his own poetry and what seem to be transcribed lectures from his seminar are long passages from Cecilia Vicuna, Alejo Carpentier, Robert Antoni, and others, all presented in the SxVx style. One of the more extreme examples of this aspect of SxVx opens this post. It is a passage from a Wilson Harris essay on V.S. Naipul with extensive in-line commentary by KB. I have photographed and modified the passage so that it reads in one long block. In MR it is split over the gutter of two pages, a fact present as the cantilevered disruption of the printed page’s straight lines. To read this passage requires unlearning our expectations of reading, and a willingness to enter the style of the text to the extent that it allows us to know (and unknow) the difference between Harris’s essay and KB’s voice. We have to read our reading reading while KB reads. This difference between author, reader, quoted, quotee, poem, book, seminar, critic and conference isn’t so much erased as radically reconfigured toward a sensation of disoriented simultaneity, a palimpsestic cosmology (like the one KB tidalectically sketches in MR, as if writing on water, writing in light) where difference syncretically disseminates along the immanent plane of the poem’s distribution of invariant relation. It is an alien phenomenology, but not one from outer space. It is the alien within our own phenomenology opened by the catalyst of the pervasive and transforming presACTIVITY of cosmological anima. Our very reading of the poem is an alien poetics, and suddenly, out from under us, the rug of reading is pulled from beneath our feet and we stop trying to understand and start interstanding (KB’s word). The death of the author does not just yield the birth of the reader, but knowledge (and non-knowledge) of the poetic symbolic, a machinic super-dense dark matter firing the cylinders of creative memory, an experience we can only have in tandem with the Other that is also Within, where identity does not mean, in fact, where a definition of identity cannot obtain. Literally. At the end of the following excerpt, just as it seems that KB will give the definition of identity according to WH, some kind of completion of the opening clause, “a reallocation of,” the line breaks off, space emerges, and one turns the page to finish the sentence only to find nothing there, because after that break there is only a new chapter. The reallocation, the reader suddenly understands, is of us (*hand turns page*), whether we can write or not.

Reading this, where capacity is a causeway, where enlightenment is [darkness!], where ground of choice is a continuum, where identity is the location/relocation/ reallocation of […] produces a form of difference repeating for however long it will retain and create a metastability that also always threatens its very identity (and any identity at all) by admitting change into the system, and a threat of destruction. The difference is never final, and the reading, impeded by the many signs and symbols disrupting the quote(s), commentary that is also a reading-with, idiosyncratic spellings that cause great leaps (ISSURE of personality) must occur slowly, like water percolating through a sponge or coral reef. It must include (by producing) an expanded phenomenology of reading as we know it. Perhaps not expanded, but cosmologically disrupted. As we get our bearings in a cosmologically disrupted word, where every center is of the disaster, we are “of” what identity conventionally is not. Slowly. At the same time, it can be quick, lightning fast, eyes at the speed of light. Opening to this phenomenology, one realizes they have opened onto an infrastructuralist phenomenology, a distributed consciousness, and thresholds of sentience that are deeply textual, deeply social, and full of confusing and delightful opacities. This aspect of the SxVx, what we might call a third order topological poetics, bends space and time around itself at the moment that moments arise and cease, that is, at the moment when everything was once thought to be susatined. One feels one becoming, just on the threshold of a new order, a new order irrupting in order. A metamorphosis within and without. The reader that undertakes reading the entirety of MR gains new eyes. Eyes that can hear Sycorax’s voice. The critic of such work must make a choice when they attempt to write about it. How do you quote from it? The answer is simple:

You can’t.

I want to direct attention to this incredible archive, The Digital Library of the Caribbean:

https://www.dloc.com/

where I’ve been able to access Kyk-Over-Al 40, 1989, an important issue for the critical literature on Brathwaite because of an interview published there with Stewart Brown and KB.

