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