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Sustaining Nothing:

2013; Penn State University Press; Volume: 50; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.5325/complitstudies.50.1.0025

1528-4212

Tze-Yin Teo,

Political Theology and Sovereignty

In what follows, I observe that where Beckett's Worstward Ho turns on its own translation and translatability, it also simultaneously loosens the temporal and material pivots that hold together the environmentalist discourse of sustainability. In this way, the relational work of translation provides a poetics for rethinking some strains within the extant discourse on sustainability: I argue that this rethinking takes place specifically through the secretions between Beckett's untranslatable and yet translated work. For in spite of the ironic imperative in its title, reading Worstward Ho with Beckett and his translator Edith Fournier in fact systematically calls into question all the elements required for a calculating logic of sustainability, namely, glimpsing the future ‘worst’ as limit point of the present and apprehending the material considerations that turn out to necessitate the orientation toward the temporal limit itself. Instead, Beckett's text gives us moments in which there is precisely nothing at stake in the bodily and material figures of wicking, pain, gnawing, and secreting—a nothing that draws its meaning from these modifications continually attached to it. Thus, as the Beckettian voice gnaws on the nothing of the future to the point of the “unmoreable unlessable unworseable evermost almost void” (“inaugmentable imminimisable inempirable sempiternel presque vide”), its linguistic extravagance paradoxically dissipates the point of the limit, revealing that sustainability is neither ability nor failure nor the imperative to calculate and ensure a future based on the problems of the present.1 Rather, as the untranslatable almost-homonymic axis on “gnawing” and “knowing” nothing might hint, Beckett's text quietly articulates one mode of sustaining that is able to poetically account for the material without reducing the differential relationship between the linguistic and the material to an issue of referentiality or reification. When there is nothing at stake, do we therefore assume that there is nothing to be done? Such a literary account of a material action, one that does not allow for simplistic references to futurity, nature, or the environment and that remains constitutively relational through its language and work of translation, would also have implications beyond the present discourse of sustainability; it would further touch on recent ecocritical concerns with relationality and our responsibilities toward a planet that we can only temporarily inhabit without appropriating. How do I sustain some nothing that cannot be known and cannot (and will never) be mine?For while much critical energy has been expended on the problem of the future and the language of impending crisis (climate change, extinction, sustainability, etc.), less pressure has been placed on critically examining the category of the present, other than to insist on the urgency of consideration and taking action. A consequence of my argument—a move from sustainability to sustaining, as it were—is a heightened sensitivity to the ways in which an ecologically and poetically minded ecocriticism must work through and question the apparent facticity of its own present, which is to say, the possible duplicity of its own moment and duration of saying. This is one reason my eventual appeal is to the transitive and potentially intransitive property in the verb “sustain”: having forced the question of what or who sustains and gets sustained, we get yet more questions. Am I the subject of this sustaining? Does it have a subject and object at all? And does the subject-object relationship even belong in this discussion?Another issue is the recent push to rethink the twinned questions of materiality and materialism, as exemplified by the 2010 volume titled New Materialisms: Ontology, Agency, and Politics.2 Gathering contemporary theorists who work on these questions from within the tradition of Spinoza, Deleuze, and more recently Bruno Latour and Jane Bennett, the volume imbues an old philosophical chestnut with a new vitalism: in varied voices that reflect our posthumanist understanding, they wonder if matter too can be understood through newer modalities like vitality, experience and process, and even agency and modes of governance made available to the nonhuman nonsubject through multiplicities and assemblages. Yet what I mean by materiality here is further conditioned by the fact that I am working with literary texts: as a general principle, all literary invocations of matter and the material in language are or become necessarily figural, but this effect of figuration would be impossible if language did not have an uneasy tie to the literal and material referent. So, for example, a skull, no matter how it oozes or bleeds in Beckett's text, ultimately can neither ooze nor bleed in the text if no one knows what a skull and oozing and bleeding are. This textual skull therefore has to undergo a complex process that is at once contingent on literary and material processes and that ultimately has wider effects that are constituted by those very processes.In the shade of this critical context on materiality, then, materiality in my literary reading of Beckett is a paradox that names the final recourse for the insensible, invisible, unsayable, unnameable, and unknowable: Beckett's materiality must work toward an erasure of matter per se (following his repeated insistence on gnawing on the almost void of existence) and yet expresses a fidelity to it and indeed is constituted by it. Thus, matter is untranslatable; thus, materiality translates and sustains, through the fragile contingencies of the literary text.Those are the stakes. My argument in what follows is developed in four stages. First, I take a