The DLOC is an amazing archive. Occasionally the internet reminds us of its most utopian possibilities. I had a similar experience when I was researching 19th century US poet James Madison Bell, whose “Poetical Works” are available at the Internet Archive:

https://archive.org/details/aalh_poeticalworksofjamesmadisonbell_r8114bel

I was working on Bell’s satirical mini-epic, “My “Policy” Man,” a poem lambasting the racist alcoholic President of the United States Andrew Johnson who assumed office following the assassination of Abraham Lincoln. Bell critiques Jonhson’s reconstruction policies, and the man himself, in part by slinging stereotypes at him that were in other circumstances used to denigrate black people, such as calling them unfit for education like apes and monkeys. In this way, the poem, I thought, powerfully overturned and détourned the racist linguistic organon of the USA against the POTUS. The poem begins,

There is a tide in men’s affairs,
Leading to fame not wholly theirs —
Leading to high positions, won
Through noble deeds by others done.
And crowns there are, and not a few,
And royal robes and sceptres, too,
That have, in every age and land,
Been at the option and command
Of men as much unfit to rule,
As apes and monkeys are for school.

At the time, I discovered UC Riverside’s incredible archive of California Newspapers. Some of their digitized papers date to the early 19th century. In particular, I was interested in newspapers written and edited prior to emancipation by free/d black authors, especially those that published poems by Bell. I became intrigued by these papers. Some had correspondents as far afield as Japan. While Frederick Douglass’s The North Star is easily available and is the subject of an immense body of critical research, there is a serious scholarly lack of work on these black-run Western newspapers of the mid-19th century. I came to think of these writers as a legitimate avant-garde, a group of radical black intellectuals and writers with the explicit goal of producing an irruptive interventional discourse that would make all claims to black inferiority absurd. In advance of their own legal freedom, and while working at the fringes of social death, they would demonstrate irrefutable proof of their creative, artistic, and intellectual freedom and value. Unfortunately, many of the newspapers are torn, missing pages, or unavailable, hence they have become sites of irretrievable loss. The papers I was especially interested in were The Elevator and The Pacific Appeal.

James Madison Bell was a mercurial figure. He was a revolutionary poet and charismatic orator associated with John Brown at one time, and he might have even been present at the raid on Harper’s Ferry, or at least helped in the raid’s planning. In the preface to his posthumously published collected poetical works, Bishop B.W. Arnett, D.D. writes, “His life has been one of great activity; his services rendered to his race cannot be measured by any standard that we have at our command. His influences have been one of those subtile influences. Like the atmosphere, it has gone many places, and the people have felt and acted upon it; they have become better and wiser by reason of reading and hearing his speeches.” A force like the atmosphere, unmeasurable by any standard, pervasive but partially unseen, this kind of avant-garde has always been underway, even if we don’t have the instruments to know it. Almost a hundred and fifty years before Paul Mann wrote in his blistering critique of the discourse surrounding the avant-garde that the future of the avant-garde might be “an unprecedented silence, exile…” a poet like James Madison Bell, and the critical void surrounding these sites of irretrievable loss, sites that nevertheless index radical and agonistic life and art, already performed it. Perhaps Mann’s critique is, paradoxically, better extended to the past and its simultaneity with the present, rather than as a call for the “next” avant-garde. The way to come to know this avant-garde is by reading the impossible, that is to say, by literally reading the absent pages of these magazines and the torn fragments of their pages, along with the voids that can never be recovered. Of whatever the avant-garde might be after the critical deconstruction of all things characteristic of 70s and 80s theory, Mann writes, “It cannot be described here, for the next stage of resistance must be carried out against this very discourse, this very incursion” (Theory Death of the Avant-Garde, 144). That it cannot be described, I argue, means that it cannot be represented, it cannot be experienced, it cannot even be written about and, therefore, it must be, like the atmosphere, a fundamental, if opaque, poetics. It may only be a site for contemplation, a site criticism can never hope to arrive at. My thinking now is that this kind of historical (non) reading might be related to Brathwaite’s notion of ‘tidalectics,’ an “oversatnding” of Hegel’s dialectics.

