Prior Outpost

The Denizen's Challenge

The proliferation of multi-national corporations and increasing movement of people around the globe continues to push culture in a transnational direction.  As the dominance of identity politics and multiculturalism is challenged, new concepts need to be formulated that better articulate the predicaments in which people find themselves.  The current categories set by the nation-state, i.e. citizen, immigrant, alien, etc., do not allow for a political engagement that provides possible spaces of resistance.  However, millions of people live each day as the exception to the political categories. These are the denizens of the contemporary world that find themselves in the evolving position outside of political categorizations and as a challenge to conventional politics.  To this end, we need to do as Rosi Braidotti suggests and “track down these shifting locations and account for them through adequate figurations in politically informed cartographies that combine accountability with the quest for possible sites of resistance” (Transpositions 264).  This project would turn the object of politics away from the state and onto singular lives by ethically responding to the diversity and particularity of life. 

            I take this as a question and a challenge to literary studies: how/can literature open up spaces of resistance that challenge the existing political categories and allow the denizen to emerge as a figure of change? Can transnational texts take up this challenge and be catalysts for change, thus enabling denizens to move forward with the process of becoming even in the face of uncertain outcomes? I would argue that it can and does in texts like Caryl Phillips’s A Distant Shore, Sebastian Barry's The Whereabouts of Eneas McNulty, and Bharati Mukherjee's Jasmine. In its singular engagement with other identities, literature proves to be a means of ethically responding to those outside of political figurations.   

The Movement, the Event

Yve Lomax juxtaposes three images to construct a singular form in her artwork.  Her book Sounding the Event asks the question: how can a photograph be an event? The singularity of the three images present goes a long way to asking the same question.  I take it a step further to interrogate the way thinking through events, i.e. thinking through movement and the way movement is represented, can challenge our perspectives, our borders, and our capacity to understand the world around us.  Lomax's book employs a peculiar form to get at these questions and become movement itself.  She takes critical theory and turns it into a conversation, asking the questions that we all wish we could pose and exploring the possible answers from the perspective of diverse theories.  The text becomes an experience as the reader uncovers the layers of the conversation and pieces together the parts of the event.  Take my word, it is a completely new way to think through critical theory that raises various issues, the issues embodied in the above artwork.

Affect, movement, and embodiment come together in the three segments bringing forth an ethical engagement with the event.  The event of what?  Possibly, of movement itself.  The face provokes a response, at least through a Levinasian interaction where the face obligates an ethical response, and by proxy a confrontation with the identity of the other. I leave it at identity, because the face seems to be the signifier of an identity and nothing more. The hollow eyes and shadowy contours leave a sense of mystery, but the definitive face leaves the ethical obligation in tact. But what emotion is contained therein?  A sense of loss?  Maybe. A confusion that leads to questioning? I would like to think so.  Either way, it is appropriately vague and offering itself up to be questioned.  I take this as a question of identity where the face only imparts a partial view of somebody, which leads to the middle image.  The bridge is blurred but nonetheless bridges the gap. It links the right and the left with the sense of movement, as if one were in the process of crossing.  The link to be made through this movement is between the face and the body, the images to either side appear static compared to the bridge.  If the face invokes an ethical obligation, what does the body do?  It does the same.  A body perched on the edge of what appears to be subway tracks; the headlight of the train in the distance, movement and arrival at the static, waiting body.  The waiting body steps up to the void left when the face is turned away, the void that is in the absence of identity.  It suggests that the body waits for its ethical recognition outside of the recognition of the face, the identity of the subject in a culture of identity politics.  It amounts to a reconsideration of the ethical obligated by embodiment and outside of identity, something a singular event, when pieced together and fully considered, does.  The figure on the right is contained within a long black coat that shields the body in absence.   The event attempts to unveil this absence by uncovering the layers of representations that construct bodies and prioritize superficial identities in the contemporary world. The event ties the body to a singular occurrence that shakes it out of the confined space society offers.  It allows for presence through the absence of existing narratives.  A definition to come, rather than offering one to fit.  An ethical movement. 

Movement, Absence, and a Prior Outpost

I begin with a simple question.  How does movement take place in the contemporary world?  Bombs and words are two unlikely allies in response to this question.  One shatters by its explosive force, the other challenges immovable objects, or both do each by diverse means.  The equation of this unlikely pair is something Dellilo posits in Mao II: "What terrorists gain, novelists lose."  Words lose efficacy in the face of violence, or voice is lost in lieu of pain.  Maybe in the moment, but I refuse to believe in permanent loss.  Instead, I want to find the productive possibility of that absence.  Not necessarily an absence the ensues from a terrorist bombing, but an absence that marks the lack of ideologies.  In this vein, I think through the two words that title this blog, Prior Outpost, and find meaning in them the conveys possibilities.  Prior invokes a sense of movement, of travel, of positioning oneself in an other place from which to gain critical distance.  It means you just came from somewhere and now are joining a new community.  Outpost signifies a refuge away from the saturation of conventional society, but also a productive lookout or guard on the frontier that needs to be manned in order to move forward.  It is a place of comfort where coffee and long conversations take place.  The two together provide a sense of nomads traveling along a route that leads, much in the same way blogs function, to diverse modes of politics, art, and life in general.

Much of my thinking is guided by the questions posed by the Denizen, a figure I see as in movement  and as a challenge to existing forms of citizenship and statehood.  No longer can people be assured of the security, possibility, and community the nation-state supposedly provides.  Refugees lie in every corner of the globe confined to camps and only awaiting a piece of land and an opportunity to work, often for next to nothing.  These people are literally Denizens, stateless and without a place to go due to the way borders become boundaries.  I take the term in a broader sense to signify a person that lies outside of an all-encompassing ideology.  The Denizen maintains the strength to move and refuse being defined by religion, media, or the boundaries that politics throws in our faces.  The Denizen does not embrace a totality except in its multiplicity and finds ethics in embodiment and contingencies.  Simple relationships no longer suffice. The definitions are too complex. We need movement, interaction, and places to build communities instead of kill in the name of totalities.  Idealistic, yes, but the idea is to provoke productive ideas, not foreclose them as already imagined borders do.  It is something Sebastiao Salgado's photograph (above) does.  It bridges a gap that may create a Prior Outpost......