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Article Excerpt
Drawing on a montage of specific cases from diverse political landscapes that echo well beyond their specificity, this article examines border poetics enacted in international migration, biopolitical poetics harnessed to the resistance by refugees to government regimentation of their displacement, the disruptive potential of poetics in the war in Iraq, and the poetics of poverty and wealth in Jamaica. KEYWORDS: ontopoetics; resistance; poetic geography; another geography; borderlines
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No. Painting is not done to decorate apartments. It is an instrument of war. --Pablo Picasso
Shortly before the United States went to war in Iraq in March 2003, on February 5, the US secretary of state, Colin Powell, walked past a blue cloth hanging on a wall on the way to a meeting of the United Nations General Assembly. Powell was at the United Nations to deliver a call for intervention in Iraq. Behind the blue cloth was Guernica, Picasso's masterful commentary on the devastation of the Spanish Civil War. The cloth had been draped over the massive canvas only a day earlier in preparation for Powell's visit. (1)
When questioned, the UN authorities stated that the blue cloth had been draped over Guernica to create a media-friendly background. (2) To many, the blue cloth was a "cover-up" at the behest of the United States. Not unexpectedly, once the news of the event was circulated, the discourse around Guernica's veiling proliferated. Reaching for the present through the historical horizon, Guernica had come alive. The question of who was behind the covering act remains unanswered. Ultimately, the answer is not even central to the significance of the event. More central is the act itself, which figures as the locus of a deeply political move. The act not only foreshadows the covert intentionalities that may have given rise to it, but also highlights the paradoxes and ironies through which it tells a revelatory tale about international relations.
Not only did the veil bring Guernica into focus, it also, and paradoxically, heightened its political relevance. In effect, the attempt to move Guernica from the physical horizon instead revealed Guernica's a priori place in the historical political horizon. As if to attest to Pablo Picasso's sentiment that art is not merely a silent decoration to power, Guernica resurfaced as an instrument of political struggle. The veil on Guernica had only camouflaged its unexpected insurrection.
Guernica's revolt attests to more than the painting's enduring political significance. In broad terms, it also highlights and attests to the enduring "work" of art in general, from poetics to aesthetics, as political praxis in all political landscapes. (3) Specifically, and more significantly, it highlights the role art plays as political praxis in international relations, even though the discipline of international relations devotes little attention to it, whether as poetics, aesthetics, or theater. (4)
Guernica's sudden insurrection brings this denial into light, and above all, its brief global play serves as a symbol for the obscured role aesthetics and poetics play in politics in international relations. Guernica demonstrates that although often shrouded, concealed, or altogether suppressed, aesthetics and poetics are almost always constructive political practices in policy and conduct of international relations. Even Powell's speech, otherwise regarded as masterful realpolitik, displays unmistakable theatricality, harnessing the constitutive force of aesthetics and poetics in the service of a political project.
Using the UN Security Council as his stage, or canvas, Powell orchestrated his story through a narrative of imminent dangers and millenarian moral imperatives. Crucial to his orchestration was the theatrical mastery of the narrative grounds. Flashy maps of Iraq and the satellite pictures of Iraqi military weapons sites were displayed in juxtaposition to the pictures of the chemical-weapons victims in Iraq--strangely reminiscent of the twisted bodies and silent cries of the victims of the Spanish Civil War depicted in Guernica. In the tableau of death and dangers he conjured, Powell was every bit as poetical and aesthetic, even fictional, creating his own painting as an instrument of war. Unlike Guernica's poetic call to protest the violence of war, Powell's political painting instead called on war ostensibly to "prevent" an impending "apocalyptic violence."
Indeed, Guernica's apparition on the political front, from the veiling to Powell's theatrics, exemplify art (as theater, poetics, and aesthetic) working as political praxis. Art is not simply a tool in constructing mere form or facade. It also creates the conditions of political agency and conduct. Taken seriously and registered, art in all forms, from poetics to aesthetics, is a vehicle through which the political articulates itself. Further, in poetic, aesthetic, and theatrical "assemblages," art acquires active agency, enacting politics and ethics in national and international times and spaces through the rhythms and tempos it employs. (5)
Undoubtedly, politics and ethics expressed in such assemblages is a function of the prevailing historical political conditions and positions in which poetics and aesthetics operate. Yet whether poetics and aesthetics endorse dominant relations of power or work counterhegemonically, or even transgressively in relation to prevailing conditions, is beside the point. Guernica occasions a view of international politics in which aesthetic and poetic conditions and agencies in international relations become perceptible or visible.
Against this background, I situate my analysis in this article in a montage of several cases from diverse political landscapes. Borrowing from Edouard Glissant, (6) I consider these cases as echoes from the world--"echos-monde"--that are the obscured expressions of peoples and places at work in the matter of the world, "prophesying or illuminating it, diverting it or conversely gaining strength within it."
