The Politics of Literature in a Divided 21st Century

Katharina Donn

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781000074260
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Letteratura
• Subtopic: Critica letteraria moderna

How does literature matter politically in the 21st century? This book offers an ecocritical framework for exploring the significance of literature today. Featuring a diverse body of texts and authors, it develops a future-oriented politics embedded in those transgressive realities which our political system finds impossible to tame. This book re-imagines political agency, voices, bodies and borders as transformative processes rather than rigid realities, articulating a 'dia-topian' literary politics. Taking a contextual approach, it addresses such urgent global issues as biopolitics, migration and borders, populism, climate change, and terrorism. These readings revitalize fictional worlds for political enquiry, demonstrating how imaginative literature seeds change in a world of closed-off horizons. Prior to the pragmatics of power-play, literary language breathes new energy into the frames of our thought and the shapes of our affects. This book shows how relation, metamorphosis and enmeshment can become salient in a politics beyond the conflict line.

1 Unmappable Gestures

Politics of Literature in the Age of Donald Trump

The dystopian is the new real. As the name of the president of the United States flares on hotel towers over Chicago’s riverbanks and gleams above mid-town Manhattan, it seems that the finance- and data-flows of late capitalism are suffocating the democratic public sphere. Like “monstrous and mutant algae,” as Félix Guattari (2008, 29) described Donald Trump’s particular brand of invasive real estate development, patterns of political, capital and information-driven power have becomes so intricately entwined as to form a pervasive parasitical presence on democratic life.

Meanwhile, in 2015: 23-year-old Johari Osayi Idusuyi settles into her seat on the podium at a Trump rally. She takes out a book she was carrying in her bag, holds it up for the camera to catch the cover and starts reading. It is not just any book; the cover now displayed on TV screens features the black hood of Claudia Rankine’s Citizen, a documentation of the piercing pain inflicted by systemic racism. Her act of resistance, savvy in its insouciance, proves why reading matters today. It enthused Huffington Post writer Claire Fallon in November 2015 to hail a new movement: “Political protest through pointed book-reading.” Yet this protest is not of the traditionally oppositional kind; indeed, Idusuyi’s ambivalent position is simultaneously complicit and subversive, which is precisely why it symbolizes the challenges of literary politics in a 21st century reality. As democracy itself has become shot through with autocratic and oligarchic elements, politics has lost the clear-cut conflict lines which existed at least on the surface of the 20th century. Now entangled in nodes that threaten implication, the position of democratic agents is unsettled. The challenge they face is not a binary choice between complicity or opposition, but the need for a differently articulated position that is as dynamic and complex as the political realities they face. Politics, as Guattari notes with significant foresight, “is no longer a question of creating an unequivocal ideology” but necessitates the “reconstruction of human praxis” (23) lest we revert to the reductionist outlooks on which charismatic leaders thrive. This requires a re-worlding of political subjecthood and the space it positions itself in per se, as only such an alternative positioning might provide a vision for a more future-oriented, less entangled existence.

‘Is there a kind of thought that does not turn into tyranny?’ (“Gibt es ein Denken, das nicht tyrannisch wird?”) is a question Hannah Arendt noted in her Denktagebuch in the 1950s. It captures precisely our current dilemma. Where, after all, is the place for utopian thought in a public sphere so deeply entwined in largely invisible powers? It seems desperately needed, as utopia offers the kind of imagination that “makes the actual world seem strange,” as Paul Ricœur claimed in 1986, 299f, shattering the seemingly obvious with doubt and affirming the possibility of living differently from the way we presently do. A century earlier Oscar Wilde went even further, asserting that “A map of the world that does not include Utopia is not worth even glancing at, for it leaves out the one country where Humanity is always landing” (2001, 141). It is worth noting that, in contrast to today’s ambivalent positionality as exemplified by Johari Osayi Idusuyi, utopia here is defined by its unequivocal mappability despite retaining a certain lure of the beyond. It offers an ‘other’ place from which to critique the present, ensuring a safe space for the imagination even as it develops worlds and narratives that are potentially wildly oppositional to the consensus of their time. Utopia, in Wilde’s sense, thus is a side effect of the map of the world and akin to the flip side of a coin. It appears as a foil, yet is already integrated into the system.

Despite the enticing sheen of Google Earth, though, 21st century worlds are becoming un-mappable to the conventional means of clear-cut boundaries and differentiated territories. The forces of what Guattari calls “de-territorialisation” (2008, 30), the power of which the Trump towers unapologetically symbolize, easily transverse the illusory bounds of mappable territory. Yet this de-territorialisation, as a pattern that defines contemporary life, is politically disinterested. However globalized the slow violence (Nixon 2011) of climate change and economic exploitation might be, terrorist networks and refugee migrations are all equally de-territorialized, too. Politically, thus, this issue cannot be grasped by a simple juxtaposition of neoliberal rightwing globalization versus left-wing thought. Re-territorialisation, manifested in the clarity of de-limited nation states, has historically engendered and continues to enforce violence, as Donald Trump’s 2017 inauguration speech made blatantly clear when his affirmation that “we all bleed the same red blood of patriots” awoke ideologies of soil-and-blood from their graves.

