Writing the Disaster
by Jed Rasula

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My general contribution to the topic, “Strategies of Excess,” is to say that excess is already upon us. What follows are some reflections on the public distemper behind a poem I wrote in 1984; and these reflections are coordinated with insights from a book by Maurice Blanchot published in 1980, The Writing of the Disaster, whichbegins with this indelible definition: “The disaster ruins everything, all the while leaving everything intact.”

     Blanchot doesn’t want to consign the disaster to mourning, dispossession, or disappointment; nor does it have anything to do with those parade ground terms, catastrophe and tragedy. The disaster “dismisses all ideas of failure and success,” he says; “it impoverishes all experience, withdraws from experience all authenticity” (12, 51). “The disaster is not our affair and has no regard for us; it is the heedless unlimited” (2). Because such terms seem heavily weighted with metaphysical baggage, disaster appears synonymous with fate. But Blanchot wriggles out of that temptation, repeatedly insisting that there’s no refuge in fatality. Blanchot goes so far as to speak of the “disappointment” of the disaster: it doesn’t comply with our expectations even of negation. So the disaster, “a rip forever ripping apart,* seems to say to us: there is not, to begin with, law, prohibition, and then transgression, but rather there is transgression in the absence of any prohibition, which eventually freezes into Law, the Principle of Meaning” (75), and out of this residue we ourselves are squeezed out as alchemical precipitates of a monstrous provocation. 

     To speak of strategies of excess is to solicit, or at least haplessly submit to, some notion of transgression; and I favor Blanchot’s terms because they specify prohibition and law as anterior to transgression. It’s only by getting into trouble that you find out what trouble means. But can you mean to get into trouble? Trouble, like Blanchot’s disaster, can’t be seized by supplication, known by petition, reached by intention. There is, rather, suddenly and ominously, trouble in mind (as the old blues song has it).

Citing Levinas’ remark, “’Language is itself already skepticism’,” Blanchot characterizes the disaster as a kind of “skeptical gaiety” (77, 76). To write is to practice a happy skepticism, to set the hoop of As If rolling under the apocalyptic menace of disaster. Blanchot refrains from mentioning apocalypse, but such a reckoning is tacit in the way he fertilizes the word disaster by recalling its parts. Désastre, in French, means literally from the stars; and Blanchot is sufficiently indebted to Mallarmé to see in the poet’s dice throw the prefix dé- which désastre shares with a vast retinue of other French words beginning with what is no longer a preposition but a helpless reference to dice (déranger, dériver, désigner and, not least, désir). To write, for Blanchot, is always to write a death sentence (dice sentience). To write is, if not to engage with, to at least feel the pinch of the disaster, clutch of the astral calipers.

     The Holocaust is among the few references to actual historical events in The Writing of the Disaster, but as monstrous and unthinkable as the Holocaust may be, it remains fastened to a particular time and place: “the absolute event of history,” Blanchot points out, is still “a date in history” (47). The force of the disaster, on the other hand, lies “outside history, but historically so: before undergoing it, we (who is not included in this we?) will undergo it” (40). Outside history, but historically so: this memorable phrase offers a crucial presentiment of a state of affairs that’s a bit different from that nineteenth century Eurocentric supposition of a world historical spirit of progress from which much of the world’s population was categorically excluded because they were “people without history.” Looking back, of course, we might say all those subjugated colonial populations were historically placed outside history. But now it behooves us to consider the ways in which the present heyday or twilight or, who knows, wretched dawn of the American imperium is inside history, but ahistorically so. How has this come about? One clue is the slapstick provocation of a verb tense: consider the future perfect—a disaster-bound bit of terminology if there ever was one—the paradigmatic form of which is: it will have been.

     This monstrous apparition, the future perfect—the verb tense—contaminates time with a hypnotic inversion. It takes the past tense and deposits it in the future, and in doing so it smuggles in a sense of historical inevitability, or destiny. It teaches acquiescence of a sort that I think Blanchot may have had in mind in this aphorism: “If you listen to the ‘times,’ you will learn that they tell you in a low voice not to speak in their name, but to be silent in their name” (65). Literature abounds with such silences, though its bounty in this harvest can hardly compete with what we call everyday life. Everyday life gets by: that is its definition. And it gets by with the narcotic booster shot of “the times” (les temps), the weather of the moment, the prevailing wind, and all those little nudges that make the future perfect. The future perfect: but no future at all.

The future perfect is the utopia of what might be called kitsch, if only kitsch implied pogroms and gulags and the auto da fe. (And maybe it does and maybe that’s the horror.) But Blanchot’s scrutiny of the disaster is not meant to identify misguided utopian schemes in order to purge them from the body politic. His concern might be approached by way of one of his favorite poets, René Char. In Leaves of Hypnos—a book written during World War Two when the poet fought in the resistance, and went by the code name Hypnos—he wrote: “Between reality and its report, there is your life which magnifies reality, and this Nazi abasement which ruins its report” (126). Substitute for “Nazi” any more immediate candidate, and Char’s point speaks to the sense of foreclosure one feels in the prevailing trends of public affairs, particularly as those public affairs become indistinguishable from everyday life. It speaks to the way in which, simply by existing, we’re complicit with the disaster.