The interview I mentioned above between Stewart Brown and Kamau Brathwait is frequently referenced in the critical literature on Brathwaite. Nathaniel Mackey quotes it in “Wringing the Word,” an essay published first in 1994 in World Literature Today . It was eventually collected in Paracritical Hinge. For Mackey, the interview acts as a kind of grounding for his discussion of Brathwaite’s nation-language: “I think the real challenge for the artist who knows his English and mediates between the two languages is to develop an English which increasingly reflects the nature of nation-language.” (Brathwaite qtd. in Mackey, 52). Mackey also quotes it in “Sight-Specific Sound-Specific” because of Brathwaite’s explanation of his performance style. Brathwaite often performed alongside dub poets that could be quite extravagant in their vocalizations and body language. Brathwaite’s performance style was much more restrained. When asked about how he performs, he responds, “I don’t perform at all, it’s my poetry that does it. . . . The words on the page have a metaphorical life of their own. I do not depend upon walking up and down on the stage and doing things. People have the impression that I’m performing when in fact they are actually dealing with poetry as they ought to, that is, the poetry is singing in their ears.”

The interview is also important for Brathwaite’s discussion of his nascent Sycorax Video-Style that he calls “writing in light.” “I think the computer has moved us away from scripture into some other dimension which is “writing in light”. It is really nearer to the oral tradition than the typewriter is. The typewriter is an extension of the pen. The computer is getting as close as you can to the spoken word — in fact it will eventually I think be activated by voice and it will be possible to sit in front of the computer and say your poem and have it seen.” The interview finds its way into discussions of Brathwaite by Mathew Kirschenbaum in both Track Changes and the recently published Bitstreams, Jenny Sharpe’s recent Immaterial Archives: An African Diaspora Poetics of Loss (2020), Mandy Bloomfield’s, Archaeopoetics (2016), and many more.

By 1989, along with the emergence of SxVx, Brathwaite’s poetry is also beginning to incorporate more Amerindean themes and “magical realism.” He refers to X/Self, “for the first time, [there is] a significant Amerindian presence in X/Self and there is is much more of what I would call magical realism than before.” That development of magical realism in relation to Amerindian thought will find a later culmination in the two large tomes composing MR (Savacou North, 2002), where world cosmologies are juxtaposed with scientific and technical developments to explain the emergence of the genre/style known as “Magical Realism.”

Brown asks Brathwaite about the tension between technology and history, and Brathwaite responds, referencing Marshall McLuhan, “What I was saying there was that technology makes nation-language easier…the ‘global village’ concept, the message is the medium and all that…The poem was saying that the computer has made it much easier for the illiterate, the Caliban, actually to get himself visible” (56). That Brathwaite reverses the famous McLuhanism re-focuses attention on the messageness of “the medium is the message,” emphasizing their inextricability. If McCluhan’s essential intervention was to attenuate the message so that we might see the media, Brathwaite, I think, offers a necessary development of that critical intervention by reinserting the message back into the media, unifying them like a wave-particle. He goes on, discussing how on the computer “you can make mistakes…you can see what you hear. When I said “writing in light” that is the main thing about it — the miracle of that electronic screen means that the spoken word can become visible in a way that it cannot become visible in the typewriter where you have to erase physically.” This form of “visuality” is quite different than the typewriter’s. It is an ephemeral visuality that sounds a little more like Freud’s magic writer and Plato’s/Derrida’s wax tablet. I think this informs why Brathwaite terms his Sycorax style Sycorax-VIDEO. Where is the video in the Sycorax video-style? Video tends to signify the technological development of sonic and visual information hardcoded together, where “seeing and hearing” and “hearing and seeing” can be chiasmatically reversed ad infinitum, because they are inextricable. Video is also a time-based medium, where sound and image pass together, and yet, its mechanical support is a vast spatial configuration only possible at this late stage of industrial capitalism. While we might experience video’s ephemerality, part of that experience always indexes what we don’t see about its support. Brathwaite’s “static” video-poems make us continue looking at video, frame by frame, and one of the effects of this is that it focuses our attention on the whole support system of the poetry, from computer, to book, to writer, to reader.