look at the etymological and historical conditions for the discourse on sustainability. What are the conditions that have allowed this concept to emerge with such force and popularity in recent years, and what is the basis of some of the skepticism surrounding it, particularly from literary scholars? I ultimately suggest that the problems with sustainability as a word, concept, and discourse can be attenuated by reconfiguring its implicit reliance on, first, the sustaining subject as capacity and resource and second, the calculability of the future. Then, I briefly examine the status of Worstward Ho as the only text Beckett deemed “untranslatable” and indeed never sought to translate in full.3 What are the stakes of defying this authorial insistence? Third, I consider one way of reconfiguring the future through Alain Badiou's reading of Cap au pire (Edith Fournier's translation of Worstward Ho). Last, I compare moments in Worstward Ho with Cap au pire, guided by the thought that sustaining as a work is constituted by a matter-materiality axis and the openings, closures, and circulations of translation. My aim throughout is not to undertake an exhaustive reading or comparison of the two texts nor to assign primacy or authenticity to one over the other. Rather, my hope is to work toward a mode of relational ecocriticism attentive to the impossibly paradoxical task of sustaining the unsustainable and translating the untranslatable.In the ordinary use of the English language, there are many ways in which something or someone may be said to “sustain” something or someone else. I may sustain a conversation with a visitor in my home; I may also sustain an injury. A judge may sustain an objection made in court, thus upholding it through judicial authority. The earth cannot sustain our constant demands on its finite resources. The community of solitude when reading a text may sustain the text's afterlife, and a text may in turn sustain its readers. In all these ways, the verb form or the act of sustaining is characterized by a certain enduring at and beyond the encounter with a limit; yet in several of these examples, endurance may not be a temporal experience but rather bodily, legalistic, material, or even affective; relatedly, literary critic Karen Pinkus writes that “at the root of sustainability, then, is the idea of stretching something, like an animal skin, into place, causing it to maintain its shape.”4 These myriad examples from ordinary uses of the English language are rendered less diffuse if we consider them together with the etymological origin of “sustain”: rooted in the Old French “soustenir,” “sustain” turns out to splice the French words for “under” and “to hold.” So etymologically, and ordinarily, to sustain something or someone is to hold or guard or manage or care for it, from underneath it, as if to subtend or hold it together—and this is not necessarily a matter of endurance beyond a temporal limit. And given its verb form, “to sustain” thus becomes the name for a very specific kind of work and relation.For this reason, there seems to be a significant fracture between the verb form and the adjectival and noun form of the same word, perhaps precisely due to their very grammatical forms. It may seem simple at first: something that is “sustainable” must simply be something that can be sustained in the long run. Yet it gets more complicated. When we ordinarily speak of sustainable development, sustainable governance, sustainable consumption, sustainable materials, and even sustainability as an overarching goal, it is because all these abstract entities (and they are overwhelmingly always abstracted and depersonalized in some way) are concerned with being able to exist or perpetuate themselves indefinitely, with extremely minimal interference or injections from external sources—and this capacity for doing so is projected from the knowledge of the present. At issue here is thus a projected capacity, an ability—hence the suffix—and, indeed, a posited, calculated autonomy from the effects of time through self-sufficiency or even self-reproduction. Discursively, then, that which is sustainable is both its own grammatical subject and object that is sustained. Its ideal iteration is absolute self-sufficiency as far as we know—an impossible promise of material immortality.This linguistic and theoretical point is deeply implicated in the global political situation from which the discourse of sustainability arose, wherein the question of national autonomy was an important and divisive player. For sustainability—or rather its sibling, sustainable development—first came into prominence as an interruption to unchecked economic growth and indeed as a possible pathway to global equity amid the structural violence inflicted by the rapid advancement of some countries at the expense of others. This was the stated motivation behind the 1983 World Commission on Environment and Development, colloquially known as the Brundtland Commission after Gro Harlem Brundtland, the then prime minister of Norway at its helm. Culminating in a 1987 document titled Our Common Future, the commission provided what would eventually become the definitive explication of sustainability and sustainable development amid a fractured movement. The summary of the commission's findings is worth quoting in full: Sustainable development is development that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs. It contains within it two key concepts:—the concept of ‘needs,’ in particular the essential needs of the world's poor, to which overriding priority should be given; and—the idea of limitations imposed by the state of technology and social organization on the environment's ability to meet present and future needs.Thus the goals of economic and social development must be defined in terms of sustainability in all countries—developed or developing, market-oriented or centrally planned. Interpretations will vary, but must share certain general features and must flow from