Andrew Jaron
Essay
Terror Conduction
Poetry is not innocent when it comes to war.1. Duncan's "Orders"
The “autonomy” of art under capitalism finds its limit-condition, and its inverted image, in oppressive social class divisions enforced by state violence. The effect of this violence seeps into, stains even as it sustains, the very form of free invention.
Not only is high culture supported by barbaric activities, but the poetic act––according to Nietzsche, Bataille, and certain postmodernists––itself makes a war of and on creation.
Such was the signal, or cry, emitted by philosophy at the moment of its separation from myth: “War is the father of all things.” This saying of Heraclitus, which posits the identity of logos and violence, was revised by Empedocles, who in his poem On Nature contended that “All things are composed equally of love and strife.” Nevertheless, an agonism at the heart of existence is here laid bare, a warlike interaction best revealed and preserved in poetic language.
Among contemporary American poets, none has explored the idea that poetry is implicated in war more deeply than Robert Duncan. A magisterial study by Nathaniel Mackey, Gassire’s Lute, 1 demonstrates that, in Duncan’s practice, “Poetry is both haunted and sustained by, ‘hounded’ and sustained by, recollections and confirmations of this primal taint [of violence].” For Duncan, “The poem is a war and the war is a poem” (GL 6:157).
In reference to H. D.’s wartime Trilogy, Duncan wrote that “It is the ‘unalterable purpose’ of the poem to convert the War to its own uses. . . the War is not to be taken for granted as simply an economic or political opportunity or as a disorder, but it is also a Mystery play or dream projection to be witnessed and interpreted, to be endured in order to be understood. The War rises from the dramatic necessity. . .” (cited in GL 6:152-153). Ultimately, both poetry and war are understood through Duncan’s gnostic Freudianism to be expressions of a timeless struggle between Eros and Thanatos, a war that generates the historical unfolding of the World-Poem itself.
As Mackey shows, Duncan’s humanistic outrage––both at the suffering entailed by war and at the the warmakers’ base motivations of profit and power––is complicated by a belief in the necessity of conflict in history and poetry alike. Mackey points out that “War is also an internal characteristic of [Duncan’s poetry], a fact of life at work within each word of which the poem is made” (GL 6:156). In Bending the Bow, Duncan invokes the hermetic invention of the bow and the lyre as a simultaneous event, “a connexion working in both directions.” 2 Thus, the lyric instrument is confounded with an instrument of war.
This “connexion” also is evident in the African legend of Gassire’s lute, which Duncan cites at a crucial moment in his poem “Orders” (BB 77-80). The legend tells of a fierce warrior named Gassire who is impatient to inherit his father’s kingship. Gassire consults a wise man about how to hurry his inheritance. The wise man instructs Gassire to enter battle with a lute slung on his back. During the battle, Gassire’s sons, fighting at his side, are slain and the lute is stained with their blood. After the battle, Gassire is exiled from his native city of Wagadu, whose citizens have grown weary of war. Gassire takes the bloodstained lute with him into the desert and one night is awakened to hear it singing of its own volition. That very night, Gassire’s father dies and the city of Wagadu vanishes from the face of the earth. The legend does not lend itself to easy interpretation, although it is clear that the lyric gift comes at the price of blood.
Duncan significantly revises the legend in his poem “Orders,” a response to the U.S. invasion of the Dominican Republic. Here, Duncan describes the Marines as “hired and conscripted killers” acting “against the power of an idea, against / / Gassire’s lute, the song / / of Wagadu, household of the folk, / / commune of communes / / hidden seed in the hearts of men / / and in each woman’s womb hidden” (BB 77). The song of Gassire’s lute now is held to represent a hidden, but still extant, community–– one, moreover, whose status has been heightened to that of an archetypal “commune of communes.” It is the “power” of this “idea,” articulated by the song of Gassire’s lute, that constitutes the real target of the U.S. invasion.