Later in the interview, Brathwaite discusses the U.S. “experimenting with alteration of atmosphere, creation of storms, droughts and things…” to describe Hurricane Gilbert (1988), the second most intense tropical cyclone on record in the Atlantic basin, a Category 5 hurricane that was responsible for the destruction of Brathwaite’s own archive. The storm was one of the largest tropical cyclones ever observed, its storm-force at one point measuring 575 mi in diameter. Whether or not we think that storms are the result of deliberate scientific experimentation by the US intelligence sector, I’ve been thinking a lot about the fact that throughout the 20th century hurricanes in the Caribbean and all around world became increasingly powerful, precisely as the result of the U.S.’s (and other major emitters’) reckless emissions. Brathwaite’s Shar: Hurricane Poem, a poem I read today, also deals with this devastating storm. In part the poem is an elegy for the destruction of his archive, a repository for what might have been at the time one of the largest collections of Caribbean poetry, and certainly an archive containing invaluable tapes, records, etc. Brathwaite was a huge collector of other writers’ work, along with their working manuscripts, and his collection constituted a veritable “Library of Alexandria,” as he often called it. Brathwaite refers to the storm as a “missile,” part of the Western cosmology that he describes in MR as “missilic.” What does viewing this catastrophic storm as a literal attack against the existence of such an archive and the people it records do to our historical consciousness? Can we take such a view? Despite the devastation, Shar urges song. It is a neganthropic ecopoem.

Brathwaite continues by discussing the insidious tourist industry in the Caribbean that had by 1989 transformed the face of many Caribbean islands into brutal concrete havens for the global elite. He worries that this transformation will foreclose the poetic youth’s ability to connect with their land, because “…you can’t really relate to a Hilton Hotel.” This creeping globalization relates to Brathwaite’s repeated claim throughout the 90s that postcolonial studies, like the tourist industry reshaping the face of the archipelego, is a violent, exploitative endeavor attempting to mine new literary resources from the third world. If the computer makes Caliban visible, there is also a danger in becoming so visible. Just as Brathwaite celebrates the potential for technology to make Caliban’s voice heard, at the same time it allows Caliban to be immediately recuperated into the scholarly apparatus that extracts cultural capital from elsewheres, creating new forms of peripheral sites of resource extraction for the “citadels” of Empire, as Brathwaite often referred to NYU. The value of visibility has become increasingly troublesome in the era of data-extraction, drone bombings, and global techno-capital, hence Hito Steyerl’s wonderful, “How Not to be Seen: A Fucking Didactic .MOV File.” Worse, even, the Anthropocene has manufactured new terrible “eyes of Apollo.” The “eyes of Apollo” is a figure meant to describe the view of the planet from a divine perspective. Today, that view is not divine, but technical, technologically sublime, even, because the atmosphere, the entire surround of Earth, is a vicious vision humanity has weaponized against itself and all things. The greatest drone bomb today is the climate itself, a new apotheosis of the missilic Western cosmology spread across the world like a sheet of cluster bombs.