a consensus on the basic concept of sustainable development and on a broad strategic framework for achieving it.Development involves a progressive transformation of economy and society. A development path that is sustainable in a physical sense could theoretically be pursued even in a rigid social and political setting. But physical sustainability cannot be secured unless development policies pay attention to such considerations as changes in access to resources and in the distribution of costs and benefits. Even the narrow notion of physical sustainability implies a concern for social equity between generations, a concern that must logically be extended to equity within each generation.5 Most invocations of this definition stop at the first two lines. But as a more extended quotation shows, the main thread of the Brundtland Report's notion of sustainable development is not endurance, or even self-sufficiency (although it implicitly assumes and values these qualities), but rather “equity” on all possible fronts and the deep imbrication necessary to achieve it: between countries of all economic or social status; within societies; and, importantly, between generations of the past, present, and future. In light of more recent work contouring the place of animals within environmental discourse, as well as philosophical shifts that would consider the human as only a specification within a generalized category of “animal,” it is perhaps also necessary to note a call (however impossible or implausible) for equity among species here.Of course, all this is easier said than done, but the underlying idealism necessary for a document like this is not the operative problem here. Rather, as political scientist John Dryzek observed in 2005, the problem is that “sustainable development advanced as a discourse for all, North and South, rich and poor; though the rich eventually lost sight of the global equity aspect that was central to Brundtland and her more radical predecessors.”6 In this light, the autonomies that carve out the possibility of sustainable development become deeply ambivalent: on the one hand, in and after a global climate of decolonization and increasing inequity, the possibility of autonomy is plainly indispensable to any quest for global justice; on the other hand, the thought of autonomy also provides an alibi for the refusal to attend to structural inequities on the global level. The very notion of sustain-ability is thus rendered inequitable by this ambivalence surrounding the autonomy that “-ability” confers. Indeed, much of the fracturing of sustainability as a movement and its consequent poor reputation is attributable to this drift from the have-nots to the haves, from the less able to those privileged with ability. (However, it is very much worth noting here that there are numerous nongovernmental organizations that do their work with great attention to sustainable development in parts of the world where they are most needed. I come back to this point.) Hence, in contrast to its early aspirations as a radical discourse for social and global justice, sustainability and sustainable development are now increasingly only overexposed corporatized buzzwords.Thus far, I have outlined two related reasons for being wary of the promises that sustainability offers. The first is its necessary theoretical reliance on an impossible capacity for autonomy or self-sufficiency. This is closely related to the second, which is the politically ambivalent privileging of such a capacity and ability, which eventually leads to our losing sight of the possibility of equity within societies, between nations, and between generations. More objections can be made, and Karen Pinkus offers an exemplary one: she has argued that, in calculating the future with respect to the present, sustainability dislocates the referentiality of both times, leaving us with “a future always already predetermined through strategic planning and regulation.”7 Pinkus's critique further looks to Lee Edelman's critique of reproductive futurity, suggesting that “sustainability is so deeply imbricated in reproductive futurity, and this model so normalized that even those who prophecy or celebrate the end of the human are conditioned by it.”8 This point takes aim at the Brundtland Report's fidelity to future generations; the aim is to undo the problematic presupposition that the future is only simply the reproduction of the present—and that because it is infinitely reproducible, it must be immune to the effects of time. She therefore argues that this overdetermined sense of calculable futurity can be countered through incorporating the disruptive force of risk into sustainability and holding the two in a kind of productive tension: “Risk may represent an unraveling of sustainability that could ultimately prove productive.”9 In the end, Pinkus calls not for a rejection of this bourgeois ideal of sustainability but for a serious accounting of its potential pleasures and its “bodily, sensorial, and ego based” dimensions: “Sustainability needs risk.”10The problems I have identified with sustainability thus pose a double task: first, to reconfigure not just sustainability but the very validity of “-ability” as it pertains to the action of sustaining; and second, to reconfigure the elements of calculable futurity and narrative of development that comprise the fundament of sustainability. For Pinkus's analysis, in its use of etymology, also seems to take for granted that the etymology of “to sustain” can be straightforwardly brought to bear on “sustainability”; yet as I have observed, what seems like only a morphological difference between the two terms veils a substantive and perhaps ultimately impossible assumption. Moreover, the fact that sustainability first gained prominence as the modifier in “sustainable development” is also not incidental; implicit within the “-ability” of sustainability is perhaps precisely the determining influence of a developmental narrative: an increasing