Mackey explains this blatant revision of the legend as a “symptom” of Duncan’s declared intention in the poem to “put aside / / whatever I once served of the poet, master / of enchanting words and magics. . . For the Good. . . the good of the people, / / the soul’s good” (BB 77), so that Gassire’s lute, that magical destroyer of community, finally is made to sing for the “household of the folk.” Duncan, in Mackey’s view, is attempting here to recast his poetic character from elitist magician to populist servant of the Good (though as Mackey observes, the attempt ends in the assumption of an even more “oracular, rhapsodic voice” [GL 5:93]).
At the high point of the poem, Duncan defines the Good as merely one aspect of an interrelated cosmos: “There is no / / good a man has in his own things except / / it be in the community of every thing; / / no nature he has / / but in his nature hidden in the heart of the living, / / in the great household” (BB 79). This claim––that the nature of each particular thing is determined by its relation to the whole––is a commonplace of occult lore as well as of dialectical philosophy. With his next breath, however, Duncan makes the statement that is crucial to integrating the meaning of this poem entitled “Orders”: “The cosmos will not / / dissolve its orders at man’s evil.” That is, the attributes (whether good or evil) of individual beings are secondary to their true, albeit “hidden,” nature, which springs from the interrelatedness of all beings. The indissoluble orders of the cosmos consist of these secret linkages: the presence of All within Each is the primary fact of nature.
Moreover, none of the actions of individual beings, including their coming into being and passing away, can alter the pattern of the Whole: in the poem, Duncan quotes Proclus to emphasize this point: “‘That which is corrupted is corrupted with reference to / itself but not destroyed with reference to the universe. . .’ ” (BB 79, from Proclus’s commentary on Plato’s Timaeus). Change occurs only with reference to the particular, not to the universal. The corollary of this insight is that neither “man’s evil” nor man’s good can change the world.
Wagadu, therefore, can be described as a “commune of communes,” as the very paradigm of interrelatedness, because it represents the cohabitation of good and evil in our hearts. If Duncan, contrary to the original legend of Gassire’s lute, identifies the song of the lute with “the song / / of Wagadu,” it is because he maintains a gnostic belief in the embrace of Eros and Thanatos––which brings him to affirm the secret relation between “man’s evil” and aesthetic beauty. He makes the following equation: “. . . rage, / grief, dismay transported––but these / are themselves transports of beauty! The blood / / streams from the bodies of his sons / to feed the voice of Gassire’s lute” (BB 79).
The blood that is spilled by “man’s evil” cannot dissolve the orders of the cosmos, but instead flows into the “voice of Gassire’s lute,” that is, into the changeless beauty of that pattern of patterns, that interrelation of love and strife “hidden in the heart of the living.”
2. Bataille's Disorders
Ineluctably, Duncan’s open form closes upon itself. Here, the commotion of the parts is stilled at the height of the Whole, whose pattern persists eternally. Creation is indestructible, inasmuch as creation and destruction become mirror-aspects of one another. Yet the formlessness of a bloodstain seeps out of this wellrounded order. The stain possesses no pattern, and resembles nothing other than itself.
This stain stands for the Chaos that cannot be reconciled to Order. In a cosmos ruled by the self-resemblance of hidden orders, what place does non-resemblance have? As a return of the repressed, it seeps scandalously from that line of darkness that divides the self-mirroring symmetries. Its asymmetrical trace provokes the suspicion that, as Adorno put it, “the Whole is the untrue.”
Or, in Bataille’s words (from Documents), “affirming that the universe resembles nothing and is only formless amounts to saying that the universe is something like a spider or spit,” something, that is, “that has no rights in any sense and gets itself squashed everywhere, like a spider or an earthworm.” For Bataille, the cosmos will dissolve its orders at man’s evil. Yet Bataille’s fetishization of evil itself represents only the mirror- reversal of an officially sanctioned moral ideology. Bataille, like Duncan, strives poetically to inscribe destruction within creation but, like Duncan, falls prey to anthropomorphism by projecting the antagonisms of the human heart onto the workings of the cosmos.
Moreover, the binary logic of mutually conditioning and implicating powers (“good vs. evil”) can only produce what Bataille himself has called a “restricted economy.” Evil remains imprisoned by its negation of the Good. Only a sovereign economy, one that is free to exceed its own limit-conditions, can do justice to the fact of non-resemblance.