Every individual, every community, forms its own echos-monde, imagined from power or vainglory, from suffering or impatience.... Echos-monde thus allow us to sense and cite the cultures of peoples in the turbulent confluence whose globality organizes our chaos-monde. (7)
The echoes reflect the distinct faces of the world, yet global relations and hierarchies give them meanings beyond their singularity. They are integral to the political and economic geography of the world. Whether in solitary conditions of alterity born in poverty and political oppression or in the unruly linkages established across the boundaries of their political and economic captivity in regimes of nation, ethnicity, or class, they shape the places central to their being. Traveling across and resonating in relation to each other, they acquire greater visibility and practical force in the shifting geographies of the political.
They are part of what the Zapatista movement in Chiapas calls "another geography": "another" not in being fully new to the dominant geographies of states and nations or multinational corporations and investment networks, but in not being sufficiently mapped onto this geography. The echoes registered temporally and spatially expand the geography of politics in theory and praxis.
With this in mind, I discuss four discursive yet interrelated world echoes in the article: the border poetics enacted in international migration; biopolitical poetics harnessed to contemporary refugees' resistance against governmental regimentation of their displacement; the disruptive potential of poetics in the war in Iraq; and the poetics of poverty and wealth at work in Jamaica's neocolonial regimentation in the global capitalist system.
I organize my discussions under the rubric ontopoetical in an effort to call attention to the poetical life (ontos) of politics or the poetical politics of life in these transversal landscapes. My inspiration linking ontos and poesis comes from rich discussions on poetics, aesthetics, politics, and history in the foundational works of Walter Benjamin, Martin Heidegger, Deleuze and Guattari, Julia Kristeva, Michel de Certeau, and Edouard Glissant. (8) Roland Bleiker, Prem Rajaram, (9) and Michael Shapiro, among others, also offer particular insights, specifically linking aesthetics and poetics to politics and history.
Bleiker has already named the growing importance of such insights for the analysis of international relations: "the Aesthetic Turn." For Bleiker, the aesthetic turn signifies a recognition that aesthetic faculties are always integral to shaping the human universe as political faculties. (10) They were and continue to be "central to modern ordering and governing" of our lives. (11) "Whether as images or sounds," faculties cultivated in art "add layers of perception or sensation to the available repertoire of knowledge." (12)
Rajaram, too, calls attention to the role of aesthetics and poetics in politics through what he calls "disruptive writing." (13) For Rajaram, as for Bleiker, the style and form of writing have direct links to articulated content and meaning as well as the ethic that is embraced and advanced. They are therefore political in "understandings of space, time, and hence identity." The radically different style and form of poetry, novel, painting, or art in general, when employed in discourses and practices of international relations, he argues, afford a certain "distance from the empirical reality," not to disown or ignore the reality but to "disassociate its rationality from its trajectory [thus] preventing rationality from securely reaching its conclusion, from instrumentally summing up what is known about something." (14) Such distance enables art to interrogate the "fundamentals of political discourse, such as notions of time and space that are taken as neutral facilitators of discourse and action rather than ideologically-loaded premises that disenable as they enable." (15) Distance not only "indicates that the world may be other than it is" but also enables art to "not repeat the empirical world's violence." (16)
Shapiro's work on the aesthetic loci of enunciations as spaces of moral interventions in sanctioned political geographies demonstrates further the practical force of such critical writing. For Shapiro, as for Bleiker and Rajaram, writing stops being merely a disruption to the prevailing idioms inquiry; it also acquires its ethical transformative properties vis-a-vis the dominant modes of thinking and being in the world. Shapiro's contributions call attention to a world richer than hitherto registered, a world in which ways of saying, enunciating, and articulating are not exhaustive of nor ever coterminous with--not even ever sufficient to--the ways of living, being, and doing in the world.
Ultimately, in my view, poetics is in part what shapes the world. It engages and articulates its social and political spaces from poetics' own spatiality--in effect, revealing the poetic geography already in place in the world. Poetics is more definitive of life than exceptional to it, whether the specific role it plays is progressive or supportive of conservative political visions at any one time. First and foremost, poetics is a condition of life, a mode of living, being, thinking, and positioning. It can be observed in the distinct organization and regimentation of the body's rhythms, tempos, sounds, and gestures into political, cultural, and economic relations via societal formations and institutions. (17) In Jacques Ranciere's terms, it is "structure-giving" as well as a "distributive" regime expressed in political, economic, cultural, and social relations. (18)
Poetics is thus a strategy of living, an artful existence, negotiating the trajectories of human agency in...
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