and calculable improvement from past to present to future. This is the narrative that Pinkus's theoretical intervention insists on disrupting through the force of risk.All of these concerns may seem like reason enough to simply abandon this fraught word and concept; yet, as it is carried out today, sustainable development surely remains a necessary and worthy environmental and sociopolitical cause in many parts of the world, already and always imbued with the risky business associated with such work. In light of this ongoing work in a proximate realm, my question is: is this work sufficient ground for thereby accepting the deep-set theoretical ambivalences operative within the word itself, which have in turn already affected its political potential for intervention within the world? Or can we instead articulate a different logic of sustaining, wherein an irreducible linguistic ambivalence helps material agents to ask what or who am I sustaining, if at all, in my labor?The question of translation and translatability within Beckett's text offers a telling parallel to the circulation of sustainable development. (That Beckett's text was translated from English to French, between the two working languages of the United Nations, is perhaps not incidental for the connections that I am able to make here, but it should be noted that the fact that English and French are the working languages of the United Nations veils the organization's own structural exclusions.) Beckett's friend Edith Fournier's translation, undertaken some two years after Beckett's death, is an important attempt because of Worstward Ho's particular status as the only extended prose work from that late period of Beckett's career written only in English and the only work of his that he had declared “untranslatable.”11 He abided by this pronouncement until the time of his death in 1989, seven years after writing Worstward Ho.But there is perhaps very little point in remaining overly faithful to Beckett's enigmatic declaration; while it has been suggestive and perhaps even instructive for many readings (including mine), I would observe that it is most interestingly taken into account with a translation that has been possible. The many dimensions involved in the translation of the title itself perhaps provide an apt synecdoche of the theoretical problems at stake in this untranslatability: literally and ambiguously “cape at/to/in/into/from the worst,” Cap au pire, Fournier's title, also ingeniously resonates with “le capot,” historically a nautical hood or cape worn on the head but that now primarily refers to a car's hood. It is also used in a geographical sense, such as with “le Cap de Bonne-Espérance,” the Cape of Good Hope. As Bettina Knapp notes in a review of Fournier's translation, the same phonemes also recall the Latin “caput” (“head”), thereby implicitly locating Worstward Ho in some kind of head space, analogous to but figurally different from what the critic Stanley E. Gontarski more cautiously calls “closed space” in his introduction to the Nohow On trilogy.12 The many new connotations of the French title belie Beckett's more austere intertextual association in his own title. Displacing the “west” from the title of Victorian novelist Charles Kingsley's 1855 historical-adventure novel Westward Ho!, Beckett's “worst” in Worstward Ho had become another kind of destination: an existential alternative to and implicit critique of the God, gold, and glory that Kingsley's colonial novel tropes in the high seas of the Caribbean. But Beckett's worst—though no longer place bound, though no longer geographically relational as west is to east is to here—must still reckon with what it has displaced, steering the modest Ho that has lost its exclamation mark, losing along with that the fragile capacity for coming to a sudden end.Thus, here, in this specific moment of translation between Beckett's act of intertextual displacement (perhaps it too is a translation, even if still within the same language) and Fournier's evocative “cap,” the end is shown to be only the horizon of a world wherein the existential end cannot semantically evade the referential and geographical end of the earth—there where the “source language” catches up to the “target language” in a surprisingly meaning-giving circle. A closer reading of Beckett's and Fournier's texts reveals that variants of this dynamic run throughout them: a textual passage between a temporal and material question is opened by the willful act of translation and its unexpected semantic effects. Thus, untranslatable in its own idiomatic and historical sedimentations yet always being set adrift, Worstward Ho may well be a translator's perpetual lament and secret joy.A similar question of translation is at work in Alain Badiou's reading of Beckett's Worstward Ho; it is further germane here because it also picks up the task of a reconfiguration of the future via Beckett's text (although Badiou has not written or spoken about it in an environmental or ecological register). The broader thought consistently guiding Badiou's reading is that Worstward Ho is Beckett's most important statement on the ontological question of language and being: as Badiou writes, “It is entirely possible to take Worstward Ho as a short philosophical treatise, as a treatment in shorthand of the question of being.”13 For Badiou, being is to be said by the subject, and it is said through what he figures as a “rhythm of thought” and a “network of thought”; these bear a close kinship to the irruptive and radically discontinuous event that he locates in the closing moments of Beckett's work and that then comes to define the subject of being.14 Furthermore, Badiou's philosophical treatments of art reject a conventional hermeneutic approach to the literary artwork as object. In its place, he proposes an “inaesthetics,” a term he first used in the French volume containing the piece on Cap au pire: “Inaesthetics describes the strictly intraphilosophical effects