3. A Cosmo-Political Treatise
The concept of a system that does not resemble itself, that supports itself by expenditure, that ultimately cannot contain itself has been formulated not only in the philosophy of Bataille, but in physics, with Nobel prizewinner Ilya Prigogine’s theory of “dissipative structures.” Prigogine’s theory recognizes that complex systems (both living and nonliving) are structured by dissipation: the organization of such systems arises from their openness to disorganization.3
Dissipative structures appear to be poised, more or less precariously, between chaos and order. Indeed, they maintain or increase their orderliness by incorporating disorder: here, random fluctuations incite (r)evolutionary development. Structuration results not from a “top-down” determinism directed by the Whole, but from a “bottom- up” indeterminism inherent to the agitation of the parts.
The agitation of the parts has revolutionized the Whole at least five times in cosmic history: namely, in the nonlinear series leading from atomic, to molecular, to biological, to social, to linguistic systems of interaction. Through these successive levels, new and unprecedented properties of matter have emerged––properties that cannot be reduced to those of the interacting elements themselves. For example, the atoms that compose water are not themselves fluid; the components of life are not themselves alive; the elements of language in isolation are meaningless: in each case, a form of interactivity poised between order and chaos4 has resulted in an ontological breakthrough. In this new version of materialism, the mirror-relation between macrocosm and microcosm is shattered, and the radical non-resemblance between the faces, the phases, of existence is demonstrated.
Equilibrium = stasis (or death). Therefore, systems of emergence must maintain themselves in a state of disequilibrium, or emergency. To accomplish this, such systems must remain open to their environments: by doing so, they will internalize chaos, circulating the non-identical as identity. The circulatory apparatus must be composed of positive (change-promoting) and negative (change-inhibiting) feedback loops, complexly entangled. Furthermore, the complexity of such systems cannot be reduced to any one element of the system. No part can determine or represent the Whole. And conversely, the emergency of being can be maintained only if the structure of the Whole does not control the interaction of the parts.
This cosmo-political law holds for human societies as well: basic forms of organization (including language) that emerge from social interaction cannot be reduced to the intentionality of group or individual actors; at the same time, these self-organizing (agency-transcending) forms remain susceptible to disequilibria (emergencies) set in motion by human agency. Here, it is relevant to cite the thoroughgoing attempt to “incorporate Prigogine’s insights into the study of human history” undertaken by Manuel De Landa in his book A Thousand Years of Nonlinear History.5 De Landa’s aim is “not simply to assume that society forms a system, but to account for this systematicity as an emergent property of some dynamical process.”6
As De Landa writes, “Even though the world is inherently nonlinear and far from equilibrium, its [socioeconomic] homogenization meant that those areas that had been made uniform began behaving objectively as linear equilibrium structures, with predictable and controllable properties. In other words, Western societies transformed the objective world (or some areas of it) into the type of structure that would ‘correspond’ to their theories.”7 Inevitably, attempts to freeze the structure of the world through the imposition of globalized systems of power are defeated by reality’s “inherent” nonlinearity: the rights of what De Landa calls “self-organized heterogeneity” are reasserted as key control parameters reach a critical melting point. Here, the world-system (sometimes abruptly) undergoes a “phase transition,” moving from a frozen to a fluid state.
4. The Poetics of Emergency
At the present moment, we are witnessing an historic phase transition from a frozen world-system, characterized by the Cold War’s equilibristic balance of power, to a more fluid system characterized by geopolitical multipolarity. All efforts by a vestigial superpower to impose a Law of Resemblance upon this newly emerging system have so far met with failure.
In a system of sufficient complexity, causality is always local, never global: the fluid (or nonlinear) interactions that are a defining feature of complexity come to resist the freezing effect of global directives. At the present moment, Empire is opposed by Swarm. Resistance to U.S. imperialism now is manifested by a leaderless swarm of actors and organizations. Such forms of resistance often take the form of self-organized networks linked by nodes, no one of which can “see” or control the organization in its entirety. Most conspicuously, terrorist networks take this form; however, swarming is increasingly exhibited by other political movements (such as the Zapatistas in Mexico) as well.