I’ve been thinking of Brathwaite in relation to Steyerl’s “In Defense of the Poor Image” (despite her retraction of some of that influential essay’s claims). The essay begins, “The poor image is a copy in motion. Its quality is bad, its resolution is substandard. As it accelerates, it deteriorates. It is a ghost of an image, a preview, a thumbnail, an errant idea, an itinerant image distributed for free, squeezed through slow digital connections, compressed, reproduced, ripped, remixed, as well as copied and pasted into other channels of distribution.” She may as well be describing Brathwaite’s process of Sycorax Video-Style, with the caveat that in general Steyerl’s essay is about digital files, whereas one of the most unique things about Brathwaite’s work (to my mind) is that it never “went digital,” in the sense that he never began to make “video-poems” in any conventional way. Instead, his poems refused such easy access or reductive notions of movement as light play across a screen. SxVx insists on the opacity of limited editions, where movement is described in difficult to print monolithic books like Barbajan Poems and MR, along with slight but powerful DIY books like Shar: Hurricane Poem, a book that leaves visible the trace marks of the Xerox machine used to scan the 8.5×11 pages. While the traces of the Xerox machine at the margins of the pages of Shar can be understood as indexical to the physical acts of scanning and printing, they are also contiguous visual-material metonymic traces of the material system the poem is including writing, scanning, printing, distribution, binding, reading, and its manifestation of cultural resonance as creative memory.

Early in MR, Brathwaite discusses what he calls “Closed” and “Open” systems. He refers to the “Closed System” as the CMS (Closed Missile System, the European/Western cosmology) that would seek to reinscribe its missilic forms of “prehensile pretention” across the world, a prehensile pretention that views all things as terra nulius for it to conquer. By contrast he offers the “Open System” as a “concept not of tabula rasa but palimpsest / wiping the slate of literary & cultural assumptions / clean in such a way that we begin to discern the ainchen voices of the inscriptions of history y memory” (MR, 53). Not tabula rasa, but something like a continuous tabula rasa or continuous morphology of wiping clean and discerning history and memory in what otherwise might “appear” blank. He suggests that there are “Open Systems” within “Closed Systems” and “Closed Systems” within “Open Systems.” In fact, it is the nascent Magical Realist cosmology that allows such contradictions and paradoxes to flourish, and that might be the ground(less ground) for hope. The “Open System” requires the radical practice of what Keats called “negative capability.” As Brathwaite defines it in MR: “negative capability involved the willing suspension of inherited / prejudice, judgment, judementals, academic lit procedures until such / time as they become useful & / or relevant” (MR, 65). Negative capability is the precondition for willful cosmological shifts. Brathwaite conceives of cosmology as a “cultural organon that determines PART=WHOLE” but that also “can be changed.” It is this changing of cosmology that, for Brathwaite, Magical Realism, and other avant-gardes of the 19th and 20th century inaugurates by offering a cosmology of “Open” and “Closed” systems co-existent as paradox, contradiction, and the radical possibility of changing all “part / whole” relations. Thus it includes invariance and variance, structure and infrastructure. “For what this course in MR is attempting, as I’ve said before, is some understanding, some ontological interstanding of why & how certain things are / as they are or as they appear to be or as they are made to appear to be.” He tells his students that doing so requires “attention to negative capability (yr capability towards & IN it); second thru yr / honesty & diligence towards the TXT(s) & v/important – thru tributarailising [indeterminate SIC] yr / own cultural xperience(s) into the dream of the enterprise” (67). The student of the MR project of open and closed systems must be toward and in negative capability, immersing themselves in a field that negates all that which heretofore “themselves” is. Brathwaite’s refusal of the transparent distinction between open and closed, self and other, is, as he writes, radically palimpsestic. It isn’t that there is a terra nullius, but that every palimpsest can be re-written, including the palimpsest of our own cultural experience and knowledge. This, I think, is a celebration of opacity, even the opacity of our “selves,” “selves” that are, finally, part of the palimpsestic movement of “witness/crossroad / from world to word to self & from self to other selves / w/what i can only call humility” (67).

If Sycorax Video-Style is an expression of such a Magical Realist cosmology (and part of the MR is devoted to saying so), then Brathwaite here offers such continuous movement, and video, perhaps, as a fundamental Other within the One, an internal moving incessant constituting force (without constitution itself) both internal and external to the One, an Otherness that is parasitically related to (by being inside and without) all systems and institutions. Allowing this Other in (stranger, alien, foreign contaminant, anomalous material, or noise, as Brathwaite often calls it, rhyming with Michel Serres’s discussion of it in The Parasite) is to invite in the threshold quasi-object all identity finally is, an impossible invitation as it continues to stand on the threshold. That impossibility, “the best of all impossible worlds,” as Brathwaite frequently détourns Leibniz to become, becomes the poem just as it escapes us and becomes us.