produced by the independent existence of some works of art.”15 Such an independence is a particular obstacle for any literary treatment of Beckett, in no small part because what Badiou calls “thought”—although related in a post-Heideggerian mode to language and being—remains severed from the idiomatic and untranslatable aspects of the English language that Beckett would insist on: indeed, for Badiou, it is precisely because this text offers a “rhythm of thought” that “we can approach Worstward Ho conceptually without thereby betraying it.”16 Implicit then in Badiou's remarks is the suggestion that this intraphilosophical rhythm of thought is entirely conceptual, translatable through its rhythmic structure—and that this rhythm of thought is separable from Beckett's untranslatable English.All these assumptions are thus in play in Badiou's discussion of the ontological character of the future, which he highlights by privileging Beckett's saying of the “on.” Notably, for environmentalist discourse in French, the English word “sustainability” is most often translated as “durabilité,” thereby implicitly highlighting its temporal underpinnings; however, in rendering Badiou's “soutenir” as “to sustain,” his translators also expose the alternate roots of the English “sustain” in something other than duration.17 (It should also be noted that Badiou always reads Beckett in French despite a repeatedly stated awareness of the language problem.) This then is the knotty bilingual context in which Badiou asks, at the conclusion of his reading of Cap au pire, and what will remain in the end? Well, a saying on a background [fond] of nothing or of night: the saying of the “on,” of the “nohow on,” the imperative of saying as such. Ultimately, this saying is the terminus of a sort of astral language, floating above its own ruin and on the basis of which all can begin again, all can and must recommence. This ineluctable recommencement can be called the unnameable of saying, its “on.” And the good—that is, the proper mode of the good within saying—is to sustain the “on.” That is all. To sustain it without naming it. To sustain the “on” and to sustain it at the extreme, incandescent point at which its sole apparent content is “nohow on.”18 Badiou's “on” is derived from Beckett's, but he gets there by way of Fournier's translation, which translates “on” as “encore.” The French “encore” carries with it connotations of continuation and repetition of an event; further, it also functions as an intensifier, such as with “yet again.” Badiou reads this “encore” as the Beckettian remainder of the saying of being but in order for it to be so, it must be a remainder that is finally and in the end severed and “floating above its own ruin.” Indeed, the network of connotations invoked by the “encore” may be precisely analogous to Badiou's network of thought; in this regard, Peter Poiana has observed that the first lines of Worstward Ho “present the ‘on’ as the discursive unit that holds together the narrative,” but he does not make the connection between this narrative and Badiou's insistence on its separation from the ruins presented by the text.19 Further, that Badiou should cast the “encore” as a “recommencement” in the ashes of the event of being perhaps points to the powerful specificity of the French translation; it would be difficult, if not impossible, to make the same argument with the English “on.”It is perhaps clear by now why my argument cannot rest on Badiou's reading of Worstward Ho: staked as it is in the untranslatable literary, as well as the need to reimagine structures of autonomy to resist the inequities of sustainability, my thinking must take place through the effects of translation and the literary; in a different modality, the truth and thought that Badiou locates in art is independent of such considerations, to the extent that he strictly privileges the philosophical autonomy of Beckett's text, excising its untranslatable language from his own ontological argument. Where my argument depends absolutely on the idiomatic particulars of Beckett's and Fournier's work, Badiou's argument holds only if we consider the two to be interchangeable. Moreover, as I elaborate in the next section, my reading cannot commit to the narrative voice as subject in Worstward Ho in the way that Badiou's reading demands. Nevertheless, Badiou's futurity offers an important conceptual nuance on what it might be to sustain: instead of an overdetermined future that is calculated in the light of the present, Badiou via Beckett suggests a paradoxical event of being in a sustaining (and even sustainable) present that has been calculated in advance by the radical separation of the future.But to return to the main question with fresher eyes: who or what sustains, and who or what does that sustain? Thus far, I have noted that my guiding thought is to recast the terms of the debate over sustainability by reconfiguring the construal of “the sustainable” as a capacity or a resource, and relatedly to also reconfigure the structure of its diachronous present and the reproducible future calculated in its light. So, these are the cruxes that I join through my reading of the novel: sustain/sustainable; translate/untranslatable; materiality/matter. They do not map neatly onto each other but rather reconfigure each other through their relational effects within these texts. I read the text roughly as its narrative unfolds in order to give a sense of its recursiveness (with an understanding that a comprehensive reading would be impossible); I mostly pay particular attention to moments when key elements are first introduced in order to explore any effects they may have on the text as it stands.The opening lines have been much remarked on: “On. Say on. Be said on. Somehow on. Till nohow on. Said nohow on” (89) (“Encore. Dire encore. Soit dit encore. Tant mal que pis encore. Jusqu'à plus mèche encore. Soit dit plus mèche encore” [7]). We begin with the one syllable that eventually punctuates ea