I'm super excited to announce that in the fall I will be
teaching a
graduate course at Parsons that looks at writers and artists who use
occult/spiritual/mystical techniques as a means of vitalizing/mediating their
sociopolitical engagements/activisms. Some of the writers we will look at
include Bhanu Jacasta Kapil,
Robert Kocik, Fred Moten, Jalal Toufic, Etel Adnan, Rob Halpern, Eleni Stecopoulos, Brandon
Shimoda, Melissa Buzzeo, Nathaniel
Mackey, and CA Conrad.
The full course description is in the link below:
Withdrawals: Occult
Poetics & Sociopolitical Practice
This course will look at a broad range of contemporary
writing practices that use both metaphors of the occult and occult techniques
to mediate the writer’s sociopolitical practices. I am interested in exploring
how recourse to the occult often proceeds from cultural impasse, as a means of
producing political and social transformation through the remediation of
traditional, yet often submerged, unofficial, or heretical, cultural knowledge.
I would also like to consider the relationship between “occlusion” (a
withdrawal of the sensible) and the non-representability and/or unavailability
of certain events and subjects. Lastly, this course will consider recourse to
the occult as a means of world-making and symbolic action, often performed under
duress, at a threshold of tangibility. Some related issues that we will explore
include: how an “ensemble of the senses” (Fred Moten) enacts an aesthetic
politics; the way fiction and radical conceptions of the imaginary operate in
relation to trauma; the appropriation of ritual in order to democratize
sociopolitical practice; and the potentialization of embodiment through
spiritual and occult techniques. The texts we will look at include Michel de
Certeau’s Heterologies, Nathaniel
Mackey’s From a Broken Bottle Traces of
Perfume Still Emanate, Fred Moten’s In
the Break, Robert Kocik’s Supple
Science, Etel Adnan’s To Look at the
Sea is to Become What One Is, Jalal Toufic’s Forthcoming, Bhanu Kapil’s Ban
en Banlieu, Rob Halpern’s Commonplace,
and Eleni Stecopoulos’ Visceral Poetics,
as well as shorter selections from a variety of contemporary writers.
From a Discussion of “the occult” for SHIFTER Magazine
Karl Marx writes in his “Economic and Philosophical
Manuscripts of 1848,” that the “senses therefore become theoreticians in their
immediate practice.” While it is a phrase that has been repeated countless
times, is it worth dwelling with again. What, I wonder, becomes the sense of
theory (or a theory of the senses) when one becomes synaesthesiac in the wake
of the disaster; when what we see also makes us hear (or touch, or smell, or
taste)? Where hearing in fact supercedes seeing, overcoming the hegemony of the
ocular? I think of Marx’s proposition as an essentially aesthetic one—one of
the few in his work. Likewise, we may think of latter Marxists, Antonio Gramsci
in particular, for problematizing a discourse of the senses through his
privileging of “common sense” as the basis for revolutionary practice. What,
too, if our common sense involves a negation of the senses? A withdrawal into
the eidetic, the subtle; into non-representational modes of meaning-making
(such are sound and gesture and movement)? At what point does language, as that
upon which our common sense largely depends, become non-meaningful, does it
refuse the reduction of “nonmeaning” and “phonic substance” for a “universal
grammar” (to quote some key phrases from Fred Moten’s In the Break). Music and sound performance, in Moten’s book,
examine the ways that meaning-making becomes irreducible to forms of life
marked by the struggle for autonomy and impropriety. That which is musical
and/or sonorous (i.e., noisy) in the visual mark the place where the visual is
“cut” (another Moten term) in order to mark a differentiation within the
otherwise present and self-same (ipseity),
a differentiation (alterity) which,
after Derrida, Moten poses as a necessary condition of possibility for a
universalism, a universal freedom to which the Black Radical Aesthetic
Tradition in particular strives. In the passage I chose to look at today, Moten
bears witness to the occlusion of the visual faced with the photograph of
Emmett Till’s casket. The visual is occluded not just because one must look
away, but because the face ruptured and wounded withdraws its essence (or
pictorial sense?) from the looker. In its excess of materiality, in its excess
of nonmeaningful significance, the onlooker is silenced, and in that silence
hears something else: the call to revolutionary action which led to the
decisive events of the Civil Rights Era/emergence of Black Nationalism; the
call to triumph over death; the call, too, of a lost maternity upon which
African-American culture is forged after the Middle Passage, “an insistent
previousness evading each and every natal occasion,” to quote Moten quoting
Nathaniel Mackey. Similarly, in Claude Lanzmann’s Shoah (1985), the filmmaker chooses to represent survivors of the