If structuralism focused on identifiable invariant structures, I argue that this conception of movement as the Open System (a movement that cannot be conceptualized) offers an important infra of structure. The infra is that which can be changed, or move/d, within a structure without the structure losing its identity. Therefore, it is the historically conditioned aspect of structure. This is, to my mind, the essence of the “post” in “post-structrualism,” at least if we mark that turn by Derrida’s essay on the historicity of the structurality of structures, “Structure, Sign and Play,” delivered at the 1966 Johns Hopkins conference, and published in 1968 in Writing and Difference. For me, infrastructure denotes the broad socio-cultural understanding of this quasi-objectivism, a social understanding that identity can be retained despite dramatic physical changes of materials, where it has become normal for things to radically transform at the level of media without becoming mere “images” or “representations” of themselves, where highways and networks, for example, or artworks and poems, like Brathwaite’s SxVx, exist as a diffuse set of material instantiations that describe a topological figure with homologous points in the mathematical symbolic and the poetic symbolic. In the case of Brathwaite’s versioning of poems, for example, the poem retains identity through its many iterations (as oral reading, as vinyl record, as cassette, as print, as computer “writing in light,” as print book, in this very post) through various historicities and historically determined sets of poetic-material identity. Many writers agree on Carrie Noland’s use of “re-mediation” to describe this transformational ability. However, I think it is important not to think of his first order topological poems as “re-mediations,” because the “re,” I think, suggests something too close to an “original.” Rather, we must view these poems as accretive and diffuse material patterns in the flux of the two symbolics. The “original” and the “re-mediation” exist as one poem. The emergent symbol of that union is its structure. It is essentially mathematical in that it denotes the poem’s invariant identity. It coalesces into a proper name: the poem’s title, itself subject to change, as Brathwaite’s titles often do. It is a continuous nommos. It is fundamentally symbolic (not to say immaterial), in the structuralist sense of the term, as in it is a description of identifiable or agreed upon invariance. The infrastructure of the poem, by contrast, is symbolic in the poetic sense. It is all the material movements of matter and energy (spacetime) the poem is, up to and including its most diffuse cultural resonances as silent influence or radiating associations. This is close to Julia Kristeva’s notion of the semiotic, that which does not signify in the signification process, and/or where the drives enter language, though remaining forever unnamed (though referred to as the chora). I use symbolic slightly differently than Kristeva or Lacan. My symbolic is not related to the thetic order, but to the Greek etymology σύμβολον or symbolon meaning token, from σύν syn “together” and βάλλω bállō ” “I throw, put,” that evolves from “throwing things together” to “contrasting” to “comparing” to “token used in comparisons to determine if something is genuine,” or “outward sign of something.” The poetic symbolic, or infrastructure, and the mathematical symbolic, or structure, are forms of things thrown together, one connoting the realm of symbolic knowledge (mathematical symbolic, something more like what Kristeva and Lacan mean by the symbolic order or thetic phase) and one connoting the material support where the signifying process occurs, and our sense of that “infrastructure” existing as an identity (however mutable). In this sense, my poetic symbolic is much closer to what Kristeva means by the semiotic and chora. The infrastructure (or poetic symbolic) is the minimal physical requirements, the conditions of possibility, for the maintenance of the contiguity between the two symbolics in the actual repetition of difference. My thinking is that the word infrastructure better connotes the way Kristeva discusses the difference between sign and symbol. Poetic infrastructure signifies an indeterminate identity (the non-identical / relation) within identity, identity’s support (though both more and less than that), within (and without) any structure, while structure signifies the invariance of identity applied to such an infrastructure. The infrastructuralist poem is a certain distribution of the interbeing of the incessant — an invariant in difference. The infrastructure of the poem, finally, includes the unknown of the poem, the poem’s non-knowledge, or non-conceptualizable content, whereas the structure of the poem describes its existence as knowledge, what we tend to call form. Content, here, I’m arguing, somewhat paradoxically, becomes precisely that which we cannot know everything about, because it is the expression of material semiosis in relation to form (i.e. content is a manifestation at the crossroads of the two symbolics). Both symbolic registers, the mathematical/structural symbolic and the poetic/infrastructural symbolic, are mutable, and are involved in constant relative motion. Infrastructuralism is the literal ongoing morphology of the physical and structural set of points that can be said to be the poem at any given moment, including the diffuse limits of that threshold at the boundaries of human thought and quasi-objectival interbeing. In this sense, infrastructuralism is a science of the poem’s virtuality, because it attempts the impossible, a tracing of what the poem has been, what it is, and what it might be, all while being that becoming. It is a figure written on the plane of immanence. And it is immanence writing.

