“My voice on the threshold. My voice coming from afar. On the threshold of the Academy.”
So begins Miguel Angel Asturias’s 1967 Nobel Prize banquet speech. Kamau Brathwaite, with slight modification and embellishment, quotes from this speech act as the epigraph to his mkissi, “Asturias,” published in the Spring 2003 issue of Black Renaissance Noire (one of the few places, he is careful to note later in Asturias, that will publish his work in his desired 8.5×11 format). In the speech, Asturias has just begun what he considers might be a “comparison too daring. But…necessary,” by comparing Alfred Nobel’s invention of dynamite to the emergence of magical realism. Asturias calls the invention of dynamite a magical catastrophe, and refers to the Panama Canal as one of its magical catastrophes. It is magical because it opens from within the world a new world, bringing forth from a dream (in this case the dream of connecting the Atlantic and Pacific by water) a reality. It is catastrophic because the Panama Canal is also a new vein carved with bombs and blood into the Earth’s skin that completed the mercantilist piercing of the Americas. It literally cuts the continents apart like conjoined twins, opening them where once they joined, joining them now by a flowing flood of capital. “The use of destructive forces, the secret which Alfred Nobel extracted from nature…A magic of catastrophe which could be compared to the thrust of our novels, called upon to destroy unjust structures in order to make way for a new life. The secret mines of the people, buried under tons of misunderstandings, prejudices, and taboos, bring to light in our narrative — between fables and myths — with blows of protest, testimony, and denouncement, dikes of letters which, like sands, contain reality to let the dream flow free or, on the contrary contain the dream to let reality escape.” Here, dikes of letters (that we understand as words), are likened to infrastructure, technical matter that disposes processes toward certain outcomes. These particular dikes in this particular rhetorical figure regulate and contain the flow between dream and reality, like sands do water on the shoreline or lakeside or creek basin, or like canals and locks do water and ships. In this metaphorical matrix, bordering on the sturdiness of allegory, a matrix consisting of words, matter, letters, dikes, water, sands, the natural, the technical, meaning, its movement, flow, its processes, and the equivocation of the created and the creative, there emerges a difficult, possibly impossible, figure: a figure (dikes regulating water flows) of figuration (of how meaning is made through regulating the signifying process with letters and words) in words (spoken, recorded, written, and received) figuring the function and manifestation of words (the fluidity of language, but also sentences as locks). Asturias, of course, speaks from within one of the major hallowed halls of literary institutionalization, but, his speech suggests, he is only present at a distance: “My voice is on the threshold. My voice coming from afar. On the threshold of the Academy” […] “dikes of letters which, like sands, contain reality to let the dream flow free or, on the contrary contain the dream to let reality escape.” Brathwaite begins his citational speech act after reality’s escape, as these cataclysms give birth to a “geography of madness”:
Brathwaite’s grafted additions, mostly bracketed, specify and update the cataclysms alluded to by Asturias (“the Discovery Slavery Hiroshima the Holocausts 9/11”), and add commentary: (“a literature of cheap compromise is “or X social realism E”); surround the “Europeans” (mirrored makeshift glyphs “[ T ]” and “[ T ]” literally press against the word); they bring up into the continuing present by syntactic analepsis (was -> is) the ongoing disaster of coloniality (“It is just that what happened to us [is] shocking. Continents [and archepelagoes] submerged in the sea…”) (Bold mine, to emphasize “arche”). Brathwaite replaces “man of hope” with “[person the spirit] of hope,” de-gendering the phrase and syntactically de-naturing it by creating a stutter, a repetition (the person the spirit). In Asturias’s original, he refers to the “orderly unfolding of European conflicts, always human in their dimensions. The dimensions of our conflicts in the past centuries have been catastrophic.” Brathwaite’s additions and addendums are admittedly mild textual catastrophes that index major catastrophes. But they do, like the catastrophe of mathematics, enfold Asturias’s speech into a slightly different topological figuration, transforming its synchronic structure, while diachronically extending it. The crux between synchrony and diachrony is when and where infrastructuralist writing intervenes.