camps through extreme close-ups of the face. I believe he does so to privilege
an aural-affective content of the face that is in excruciating excess to the
stories the survivors attempt to, but often cannot, tell. The face withdraws,
in this case, because it is too present,
because it says (or remembers) too much; in this way it embodies the concept of
“trace” in Derrida’s and Levinas’ thought. As Jalal Toufic has written of the
face in Lanzmann’s Shoah, the extreme
close-up makes present the “over”; that which is in the diegetic image-track
that would seem occulted, occluded, as though of another world. The
otherworldly, in Toufic, is constituted through trauma; the breakdown of
cultural production, and of empirical and historical reality, in the face of a
incalculable collective trauma. There is a passage in Toufic’s Vampires (2nd Edition)
sublime becomes it articulates concisely the status of haunting in relation to
trauma; that in the throes of such deep trauma, the ghosts do not yet haunt a
place because they have yet to even return. The point of much of Toufic’s work,
as he says in Vampires, is to recall
those ghosts, to provide for them (as he puns on the plight of Palestinians) a
“right of return” through literature, art, and other modes of cultural
production. The text that I chose to look at today, The Withdrawal of Tradition Past a Surpassing Disaster, collects a
number of texts from across Toufic’s many books, as well as from uncollected
texts such as Toufic’s introduction to Etel Adnan’s The Arab Apocalypse. In brief, a surpassing disaster marks a
cultural trauma so intensive that the traditions of that culture can no longer
be sustained. Among his many examples, Toufic sites the Jewish Frankists of 18th
Century Poland/Eastern Europe, who faced with extreme persecution declared a
practice of “redemption through sin,” a negative messianic condition in which
Jacob Frank and his followers enacted their belief that the messiah’s coming
could be expedited through transgression. In other poignant examples, Jewish
students kick-down and deface tombstones in a Jewish cemetery in Berlin; and
Native Americans prohibit that a traditional dance any longer be performed. The
“occult” here marks a withdrawal of the objects and practices of a
culture—their subtlization—after disaster. Withdrawal necessitates
negation—negation through occultation—but also an affirmation through innovation—new
forms of cultural production. By addressing a negative condition of one’s
senses, that a culture’s commonsense can no longer access or invest belief in a
object or ritual—Toufic calls upon his contemporaries to “deserve” their
culture (and I am thinking here of the eponymous essay in his book Deserving Lebanon). Which is to say,
make culture in the rubble that will tarry with the event in order to transcend
it, a dice throw within eternal recurrence that inaugurates new life, or a
resurrection of those withdrawn cultural traditions that would not be
“counterfeit” (a demonic doubling; a return only in appearance). The problem of
the surpassing disaster is to know that we are in one. It is the artist who
discerns this through their work. The senses therefore become theoreticians in
their immediate praxis, yet through the withdrawal of the senses—in the turn of
the senses towards the subtle, virtual, eternally recurrent, eidetic—one grasps
a crucial spiritual response to collective trauma. One of Toufic’s principal
examples of surpassing disaster is the book-length poem by Etel Adnan, The Arab Apocalypse (1989), regarding
the oppression and genocide of itinerant Palestinians during the first days of
the Lebanese Civil War. One of the most curious aspects of Adnan’s poem, much
of which otherwise reads life an Expressionist hymn a la Aime Cesaire’s
“Notebook of return to my native land” or Allen Ginsberg’s “Wichita Vortex
Sutra,” is her inclusion of drawings, many which resemble a kind of
writing—hieroglyphs, petroglyphs, calligraphy—that disrupt the poem’s lines.
Cultural trauma is registered here by a writing the status of which is neither
image, sound, gesture, or text, but all and none of the above. Drawing as
writing and writing as drawing; writing-drawing-writing as intense
aural-acoustic gesture saying saying
saying (Levinas). Similarly, Adnan’s insistent naming of colors throughout
the poem marks the beginning of a world-forming, the names for the colors being
possibly the closest one can come to the non-discursive (or non-existent)
through the nominal-descriptive—a Peircian “firstness” before relation. I have
called the colors in Adnan’s paintings “angel colors” because they seem to
erupt from a realm of non-being, a plenum of pure potential—and physically this
may be attributed to Adnan’s painting with tubes of paint directly onto
canvases with a palette knife. The result of this unique practice are overtones
that affect one much less visually than aurally, acting directly—like sound
vibrations—on the central nervous system.