I’ve had difficulty tracking down many of Brathwaite’s publications, and some of them, like Barbajan Poems and MR, are extremely expensive and extremely rare. No one, to my knowledge, has yet to make them into PDFs. Why not? Perhaps out of respect for the power they have when you hold them in your hands, watching and hearing and seeing and listening to a radical Magical Realism bringing into being that groundless ground of an entire new cosmological principle. A shaking, shuddering, stammering OPEN SYSTEM, as Brathwaite writes in MR, an OPEN SYSTEM to destroy from within the CLOSED SYSTEMS that originate with Aquinas’s Summa Theologica. In this counter-discourse, or anti-discourse, or non-philosophy, there might be an “unprecedented silence,” the kind Paul Mann asks for, what we might call an internal avant-garde of the passing sublime.

I don’t think it’s a stretch to situate Brathwaite’s critical work, especially the work done in the SxVx style, as something kin to Georges Bataille’s heterology or Summa Atheologica, itself a heterological expounding of our greatest silences. In The Unfinished System of Non-Knowledge, and everywhere in Bataille’s oeuvre, he calls for a radical new system of non-knowledge as the actual necessity for revolution (a necessity that would destroy all necessity), one divorced from the utilitarian demands of reason, demands that thingify humanity and the world, leaving us profane objects and things at the behest of our own destructive systems of capital’s form of sovereignty. In Heterology, Bataille writes, “Now black communities, once liberated from all superstition as from all oppression, represent in relation to heterology not only the possibility but the necessity of an adequate organization…It is only starting from this collusion of European scientific theory with black practice that institutions can develop which will serve as the final outlets…for the urges that today require worldwide society’s fiery and bloody Revolution.” Of course, Césaire, Fanon, Wynter, Spivak, and others, would soon sound the bell for the necessity of a violent revolution (both actual and intellectual) emerging from “subalternity.” Bataille, though, is hard to shake. His notions of “base material,” “l’inform,” and “general economy” remain significant ways to theorize a form of material social connection foreign to the capitalist and political social relations still ruling today, relations that tend toward thingification; thingification in the sense of alienation (commodity, labor, value), and thingification of individual subjective representation in liberal democracy. It is that excluded thing that cannot be so alienated or “thingified” that always threatens theory. It returns in writers like Bernard Stiegler and Achille Mbembe, and, more recently, in Aria Dean’s recent essay in November, “Black Bataille.” Here, she puts Bataille’s notion of l’informe and base material in conversation with Afropessimist (non)philosophy. Her striking essay concludes:

“…I hope that wedging this Bataille thing into Black art discourse, and into general art theory anew, might inspire other Black artists and scholars to reassess our practices — and everyone else’s to pursue an absolutely counter-modernism and all its hypothetical counter-legacies from a true and decisive limit point — to find, draw out, and magnify those lurking base materialistic elements in order to extend and strengthen a notion of Black art that luxuriates in its outside-the-world-ness.”