The conventional uses for brackets when quoting material are to add information without changing the meaning of a sentence (often for grammatical reasons), to point at an error that the quoter does not want to be blamed for ([sic]), and to translate from one language to another. Brathwaite’s use of brackets systematically detourns each of these conventions. He introduces non-standard grammar, deliberately changes meaning by adding description, and he misspells words, introducing “mistakes” into a rhetorical trope meant to correct them. These inverted mistakes, that is, mistakes with purpose, deliberately appropriate and detourn literary critical conventions by performing (not to say representing) a negative mimesis of established literary norms. They trouble the integrity of the quote, and might even cause us to wonder who said what and when. They are cyborgian, prosthetic supplements augmenting the cited text in its new context, while recapitulating, by emphasizing, the provocative original context of Asturias’s speech. There, Asturias critiques from within the institutional history and context that has just awarded him the highest prize in literature. It might even tacitly question, with no uncertain bravado, why Brathwaite has no Nobel himself. Tacitly, Brathwaite seems to be challenging, If we are, finally, worried about correctness over truth, then the anal crititics might point out that Brathwaite does make an actual mistake. The quote is not precisely from Asturias’s “Nobel Acceptance Speech,” but from his Nobel Prize Acceptance Banquet Speech. (from “The Critic”: Squat w/his hot / check shirt [whose] theories dic- / tate his joys. / be- /cause he hears not heavenly mel- / odies…But high-/ly refined dissonance & noise).
And yet, Brathwaite adds that the spirit of hope, nevertheless, “wanders through our own songs…[soffly unfolding].” This might reflexively refer to the pixelated cursive font KB renders Asturias’s speech into, a hallmark of Brathwaite’s SXVX, as if the text is quietly squinting or it’s a still from a poorly interlaced video, soffly unfolding, as if peeking out from a dream. And/or we might suspect this “soff” unfolding proleptically anticipates the tenor of the work to come. And yet, rather than a soft unfolding, the next paragraph, (1), (a secondary exordium, as if the story/poem can’t quite seem to begin, or has already begun, but we must become slowly immersed in it), dramatically shifts appearance into an all caps bolded graffiti-style font, rendered difficult to read by its possibly compressed kearning. Like the cenzontle, “the bird whose song has 400 tones,” that Menendez y Pelayo elevated above the nightingale, KB’s song can shift appearance like light like thought.
from Asturias, Kamau Brathwaite (Black Renaissance Noire)
A failure: “▯What is possible in the best of all impossible words▯”
from MR, Kamau Brathwaite.from MR, Kamau Brathwaite.from MR, Kamau Brathwaite.
The “Failure Glyph,” “▯,” colloquially known as “Tofu” due to its resemblance to a block of tofu, is a white rectangle used to signify to the user a Glyph Failure, that is, when a glyph cannot be represented by the font or software being used.
Later, I will discuss this phenomenon more thoroughly, because it offers another kind of caesura, a caesura in the technological sublime. Some have called this rectangle a signifier for glyphlessness.
This failure glyph begins showing up in Brathwaite’s work in the late 90s. In the semantic sense it is a fundamentally deictic symbol meant to orient us to the failure of our system’s inability to present / represent a coded sequence, usually a letter or symbol that one font has that another does not. In ASCII, this glyph is coded as .nondef. Non-definitional. Without definition. That for which there is no glyph, no adequate symbol, or, put more strongly, no existent symbol, at least, in the system being used. For the system using ASCII translation it is the impossibility of representing something its code. It refers to the untranslatable. In other words, if in a rather banal way, it represents a disaster to the system, or what Brathwaite might call a “cosmological disruption.” The failure glyph signifies the possibility that any reading might succumb to the absent presence of what is excluded by the system, that upon discovery may or may not re-color the entire text, our understanding of it, its identity, the entire world. Until the “▯” is deciphered any text might really mean anything. Thus, the presence of the “▯” disorients the possibility of reading for complete meaning, and leaves the reader in utter partiality. It is a caesura, albeit a contingent one (but what caesura is not contingent?), that hovers over the text, making any critical scrutiny fundamentally anacrusitical. But it is also contingent contingency, because there is always the possibility that the “tofu” is intentional, i.e. that the “glyph failure” signified by the “tofu” is not a failure at all, but a deliberate inclusion by the author, in this case, Brathwaite. So, finally, any such determination is a decision to believe what I have no final access to. Brathwaite’s failure glyphs do not fail to signify, but, rather, hypostatize the signifying process, abandoning it to paradox and contradiction, in other words, abandoning it for the invisible and opaque. Here we see what we cannot: “the floating materiality of matter that “does not fit.” (Myung Mi Kim) The Sycorax Video-Style is a relentless glyph failure, and failure of glyphs, and celebration of opacity as fundamental to the palimpsestic cosmology Brathwaite advocates for in MR, a cosmology that leaves the critic unmoored. In the post to come, I will demonstrate one way that the use of glyphs disintegrates certain normative critical methods, methods that, finally, should be abandoned, in favor of an anacrusitical, caesural reading praxis, or, more simply put, poetics.