The Cold War now occasions an odd nostalgia, as if the looming extinction of the species were a comfortable thought. But, in reality, we now face another prospect altogether, one recently commemorated with an Oscar under the title An Inconvenient Truth. Although target vilification is tempting, the disaster Blanchot spoke of in 1980 now has a discernible face: it is a species, our own. How do we protest our own species? It is a conundrum without historical precedent. Listen to Char again with a slight alteration: Between reality and its report, there is your life which magnifies reality, and this species (Homo Sapiens) which ruins its report.

 One of the ways in which I experienced this complicity, and which I offer here not as a mea culpa but as historical testimony, was during the grim declivities of the Reagan era, in which I felt a bit like a fleabitten rodeo contestant, specifically a “dogger,” whose job it is to bring down anything short of a bull by the horns. I got my first computer then, during a year commemorated in advance by George Orwell; an Epson with green pixels on an olive gray screen; and it may have been premonitions of the then nonexistent Internet (or maybe just the future perfect having its way with me), or it may have simply been the new biological arrangement of having my writing directly connected to a virtual alphanumeric engine coasting on the global web of generated electricity. In any case, it came home to me as a WEB, a magnified intra-human spider spittle grid on which I was almost palpably bouncing; and this sensation was enhanced by listening to the radio while I was on my computer. And the news consisted largely of the future perfect borne along by such items as the Star Wars preemptive defense shield, the funding of contras in Nicaragua, the administration’s dehumanizing indifference to AIDS, not to mention the tzarist opulence of the Reagan White House itself—: these sorts of things percolated into one side of my brain by way of National Public Radio, while the other side of my brain, through the filtration pumps of my fingers on the keyboard, deposited some record of this dogger gripping the horns. Here’s the poem.

Nervous Music

Out here under the neocolonial bigtop,
in the intersubjective padlock of fieldwork,
adjusting our headphones and chastity belts, the voice-over
in the prosthetic garden of eden of Harlequin fiction
forgot to mention the three little piggies
asking for “Heat Loss.” But what if
“mere appearance” is the soliloquy of the Home Court Ad-
vantage Hypothesis? Expending strategic initiative
through vocal parasites in the private sector
isn’t the only missing link up their sleeves.
Debtor nations’ mental shotput
peeling the balloon of market ideology
without releasing the helium
is both a challenge, and an oper-
an oppopper,
an oppoppertoo,
an oppopertunity
an opera tune unity you micro-chip chums can’t refuse.
To have bred a part of that story—his or hers—
that history urges our tail to swell, why it might be
anything, anything at all: if it’s not sir or mister, it’s
genetic etiquette, rounding up & judging
the world for the purposes of life,
noise for the purposes of nervous music. If it’s not
one nation, under the odds, with justice invisible for awe,
it’s bounty hunters & mousketeers
injecting fertility drugs
into their foreign-policy skits,
conspiring to power the payload into a deeper space.

Whenever the weapon itself delivers the arms
contract to the next of skin, you’re talking
style.

Just in case you thought you’d ask,
now you know.

This poem was written out of a palpable sense that we were about to be harvested by the “heedless unlimited,” the only discernable limits of which were in the future perfect—tense.  

     The engine of this grim harvest was election—that is, being singled out, set apart. Manifest destiny—American exceptionalism—has always been predicated on available scapegoats, sacrificial fodder. But this is also the distinguishing feature of stardom, as well as canonization. American Idol: American idolatry. Do all these aspiring people really want to be singled out, whatever the cost? What if you, personally, were to be crucified in the name of a general cleansing? Would it be better, different, or the same as if you, impersonally (it could be anyone, but it happens to be you) were crucified in the name of a general cleansing? Does being singled out mean automatic exemption from the general fate?  Or does it mean that the generic fate, being automatic, begs pleads and borrows any tatters it can from the wayward pattern of deviance that suddenly swishes into view? At what point do the parables of rapt compliance intersect with the rapturous parables of noncompliance?

I’ll close with a passage from John Ashbery’s Three Poems—a question and a tentative reply:

Why, after all, were we not destroyed in the conflagration of the moment our real and imaginary lives coincided, unless it was because we never had a separate existence beyond that of those two static and highly artificial concepts whose fusion was nevertheless the cause of death and destruction not only for ourselves but in the world around us? But perhaps the explanation lies precisely here: what we were witnessing was merely the reverse side of an event of cosmic beatitude for all except us, who were blind to it because it took place inside us. (Three Poems 114)

References

Ashbery, John, Three Poems (New York: Viking, 1972)
Blanchot, Maurice, L’écriture du désastre (Paris: Gallimard, 1980)
———, The Writing of the Disaster tr. Ann Smock (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1986)

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Other essays on EXCESS in ActionYes #5:
Anne Boyer
Lara Glenum
Johannes Göransson
K. Silem Mohammad