Unmappability, thus, is a Ianus-faced phenomenon, but it also offers new opportunities to articulate a more humane agency elsewhere. This search for what it means to be, live and act humanely, though, requires a departure from the kind of thinking that moves along maps. Utopias might have entered the public imagination in the shape of territorialized visions, countries to be travelled to, most famously in Thomas More’s eponymous 1516 satire. Yet this de-limitation also opens the genre to charges of frozen perfection, costuming “a will to power over all those individuals for whom you are plotting an ironclad happiness” (Jameson 2000, 383) in the seductive garments of visions of a better life. This raises questions not about the nature or ideological content of the utopian as such, but addresses a more fundamental dilemma between a politics of motion versus the rigidity of ideological end points; how can the velocity and energy of the initial creative impetus be retained without inadvertently being channelled into a petrified utopian ideal? An open society can paradoxically become set in stone; Saint-Simon’s early 19th century socialist utopia, for example, begins with passionate revolutionary activity but ends in a final diagram which inscribes the symmetries and hierarchies of his utopian rule into the brickworks of a metaphoric house. Used with scathing clarity by Ricœur to exemplify how utopian thinking might carry the seeds of its own failure when it “becomes a picture; time has stopped. […] Everything must comply with the model” (1986, 295), this also indicates a conceptual difference between a politics in motion, and one that seeks fulfilment. It is the former, dynamic conception that interests here, as it offers an opportunity to translate the utopian impulse into the 21st century in an updated, Diatopian form.

After all, Jameson’s premature denunciation of all utopian thought, as cited above, was articulated on the basis of the traditional canon’s obsession with accurate symmetries and mappable societies, and is thus based on a reductive notion of the genre. The utopian desire to infuse current reality with doubt plays out much more openly in what Sean Austin Grattan (2017) terms the “critical utopias” of the 1970s, in which authors such as Ursula LeGuin, Octavia Butler, Margaret Atwood, JP Delaney, or Marge Piercy create alternative worldings without becoming trapped in monolithic answers. Contrary to the returning declarations of the end of utopia, the end of mappability, thus, does not entail the end of the utopian impulse – it just cannot be located on Oscar Wilde’s map anymore. When Karl Mannheim declared such an end of utopia in 1929 in Ideologie und Utopie (1995), his argument that society was disintegrating into piecemeal approaches that left no opportunity for larger visions proved to be astonishingly blind to the totalitarian near future of the first half of the 20th century. Yet it can be argued that Mannheim’s notion of circularity, which renders any evaluative standpoint impossible, has returned in a neoliberal era. Indeed, Mitchum Huehls voiced similar concerns when he noted in 2016 that “[G]iven neoliberalism’s omnipresence, the position you hold will be just as neoliberal as the position you’re against” (5). At the end of the 20th century, Zygmunt Baumann had equally observed that the liquidation of modernity, rendering fluid all that was solid, would flatten out visions of change; and frustrated with the state of Western capitalism, Slavoj Žižek took a similarly apocalyptic standpoint when he declared that “nobody seriously considers possible alternatives to capitalism any longer … it seems easier to imagine ‘the end of the world’ than a far more modest change in the mode of production” (1994, 1). Yet even if this list could be continued even further, reading these late 20th century and early 21st century voices with and against Mannheim also opens up a host of perspectives on how to escape this circle and to re-instate critique. After all, Mannheim himself sees the historical process and emergent correlations in history as a way beyond this very doublebind.

This pattern of capitulations to ideological entrapment can be traced back to Mannheim’s view of ideology as a vicious circle which, by virtue of being engrained in every aspect of thought and life, undermines any possibility of critical evaluation. Yet this is, ultimately, politically reactionary, submitting to the sense that “we cannot put our social life into radical question precisely because we are the products of it, because we bear in our bones and fibres the very traditions we are foolishly seeking to objectify,” as Terry Eagleton (1994, 3) phrases it. Recent political U-turns, for instance by Žižek when, in an interview with the New Statesman in January 2019, he endorsed Donald Trump in the hope of a “crack appear[ing] in the liberal centrist hegemony” demonstrate that this apocalyptic view of an ideological entrapment, allegedly only to be breached by violently populist white supremacism, is a dead end. Paul Ricœur’s claim that “the only way to get out of the circularity in which ideologies engulf us is to assume a utopia, declare it, and judge an ideology on this basis” (1986, 172), in contrast, insists on both the possibility and need for an ‘outside’ to current realities. The gesture of declaration here is particularly interesting, as it enacts a performative impulse rather than prescribing an alternative normative order. Yet just as the ideological landscape has changed since he wrote this in 1986, ideas of what such an ‘outside’ might entail need to change and adjust, too. In the 21st century, imagining change needs to take a different shape.