That Brathwaite brackets “CLOSURE” with failure glyphs will likely pique the ears of readers interested avant-garde poetics.
I will “close” with the “close” of Lyn Hejinian’s “continuation” of her own famous essay “The Rejection of Closure.” In, “Continuing Against Closure,” published in Jacket #14, Hejinian points us in the direction of borders. The caesura might be said to be the space within and without a border, where borders are written, what they border. At the same time, they are not, because the caesura is neither the phrase to the left of the hemistitch or the phrase to the right of the hemistitch. It is not the space after the comma or before the beginning of the next phrase. It is not space at all, but time, that is, a form of rhythm. The literal caesura of Howe’s presented above, too, is also a caesura in time, insofar as the caesura is, finally, never a gap, hole, or emptiness, but an interval. The caesura is not Howe’s cut out of the Xeroxed page from Tsur’s essay, but what is opened by the cut. The failure glyph signifies the indeterminate border of the poem where it cannot assimilate into the ASCII code. It is the limit of caesura, where information (even no information) no longer pertains to the poem. It is where its infrastructure ends.
“It is in this context that, though still arguing my case against closure, I can speak in favor of the border, which I would characterize not as a circumscribing margin but as the middle — the intermediary, even interstitial zone that lies between any one country or culture and another, and between any one thing and another. It’s a zone of alteration, transmutation, a zone of forced forgetting, of confusion, where laws and languages clash, where currency changes value and value changes currency, and where, bumbling along, everyone is a foreigner, Jane to Sam, wolf to donkey, rhapsodist to infant, pigeon to goose.”
Not wishing to limit itself to a “study of sources”— which was Julia Kristeva’s term for what she saw happening to her idea of “intertextuality”— this book concludes by returning to that sharper and more troubled notion of the intertext as the problematic activity of a sign when it interacts with another sign system, perhaps even as its users bring about that interaction unwittingly or blindly (59–60): a conception of the sign that we see in the Quechua concepts of quilca and ayllu—but also more generally in the emergent natures of unnatural signs.
[…]
While a critique of colonial power can never relent (especially when contemporary political life remains so contaminated by colonial legacies of racial and sexual subjugation), the endurance of these signs reveals the imperfection of that power; its contradictions are canalized into the affirmation of worlds other than that singular modernity of the commodity form.
I am not talking about the brevity of a recorded film that one could see again (life will have been so short) but of the very thing itself.
Beyond memory and time lost. I am not even speaking of an ultimate unveiling, but of what will have remained alien, for all time, to the veiled figure, to the very figure of the veil.
This desire and promise let all my specters loose. A desire without a horizon, for that is its luck or its condition. And a promise that no longer expects what it waits for: there where, striving for what is given to come, I finally know how not to have to distinguish any longer between promise and terror.
from Monolingualism of the Other, Or, The Prosthesis of Origin, Jacques Derrida
All through these pages I have suggested that literary studies must take the “figure” as its guide. The meaning of the figure is undecidable, and yet we must attempt to dis-figure it, read the logic of the metaphor. We know that the figure can and will be literalized in yet other ways. All around us is the clamor for the rational destruction of the figure, the demand for not clarity but immediate comprehensibility by the ideological average. This destroys the force of literature as a cultural good. Anyone who believes that a literary education should still be sponsored by universities must allow that one must learn to read. And to learn to read is to learn to dis-figure the undecidable figure into a responsible literality, again and again. It is my belief that initiation into cultural explanation is a species of such a training in reading. By abandoning our commitment to reading, we unmoor the connection between the humanities and cultural instruction.
from Death of a Discipline, Death of a Discipline, Gayatri C. Spivak
We must learn to do violence to the epistemic epistemological difference and remember that this is what education “is,” and thus keep up the work of displacing belief onto the terrain of the imagination, attempt to access the epistemic. The displacement of belief onto the terrain of the imagination can be a description of reading in its most robust sense.
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:
from Concordance, Susan Howe (New Directions, 2020).
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.”
Nikki de Saint Phalle
Nikki de Saint Phalle
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.
from “Metaphor and figure-ground realtionship,” in Playing by Ear and the Tip of the Tongue,” Reuven Tsur, (JB 2012). I have cut from the image of the page Susan Howe’s slice included in Concordance.
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:
snipped from the image above
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 readingis 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.
“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.
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To unravel and at the same moment more vigilantly wend through the rhythms, speeches, dictions, deformations, and cadences presenced in the poem.
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The poem undertakes the task of deciphering and embodying a “particularizable” prosody of one’s living.
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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).