Researchers at the Rand Corporation, a government-sponsored think tank, have studied the features of such networks in the hope of finding ways to counteract them: “The rise of networks means that power is migrating to nonstate actors, because they are able to organize into sprawling multiorganizational networks (especially ‘all-channel’ networks, in which every node is connected to every other node) more readily than can traditional, hierarchical, state actors. . . . Information-age threats are likely to be more diffuse, dispersed, multidimensional, nonlinear, and ambiguous than industrial-age threats.”8
The researchers identify the “swarming” capability of such networks as the most serious threat of all. Swarming, they write, “is quite different from traditional mass- and maneuver-oriented approaches to conflict. . . . [It] is designed mainly around the deployment of myriad, small, dispersed, networked maneuver units. Swarming occurs when the dispersed units of a network of small (and perhaps some large) forces converge on a target from multiple directions. The overall aim is sustainable pulsing––swarm networks must be able to coalesce rapidly and stealthily on a target, then dissever and disperse, immediately ready to recombine for a new pulse. . . . The Chechen resistance to the Russian army and the Direct Action Network’s operations in the anti–World Trade Organization ‘Battle of Seattle’ both provide excellent examples of swarming behavior.”9
Swarming, in other words, maximizes the advantage of formlessness over form, undermining and even toppling what De Landa calls “linear equilibrium structures” through nonlinear action. Because such action is self-organizing and self-producing (or, in the terminology of complexity theory, autopoietic), it is liable to occur spontaneously at all levels of social organization. Not only does Swarm threaten Empire’s monuments and armies, but its linguistic “linear equilibrium structures” as well. At the level of language, swarming is a sign of poetic activity.
While the dominant ideology attempts to globalize control of language, and thus to equilibrate meaning, language itself remains a complex system poised between order and chaos, susceptible to poetic convulsion. In poetic language, linear equilibrium structures of meaning become the targets of swarming attacks. Lines of poetic force converge upon a unit of meaning from multiple directions, in an ever-renewing play of pulses that dissever and recombine the relations of sense and sensation. In this way, the poetic act breaks the (ideologically imposed) mirror-symmetry between word and world.10
Here, Duncan’s “connexion” between the bow and the lyre–– the instrument of war and the instrument of song––becomes legible once again. However, the Heraclitean X of the equation must be revised: it is not war, but disequilibrium that is the progenitor of all. The poetic word is the latest extension of that series of broken symmetries that made the world.
In poetry, then, meaning exceeds its limits and becomes, at best, a mode of “terror conduction.”11 (The apparition of the sublime, as Kant and the Romantics defined it, brings about the structural failure of meaning: in his “Analytic of the Sublime,” Kant emphasized its “chaos, . . . its wildest and most irregular disorder,” which induces an “astonishment amounting almost to terror.”12 From Romanticism to postmodernism, the poetic act has always conducted language toward this opening.)
Yet where the bow inflicts, the lyre inflects: creation re-creates destruction as an Opening to Otherness. This abyssal passage will be negotiated by a subject without identity (that is, one standing ecstatically outside the “linear equilibrium structure” of I = I). Gassire’s lute, as soon as it is stained with the blood of war, begins singing of its own accord, playing without need of a player. The lyric instrument refuses to serve as the instrument of agency: unlike the bow, the lyre undergoes metamorphosis once it has been stained by, inscribed by, suffering. This fateful bifurcation marks the advent of poetic autonomy.
The image of a bloodstained lute that plays itself recasts, in mythic terms, the concept of the self-organized criticality of the cry. Here, “the system [of singing, of signing] tunes itself towards optimum sensitivity to external inputs. . . towards the critical point where single events have the widest possible range of effects.”13 Whatever enters language at this pitch must circulate chaotically as a form of emergency.
The precondition of truth, according to Adorno, is that which gives a voice to suffering. However, the imperative of lyric––as the ekstasis of lament––is not to preserve suffering in a reified crystal, but instead to move with suffering, to trace its cry against its own condition as a movement toward something other than itself: Utopia, or Wagadu.
Notes