As I am tracing the development of utopian literature into what I will propose as the Diatopian impulse, I have already repeatedly referenced the performative qualities of a politics in motion. Ideas, as Terry Eagleton emphasizes in Ideology (1994), are an “active force,” and however virulent ideologies of patriarchy, racism, neo-colonialism, or free-marketeering remain, they are never fully internalized nor accepted “without a struggle” (19). Literary politics does not require a utopian idea to be rendered absolute, yet neither is it purely experimental play with configurations. It rather proposes a non-representational mode of thought, seeking not analogy or any correspondence between word and a pre-existing world, but free movement from the interior to the exterior, riding difference.

While the border wall, as erected between the United States and Mexico, seems to be the emblem of a world order defined by unsurmountable dual opinions, this violent clarity is actually misleading. The issue of a politics of literature in a convoluted, unmappable present, thus, cannot be approached in terms of the traditional differentiation of the political sphere into ‘left’ and ‘right,’ and neither can the de-territorialized, transversal currents shaping our reality be made to stop. Driving beneath such partisan divides, literature drills through to the deeper conditions of our agency, positionality and voice. The recurrent rhetoric of border walls only marks the deadly absurdity of retaining the need for clear-cut distinctions, be they nationalist, racist, or normative, proving the impotence of wall constructions which can destroy lives, but, driven by a mistaken nostalgia for sedentary rigidity, cannot reshape the world into a fixity it most likely never had.

When attempting to explain this seeming paradox of political forces seeking fixed, territorialised positions in a de-territorialised world, Italian philosopher Roberto Esposito approaches our contemporary condition through the ongoing negations of ‘community’ and ‘immunity’ – a sense of exemption and protection that is in continuous friction with the responsibility of care for one another in our coexistences and cohabitations. This negotiation, as such, is not exclusive to the present-day but can be traced through the history of humankind. What Esposito identifies in our present-day condition, though, is the key to current political challenges. According to Esposito, this immunitary dispositif has become the “rotating axis around which is constructed both the practices and the imaginary of an entire civilization” (2008, 4). The contact of the globalized self with different forms of contagion and responsivity, ranging from cyber viruses to AIDS and globalized terrorist grooming, has increased the perceived sense of risk to such an extent that self-immunization has morphed into the core ideological tenet of our times. Yet when he argues that it is precisely the tearing down of walls such as the Berlin Wall, “a wall both real and symbolic,” which engenders the construction of new walls until it “perverted the very idea of community into the form of a fortress under attack” (2008, 6) he puts his finger on the dangerous paradox this entails: “immunization at high doses is the sacrifice of the living, which is to say, every form of qualified life, to simple survival” (2008, 7). A politics of literature that retains the political impulses of the Diatopian, but shies away from the rigidity of fixed orders, can address this double-blind by creating imaginative realities as worlds performed and enacted in constant motion.

To explore what such a literary politics of transversality and unmappability can entail, let’s return to what Osayi Idusuyi was reading at that fateful rally:

“The wrong words enter your day like a bad egg in your mouth and puke runs down your blouse, a dampness drawing your stomach in toward your rib cage. […] You are reminded of a conversation you had recently, comparing the merits of sentences constructed implicitly with “yes, and” rather than “yes, but.” You and your friend decided that “yes, and” attested to a life with no turn-off, no alternative routes: you pull yourself to standing, soon enough the blouse is rinsed, it’s another week, the blouse is beneath your sweater, against your skin, and you smell good.”

(Rankine 2014, 8)

Searching for a language that says “yes, but”: this is what thinking about political speech today entails. Against the limping untruths of ideological non-thought, poetic speech engenders the kind of thought that dares to imagine new ways of inhabiting our world. Yet these sentences starting with “but” do not people an alternate land of utopian hope or dystopian demise. Rankine’s writing is Diatopian because it addresses a “you,” a poetic gesture that traces the scars of racist violence. Cutting across time, skin and mind, it is also deeply embedded in bodies, implicated in the ideological stratosphere of systemic racism it strives against but cannot fully escape. In her ecological feminism, Stacy Alaimo describes this double-bind as a core principle shaping practices of resistance, noting that “[I]f we are all constituted by discourses implicated in oppressive systems, there is never any untainted path to liberation” (2000, 9).

Physically sick from taking every-day blows, of friends confusing the names of the only two black people they know, of teachers who do not even consider that a white girl might be copying the answers of a black student, the outcry that should follow never does. The blouse is tucked back in and the hurt banished inside. Being a citizen in Citizen means being engulfed in a desperate conflict between insult and survival instinct in which the sentence that begins with “but” taunts and evades you. “Every day your mouth opens and receives the kiss the world offers, which seals you shut.” Flows, parameters, patterns of dis-and re-assembly increasingly shape not merely Guattari’s de-territorialized globalized capitalism, but also define the working of ideologies such as the “stratifying system o...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Introduction: Towards a Diatopian Politics of Literature
• 1 Unmappable Gestures: Politics of Literature in the Age of Donald Trump
• 2 Uncontainable Bodies: Posthuman Biopolitics
• 3 Transversing the Event: Beyond the Trauma of Terrorism
• 4 Emergence, Submergence, Insurgence: Politics on Liquid Ground
• 5 Unravelling the Nation State: Openwork Lives in Migrant Graphic Narratives
• Index