A classic work (originally published in 1990) theorizing aesthetics and politics starting from the ways in which the experiences of people in the Caribbean have historically been organized. By a renowned intellectual and poet from Martinique. Translated from French (and not just any French, but a French infused with Creole and torqued through linguistic innovation and play that is central to the theoretical work being done).
Gonna be honest here, I do not bring enough to this book to get out of it even close to all the richness it contains. But I think I got some of the basics. He doesn’t use this language, exactly, but the book is about different logics that organize different cultures, different ways of moving through the world, and the world itself. Classic Western culture of the last five centuries is characterized by an impulse to projection into the world via linear movement, to assertion of legitimacy via connection to some mythical root, to linear notions of time, to knowing the world through a particular kind of rationalism that subsumes particularities under generalities and enables power-over, to relating to difference as expressive of static essences – to, in short, all of the ways of being wound through colonial and other forms of domination. That is not the only logic out there in the world, of course – he also mentions, for example, the circular temporalities of Buddhist cultures, and others beside. But his main focus beyond the Western cultural logic is what he describes as Relation, a cultural logic that has emerged from cracks in the world that the Western logic has produced, particularly in the Caribbean and other places where domination was organized through the social form of the plantation. Relation, it seems to me, is both a description of how the world is in practice increasingly organized – the classical world of the 18th century West is no more, regardless of the violent nostalgia of white nationalists – but also as something to aspire to, something that some embrace while other do not and that all of us should, and still a context in which great harm can be done by those with a will to dominate. It is a world of complexity, of networks of difference in which particularities understand themselves through their inevitable relationships with other particularities but are never forced to become other than they are through generalization. Its associated logic of movement is not linear projection with the intent to dominate (nor the exile such domination can impose on others, nor the circular nomadism of certain other cultures) but what he describes as “errantry,” a kind of non-linear but deliberate movement through the world via which connection is cultivated. All of this is explored in a lot of different ways, not all of which I completely understood.
I read this because there is one particular idea that Glissant uses that I think might be useful to me, and I wanted to make sure I understand it well enough to know for sure and to use it respectfully. Another feature of classical Western cultural logics is a drive towards what he calls transparency – to relating to everything as if it can be completely known, including other people and peoples. This is connected to the colonial tendency to generate knowledge about the colonized in ways that render them knowable and therefore controllable objects. In contrast, Relation is premised on respecting the reality of opacity – that we cannot ever know everything that there is to know about other people, other cultures. Moreover, accepting opacity means accepting the personhood and agency of those who are different, rather than indulging in the violent pretense of knowing enough to know better (in the ways the colonizer always claims to know better). Mutual opacity, and respect for mutual opacity, is foundational to the kinds of nonhierarchical relations across difference that are emerging as Relation emerges, and certainly part of what the aspiartion for Relation points towards. Opacity is both a feature of the world, because we really *can’t* know everything about other people and it is only the violent generalization of Western cultural logics that allows us to pretend that we do. But it is also something that we must fight for – “We clamor for the right to opacity for everyone” (194).
Anyway…any work like this inevitably has strengths and weaknesses, but there’s lots about it that I just don’t feel capable of evaluating. But it is, overall, fascinating and brilliant, if sometimes quite hard work.
Originally posted by Scott on Goodreads.